Age of Sigmar: Second Edition

[Gotrek]

To be fair, a pure BCR (outside of snowball spam) will always suck because the entire faction is 5 kits. They simply do not have a deep enough roster to play. Its like playing pure soulblight. It'll never be good with the tools it has because it doesnt have the right tools for the job (scenarios), its like using a hammer as a screwdriver, it just doesnt work.

[AverageBoss]

1 minute ago, Gotrek said:

To be fair, a pure BCR (outside of snowball spam) will always suck because the entire faction is 5 kits. They simply do not have a deep enough roster to play. Its like playing pure soulblight. It'll never be good with the tools it has because it doesnt have the right tools for the job (scenarios), its like using a hammer as a screwdriver, it just doesnt work.

If only Gutbusters, Firebellies, and BCR were 1 faction. A sort of kingdom of ogors if you will.

[Drib]

5 minutes ago, Gotrek said:

To be fair, a pure BCR (outside of snowball spam) will always suck because the entire faction is 5 kits. They simply do not have a deep enough roster to play. Its like playing pure soulblight. It'll never be good with the tools it has because it doesnt have the right tools for the job (scenarios), its like using a hammer as a screwdriver, it just doesnt work.

Just add an impact driver. ?

[Gotrek]

5 minutes ago, AverageBoss said:

If only Gutbusters, Firebellies, and BCR were 1 faction. A sort of kingdom of ogors if you will.

Seriously, they couldve just rewritten the lore and included the entire range from fantasy and this wouldnt even be a problem.

[GeneralZero]

As you guys seems super pointy and competent about rules, could you please tell me: a Wight King or a a Vampire lord cost some points. But I can't find the cost for the same on horse (WK & VL) or with wings (VL). Is this the same cost?  I ask because I just found in my old armies one of each on horse that I didn't even know I had  Lucky me 

[Infeston]

9 minutes ago, AverageBoss said:

If only Gutbusters, Firebellies, and BCR were 1 faction. A sort of kingdom of ogors if you will.

*irony on*

You mean a whole kingdom of Ogors? What an interesting idea this is. ?

They could create a completely new faction and maybe call them something like "The Ogor Kingdoms" with different kind of ogors all banding together. 

*irony off*

 

No but really. At the beginning I was a big fan of splitting up the factions, because I had hoped they would expand on every single faction they split up. If they still plan on doing this for all the Ogor factions (like Maneaters, Gutbusters, Firebellies and Beastclaw Raiders) I am still in for it. But if they would really just put them together into one faction again I would have to ask "What was this all about? Why split factions in the first place if you don't plan on expanding on them in the future?"

[Skabnoze]

2 minutes ago, GeneralZero said:

As you guys seems super pointy and competent about rules, could you please tell me: a Wight King or a a Vampire lord cost some points. But I can't find the cost for the same on horse (WK & VL) or with wings (VL). Is this the same cost?  I ask because I just found in my old armies one of each on horse that I didn't even know I had  Lucky me 

They don't have different costs in many of those cases.  The whole warscroll itself has a single cost - and then you select which options you want within that warscroll and they are effectively all the same cost.  In a number of cases models on a non-monster mount or on foot are simply treated as equipment options.

[Freejack02]

39 minutes ago, Gotrek said:

To be fair, a pure BCR (outside of snowball spam) will always suck because the entire faction is 5 kits. They simply do not have a deep enough roster to play. 

Fyreslayers can do just fine with ~5 kits - it's the fact that BCR struggle to put enough models on the field, and the fact that the monsters they do have are (probably) overcosted right now. 

[Sleboda]

1 hour ago, AverageBoss said:

They began differentiating between Wounds and Mortal Wounds quite awhile ago. Taking Legions of Nagash as an example:

Deathless Minions and First Cohort specifically mention Wounds AND Mortal Wounds.

Nagash and Morghast armors mention only Mortal Wounds.

Necromancer and Wight King both only mention Wounds on their special rules.

There's a 2.0 thing to wish for right there! Intuitively, a mortal wound is a subset of wounds. If that's not what we're supposed to think, then call mortal wounds something like Essence Drain or whatever.

[amysrevenge]

Haha if we're wishing for things...  To Wound should be renamed To Damage.  Move should be renamed March (or some other word than Move).  Clears up so many things.

[Gotrek]

Getting off of the snowball hate train/funeral dirges for BCR for a hot minute:

With the preview up today about the realm spells only coming into play when in that specific realm and the realm you fight in (essentially) being a dice roll, does this quell the "banishment is OP!" fear? 

[TheOtherJosh]

57 minutes ago, Skabnoze said:

1 hour ago, GeneralZero said:

As you guys seems super pointy and competent about rules, could you please tell me: a Wight King or a a Vampire lord cost some points. But I can't find the cost for the same on horse (WK & VL) or with wings (VL). Is this the same cost?  I ask because I just found in my old armies one of each on horse that I didn't even know I had  Lucky me 

They don't have different costs in many of those cases.  The whole warscroll itself has a single cost - and then you select which options you want within that warscroll and they are effectively all the same cost.  In a number of cases models on a non-monster mount or on foot are simply treated as equipment options.

So the Vampire Lord (with Wings or on horseback) is a current versions of the Vampire Lord in LoN.

Wight King with Baleful Tombblade also has an option to allow Mounted in LoN.

The necromancer on mount, however, is not currently a Legions of Nagash unit.

[GeneralZero]

too bad for the necro, which can't be fast 

I hope my 2 mounted minis, which are more than 20 years old in METAL, won't look too bad or small compared to actual ones...

I have to base them and find something so they stand a bit out of the normal troops

[heywoah_twitch]

2 hours ago, Gotrek said:

1) the snowball IS just a bad mechanic, period. 2+ for 6 mortal wounds at a 26" threat range (move + shoot) is TERRIBLE. Way too reliable and way too hard to mitigate (being as its mortal wounds and not normal wounds). Its even worse when you remember that you can bring 4 of them and 2 of them are your battle line.

2) "just hurt the thing" you're conveniently leaving out the part that you can heal these ****** 

3) "hide your dudes", hiding them is dependant on the table you're on and whether or not the dude im hiding needs line of sight to do what i brought him for.

4) your hit/wound stats arent any worse than anyone elses, the only thing that hurts is that since each hit deals multiple damage you get less attacks.

5) in my opinion BCR isnt placing at tournaments because they dont have the bodies they need to get the objectives. It has nothing to do with the power level of the models and everything to do with being forced into an MSU playstyle 

6) sorry to come off as combative but the snowball is a terrible mechanic and it's keeping it as it is or even making it more powerful wont help BCR. They are an army that is forced to use allies.

1) I Agree it is a bad mechanic. Polarizing, Expensive, One-Trick, Bad Late Game. Not fun to play against casually, but overpriced and trivial to neutralize competitively. ie the worst of both worlds.

2) You do have a chance to heal them 1d3 on your turn if using the huskard version.  The mechanic promotes spamming them for more consistent healing, although a list with many thundertusks would be pretty easy to defeat. I mean any beastclaw list is easy to defeat now (and looking forward) so I guess who cares.

3) They give you a pretty decent amount of counter-play all things considered. Their downsides are built-in and pronounced.

4) They are when you consider that we don't have buffs/synergies/high numbers of dice rolled. Many peoples attacks start out similar to ours, but then get considerably better by the time you're actually rolling. Or piling in twice. A low number of high damage attacks is almost always just bad in AoS, unless you're getting some loremaster-style buffs.

5) MSU playstyle is one of our issues, but what really killed BCR competitively was stone skeleton nerf and mounts not affected by artefacts nerf (no more hitting on 2s/3s), and the evolving metagame. They got hit with gamewide nerfs and targeted nerfs at the same time, and don't forget no one was playing actual beastclaw when they were good, they were playing Mixed Destruction because our allegiance abilities/traits/artefacts have always been bad. To be clear, the power level of our models went way down and now we suck, so I can't agree with you that the power level of our models has nothing to do with it.

6) Hey I think fate dice and runesmiters are terribly unfun mechanics to play against, but almost every army has at least something a little unfair. I don't think you sound combative at all if your point is that beastclaw need nearly a complete overhaul rewrite as a faction that happens to lose frost wreathed ice in the process of becoming viable again then we're basically on the same side. 

So in the end I agree with your idea, but couldn't help myself on correcting a lot of the specific points, and I hope (as you hoped) that I didn't come off as combative. As a person who has has one of the worst performing armies for the past year, I just had a flaccid faction focus after watching everyone else showered with candy so you must excuse me.

[Enoby]

I tried a practice AoS 1.5* game today to try and get a little insight into things. We used the changed priority rules, look out sir, changed shooting, changed arcane bolt/mystic shield, and command points. I played Slaaneshi Slaves to Darkness (seekers host), and my opponent played Moonclan. As for a few thoughts, if anyone would find them interesting:

- we really liked command points, especially how they could be stockpiled for more important turns 

- look out sir meant that he never tried to aim at my heroes (not blaming him as he'd have had a 6+ to hit then), so I guess it seems to be a good deterrent if nothing else 

- we weren't a fan of the new change to mystic shield as it didn't feel very useful for its casting value. Though we didn't use endless spells (as we didn't know enough about them) so I can't judge the rule fully. I think we both prefer arcane bolt doing fewer mortal wounds 

- priority rule change didn't matter too much, though it seemed like the game was determined by a double turn in the end (a unit of 60 grots wiped out 30 chaos warriors and then got the second turn to move onto the general and finish him off) 

- we made an approximation of depravity points (wounds done to his heroes by my heroes, and wounds my heroes take) and I got 11 through the whole game (with 6 heroes). They seem to rack up quite slowly, but this may be because heroes seem to die very quickly without the protection of mystic shield. 

Just as a side note, I hope Slaves get some significant buffs in the next edition - they seem too 'meh' for how cool their models look

 

* obviously we don't know everything about AoS 2's changes, so we made some educated guesses and called it 1.5

[Sigwarus]

57 minutes ago, Gotrek said:

Getting off of the snowball hate train/funeral dirges for BCR for a hot minute:

With the preview up today about the realm spells only coming into play when in that specific realm and the realm you fight in (essentially) being a dice roll, does this quell the "banishment is OP!" fear? 

Sure, we only have to deal with it when rolled. And tournaments (if going for realms at all) can deliberately choose realms with more balanced magic (if any).

[boombyeyeah]

Maybe a good tournament rule would be that each player can veto against one realm, than make a random roll for the rest

@ snowball debate: Its just not fun to play against, and its not fluffy. Should have made its damage drop with increasing range

[AdamR]

Snowballs made me play Vanguard Wing!

[grungolah]

4 minutes ago, boombyeyeah said:

Maybe a good tournament rule would be that each player can veto against one realm, than make a random roll for the rest

@ snowball debate: Its just not fun to play against, and its not fluffy. Should have made its damage drop with increasing range

Does AoS embrace dual list tournaments?  It seems like having multiple realms would encourage this.

[Brightstar]

2 hours ago, Asamu said:

What other miniature war game like AoS doesn't use points in some form? Checkers and Chess have fixed mirrored pieces; there's no creation step to the game before you can start playing, so they aren't comparable; CCGs are again, not comparable to AoS, as you do not start with your entire deck/army in play. What other way would you want the game to be balanced? The only way to balance the game off of something like wound or warscroll count would be to homogenize units so every warscroll has the same value, which would take a lot away from the game, rather than adding to it. If you want to do that for yourself, that is something you can do by using their points as a basis for it.

What does "more intrinsic balance between scrolls" even mean? Do you want clanrats to be just as strong as chaos warriors per warscroll? They can be, if you bring ~15 clanrats per 5 chaos warriors, which is what you get with the points system anyway.

Would you like them to provide fixed army lists for every faction/faction combination that people can pick from? That takes away the freedom of players to create their own armies with the models they have. It's either restrictive in a bad way outside of narrative games.

It's fine to say you don't like how they did things, but if you can't provide a reasonable alternative, then what's the point?

Why would they cater to a minority of players that don't like points seemingly just on principle?  Points are the easiest and most familiar way to balance a game like AoS, which makes it the most attractive method for both a game creator and the community. There is a reasonably sized portion of the community that never would have touched the game if it didn't have a points system or another good way to balance games, but I can't honestly think of an alternative that would be as good for a game like AoS that isn't essentially a points system.

 Cutting out  CCG's is a gross overstatement.  They are extremely comparable.  But I'm not in this conversation to "win" anything, so lets just move on.

So let me focus on : another good way to balance games

okay, Intrinsic value in your language.  Make all units viable.  How?  By balancing each unit of a similar type against other units in their own army and comparable enemy units  of the same type - hero to hero, weaker monster to weaker monster, stronger monster to stronger monster.  Your example, 15 clan rats = 5 chaos warriors.  Sure.  That's an example.  Not saying it would be perfect, but changing how we war game - which was one of the original design elements of AOS - could change many of the needless arguments about points.   

Better intrinsic/internal game balance would be better for everyone.  I don't see why that is so daunting to understand except it doesn't fit the tournament scenes narrative of points and their intrinsic awesomeness to wargames.  Or do you not agree?   

Oh right, because we've always used points so why change now. 

The points system does not create balance.  Period.  Otherwise, there would be - across every game platform "like AOS," in every forum - hundreds of thousands of less posts and arguments about viable and non viable units, point optimization,  cheap spam, armies that are unplayable, list tiers, etc.  In fact, it could have prevented the epic long debate over the validity of summoning "costing" or "not costing" points debate in this very thread.   Conversations which are far more damaging to the community than helping create a strong, healthy atmosphere.   

Which, everything about the competitive play is about busting points or finding loop holes in the points system so I don't see why competitive players even want the things in the first place.  Games are not balanced by points.  The meta of lists and viable/non viable  units only shifts every time the points are "rebalanced"  or new models are introduced to the collective point pool.  It is one way of doing it. 

So what could have they done instead with AOS 2 that I would have liked to see?  Instead of dropping the "points" of units, improve the units performance on the table to make it worth its value, by adjusting its wounds, save, to hit chance, etc.   Again, I don't see why that is so confusing. 

I also never said, don't use points.  I said GW could have come up with something else other than points.  I also said GW could do more to support the play style of people who don't use them.   What I suggested they do instead of adjust points would make both types of players happy.  Like I have said repeatedly in this thread, there are three ways to play this game.  I did not say to invalidate the points mechanic or remove it.  I said there were other ways  I am sorry you view how I play as a minority that GW should not "cater to."  I strongly disagree with your opinion on that.  

This is an AOS 2.0 rules discussion thread.  Not a "how the game works without points."  Though I do play with points at events, my group plays without points all the time.  If you'd like to actually discuss that somewhere else I'd be happy to, but I seriously doubt it would be at all any interest to you other than to find new and interesting ways to argue with me.

 

 

[Gotrek]

7 minutes ago, Brightstar said:

</snip>.   

Which, everything about the competitive play is about busting points or finding loop holes in the points system so I don't see why competitive players even want the things in the first place.  Games are not balanced by points.  The meta of lists and viable/non viable  units only shifts every time the points are "rebalanced"  or new models are introduced to the collective point pool.  It is one way of doing it. 

So what could have they done instead with AOS 2 that I would have liked to see?  Instead of dropping the "points" of units, improve the units performance on the table to make it worth its value, by adjusting its wounds, save, to hit chance, etc.   Again, I don't see why that is so confusing. 

</snip>

Competitive players want points (or other arbitary generic balancing mechanism) because at some level we all have a little bit of Johnny and Spike in us.  Points gives us a system to break and bend to our will. Let's us feel smarter/better than the dirty plebs. There's an old saying for tabletop RPGS: "it's the players job to try and break the game". Same applies here.

 

I agree that GW should rewrite a ton of warscrolls for 2.0 and not just tweak points because there are units out there that will always be trash no matter what they cost because they just can't DO anything on the table other than give your opponent kill points. Imho, grave guard are a good example of this. They are worse than skeletons in EVERY measure except that they have rend 1. Oh man, rend 1! And I get a whole 25% (ish not doing the math right now) attacks at the same hit/wound values for the same number of points and only get half the wounds on the table! So much valu-/barf.

[Bellfree]

2 hours ago, grungolah said:

Does AoS embrace dual list tournaments?  It seems like having multiple realms would encourage this.

Some places do, in general it's a bit difficult. Armies are fairly large and venues are fairly small on average as is. For a dual list event you'll need to carry around, and the venue will need room for all the players initial armies, the secondary list army, summoning for the first army, summoning for the second army(if they're different enough) and then that means each player will have to have upwards of 1000 additional points painted which reduces the overall hobby quality.

[ZaelART]

I have to say, the last thing I would like is for any Death units to get a points increase... what if you are playing a non-Legion allegiance? They are already weaker but then their units would be overcosted because it’s assumed they’ll be coming back for free (which only happens in a Legion allegiance with gravesites).

[Jamopower]

4 hours ago, Bellfree said:

Some places do, in general it's a bit difficult. Armies are fairly large and venues are fairly small on average as is. For a dual list event you'll need to carry around, and the venue will need room for all the players initial armies, the secondary list army, summoning for the first army, summoning for the second army(if they're different enough) and then that means each player will have to have upwards of 1000 additional points painted which reduces the overall hobby quality.

Wasn't the sideboard somewhat regular feature before the GHB? i.e. you had 3000 points of models and used 2000.

[NurglesFirstChosen]

42 minutes ago, ZaelART said:

I have to say, the last thing I would like is for any Death units to get a points increase... what if you are playing a non-Legion allegiance? They are already weaker but then their units would be overcosted because it’s assumed they’ll be coming back for free (which only happens in a Legion allegiance with gravesites).

I’m not a death player so do not really understand what you mean,  please explain how youd not play a legions army? (Apart from straight nighthaunt).