Age of Sigmar: Second Edition

[Bellfree]

32 minutes ago, Jamopower said:

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

PreGHB a lot of tournaments were experimenting with a lot of different formats. I believe a 500pt sideboard was fairy common.

[Bellfree]

17 minutes ago, NurglesFirstChosen said:

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). 

There is still the options to play death grand alliance instead of FEC, NightHaunt, or LoN.

[mmimzie]

12 minutes ago, NurglesFirstChosen said:

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). 

Legions takes alot of the choice of what to play by giving you too many options that tend to ovetr shadow many of the units. Age of sigmar with it's rule for damage the way it is. For the most part you don't need to be too cute with list deversity, and almost any unit can be a powerfull killy units or a super tank unit dependingf on it's strengths and synergies. While also with the small amount of different types of units you can fit at max size in AoS and the general benefit for running max size units. It all boils down to large factions like stormcast and now legions of nagash just make many of the options feel abit medicore by comparison??  Why would i play zombies for instance when skeletons are just purely better in every way out side of jsut  pure numbers, that sort of doesn't matter because you can bring lots of skeletons already. As just on comparison. 

So legions of nagash by offer sooooo many options all in one faction. Just makes many of the options useless next to your other options.  This is pretty true many other armies but the scale is much smaller. So if you for isntance like night haunt or soulbliught models or whatever in legions of nagash.. it just feels like your tying your own shoes together.  This isn't an end of the world problem, but it's just... feel alittle like legions sorta waters down death even more than when we had it before. 

[HorticulusTGA]

Thx to our friend @Antipodean7  from AOS shorts : 

[ZaelART]

31 minutes ago, NurglesFirstChosen said:

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). 

If you want to play Soulblight or Death allegiance (which have their own command traits, battle traits and artefacts in the Legions of Nagash book), then you do not get access to gravesites. This is understandably to penalise people from getting too soup-y with Death allegiance, but if they increase points costs then you're getting double penalised and paying for something you don't even have access to. It's just something that forces people to play a certain way or suffer a handicap.

[HorticulusTGA]

I hope that that Sequitor on the WD is the new SCE Battletome cover !

[Erdemo86]

When does the new white dwarf come out? Today? Are there warscrolls in it or some other new infos?

[NurglesFirstChosen]

15 minutes ago, ZaelART said:

If you want to play Soulblight or Death allegiance (which have their own command traits, battle traits and artefacts in the Legions of Nagash book), then you do not get access to gravesites. This is understandably to penalise people from getting too soup-y with Death allegiance, but if they increase points costs then you're getting double penalised and paying for something you don't even have access to. It's just something that forces people to play a certain way or suffer a handicap.

I find this very surprising, are you sure? I thought every sub-faction in the LON battletome would, similarly as with nurgle sub-factions. 

For example, mortal, rot bringer and daemons all get their own lores/artefacts/traits but still benefit from the nurgle allegiance ability. 

[Jamopower]

5 minutes ago, NurglesFirstChosen said:

I find this very surprising, are you sure? I thought every sub-faction in the LON battletome would, similarly as with nurgle sub-factions. 

For example, mortal, rot bringer and daemons all get their own lores/artefacts/traits but still benefit from the nurgle allegiance ability. 

The universal death allegiance ability is only the deathless minions (the 6+ extra save). 

[Rintrah56]

46 minutes ago, Erdemo86 said:

When does the new white dwarf come out? Today? Are there warscrolls in it or some other new infos?

 8 June - later release than normal, presumably because of new editions AOS etc

[Elmir]

30 minutes ago, NurglesFirstChosen said:

I find this very surprising, are you sure? I thought every sub-faction in the LON battletome would, similarly as with nurgle sub-factions. 

For example, mortal, rot bringer and daemons all get their own lores/artefacts/traits but still benefit from the nurgle allegiance ability. 

Not how LoN works... 

There are 6 allegiances in that book, all with their own command traits/artifacts: 

Grand host of Nagash: gets gravesites, gets magic, gets Endless Legion command ability (resurrect summonable units at gravesites), gets legion innumerable(more healing) and gets chosen guardians (better morghasts).

Legion of Sacrament: gets gravesites, gets magic, gets endless legion command ability, gets master's  teaching (resurrection of a summonable unit when you kill enemy units on a gravesite, triggered on 4+), better casting (+1 to cast)

Legion of blood: gets gravesites, gets magic, gets endless legion command ability, gets immortal majesty (-1 bravery debuff), gets favoured retainers (better vampires). 

Legion of night: gets gravesites, gets magic, gets endless legion command ability, gets the bait (+1 AS for skellies in own territory) and ageless cunning (ambush rules). 

Soulblight: NO gravesites, gets vampire magic, NO endless legions, gets bloodlines (bonus to charging, deathless minions save, casting or movement)

Death GA: No gravesites, no extra magic, no endless legions, no bonus of any kind except deathless minions. 

 

[NurglesFirstChosen]

9 minutes ago, Elmir said:

Not how LoN works... 

There are 6 allegiances in that book, all with their own command traits/artifacts: 

Grand host of Nagash: gets gravesites, gets magic, gets Endless Legion command ability (resurrect summonable units at gravesites), gets legion innumerable(more healing) and gets chosen guardians (better morghasts).

Legion of Sacrament: gets gravesites, gets magic, gets endless legion command ability, gets master's  teaching (resurrection of a summonable unit when you kill enemy units on a gravesite, triggered on 4+), better casting (+1 to cast)

Legion of blood: gets gravesites, gets magic, gets endless legion command ability, gets immortal majesty (-1 bravery debuff), gets favoured retainers (better vampires). 

Legion of night: gets gravesites, gets magic, gets endless legion command ability, gets the bait (+1 AS for skellies in own territory) and ageless cunning (ambush rules). 

Soulblight: NO gravesites, gets vampire magic, NO endless legions, gets bloodlines (bonus to charging, deathless minions save, casting or movement)

Death GA: No gravesites, no extra magic, no endless legions, no bonus of any kind except deathless minions. 

 

Understood, thank you.

[Asamu]

7 hours ago, Brightstar said:

 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.

If you don't want to discuss something somewhere, then don't bring it up there in the first place.

7 hours ago, Brightstar said:

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.

Your suggestion falls under the idea of homogenizing scrolls to have more equivalency, which is something that I brought up in my previous post. It takes away interesting effects and removes many of the differences between armies/units in an attempt at balance.

Without an abstraction to evaluate units by (IE: points), how do you take into account for very different strengths between two single entity units? For example, it would be silly for a megaboss to be equivalent to a Grot warboss in terms of power level. That's all points are: an abstraction to allow for more gradation in the evaluation of units and to make it easier to compare units that are vastly different without taking away the things that make them unique or to make situations that don't make sense in order to achieve a reasonable balance. Wounds as the abstraction didn't work very well for obvious reasons, and the same applies to warscroll limits.

7 hours ago, Brightstar said:

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.

I can guarantee you that if the system your group uses for balance were adopted by GW and used by the majority of players, you'd still get just as many posts about things not being balanced as you get now. If there were no system in place, either those people complaining about it would move to a different game entirely, causing GW to lose customers, or they would be demanding one. I actually think that balance posts are an important part of a healthy community, because it shows that people care about the game, and gives an indication to GW of what to look into for the next update.

And no, points are not why people debate over the validity of summoning costing or not costing points or whatever other method you're using to balance the game. That debate happens because there is a structure to balance the game at all, and summoning is an incredibly difficult mechanic to get right. I actually think what they've revealed so far in AoS 2 for summoning looks promising, since there is opportunity cost involved, such as an entire unit needing to die for you to summon it, or trading spells that can immediately impact the game to generate summoning points to bring out a unit that can affect the game later.

Is it? Finding things in the game that can be broken is part of the fun of the game, and having restrictions and limitations on building armies adds to that. Regardless of what system is being used for balance, the competitive side of the community would try to break it.

Of course the viable/non-viable units shift every time the points are changed or new models are released: it's an asymmetric game. The same thing happens in every video game with balance patches and every other TT game to differing degrees. If you want a system such that what a person brings to the table is a non-factor in their chance to win the game, that's not going to happen, not because they won't try for it, but because it's impossible in an asymmetric game. No matter what system you use for balancing, different combinations of units will be better or worse than others, and players will exploit that, whether that's in tournaments or casual play. Points just happen to be the best system people are currently aware of for balancing the game that isn't overly complex.

8 hours ago, Brightstar said:

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. 

It's not confusing. It's something that is unreasonable to ask for, because it achieves the same thing, but requires more work for both the community and GW. GW is a business, and changes to warscrolls invalidate existing products (battletomes, printed warscrolls, etc...) that they don't want players to have to replace without a new release. It would create a backlash that would be bad for them as a business. Sure, I'd love to see some warscrolls get changes, like some monsters getting rend -2 instead of rend -1 (Carnosaurs being one example), but those changes would have to be extremely limited and part of a major update like AoS 2 or be part of a new battletome for the respective faction.

They are changing some warscrolls going into AOS 2, but it is likely to be the bare minimum, and mostly restricted to units like the Engine of the Gods that have significant changes in existing erratas due to problematic mechanics.

8 hours ago, Brightstar said:

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.  

What can they do to support the playstyle of people that don't use the material they produced? They already release campaign books that have options for set armies instead of points. The best they can do to support narrative players that want to create their own narrative games IS to add points (or some other metric to balance the game) so those players have something to go off of in balancing their games. How does changing warscrolls instead of points values cater to players that don't use points, when those players currently have the freedom to adjust what they bring however they want to better balance their games?

If your balancing system that isn't points works for your group, that's great, but GW doesn't know what it is, and why should they, and how/why should they cater to it when they've already made something to balance the game? You and your group are also free to adjust that system however you want, whenever you want, so what changes GW makes should be irrelevant to whatever balance you get with it.

You seem to be asking for something official to use in the place of something official that already exists and accomplishes much the same thing. You can probably understand why I see that as odd. It appears to me that you do not like points because you dislike the more competitive side of the game (despite, and probably because, you are likely a person that gets competitive when building army lists and/or playing the game), and not because there is anything actually wrong with them as a method of balancing the game.

[blueshirtman]

2 hours ago, Bellfree said:

PreGHB a lot of tournaments were experimenting with a lot of different formats. I believe a 500pt sideboard was fairy common.

Isn't this kind of a the thing that killed WFB, the starter army pack being 3000pts scares around anyone who would pick an army that wants a side board.

[Mcthew]

18 minutes ago, Asamu said:

If you don't want to discuss something somewhere, then don't bring it up there in the first place.

Your suggestion falls under the idea of homogenizing scrolls to have more equivalency, which is something that I brought up in my previous post. It takes away interesting effects and removes many of the differences between armies/units in an attempt at balance.

Without an abstraction to evaluate units by (IE: points), how do you take into account for very different strengths between two single entity units? For example, it would be silly for a megaboss to be equivalent to a Grot warboss in terms of power level. That's all points are: an abstraction to allow for more gradation in the evaluation of units and to make it easier to compare units that are vastly different without taking away the things that make them unique or to make situations that don't make sense in order to achieve a reasonable balance. Wounds as the abstraction didn't work very well for obvious reasons, and the same applies to warscroll limits.

I can guarantee you that if the system your group uses for balance were adopted by GW and used by the majority of players, you'd still get just as many posts about things not being balanced as you get now. If there were no system in place, either those people complaining about it would move to a different game entirely, causing GW to lose customers, or they would be demanding one. I actually think that balance posts are an important part of a healthy community, because it shows that people care about the game, and gives an indication to GW of what to look into for the next update.

And no, points are not why people debate over the validity of summoning costing or not costing points or whatever other method you're using to balance the game. That debate happens because there is a structure to balance the game at all, and summoning is an incredibly difficult mechanic to get right. I actually think what they've revealed so far in AoS 2 for summoning looks promising, since there is opportunity cost involved, such as an entire unit needing to die for you to summon it, or trading spells that can immediately impact the game to generate summoning points to bring out a unit that can affect the game later.

Is it? Finding things in the game that can be broken is part of the fun of the game, and having restrictions and limitations on building armies adds to that. Regardless of what system is being used for balance, the competitive side of the community would try to break it.

Of course the viable/non-viable units shift every time the points are changed or new models are released: it's an asymmetric game. The same thing happens in every video game with balance patches and every other TT game to differing degrees. If you want a system such that what a person brings to the table is a non-factor in their chance to win the game, that's not going to happen, not because they won't try for it, but because it's impossible in an asymmetric game. No matter what system you use for balancing, different combinations of units will be better or worse than others, and players will exploit that, whether that's in tournaments or casual play. Points just happen to be the best system people are currently aware of for balancing the game that isn't overly complex.

It's not confusing. It's something that is unreasonable to ask for, because it achieves the same thing, but requires more work for both the community and GW. GW is a business, and changes to warscrolls invalidate existing products (battletomes, printed warscrolls, etc...) that they don't want players to have to replace without a new release. It would create a backlash that would be bad for them as a business. Sure, I'd love to see some warscrolls get changes, like some monsters getting rend -2 instead of rend -1 (Carnosaurs being one example), but those changes would have to be extremely limited and part of a major update like AoS 2 or be part of a new battletome for the respective faction.

They are changing some warscrolls going into AOS 2, but it is likely to be the bare minimum, and mostly restricted to units like the Engine of the Gods that have significant changes in existing erratas due to problematic mechanics.

What can they do to support the playstyle of people that don't use the material they produced? They already release campaign books that have options for set armies instead of points. The best they can do to support narrative players that want to create their own narrative games IS to add points (or some other metric to balance the game) so those players have something to go off of in balancing their games. How does changing warscrolls instead of points values cater to players that don't use points, when those players currently have the freedom to adjust what they bring however they want to better balance their games?

If your balancing system that isn't points works for your group, that's great, but GW doesn't know what it is, and why should they, and how/why should they cater to it when they've already made something to balance the game? You and your group are also free to adjust that system however you want, whenever you want, so what changes GW makes should be irrelevant to whatever balance you get with it.

You seem to be asking for something official to use in the place of something official that already exists and accomplishes much the same thing. You can probably understand why I see that as odd. It appears to me that you do not like points because you dislike the more competitive side of the game (despite, and probably because, you are likely a person that gets competitive when building army lists and/or playing the game), and not because there is anything actually wrong with them as a method of balancing the game.

I agree, I find the freedom to use points or not to, is liberating, and accommodated by the rules-set in AoS already. To add another official dynamic to balance the armies outside of points doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me either unless we go down the old WFB route of set campaigns with set armies such as Bloodbath at Orcs Drift (which I loved back in the day).  

I prefer the slight imbalance anyway as no battle in the history of warfare has been even. That adds to the excitement when victory is against the odds, or resignation that you were gonna get your butt kicked from the off! It’s the fun of it - the strategy, the roll of the die... ?

[Deadkitten]

52 minutes ago, Mcthew said:

 

I prefer the slight imbalance anyway as no battle in the history of warfare has been even. That adds to the excitement when victory is against the odds, or resignation that you were gonna get your butt kicked from the off! It’s the fun of it - the strategy, the roll of the die... ?

Part of that is the difficulty to capture some of the broader strategic and economic aspects of war in a table top game.  Map campaigns can do a lot to pickup this slack though.  Ironically, from the tactical side of things, history is either fairly balanced (ACW, Napoleonics, ect) or vastly lopsided as the result of some tech advantage (Mongols, Zulu, ect).

[blueshirtman]

yeah, unbalance is acceptable as long as factions actually have units you want to take for them. If you sit down and look at your faction, and the only "good" thing about your army is how it looks painted by a studio, then there is something deeply wrong with how its battletome was constructed. Some armies will always be the best, and I understand that GW wants to switch up stuff, it is fair game, otherwise people wouldn't be buying more models. But each unit should really have something in them that wants to play with them, and not just sit in a bag with a overcosted or bad rules tag on it.

And there isn't really much strategy involved when you know that your army is has an under 40% chance to win, and what is worse, the data from around the world seems to point out that it is just you being bad, which can happen, but the army being bad.

In a way I do with the sentiment that points aren't the ultimate fix to everything. An army or unit can have points and it can still be very bad. What does worry me, is that given the option to fix stuff GW is more interested in giving extra stuff to factions that were already doing alright, then fixing those that are bad. I actually re read all the other faction focus articles, and while all didn't have much info in them, there was always some glimps of stuff that could potentialy be good. New spells there, summoning here, unit synergy enhanced etc all cool stuff. For BCR though they went with buy ally as the cool thing to do, in fact I was so stupid that for a whole day I thought that the firebelly mentioned in the faction focus, is going to be an actual BCR unit sitting on a beast, which good or bad, at least would be interesting.

[Mayple]

40 minutes ago, blueshirtman said:

yeah, unbalance is acceptable as long as factions actually have units you want to take for them. If you sit down and look at your faction, and the only "good" thing about your army is how it looks painted by a studio, then there is something deeply wrong with how its battletome was constructed. Some armies will always be the best, and I understand that GW wants to switch up stuff, it is fair game, otherwise people wouldn't be buying more models. But each unit should really have something in them that wants to play with them, and not just sit in a bag with a overcosted or bad rules tag on it.

And there isn't really much strategy involved when you know that your army is has an under 40% chance to win, and what is worse, the data from around the world seems to point out that it is just you being bad, which can happen, but the army being bad.

In a way I do with the sentiment that points aren't the ultimate fix to everything. An army or unit can have points and it can still be very bad. What does worry me, is that given the option to fix stuff GW is more interested in giving extra stuff to factions that were already doing alright, then fixing those that are bad. I actually re read all the other faction focus articles, and while all didn't have much info in them, there was always some glimps of stuff that could potentialy be good. New spells there, summoning here, unit synergy enhanced etc all cool stuff. For BCR though they went with buy ally as the cool thing to do, in fact I was so stupid that for a whole day I thought that the firebelly mentioned in the faction focus, is going to be an actual BCR unit sitting on a beast, which good or bad, at least would be interesting.

What units are you referring to here? I can't think of many non-aelven factions that have units that are straight up worse than everything else (shadowblades, corsairs, serpentis) , and even in those cases I could argue some usage for them; in fact, their problems come mostly from being incomplete factions

Player skill and playstyle is hugely important in deciding whether their army will perform or not. Statistics are skewed by a vast majority picking up 'good' armies in competitive settings, giving the appearance that only good armies can win; ignoring the fact that few, if any, 'bad' armies showed up. Additionaly, the players picking up the most competitive armies often practice extensively with them, which makes them a better, more knowledgeable player, and allows them to hit that top ten/twenty mark by skill alone, the army itself nudging them up a few spots more.

Anyway, I digress: What, specifically, are you thinking about as an example when you say 'the only good part about your army is how it looks painted by a studio' ?

[Lemondish]

1 hour ago, blueshirtman said:

I actually re read all the other faction focus articles, and while all didn't have much info in them, there was always some glimps of stuff that could potentialy be good. New spells there, summoning here, unit synergy enhanced etc all cool stuff. For BCR though they went with buy ally as the cool thing to do, in fact I was so stupid that for a whole day I thought that the firebelly mentioned in the faction focus, is going to be an actual BCR unit sitting on a beast, which good or bad, at least would be interesting.

They showed a new spell (which I know everyone is ignoring because it requires an allied unit), some synergy with the realm specific artefacts stacking on a Stonehorn, and increased flexibility when choosing a battalion. 

I can tell that this is not enough for many, but to act like there's nothing there or resulting to what aboutism kind of sounds like nothing but a full overhaul would have satisfied many of you, and I'm sorry to say but I get the impression that was pretty unlikely. 

[Infeston]

No faction focus today? Normally there is a Faction Focus at this time of day. Or are they already finished with Faction Focusses? I would have hoped for a Faction Focus: Gutbusters.

[GeneralZero]

They have tought about our super constructive comments and GW finally decided that they will launch the game in june 2019 by adding so much good ideas that we gave to them.

[Furuzzolo]

38 minutes ago, Infeston said:

No faction focus today? Normally there is a Faction Focus at this time of day. Or are they already finished with Faction Focusses? I would have hoped for a Faction Focus: Gutbusters.

Bare with us, should be the Dispossessed Faction Focus. 

We're kinda used to wait, just be patient! Bring your tears bucklet, sit down, ready the grudges book and the ink.

[Ollie Grimwood]

There should be a Dispossed one considering they mentioned it as released on The Stormcast 

[SaJeel]

Its up now https://www.warhammer-community.com/2018/06/02/june-2nd-faction-focus-dispossessedgw-homepage-post-3/ praise Grungni

[SaJeel]

Really wanted to know if Unforged would get anything, will have to wait and see, hopeful a point drop too. Happy to see The Irons battleline tho, my disspossed army might be a thing this edition =D