6 Nations take aways

[Karol]

8 minutes ago, Skabnoze said:

None of those issues could really be fixed during the period of time of the Community articles.  All of the books were already being cranked out at the printers.  It was far too late by then.

Ok, but what kind of a people tested 2.0, I am assuming it was tested, and didn't notice the intereaction between Kroak and the new rules? I understand someone missing some wanderers special rule that interacts, with an ironjaws opponents relics, and makes the game go in a loop. Or some other aelf non phoenix thing suddenly going over 9000. But lizardman were a well known and played army. Kroak builds existed before 2.0. I am not a lizardman player, total noob, but if someone showed me his rules and the fact that he can suddenly spam it, I would know it as a bad thing. All it took to check it was for someone who plays lizardman to take his kroak list and play it once with the new 2.0 durning the testing period.

[Skabnoze]

11 minutes ago, Arkiham said:

they must have been obvious before the books went to the print. 

you dont print a million books then decide to read the rules & playtest it...

How long have you been playing games workshop games?  

We might as well be clamoring for the sky to be plaid.

[rokapoke]

27 minutes ago, Arkiham said:

they must have been obvious before the books went to the print. 

you dont print a million books then decide to read the rules & playtest it...

That said, most of the play testers are top-end players. At the top tables, most of the regulars know how to beat those cheesy exploit combos/lists, whereas that is 100% not true of scrubs like myself. So it’s theoretically possible that the play testers were not really able to fully break the lists the way the community can, since the community faces a wider range of skill levels. 

[Enoby]

I noticed a Slaanesh list in there - any word on how they're doing? 

Other than that, things do seem to be getting pretty ridiculous - reminds me of the beginning of AoS where people had to ask their opponents to not play three Mornghuls, except now we'll need to call for grot disarmament. I feel like AoS 2 could have done with a little extra time in Playtesting; the hype leading up to the new edition was great, but I can't help but feel the rules weren't all that well thought out. Hope we get a large FAQ ala 40k after some more time to test. 

[Ratatatata]

This was a very depressing thread to read. I was at the 6N and had a blast; brilliant games and opponents. Sure, we could see a few issues, all of whom are easy to fix. GW knows about them, will probably sort it out. If they don’t, the community can. 

All in all though, the game seemed more balanced then ever before. The new scenarios seem really good, point tweaks and new abilities make a difference, etc. 

So with this good experience in mind I read through this thread and... wow. All the complainilg and agression, such a bummer to read.

Seriously, what’s up with theese forums? How hard can it be to just NOT COMPLAIN at everything! 

Way I see it is 99/100 persons using this thread to ramble ans complain wasn’t even at the event. My humble guess is most of you haven’t even played a single game of AoS 2. 

Ben created theese forums hoping for a place where there could be positive discussions about AoS. You people are destroying that. You should all be ashamed.

 

[JackStreicher]

After years of competitive gaming I‘ce come to the conclusion that dice-based games are never suited to be competitive and the usual tryhard players as well as the constant maxing out of armies really sucks a game dry. So I prefer games with Friends: we usually play thematic armies which we try to make good and strong - we don‘t max-out every damn synergy for the sake of powergaming. You know what? It‘s the most fun I‘ve ever had in 18 years of Warhammer. So I don‘t care if certain combos are broken as long as my opponent plays for the fun (having a close game) and avoids abusive combos or the spamming of OP-Units.

as you might notice in this thread: Competetive nonsense makes people really bitter. Simply try to have fun and stop playing with abusive lists/players.

About Battalions:

I like them since they‘re thematic, I however despise the fact that the amount and kind of Battalions is this unequally distributed.

for example: Kegions if Nagash have 5? Battalions if which only one does not require you to field a named Charakter (tbh the frequency in which NCs are picked is absurd; why the heck should a named Charakter participate in every 2nd battle? Is every fray that important?)

compared to flesheater courts: they seem to have more Battalions than Unit entries. 

They should add 1 or 2 basic Battalions Just to equalise things. An example:

Frontline  Battalion 80 pst

1 Hero - Must be General

4-6 Batteline Units

effekt: +1 bravery for battleline units while wholly within 12“ of the General.

About 2.0 in general: it‘s super fun to play! Lot‘s of possibilities and I haven‘t encountered anything gamebreaking  yet. 

 

[Enoby]

Also, may seem like a daft question, but what does 'TP capped and TP uncapped' mean? I'm also confused why NI was lower than Wales and Sweden despite having more wins. Looks like TP capped detirmined the victor, but I'm wondering how that related to wins. 

I feel I'm missing something obvious here ?

[Vextol]

45 minutes ago, Karol said:

Ok, but what kind of a people tested 2.0, I am assuming it was tested, and didn't notice the intereaction between Kroak and the new rules? I understand someone missing some wanderers special rule that interacts, with an ironjaws opponents relics, and makes the game go in a loop. Or some other aelf non phoenix thing suddenly going over 9000. But lizardman were a well known and played army. Kroak builds existed before 2.0. I am not a lizardman player, total noob, but if someone showed me his rules and the fact that he can suddenly spam it, I would know it as a bad thing. All it took to check it was for someone who plays lizardman to take his kroak list and play it once with the new 2.0 durning the testing period.

I mean, the old edition of age of Sigmar had rules of 1 that were almost EXCLUSIVELY written because of Seraphon.   The rule of not being able to modify initiative rolls basically only impacted 2 models, one of which was Kroak the other of which was again, a seraphon.  Maybe there were more, but these two were definitely the big players.  I don't know why they left kroak unchanged but they definitely didn't miss it.

Kroak's spell in question is what?  7+, 8+, 9+, 10+?  So not easy to cast after the first 1/2 and you need to be 10.5 inches from all the stuff you want to kill.  Also, hes a lot of points.  To make him really scary you need Astrolith bearers and a balewind correct?  Guessing there's a portal thrown in there too to really pump out range?

If you make Kroak a 'monster' you put a huge damper on his survivability and kill the balewind play.  Astrolith bearers are one of the few stacking buff units like that in the game so just hit them with the "Any" keyword like all the other buffers get.  Now, Kroak is a 6+, 7+,8+, 9+ with diminished range and the monster keyword.  A Slann can make it better with the right stars I guess but still with very few warscroll updates it could have been greatly cut back on potency.

The fixes are simple and in line with a lot of other changes they've made.  Also, I think Seraphon are still a pretty big seller so it's not like they just don't care about the army. 

I don't know why they didn't change it but I believe they must have had a reason because if they had wanted to hurt him they could have easily done it.

[Skabnoze]

We don’t have any real visibility into the methods they used for playtesting and how extensive or not they were.  It could very well be the case that playtesters were not allowed access to the full spectrum of everything and they may have been doing select targeted tests and overlooked other stuff.  Or the playtest time could have been too short for some of this stuff to shake out.  Or playtesters may have brought some of these issues up and had them ignored.  GW does not have a transparent process so we just don’t know.

From my point of view whatever current process or set of playtesters they use are no better than what they did 10-20 years ago.  You can still often find big exploits in their books within an hour of cracking it open.

It is what it is at this point.  But at least they are faster and better about handling errata than the GW of the past.  Give them credit for the improvements that they do make and hope that they improve on the rest over time.  Not much else you can do aside from take your business elsewhere if that is not good enough.

[Vextol]

18 minutes ago, Ratatatata said:

This was a very depressing thread to read. I was at the 6N and had a blast; brilliant games and opponents. Sure, we could see a few issues, all of whom are easy to fix. GW knows about them, will probably sort it out. If they don’t, the community can. 

All in all though, the game seemed more balanced then ever before. The new scenarios seem really good, point tweaks and new abilities make a difference, etc. 

So with this good experience in mind I read through this thread and... wow. All the complainilg and agression, such a bummer to read.

Seriously, what’s up with theese forums? How hard can it be to just NOT COMPLAIN at everything! 

Way I see it is 99/100 persons using this thread to ramble ans complain wasn’t even at the event. My humble guess is most of you haven’t even played a single game of AoS 2. 

Ben created theese forums hoping for a place where there could be positive discussions about AoS. You people are destroying that. You should all be ashamed.

 

This post is ripe for aggressive retort but I want to settle it a bit before it gets there.  

I think most people are just questioning some of the changes and how much they will impact play.  While I agree that having a blast is the most important thing, a lot of players, like myself, will end up playing the same players using the same lists over and over and over again.  Even with the best of spirits, it can be hard to continually be pulling your intricately painted and cared for models off the table without being able to do much of anything time and time again.  And playing with someone else isn't always a viable option.

I also think that without considerable effort, it's very easy to impose an unintentional negative attitude in a text format.  As someone whose played 15 or so games since the new edition came out, I will say that I love all the new changes!  I have high hopes for this year!  You were at the first big event so there is going to be a lot of questions on these new changes and how much of an impact they really had in a competitive environment. 

People are looking to you for your input because you are going to be considered someone who really knows.  If you think the game is not overly unbalanced, that is excellent information.  Calling us peons a shame to the community is a little depressing.

Also, green with envy that you were there!

[JackStreicher]

9 minutes ago, Vextol said:

This post is ripe for aggressive retort but I want to settle it a bit before it gets there.  

I think most people are just questioning some of the changes and how much they will impact play.  While I agree that having a blast is the most important thing, a lot of players, like myself, will end up playing the same players using the same lists over and over and over again.  Even with the best of spirits, it can be hard to continually be pulling your intricately painted and cared for models off the table without being able to do much of anything time and time again.  And playing with someone else isn't always a viable option.

I also think that without considerable effort, it's very easy to impose an unintentional negative attitude in a text format.  As someone whose played 15 or so games since the new edition came out, I will say that I love all the new changes!  I have high hopes for this year!  You were at the first big event so there is going to be a lot of questions on these new changes and how much of an impact they really had in a competitive environment. 

People are looking to you for your input because you are going to be considered someone who really knows.  If you think the game is not overly unbalanced, that is excellent information.  Calling us peons a shame to the community is a little depressing.

Also, green with envy that you were there!

Talk with the person to stop fielding boring-a** Auto-win lists and try to play narrative but with matched play rules.

communication matters.

 

@Skabnoze

as for gametesting:

they din‘t Have the time to run as many tests with as many individual scenarios as the community does. Apart from that: Idon‘t think they have the so common mindset of: uhh that looks broken as hell, I gonna abuse the hell out of this rule. - a mindset too many players have for some reason.

players tend to ruin their game all by themselves.

 

[Vextol]

Edit: Unimportant and off topic ?

[PlasticCraic]

12 hours ago, Gaz Taylor said:

 (I'm expecting updates for some of the older books as quick wins from GW)

Talk dirty to me!

[Skabnoze]

It could be the case that Seraphon are going to get a new battletome soon and they are planning to handle Kroak then.  I dunno.  That seems a bit unlikely to me though because looking at the Seraphon model line it seems like they would want to replace a lot of kits when they rewrite the book.  

But one thing to remember is that they are one of the oldest battletomes and the game has changed in quite a few ways since they were released.

Or maybe they are just really disorganized and let a lot of stuff slip through the cracks.

[Andreas]

37 minutes ago, Enoby said:

Also, may seem like a daft question, but what does 'TP capped and TP uncapped' mean? I'm also confused why NI was lower than Wales and Sweden despite having more wins. Looks like TP capped detirmined the victor, but I'm wondering how that related to wins. 

I feel I'm missing something obvious here ?

You could only get 60-120pt each round despite you maybe winning or losing more games. It makes the draft a bit more tactical when you know that you can give a few games away without losing any points. It also makes it a bit more important to win the close matchups against teams close to your score than thrashing teams in the bottom. I think that's the idea with the cap.

[Vextol]

3 minutes ago, Skabnoze said:

It could be the case that Seraphon are going to get a new battletome soon and they are planning to handle Kroak then.  I dunno.  That seems a bit unlikely to me though because looking at the Seraphon model line it seems like they would want to replace a lot of kits when they rewrite the book. 

Don't tease...aside from how extremely exciting that would be, I think GW would have an Orc riot if we saw another Order battletome.

[amysrevenge]

5 minutes ago, Vextol said:

Don't tease...aside from how extremely exciting that would be, I think GW would have an Orc riot if we saw another Order battletome.

Haha I've already typed "WAAAG" in a draft email to my boss.  Don't make me finish the "H!!!" and head out across the sea toward Notts...

[Skabnoze]

@JackStreicher I don’t disagree with what you said about playtesting.  I fully agree that the GW dev team has historically, and still does, seem to have a very different mindset than a vocal online player subset and the tournament crew.  

All that I said is that their playtest process is closed and opaque so we don’t know much about it.  And also that the current process, if different than the past does not appear to have better results.  I am perfectly ok with waiting for an errata and that is generally what I have been saying.

I do disagree about the state of the game resting fully on the shoulders of the players though.  GW was the ones that got the ball rolling a couple decades back for tournaments and overly competitive play and they just never kept up with what they created.  In addition, it is not human nature to self-handicap in competition.  It is niaeve to assume the playerbase at large will do so.

It is fully acceptable to treat games developers as professionals and expect a good product from their efforts.  It is also perfectly acceptable to voice when you feel that they have not delivered.  But having said that, at some point you have to choose to continue to support them with your money or not.  I mainly play for fun and the people I play with are mostly the same - so i can deal with some rules cruft if I find the game to be fun on the whole and the models to be good.  Other people have to make that decision for themselves.  But I will say that it does continually disappoint me to see them trip on the same sorts of things for each edition over the past 25 years.

And if the playtest period was too short for good results then the fault with that lies entirely in GWs hands.

Anyways, all that said I think this edition is great.  I think the big issues will eventually get fixed and I am cool with that.  They are still getting my hobby dollars and that has not been true for every game edition.

[Skabnoze]

10 minutes ago, Vextol said:

Don't tease...aside from how extremely exciting that would be, I think GW would have an Orc riot if we saw another Order battletome.

Hey, I play Destruction and Death.  But order is such a behemoth of a grand alliance by design that we would have to be seriously deluded to think they will not have more books released.

I also expect that they are going to start rewriting a number of battletomes and order is ripe for that.  It is almost guaranteed money even if they don’t release models.  That is one of the major benefits for GW when they release new editions - they get to sell you a lot of new books.

Also, book rewrites are potentially good for everyone.  If they don’t ****** up a new book then they can broaden the pool of enemies, shake up lists from other factions in response, remove bad play experiences, etc.  It does not always work out like that, but it often can.

I am chomping at the bit for a Moonclan battletome and I might be willing to sell one of my kids for a Legions of Nagash style book for Orcs & Goblins (I got enough kids that I could probably spare one...). But I am still ok with the idea of some order book rewrites.

[PlasticCraic]

1 hour ago, Ratatatata said:

This was a very depressing thread to read. I was at the 6N and had a blast; brilliant games and opponents. Sure, we could see a few issues, all of whom are easy to fix. GW knows about them, will probably sort it out. If they don’t, the community can. 

All in all though, the game seemed more balanced then ever before. The new scenarios seem really good, point tweaks and new abilities make a difference, etc. 

Good to know you enjoyed it and found it overall to be in a good place.  Hopefully the FAQs can wrinkle out the creases.  I've personally been pulling my hair out about a few things, but it seriously does help to know that your experience of playing a full event under 2.0 was a very positive one.

Also: I think I saw 2 different teams on Twitter stating that their Dreadwood Wargrove lists both went 5-0: what's the deal there?  What is it in the rules or scenarios that has given it a sudden power bump?  I know it was a fairly competitive build before, but nowhere near dominant?

[Aginor]

Reading this thread leaves a sour taste in my mouth, it sounds...bad.

I am a Seraphon player and over at Lustria Online we all have seen it coming for weeks, without even playing the game, but neither GW's rule team nor the "playtesters" did, it seems.
Seriously, it took us only a few hours after the first leaks and the faction focus to come up with potentially game breaking lists. What are those guys doing?

I am angry (in a tea drinking way) about it a bit, because I am a person who feels bad playing broken armies or lists, and it seems we only have bad/mediocre stuff and broken stuff.
I want a balanced game and from what I've heard that's not really the case right now. I don't want to pull punches when playing my friends.

I also fear we will share the fate of the BCR now and get nerfed to the ground because people are (mostly rightfully) complaining.

I hope they give Kroak and the Rippers something else instead of what they have  now, maybe even only change their warscrolls to have the rule of one back, that would help. Maybe let Kroak do some additional buffing instead so he doesn't become too bland. And the EotG: Either let it create summining points (2d6 for example or even a flat 6 or 10 or whatever, that's an easy to balance number), and/or make the EotG unique so we can take only one. That would not nerf them to the ground and still fix the broken stuff.

And please GW if anyone of you reads this: just talk to us. We are here and we want to help.

[InvalidUsername]

One thing to keep in mind, is that(provided no intervention on GWs part) this is the absolute weakest these lists will ever be at the competitive level. This is the bottom of the barrel of the future of the competitive meta. As time goes on people are going to refine these lists to a razors edge at the same time as they get better at playing them.

What we're seeing here is the stuff we'll laugh at 6 months from now for thinking it was good. Now some of you are thinking 'ha, see I told  you these lists weren't a big deal, they're TOTALLY beatable' this is the incorrect conclusion. The correct conclusion is 'holy s**t this is gonna get worse'?  Then all the new battletomes that come out will  have to be able to compete with whatever new strategy crops up around 100 mortals Kroak or 64 damage grots or whatever other crazy new nonsense comes out and the next next battletome will have to keep up with the previous one, and so on and oh look, we're playing 7th edition 40k again.

I suffered through 7th once already. Never again.

[yarrickson]

I played at 6N. Despite getting humped in all 5 games I really enjoyed myself. The atmosphere was amazing. As has been repeatedly stated there are a few issues ATM with stacking, seraphon and the spell portal all contenders for most broken thing right now. These are all relatively easy fixes going forward either by FAQ or by TOs. 

7 weeks till my next event. I expect a fair bit to have changed/settled by then. Can't wait to go again. ?

[Mayple]

Is it correct that Kroak in cover, summoning a balewind, would get a +2 to his save? (+1 from cover, +1 from balewind) - While also benefiting from "Look out sir"?  ?

With the chromatic cogs (which he'd want to do anyway) he'd then end up on a 2+ re-rollable save, correct?

Much less concerned about the single turn damage output than I am about the unkillable summoning beast if all of the above is true

[Skabnoze]

39 minutes ago, Aginor said:

And the EotG: Either let it create summining points (2d6 for example or even a flat 6 or 10 or whatever, that's an easy to balance number), and/or make the EotG unique so we can take only one. That would not nerf them to the ground and still fix the broken stuff.

Or increase the cost on the thing.  The current cost is rather ludicrous.

I honestly have no issues with the wording of any of the rules on that warscroll.  They other day I saw some people referencing that thing and calling it broken and I opened it up and took a look.  Nothing on that warscroll is that bad.  Run the numbers and mathematically it is not that crazy.  Then I saw the absurdly low cost and the fact that it is not unique and I thought - oh no...  There are a number of ways that they can address that guy - hopefully they choose a way that still makes it useful and fun for Seraphon players rather than just nerfing it into the dirt.