Why SCE is doing even worse in tournaments compared with previous version?

[Pavnik]

12 minutes ago, Requizen said:

Well chatted with the guy, apparently almost tabled Daughters list but lost due to time (ending in T3), beat Gavriel bomb and mixed Destro with 2x Thundertusks + Stonehorn. Also beat Strike Chamber SCE and Ogors, which sounded a bit more fluffy than not. 

Sounds like a pretty standard tourney run to me to be honest. "As well as it could do" is imo a bit insulting to someone who came in 8th out of almost 90.

So he played two games against equal or better tiered opponents and 3 fluff lists.  Against the Gavbomb he can screen okayish with the Sequitors and defuse the bomb in an counter strike with his 10 Evos.

[Mark Williams]

1 hour ago, Requizen said:

Well chatted with the guy, apparently almost tabled Daughters list but lost due to time (ending in T3), beat Gavriel bomb and mixed Destro with 2x Thundertusks + Stonehorn. Also beat Strike Chamber SCE and Ogors, which sounded a bit more fluffy than not. 

Sounds like a pretty standard tourney run to me to be honest. "As well as it could do" is imo a bit insulting to someone who came in 8th out of almost 90.

I understand it seems insulting, but as an sce player, in my local area if I took that list, I wouldn’t do very well. The list seems designed to protect and buff the evocators. That’s his big power unit. You figure a way to kill that he’s got nothing left. Scioning them would be a bad idea as you want to set them up to countercharge, not the other way around. Did his oponents just blindly rush forward into charge range of them every game?

[PJetski]

I'm going to sound extremely elitist here, but... I'm not going to consider a tournament with Destruction and Phoenix temple in the top 4 and zero Seraphon players (imo the best army currently) as a competitive event

Kudos to the players doing well with "weak" armies, but this shouldn't be used as a representative sample of what the competitive metagame is like.

[Killamike]

So all the people throwing shade on this guy that they probably dont know, aka the 3 guys above me, what are your tournament results?? Show us all what major event you have played in and hit the top? 

To be honest no one is going to listen to your negative and insulting posts over someone who went, played and did well with their army. 

Enjoy your echo chamber, because that's all this thread is. 

[Mark Williams]

16 minutes ago, Killamike said:

So all the people throwing shade on this guy that they probably dont know, aka the 3 guys above me, what are your tournament results?? Show us all what major event you have played in and hit the top? 

To be honest no one is going to listen to your negative and insulting posts over someone who went, played and did well with their army. 

Enjoy your echo chamber, because that's all this thread is. 

If I post one of my recent tournament results, will you magically start to respect me? It seems that you've already made up your mind that my opinion is worthless.

[Requizen]

10 minutes ago, Mark Williams said:

If I post one of my recent tournament results, will you magically start to respect me? It seems that you've already made up your mind that my opinion is worthless.

Personally, I don't think you need tournament results to have your opinion respected. 

However, it seems like every time someone posts good results here, the immediate response is a slew of excuses why it doesn't really count, or how it would never work at a "real tournament", because apparently a real tournament only has hard netlists in the top 20, and anything else is a joke. 

At some point, people are going to have to realize that the results do actually matter in these discussions, especially when it consistent from one event to the next.

[Mark Williams]

1 minute ago, Requizen said:

Personally, I don't think you need tournament results to have your opinion respected. 

However, it seems like every time someone posts good results here, the immediate response is a slew of excuses why it doesn't really count, or how it would never work at a "real tournament", because apparently a real tournament only has hard netlists in the top 20, and anything else is a joke. 

At some point, people are going to have to realize that the results do actually matter in these discussions, especially when it consistent from one event to the next.

I think everyone posting in this thread have a slightly different opinion, goal, and point they are trying to make.

The only point that I wanted to get across in this thread is that SCE, while doing well and better than the total game average, do not seem to be in as good of a place as they were before AoS 2.0 and the new Battletome. I have no interest in arguing that SCE are bad or not good enough to perform well in tournaments. But it feels like universally every time someone responds, they've mis-interpretted the thread as another complaint thread about why SCE aren't on top.

As for this list in particular, I'm only commenting that I'm confused as to how it did so well. On the surface, it seems to be centered around baiting the opponent into attacking a ring of sequitors, then counter-attacking with 10 evocators, buffing them with a lord celestant command ability. It's a solid strategy, but it only has one trick, and there are several missions where you can't set it up because the mission requires you to get across the table or constantly capture a target the moves every turn. This army is very stationary and defensive in nature, and from what I have historically seen, defensive armies have a limit to how well they can do, due to the fact that a lot of the game involves rushing forward and alpha striking opponents in order to limit their resources and mobility. If I were fighting this person, I would wait to see how they are playing their evocators, then counter that with one of two things in my army that can counter it. We'd take some losses, but his lack of mobility would allow me to pick and choose where and when I want to attack him. He has no ranged attacks, and the castigors are pretty weak, so  I can also set up fire lanes and "no go" zones on the table as well.

I'm just simply saying I'd be curious to see the actual games. I've tried similar army setups and had a lot of trouble getting them to work unless my opponent just crashes blindly into me and underestimates what the evocators can do.

[JackStreicher]

On 9/17/2018 at 2:53 PM, Yokai said:

Man, the way the direction in which this discussion has tangented reminds me a whole lot of the "PvE vs PvP" discussions in my MMORPG days.

It basically boiled down to this: PvE fans wanted fluff and variety and did not care a whole lot about competitiveness, whereas PvP fans wanted everything to be on an equal footing competetively. Needless to say, games which tried to please both crowds did not fare very well. So, the best games were the ones which focused its design and ruleset mainly on one of those categories, and did it well.

I think the same lesson applies here: look at what kind of game AoS is designed to be, and adjust your expectations accordingly.

Not a fitting comparison at all since PvP and PvE Balance have an enormous overlap in AoS:

balance the points right (first internally and then externally) and both sides are happy. - that‘s all (you don‘t need to balance two fundamentaly different kinds of playstyle like they are in MMORPGs. In AoS both are the same and the only time ‚pve‘ loses is if a fluffy rule is removed due to PvP reasons).

 

[SwampHeart]

4 hours ago, PJetski said:

I'm going to sound extremely elitist here, but... I'm not going to consider a tournament with Destruction and Phoenix temple in the top 4 and zero Seraphon players (imo the best army currently) as a competitive event

Kudos to the players doing well with "weak" armies, but this shouldn't be used as a representative sample of what the competitive metagame is like.

I'm curious how you're backing up that thought process on Seraphon? I ask because (especially post FAQ) they haven't really been showing up super well in big events. 

[Mark Williams]

23 minutes ago, SwampHeart said:

I'm curious how you're backing up that thought process on Seraphon? I ask because (especially post FAQ) they haven't really been showing up super well in big events. 

I don't know about them performing overall in events, but on a personal level, they are very difficult for me to deal with. Once they start getting the summoning points rolling, if I can't stop them by the first or 2nd turn, the game is kind of over... At a certain point the board is just flooded with bodies, and I can't generate enough damage to clear any space out. It's like trying to drive a car through a swamp. I think if you can build an "alpha strike" type of army you can deal with them, but if your army is designed to spend a turn or two building up to some big move, they just glut the table and you run out of space to move.

[SwampHeart]

6 minutes ago, Mark Williams said:

I don't know about them performing overall in events, but on a personal level, they are very difficult for me to deal with. Once they start getting the summoning points rolling, if I can't stop them by the first or 2nd turn, the game is kind of over... At a certain point the board is just flooded with bodies, and I can't generate enough damage to clear any space out. It's like trying to drive a car through a swamp. I think if you can build an "alpha strike" type of army you can deal with them, but if your army is designed to spend a turn or two building up to some big move, they just glut the table and you run out of space to move.

That's fair and I don't intend to hold myself out as some tactical master. I'm just genuinely curious. Ultimately my particular SCE build (MW bomb) doesn't have too much of an issue with them but I acknowledge they have many potent tricks. 

[Mark Williams]

2 minutes ago, SwampHeart said:

That's fair and I don't intend to hold myself out as some tactical master. I'm just genuinely curious. Ultimately my particular SCE build (MW bomb) doesn't have too much of an issue with them but I acknowledge they have many potent tricks. 

2nd type of army I faced in a recent tournament was an Alpha strike seraphon list. It caught me off-guard, and they won super fast, like first turn. We were playing that mission where you burn objectives, and they had 2 battalions. (star strike or something?). The first turn, a large unit of dinosaur riders summoned in front of one of my side units and charged it and wiped out 20 wounds worth of liberators and judicators in a single charge. They captured the objective and burned it. 2nd turn, they did the exact same move on the opposite flank with a unit of pterodactyles that landed within 3" of me and with a toad. Same thing - blew through 20 wounds of models, captured objective, burned it. Game was over immediately. My army can't be stretched that thinly and defend multiple objectives, so I just collapsed... By the end of the game, I beat him in terms of casualties, but he out-alpha-striked me, and it was just a good mission for him.

[Yoshiya]

So Stormcast gets in the top 10% and people write the tournament off because the list isn't the theory crafted netlist (it even includes 9 Castigators which everyone was acting like would completely ruin your list), factions doing well in their local meta didn't get top, and armies they've theory crafted to be bad did well?

At what point will people seriously start seeing Stormcast as doing well? When they consistently get top 3 in every single tournament for a year?

[Mark Williams]

26 minutes ago, Yoshiya said:

So Stormcast gets in the top 10% and people write the tournament off because the list isn't the theory crafted netlist (it even includes 9 Castigators which everyone was acting like would completely ruin your list), factions doing well in their local meta didn't get top, and armies they've theory crafted to be bad did well?

At what point will people seriously start seeing Stormcast as doing well? When they consistently get top 3 in every single tournament for a year?

The fact that it spent so many points on Castigators and did so well sincerely blows my mind. Lol.

[XReN]

Okay, props to the guy who managed to get 8th.
Question: why all those big events have such stupid silly things as painting, sports and list (what the F last two suppose to represent btw?) points?
It's not like you need another 3 tiebreaking tools or anything

Okay, I get the painting, but at my local tournaments we have only 3 ranks for it (0 for plastic/primer, 1 if you have some unpainted models and 3 for fully painted army) to encourage people to play painted armies (which in the of the day rarelly changes anything since almost everyone plays fully painted armies)

[Mark Williams]

It’s all over the past place in my area, but generally the bigger the event, the less soft scores matter. Large events are like you describe, but the smaller events a fully painted army counts the same as a major victory.

[stato]

27 minutes ago, XReN said:

Okay, props to the guy who managed to get 8th.
Question: why all those big events have such stupid silly things as painting, sports and list (what the F last two suppose to represent btw?) points?

Because thats what the organisers wanted to do.  Facehammer is one of the most respected UK events and sells out well in advance.

This is not a topic of discussion for this thread, plenty of other threads available if you want to open up that black hole of discussion.

 

EDIT: Regardless, TP are listed so you can work out battle rankings instead of overall if you wish, it would only change 8th to 6th so makes little difference to the context of discussing Stormcast at Tournaments.

[JackStreicher]

2 hours ago, Mark Williams said:

It’s all over the past place in my area, but generally the bigger the event, the less soft scores matter. Large events are like you describe, but the smaller events a fully painted army counts the same as a major victory.

Yep, we handle it like that most of the time and it‘s great =}

(it‘s an hobby event after all and not a „strongest list equals maximum score“ event)

[Andy Bryan]

Folks 

I came 11th with my stormcast which was 

Sureheart

lord arcanum on foot (general)

knight vexillor

20 sequitors

5 judicators 

5 judicators 

10 evocators 

10 evocators 

I think it’s a really strong list and I lost to daughters who are amazing. 

Its 1920 points so triumph and a command point.

 

[Aeonotakist]

18 hours ago, Requizen said:

Really? Seems pretty obvious to me. Evos hit hard, Ballista is a reliable plink damage, Castigators have good damage on the turn they come in (and double turn if you get it), 5 man Sequitors and Dracovators are not super killy but hold their own quite well. There's also solid mobility with Translocation, Dracolines, Scions, and Arcanum getting the extra d6 Ride the Winds. It's a list without one centralized gimmick but with a lot of ways to hit and respond.

 I think you have never met any people who play it right. They just keep engine and Slann to the bottom line, use skinks to keep you out of 18’ form their core, then summon at least 40 skinks every turn and teleport them and flying dinasour to take objectives . Castigated has no chance to get inside of 18 of their Slann core at all. They are 3 steps deploy and the first turn they will have 6 units of 20/20/20/10/10/10 skinks. These unit just keep 17 inch from Slann/engine so it makes a huge no fly in area. The only way to hit Slann is ballista but that one got -2 to hit with artifacts.

[Requizen]

3 hours ago, Andy Bryan said:

Folks 

I came 11th with my stormcast which was 

Sureheart

lord arcanum on foot (general)

knight vexillor

20 sequitors

5 judicators 

5 judicators 

10 evocators 

10 evocators 

I think it’s a really strong list and I lost to daughters who are amazing. 

Its 1920 points so triumph and a command point.

 

Thanks for sharing! The Gav bomb is obviously quite strong, and 20 Evos is pure terrifying. Congrats on the placement! 

Daughters are also pretty solid for sure, they seem to be a pretty hard counter to SCE as well in some builds. I think shooting might be the best solution to facing them, but Khailebron (sp?) makes that difficult as well. 

1 hour ago, Aeonotakist said:

 I think you have never met any people who play it right. They just keep engine and Slann to the bottom line, use skinks to keep you out of 18’ form their core, then summon at least 40 skinks every turn and teleport them and flying dinasour to take objectives . Castigated has no chance to get inside of 18 of their Slann core at all. They are 3 steps deploy and the first turn they will have 6 units of 20/20/20/10/10/10 skinks. These unit just keep 17 inch from Slann/engine so it makes a huge no fly in area. The only way to hit Slann is ballista but that one got -2 to hit with artifacts.

I wasn't talking about Seraphon when discussing that list.

[Yokai]

20 hours ago, JackStreicher said:

Not a fitting comparison at all since PvP and PvE Balance have an enormous overlap in AoS:

balance the points right (first internally and then externally) and both sides are happy. - that‘s all (you don‘t need to balance two fundamentaly different kinds of playstyle like they are in MMORPGs. In AoS both are the same and the only time ‚pve‘ loses is if a fluffy rule is removed due to PvP reasons).

 

That's a fair point. However, the prevalence of "netlists" in AoS, 40k et al is quite analogous to the "cookie cutter" builds that change everytime the rules are adjusted, ever so slightly.

[JackStreicher]

1 hour ago, Yokai said:

That's a fair point. However, the prevalence of "netlists" in AoS, 40k et al is quite analogous to the "cookie cutter" builds that change everytime the rules are adjusted, ever so slightly.

True.

 

to be overly correct here: the rules aren’t the issue. The lists aren‘t the issue either, it‘s the people constantly using/abusing them. Perhaps tournament organizers should start to enforce balanced lists:

ban named characters. Use all the realmrules (Ghur has to be adjusted). Play games in a narrative fashion which means that every played game of all players leads to a progress. Make sure that pure winning is no longer the main goal. Ban netlists and current meta lists (without named characters most meta lists won‘t work anyway) to make sure people play AoS and not „The Meta Hunt“ Game.

 

—-> people can still play to win but list building needs a lot more thought than „let‘s spam the most point efficient unit“ or „let‘s use the most OP Heroes“.

though baning named chars goes a long way already for AoS.

[Freejack02]

21 minutes ago, JackStreicher said:

Perhaps tournament organizers should start to enforce balanced lists

 

21 minutes ago, JackStreicher said:

 Make sure that pure winning is no longer the main goal

Guess what the point of a tournament is? To see who is the best; who comes out on top. Tournament players are there to try and win (if they are just there for the "experience" or to have fun and see some cool armies, then they fully expect to be at the bottom and may as well watch in my opinion). The Word Cup or the Final Four isn't about playing ball with some buddies, it's a competition to see who is the best. 

Winning will be the main goal of nearly any tournament, what on earth is your post even going on about. 

[ledha]

2 hours ago, JackStreicher said:

True.

 

to be overly correct here: the rules aren’t the issue. The lists aren‘t the issue either, it‘s the people constantly using/abusing them. Perhaps tournament organizers should start to enforce balanced lists:

ban named characters. Use all the realmrules (Ghur has to be adjusted). Play games in a narrative fashion which means that every played game of all players leads to a progress. Make sure that pure winning is no longer the main goal. Ban netlists and current meta lists (without named characters most meta lists won‘t work anyway) to make sure people play AoS and not „The Meta Hunt“ Game.

 

—-> people can still play to win but list building needs a lot more thought than „let‘s spam the most point efficient unit“ or „let‘s use the most OP Heroes“.

though baning named chars goes a long way already for AoS.

Most of the top tournament players are extremely good players by themselves. Even with "balanced lists", they would end at the top against more casual players using "balanced lists "as well. But i totally understand the will to stop the meta-chasing mentality with more narrative driven tournaments