Shooting and the Meta

[overtninja]

Wanderers were downgraded because they were super annoying to fight.

I have a Wanderers army too, and I'd really rather like to have good shooting and decent melee rather than be a meanie that doesn't let my opponents play their army while I snicker at them from other side of the table and shoot their units off the field one at a time, teleporting away when they get close.

It's kind of dumb that two Wanderers units are supposed to stand still, while the rest of the army wants to be super mobile and evasive. It directly promotes the degenerate 'teleporting bunker' play that got the army nerfed to begin with.

[Tropical Ghost General]

I wish that Death had some shooting. In the LoN book the only shooting in dragon breath or the tomb banshee scream (which is horrendous). In tje bedsheet book it's chainghasts and the tomb banshee (which are both horrendous). I miss skelebobs archers 😢

[Keldaur]

5 hours ago, Luzgurbel said:

What was the last tournament won by a full shooting army?

DoT last year as far i remember. Yes, there is magic involved, but the it works the same way, to kill your enemy from afar and screen him to death. KO had very powerful builds but they were nerfed directly and indirectly ever since Nurgle's release, plaguebearers are obnoxious to play against with a shooty army. We have to remember that before 2017's GH people were complaining about the shooting meta A LOT.

There is a combination of factors that killed all shooty armies (i don't think that's healthy for the game tbh), to me, the worst offenders are the chronomatic cogs, which had accelerated combat in a way that's perfectly normal to be fighting in turn 1 even with infantry units. Chronomatic cogs also make deepstrikers way more reliable, which effectively forces gunlines to castle hard to avoid being easily sandwiched, which makes them lose in the objective game since age of sigmar missions rarely benefit the player who takes the objectives in the last turns.

To be honest, as a nighthaunt player and chronomatic cog abuser, I had grown tired of it.

 

 

 

[AaronWilson]

If I was to play a second army it would defo be KO. I'd love to play a purely shooty army and try and make it work. 

[Kramer]

22 hours ago, Tzaangor Management said:

I think the changes to the armies that were really good at shooting, as well as GW responding to the communities apparent dislike of shooting are probably the biggest factors here. The introduction of 'lookout sir' played a part and continues to effect the psychologically of the game, as did the IDK Allegiance ability, but the meta seemed to move away from shooting before the changes to the Wyldwod scroll and the introduction of realm rules that potentially shut down the phase. They both probably play some part in delaying this army archetype from returning, which I think is intentional on behalf of GW, but I don't think either were responsible for taking them out of the meta.

Tzeentch were particularly prevalent, but changes to the points cost of Skyfires, changes to their warscroll so that they triggered mortal wounds on a 6, rather than a 6+ and the changes to Damned terrain neutered their effectiveness. Add changes to Pink Horrors and Marauders, who were the most often used screens and you see an army that was dominating the shooting phase altered almost beyond recognition. KO likewise experienced sweeping changes and Kunning Ruk was also pointed higher and, if memory serves, toned down a little. The Aetherstrike Batallion was removed from the Stormcast book and a number of other armies were affected lightly, but enough to make them unattractive.

There were tonnes of threads on this very forum about toning down shooting and I think GW responded (not just to this forum, but to the community as a whole) and made the worst offenders less effective. There are still lots of good shooting units out there (I actually think that Hurricane Crossbows were already better than Longstrikes in most cases even before their points reduction) and some might be the answer to DOK and LON builds that seem to be dominating at the moment. You will however need to go against what GW is encouraging in order to make one of these armies work, which is more difficult than building towards what is encouraged.

 

Great write up! (Ran out of reactions, but mirrored my thoughts so had to give the support)

[overtninja]

4 hours ago, AaronWIlson said:

If I was to play a second army it would defo be KO. I'd love to play a purely shooty army and try and make it work. 

I think that purely shooting armies are probably a bad idea from a design standpoint, simply because the gameplay really suffers if there's no melee combat. It's intensely frustrating to the player being shot at because they can never use their units, and when they finally hit into combat it's frustrating for you as the shooter with a melee-poor army.

If your army shoots well, it should have melee options, too - not for grinding combat, but for hitting hard on the charge, or accepting a charge to set up your own charges. Melee should be part of the game for every army - a bigger or smaller part depending, but certainly something that every army should be able to engage in with confidence using the right units.

[Kramer]

20 minutes ago, overtninja said:

I think that purely shooting armies are probably a bad idea from a design standpoint, simply because the gameplay really suffers if there's no melee combat. It's intensely frustrating to the player being shot at because they can never use their units, and when they finally hit into combat it's frustrating for you as the shooter with a melee-poor army.

If your army shoots well, it should have melee options, too - not for grinding combat, but for hitting hard on the charge, or accepting a charge to set up your own charges. Melee should be part of the game for every army - a bigger or smaller part depending, but certainly something that every army should be able to engage in with confidence using the right units.

Very very true, but for @AaronWIlson reference, KO does have those options with riggers and Brok himself. But the balance is off in the faction right now. So most players go all on one or the other. But most importantly, for me at least, I still have lots of fun playing them  

[AaronWilson]

Yeah I would throw in some riggers in there, they're some what fast and I like hitting things in the head  

[Superninja]

I will say it is quite weird that many armies can run faster/farther than many units can shoot.   Essentially, they are faster than a speeding arrow(bullet).  I am not saying I wish for shooting to be better, just seems weird that max range is say 18" or so for a lot of ranged units but melee units are moving/running/charging just as far or farther.

[Bellfree]

On ‎11‎/‎20‎/‎2018 at 12:29 PM, SwampHeart said:

So I've been listening to several podcasts lately talking about the prevalence of certain builds and models at tournaments due to an overall lack of shooting in the meta. This seems to be the case as far as back as Blackout (which granted wasn't forever ago) and doesn't seem to have changed at all in events since then. And I wonder why? Is it just a matter of time (i.e. people need to build and paint the necessary models)? There is definitely an argument to be made that meta changes aren't instant. Or is there not enough viable shooting builds on otherwise high tier armies? I don't really have a solid theory - its just something I've been curious about and I'd like to know what others think. 

TL;DR - Shooting armies are poised to do well in the current meta, but aren't showing up. Why?

Couple of big problems with shooting armies atm.

1) Easy to shut down a shooting unit with a fast unit or a deepstriker because they can only shoot the unit in front of them. This ultimately isn't too huge of a nerf from how things used to be because they can still do damage to SOMETHING but it definitely makes shooting units weaker and stop you from getting to target anything of significant value with your shooting attacks a lot of the time.

2) Character assassination is harder thanks to look out sir. Shooting units were best used to take out significant buff characters due to both their reliable ability to apply damage and their actual damage per turn being relatively low.  Even the best shooting units in the game don't really nuke things anymore.

3) Realm of Battle: For the record I think everything that realms of battle touches turns to s**t, but shooting very specifically gets absolutely annihilated. If you pull up Ulgu as a shooting army you can basically pack up and go home. Even if you don't get the worst case scenario, several other realm of battle rules negatively impact shooting in one way or another. The rules that benefit shooting(Fecund Quagmire, Aqshy) range from 'Absolutely devastating' in some matchups(slaanesh) to 'Largely worthless' (Nagash lists).

4) Heavily buffed magic encroaching on shooting's battlefield role while also being more flexible. Some kind of magical ability is also basically mandatory if for no other reason than having a change to stop your opponents magic.

5) Legion of Nagash, DoK, and Stormcast don't care about shooting at all.  Nagash is basically impossible to kill with just shooting and Necromancers can be very difficult. You also can't really stop their regeneration without putting your units into charge range of things they WILL NOT survive. DoK have high body-count armies with healing and either get a universal -1 to hit in shooting(+ a teleport) or potential for a 6+ 5++ 5+++ against shooting units. The only character that are valuable to target with shooting are Hag Queens and they'll be -2 to hit constantly in any meta where shooting is prevalent. Stormcast basically Null-Deploy and Sequitors/Evocators have too many wounds and too good of saves to be killed by shooting, especially when they're basically guaranteed to be in combat the turn they drop thanks to Gavriel.

[Bellfree]

On ‎11‎/‎21‎/‎2018 at 6:48 AM, Tzaangor Management said:

I think the changes to the armies that were really good at shooting, as well as GW responding to the communities apparent dislike of shooting are probably the biggest factors here. The introduction of 'lookout sir' played a part and continues to effect the psychologically of the game, as did the IDK Allegiance ability, but the meta seemed to move away from shooting before the changes to the Wyldwod scroll and the introduction of realm rules that potentially shut down the phase. They both probably play some part in delaying this army archetype from returning, which I think is intentional on behalf of GW, but I don't think either were responsible for taking them out of the meta.

Tzeentch were particularly prevalent, but changes to the points cost of Skyfires, changes to their warscroll so that they triggered mortal wounds on a 6, rather than a 6+ and the changes to Damned terrain neutered their effectiveness. Add changes to Pink Horrors and Marauders, who were the most often used screens and you see an army that was dominating the shooting phase altered almost beyond recognition. KO likewise experienced sweeping changes and Kunning Ruk was also pointed higher and, if memory serves, toned down a little. The Aetherstrike Batallion was removed from the Stormcast book and a number of other armies were affected lightly, but enough to make them unattractive.

There were tonnes of threads on this very forum about toning down shooting and I think GW responded (not just to this forum, but to the community as a whole) and made the worst offenders less effective. There are still lots of good shooting units out there (I actually think that Hurricane Crossbows were already better than Longstrikes in most cases even before their points reduction) and some might be the answer to DOK and LON builds that seem to be dominating at the moment. You will however need to go against what GW is encouraging in order to make one of these armies work, which is more difficult than building towards what is encouraged.

 

Your first two paragraphs aren't totally off base, though I think you're really underselling how devastating those changes are to shooting lists,  the last one is...not as good. There are a couple of good shooting units still out there, but not many and they lack any significant roll in the game due to character sniping being less of an option. Hurricane crossbows are TERRIBLE and have always been terrible. They were always worse than Longstrikes because you only ever get to shoot with them once (inside 18"=getting charged next turn) and they lose a third of their damage if they move or deepstrike in.  One unit of Longstrikes do roughly 2.77 wounds to an unbuffed witch elf.  Hurricanes that moved do 3.12, Hurricanes that didn't move do 4.69. A unit of Longstrikes gets 1 turn to shoot at a unit of witch aelves, a unit of Longstrikes can get about 3, putting the Longstrikes ahead 8.31 to 4.69. Lets say though, that you're the greatest Hurricane Crossbow user in history and you manage to get two full turns of stationary hurricane crossbow shots at a unit of witch aelves before his counter attack. That's 9.38 models, which is over half the point cost of the unit of crossbows you brought, so hey, not bad. But that's unbuffed witch aelves. What happens when you have a unit of witch aelves with a Cauldron Buff and Khailebron? You went from 4.69 to 2.5. So even with perfect use, two turns of stationary hurricane crossbow shots kill 50pts of witch aelves. If you try to kill a character instead, you're looking at .94 damage to a Hag Queen. That means you need SIX units of stationary hurricane crossbows to kill 1 Khailebron Hag queen in range of the Cauldron buff. To put these numbers in perspective, a unit of 10 Witch aelves with Witchbrew and Mindrazor will kill 6 hurricane crossbowman and a unit of 30 will kill 20. These aren't even cherry picked scenarios, these are the things the DoK player will apply to their units passively. If they want to actively defend the witch aelves, they can add mystic shield, cover, and reroll fanatical faith to reduce the damage down to less than 2 dead witch aelves per turn. Oh, also the Witch aelves can teleport. Also, Cauldrons aren't monsters so unless it got FAQed they get Look Out Sir!

LoN are pretty much immune to shooting between their high toughness characters and their squishy characters having great ways of avoiding taking damage. You also can't stop LoN from summoning back units you do manage to kill with a shooting unit the way you can with melee units.

Shooting units don't usually do enough damage to be efficient at killing anything but characters. Kunnin Ruck, Skyfire spam, and Mixed Order were the only armies that did the majority of their damage in the shooting phase left BEFORE AoS2 came out and they got pretty hit pretty hard.  It's not about what GW does or does not encourage, it's about math. For shooting units in AoS2, the numbers just aren't there.

[adreal]

How much shooting suffers comes down to how much shooting is hitting on 4s (or worse) before buffs.

If wanderers could move around the table easier (why is realm wandering only for 1 unit) they would be in a good (not great, but good) place because alot of thier allegiance abilities help shooting (being able to fall back from combat and still shoot is amazing) or they have some good passive buffs (nomad prince reroll 1s to hit) with stuff that hit on 3s (sisters of the watch, glade guard in bigger units then 20). 

I think khardron would greatly benefit from some units (boats and the more elite units) hitting on 3s.

Mixed order with a hurricanum can be pretty gross in the shooting phase, but I'm not sure pure freeguild can match that

[Tzaangor Management]

22 hours ago, Bellfree said:

Your first two paragraphs aren't totally off base, though I think you're really underselling how devastating those changes are to shooting lists,  the last one is...not as good. There are a couple of good shooting units still out there, but not many and they lack any significant roll in the game due to character sniping being less of an option. Hurricane crossbows are TERRIBLE and have always been terrible. They were always worse than Longstrikes because you only ever get to shoot with them once (inside 18"=getting charged next turn) and they lose a third of their damage if they move or deepstrike in.  One unit of Longstrikes do roughly 2.77 wounds to an unbuffed witch elf.  Hurricanes that moved do 3.12, Hurricanes that didn't move do 4.69. A unit of Longstrikes gets 1 turn to shoot at a unit of witch aelves, a unit of Longstrikes can get about 3, putting the Longstrikes ahead 8.31 to 4.69. Lets say though, that you're the greatest Hurricane Crossbow user in history and you manage to get two full turns of stationary hurricane crossbow shots at a unit of witch aelves before his counter attack. That's 9.38 models, which is over half the point cost of the unit of crossbows you brought, so hey, not bad. But that's unbuffed witch aelves. What happens when you have a unit of witch aelves with a Cauldron Buff and Khailebron? You went from 4.69 to 2.5. So even with perfect use, two turns of stationary hurricane crossbow shots kill 50pts of witch aelves. If you try to kill a character instead, you're looking at .94 damage to a Hag Queen. That means you need SIX units of stationary hurricane crossbows to kill 1 Khailebron Hag queen in range of the Cauldron buff. To put these numbers in perspective, a unit of 10 Witch aelves with Witchbrew and Mindrazor will kill 6 hurricane crossbowman and a unit of 30 will kill 20. These aren't even cherry picked scenarios, these are the things the DoK player will apply to their units passively. If they want to actively defend the witch aelves, they can add mystic shield, cover, and reroll fanatical faith to reduce the damage down to less than 2 dead witch aelves per turn. Oh, also the Witch aelves can teleport. Also, Cauldrons aren't monsters so unless it got FAQed they get Look Out Sir!

LoN are pretty much immune to shooting between their high toughness characters and their squishy characters having great ways of avoiding taking damage. You also can't stop LoN from summoning back units you do manage to kill with a shooting unit the way you can with melee units.

Shooting units don't usually do enough damage to be efficient at killing anything but characters. Kunnin Ruck, Skyfire spam, and Mixed Order were the only armies that did the majority of their damage in the shooting phase left BEFORE AoS2 came out and they got pretty hit pretty hard.  It's not about what GW does or does not encourage, it's about math. For shooting units in AoS2, the numbers just aren't there.

The maths for shooting is exactly the way that GW are discouraging the use of shooting, so I think we sort of agree there, albeit having come at it from slightly different angles. Where it seems to me that we disagree, is that I do think there is a potential shooting list out there that could challenge these current builds. I'm not saying it's easy and I'm also not saying that I have, nor that Hurricane Crossbows are, the answer, but there could be something there.

Two rounds of stationary shooting is not out of the question for Hurricane Crossbows. Drop them in (a set-up is not a normal move, so they get the stationary buff) and double turn or even drop a screen in front of them to blunt the charge. You can also redeploy them with the Aquilor to get them out of trouble if they become a target for 30 Witch Aelves and if they've become a target and are nowhere near an objective then you're doing something right. 

Again, I definitely don't have the answer, but a mobile, shooting heavy list is a different question for the DOK and even LON players, so might bring some different results. Time will tell I guess, but I certainly don't think it's out of the question.

 

[InSaint]

Honestly, this is more of a commercial decision to deliberately make shooting a secondary role in AOS.

GWS already has another tabletop game that is dominated by shooting called Warhammer 40,000. To be honest, as a player of both Warhammer games, I am quite happy AOS is more close combat and magic oriented for variety.

[stratigo]

On 11/21/2018 at 4:44 PM, Keldaur said:

DoT last year as far i remember. Yes, there is magic involved, but the it works the same way, to kill your enemy from afar and screen him to death. KO had very powerful builds but they were nerfed directly and indirectly ever since Nurgle's release, plaguebearers are obnoxious to play against with a shooty army. We have to remember that before 2017's GH people were complaining about the shooting meta A LOT.

There is a combination of factors that killed all shooty armies (i don't think that's healthy for the game tbh), to me, the worst offenders are the chronomatic cogs, which had accelerated combat in a way that's perfectly normal to be fighting in turn 1 even with infantry units. Chronomatic cogs also make deepstrikers way more reliable, which effectively forces gunlines to castle hard to avoid being easily sandwiched, which makes them lose in the objective game since age of sigmar missions rarely benefit the player who takes the objectives in the last turns.

To be honest, as a nighthaunt player and chronomatic cog abuser, I had grown tired of it.

 

 

 

THe KO's nerfed power build delivered its damage primarily through the application of 30ish inch moving endrinriggers. Its shooting mostly targeted support models.

 

The reason shooting doesn't exist in top tables (and that magic does) is that it is trivial to turn off shooting. Too many armies have builds that make shooting worse or completely irrelevant (that don't, notably, work on magic. The armies that turn off magic also happen to be the magic nukers too). Most of the top armies have a build that SIGNIFICANTLY nerfs shooting. You might get someone trying to counter meta witha  shooting army, but the second this happens, players will tech in their anti shooting options and no shooter will compete until the meta forgets shooting again and this combined with a general shooting nerf that allowed armies to spoil shooting entirely if they have enough fast moving elements to just supress the shooting part of the game entirely without relying on the variety of buffs/debuffs/auras/army abilities that negatively effect shooting.

 

And the nerfs were cause people were upset that their support chars got sniped and they couldn't dump 30 spells and 5 auras on their uber murder deathstar without risking their support elements.

 

Which of course.... made the game about building the meanest uber murder deathstar for the cheapest (so you could spam out, say, 200 of them *cough* plague monks *cough* witch elves *cough*) and the way to deliver them into the opponents face the fastest. Even Nurgle reliably launches first turn charges.

On 12/9/2018 at 7:17 AM, InSaint said:

Honestly, this is more of a commercial decision to deliberately make shooting a secondary role in AOS.

GWS already has another tabletop game that is dominated by shooting called Warhammer 40,000. To be honest, as a player of both Warhammer games, I am quite happy AOS is more close combat and magic oriented for variety.

just sucks if you got excited for that army they made with lots of shooting and no magic whatsoever. But, hey, those people shoulda been able to foresee the future man and by a better army then!

 

 

[PUFNSTUF]

I feel they could reverse the KO nerfs now a days and they would be decent but not top tier.

[Skreech Verminking]

Say aren’t free people rather reliable with their handgunnners and the great companies.

i mean like, having 3 units of 20handgunners, which support each other, seem to be very strong, shooting, buffed by a free guild general and shooting out 60shots shooting phase, which hits on 2s and wounds on 3s with a -1 rend, they seem to be able to dish out a lot of damage, especially since they will be able to shoot in the enemy charge phase. And they can repeat this form of throwing out deadly shots, as long as the enemy unit dies.

happened to me and believe  me I have lost around 140clanrats to just trying and charge a great companie of handgunners.

[Carnelian]

On 11/25/2018 at 1:45 AM, Bellfree said:

They were always worse than Longstrikes because you only ever get to shoot with them once (inside 18"=getting charged next turn) and they lose a third of their damage if they move or deepstrike in. 

Just thought I'd point out that raptors don't count as moving if they are deepstriked in so they are a wee bit better than you think

[AaronWilson]

With the new wave of Slaanesh and Fiends looking absolutely terrifying, I could see a fair bit of shooting rotating back in.

[Enoby]

Now people have mentioned them, why don't Free People seem to do well? To me it looks as if they have some absolutely phenomenal shooting that the opponent would struggle to answer to, but you very rarely see them top. Is it a different problem with Free People, or is it an issue with their best tool (shooting)?

[AaronWilson]

Partly I think because of Syylvaneth being a boogi-man to them (as in totally shutting them down) partly due to the castle nature of the army and how scenarios currently force you into the middle of the table. There lack of fly means you can just pin them into there deployment and score big 1-2 and at events you're normally done by 3.

[PJetski]

3 hours ago, Enoby said:

Now people have mentioned them, why don't Free People seem to do well? To me it looks as if they have some absolutely phenomenal shooting that the opponent would struggle to answer to, but you very rarely see them top. Is it a different problem with Free People, or is it an issue with their best tool (shooting)?

1. They have relatively short range so they lose the range game to armies with better range (Stormcast, Seraphon, Tzeentch)

2. They use massive regiments in a meta with people using anti-horde units (Drycha, gaunt summoner, etc.)

3. They lose early objectives because they need to play defensively

4. They can shoot the enemy off the table but it takes 2-3 turns and they don't have the mobility to capture objectives afterwards

5. Ulgu realmscapes

6. They don't have the mobility to deal with Woods blocking LOS

[Saiken]

There might be something to do here with a mixed order list.
They kind of fell out of popularity too, though it seems like there are a lot of cool options.

Also I love that Hurricanum model, it's gorgeous and I wish I could see more of them

[BWG Cannonball]

So, a couple things I can add with all this.  I'm a primary KO player and I absolutely love the army.  As was said earlier, I think they could absolutely reverse a lot of the KO nerfs and be fine again.

In terms of shooting, I think KO has one of the better options in terms of shooting and mobility through the Arkanaut Company, but with specific skyports (Mhornar). 

I think the overall difficulty GW has had with balancing shooting is pointing it out correctly or giving them(shooting armies) more ways to defend themselves on the counter-attack.  I think being able to take out support units was one of those defensible abilities.  Without that, as was said before, we run into armies that are so ridiculously brutal and tough in close combat that there really is no real way of stopping them unless you are also running a ridiculously brutal and tough unit in close combat.

[Enoby]

As a bit of a tangent, but still related, how do you think GW could make strong shooting fun? Unlike combat, where you get to make your own attacks back, shooting only involves the opponent when making saves. In the early days of AoS, I had a super slow skeleton Death army against reaper bolt throwers on the other side of the table; needless to say, it is not at all fun to sit there and watch your army get torn to shreds. Even if I could win on objectives, it's not a fun way to play. 

I played a Noise Marine/obliterator gunline army in 40k, and I usually felt a bit bad after playing; my opponent oftentimes didn't get to use their army. I have changed things now to be more fun, but it doesn't change the fact that someone can still do it (and there are probably much better gunline armies). 

Shooting, especially good shooting, is a difficult one to balance.