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GHB2019 Hopes & Expectations


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13 hours ago, HollowHills said:

Mostly I don't like realm artefacts because they make battletome artefacts redundant. There are a few that are really strong, ethereal amulet, scales, previously doppelganger cloak. Then there are a lot that aren't overpowered but are just slightly better versions of similar things in battletomes. It means that you have have two to four tables of thematic artefacts in the battletome that no one uses. 

I also think the realm spells and rules are unbalanced and particularly vulnerable to exploitation by units like Nagash. I don't know why GW push them for tournaments when they just add a random factor that most matched play players hate. 

Even the realm rules are awful. I played an opponent in ghyran to try them out in the summer and we rolled on the table for a random result. We got the feature that meant units without fly couldn't run. Terrible for his army, no issue for my eels. I knew I'd won before we even rolled a die. 

I'd rather they keep fluffy stuff to narrative and open play, though I don't know anyone who even plays those. 

While we're at it I'd love to see matched play be the only ruleset and less time be spent on writing non matched play rules. 

I'd like to kill the WHFB armies because to some extent I think they are a trap for new players and set unreasonable expectations. 

Armies like dispossessed, greenskinz, free guild and darkling covens appear to be legitimate from the web store. Some of them even have allegiance abilities. However, the fact is they are terrible on the table and mostly are out of place with the setting. 

Then you get salty players on forums and in shops upset that their WHFB army that their lucky to even be able to play isn't able to beat a proper army like Stormcast, DoK or Nighthaunt. 

I know some of them will get soup tomes but personally I feel it would be better to kill them. They are just hold overs from the transition period. A lot of them detract from the fluff too, like the whole story of freeing aelf souls from slaanesh even though there are loads of random little high and dark elves running around. 

At the very least they should make it clear that grog armies aren't going to get supported going forwards. 

What I'm getting from this is you should be playing Warmachine, Malifaux or any other 'Serious Competitive Game'.  You'd probably enjoy it more frankly.

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For Realm Artifacts, I sort of get it since in Gloomspite there an artifact that give you a 5+ save for MW but Ignax scale is a 4+ save for MW so it clearly better and certain hero in the book can't use artifact because of keyword limitation so you pretty much have to use realm artifacts for them, But  since a lot of the Non Battletome army rely on the realm  artifact I think it be poor to get ride of those options from them atm. maybe in the future they could balance the realm artifact by giving them a small point cost on them and the relic in your battletome are free but for right now they are ok

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As a new player of AoS (played WHFB 6-8 editions), my experience is limited. I'm expecting points changes (as always). Most have been covered already in this thread, but my hopes are:

I'll echo the changes mentioned for Nagash, Reapers in LoN, and DoK.

I'd also suggest most NH stuff needs point reductions (Lady O, Kurdoss, MKoS, KoS, Dreadblade Harrow, Tomb Banshee, Hexwraiths, Myrmourn Banshees).

I also think the Frostheart and Flamespyre phoenixes should switch points and that Phoenix Guard should go up a touch.

Other hopes I have:

New general endless spells released in conjunction with the GHB

A new battalion for armies that aren't getting battletomes in 2019

Replacing Relocation Orb with a better battleplan

And as someone mentioned, making the NH Black Coach a "hero." I don't get how it has a Wraith (hero) and the spirit of either a Vamp or Necromance but isn't a hero itself.

 

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18 hours ago, HollowHills said:

While we're at it I'd love to see matched play be the only ruleset and less time be spent on writing non matched play rules. 

Games Workshop has never been that sort of company.  Odds are they never will be.  Unfortunately I think you may be disappointed over the long-haul.

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5 hours ago, Jetengine said:

What I'm getting from this is you should be playing Warmachine, Malifaux or any other 'Serious Competitive Game'.  You'd probably enjoy it more frankly.

Malifaux has a fairly tight rule-set overall, but it is still firmly grounded in the idea of narrative play as the game was designed around the idea of a story playing out on the table.  I would not say it is any more competitive by nature than Age of Sigmar.  War machine does try to be what you describe though...

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51 minutes ago, Skabnoze said:

Malifaux has a fairly tight rule-set overall, but it is still firmly grounded in the idea of narrative play as the game was designed around the idea of a story playing out on the table.  I would not say it is any more competitive by nature than Age of Sigmar.  War machine does try to be what you describe though...

It was designed that way but its evolved into very much a tournament game 

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37 minutes ago, Jetengine said:

It was designed that way but its evolved into very much a tournament game 

It can be, but it still maintains a split between story missions and more competitive ones.  I have not looked into 3rd edition but I doubt that is something they are going to do away with soon.  Narrative always seemed to be something very core to their concept of the game and world - even as they tightened up rules mechanics.  

Warmachine on the other hand is designed to be relatively incompatible with story or narrative play.  For better or worse that is the route they took from early on.

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Just now, Jetengine said:

Much to its own detriment. Damn things dead in the UK. 

I played it here since the early days of mk1 and I honestly don’t miss it.  The designers only seemed to ever know what they were doing about 1/3 of the time and the game just refused to truly evolve.  They tweaked the rules a bit in each edition but the core structure of the game never changed.  Over 8 years the games I played generally felt like we were running through the same motions.  It got stale.

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1 minute ago, Skabnoze said:

I played it here since the early days of mk1 and I honestly don’t miss it.  The designers only seemed to ever know what they were doing about 1/3 of the time and the game just refused to truly evolve.  They tweaked the rules a bit in each edition but the core structure of the game never changed.  Over 8 years the games I played generally felt like we were running through the same motions.  It got stale.

I think the problem is they were in 2 minds of how to take it and chose to do both despite them not working. Since imo you cant keep Caster Kill as a functional winning  condition and then expect people to be down with varied tournament missions and have interesting army composition. It boils down to "Can my units alpha strike his Caster" or "Can my deathstar/super tank unit sit on this objective". 

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29 minutes ago, Jetengine said:

I think the problem is they were in 2 minds of how to take it and chose to do both despite them not working. Since imo you cant keep Caster Kill as a functional winning  condition and then expect people to be down with varied tournament missions and have interesting army composition. It boils down to "Can my units alpha strike his Caster" or "Can my deathstar/super tank unit sit on this objective". 

They were also simply awful at designing units.  The good ones seem to be almost more accident than design.  So many units were pure awful even at initial release and it was absurdly frustrating.

But we are straying way off topic at this point.

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Just gonna pop in here as an active Warmachine and hordes player and politely disagree with the discussion :P. Game is incredibly fun, with both scenario and assassination as viable win conditions, and basically every army is competitive. I'm currently getting into AoS as a side game, and its incredibly easy to see the massive divide between the haves and have-nots in comparison.

As for GHB, matched play competitiveness ect... if matched play exists, it should focus on being the best comp. ruleset it can be. The excitingness of the double turn is fantastic for narrative and open play but really isn't conducive to a game that people are going to spend hundreds of dollars travelling to play in prize-money-having tournaments for. GW should absolutely keep open and narrative play around, and expand them so that they can become the defacto Beer-and-Pretzels at the game club experience. These rulesets are a big part of what allows GW to keep their games afloat vs Warmachine, Xwing, ect and should be cherished as such. But if they want to run a tournament series as big as the GT, they need to focus Matched Play (or a 4th, very specifically tourney-minded ruleset) in on balancing the game and armies to a standard that the current rules do not. Just my 2c though.

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GW dont and have never cared much for the tournament crowd. When getting pelted about tourney questions before, they admitted that WFB wasnt a tournament game, wasnt designed to be one and was only being played at tournaments because the fans wouldnt shut up about it. I mean they'll mess with them for easy cash but thats down to sales.

Its like a group of people insisting on playing Snakes and Ladders at a tournament level despite the owners insistence its not and isnt a balanced game.

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23 hours ago, LionofFenchurchEast said:

I agree with you tbh I think that they fact they've just stuck WHFB models into AoS is totally disjointed, I find it hard to believe from a lore standpoint that Duardin from "the world that was" wouldn't alter in some format tbh I'd like to see them become part of a larger Duardin faction that creates a sort of " mechanised ground pounder" counter point to the Overlords give them some form of "tank" and "APC" models to balance against the Airships and then you've got Fyreslayers as an "infantry" option 

Do we really need to have Duardin end up being the reanimation of Squats, just in AoS?  At some point, the game ends up just being Steampunk 40k, not High Fantasy.

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Delete the Realm of Battle rules from organized play. They're stupid and add nothing but RNG to tournaments. Keep them for normal match play if you want but make it clear they're not really intended to be used at competitive events. Because regardless of what GW, they are in fact NOT designed for tournaments.

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1 hour ago, Jetengine said:

GW dont and have never cared much for the tournament crowd. When getting pelted about tourney questions before, they admitted that WFB wasnt a tournament game, wasnt designed to be one and was only being played at tournaments because the fans wouldnt shut up about it. I mean they'll mess with them for easy cash but thats down to sales.

Its like a group of people insisting on playing Snakes and Ladders at a tournament level despite the owners insistence its not and isnt a balanced game.

This is mostly true of Kirby era GW, but modern GW has figured out that Matched play events are where the actual money is. They mostly still cater to the narrative side, because that's what they enjoy, but they've had to devote a lot of time and effort to making Matched play at least somewhat usable because dolla, dolla bills ya'll. Also because every time they totally give up on balance you end up with 7th edition 40k and no one wants to open THAT can of worms again.

The only problem with this is that they keep trying to force narrative and matched play together when they should be making the separation more stark. 

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9 hours ago, dmorley21 said:

Replacing Relocation Orb with a better battleplan

Thats my favorite battleplan out of the 6 new ones. Sure, it looks confusing as hell and random but it is really fun. I had some of my best games with that scenario. 

I prefer slightly unbalanced battleplans like the Relocation Orb to boring ones like "Knife to the Heart". 

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On ‎1‎/‎10‎/‎2019 at 5:34 AM, Joseph Mackay said:

not every army has access to battalions (or only have useless/overcosted battalions) to get access to more than one artefact

What army DOESN'T have near useless, overcosted battalions at this point? Even the 3 battalions that actually get played are picked up because they're just barely cheap enough to not be actively detrimental, involve units you would have taken anyway, and for the CP and Artefact.

Battalions being a significant contributor to imbalance between battletome and non-battletome armies is a myth at this point.

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42 minutes ago, Bellfree said:

What army DOESN'T have near useless, overcosted battalions at this point? Even the 3 battalions that actually get played are picked up because they're just barely cheap enough to not be actively detrimental, involve units you would have taken anyway, and for the CP and Artefact.

Battalions being a significant contributor to imbalance between battletome and non-battletome armies is a myth at this point.

Skaven😭😭😭 (verminus, moulder, Masterclan, Eshin)

edit: we don’t have any

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56 minutes ago, Bellfree said:

Delete the Realm of Battle rules from organized play. They're stupid and add nothing but RNG to tournaments. Keep them for normal match play if you want but make it clear they're not really intended to be used at competitive events. Because regardless of what GW, they are in fact NOT designed for tournaments.

Nah I find them quit enjoyable.

although some of them might need a kind of rewrite.

edit: They are quite amusing.

i also find them very enjoyable in tournaments where the whole aspect can get turned to a certain role.

although some rules should be slightly changed in such a way that an armies that are heavily focusing on a certain theme (like ko) won’t  get shut down, for the rest of the game.

 

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13 hours ago, Jetengine said:

What I'm getting from this is you should be playing Warmachine, Malifaux or any other 'Serious Competitive Game'.  You'd probably enjoy it more frankly.

 

8 hours ago, Skabnoze said:

Games Workshop has never been that sort of company.  Odds are they never will be.  Unfortunately I think you may be disappointed over the long-haul.

I don't think I'm suggesting anything too extreme. 40k has a much tighter ruleset than AoS and doesn't have game breaking stuff like the realm rules, artefacts and spells. You also have strategems which are much more engaging than spamming the same warscroll ability. 

Also I've literally never seen anyone play open or narrative. Even people playing non competitive armies and lists still use match play for balance. Why are 2/3rds of the rules we get for something no one plays is my point. 

I like the models for AoS and the game has a strong community where I live.

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17 minutes ago, HollowHills said:

 

I don't think I'm suggesting anything too extreme. 40k has a much tighter ruleset than AoS and doesn't have game breaking stuff like the realm rules, artefacts and spells. You also have strategems which are much more engaging than spamming the same warscroll ability. 

Also I've literally never seen anyone play open or narrative. Even people playing non competitive armies and lists still use match play for balance. Why are 2/3rds of the rules we get for something no one plays is my point. 

I like the models for AoS and the game has a strong community where I live.

40ks tournament scene is also reviled though.

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53 minutes ago, HollowHills said:

Also I've literally never seen anyone play open or narrative. Even people playing non competitive armies and lists still use match play for balance. Why are 2/3rds of the rules we get for something no one plays is my point. 

Couple of points I'd raise in possible objection to this, personally I suspect that actually globally there's probably a greater number of people either playing some kind of Open/Narrative version of the game or a very, very soft version of Matched Play than Competitive Matched Play it's just it's a lot less visible as these people aren't out at tournaments (obviously) and in the majority of cases they prefer playing at home with friends than with random people in a shop.

This is all anecdote rather than data of course, but the people I know who are into this would almost never even consider playing the game in a public space like a GW shop, it's just not an enjoyable experience (or at least the kind of experience they want). Narrative games (can) require a lot more thought, give and take and discussion, it's a lot simpler to do this when you're playing people you know well and share similar ideas with.

I like popping into my local shop to chat a bit and see what's going on and sure if I was a kid it'd probably be fun to hang out and play but I see pretty much the same set of people playing every time there and they are just a small percentage of those actually coming and going, buying stuff. Likewise I could just about imagine once in a while going to an AoS tournament for a laugh, to meet people and experience an event but 99/100 times I'd much prefer to play it at home. I can't imagine I'm alone in that or indeed that far from the norm.

The other thing that muddies the waters I'd say is that I'm sure a lot of narrative players do use matched play points either, as you say, for some semblance of balance (or possibly/probably to purposefully create an unbalance). Sometimes when I'm thinking up campaigns/scenarios I might be thinking about each army fielding very specific units in which case points might not come into it, but sometimes it might just be a way of adding some element of structure without being too prescriptive.  Or we just fancy a game that doesn't require tonnes of prep so you just agree to bring x number of points but then you're adding in a few elements of narrative play just to spice things up.

I personally think that rather that than doing away with two thirds of the game that is at the very core of what the it is and where it comes from, it would probably be better instead to develop Competitive Matched Play as a subset of the game, essentially a stripped back, leaner version of the game with a ruleset and list of available options/expansions etc that is determined and updated once a year by GW in coordination with the top tournament organisers.

I think that by its nature the Competitive Matched Play scene/game will always be more conservative in nature, and the more focussed and stripped back version of the game, not in itself a bad thing, it might not be more me but I can totally see why people get a kick out of competitions* and I want them to have the best experience they can. The crazy wild stuff will come from people experimenting in open/narrative games, not all of it will be good or relevant to the wider game but the best of that will eventually get folded into future rulesets or influence the evolution of the game. Think of open/narrative as like the R&D department for the game.

Sorry for rambling on at length, unedited thoughts here, probably needs shaping up but in a rush. Quite happy to say that I could be entirely wrong about all this but just my feeling anyway.

 

 

* just an addendum but I see a lot of people who look down on narrative play as silly or fluffy or whatever think that people playing more narrative games aren't playing to win or have no interest in winning games,. Yes we might be looking to create a game that has more of a story feel, but I think you'll find most still want to be the hero of their own story and it just might be that winning involves something more than tabling the opponent.

 

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14 hours ago, Ironbreaker said:

My 2019 hope is a Dispossessed battletome, but I guess I will just focus on 40k and wait until next year for any updates. It ain't easy being a dorf player. 

Your hopes may be rewarded more so than many others. 

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