So what about DoK and Legions?

[Mutton]

Before the influx of new faction updates, people were screaming for these two armies to be knocked down a peg, and maybe for good reason considering their power level in comparison to everyone else. But that was several months ago. Now we have 3 new tomes and a practically brand-new army (Gloomspite) all toting spicy upgrades and options to what used to be fairly unimpressive/mediocre models. Things like warp-lightning for Skaven and Gristlegore for FEC exist now. And from what I've seen of the Khorne Battletome, they're going to be capable of some awesome murder/anti-magic combos.

So my long-winded question remains: what about DoK and Legions? Natural counters to these factions have erupted. Should we even consider these two, once completely dominant, factions overpowered now? If so, how much and why? The current thought of AoS army design seems to be "Everyone gets super powerful stuff, therefore everyone is on the same footing." Several months ago I would have looked at these factions and pointed out exactly what needed to be changed to bring them in line with everyone else...but now, you look at the sorts of things these updated armies are capable of, and I can't say I know whether they'd need to be changed at all at this point. In fact, I'd worry that changing them much might bring them a step behind these updated armies (where they should have been months ago, but places them underfoot of the current market of armies).

Maybe we've reached the optimal path, where they don't need to be nerfed much at all because we've lifted up everyone around them. It's what I hope. And assuming all of the other armies lagging behind get their own updates (a pretty reasonable assumption), we might be getting closer to every army having a fighting chance against one-another.

(Full disclosure, I collect DoK casually. I don't run giant blocks of Witch Aelves and aren't well-versed in the tournament scene. I only know what goes down at the local shops)

[kenshin620]

I think one of the biggest problems many people point to DoK is 60pt Hag Queens, a decent combat model who is also a priest. How many other models are also 60pts, a decent combatant AND a priest? Combined with 30 strong witch aelves, and you have a pretty point efficient blender. Well that and all the other crazy buffs you can pump into them. I think once they're more point balanced, reigned in with Wholly Within ranges, and Temples no longer being "free" (aka have to take Trait and Item tax), DoK will be less problematic

 

Legions of Nagash is less LoN themselves being the problem (well other than Nagash) and more so Grimghast Reapers being part of their army and getting revived.

[Skreech Verminking]

I’m guessing that Gw isn’t interested in nerving an armie till they fall like the steampunkdwarfs.

technically it would be much easier to power up every other faction, which seems to be happening right now,

meaning that different factions will be able to compete against each other in some way rather then beeing unable to even set foot on the table.

[Nos]

Won’t know until the meta settles.

But your observation dosent really follow through in that if LON and DOK were so dominant before and aren’t any longer because there’s now an army who can counter them it just means there’s now an even more dominant set of factions, DOK and LON are just as well placed to beat the line-ups they used to. In that scenario it just increases the number of factions who aren’t as competitive.

[Sedraxis]

14 minutes ago, kenshin620 said:

I think one of the biggest problems many people point to DoK is 60pt Hag Queens, a decent combat model who is also a priest. How many other models are also 60pts, a decent combatant AND a priest? Combined with 30 strong witch aelves, and you have a pretty point efficient blender. Well that and all the other crazy buffs you can pump into them. I think once they're more point balanced, reigned in with Wholly Within ranges, and Temples no longer being "free" (aka have to take Trait and Item tax), DoK will be less problematic

 

Legions of Nagash is less LoN themselves being the problem (well other than Nagash) and more so Grimghast Reapers being part of their army and getting revived.

This.

Also remember that most of the complaints about DoK and LoN come from people looking up tournament stats rather then play experience. They aren't actually problematic unbeatable auto-win armies, AoS doesn't have any of those. If GH 2019 or an updates tome brings the changes suggested by Kenshin620 they will be at the same level as most factions are right now.

I don't have any experience with Skaven or the new FEC yet, but while they appear strong I think the initial reaction will blow over as we've seen with Gloomspite.

[Neffelo]

5 hours ago, Sedraxis said:

This.

Also remember that most of the complaints about DoK and LoN come from people looking up tournament stats rather then play experience. They aren't actually problematic unbeatable auto-win armies, AoS doesn't have any of those. If GH 2019 or an updates tome brings the changes suggested by Kenshin620 they will be at the same level as most factions are right now.

I don't have any experience with Skaven or the new FEC yet, but while they appear strong I think the initial reaction will blow over as we've seen with Gloomspite.

I'm going to disagree with this. Both FEC and Skaven have a few units that are far stronger than anything that was in the Gloomspite Gitz book. The Sheffield Slaughter tourny had 3 FEC and 2 Skaven in the top ten. I don't think Gloomspite have made anywhere close to a top 10 since their release. 

So far the initial reaction of both FEC and Skaven is quite justified. 

[Luzgurbel]

The problem is that both DoK and LoN are still showing up at top10 and winning tourneys.

[Neffelo]

12 minutes ago, Luzgurbel said:

The problem is that both DoK and LoN are still showing up at top10 and winning tourneys.

I haven't seen DoK place high in a long time, it seems like the meta has really shifted away from them. LoN in multiple forms has been showing up very consistently though. 

DoK still need a few adjustments though. 

[Skabnoze]

2 hours ago, Neffelo said:

I'm going to disagree with this. Both FEC and Skaven have a few units that are far stronger than anything that was in the Gloomspite Gitz book. The Sheffield Slaughter tourny had 3 FEC and 2 Skaven in the top ten. I don't think Gloomspite have made anywhere close to a top 10 since their release. 

So far the initial reaction of both FEC and Skaven is quite justified. 

To be fair, I think more people had Skaven and FEC armies ready to go than Gloomspite players.  There are a fair number of goblin players around, but I doubt as many tournament players had an army ready to go as it has generally been a fan army that was at best middle of the packnor lower competitively. 

[prochuvi]

Both lon and dok need nerfs,both are the top armys even with the new codex.

 

Data of overall  

 

Also data only since the launch of new codexs

 

So both lon and dok are overpower and need a nerf,idoneth also need nerfs.

 

Those armys need be around 50% win rate,now they have 60+ so untill they have 50 need nerfs

[King Taloren]

Looking For that sarcasm text prompt still.

We are never going to see a 50% win rate on all armies. It is not only unfeasable it’s ridiculously shortsighted.  This win rate doesn’t take into any account of how good the players using the armies are. Better players will get better win rates Irregardless of the army they are playing. This does not take into any account of what kind of games were played. We’re there realm rules and artifacts from Malign Scorcery? What were the battleplans? Was it kill based or objectives? Was it a spam of certain models or variety? 

Use some thinking process. Numbers don’t mean Sigmar’s Farts unless you understand what went behind those numbers outside of who won.

[Luzgurbel]

Anyways, a 60/70% of victories, with both armies having a huge percentage of 5+ wins is something the developers have to solve. And they have been so strong for a very long time...

[King Taloren]

If you look closely you can also see that one reason there is such a high win rate is because there are not as many people playing those armies either compared to Stormcast and other more popular armies. LoN is kind of the only offshoot that has a great deal of players and the highest 5-0 wins.

Idoneth and DoK were just about half as many or less as there were Stormcast players.

The army is strong but it’s also greatly the skill of the players who are playing DoK and Idoneth.

Though if we want to complain about pure win rates. LOOK AT PHOENIX TEMPLE. OMG IT’S GOT A 72% WINRATE!!! Someone nerf them fast. Even though I know for fact most of that was one guy playing it, if not all him. And that is the prime shut your mouth example right here. Those numbers only mean that is what the best general took for games.

[The World Tree]

 

Talking about nerfs for an army based on overall win rate misses the point. You can basically fix LoN being so strong by removing the summonable key word frm Reapers in Legions armies. However good balancing would be to tweak those units that we don't see often. I'd rather they focus on internal balance within an army first.

The best example is with Deepkin. They aren't actually that strong holistically, just the Morrsarr eels and the tidecaster. Thralls are solid but don't do the heavy lifting.

 

[Dr Ben]

I'm not a tournament player but follow the stats and reviews from a distance. But it seems to me that aiming to have most real fctions in the 40-60% bracket would be a reasonable aim from a balance perspective. 

The recent tournament results seem to have shown the FEC and Skaven have come in pretty powerful. But LON and DOK do retain high win rates (despite Ben Savva not playing DOK at recent tournies!). Good comments were made above about not wanting to leaving other old Aos 1 factions even further behind. Altogether this says to me that says maybe LON and DOK could still use a little adjustment so those Aos 1 factions aren't too far behind but just not as much as the big nerfs people were asking for before. Eg maybe just increase hags to 100pts, make dire wolves not battle line. Tones them down a bit but doesn't leave them behind skaven/fec/idk. Those extra 40-80 points will make a fairly big difference to top level players but not enough to make casual players feel like their army is now totally different. 

[JackStreicher]

The trend of GW is not to nerf anything instead they make the newer factions even stronger...

(I bet you need 4x the points of Blades of Khorne army for a non-bt army to have a fair chance of beating them. Same for FeC)

[Mutton]

I see a lot of comments suggesting they still need to be brought down to accommodate the older armies. But I was rather positing that if the older armies all get new battletomes of quality (as we've been seeing and is highly likely, maybe even all within the year), then is there still a need for it? The question then becomes: "Are DoK and Legions on par with the updated factions coming out (FEC, Skaven, Khorne)? Pitting these new battletomes against one-another, are they fair fights? Do FEC, Skaven, Khorne, etc., need to be toned down in some capacity as well?"

Unfortunately, we likely won't know until the new battletomes have been roaming around out there for awhile; and my concern comes from GW asking for public input on the '19 GHB, well before we had a glimpse of the new books. I have to wonder, what was the purpose in asking for advice to change an ecosystem that was liable to drastically change in the next couple months? It's kind of like asking people how much they should change rock and paper to be fairer, but then add scissors to the game a little while later.

[Mutton]

7 minutes ago, JackStreicher said:

The trend of GW is not to nerf anything instead they make the newer factions even stronger...

I think KO, Tzeentch, and Beastclaw would all disagree. I don't think we really know what they're going to do, or how far they'll take it in that direction.

[Skreech Verminking]

11 minutes ago, Mutton said:

I think KO, Tzeentch, and Beastclaw would all disagree. I don't think we really know what they're going to do, or how far they'll take it in that direction.

Well yeah that was a big problem, let’s hope they’ll fix that with a few new battlwtome for this guys (or better said for all factions edit: that don’t have one yet, or an outdated one)

[King Taloren]

*sees a confused face on my post* TRIGGERED!! 😆😆😆😆

Alright you guys asked for it!

*puts on Professor Cap*

Welcome all to Professor Taloren’s Game Design and Balance Lecture.

Let’s talk about why having all armies get a 50% win rate is not only near impossible but completely should be avoided as a balancer for Games in general. And why tournaments winners should not the be all end all indications of what is strong and what is wrong.

As a note I am not going deny power creep. I will admit it exists to a point but nowhere near the level some might say.

Lets start with tournaments.

Just because you can state that DoK wins a lot of games does not point to any other factors that gave them wins. Who was playing these armies?  What was the composition of the lists? What was the skill of the player and his opponents? What armies did he play against? How easy were his early opponents? Sid he play a new comet and give them the tournament equivalent of Will Smith from Independence Day’s “Welcome to Earth”? Was the terrain a good balance? Were there realm rules being used? Uglu? Shyish? Realm artifacts in play?  There are many more factors into these statistics than a simple win/loss number. Not to mention that there is a big chunk of data missing from this chart. But we will get to that later.

First let’s focus on the players themselves. Most of these Top 10 players have something in common. Can you guess what it is?

Many of them have placed Top 10 in multiple tournaments for years with various armies. The skill of these players is much higher than an average player. The composition of their army certainly helps to a point but it is not  the army alone that wins the games.

Let’s look at the bottom tier of players. Stormcast, Seraphon, Blades of Khorne, and Ironjaws all have the highest number of players to go 0 wins. Even the new Gloomspite Gits has 3 players without a win.

Are these armies too weak and need buffs? Not necessarily. After all Nagash, Order, Nurgle and a few other armies all have a good number of 0 win players.

What caused these losses? Bad list building, poor tactics, probability chucking dice into the bin and ******. 

You cannot expect to win a competition with an army that is not;

1: internally balanced in the list itself, (if all you bring is archers what happens when the army charges its infantry and you can’t defend yourself. Answer is just die on the battlefield or be routed)

2: properly executed in regards to its strength and weaknesses and choose the right tactics and targets. (don’t charge your high power killing monster  dragon into 40 plaguebearers and wonder why your squishy mage got beat to death by a unit of Blightkings.)

3: built around synergy to shore up a dependance on luck and probabilities. (The less you have to hope your dice will straight up roll everything you need to win the better off you are)

Quite often the bottom tier is people who only bring what they have without any regards to the above, over reliance on a now defunct or underpowered mechanic, or it is poorly thought out, or the tactical decision making was not toward the actual win conditions. This is one of the main difference between top tier and bottom tier.

Another thing to note is the popularity of the factions and how many players are in each one. Nearly 3x the players were in Stormcast Eternals and Legion of Nagash over Daughters of Khaine and Idoneth Deepkin. This can heavily skew data that can also be drawn. The more numbers you have to average out the more stable and harder to change those numbers. And the inverse is also true. The fewer amount of players in a faction the higher the winrate can be if most of the players in that particular faction win more games. (See my Phoenix Temple rant above) More players in a faction raise the odds of more of those player armies losing. It’s just simple statistics. For someone to win someone has to lose. Also a vast majority of those who played DoK or Idoneth are veteran players who owned most of the faction already, or had enough money/time to win invest and learn how to play them and maximize the strengths. Though again there is still some missing Data to consider which we will get to later.

Tournaments do have some useful data to provide. Such as the popularity of certain armies. Which, no surprise, the two stars of Soul Wars are taking the top two spots as the largest part of the player base. This also means they have the largest supply of new players. And the amount of factions that didn’t get many players to go 3 wins is also useful to know on who is more in need of a buff/new battletome. 

So what about the win rate percentage? Isn’t that important? Not really. In fact unless you divide these numbers further into upper and lower skill tiers it’s as useful as a census is for determining how much money Tom, you friend next door has in his bank account. You might find out that the average guy in your neighborhood makes $40k a year but that doesn’t really mean he does or has that kind of cash.

How many of these low win players were brand new to the tournament scene? How many vets or casual players are on the bottom rungs? Did any previous top 10 players fall from grace? How many actually played the entire tournament? 0 wins doesn’t mean they stayed and lost of 5 games of a tournament, nor does even 1 win, this can skew the numbers as well and can change the numbers if you remove all the players who dropped out after day one. It might not amount to a grossly significant change but it could certainly raise some of the win rates of certain armies.

So now that we are talking about winrates let’s move into balance.

Chess is agreed to be the most balanced game in the world. Can anyone guess the winrate of White.

If you said about 50% you are wrong. In fact according to most chess databases. The win rate is only 34-38% give or take. So is black actually winning more? No...

Black is only winning about 24-34% of the time. So where is the missing percent?

Ladies and Gents, some of the missing data. TIE GAMES!

Yes! The odds of winning losing and tie are nearly the same in Chess.

Tie games are also important to know. How many of the 4 and 3 win players also had tie games? Sigmar is not a binary game, it has three endgame conditions that can occur. The third has been narrowed considerably but it is still a factor that must be considered. The percentage of ties in Sigmar is nowhere near 33% thanks to killpoints/ and asymmetrical objectives.

But let us also note that in Chess there are only two factions of equal abilities before someone sits down to play. Sigmar is not in any way, shape or form this balanced and will never be.

The main reason is the number of factions and wide range of armies that can all be custom created by the player. Trying to balance a 50% winrate is laughable. Maybe a 50% average but even that isn’t good enough.

Pointing to another game which has a similar amount of choices in how you build and play their game, we find a design team with a simple ideal about how to balance their “factions”. League of Legends tries to maintain a winrate balance of 60-67% between all their characters. This sounds strange but it works once you realize how many characters/factions there are. Not everyone has to lose to the same groups and there is enough to go around that almost everyone can beat about 2/3ds of their opponents and the other 1/3 is a hard/soft counter.

There is a soft power creep among characters but often at the start of a new season they rebalance things and put people on a more even standing. And the counters are still there to keep certain players in check long as someone thinks to grab one for specific characters. I remember back when they introduced one hero call Vel’Koz, tentacle creature with a lot of long range powers, (man I was god tier on him those first few days. Sigh)  Lot of people hollered out about how overpowered he was but that only before people figured out his counter. DOTA 2 has the same issue in low tier with Rafki (a stealthy character that passively stays invisible until he starts attacking or you place down an item that shows his location. Very good way to learn how to guard your back while playing.) 

Also the variety of match ups are endless. Though it is easier to switch between various characters as you play than sigmar armies the overall goal is to make it asymmetrically balanced across the board worldwide instead of balancing your neighborhood FLGS. 

At the moment we are in a point where still over half the factions are playing by old rules. Games Workshop is still updating for the “new season” so let’s just wait and see where thing will stand in a few more months/next year. Balancing against the old rules is detrimental to the overall future state of sigmar since it would require more rebalancing if a faction that had a specific issue now had an overwhelmingly large advantage against an issue from the 1-2.0 movement going on now. If the new books are coming out strong then take heart that hopefully all the future ones will be as strong and not stronger.

Ok I think I am done. Didn’t really get into actual design but I figured this could be a series to start up if anyone is interested in reading more. 

[Furuzzolo]

14 hours ago, prochuvi said:

 

That's a grudge. 😡

[Ointagru]

1 hour ago, King Taloren said:

Just because you can state that DoK wins a lot of games does not point to any other factors that gave them wins. Who was playing these armies?  What was the composition of the lists? What was the skill of the player and his opponents? What armies did he play against? How easy were his early opponents? Sid he play a new comet and give them the tournament equivalent of Will Smith from Independence Day’s “Welcome to Earth”? Was the terrain a good balance? Were there realm rules being used? Uglu? Shyish? Realm artifacts in play?  There are many more factors into these statistics than a simple win/loss number. Not to mention that there is a big chunk of data missing from this chart. But we will get to that later.

 

You made some good points, so I won't quote and discuss your entire message. 

However, I believe some of the factors you mention as a possible explanation of the DoK win rate are irrelevant, given the size of the sample.

Let’s take as an example: “ Was the terrain a good balance?” For the terrain to have an influence on a win rate of a faction, there should be a statistically significant difference in terrain composition between matches of that faction compared to to whole sample. You could also have asked: have the DoK player drank coffee before playing, giving them a slight advantage in concentration? But there is no reason to suppose that DoK players are different regarding coffee consumption habits from other players. Similarly, there is no reason to suppose that 500-600 matches of DoK players had different terrain from the other 10 000 matches. The same goes for some other factors you mentioned, such as “What armies did he play against?” It is irrelevant, unless you assume that DoK players had on average different opponents compared to the other factions.

[King Taloren]

Well averages is that most DoK players probably faced at least one Stormcast and two Nagash players every tournament especially when you get into the top tables after round two. But early tables are much more random in earlier tables especially in Swiss rounds. The matchup could have been a lot easier or harder and can make or break a players tournament placings. For skilled players it’s not as big a problem, for people taking armies that really get countered by newer armies (I.e. KO vs Idoneth) it just turns into bad luck on their part to end up facing doom so quickly.

that kind of sample just proves that all the 1.0 battletomes and armies without one  needs an update to get back into competition. (Except Phoenix Temple.) Daughters are still fairly strong but it has certainly leveled out more. The post release shows that outside of Nagash it was a six way tie between all the newer times minus Gloomspite who was only one player behind. 

Now Daughters and Idoneth still sit high on the 4 and 3 win bracket which is about where I think they should be. Even as strong as they are they still are a higher skill level army than some others. Very fragile glass cannons, they can hit incredibly hard but bad positioning can ruin them. Stormcast have the issue of too many choices and basically the win is Sequitor spam. The only downside they have is the overall Stormcast susceptibility to mortal wound spam.  Nagash needs to sit down and just chill, literally the only faction that is the Grand Alliance without having to play as the Grand Alliance. At least until we see if Games Workshop does a Chaos Undivided Battletome to run everything but Skaven in one army.

[ledha]

Honestly, it's not even that hard to rebelance the DOK battltome. Put the Hag Queen at 140 pts (even at 120 she is better than any 120 pts hero), put all the "within" ranges in wholly within, up the cost of units like wytches aelves/blood sister of 20/10% and it's more or less done. Oh, and decrease the general resilience of the army, because a 5++ reroll is absolutely dumb, sorry. The problem of DOK isn't that they hit basically harder than anyone else while being super mobile, it's that the cheap cost combined with a mountain of defensive buffs make them way too resilient for what is supposed to be a glass canon.

Fighting a 2000 pts army of DOK always feel like fighting a 2500 pts because they have so many units on the board and each of their unit can more or less destroy 2 or 3 of yours, depending of how powerful your battletome is.

[DantePQ]

On 3/16/2019 at 5:29 PM, kenshin620 said:

I think one of the biggest problems many people point to DoK is 60pt Hag Queens, a decent combat model who is also a priest. How many other models are also 60pts, a decent combatant AND a priest? Combined with 30 strong witch aelves, and you have a pretty point efficient blender. Well that and all the other crazy buffs you can pump into them. I think once they're more point balanced, reigned in with Wholly Within ranges, and Temples no longer being "free" (aka have to take Trait and Item tax), DoK will be less problematic

 

Legions of Nagash is less LoN themselves being the problem (well other than Nagash) and more so Grimghast Reapers being part of their army and getting revived.

First and foremost it helps when you know the army you are writing about. They have a lot of wholly within abilities in DoK and then those that aren’t are 7” or 3” range.

Also Temples arent free as you got to take Trait or Item to use them so there is a tax. Then you can’t have Morathi as your General for example. 

I think 120 Hags,120/300 for Witches and  350 for Slaughter Queen is enough. As it makes Hags 100% more expensive and Witches 10-20%.

LoN is powerful because command Ability to bring back whole unit of Reapers is crazy good for 1CP plus there are Realm Spells. Without Realm Spells and Repaers not being summonable (or CA costing 2-3 CP) would be just fine as well.