Concerns with the development of AOS 2

[King Taloren]

3 hours ago, Ointagru said:

A GAME without immersion  doesn't need painted models. In fact it doesn't need models at all. If it was  only about fun mechanics, it could and should be played with cardboard tokens. It also doesn't need backstory or artwork, which contribute nothing to the game as a GAME.  

I call this Fantasy Flight Games 🤣 I kid. I kid.

[Nos]

2 hours ago, Carnivore said:

And that's exactly my concern.

That the game might get worse in the future, 

It might. 

It might not.

Theres literally nothing anyone can do about it. Not really sure what your point is. Are we supposed to Sabotage the rate of Battletome releases from within sonehow?

GW will do its own thing. It might continue to succeed, it might lose the plot completely, whatever, it will work as it always has done. If people like the product they’ll buy it. If they don’t they won’t. There’s nothing else to be said. 

You’re obviously free to harbour anxieties and misgivings about it all but there’s no reason anyone should care or share in them if they don’t alreasy feel the same. It’s certainly not going to accomplish anything.

It just feels like you’re diminishing your own enjoyment from the hobby by fixating on the fact that it might get worse, rather than enjoying it for what it is right now. Most things go into decline at some point, including humans. Dosent stop us from doing stuff now in the knowledge it will be harder or less pleasant one day. If anything it tends to encourage people to focus on making the most of what they have.

[Mayple]

Personally, I see GW's pattern of doing a -much- better job with the rules nowadays than a year or two ago. They've finally settled on what they want Age of Sigmar to "feel like" rules wise, and I think it is all the better for it. Golden days ahead

Our enjoyment of the game locally has increased a lot since GHB2, and it keeps getting better. 

Edit:

I'll be honest. I don't see the issue people are having with the supposed faction inbalance. If it bothers you so much, switch factions, if you don't want to do that then make your faction work. I played Skaven for years without a tome, and stubbornly forced myself to work with that.*

*As usual, Beastclaw players get a free pass on this one I see you! 

Nothing is invincible. Anything can be beaten. 

The mortal wound spam with no counter-play argument is also a bit flat. With the exception of some spellcasting spellportal shenanigans, everything in the game has a counter-play. 

tl;dr: Try to solve the problem rather than defeating yourself on its perceived advantage. 

[InSaint]

Just for comparison with the sci-fi tabletop counterpart, AOS is in a much better place than Warhammer 40,000. 

You have no idea how ridiculously competitive Warhammer 40,000 is now. Players are just cherry picking the best units in each fraction to bring to the table and still get to enjoy the fraction's abilities. And yes, you can easily get tabled in the first turn in WH40K or face armies you can literally do nothing against.

This happened because GWS wanted to push for more revenue and allowed for soup armies to encourage cross sales between fractions.

[King Taloren]

Yup. The new detachment rules are pretty bunk.

Which is why anything not Imperial or Chaos is basically screwed in 40k. Cause outside of Aeldari, and Tyranids, everyone else has no allies and then they only have a couple of factions, not three fourths of the entire 40k store catalogue.

[Belper]

58 minutes ago, King Taloren said:

Yup. The new detachment rules are pretty bunk.

Which is why anything not Imperial or Chaos is basically screwed in 40k. Cause outside of Aeldari, and Tyranids, everyone else has no allies and then they only have a couple of factions, not three fourths of the entire 40k store catalogue.

That only really leaves Orkz and Tau (who are both perfectly viable, even on their own). Plus, people always bring up '3/4ths of the catalogue' but it's only ever the same handful of units getting picked. There's less unit variety across all imperial soup lists than there is in mono CWE.

Back to the topic at hand. The single most worrying thing about AoS 2 is the realm of battle rules. Pigeon holing these terrible nonsense fluff rules into matched play is the first step on a long and terrifying road I call '7th edition 40k ave' where goofy fluff nonsense introduced with not even a passing glance at balance slowly makes the game unplayable.

 

Why did Nagash need 7 more spells per realm to choose from every hero phase?(yeah ALL 7, you heard me)Why is whether or not you roll up Ulgu the #1 determining factor in whether or not your shooting primary list has a ghost of a chance of winning? Why can you have a 3+ Ethereal VLoZD when that's WAY stronger than any of the equipment options the battletome was balanced around? Why is everything about Ghur so stupid? Why does rolling a 6 make you the better player in 80% of Realm of Battle Scenarios?

 

 

[Belper]

51 minutes ago, InSaint said:

Just for comparison with the sci-fi tabletop counterpart, AOS is in a much better place than Warhammer 40,000. 

You have no idea how ridiculously competitive Warhammer 40,000 is now. Players are just cherry picking the best units in each fraction to bring to the table and still get to enjoy the fraction's abilities. And yes, you can easily get tabled in the first turn in WH40K or face armies you can literally do nothing against.

This happened because GWS wanted to push for more revenue and allowed for soup armies to encourage cross sales between fractions.

This is straight up nonsense. As someone who plays both competitively, both 40k and AoS are exactly the same level of bullstuff at the moment.

You will never get tabled on the first turn of 40k. You can LOSE on the first turn, but you'll never get tabled, which is also exactly true of AoS. The only reason AoS SEEMS less brutal is because it being more melee focused means that you get a turn of movement before everything dies. 40k is also WAY less broken than it was before 8th edition dropped.

Cherry picking the best units is standard practice in ANY competitive environment and the only reason you don't see more of it in AoS is because of how balls to the wall busted most army's allegiance abilities are.

At least in 40k you can't lose the game in BEFORE DEPLOYMENT, like you can in AoS. 'Oops, my Aetherstrike list rolled a 1 on Ulgu against LoN, I lose. Man, I wish I was skilled enough to roll the right number on a stupid random table of pointless nonsense and win the game instantly'.

[kenshin620]

I'm having flashbacks of being on a warhammer forum at the twilight of 7th edition WFB. 🤒

Man that was a crazy time.

[Skabnoze]

39 minutes ago, Belper said:

 Why is everything about Ghur so stupid?

Everything about Ghur is amazing.  

[Mayple]

42 minutes ago, Skabnoze said:

Everything about Ghur is amazing.  

Minus their realmscape rules, to be fair. 

[Dead Scribe]

I agree that the fluff rules like the realm of battle rules for each realm need to not be in matched play.  They should have been in narrative and open play.  

And cherry-picking the best units is pretty much how any competitive game is.  Thats the point of being competitive, fielding the best your team has to offer.   Otherwise you are just handicapping yourself, which is the opposite of playing competitively.  No professional sports team is going out and putting in their back ups to start the game because they want to handicap themselves.  Neither would any competitive gamer be expected to do that.

[Skreech Verminking]

2 hours ago, Dead Scribe said:

I agree that the fluff rules like the realm of battle rules for each realm need to not be in matched play.  They should have been in narrative and open play.  

And cherry-picking the best units is pretty much how any competitive game is.  Thats the point of being competitive, fielding the best your team has to offer.   Otherwise you are just handicapping yourself, which is the opposite of playing competitively.  No professional sports team is going out and putting in their back ups to start the game because they want to handicap themselves.  Neither would any competitive gamer be expected to do that.

Nah a perfect and cunning Warlord must be equipped for battle in any circumstances, even when lead would rain from the heavens🧐.

where would be the fun if it just weren’t meant for match play, I mean who doesn’t like it if an overpowered, undercosted, stolen warmaschine from the Aelves just can’t shoot for 1-2 turns (sadly it’s mostly the whole game, hopfully they’ll change that and a few other rules) they are all cool and can make the game much more interesting, just some rules might need a slight change, just that an armie doesn’t get useless fully.

 

[Thiagoma]

10 minutes ago, Skreech Verminking said:

Nah a perfect and cunning Warlord must be equipped for battle in any circumstances, even when lead would rain from the heavens🧐.

where would be the fun if it just weren’t meant for match play, I mean who doesn’t like it if I’m overpowered, undercosted, stolen warmaschine from the Aelves just can’t shoot for 1-2 turns (sadly it’s mostly the whole game, hopfully they’ll change that and a few other rules) they are all cool and can make the game much more interesting, just some rules might need a slight change, just that an armie doesn’t get useless fully.

 

On an off topic,  this theft really pissed me off, almost made me wanna quit AoS. No Bt for Aelves AND steal our units? 

****** you gw!

/rant off

/sorry sorry

/not really sorry 

[Charleston]

My opinion on this topic fits quite well to what other users have already described:

• The overall Meta seems okay. The small insights I get from tournaments show that there is a broad variety of lists at events of all sizes and even factions concidered underdogs appear from time to time on the upper places.
• At casual games the balance seems overall okay. Biggest weakpoint are differences between factions without alligience-abbilities or ghb-ones compared to the ones with Battletomes. While I think that this "powercreep" is simply a result from the AoS Developers getting more and more experienced I yet hope that the 2.0 Battletomes keep their current release pace so all factions get onto one similar power level.
• The Internal balance of most factions is quite good and the "anything can wound anything" base mechanic of AoS detaches strategical decisions from list building as it occurs in 40k. This allows pretty relaxed listbuilding in an casual environment.

I also noticed that the game experience alters a lot with different rule sets and point sizes.

[Skabnoze]

5 hours ago, Mayple said:

Minus their realmscape rules, to be fair. 

Nope.  I disagree.  The realmscape rules for Ghur are a lot of fun.  Tournaments are only one aspect of how to play this game and by their nature they are a very specific style of play.  It is perfectly fine for there to be multiple layers of rule systems in the game and players can decide which to use and ignore for any of their games - tournaments included.

[svnvaldez]

1 hour ago, Skabnoze said:

Nope.  I disagree.  The realmscape rules for Ghur are a lot of fun.  Tournaments are only one aspect of how to play this game and by their nature they are a very specific style of play.  It is perfectly fine for there to be multiple layers of rule systems in the game and players can decide which to use and ignore for any of their games - tournaments included.

So tournament play =/= matched play so I don’t know exactly what to think of my following suggestion but maybe one day we could see the GH have a recommended section on which realmscape features/ realm/ battle plans to included in tournaments games. This is really tricky thou because tournament play =/= matched play and honestly there is nothing wrong with Ghur if both players bring equal pointed monsters and play a matched play game. But people often don’t and then complain an event is unfair when I bring a magma dragon and they don’t have anything. I would bring a magma dragon to a tournament but never to a matched play game at my local store. So that’s a very difficult distinction. These really are tournament issues not matched play issues. I would like to see GW provide more guidance thou so ppl don’t fight over “comp”.

[Skabnoze]

41 minutes ago, svnvaldez said:

So tournament play =/= matched play so I don’t know exactly what to think of my following suggestion but maybe one day we could see the GH have a recommended section on which realmscape features/ realm/ battle plans to included in tournaments games. This is really tricky thou because tournament play =/= matched play and honestly there is nothing wrong with Ghur if both players bring equal pointed monsters and play a matched play game. But people often don’t and then complain an event is unfair when I bring a magma dragon and they don’t have anything. I would bring a magma dragon to a tournament but never to a matched play game at my local store. So that’s a very difficult distinction. These really are tournament issues not matched play issues. I would like to see GW provide more guidance thou so ppl don’t fight over “comp”.

I don’t disagree with those points.  

It would be nice if GW put forth the effort to create a competitive tournament rules framework.  They did that for KillTeam and maybe that is a test run and they will later expand to include rules like that for the main games.

In regards to Ghur there can be discrepancies between the monsters that are included.  In normal pick-up games it should be easy to resolve this.  If an event chooses to include Ghur as a realm then it would be nice if that was specified in the event pack and a reasonable point restriction placed on the monsters.  Then people could plan ahead and if they don’t bring a monster then that is their fault.  Or the event could select a monster warscroll or create one and say that both players use that profile for the monster models they bring.  There are a lot of ways to make the Ghur rules work for an event and it just takes a bit of preplanning from the organizer.

My only real complaint about Ghur is that the monster placement rules are poor and they encourage simply sticking it right in the enemies face so they will have to deal with a big monster in turn-1.  I would have preferred if they had to deploy in the center line of the table so that there was more chance for players to maneuver around them.  I would also prefer if they moved randomly in the movement phase to make them more of a hazard than a strategic benefit.  That said, I still think the monster rules are fun.

[Dead Scribe]

My only real complaint about Ghur is that the monster placement rules are poor and they encourage simply sticking it right in the enemies face so they will have to deal with a big monster in turn-1. 

GW games often put a lot of emphasis in alpha strike style rules.  They are fun and exciting for a lot of people.

[svnvaldez]

1 hour ago, Dead Scribe said:

GW games often put a lot of emphasis in alpha strike style rules.  They are fun and exciting for a lot of people.

Calling it now! Next 5 responses will be people who are "triggered" by that comment  I like my games quick, but I understand lots of people only get to play once a month and do not want their toys removed T1.

[Mayple]

2 hours ago, Skabnoze said:

My only real complaint about Ghur is that the monster placement rules are poor and they encourage simply sticking it right in the enemies face so they will have to deal with a big monster in turn-1.

We agree completely. That is my whole issue with Ghur 😛

Nevermind if it's a Magma Dragon or a Gargant, whoever gets the first turn gets to throw it right into the face of the enemy while also removing whatever was put close to their own lines by the opposition. 

The realm becomes much more a "and here we see two armies, but one of them was crippled by a mountain pre-battle, oh I wonder how the rest of this battle will go!" rather than the much desired "Oh! Behold, a dragon decided to enter the fray while the two armies were deeply embattled! What will it do? Who will it eat!?" 

So my grievance is mostly over what it could be, which could easily have been the best of them all, but instead it just kicks one of the players in the face as hard as it can before the battle has even started 😛 No plan or army list in excistence could ever account for Ghur.

Stomping my opponent thoroughly because a Magma Dragon ate his Nagash (or a gargant stomped his frontline) is not exactly my idea of a good victory 😛 y'know?

[Skabnoze]

1 hour ago, Mayple said:

Stomping my opponent thoroughly because a Magma Dragon ate his Nagash (or a gargant stomped his frontline) is not exactly my idea of a good victory 😛 y'know?

Since when is it ever a bad victory when a Magma Dragon eats Nagash?

[The World Tree]

10 hours ago, Skreech Verminking said:

Nah a perfect and cunning Warlord must be equipped for battle in any circumstances, even when lead would rain from the heavens🧐.

where would be the fun if it just weren’t meant for match play, I mean who doesn’t like it if an overpowered, undercosted, stolen warmaschine from the Aelves just can’t shoot for 1-2 turns (sadly it’s mostly the whole game, hopfully they’ll change that and a few other rules) they are all cool and can make the game much more interesting, just some rules might need a slight change, just that an armie doesn’t get useless fully.

 

I think one of the big problems with realm use in games is informational asymmetry. We have a local AOS league and there's a pre-determined realm each round. There have been times when I've won because I knew there was a spell/command ability  that could win teh game for me. Because my opponent doesn't know or hasn't looked at those rules right there means they were caught unaware. It doesn't feel good to do it and I don't want to have my nose in a book whilst playing just to make sure I remember all of the spells. Like magic items, it is just bloat. 

[Kramer]

15 hours ago, Dead Scribe said:

No professional sports team is going out and putting in their back ups to start the game because they want to handicap themselves.  Neither would any competitive gamer be expected to do that.

True, but not every sports team is that ‘professional’. For every 1st team, there are string of teams behind them that let every player play roughly equal amounts. 

Which is also fine. And to draw it back to AoS, just taking to your opponent solves a lot. There are a lot of units that are great fun, but not the most effective. If your opponent and you have the same mindset you will both have fun including those or not. 

[Dead Scribe]

7 hours ago, The World Tree said:

I think one of the big problems with realm use in games is informational asymmetry. We have a local AOS league and there's a pre-determined realm each round. There have been times when I've won because I knew there was a spell/command ability  that could win teh game for me. Because my opponent doesn't know or hasn't looked at those rules right there means they were caught unaware. It doesn't feel good to do it and I don't want to have my nose in a book whilst playing just to make sure I remember all of the spells. Like magic items, it is just bloat. 

While I 'm not a fan of the realm rules in general, what you are describing are players that don't take it upon themselves to learn the scenarios and situations they will be in and are beating themselves.  Especially if you are playing in a competitive league, the absolute onus is on the players to be aware of what all the rules are in play so that they can optimize for that scenario.  If they choose to be lazy and not read the book and get the rules, thats not on the other player.  Thats on the player being lazy.  

Write the spells down on paper or part of your army list.  That way your nose doesn't have to be in the book more than once.

[Skabnoze]

13 hours ago, svnvaldez said:

Calling it now! Next 5 responses will be people who are "triggered" by that comment  I like my games quick, but I understand lots of people only get to play once a month and do not want their toys removed T1.

This does not “trigger” me, but I have the opposite opinion as you - at least for this game.  I can understand people want quick games when they attend events and have multiple games over the course of the day.  I like some games quick, but I find that is best for skirmish games and other small/medium games.

40k and AoS are not small games.  They are played on a full dinner-table and fairly covered with terrain.  The armies are not small and even  elite low-model count armies tend to be at least 20-30 figures.  Other armies can easily top 100 models on the table.  In my opinion the time to play this game should not really be less than what it takes to set up the table and deploy the two armies.

But this is just my opinion.  I care more about playing and enjoying the game and less about the result of the game.