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Slaanesh Summoning


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What has your experience of Slaanesh summoning been like?

In my games, it is far too good. There are no other armies in the game that can get so much so quickly. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game with less than one extra Keeper and at least another unit or hero.

That’s at least 500 points of additional free units in every single game. It’s also automatic. You have to kill the heroes, and in doing so you allow them to summon more. There is no downside whatsoever and no punishment for just kamikaze charging Keepers in, like there is with other monsters.

Edited by Grailstorm
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My experience is the slannesh player having about 50-60 by the end of turn two. Shooting it off sort of works if you have it. 

Take an army of 1 wound models also works if you as long as you never want to play stormcast, ogres, ironjaws, undead with anything cool, daughters with snakes, KO etc

Edited by Slayerofmen
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I think most people agree their summoning is skewed. There's no real counter to it and Slaanesh gains so much Depravity from doing very little; the only real limitation is physically not having enough models to fill up the board with more KoS and Daemonettes. Heaven help you if you play armies with 2-4 wound models.

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8 hours ago, Dead Scribe said:

Slaanesh summoning is pretty bonkers and of the chaos factions is the easiest to abuse and max out on.  But I think thats as designed and working as intended.  

It’s just infuriating turning up to a 2,000 point battle and facing 2,500-3,000 points...

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I think its working as they intended, but also that it might want some rebalancing adjustments. 

 

Personally I'd welcome two key changes

1) A cap per turn along with adjustment to the costs of units. Whilst this kind of forces the Slaanesh players hand to always hit that target; it also means that they can't go overboard. This levels the playingfield somewhat since right now Slaanesh loves playing against a multi-wound opponent like stormcast, but can struggle against a single wound heavy army like Skaven going heavy for clan rats. Ergo there are some match ups where Slaanesh is excelling far above normal. 
Adding a cap means that it levels that playingfield; it also means that point costs can be balanced out to be fairer. 

This change also makes troops more viable, provided the limit isn't too high since now the player only has to consider taking enough leaders to generate enough to hit the target. 

It's a simple change and even without adjusting point values for summoning costs a limit imposed is a very quick fix. 

 

2) Add generation to troops/some troops. Right now I feel Slaanesh is weighted too heavily toward taking all leaders (keepers) then summoning more leaders to generate more depravity. There's basically far less reason to take any troops beyond the battleline minimum. This is not very good for the army I feel because its pushing the competitive end into a very limited roster of choices. It also means that a huge number of great models and options are being sidelined. Adding depravity into regular infantry would at least make them more viable to take.

Of course the costs to summon would have to be adjusted and this approach is only helping the Slaanesh army increase its diversity within its Tome; it still suffers from the same issues of matchup problems whereby any multiwound opponent has a much harder time against a Slaanesh force. 

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16 hours ago, Grailstorm said:

It’s just infuriating turning up to a 2,000 point battle and facing 2,500-3,000 points...

Thats why its important that you are either doing a lot of mortal wound damage or other ways to damage them faster than they can summon, or you need to be summoning just as many points as your opponent.

Or else you're going to be on the short end of the stick pretty much every time.  

When you stop and think about it, good players are also building lists that are composed of units that are undercost, so even without summoning a good player is turning a 2000 point list into something that operates like its 2,500 or 3,000 points.

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1 hour ago, SwampHeart said:

I adore when people compare Slaanesh summoning to Khorne summoning without realizing the difference in the two mechanics (or the fact that Bloodtithe is better spent on boons than summoning). 

The difference in the two mechanics only highlights the power of Slaanesh summoning, and the power of their allegiance abilities. The fact that blood tithe is better spent on boons is irrelevant.

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2 minutes ago, Grailstorm said:

The difference in the two mechanics only highlights the power of Slaanesh summoning, and the power of their allegiance abilities. The fact that blood tithe is better spent on boons is irrelevant.

Yeah I mean Slaanesh totally gets it for just killing units out right, any unit on the table, with any model right?

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9 minutes ago, SwampHeart said:

Yeah I mean Slaanesh totally gets it for just killing units out right, any unit on the table, with any model right?

I don't really think that you can honestly make the argument that it's easier to generate Blood Tithe than it is to generate Depravity. Part of the issue wit Depravity is that all of the summoned heroes come with a built in refund -- any Keeper you summon will be giving you back a minimum of 43% of the Depravity that you spent on it, and that is assuming it doesn't get a chance to heal or deal any damage itself. A Bloodthirster, on the other hand, only comes with a built in refund of 12.5%.

Personally, I think Depravity is a really nice mechanic. I do think it could use some tweaks though, and these are the tweaks that I'd suggest:

  • Depravity only generated by damaging heroes or monsters, not any multiwound models.
  • Summon only one thing per turn OR can only summon troops (no heroes) OR summoned heroes can't generate Depravity

I would pair these two changes with some points reductions for Slaanesh units. I know many will find that to be crazy, but I think most of the troops are at least a little overcosted and the army is coasting now on Depravity.

I do want to be absolutely clear about one thing: I do not think Depravity or Slaanesh is inherently broken or even all that imbalanced in competitive play. It's at the top end now, for sure, but I think there are multiple valid lines of attack and if Slaanesh is overtuned it isn't overtuned by much. 

I think these Depravity changes are actually more needed for casual and casual-competitive play than they are for the GT scene. The reason for this is that Slaanesh right now creates an incredibly unpleasant play experience for a lot of people. It just isn't fun to finally bring down your opponent's monsters only to see them all summoned right back again instantly. It's also really unfun to think that your faction starts off at a crippling disadvantage simply because you have no choice but to field multi-wound models. If I were playing Ironjaws, Bonesplitters, Stormcast, Ogres/BCR, or any similar faction I'd basically never want to play against Slaanesh. I'd also hate to have to intentionally avoid taking warscrolls that I like just because they are a liability against Slaanesh.

These concerns are absolutely not appropriate for the tournament scene. Even if Slaanesh rose up to ~10% of the meta (way higher than DoK ever got), it still wouldn't warp the metagame too badly. If you play in tournaments you have to accept that sometimes you will have a bad matchup.

In casual games though it can be soul crushing, especially if your local play group is small. You may not have any choice but to play against Slaanesh all the time, and that's the kind of thing that can drive people out of the hobby.

So basically my goal would be to implement the above changes as a way of addressing Slaanesh in a casual context without hurting it too much in the tournament context.

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11 minutes ago, swarmofseals said:

I don't really think that you can honestly make the argument that it's easier to generate Blood Tithe than it is to generate Depravity

I'm not, I'm pointing out that they are two very different mechanics that work to accomplish different ends. I agree with the bulk of the rest of your post though - I think a simpler fix could just be increasing the Depravity Cost to summon most units. 

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Quote

Summon only one thing per turn OR can only summon troops (no heroes) OR summoned heroes can't generate Depravity

If there's one thing I've learned from GW its that Restrictions are largely seen as unfun and bad.

In casual games though it can be soul crushing, especially if your local play group is small. You may not have any choice but to play against Slaanesh all the time, and that's the kind of thing that can drive people out of the hobby.

There are several things that this is said of.  Unfortunately the game is designed in an insular fashion and so long as it functions fine in the GT hall, you aren't likely to see many if any changes.  Slaanesh depravity works fine in the GT Hall.  Casual players are going to need to learn how to up their listbuilding and field models they don't want to as well as learn the counterplay if they want to have a good game, but thats true of all of us.

Edited by Dead Scribe
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4 hours ago, Dead Scribe said:

There are several things that this is said of.  Unfortunately the game is designed in an insular fashion and so long as it functions fine in the GT hall, you aren't likely to see many if any changes.  Slaanesh depravity works fine in the GT Hall.  Casual players are going to need to learn how to up their listbuilding and field models they don't want to as well as learn the counterplay if they want to have a good game, but thats true of all of us.

Dead Scribe, apologies for being blunt, but are your posts constructed as an elaborate satire of competitive players?

We very rarely crop up in the same threads, as if your posts aren't satire we both have very different hobbies, but everything I've seen from you pushes this weird "tournament/matched play is the only way the game is designed to be played, everything else is an ancillary after thought" line, and superiority complex using derogatory video game style language, dismissing anyone who plays the game differently to you and oft-cited competitive gaming group as "casuals" or similar.

As someone who's amassed a massive collection of miniatures and paraphernalia playing some variation of Games Workshop for the last 25 years, with tournament gaming as the least of my priorities I can accurately say that myself and many others in my position couldn't fairly describe their hobby as casual if they wanted to, and simply enjoy different aspects of it to you.

I'm sure anyone working in the Age of Sigmar design studio could assure you that the game isn't designed in an insular fashion, with matched/competitive play being only one of the often-promoted, and very supported three different suggested ways to play the game, and even if you don't choose to play the game any other way, there's absolutely no reason to offhandedly deride or dismiss those who do and tell them to get better and field units they don't want to when they're not enjoying playing against a particular rule as if they were beneath you. I don't have a whole lot of love for certain parts of the hobby that others enjoy, but gaming's a broad church, and I certainly don't make passive aggressive comments trashing things I don't like, but know full well others do when I have no reason to.

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Sumoning could be balanced if every unit on the codex would cost 50-70% more his intended cost to makeup for the fact u can sumon free units in the game.thats way despite playing a 3k vs 2k game in reality u would be playing a evenly 2k game. But they arent. Every summoning codex has his points balanced without any summoning in play.

So of course after u add the free sumon they get absurdly stupid.

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