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Argument for Strength and Toughness in Age of Sigmar


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1 hour ago, TheCovenLord said:

t but its also a real fantasy killer for me in certain situations (which I think a simple S/T system OR special rule similar to morathi which could embody the "tankiness" of the monster). Seeing a friends bloodthirster charge plague rats kill 8 and die instantly is pathetic. Seeing a ghorgon/Cygor hit the table just makes me laugh at this point. They aren't monsters. They aren't tanky or tough or scary. They don't really do damage. Can't effectively hold objectives. They're pathetic pieces that fail miserably to live up to the fantasy in the face of buffed stacked hordes of goblins/witch elves/ mortrek/saurus/beserkers etc.  its at the point where people I know have left the game because of the miserable performances of their favorite centerpiece.

It seems that this is a design choice.

GW took away WD, initiative, then toughness; all those were the defenses of "elite" and "monstruous" units.  Instead, they added more buffs and force multpliers.

 

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Everything in AoS dies. They die quickly and die generally as soon as a unit swings in AoS they die. In a way its satisfying and prevents annoying tarpits for the most par

Personally, I would prefer routing (and returning) units as a way to avoid silly tarpits.

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4 minutes ago, Greybeard86 said:

It seems that this is a design choice.

GW took away WD, initiative, then toughness; all those were the defenses of "elite" and "monstruous" units.  Instead, they added more buffs and force multpliers.

 

Personally, I would prefer routing (and returning) units as a way to avoid silly tarpits.

I know. The way those buffs and multipliers are currently implemented though enhance volume over quality. Which I find disturbing and unsatisfying.

 

As for routing. I would prefer GW Sh*t or get off the pot and either make bravery meaningful or discard it in the name of streamlining anyway. I would prefer battleshock and routing/rallying become something meaningful but I seriously doubt it with the current direction of the game. 

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I much prefer the simple rules we have now, getting into AoS this year after a few years out from fantasy the change felt really intuitive and made the game really easy to get into, especially as I was introducing my wife to the game who had never played a tabletop game before (she played chess for the first time the year before). 

I find the current rule is so we'll streamlined, I've been playing 6 months now and can basically recall 90% of the stormcast warscrolls, 50% of the Seraphon (I play skinks only) and most of my wife's nighthaunt so games move quickly even if they still take hours due to decision making, moves etc. 

Now I don't think I would quit if they brought in S/T but my wife might and I do genuinely think I'd find games less fun, more time looking up numbers and calculating hits is less time drinking beer and talking ****** and ultimately there is already a game with this system so why not keep the differentiation? 

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I think i understand the suggestions for a single roll to resolve to Hit and to Wnd quickly. However, i dont think the granularity of d10 results would be enough.  My reason buffs.

Like many players, the first aos warscroll i ever saw was for SE Liberator.  I looked at the weapons profiles and thought they were unnecessary 3+, 4+ vs 4+, 3+. Surely they produce the same result! However, as i discovered the importance of buffs, i learned that stategic choices have to be made.  Will i buff to hit or to Wnd ?  It starts to make a difference both strategically and statistically.  Sure, we could similarly buff / debuff both attacker strength and defender toughness, but that seems much less elegant to me.

So, my suggestion (a drum roll, please...)

1) increase the number of  (-) / natural 6s required  for to Hit, to Wnd, and to Save

Two natural 6s and a natural 1 would be requires for a goblin with (-) to Hit (-) to Wnd to wound our friend the dragon with an un-rendable (-) to Save.  Thats a 1/216 chance of damage.

2)  Meanwhile, improve save rolls in general, while simultaneously increasing the range of rend.  1+ Save would still fail on natural 1, but there would be more granular variance.


TLDR: (-) values, a wider range of rend, and better save rolls would allow for more distinction between the potency of units and weapons.  

Importantly, all that is required is an overhaul of warscrolls, not core rules nor irregular dice.

 

What am i missing?

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I definitely prefer To Hit & To Wound. The simplicity is a breath of fresh air after trying to get my friends into Wfb 7th & 8th edition and see them quit because of the smoke coming out of their(and my) ears with all those variables.

Having tiny daggers kill dragons is great too because it keeps the battleground equal without a major pay-to-win wall in place, everything is a viable threat. AoS1 was great to see because you had vets and beginners bring in a group of chaos warriors vs a beginner's Grot force and the results ended up 50/50 instead of a stomp.

It's all made to be beginner friendly and casual which is a huge boon for the game and why it has such a flood of beginners and old veterans who took a decade long break joining in everyday.

Lastly is the realistic argument which I personally chuck out the window when the battlefields are realmscapes on the backs of living continents that mate with eachother and every blade of grass or ingot is inherently made of magic from the realmcrust that formed them as physical gods walked over them.

You don't have to say Grots killed Archaon by stabbing his ankles. Their simple blades could have resonated with the realm magic they're made from and caused the living earth to open up and eat him or Gorkamorka/Da Bad Moon empowered the Grots leader to cleave through Archaon's chest plate as their power & magic grew strong from the battle turning and stirring up the realmsphere, like the battles do to the aspects of the gods sometimes causing them to change as well. Like this art showing Grimnir changing into a bloodthirsty aspect side thanks to Death turning the tide against his children.

tze-kun-chin-ghoulvsfyreslayers.jpg?1528

 

It all just blends so well together for that over-the-top fantastical and malleable magic realms feel Age of Sigmar has.

You can make adjustments to stats and trait rules to keep balancing things out but the core rules are perfect as is by me. :)

 

Edited by Baron Klatz
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The existing lore and novels is riddled with all manners of combats where seemingly weak creatures take down monsters. In Shreikstone, an entire Lodge of Fyreslayers is taken out by Grots and Squigs. When I see something like that on the battlefield, I don't think a 5+/5+ Grobi slicing the belly open of my beloved Joren Grimnir is lame and lore breaking cos I'm not using strength and toughness. I think "Damn, that's one kick ass grot" and I give my mate spare Fyreslayerz bits to put on his base.

No game of AoS I've played has been ruined by the loss of S/T. But I've asked "what's his toughness?" often enough in 40k for it to have grown quite tiresome.

Edited by plavski
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It seems that the complain is that due to the simplified system hordes are too effective, and some big centerpieces just aren't. Even in a toughness based system you can have a grot kill a dragon, it would just be less likely and "epic" as opposed to an effective method. To those who dislike the system this ruins the "fantasy".

Truth is, I don't think people are killing dragons with grots. Maybe someone can give a common example from the current meta where a unit of "regular" folks in a horde are "too good" against "big guys"?

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I do much prefer the streamlined gameplay of AoS' hits n wounds mechanic.   To really represent a difference in units besides other little rules on the warscroll, they could reach be rolling their rolls with D4/D6/D8/D12.  3+ on a D4 is harder than on a D12.  

I guess a divergent topic:  most monsters / behemoths bracket way too hard in performance, either too soon for less performance, or too many stats get decreased for more wounds taken (except for Skarbrand :D )

easy overall rule fixes might be:

-It would be neat if monsters would have an aura of -2 or more bravery, and monsters that are behemoths always force battleshock tests for units in range.  I agree that there are too many things to avoid battleshock altogether.

-Seems like all monsters that are behemoths should also count as some amount of models, perhaps per wound remaining, for objective scoring purposes?  

Those two things would go a long way to making them more worthwhile.  

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5 hours ago, Mattrulesok said:

Now I don't think I would quit if they brought in S/T but my wife might and I do genuinely think I'd find games less fun, more time looking up numbers and calculating hits is less time drinking beer and talking ****** and ultimately there is already a game with this system so why not keep the differentiation? 

I agree with you. 

But the counter argument is so easy. 
You remember your 4 instead of 4+ to wound. I remember my toughness X. Is your strength higher 3+ to wound. Equal 4+ to wound. Lower 5+ to wound. 

It doesnt need to be more complicated than that. But again I agree with you because you'll end up with 5+ to wound due to low strength, and then abilities that give you -1 to hit/wound and you're never doing anything even is it's 40 clanrats that attack. #Swarmsshouldswarm

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10 hours ago, Greybeard86 said:

You make a sacrifice: you say a rifle can hurt a tank.

If that is acceptable to you, with all that it entails, then all is good.

Yeah, I think you've cut right to the heart of the debate with this observation - even if it feels a bit 40K-oriented!

I played 40K when small arms couldn't hurt vehicles. I played WH Fantasy when ethereal models were immune to non-magical weapons. In both cases, I thought those mechanics were bad for the game. More broadly, I find mechanics where one player's resources can suffer a near-total loss of effectiveness to be unsatisfying, and lead to poor game experiences.

However, other players will find it unsatisfying that small arms are even capable of damaging a tank - or more pertinently for these forums, that a mass of goblins can eventually bring down a dragon. In that case, it doesn't matter what abstraction you use, because if it's theoretically possible (albeit completely impractical in actual play) then those players will not be happy.

And that's where I would draw the line and agree to disagree, I think. It's worth noting that 40K's current Strength-Toughness system also says that a rifle hurt a tank - replacing To-Wound with S-T doesn't change that paradigm, and in either system you can make it so that a rifle will barely hurt a tank, if that's the outcome you want. But if what people actually want is a system where a goblin cannot hurt a dragon no matter the circumstances, then I will strongly oppose AoS becoming that system.

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16 minutes ago, boombyeyeah said:

After reading most answers, this seems about balancing hordes. 

Simply introduce weaponranges of 0,5 inches for horde units. 

Different solution that will end up with the same arguments. 

you either want a game where everything is a threat. Or you want a game where ‘lowly’ units only hurt other lowly troops. 
 

at least that’s my conclusion after reading the responses. I don’t think the way it’s fixed matters all the much. Certainly can be low range, or S/T. But unless you agree on that core choice the way to achieve it doesn’t really matter. 

 

what I would like about 0,5” range is that it would means basic troops would have to swarm around their opponent more to get attacks in. That would be a fun and thematic outcome. 

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12 hours ago, Greybeard86 said:

Truth is, I don't think people are killing dragons with grots. Maybe someone can give a common example from the current meta where a unit of "regular" folks in a horde are "too good" against "big guys"?

I think this is important even though nobody seems to have picked up on it. As someone with experience playing Legions of Nagash, hordes by themselves don't destory monsters and other high wound, high armour targets. Hordes with rend can, though.

This is due to the (possibly slightly counter-intuitive) way saves interact with wounds. Each +1 to a save is more impactful than the last.  For example, 6+ save multiplies your effective wounds by 1.2 compared to a save of '-'. But a 5+ save multiplies them by 1.5, and the returns keep rising. You can compensate for saves up to 4+ with volume of attacks. 4+ effectively doubles your wounds. This is something that a horde can compensate for better than an elite unit, since elite units don't usually have attacks that are twice as good as those of a horde unit for the same points.

However, at 3+ and 2+, your effective wounds start to outpace what a horde unit can effectively compensate for with just raw damage/volume of attacks. 3+ triples your wounds, while 2+ multiplies them by 6. At that point, rend becomes the deciding factor. Since each level of rend effectively reduces the opponent's save by 1, you will find yourself in the position of only needing to do half or even less than half the effective damage compared to a no rend unit, at which point more elite units can start to pull ahead in their performance.

What this shows is that the game definitely has the tools to simulate a dragon that cannot be killed by grots or a tank that cannot be hurt by a rifle. If the dragon has a 3+ or 2+ save and the grots don't have rend, you have essentially got it. Especially if the dragon has a ward save, too. Getting those 200 attacks from a skeleton unit when everything works out just right sounds powerful, but against 2+ only 8 to 9 of those actually go through.

Now, I get that behemoths in general are not as threatening as they should probably be right now. But that can be fixed by giving them more forgiving damage brackets and just generally higher saves.  Not to mention other abilities like 'This model gets a 4+ ward against attacks made by units with more than 20 models' or something.

I'd also like to point out that rend simulates the characteristic that a lot of people seem to want to introduce strength to simulates: The ability of a unit to punch through it's target's defense, separate from damage. The more I think about it, the more the 'to wound' roll is just badly named. It has really has nothing to do with whether you wound or not. It's really just 'to hit but a second time so the math works out'.

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1 hour ago, Kramer said:

Different solution that will end up with the same arguments. you either want a game where everything is a threat. Or you want a game where ‘lowly’ units only hurt other lowly troops. 
0,5” range is that it would means basic troops would have to swarm around their opponent more to get attacks in. That would be a fun and thematic outcome. 

Swarm style sounds fun to me too. Just wanted to point out that more than "lowly" vs "elite" or "monstruous" it is about the specialist nature of the unit. For example, you could have a monster specialist in fighting hordes (flame spiting creature with damage based on number of models) that might be bad against low count units or behemoths. Also, the current 40k toughness tables are quite forgiving, and most often you wound on at least a 5+.

What bringing toughness would do is allow for more differentiation between units. Currently, it seems that naked elf ladies are equally good at shanking grots or giants. One would imagine that the tactics involved in figthing those two types of enemies would be different, and that the weapons effective against one type would not be as effective against the other.  The question here is whether a game with more specialization is more "fun" or not.

Since coming over to AoS I have noticed that there is a tendency in more "competitive" armies to spam certain units (e.g. witches, hearthserkers). This, in part, is a consequence of the lack of "specialization" in damage dealing. When a unit is a high damage dealer, it seems to be a high damage dealer against a majority of targets. Large blob with multiple attacks and rend seems a theme. Am I wrong?

8 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

I think this is important even though nobody seems to have picked up on it. As someone with experience playing Legions of Nagash, hordes by themselves don't destory monsters and other high wound, high armour targets. Hordes with rend can, though.

Very true! Rend or, conversely, better saves make a huge difference. I guess the issue here is that stacking buffs benefit hordes a lot more (force multiplier), and that the current existing buffs do eliminate such weaknesses. For example, allowing witches to get rend.

8 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

What this shows is that the game definitely has the tools to simulate a dragon that cannot be killed by grots or a tank that cannot be hurt by a rifle. If the dragon has a 3+ or 2+ save and the grots don't have rend, you have essentially got it. Especially if the dragon has a ward save, too. Getting those 200 attacks from a skeleton unit when everything works out just right sounds powerful, but against 2+ only 8 to 9 of those actually go through.

Now, I get that behemoths in general are not as threatening as they should probably be right now. But that can be fixed by giving them more forgiving damage brackets and just generally higher saves.  Not to mention other abilities like 'This model gets a 4+ ward against attacks made by units with more than 20 models' or something.

Again, very true. But doing this would require introducing more special rules ('This model gets a 4+ ward against attacks made by units with more than 20 models' ), or being extremely disciplined with giving rend. Probably a combination of range considerations, rend, and giving behemoths / elite units some form of save could do great for their defense. Then again, the same could be achieved with toughness while allowing "armor" to retain a differentiated design space.

The next issue would be their attack, but I am not sure I fully get what the current "combos" are yet, plus it is not the topic of the thread.

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31 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

The more I think about it, the more the 'to wound' roll is just badly named. It has really has nothing to do with whether you wound or not. It's really just 'to hit but a second time so the math works out'.

That's my impression too!! 

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I've mused over the S/T question before and it's a really awkward one. 

On the one hand you have the current system where anything can wound anything.  There's very little granularity with damage largely being down to three dice rolls - two on the part of the attacker and one on the part of the defender.  This system allows some interesting mechanics to be added, natural 6's to hit/wound can "do things" and there's a buff/debuff mechanic that can be added and it's easy to understand (remember there's quite a few younger folk who cut their teeth with AoS).

Conversely you have the S/T system.  It's still down to three dice rolls, but the wound roll is influenced by both the attacker and defender, adding a surprising amount of granularity to the roll which in turn adds an element of realism.  You would lose +/- wound modifiers and instead have the option to change the Strength or Toughness for an attack - but that would have less impact on the dice roll - +1 S may still require you to roll 5+.

I believe that a S/T system could be a step towards changing a few things in AoS that do get mentioned quite often as being issues

  • Behemoths & characters can feel pretty weak
  • Hordes can be quite powerful
  • Repetitive army list builds (e.g. the aforementioned eel army)
  • The game doesn't "feel" like a story (Eric the brave, Grand Master of the Knights of Ni - killed by a mob of Goblins)

But I also think there are other ways of identifying these items that don't require such a big change.  Increasing wounds on behemoths/characters, reducing the size/quantity of some units etc.

That said a big change like adding S/T would give GW the platform to revisit every warscroll in the same way as the 40k design team are doing for 9th edition, and it's a pretty frequent comment that people would like to see warscroll updates to identify various issues and problems with armies/units.  The biggest downside is that we'd need every warscroll updated within a very short space of time to add S/T whereas 40k is able to deal with this largely an army at a time.

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Then issue of spam though seems directly related to this, as others have noted. In part this seems to be an issue of permissive army compositions, e.g. battle Iines that are actually the best unit in the army, like heart serkers. But also because there aren’t that many differences in attacks: the expected damage and the level of rend (with mortals being an extreme). That’s it, the to wound and to hit and re rolls and what not are just combinations to allow for granularity. 

It really seems like some units have been allowed to concentrate too high values in these limited possibilities to differentiate units. Which isn’t strange, since, again, you have very few dimensions to make them different. With only a few parameters, it is hard to have good units if you don’t give them high values in all those parameters. That is why, imho, Very streamlined games can be hard to balance too.

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I have seen both types of playing and I don't think that S/T will change the game for the better.

We basicly have two philosophies how the wounding system works

With S/T you look if the weapon is able to wound a specific enemy model, while with "toWound" it is checked how good the model using the weapon is wounding something.

There is actually a third way existing that is partly used in AoS as well. In Kings of War each model has a Toughness Characteristic on which the model is wounded and some weapons add x to the wound roll. It is basicly our save/rend mechanic but the saves would be higher.

I also think that it is easier to give a model a price with the fix values AoS has. We see this with the Anvil of Apotheosis were a better hit/wound or rend is basicly +20 Points. We can say that model has x Attacks, hitting of y, wounding on z and having Rend of a, while having a save of b and c wounds and we can give it a price without knowing every other unit in the game.

How much points is a strength 5 worth compared to strength 6? A Strength 5 Attack is worth more against toughness 4 than against toughness 6.

There is also another point. In WHFB ranged units were basicly the better core combat units. For example, Warriors and Quarrellers had the same strength / toughness, and both could have shields or two handed axes. Except for the point that Quarrellers were more expensive they were the better unit because of having ranged support and being as good in close combat.

If we compare their AoS Profile (I know they are old profiles but still comparable to their old counterpart), Warriors hit on 3+ while Quarrellers hit on 4+. Or in case of Thunderers we have the case that they wound on 5+ as well where warriors wound on 4+. Having a fix to wound helps in that case to balance Ranged Unit with having bad close combat attacks instead of being more expensive better alrounder.

On 10/5/2020 at 4:38 AM, Kadeton said:

As a practical example, you talk about grots attacking with a 2+ To Wound. In a Strength-Toughness system, that would presumably be equivalent to boosting those grots to Strength 14 or so (depending on prevalent Toughness values). Ridiculous? Of course, but so is boosting them to 2+ To Wound.

I think there's definitely a strong argument to be made that the Strength-Toughness abstraction makes those "ridiculous" situations easier to spot. Players are more likely to balk at the idea of a grot that's literally stronger than a mega-gargant than the next-level abstraction of being ineffably "extremely good at wounding," whatever that might mean. But in the end, it doesn't matter, because the designers are still working in the same mathematical space of expected outcomes - if it's necessary for their purposes that grots can wound Archaon on a 2+, then they will find ways to twist the Strength-Toughness system until that's the case. At the same time, moving away from an abstraction that's rooted in measurable characteristics allows the designers much more freedom to play with the maths - if they want the outcomes generated by 2+ To Wound they can simply do that, and the players can argue all day about what that stat actually "means".

The problem here is, it is not the problem of the "To-Wound" but with the Buffing System. Even with S/T you could have the same situation if Buffs are added to the To Wound Value after comparing S/T . And if the buffs add to the strength, there is a very high chance that the buff does literally nothing (if you use the System that 40k uses at the moment and you already had strength 4 against toughness 3).

21 hours ago, Dankboss said:

Now I really didn't play much of 8th Edition 40k, so most of my experience is from 4th through 7th, and in those older versions, if you didn't have the tool for the job, you couldn't win a fight. It also had a real issue with 'Deathstars' which AoS avoids completely, and that could be compounded by being impossible to kill.

Yeah, I played those early editions as well. I have seen Bigbug (8 monstrous creatures, with Toughness 6 or 7 + Genestealers as core so everything was immun to psychologie), Imperial Guard Tank Spam, Eldar with 2 Phantom Lords (Toughness 8), Eldrad (who had Toughness 6 at the time), Phantom Droids (Toughness 6) and some minimum stuff to spend for core, Necrons with 3 Monoliths (Armour 14).

The Entire Game was basicly based of spamming the stuff with the most Strength and Toughness, making 3/4 of armyentries completely useless. This was basicly a lorekiller.

This wasn't so much different from WHFB where the goal was to create nearly unkillable Heroes (2+ Save Rerollable + 4++ Wardsave + maybe regenation as well and those heroes often had 3-4 Attacks Strengt 6 as well). With the problem as well, that the strength of the attack affected the save as well, so having a 6+ or 5+ save was pointless most of the time.

Bringing back S/T could basicly bring us back to that situation where Spamming High Toughness and Strength is the goal and units with low stats won't be used anymore. the problem with monsters could basicly solved if buffs would be limited and Monsters get when targeted a -1 to wound if the attacking model isn't a monster as well.

Edit:

Some of the changes of 8. Edition 40k were actually wierd ones. I mean, when AoS came out the toughness was compensated by having more wounds (A monster in WHFB had most of the time toughness 6 and 3-4 wounds. In AoS those monsters often have 12+ Wounds.

I don't have the 40k values in front of me but there a monster basicly went from toughness 6 and 3-4 wounds to toughness 6 and 12+ Wounds, with the only difference that their was no rend but a all or nothing save modifier before introducing rend in 8. Edition again.

Edited by EMMachine
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1 hour ago, EMMachine said:

Bringing back S/T could basicly bring us back to that situation where Spamming High Toughness and Strength is the goal and units with low stats won't be used anymore. the problem with monsters could basicly solved if buffs would be limited and Monsters get when targeted a -1 to wound if the attacking model isn't a monster as well.

Skew lists are the result of poor balancing.

I would argue that, from what I have seen, current AoS competitive lists are pretty spammy too. Murder blobs, eel spam, essentially lots of picking highly "efficient" units and spamming them (keeper of secrets galore). It just seems that there are big issues with internal balance.

The typical counterargument to S-T is that it can be "unfun" to play against. What if Timmy brings only high T units in a very skewed list and half my army is useless against them? The answer to that should be within the simulation. Maybe fully surrounded behemoths become more vulnerable (+X to wound).

It all comes down to how you want the game to be played, and where you want the complexity.

  • Should it be about finding combos? Buffs stacking units to multiply their performance. As a result, you see large blobs of units.
  • Or perhaps about picking the "good fights"? That is, using units to fight the enemy units that are particularly ''efficient'' at targeting those enemy units. Then army composition ought to vary, although this is vulnerable to internal balance issues (if a unit is bad for its cost, you don't need to bring a counter for it).

Personally, I would rather see a variety of units than spam.

 

Edited by Greybeard86
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I can understand the sentiment that many monsters are a bit to easy to kill. But at the same time, I absolutely believe that a horde should be able to kill a monster, under the right conditions.

I have never played any other miniaturegame than AoS, so I have not tried playing with strenght and toughness. I do, however, feel that we already have a roll to represent a units toughness: Save roll. Instead of changing how "to wound" works, perhaps we could look at making this roll more interesting? Maybe monsters and combat heroes have a special rule called "Perfect parry" or something, which would be universal across the whole game. Im thinking something along the lines of: 

"Unmodified save rolls of 6 medigate two incomming attacks instead of one"

If this was a universal rule mentioned in the core rules, then especially tough monsters could have rules that modify this. Like "Dragon scales: Perfect parry trigger on all succesful save rolls".

...

I mean, the suggestion is in no way perfect, but I think it gets the point across. Make save roll more interesting, rather than changing "to wound". I also believe that some monsters need to bracket slower when taking damage and that might help too.

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There's only been one time where I felt I couldn't defeat a unit, and that's when Slaves to Darkness had first come out, and there were 15 Nurgle Chaos Warriors on a 3+ rerollable save, sat in cover for a 2+, bouncing d3 mortals on a 6 to hit and 1 on a 6 to wound, and with a 6+ ward save and 5+ mortal save. This is no longer an issue with the changes since then, but it does illustrate how rare it is to be unable to kill a unit in AoS.

Now as I said before, I think Damage-Durability scaling needs to be tweaked, but as far as Warhammer goes, AoS is the best I've experienced.

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Some really interesting points have been brought up throughout, and have definitely given me things to think about :)

One thing I would like to home in on is the argument of "S and T would leave one person not able to have fun if their models could hardly scratch the opponent".

In theory, this shouldn't be an issue if everyone builds balanced lists - balanced in that they have a well rounded number of horde, elite, super elite, heroes, and monsters. However, in practice there could be a broken situation where a list is designed around having heavy super elite with a lot of strong ranged firepower to blow up the opponent's monsters to decrease the threat to their own monsters (leaving their opponent wounding on 6s). To fix this, GW would have to make sure ranged weapons and spells were not super damaging so they could overwhelm monsters and elites with ease - maybe keep ranged weapons capped at S6 for cannons, and about S3 for normal bows. 

I also want to turn this question around and ask if it's fun in the current game to have monsters and elites die without feeling monstrous or elite? 

For this, I'll use a meandering anecdote. I built and painted the below monster over the course of a few months; she has a backstory and many hours of work has gone into her.  It was a godsend when the anvil of apotheosis came out and I could make proper rules for her (rather than just using Archaon's rules). As you can tell by the pictures, she's pretty large so I wanted to give her a 3+ save to reflect that.

Unfortunately, despite the 3+ save and 15 wounds, she never feels like she 'should' on the table, having to cower behind shields of beastmen so she doesn't get wiped off the face of the mortal realms by a group of ardboys. In the same way it's not fun not being able to kill a tough dragon because you're out of anti dragon troops, it's not fun for the dragon player to have their dragon die without feeling like a dragon.

To reiterate, it's not very fun putting a lot of work into a hero or monster who gets wiped off the field by a group of buffed infantry. The fantasy of having Godzilla rampage through a group of people is very difficult to pull off - people watch Kaiju movies for the Kaiju fights, and it would feel out of place for 30 soldiers firing into Gozilla to bring him down. When people play monsters in AoS, I think many want them to feel like towering behemoths that are stronger and tougher than a small group of humans could deal with without a lot of luck. 

While I don't play 40k very often, I have a Chaos Knights army. While there's a lot to dislike about 40k, when playing Chaos Knights in a casual scene, their super defensive and super damaging profiles fit really well with their narrative and felt good to play. Yeah, it took lots of shots and melee attacks to bring them down, but when I lost one I lost a quarter of my army and struggled to win points. They felt like I was playing giant mechs and the opponent had to try to bring them down one by one. Without S and T, they would have been brought down by 30 boyz no problem which would have felt disappointing to say the least.

Edit: I did some maths, and a unit of 10 fully buffed ardboys has about a 38% chance of killing this model in a single charge. 

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Edited by Enoby
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2 hours ago, Greybeard86 said:

For example, you could have a monster specialist in fighting hordes (flame spiting creature with damage based on number of models) that might be bad against low count units or behemoths.

Oh yeah absolutely, thats what annoys me about the thundertusk. It's snow breath ability is exactly that. better vs hordes, but they didn't go all the way and make it's tusk also good vs hordes. So it ends up not having a real role in the army. 

 

2 hours ago, Greybeard86 said:

What bringing toughness would do is allow for more differentiation between units. Currently, it seems that naked elf ladies are equally good at shanking grots or giants. One would imagine that the tactics involved in figthing those two types of enemies would be different, and that the weapons effective against one type would not be as effective against the other.  The question here is whether a game with more specialization is more "fun" or not.

Since coming over to AoS I have noticed that there is a tendency in more "competitive" armies to spam certain units (e.g. witches, hearthserkers). This, in part, is a consequence of the lack of "specialization" in damage dealing. When a unit is a high damage dealer, it seems to be a high damage dealer against a majority of targets. Large blob with multiple attacks and rend seems a theme. Am I wrong?

first part. I agree with the goal of more differentiation. Just like with the Thundertusk. Things need to have a role to be fielded. But that just doesnt need to be S/T. It could be anything from the Decimators 'attack per enemy', could be due to roles like the protectors are better vs Monsters. 
Add MOUNTED as a keywords and give units with spear +1 damage vs. MOUNTED.

I jsut personally wouldnt be for that kind of rock paper scissor approach. Because that's where I image it ending up. 

Second part, I agree that specialization would help against that. If two units fulfill the same role, or too near enough, one is inevitably more points efficient than the other and be taken in competitive play. 

But is that bad? Or simply the essence of competitive play?

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My Magmadroth has "Ignores the first level of rend" which does wonders to remove low level threats. Similarly, Seraphon coalesced monsters reducing damage down by 1 to a minimum of 1 also gives a lot of benefit. Bastiladons having a 1+ unrendable save is another way of making monsters beefy. It's perfectly possible with warscroll rules to make Behemoths beastly. I imagine this is just a case whereby Warscrolls need to be stronger to handle hordes, something that gradually happens as the game itself shifts. Seraphon have definitely done that. Monsters like Morathi having a limit of wounds taken per round is another way - we've seen that with Ghazkull out in 40k too.

I don't think you need blanket rules, just precision scalpel updates to warscrolls which will come in book revisions.

But hordes should have their vulnerabilities too. I think you could heavily neuter hordes in general if you just got rid of Inspiring Presence, or made it limited to once per game. I should be able to melt a bunch of grots before they get to me and have them leg it, instead of just being able to command point brute force their way through. I think rather than monsters needing huge benefits, hordes need fewer benefits. 

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9 minutes ago, Kramer said:

Things need to have a role to be fielded. But that just doesnt need to be S/T. It could be anything from the Decimators 'attack per enemy', could be due to roles like the protectors are better vs Monsters. 
Add MOUNTED as a keywords and give units with spear +1 damage vs. MOUNTED.

I jsut personally wouldnt be for that kind of rock paper scissor approach. Because that's where I image it ending up. 

Of course, we do have that and could expand on it. The issues I see with going for special rules are:

  • Rule bloat: now every unit has special rules, making it hard for the other players to know / remember.
  • Rules outdated: we all know that this is a thing; so what if the "new" battletome has special rules that are better than the old special rules for X unit?

That's why I would advocate for universal rules, and only very rarely go for unit specific special rules. At most, army specific special rules.

For example, special rules for behemoths (e.g. +1 to saves vs non behemoths). And maybe then introduce another special category of "monstruous" for large models such as trolls, with also some advantages. That would be not going for T-S but trying to bend the system to accommodate for toughness.

9 minutes ago, Kramer said:

Second part, I agree that specialization would help against that. If two units fulfill the same role, or too near enough, one is inevitably more points efficient than the other and be taken in competitive play. 

But is that bad? Or simply the essence of competitive play?

It all depends on what you want to see on the table; I like variety. One way to encourage variety is to give units niches; in other words, avoiding "bestamest" types of units. For example, eels, hearthserkers, witches, and similar things I have seen are often spammed.

It is not always perfect. For example, in 40k now vehicles are perceived to be weak, so competitive armies don't go all out in AT weapons. So if you have weak archetypes, counters aren't brought, and so on. Also, skew can become a thing (old all knights lists) if it isn't balanced.

No system is perfect but, again, what do you want to see on the table?

30 minutes ago, Enoby said:

I also want to turn this question around and ask if it's fun in the current game to have monsters and elites die without feeling monstrous or elite?

That is, I feel, the angle that will get the most traction. Because while we might like S-T, clearly GW doesn't want it in AoS. But Behemoths / elites / monsters might not "feel" / "play" as such, then that is complaint GW might look into.

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