What would you like for AoS 3

[Kadeton]

39 minutes ago, yukishiro1 said:

I think you're kinda missing the point by conflating whether something is overpowered with whether it's not a fun game experience.

Speaking for myself, it's not that I want to see shooting nerfed per se in terms of being made objectively worse...I want it to work differently, more the way the rest of the game does, where there is interactivity and counter-play.

If that ended up being a game where shooting was actually more deadly, but with more ways to mitigate it...that's fine by me.

The problem isn't figuring out ways to do it, it's getting GW to see that a non-interactive phase with few if any meaningful restrictions does not a fun game experience make.

You have the patience of a saint. Thank you for your continued efforts to articulate this position - I think the above is a near-perfect distillation of my thoughts on the matter as well.

[Doko]

Look out sir doing imposible shooting to heroes.

Also something as totalwar where units with shields get less damage from shooting.

That every army get the same deal that idoneth,in aos3 you only can shoot to the closest target,so we have any form of play around it.

Not all this,but some of these changes would do the game funnier.

I played tau in 40k 5 year ago and i yet remember how everyone hated tau and many people didnt played if you bring tau. Due to be a 100% shooting army and dont let the rival play.

This is 100% the same problem with kharadrons and lumineths. The shooting isnt the problem, these two armys are the problem due to the movility of kharadrons and the 0 counterplay of lumineths

[stratigo]

4 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

I think you're kinda missing the point by conflating whether something is overpowered with whether it's not a fun game experience. I mean you could nerf Sentinels via points to the point where taking them was an objectively terrible idea...and it still wouldn't make it any more fun to have your heroes sniped out by them with no counterplay. It'd still be NPE, it would just be underpowered NPE instead of overpowered NPE. It's worst when something is both NPE and overpowered, because when something is overpowered you see it everywhere...but something doesn't have to be overpowered to be NPE.

Speaking for myself, it's not that I want to see shooting nerfed per se in terms of being made objectively worse...I want it to work differently, more the way the rest of the game does, where there is interactivity and counter-play. I use the Sentinels example (I feel like I'm repeating myself here, but I guess it didn't get through the first time) not because they're overpowered but because their basic schtick is the perfect example of a unit that just does its things no matter what and you have to just sit there and have it be done to you, which is the fundamental problem with shooting in AOS. 

I want a game where if someone snipes out my heroes I feel like "well, that's a tactical choice I made not to protect them," not "well, I was playing LRL, so that means my heroes just all die no matter what." Even if the clear tactical choice is to let them die, I want the sense that I'm involved in the process, not just the NPC getting whacked. You have that feeling in 40k with shooting. You have that feeling in AOS with melee, for that matter. You don't have that feeling in AOS with shooting.

If that ended up being a game where shooting was actually more deadly, but with more ways to mitigate it...that's fine by me. It's not that I want my support hero to survive standing out in the open if he's targeted by a bunch of archers. It's that I don't want to feel like my support hero is always standing out in the open ready to be no-scoped, no matter what I actually do. 

Now there's a billion different ways you could accomplish that (aside from reworking Sentinels, obviously, which is a separate issue and needs to happen no matter what). You could make terrain a bigger deal. You could lower ranges significantly - if almost all ranged weapons were 18 inches or shorter, and the standard was 12", that means you actually can screen them out. You could buff Look out Sir to actually significantly limit sniping. You could put in stuff like a morale check to fire at something other than the closest target that add RNG to the process and therefore make shooting less reliably be able to delete exactly the thing you want to delete. I mean we could go on a long time here. The problem isn't figuring out ways to do it, it's getting GW to see that a non-interactive phase with few if any meaningful restrictions does not a fun game experience make. 

 

 

I wonder how 40k is the most popular GW game if shooting is really the least fun mechanic then? And I can tell you, 40k doesn't have LESS interactivity to AoS by any measure.

 

I think terrain should always be a bigger deal though.

 

But the idea that shooting is less interactive than melee is... just... false. It always has been. You can do plenty of things to maneuver to zone out 90 percent of shooting (kroak and the sentinels are the major outlier) from your supports or more important units, and, like, melee armies are fast enough to catch any shooting army in a single turn, and a good melee unit blenders shooting.  And like, none of the suggested 'fixes' to shooting as a mechanic would fix sentinels or kroak.

 

And ultimately, the game is won on points and shooting struggles taking them. Even if you kill a unit on a point... you haven't taken that point. You need a further turn to start scoring it. There's a reason LRL aren't tearing up the tournament racket. And, at a certain point, you can only cater to less good players so much before you start alienating other players.  There's an entire army that is unplayable under a lot of these shooting suggestions.

 

3 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

Negative play experience. Basically, whatever you don't enjoy about the game. If anyone hasn't watched Vince's recent episode on this topic, I'd really recommend it. Their survey data is broken down in a great amount of detail. You can see exactly what people don't like in AOS, and there's a lot of interesting recurring themes, largely to do with feeling like you're being made into a spectator rather than a participant. 

I mean, I hate watching an army sprint across the board in a turn and kill my entire army. But that happens plenty if I'm not building cheese lists.

 

AoS is the NPE game. You want to fix that? Look in the movement phase (and out of phase movement), not the shooting or combat phase.

[stratigo]

2 hours ago, Doko said:

Look out sir doing imposible shooting to heroes.

Also something as totalwar where units with shields get less damage from shooting.

That every army get the same deal that idoneth,in aos3 you only can shoot to the closest target,so we have any form of play around it.

Not all this,but some of these changes would do the game funnier.

I played tau in 40k 5 year ago and i yet remember how everyone hated tau and many people didnt played if you bring tau. Due to be a 100% shooting army and dont let the rival play.

This is 100% the same problem with kharadrons and lumineths. The shooting isnt the problem, these two armys are the problem due to the movility of kharadrons and the 0 counterplay of lumineths

It... is not at all.

 

Tau weren't a problem because they shoot good. You could trivially make a marine or guard or eldar army that shot as good. Or better!

 

Tau were a problem because, unlike how people actually use the term, competitive tau WERE non interactive. Attack them? They shunted the damage off. Charge them? They shoot you, shunt the damage, and then fly away and shoot you next turn. There wasn't anything at all you could do to hurt their primary units because you had to grind through endless ablative wounds, and melee army just gave them another shooting phase, and they could leave combat without penalty. So it was just a grind to try and kill their footsloggers and sit on objectives before riptides killed your army, cause there's no way to effectively kill one at all. You were best to just ignore it existed.

 

And, the joke is, there were two changes that kicked the tau from the top into the trash. They lost the ability to leave for free, but FAR more importantly, holding objectives was made the most important metric, and a riptide, still as near immortal as ever, just isn't strong enough to dominate 4 to 6 objectives before the tau are hopefully outscored, and having to go TO the objectives make them vulnerable to lock down (note, they CAN shoot into their own combat still, being biggies). So, now tau just suck. But any rework of the tau book, which they desperately need, is NOT gonna make them, like, a melee army. They will, and should, remain a shooting army. It was never being good at shooting that made tau unfun to play.

[Bosskelot]

40k does absolutely have more interactivity than AOS when it comes to shooting because you have various ways to counterplay it. Terrain, Cover, Look out Sir!, tying up in combat, no shooting into combat etc. None of these things really exist in AOS. See my earlier post in this thread for how AOS, uniquely to perhaps any wargame I know, gets shooting so wrong.

[stratigo]

14 minutes ago, Bosskelot said:

40k does absolutely have more interactivity than AOS when it comes to shooting because you have various ways to counterplay it. Terrain, Cover, Look out Sir!, tying up in combat, no shooting into combat etc. None of these things really exist in AOS. See my earlier post in this thread for how AOS, uniquely to perhaps any wargame I know, gets shooting so wrong.

 

So wrong that the game is almost as balanced as it has ever been. So wrong that the armies that broke 70 percent winrates were all melee, and the so called shooting meta doesn't. 

 

The stats just have never backed this stuff up. The most super OP stuff just got nerfed hard and fell out of the meta. And you know, of the two top armies in the game, one of them can be, but is not always, shooting, and one can't be. 

 

Shooooting isn't the prooooblem.

 

I mean... look upon these stats ye mighty and despair in the shooting meta. Deeeespaaaaair (hint, there's no shooting dominance)

https://thehonestwargamer.com/age-of-sigmar-tts-stats-15-2-21/

 

Edited February 17, 2021 by stratigo

[Kadeton]

27 minutes ago, stratigo said:

So wrong that the game is almost as balanced as it has ever been. So wrong that the armies that broke 70 percent winrates were all melee, and the so called shooting meta doesn't. 

No, so wrong that playing against a shooting-focused army isn't a fun or entertaining experience. So wrong that playing a shooting-heavy army is boring, too.

For the umpteenth time, this is about how shooting isn't fun, not whether or not it's balanced. We want to see it made more fun, not less powerful.

[stratigo]

Just now, Kadeton said:

No, so wrong that playing against a shooting-focused army isn't a fun or entertaining experience. So wrong that playing a shooting-heavy army is boring, too.

For the umpteenth time, this is about how shooting isn't fun, not whether or not it's balanced. We want to see it made more fun, not less powerful.

Honestly, I just think it's people like you shouting in other's faces about how unfun shooting is that makes people think it isn't fun. There's no real why here. It's just groupthink. 

 

Do you have fun losing to any army? Be honest.

[Kadeton]

@stratigo

And yet, the data we have overwhelmingly shows that players find shooting-heavy armies to be the least fun aspect of AoS. Is there a reason you only reference data that "agrees" with you?

I've had some very fun games that I've lost, yeah. Mawtribes versus Beasts of Chaos was the most recent, we both deliberately toned down our lists from tournament standard in order to experiment with different options, and it was a blast. Lots of high-stakes gambles to try to gain an advantage - exciting when they paid off, tragic when they failed. Loads of dramatic moments and agonising decisions, a really entertaining game. More of my opponent's tactical gambits paid off than mine, so he won in the end, but that wasn't why either of us enjoyed the game. It was exciting.

I've had some really dull games that I've won, too. I played against Lumineth at a tournament last year, massed Auralan infantry with Teclis. They faffed about with spells and arrows for a couple of turns, then I rolled across the table and crushed them with no trouble. I won comprehensively, but I didn't enjoy the game. The Lumineth basically didn't even move, just rolled dice on and on for ages, then died. Totally unsatisfying.

The thing I enjoy most in AoS is forcing my opponent to make difficult and meaningful decisions. The next most enjoyable thing is having my opponent force me to make difficult and meaningful decisions. There just aren't a lot of meaningful decisions in AoS' shooting game, it's basic target prioritisation.

How about you? Did you have fun the last time you lost to Kharadrons, Lumineth, etc? What made those games fun for you?

Edited February 17, 2021 by Kadeton

[Beliman]

Let people think what they want and move on.
We have more posts talking about what some people  think about another suggestion from another user than what would people like  to see for AoS 3.0.

 

 

[Gistradagis]

1 hour ago, stratigo said:

Honestly, I just think it's people like you shouting in other's faces about how unfun shooting is that makes people think it isn't fun. There's no real why here. It's just groupthink. 

 

Do you have fun losing to any army? Be honest.

Yes, groupthink with actual data on how current shooting is the nº1 most hated part of the game, to the point it's currently mostly thought of as an NPE instead of one of the phases of the game. 0 risk, 0 interactivity and, for many units, 0 mitigation makes for an intensely boring experience, surprise.

If I get crushed in melee, I'll blame my positioning, my screening, my tactics, and applaud the other player's skill. Perhaps scream about dice gods. If I lose a game where I never had a chance no matter what I did, where screening is useless, where Look Out Sir is a joke, with units and tactics that appear to belong to a single player game, it'll simply feel like there was no point to the game whatsoever.

The data from honest is also a joke. The problem with those results is a clear imbalance on feedback; a ridiculous sample size with some armies placing high or or low because they have 7, 4, 2 or even 1 player (STD is D tier with tournament results better than most of the higher tier armies? I feel like they -and you- are sort of not understanding what faction and meta tiers actually are, as opposed to winrates of games per faction overall). BoC holds hands with Sylvaneth as profoundly low tier armies due to being mostly unsupported, but it so happens that this statistics, which we must guess are somehow genuine, put them as tier A as they win games that no one is seeing? Yeah, sure, ok. You could, I don't know, even use the official metawatch data (even if GW ignores it), but I guess you're not because that completely deflates your point, seeing how magic and shooting is indeed the name of the game in the current meta, and that tournaments that aren't purely casual tend to see the domination of stuff like Seraphon and Tzeentch (with a clear exception in IDK, who got a very juicy buff in BR and it shows, and who can actually counterplay shooting).

It's always surprising to see shooting and magic crush so much, and still see people claim that a problem of mechanics and interactivity doesn't exist, and that shooting is not a problem whatsoever. Although seeing that you have a clear vested interest as you seem to play one, it's not surprising that the person doing the one-sided crushing fails to see why would people have no fun.

Edited February 17, 2021 by Gistradagis

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

18 hours ago, whispersofblood said:

IF it does not produce excess damage, and shooting does not determine the outcome of games what is NPE about it?

And, why is changing the game better than educating people and aligning their expectations with quality mechanics?

@yukishiro1 has already given an explanation of what NPE is about, but since you asked me directly I'll write out my take on it, too.

"Negative play experience" is about how certain aspects of the game feel when you encounter them. One definition I have seen is that it refers to all those espects of the game that bore or frustrate players. But frequently the term gets linked to mechanics remove interesting decisions from the game, or prevent interesting things from happening. I think this makes sense: Feeling like your decisions don't matter is frustrating, and feeling like things don't progress is boring.

Negative play experience need not, but can be, linked to the power level of a mechanic. A mechanic that feels like it takes away your player agency and is likely to win games is more easy to perceive as problematic. I think the wave of "always fights first" that AoS had for a while is a good example of that. If you watch the Warhammer Weekly episode on NPE, that's still the most disliked mechanic by number of votes.  But mechanics can result in negative play experience even if they are not particularly powerful. As an example, there exists a Magic deck with the game plan to slow down the opponent's game and counter their spells until it can resolve a card that ends the game in a draw. This deck is obviously incapable of ever winning a game, by it's own design, but it would be terrible to play against none the less. An example of very mild NPE that has nothing to do with power level from AoS are Legions of Nagash Skeleton Warriors. A block of 40 gets 120 attacks naturally, but up to double that with buffs, and possibly attacks twice from a spell. Their damage is still not good, but watching an opponent resolve 400+ attacks for very little effect in game is still a bad experience.

Why should we care about NPE? Because in games, it's not just the outcome of the game that matters, but also how you get there. By that I mean how much you enjoy playing, how many interesting decision you get to make and how much it feels like your choices influenced the outcome. I think this becomes most salient from the perspective of a game designer. Imagine you design a game that is well balanced, but the all people you ask to play it tell you they don't enjoy an aspect of it. You probably should not just tell those people "You just don't understand the game, get better and learn to live with it." That would probably just make people stop playing, or never start at all. And that's a situation that we want to avoid. NPE is a problem especially when we are concerned with growing the game and retaining players. I don't think that it should be controversial that how enjoyable a game is to play is another quality games have that can make them better or worse, independent of balance. Since you are apparently a Platonist about truth, I assume you are also one when it comes to good and bad. You should not have trouble accepting that, objectively, one rule set of a game can be more fun than another.

You might want to say that we should not put any stock into what any one person things is fun or not about a game. After all, a person can always be mistaken about what they want, or maybe they just don't understand the game, and in any case they can just go play a something different. But what I am talking about are not the feelings of any one person, but a look at the response of a larger section of the player base. From the statistics we have, about a third of players say, AoS shooting is an NPE (top 1 and 2 are "activation wars" ~45% and "magical dominance" ~42%, two other extremely non-interactive mechanics). But of those players, 50% say shooting is the worst thing in the game. 75% say it's in the top two. That is absolutely data that should not be ignored, regardless of how good shooting armies are in tournaments right now. It's not about what any one person does not like or can't deal with, for whatever reason. It's about the response the mechanic generally provokes.

Edited February 17, 2021 by Neil Arthur Hotep

[whispersofblood]

12 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

@yukishiro1 has already given an explanation of what NPE is about, but since you asked me directly I'll write out my take on it, too.

"Negative play experience" is about how certain aspects of the game feel when you encounter them. One definition I have seen is that it refers to all those espects of the game that bore or frustrate players. But frequently the term gets linked to mechanics remove interesting decisions from the game, or prevent interesting things from happening. I think this makes sense: Feeling like your decisions don't matter is frustrating, and feeling like things don't progress is boring.

Negative play experience need not, but can be, linked to the power level of a mechanic. A mechanic that feels like it takes away your player agency and is likely to win games is more easy to perceive as problematic. I think the wave of "always fights first" that AoS had for a while is a good example of that. If you watch the Warhammer Weekly episode on NPE, that's still the most disliked mechanic by number of votes.  But mechanics can result in negative play experience even if they are not particularly powerful. As an example, there exists a Magic deck with the game plan to slow down the opponent's game and counter their spells until it can resolve a card that ends the game in a draw. This deck is obviously incapable of ever winning a game, by it's own design, but it would be terrible to play against none the less. An example of very mild NPE that has nothing to do with power level from AoS are Legions of Nagash Skeleton Warriors. A block of 40 gets 120 attacks naturally, but up to double that with buffs, and possibly attacks twice from a spell. Their damage is still not good, but watching an opponent resolve 400+ dice to for very little effect in game is still a bad experience.

Why should we care about NPE? Because in games, it's not just the outcome of the game that matters, but also how you get there. By that I mean how much you enjoy playing, how many interesting decision you get to make and how much it feels like your choices influenced the outcome. I think this becomes most salient from the perspective of a game designer. Imagine you design a game that is well balanced, but the all people you ask to play it tell you they don't enjoy an aspect of it. You probably should not just tell those people "You just don't understand the game, get better and learn to live with it." That would probably just make people stop playing, or never start at all. And that's a situation that we want to avoid. NPE is a problem especially when we are concerned with growing the game and retaining players. I don't think that it should be controversial that how enjoyable a game is to play is another quality games have that can make them better or worse, independent of balance. Since you are apparently a Platonist about truth, I assume you are also one when it comes to good and bad. You should not have trouble accepting that, objectively, one rule set of a game can be more fun than another.

You might want to say that we should not put any stock into what any one person things is fun or not about a game. After all, a person can always be mistaken about what they want, or maybe they just don't understand the game, and in any case they can just go play a something different. But what I am talking about are not the feelings of any one person, but a look at the response of a larger section of the player base. From the statistics we have, about a third of players say, AoS shooting is an NPE (top 1 and 2 are "activation wars" ~45% and "magical dominance" ~42%, two other extremely non-interactive mechanics). But of those players, 50% say shooting is the worst thing in the game. 75% say it's in the top two. That is absolutely data that should not be ignored, regardless of how good shooting armies are in tournaments right now. It's not about what any one person does not like or can't deal with, for whatever reason. It's about the response the mechanic generally provokes.

Thanks for your explanation, as it gets to the guts of what I am trying to say. The feeling of a lack of agency doesn't necessarily indicate that a lack of agency exists. We can agree on this yes?

My frustration is with the obsession with causative thinking, the idea that the moment of realization or resolution of a process is the "thing" in itself. 

Perhaps it's the Johnny in me, but the process involved particularly in the shooting phase is a very long one and involves the individual choices of both players. The defending player has a lot of power over how effective the shooting player's attacks will be. If you don't participate in that process through either ignorance or choice then the results are as they are. 

So the question that hasn't really been answer is if the full process can satisfy the player base's need to feel involved.

 

[Gistradagis]

1 hour ago, whispersofblood said:

Thanks for your explanation, as it gets to the guts of what I am trying to say. The feeling of a lack of agency doesn't necessarily indicate that a lack of agency exists. We can agree on this yes?

My frustration is with the obsession with causative thinking, the idea that the moment of realization or resolution of a process is the "thing" in itself. 

Perhaps it's the Johnny in me, but the process involved particularly in the shooting phase is a very long one and involves the individual choices of both players. The defending player has a lot of power over how effective the shooting player's attacks will be. If you don't participate in that process through either ignorance or choice then the results are as they are. 

So the question that hasn't really been answer is if the full process can satisfy the player base's need to feel involved.

 

The problem with your explanation is that it's purely theoretical. Precisely one of the reasons the most hated shooting is stuff like LRL or Seraphon is that it does NOT involve any choices in the defending player. Heck, the command for re-rolling 1s to save is Combat Phase only, you don't even have that. Why does Volley Fire exist, but no defence against it? What are these decisions that allow counter-play (or at least defence) against a unit with good range who doesn't care about armour, positioning or Look Out Sir?

I'm not even sure what do you mean with "the process involved particularly in the shooting phase is a very long one and involves the individual choices of both players." The Shooting phase, by design, heavily involves one player and little to not at all the other. Your description only applies to the Combat Phase, where many abilities and alternate selection of units actually happens.

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

3 hours ago, whispersofblood said:

Thanks for your explanation, as it gets to the guts of what I am trying to say. The feeling of a lack of agency doesn't necessarily indicate that a lack of agency exists. We can agree on this yes?

I can agree for any particular instance of a person experiencing a loss of agency in a game.

But I also believe that if we look at the reactions of a lot of people and see a pattern that certain mechanics are more likely than others to provoke a feeling of a loss of agency, that's probably indicative of the actual existence of an actual loss of agency. I also believe the distinction between a mechanic actually resulting in a loss of agency and it just provoking widespread experience of a loss of agency is somewhat immaterial, since it should be adjusted in either case (although maybe in different ways).

 

3 hours ago, whispersofblood said:

My frustration is with the obsession with causative thinking, the idea that the moment of realization or resolution of a process is the "thing" in itself. 

Perhaps it's the Johnny in me, but the process involved particularly in the shooting phase is a very long one and involves the individual choices of both players. The defending player has a lot of power over how effective the shooting player's attacks will be. If you don't participate in that process through either ignorance or choice then the results are as they are. 

So the question that hasn't really been answer is if the full process can satisfy the player base's need to feel involved.

Just to be clear, I don't think the problem with shooting is that when an opponent shoots at my guys, that I can't decide to spend a command point and nullify their attack in that instant, or something like that. I think most AoS players just want to feel that the decisions they make in the lead up to being shot at matter.

I can agree that for the longest time, you could defend against shooting by making use of the mechanics that are in the game. But I also believe that since the introduction of Bonereaper catapults, more and more armies have shooting that is much more non-interactive than before.

• Longer range makes it harder to counter with good positioning and screening.
• Mortal wounds shooting makes cover and armour matter less.
• Mortal on hit remove the benefit of Look Out, Sir, as well. And the extra benefit from garrisons (lol).
• Easy access to teleports make line-of-sight a non-issue and further weaken counterplay from positioning and screening.

No single one of these factors invalidates your decisions when responding to shooting by itself. But they all play a role in making shooting more something that just happens to you than something you feel you respond to. The more of these properties your opponent's shooting has, the less your decision matter. I keep coming back to Lumineth archers because they hit all of those points at the same time, by weakening or removing counterplay in the form of positioning, line-of-sight, penalties to hit and cover/armour in general.

Off the top of my head, OBR, Lumineth, Seraphon, Kharadron Overlords, Tzeentch and Daughters of Khaine all have shooting options that hit at least some of these factors. The new Slaanesh archers seem to fall into this category, too, but it remains to be seen how they shake out. I definitely think that the shooting component of these newer releases are less interactive than they were before. We can see the difference in rules and claming they make the game less interactive is not just conjecture. We can provide an explanation of why we think they have this effect. And since we have only really been seeing complaints about shooting really ramp up after these armies became a thing, I think we also have real-world statistics that back up our theory.

By the way, I believe a lot of people feel the same way about magical dominance, because it has a lot of the same issues.

We'll see how GW deals with these trends. Maybe the plan is to give most armies access to solid shooting units and then introduce an overall rules tweak that allows for new ways to counter play against it. That's essentially the situation in 40k, where most armies can pull off decent shooting, but there are also more ways to deal with it (to my understanding; I don't play that game). That would not be the worst solution to the issue in my opinion. But I believe if GW's design of ranged armies keeps progressing the way it has been recently, the current counter play options are not enough to satisfyingly interact with the mechanic anymore.

Edited February 17, 2021 by Neil Arthur Hotep

[Frowny]

I'd love to see

• Real terrain rules- not just the random 'thing happens on a d6 of 1'. I think just importing the 40k rules would be pretty reasonable.
• Less fiddly combat- The 40k combat criteria (base to base of something in base to base of enemy) is way nicer than measuring 2 inch reach on a  bunch of 32 mm bases. Just annoying.
• More counterplay to magic and prayers- Maybe + to unbinds if you are closer to them, creating incentives to get your guys within range. 
• Anything wholly within 9 increased to wholly within 12 or 15''. I'm all for wholly within to constrain conga lines, but 9 is far too fiddly. 12 is also a bit fiddly if the unit makes the charge and the hero doesn't. 

I want my AOS to be about the decisions I make, not whether I can fiddle 3 extra bases to within 2 inch is not a fun experience for me. Little fiddling over a few bases really takes it away for me.

 

[whispersofblood]

10 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

I can agree for any particular instance of a person experiencing a loss of agency in a game.

But I also believe that if we look at the reactions of a lot of people and see a pattern that certain mechanics are more likely than others to provoke a feeling of a loss of agency, that's probably indicative of the actual existence of an actual loss of agency. I also believe the distinction between a mechanic actually resulting in a loss of agency and it just provoking widespread experience of a loss of agency is somewhat immaterial, since it should be adjusted in either case (although maybe in different ways).

 

Just to be clear, I don't think the problem with shooting is that when an opponent shoots at my guys, that I can't decide to spend a command point and nullify their attack in that instant, or something like that. 1. I think most AoS players just want to feel that the decisions they make in the lead up to being shot at matter.

2. I can agree that for the longest time, you could defend against shooting by making use of the mechanics that are in the game. But I also believe that since the introduction of Bonereaper catapults, more and more armies have shooting that is much more non-interactive than before.

• Longer range makes it harder to counter with good positioning and screening.
• Mortal wounds shooting makes cover and armour matter less.
• Mortal on hit remove the benefit of Look Out, Sir, as well. And the extra benefit from garrisons (lol).
• Easy access to teleports make line-of-sight a non-issue and further weaken counterplay from positioning and screening.

No single one of these factors invalidates your decisions when responding to shooting by itself. But they all play a role in making shooting more something that just happens to you than something you feel you respond to. The more of these properties your opponent's shooting has, the less your decision matter. I keep coming back to Lumineth archers because they hit all of those points at the same time, by weakening or removing counterplay in the form of positioning, line-of-sight, penalties to hit and cover/armour in general.

3. Off the top of my head, OBR, Lumineth, Seraphon, Kharadron Overlords, Tzeentch and Daughters of Khaine all have shooting options that hit at least some of these factors. The new Slaanesh archers seem to fall into this category, too, but it remains to be seen how they shake out. I definitely think that the shooting component of these newer releases are less interactive than they were before. We can see the difference in rules and claming they make the game less interactive is not just conjecture. We can provide an explanation of why we think they have this effect. And since we have only really been seeing complaints about shooting really ramp up after these armies became a thing, I think we also have real-world statistics that back up our theory.

By the way, I believe a lot of people feel the same way about magical dominance, because it has a lot of the same issues.

We'll see how GW deals with these trends. Maybe the plan is to give most armies access to solid shooting units and then introduce an overall rules tweak that allows for new ways to counter play against it. That's essentially the situation in 40k, where most armies can pull off decent shooting, but there are also more ways to deal with it (to my understanding; I don't play that game). That would not be the worst solution to the issue in my opinion. But I believe if GW's design of ranged armies keeps progressing the way it has been recently, the current counter play options are not enough to satisfyingly interact with the mechanic anymore.

 

 

 

1. My argument is that players aren't correctly identifying what those decisions actually are. For example; Being able to screen in game, in a decision you make before any models touch the table. If you don't decide to do that at list construction you don't have agency in game when someone shoves a Mawcrusher into your army. The first time its reasonable to feel bad but once you know it can happen you can make changes to stop it, if you can't figure it out for yourself you have excellent forums like this to help find answers. Now we could argue that it should be made so that a Mawcrusher can't do that, but there are consequences to that change. As a community we should be weighing those consequences against the objective of satisfying people's feelings, it is only worth it when it does cause more negative consequences.

Shooting has deep roots in how you think about the models you are going to put down. And, no the rules of the game cannot support people choosing an assortment of whatever models they think look coolest and give them a decent chance of winning on the table, that isn't how choice works. Making a choice means accepting the logical consequences of that choice, it is a fundamental component of the world we have observed. 

2. The game isn't static and we shouldn't want it to be, that is how most of GW's competitors end up in the graveyard. First of all, we asked for this. Do you remember for the last few years the "shoot the heroes" meme? We asked for the ability to interact on the table with universally untargetable buff pieces. This isn't a theoretical debate the game state was bad, HoS on paper weren't 70% good. But, in the game state we had at the time they were the perfect counter. Which was buffing up your most offensive unit and getting it across the board while you use the cheapest battleline units available to collect objectives. If you windup kill machine was a battleline unit, you had a 10-15% points bonus on your opponent which let you buy more or better support (Worst offender? DoK). The game state was a collection of hammers of various sizes and buff pieces, ever match was very similar and for lack of a better term boring. If units didn't interact with that scheme they had little to no value.

The introduction of good and useful shooting units not only broke up that meta, but introduced more varied play. The game is intrinsically about combat nothing can change that, but having shooting that is in reality a threat opens up the utility of new types of units. Units which are fast, but not very durable are good for dealing with the majority of these shooting units, We have seen these units increase in representation, and where they didn't exist previously being added to factions. Light cavalry has seen a resurgence, an increase in these sorts of units has made units which target them more viable as well. For the first time in AoS we are actually seeing well-rounded armies that for the most part look like an army you might imagine. Can you point to a time where list diversity of rule and models has been better?

Let us look at the stats such as they are of what we have going on, in the most recent state of the game and what is winning the most. (Obviously this is only "competitive" games since that is the only thing we measure)

The current rankings are this

60+: Seraphon, IDK

55-59: DoK, Legion of Chaos Ascendant

50-54: FS, DoT, OM, MN

As you can see most factions are winning less than 50% of their games, of what is left that can by your definition is DoK, Seraphon and DoT satisfy impact in the shooting phase. The rest are almost exclusively combat factions. So to me this is the situation, even if I accept that the shooting phase as a matter of course lacks interactivity. So what? The game as a whole has never been in a better place with so many factions in and around that fat middle we have desired and been vocal advocates for. There are 11 factions between a 40% and 54% winrate out of 24 factions. HoS will probably move into that section as well, so fully half the factions in the game are not just viable but well into the game.

Further feelings are generated by the interactions between a person's expectations and their own liver experience, they are also aggressively contagious things. It is one of the things that has made us such a successful species. In nature we run a million individual experiments where win lose means live or die to determine what is true and what is false. We have intellect and what we should be doing is deep diving into the guts of the game to determine if the truth is our expectations are misaligned with reality or if our experience has alerted us to a problem in reality. I'm suggesting a) we aren't doing that and b) that when I've looked under the hood of the game even assuming there is a lack of agency in that particular phase its worth the cost overall. Remember people's expectations have been set by 5 years of a game without any effective shooting, except for a few fringe cases, and change was going to illicit a reaction.

3. The slight of hand in this thread to conflate interactivity and agency isn't productive. AoS as a game has massive amounts of agency its starts from the moment you pick that first box up off the store shelf. It can be compromised by a lack of knowledge but, having a lack of agency means a lack of independence in your ability to make choices. Agency is not compromised by negative outcomes of your exercise of free will. Interactivity is about the interplay of two players and how their expression of their agency, the choices and actions they make, impact the other participant. I believe we fail the community when we render that phenomenon down to the specific interaction of rules, rather than a holistic appreciation for the exercise of each players agency.

Continuing on with that thought I believe that AoS and wargaming in general is in a tricky spot. We have kind of quasi-professionalized it, but there really isn't the rigor behind the scenes to increase the accessibility and benefits of that to the common player, in the same way that sports has benefited from advanced analytics. Youth and amaeture sports has improved immensely precisely because those involved can go on the internet and learn a great deal without the painful and time consuming work of discovery. I think a lot of these problems are a symptom of the lack of accessibility in the game due to the inequality of talent, time, and money in our society. The perfect example of this is Pile-in, very few players do this correctly live, even when they know the rules. And, it results in outcomes that the game otherwise wouldn't produce. That's a bad mechanic. 

[EMMachine]

11 hours ago, Doko said:

That every army get the same deal that idoneth,in aos3 you only can shoot to the closest target,so we have any form of play around it.

I don't think that this was a good mechanic. It can be exploited far too easy.

Put a Leviadon in front and the rest of the army standing in the open is immun against shooting forever because most shooting isn't strong enough to make 8 Wounds against the 2+ Save.

This is as tactical as the Sentinels we had often enough in the thread.

In case of 40k we had a braverycheck in 4. Edition if another unit except the next can be shot and in WHFB wheir was either you can't shoot through units with the same size and later, you get hard cover when shooting through the unit.

Something like this could be a better solution because you would screen with expendable units by positioning and not tank the entire army on the assumption alone that one unit is closer.

 

Edited February 17, 2021 by EMMachine

[Doko]

10 hours ago, stratigo said:

mean... look upon these stats ye mighty and despair in the shooting meta. Deeeespaaaaair (hint, there's no shooting dominance)

https://thehonestwargamer.com/age-of-sigmar-tts-stats-15-2-21/

I allready did a post showing how gw overbufed the turtle of idoneths for 340 points when his stats are from 500+ points and idoneths called me liar or cryier......now the tournamenth data show who had the point.

16+ wounds with save2, aura of +1 save,21 damage,fly and fast,together the also overbufed new shark who many people are starting to abuse and bringing as ally who can.

Was easy to see how idoneths are the top army together seraphons.

Edited February 17, 2021 by Doko

[yukishiro1]

I dunno how someone looks at a chart that shows that of 12 events, 8 were won by ranged magic/shooting armies...and conclude that isn't dominance for that playstyle. I think maybe he was confused by the ordering by win %? You can't really get much from win % without much larger sample sizes, at those sizes it is so skewed by the skill of the players taking the faction. When a faction has a high win % AND high podium results, that's a pretty good bet it's a top faction. Whoever put LRL in "C" tier due to a 48% win rate despite a 1st place, a 2nd place, 2 3rd place and 14 top-10 placements really doesn't understand how to evaluate tournament results. 

What the chart shows is the following armies are the top of the meta:

Seraphon (by a mile), IDK, LRL, Tzeentch. You could throw Maggotkin in there if you were being generous I guess. Three out of four are ranged focused, the other is the hardest counter to ranged-focused armies in the game.

Seems to illustrate exactly how dominant ranged playstyles are. The meta at the moment is overwhelmingly dominated by ranged factions and factions that have play against those ranged factions. 

Edited February 17, 2021 by yukishiro1

[Ragest]

1 hour ago, yukishiro1 said:

I dunno how someone looks at a chart that shows that of 12 events, 8 were won by ranged magic/shooting armies...and conclude that isn't dominance for that playstyle. I think maybe he was confused by the ordering by win %? You can't really get much from win % without much larger sample sizes, at those sizes it is so skewed by the skill of the players taking the faction. When a faction has a high win % AND high podium results, that's a pretty good bet it's a top faction. Whoever put LRL in "C" tier due to a 48% win rate despite a 1st place, a 2nd place, 2 3rd place and 14 top-10 placements really doesn't understand how to evaluate tournament results. 

What the chart shows is the following armies are the top of the meta:

Seraphon (by a mile), IDK, LRL, Tzeentch. You could throw Maggotkin in there if you were being generous I guess. Three out of four are ranged focused, the other is the hardest counter to ranged-focused armies in the game.

Seems to illustrate exactly how dominant ranged playstyles are. The meta at the moment is overwhelmingly dominated by ranged factions and factions that have play against those ranged factions. 

And what about fyreslayers and ascendant? You are not reading right data, is not about shooting (lrl is stucked at 50%) is about dr and teleport

Edited February 17, 2021 by Ragest

[yukishiro1]

Did you read what I wrote? Win rate isn't a useful metric with so few games played. It's as likely to show the caliber of players (i.e. lots of bad players play LRL) than it is to show actual power. You need a much larger sample than what's on offer to make any conclusions based solely on win rate. Based on that win rate data, Beasts of Chaos is one of the strongest armies in the game, which presumably we all know is not the case.

Fyreslayers and Chaos Ascendent are clearly a rank down from the above factions based on that data - they don't have anywhere near the same records of actually topping events. They're at the top of the fat middle, with Maggotkin and STD being the wobblers between top-tier and middle. 

Three of the four top factions on that chart are ranged-focused armies, and the fourth is the only faction in the game that hard-counters ranged armies. That's not some big coincidence. 

Edited February 17, 2021 by yukishiro1

[Sleboda]

13 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

Imagine you design a game that is well balanced, but the all people you ask to play it tell you they don't enjoy an aspect of it. You probably should not just tell those people "You just don't understand the game, get better and learn to live with it." 

You mean Warmaster?

Every time I hear someone say that's a good game, I wonder if I'm living in the Upsidedown.

I think it's just about the worst game GW ever made, and it almost entirely comes down to one absolute stinker of a rule where you can lose your whole turn because you got a single bad die roll. Yuck.

[Saxon]

14 hours ago, stratigo said:

 

So wrong that the game is almost as balanced as it has ever been. So wrong that the armies that broke 70 percent winrates were all melee, and the so called shooting meta doesn't. 

 

The stats just have never backed this stuff up. The most super OP stuff just got nerfed hard and fell out of the meta. And you know, of the two top armies in the game, one of them can be, but is not always, shooting, and one can't be. 

 

Shooooting isn't the prooooblem.

 

I mean... look upon these stats ye mighty and despair in the shooting meta. Deeeespaaaaair (hint, there's no shooting dominance)

https://thehonestwargamer.com/age-of-sigmar-tts-stats-15-2-21/

 

Wait the game is balanced? I'd love to see a nighthaunt list that can last 3 turns against Lumineth Realm Lords with the potato autocast spells and MW from shooting. 

I also dislike using tournament stats to define how balanced or broken an army is. Those are mostly cheese lists that are designed to be unfun and WAAC. 

[kahadin]

Keep turn rolls and potential double turns. Its an aos mechanics incentive the dawn of the game players need to cope with.

Kill free summoning. I have always hated it and it has not been an aos staple like rolling for turn priority. It was a 2.0 addition that focus groups seemed to want. (Anyone remember the days of 2-3 complaints per day that horrors didn't get free split?) Obviously rework the points for everything, like horrors without free split.

Maybe bring in obscuring area terrain to give some shooting and spell counterplay. 

I know I'm ignoring 15 pages of discussion, but I had to drop my opinion on AOS 3

Edited February 18, 2021 by kahadin