What would you like for AoS 3

[Enoby]

2 hours ago, whispersofblood said:

There is fundamentally two questions. The first is what is the feeling percisely? Boredom? Frustration or powerlessness? 

 

While I'm not the person you've been talking to, I might be able to shed a bit of light on the feelings (or at least my own) on NPE

I used to play competitive YuGiOh, and if you don't know, the point of competitive YuGiOh is to stop your opponent playing through negates, interrupts, immunity, and destroying key cards. The aim of the game was to try waste as many of your opponent's resources for them ultimately to do nothing. It was a high skill game, and initially there was interactivity in the non-interactivity; it became about negating negates, or feigning a move and baiting your opponent, or letting your opponent go off and overextend until you found the exact time in their chain to destroy a weak link. 

It was a lot of fun, but I eventually fell out of love with it as my deck fell out of the meta and the new decks were even better at negating and ignoring negates and recoveries. When I played, it felt as if the choice was either to catch up and buy a new deck or to watch your opponent chain for 10 minutes. This is obviously a powercreep issue, which isn't a dirw AoS issue, but the main problem was the feeling of NPE. 

It was boring and frustrating. If you showed up to a competitive match with an out of meta deck, you were basically watching your opponent play solitaire. The thought that made me quite the competitive side was "I don't even want to be here, I'm not playing anymore and I'm wasting my time". 

I want to make it clear that AoS is not anywhere as bad as YuGiOh for NPE. But I think the general frustration of wondering why you bothered getting your models out of the case when half of them didn't have the chance to do anything besides move. 

Whether due to poor tactics, overpowered units, sheer luck, or something else, unless you've put a unit on the board to screen, not many people enjoy watching one of their cool units die without a chance to do much about it. 

Even in the case of bad tactics (e.g. moving into range without any defenses when this could be avoided), people don't enjoy it as it can feel too punishing. At the end of the day, 'punishing' bad tactics is fine only to an extent, but what extent is the important question - I think nearly everyone would be against a hypothetical unit that wipes out the opposing army if a single model is out of place. 

Others would argue that certain units don't have enough accessible counterplay. Sentinals are often accused of this as they ignore many important rules to help defend models. Even if a unit can be played around, if it's very awkward to do and can cost objectives, it often will be unsatisfying. 

So hopefully to help with the "what feelings", at least from my perspective, NPE rules are boring, frustrating, and unsatisfying.

 

[EMMachine]

23 minutes ago, Enoby said:

I used to play competitive YuGiOh, and if you don't know, the point of competitive YuGiOh is to stop your opponent playing through negates, interrupts, immunity, and destroying key cards. The aim of the game was to try waste as many of your opponent's resources for them ultimately to do nothing. It was a high skill game, and initially there was interactivity in the non-interactivity; it became about negating negates, or feigning a move and baiting your opponent, or letting your opponent go off and overextend until you found the exact time in their chain to destroy a weak link. 

It was a lot of fun, but I eventually fell out of love with it as my deck fell out of the meta and the new decks were even better at negating and ignoring negates and recoveries. When I played, it felt as if the choice was either to catch up and buy a new deck or to watch your opponent chain for 10 minutes. This is obviously a powercreep issue, which isn't a dirw AoS issue, but the main problem was the feeling of NPE. 

It was boring and frustrating. If you showed up to a competitive match with an out of meta deck, you were basically watching your opponent play solitaire. The thought that made me quite the competitive side was "I don't even want to be here, I'm not playing anymore and I'm wasting my time". 

I don't really know what is going on with Yu-Gi-Oh! at the moment (never really played it actively besides some of the console games), but I guess you mean such cases were someone starts the game and is basicly drawing his entire deck in turn one to get Exodia (at least I have seen a video with something like this.)

37 minutes ago, Enoby said:

Others would argue that certain units don't have enough accessible counterplay. Sentinals are often accused of this as they ignore many important rules to help defend models. Even if a unit can be played around, if it's very awkward to do and can cost objectives, it often will be unsatisfying.

I think this is the main problem with Sentinels. Their is no reason to kill the Shooting phase for 75% of Shooting units when a simple Warscroll change (no mortal wounds on the shooting profile that is used for indirect shooting / long range) would most likely solve that problem.

[yukishiro1]

3 hours ago, whispersofblood said:

There is fundamentally two questions. The first is what is the feeling percisely? Boredom? Frustration or powerlessness? 

The second is I'm why what is happening casually results in that feeling? Otherwise it's just synchronicity which isn't sufficient grounds for taking action.

You could call it boredom. You could call it lack of engagement. You could call it feeling like the game is happening to you rather than than that you are an active participant. You could call it a feeling that your choices on the table are rendered irrelevant because the unit ignores the normal game mechanics that allow you to interact with it. 

As to why...I think I've explained that is quite some detail now? It's because the unit ignores all the normal mechanics within the game for mitigating damage. It's range covers essentially the entire board, so you effectively can't stay away without conceding the game. The way its damage output works effectively ignores hitting, wounding, and armor saves. I don't think it's weird that that results in a feeling of a lack of engagement, because on a quite literal level the unit ignores virtually all of the normal levers the game gives you to engage with them. That's the whole point of the unit's design: to be something that just does its thing, no matter what your opponent does or what it's shooting at. And it shouldn't surprise anyone that when you exempt a unit from the normal rules of the game in a way that gives the opponent very little comparative ability to interact with it, that opposing player is going to feel like, well, they have very little comparative ability to interact. That's a natural result of the way the rules work. It'd be weird if someone didn't feel like Sentinels gave them far fewer options for mitigating their impact than almost any other unit in the game, because that's objective fact based on the way the rules work. 

Teclis' auto-casting is another example of the NPE inherent in the design of LRL: it ignores all the normal rules of the magic phase, just like Sentinels ignore all the normal rules of the shooting phase, and puts all the control in the hands of the LRL player, with extremely limited ability for the other player to have any impact. This is again a recipe for NPE that stems from feeling like you're not as involved in the game as normal, because quite literally, you aren't.

Contrast this with the way casting works for a Lord of Change, for example. In practice, the Lord of Change is mathematically almost as reliable as Teclis - but critically for the purposes of NPE, that's not because it ignores all the normal rules and auto-casts and auto-dispels; it's just that it's very good at both casting and dispelling. Your chances of stopping its casting, or getting off your own casting around it, are low...but they're not a foregone conclusion. You'd be silly to rely on it...but it doesn't feel like a completely forgone conclusion. 

The problem with LRL's design is that the faction has tons of mechanics that feel like forgone conclusions the other player has no ability to impact. That's a recipe for NPE. 

Edited March 10, 2021 by yukishiro1

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

22 minutes ago, Enoby said:

 

While I'm not the person you've been talking to, I might be able to shed a bit of light on the feelings (or at least my own) on NPE

I used to play competitive YuGiOh, and if you don't know, the point of competitive YuGiOh is to stop your opponent playing through negates, interrupts, immunity, and destroying key cards. The aim of the game was to try waste as many of your opponent's resources for them ultimately to do nothing. It was a high skill game, and initially there was interactivity in the non-interactivity; it became about negating negates, or feigning a move and baiting your opponent, or letting your opponent go off and overextend until you found the exact time in their chain to destroy a weak link. 

It was a lot of fun, but I eventually fell out of love with it as my deck fell out of the meta and the new decks were even better at negating and ignoring negates and recoveries. When I played, it felt as if the choice was either to catch up and buy a new deck or to watch your opponent chain for 10 minutes. This is obviously a powercreep issue, which isn't a dirw AoS issue, but the main problem was the feeling of NPE. 

It was boring and frustrating. If you showed up to a competitive match with an out of meta deck, you were basically watching your opponent play solitaire. The thought that made me quite the competitive side was "I don't even want to be here, I'm not playing anymore and I'm wasting my time". 

I want to make it clear that AoS is not anywhere as bad as YuGiOh for NPE. But I think the general frustration of wondering why you bothered getting your models out of the case when half of them didn't have the chance to do anything besides move. 

Whether due to poor tactics, overpowered units, sheer luck, or something else, unless you've put a unit on the board to screen, not many people enjoy watching one of their cool units die without a chance to do much about it. 

Even in the case of bad tactics (e.g. moving into range without any defenses when this could be avoided), people don't enjoy it as it can feel too punishing. At the end of the day, 'punishing' bad tactics is fine only to an extent, but what extent is the important question - I think nearly everyone would be against a hypothetical unit that wipes out the opposing army if a single model is out of place. 

Others would argue that certain units don't have enough accessible counterplay. Sentinals are often accused of this as they ignore many important rules to help defend models. Even if a unit can be played around, if it's very awkward to do and can cost objectives, it often will be unsatisfying. 

So hopefully to help with the "what feelings", at least from my perspective, NPE rules are boring, frustrating, and unsatisfying.

 

I think the term "negative play experience" is well chosen, because I believe it's not one single feeling we are talking about. In my view, it seems to be a range of different negative experiences, as the name would suggest.

What those expriences have in common is that they are caused by a common type of mechanic. We can think about it very loosely as the type of mechanic that prevents the things that make the game interesting from happening. That's a kind of fuzzy category, but I believe if we really want to engage with the concept of NPE we need to be comfortable with this kind of vagueness.

If we put the hobby component of AoS to the side for a moment, I think what makes the game interesting is the tactical decision making. Thinking about how to position, when to attack, what risks you are taking... That kind of thing. The list building portion of the game is another draw. You would (justifiedly) expect your decisions regarding what units you decide to bring to matter during the game. When mechanics go too far with nullifying these components, the result is a negative play experience.

If this is correct, we can see why Lumineth Sentinels are regarded as an especially egregious example of bad design. Usually, you players in AoS can make a few meaningful decisions when it comes to how to defend their models from ranged attacks. Make sure your heroes are in cover and have Look Out, Sir!. But that's not effective against Sentinels, so there is no decision to be made here. Try to not give your opponent line-of-sight. Again, not a decision against Sentinels. Position out of range. This is possible against Sentinels, but if your opponent sets their Sentinels up correctly, you will have to put your hero so far out of position that they become effectively useless. This kind of situation where basically "turn 0", all options you have are bad is just frustrating and disappointing.

Of course, we could take a look at the list building stage. But there is not really meaningful counterplay at that stage for all armies, as well. "Just don't take small heroes" is certainly not meaningful counterplay. The same goes for "just switch armies". At that point the hobby portion of AoS we put aside at the beginning becomes really relevant: It's just not super easy to quickly make large changes to lists in AoS, much less switch armies. And for less drastic changes, we might again be facing a point where there are no interesting decisions to make. If not bringing my buff hero makes my units bad, that's not an interesting decision to consider.

Finally, I think there are also very different examples of NPE, like facing down a block of 40 Skeleton warriors. They are not really a threat, because they don't deal very good damage. But you might still be stuck watching your opponent roll 200 dice to deal like 4 damage to your Steam Tank. That's a different way how interesting decisions can be prevented from happening: Because you are stuck doing inconsequential stuff for a long time for no apparent reason.

[MitGas]

1 hour ago, whispersofblood said:

I don't actually have a problem with flamers though... I just acknowledge they are strong and consistently so which is why they win tournaments. If you can quote me where I said Flamers are problematic I would appreciate it? Again the questions here isn't about the strength or power its about specifying what the NPE is, and why they are causally linked.

Flamers are not consistent against all types of units like you claim; they can be dealt with much more easily than Sentinels in almost all cases e.g.

I gave you examples of units that - while they might take a few wounds and lose a single model - will pretty much laugh about flamers and kill them sooner or later. 
Of course flamers are good all in all but they're far from broken or even overpowered on their own. And if they are, it's down to eternal conflagration's rend/buffing them, etc. not the warscroll itself... from many games I know that other units do better than them. 

So yes, they can do some damage (less so on multi-wound/high armor units) but it's not like they got the Sentinel's range, spell with MWs on a 5+, need no LOS (okay, they're jumpers) and so on and on.... 

[Enoby]

22 minutes ago, EMMachine said:

I don't really know what is going on with Yu-Gi-Oh! at the moment (never really played it actively besides some of the console games), but I guess you mean such cases were someone starts the game and is basicly drawing his entire deck in turn one to get Exodia (at least I have seen a video with something like this.)

It's usually something along the lines of:

Flip to go first

1st player spends 10 minutes searching through their deck, summoning, drawing cards, sending cards to their grave yard, until they have 5 cards in hand and like 3 big negate monsters on the field, and a negate in the grave too. 

2nd player goes, they have 6 cards and likely 3 or 4 ways to start a combo. As the opponent has 3 to 5 negates (3 monsters, and grave and handtrap negates), there's a good chance 2nd player can't play because every start combo piece is stopped. 

Basically, unless they brick or have a weird deck, who goes first usually wins. 

The issue is the time it takes watching your opponent play for 10 mins only for them to end up with an unbreakable board.

[whispersofblood]

@EnobyI played YuGiOh! About 20 years ago, but I did play the first few sets. It is interesting to hear what direction the game went, at the time I built a pretty off meta myself playing a deck. It was designed to generate health damage very quickly, ending rounds in under 4 draws, in response to how potent trap cards had become even then. My poverty at the time meant I was doing it with a lot of commons and uncommons, but it was a fair successful way to play before the internet really made netdecking a thing. 😅

I think you touch on some important topics though. Big games, like 40k, AoS, Pokemon, YoGiOh have to develop and progress to keep selling. That doesn't have to mean more powerful effects(though it does happen at times), but it does mean some cards for example will simply age out of effectiveness its built into the game. If you do something often you probably don't notice it, but I'm sure if I tracked down my cards and tried to play a game they would be largely useless or at least uncompetitive.

I think your second point about cool units dying is important, and I tried to talk about that earlier. The stuff with impactful rules is still getting taken. Skink Priests are possibly the softest hero in the game, and they often can't be hidden to employ their effects. But, they are so useful, and cheap so the risk is worth it and their loss isn't crippling. Very few people would probably say the enjoy losing their models, but I think we need to seperate that feeling from the feeling one gets from being disproportionately inconvenience by what has happened. Is that fair?

@Enoby and @Neil Arthur Hotep think why Sentinels are the perfect test case to some degree is because they rip away the veil and expose it as probably not very substantial anyway. For instance, most heroes are on not much better than a 5 wounds on 5+ save if they are on foot, and its highly unlikely you are going to deploy them behind a wall anyway as it severely limits they're already low (on average) utility. The most reasonable shooting attack has a high probability of removing them without recourse so long as they can get in range, and range has become increasingly less relevant due to the number of alternative deployments and teleports made available. That's the default state of the game. At the same time shooting damage except in some very fringe cases, doesn't do significant damage to ordinary units on a per point basis. 

So we have a situation where the bulk of a category is low utility, low survivability, and by default its loss causes some ill feeling. To compound it we also have to contend with the snowball effects of buff pieces, so we can't increase this category of models too far in those characteristics, before we end up with a NPE we have already lived through. I think we can figure out exactly the combination of factors that need to be resolved here are, it just needs some proper investigation.

@yukishiro1

This is better, but for that logic to work I need to understand what you define as "the game". For me The Game: is the journey from list building to the final score in a battle plan. I make lots of choices and sacrifices along the way some very tightly linked to specific stimulus others very tangentially. For example the Bray-Shaman spell devolve. Its included with Kairos to do one specific thing, get Archaon into combat turn 1. Once it does that thing it is a nice to have. If it gets shot off by Sentinels most people would probably shrug their shoulders, because its usefulness has been spent. But, doing that thing reliably might mean a bunch of things I need to do at list writing and deployment. That's a useful and interesting tension in the game beyond simply dice rolling and blocking line of sight, I'm talking more about the choices to take screens or not, as opposed to the rules making screens actually work.

So employing your logic to my definition. We do not want units (for example Sentinels) that impact that definition so wildly as to make it a unidimensional reality. Is the bolded definition sufficient to work with for you?

[whispersofblood]

25 minutes ago, MitGas said:

Flamers are not consistent against all types of units like you claim; they can be dealt with much more easily than Sentinels in almost all cases e.g.

I gave you examples of units that - while they might take a few wounds and lose a single model - will pretty much laugh about flamers and kill them sooner or later. 
Of course flamers are good all in all but they're far from broken or even overpowered on their own. And if they are, it's down to eternal conflagration's rend/buffing them, etc. not the warscroll itself... from many games I know that other units do better than them. 

So yes, they can do some damage (less so on multi-wound/high armor units) but it's not like they got the Sentinel's range, spell with MWs on a 5+, need no LOS (okay, they're jumpers) and so on and on.... 

I don't really know what you are trying to argue? That Flamers don't do significant dmg per point? That demonstratively untrue... That they are situationally not the best unit? I've not made the argument that they are. We know they do good damage when the game is played and we know that damage is capable of producing good results there are several tournament games live recorded over the least 2 years which show this. I've also not said that they need to change or that they are overpowered...

Just to kind of wrap this up, 140 points of flamers and 140 points of Sentinels do almost exactly the same amount of average dmg based on the rules on their warscroll against a unit with a 4+ save (3). Against 10 models Flamers do between 3 and 9. Flamers are more mobile, Sentinels have more range. Sentinels have limited effective buffs after their warscroll(Lambent light) even if I give the maximum benefit of full rr to hit, the dmg caps at 9, but more likely its 5 dmg. Flamers can push their base damage against a 4+ save to between 4 and 12 with no casts or command abilities (eternal conflag + exalted flamer+Aura of Mutability), and between 5-15 against 10 models. With 1 spell (Arcane suggestion) that dmg can jump to between 5-15 and 7-21 against a 4+ save. Ignoring that the Exalted Flamers also benefits from the  buffs to the flamers simultaneously at no cost.

[MitGas]

24 minutes ago, whispersofblood said:

I don't really know what you are trying to argue? That Flamers don't do significant dmg per point? That demonstratively untrue... That they are situationally not the best unit? I've not made the argument that they are. We know they do good damage when the game is played and we know that damage is capable of producing good results there are several tournament games live recorded over the least 2 years which show this. I've also not said that they need to change or that they are overpowered...

Just to kind of wrap this up, 140 points of flamers and 140 points of Sentinels do almost exactly the same amount of average dmg based on the rules on their warscroll against a unit with a 4+ save (3). Against 10 models Flamers do between 3 and 9. Flamers are more mobile, Sentinels have more range. Sentinels have limited effective buffs after their warscroll(Lambent light) even if I give the maximum benefit of full rr to hit, the dmg caps at 9, but more likely its 5 dmg. Flamers can push their base damage against a 4+ save to between 4 and 12 with no casts or command abilities (eternal conflag + exalted flamer+Aura of Mutability), and between 5-15 against 10 models. With 1 spell (Arcane suggestion) that dmg can jump to between 5-15 and 7-21 against a 4+ save. Ignoring that the Exalted Flamers also benefits from the  buffs to the flamers simultaneously at no cost.

Me: "That said, it's nice if people don't complain about Flamers as much anymore... (they are great against low save models tho....)"

You: "Imagine thinking flamers aren't one of most offensive shooting units in the game..."

Me: "Depending on the enemy, they aren't all that hot. They're just too good vs. some enemies/armies. So if they cost more points, they'll soon start to see less play in general and will stay against armies weak to them. It's difficult to balance them right."

Perhaps I misunderstood your posts! 

I just argued that they aren't all that great vs. quite a few units actually and perform very well (or too well) against others - when so many see them as the weapon of choice vs. absolutely everything. With the random dmg, their output can also vary a lot. But without rend and buffs, well, they're really not that hot anymore.

I'd like - like I've written before - see GW provide good warscrolls and add fewer ways to buff units via subfactions and battalions - cause that's where usually the broken stuff comes in. If they change the points, the unit might become totally unattractive outside the battalion, if they change the warscroll, the problem might still persist (although it would fix some things).... so I hope GW starts to work more on the offending units/parts of armies holistically instead of just tweaking points 99% of the time. Sometimes it's a warscroll, sometimes it's a subfaction... the fix is seldom done properly with increasing a unit by 20 points.

[yukishiro1]

2 hours ago, whispersofblood said:

For me The Game: is the journey from list building to the final score in a battle plan.  Is the bolded definition sufficient to work with for you?

Yeah, sure, in the abstract. But there's a continuum there too. The answer to "this is NPE"  can't simply be "take a different list," unless it's something very broad like "you need to take screening units." In other words, the answer to Sentinels being NPE can't just be "well take bodyguard units since that's the only actual way to mitigate them," because most factions don't have them, nor should the only way to avoid a NPE be to take a very particular unit. 

In other words, the focus of the game is actually playing. List building is important, but if you're having to tailor a list extremely carefully to avoid an otherwise unavoidable NPE, that's a good sign that whatever is causing the NPE needs to be looked at. 

[whispersofblood]

4 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

Yeah, sure, in the abstract. But there's a continuum there too. The answer to "this is NPE"  can't simply be "take a different list," unless it's something very broad like "you need to take screening units." In other words, the answer to Sentinels being NPE can't just be "well take bodyguard units since that's the only actual way to mitigate them," because most factions don't have them, nor should the only way to avoid a NPE be to take a very particular unit. 

In other words, the focus of the game is actually playing. List building is important, but if you're having to tailor a list extremely carefully to avoid an otherwise unavoidable NPE, that's a good sign that whatever is causing the NPE needs to be looked at. 

Yeah of course, if you make construction overly punishing then the available playstyles are restricted as well which is non-optimal. I think Body guard units are dumb personally, and wish they didn't exist beyond narrative. List building is also a bottomless pit of effort, there isn't a maximum, just depreciating returns but I generally believe all games should reward effort and care.

What if the answer is just having more heroes in lists, effectively redundancy. But, also ensuring these sorts of models have actual impact in the game, a reason for being there to make the redundancy worth investing in. Looking at a cross reference of heroes in Azyr most are between 120-80, with some outliers at 140/70. In there are models like the Slaughter Queen on foot which double activates on a prayer, with high quality attacks for 100 points, or 110 for a Runesmiter that allows Deploy from off the board. There are great heroes and even with extreme cases of ranged damage (Sentinels) have high utility and impact on the game and therefor worth taking. And, if you choose to rely on their abilities worth building in redundancy for. Shooting can only be invested in so much before the shooting army struggles to play the game itself. 

But, also there is Bloodmaster which has a couple attacks and a cool model. Or, the Doomseeker a Mv4 meh combat hero for 100... There are a ton of rubbish heroes with great models and no purpose, other than faction command abilities, which can be used by better Warscrolls.

Which leads to the next problem, drops. Because that is why taking more heroes, even well priced, high utility heroes is a existential risk to an army. So perhaps there is something to be done concerning drops as well.

Like I said earlier, Sentinels more than anything display the perhaps inadequate nature of look out sir. Because even without Scryhawk Lantern, I don't think hiding models to keep them alive, but also preventing them from being in the game is sufficiently satisfying is it? 

I think we also have to be careful at home much invulnerability we give heroes, because we've lived in a meta without effective shooting and no one seemed to care for it much (#shoottheheroes). So we don't want models which have no risk of failure, we just want there to be room for an individual player to make a choice about how much risk they are taking on. 

[Ragest]

12 hours ago, MitGas said:

Flamers are not consistent against all types of units like you claim; they can be dealt with much more easily than Sentinels in almost all cases e.g.

I gave you examples of units that - while they might take a few wounds and lose a single model - will pretty much laugh about flamers and kill them sooner or later. 
Of course flamers are good all in all but they're far from broken or even overpowered on their own. And if they are, it's down to eternal conflagration's rend/buffing them, etc. not the warscroll itself... from many games I know that other units do better than them. 

So yes, they can do some damage (less so on multi-wound/high armor units) but it's not like they got the Sentinel's range, spell with MWs on a 5+, need no LOS (okay, they're jumpers) and so on and on.... 

So you are comparing no support flamers with fully stacked sentinels

Sentinels don't need los, flamers can be teleported.

Sentinels cover 36", flamers every point in the map 9" away (with 18" range)

Sentinels do MW if you successfully cast power of hysh, flamers get -1 rend for free, +1 hit near exalted and rr hit from fatemaster with a cost of 1CP.

Sentinels do 3 wounds as average with power of hysh and lambent light, bot having counterplay dispelling them,, flamers do 5 wounds with exalted and fatemaster, less interaction against.

Sentinels have 10 wounds saving 5+, Flamers can be summoned.

Again targetting Sentinels to move nerf agendas against Lumineth.

 

About the other point, Sentinels can be NPE... vs certain out of meta armies. Std saving mw 5+, nurgle and archaon forcing rr of 6 to hit, mawtribes and ogors being a sack of wounds, fyreslayers mounted in magmadroths, kroak with his nice saurus, slanns dispelling and throwing away mw in the corner, idk that can't be targeted, morathi just taking 3 wounds, OBR healing themselves the average damage coming from sentinels every turn, Kharadron being far far away until tou let them DR, Slaneesh making an alpha turn 1 with 2 drops, phoenix guard saving 4+ and their general passing wounds... I can see some tailoring about list there, is not as simple as "i can't play my little hero"

Edited March 11, 2021 by Ragest

[MitGas]

8 minutes ago, Ragest said:

So you are comparing no support flamers with fully stacked sentinels

Sentinels don't need los, flamers can be teleported.

Sentinels cover 36", flamers every point in the map 9" away (with 18" range)

Sentinels do MW if you successfully cast power of hysh, flamers get -1 rend for free, +1 hit near exalted and rr hit from fatemaster with a cost of 1CP.

Sentinels do 3 wounds as average with power of hysh and lambent light, bot having counterplay dispelling them,, flamers do 5 wounds with exalted and fatemaster, less interaction against.

Sentinels have 10 wounds saving 5+, Flamers can be summoned.

Again targetting Sentinels to move nerf agendas against Lumineth.

 

About the other point, Sentinels can be NPE... vs certain out of meta armies. Std saving mw 5+, nurgle and archaon forcing rr of 6 to hit, mawtribes and ogors being a sack of wounds, fyreslayers mounted in magmadroths, kroak with his nice saurus, slanns dispelling and throwing away mw in the corner, idk that can't be targeted, morathi just taking 3 wounds, OBR healing themselves the average damage coming from sentinels every turn, Kharadron being far far away until tou let them DR, Slaneesh making an alpha turn 1 with 2 drops, phoenix guard saving 4+ and their general passing wounds... I can see some tailoring about list there, is not as simple as "i can't play my little hero"

Uhm, your comparison is laughable now.... you're comparing a couple of hundred points (fully buffed flamers with exalted flamer AND fatemaster PLUS teleport, are you even listening to your own argument) to a single sentinel unit. Well, of course the flamers will be stronger then.... Compare flamers with no buffs, no spent CP and no rend (cause that's part of the cult) to your sentinel warscroll. Everyone (apart from an aelf) will tell which of these sounds more broken or unfun... simple as that.  Of course 500+ points will do better then... 🙄

And yes, we're all out to get your Aelfs. Cause we're also hating on ALL other units of them. Which reminds me: as a Tzeentch player that spoony pseudo-magic god of yours irks me as well!

 

[zilberfrid]

I know I have participated, but I think the definition of NPE and discussion about Sentinels and Flamers isn't the focus of this thread.

I don't see the sides nearing even slightly since it started, so it wouldnever end..

[whispersofblood]

10 hours ago, zilberfrid said:

I know I have participated, but I think the definition of NPE and discussion about Sentinels and Flamers isn't the focus of this thread.

I don't see the sides nearing even slightly since it started, so it would never end..

I thought we were making good progress actually..😅

One of the useful parts of the discussion is finding out what actually causes of the NPE and how we can creatively actually resolve the NPE at a deeper level.

[stratigo]

On 3/5/2021 at 2:05 PM, yukishiro1 said:

Sentinels can't really be fixed with points, the mechanics are fundamentally abusive - they just ignore all the fundamental rules of the game. To hit doesn't matter. To wound doesn't matter. Saves don't matter. LOS doesn't matter. It's a literal joke of a unit, like what someone would come up with when intoxicated. 

 Ranged MWs on a to hit roll that ignore LOS should simply not be in the game, and they certainly shouldn't be in the game when you can trigger them on a 5+ rerolling. 

You could point them so high they weren't worth taking, but they'd still be abusive - just underpowered and abusive, instead of overpowered and abusive. It wouldn't really fix the issue.

It still boggles my mind that Sentinels made it through the design phase, much less "playtesting" (quotation marks required given what happened). It's a big indictment that nobody was brave enough to stand up and say "no, you can't do this, it's just terrible design. Go back to the drawing board and come up with something else, this isn't a winner." 

They also have minus 1 to hit

On 3/8/2021 at 5:47 AM, MitGas said:

I don't think it, I know it.

Smaller elite units with multiple wounds and decent armor saves are not impressed at all by flamers in my experience. That rend  is also not on the warscroll.... so the problem is the cult...

Those units (Ironjawz, troggoths, etc.) are actually more afraid of Kairic Acolytes in a game where you don't run eternal conflagration...

Same thing with the Gaunt's or Sorc Lord's on Manticore spell... sure, they're absolutely insane vs horde units but entirely unproblematic against some others.

The problem being in one cult is a problem for the whole army because cults are free

 

On 3/9/2021 at 9:36 AM, whispersofblood said:

I would suggest the game is actually quite balanced when it comes to competitive play, the disparity has more to do with tournaments being catch all type events rather than purely competitive. I have a hypothesis that when we eventually get back to table top gaming the disparity in win rate is going to jump drastically, right now we have data for as close to a closed competitive meta as we can possibly get and things are actually ok. I feel like, as I don't have any data to support this theory, that the game is actually heavily distorted because people play the game with the models they like and I'm not sure there is a way to solve for that.

There is a huge difference between player skill being the dominant factor in determining results and the presence of mechanics players find offensive. Spell in a bottle is the perfect example of this, as are Sentinels. Competitive players ultimately want enough balance that they can a) express their personality, and b) player skill is the generally the deciding factor. Getting "a" means creating issues in matchups, but competitive players are quite sanguine about that I find.

As to you second point, tbh it isn't an issue in my opinion. The first example is a necessary abstraction to turn what is essentially a skirmish ruleset into an army game, and the second isn't actually true it is basically impossible to hide a model behind another model that isn't call a Great Unclean One. The ruleset basically makes these physical differences mostly irrelevant. 

Again these things might feel bad, but the game is perfectly capable of absorbing them from a mechanical perspective, and I generally err against listening to technical feedback from the public. If you look at lists from TTS you'll find despite the addition of Sentinels and shooting we are seeing infantry heros persist and even proliferate. 

Your position on Frostgrave perfectly encapsulates the difference in opinion. Personally I find Frostgrave is as intellectually stimulating as choosing between shades of warm off white, I find the universe of interactions is miniscule, and even as a roleplay function a video game does it better, faster, with much less investment. I "like" that AoS often doesn't have a prepackaged modular right answer, and that you have to find a way to  adapt to what is happening on the board. This is what keeps the game fresh across multiple iterations and why WHFB was less gripping than 40k, the games could effectively be scripted at the high level, and descend into mechanical chaos at the casual level. Where as AoS with one opponent, even with 2 armies with limited direct interaction, you could play a game every other week for a year and still not play the same game twice.

I can't take your argument with a straight face when you go "AoS is balanced"

 

Like, lul, no. No it isn't. AoS balance is a mess. Seraphon are too good. LRL look to be approaching that level, especially with a new wave of releases. IDK are too good. Based on actual winrates and top finishes. If your answer to balance is "Actually you should play nothing but meta armies", mate, you don't know what balance is.

 

 

And yes, interactivity is extremely important to a wargame. Not just for fun, but for actual competition. Any idiot can net list. But if that same idiot can do that and go 4-1 or even 5-0 at a tournament, this is a big ol' problem.

LRL have the issue of being able to delete combo pieces (which I think GW has vastly overpushed because of profits), while utterly dominating the magic phase in a way no other army can, and having actual extremely strong, on the spot defensive tools in aetherquartz with army wide defensive tools in shining company making an attempt to counter them before they kill you a challenging prospect for even an alpha strike based army. I can tell you how much a straight minus one to hit army wide messes up the math of trying to eliminate key units. It's a lot. 

 

Then you combine that with an inability to stop their tools. You can't hide, or play with the rangebands of either their sentinels or spells. You can't really stop their magic from casting. The other two power armies win mostly off the back of messing with fundamental mechanics with IDK or just endless buff stacking in seraphon from vastly underpriced units. Otherwise, it's actually a problem. In that you cannot interact with what LRL is doing to your army, but they trivially negate or nerf a lot of what you can do with yours. 

 

It's almost the tau problem. The tau, being the worst army in 9th edition, remain also the least fun to play against because their mechanics render the best way to play against them to simply ignore that they exist and score points. An inability to meaningfully effect an opponent's models or disrupt their strategy is bad for the game no matter the quality of the army. LRL are difficult to do anything to for most armies in the game.

 

On 3/9/2021 at 4:07 PM, SeanMaguire1991 said:

Nerf shooting with Sigmar's hammer. 

Hate playing against Kharadron and Skyre.

I'm sure they hate playing against you too.

[MitGas]

12 minutes ago, stratigo said:

They also have minus 1 to hit

The problem being in one cult is a problem for the whole army because cults are free

That's why I argue all the time for getting rid of the keyword spam in warscrolls, work on good, balanced warscrolls and heavily reduce the buffing and subfaction mechanics we got now going on. 👍

[Doko]

1 hour ago, stratigo said:

balance is a mess. Seraphon are too good. LRL look to be approaching that level, especially with a new wave of releases. IDK are too good. Based on actual winrates and top finishes.

Yup,and i would add also tzenth and his retarded low cost units and free +1rend and the new overbuffed snake archers with doubl shooting and teleport with the overbufed new morathi.

[MitGas]

57 minutes ago, Doko said:

Yup,and i would add also tzenth and his retarded low cost units and free +1rend and the new overbuffed snake archers with doubl shooting and teleport with the overbufed new morathi.

Allow me to return the favor! 

[Doko]

Sure np.

Also last biggest tournament,50+ players and 5 rounds.

Result? Tzenth first and second.

So so much speaking(myself) about how broken and unfun are lumineths but seems tzenth is worse than lumineths

https://tabletop.to/battle-of-copenhagen-tts

Edited March 11, 2021 by Doko

[Boar]

27 minutes ago, Doko said:

So so much speaking(myself) about how broken and unfun are lumineths but seems tzenth is worse than lumineths

I would be very careful about use of single tourny to draw far reaching conclusions. There were only 2 Serpahon lists there f.ex.

Edited March 11, 2021 by Boar
better exprs. my toughts

[MitGas]

1 hour ago, Doko said:

Sure np.

Also last biggest tournament,50+ players and 5 rounds.

Result? Tzenth first and second.

So so much speaking(myself) about how broken and unfun are lumineths but seems tzenth is worse than lumineths

https://tabletop.to/battle-of-copenhagen-tts

Well, one of the lists had flamers... and yes, I'm not saying that they're not too strong if used in a eternal conflag/changehost/exalted and fatemaster combo (edit: which costs a LOT of points for it, keep that in mind). Still, without all those things they're still a fairer warscroll than sentinels. They should change something to make flamers less of a problem in the game in such situations... would be easy as they could simply remove one of the combos to make them less OP.

And changehost (which I never play as I value my friends) needs to get removed - the nerf wasn't enough as it's still a grade A "erm" move...

That said, our heroes are hella expensive, so very few units are really low cost in Tzeentch as the summoning tax is included in our wizards...

Edited March 11, 2021 by MitGas

[yukishiro1]

Tzeentch is probably too powerful - probably more powerful than LRL, incidentally - but it's mechanics aren't abusive and unfun to play against in the same way that LRL's are. That's the big difference in my mind. LRL is the most NPE army in the game right now by a country mile, even though it clearly isn't the most powerful army, which is obviously Seraphon.

 

 

Edited March 11, 2021 by yukishiro1

[MitGas]

57 minutes ago, yukishiro1 said:

Tzeentch is probably too powerful - probably more powerful than LRL, incidentally - but it's mechanics aren't abusive and unfun to play against in the same way that LRL's are. That's the big difference in my mind. LRL is the most NPE army in the game right now by a country mile, even though it clearly isn't the most powerful army, which is obviously Seraphon.

 

 

Very well said! And I agree, Tzeentch still needs more nerfs... ideally in such a way that a few of the lesser seen units get a bit better and the too good units get a bit worse. 

[Beliman]

13 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

LRL is the most NPE army in the game right now by a country mile, even though it clearly isn't the most powerful army, which is obviously Seraphon.

New generic "everblaze meteor":

 K–Pg bomb: Remove all Seraphon units from the table. They are extinct from now on!