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Discussing balance in AoS


Enoby

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Ossiarch sucks!  Everything should have +1 Bravery in Pitched Battles.  More should be on the line for these entities in larger games; fewer models should fold, falter or outright quit a battle that involves all sorts of elite units plus famed heroes and villains.  It would also be a solid buff to GSG, not that I'm biased at all or anything.

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3 minutes ago, Joseph Mackay said:

No, the way saves and rend work is fine. People’s inability to read the rules properly and then complain about how it actually works is bull.

Nah, I'm with Ninth on this one. You can read and understand how the Rend rules interact with 1+ saves, and still think that the outcome is stupid.

Fortunately my army puts out a ton of mortal wounds, so 1+ saves aren't an issue for me... but if we see the kind of reduction in the ability to spam mortal wounds that many people are calling for, then the 1+ save rules will still be stupid and they'll also become a problem for the game in general.

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2 hours ago, Joseph Mackay said:

No, the way saves and rend work is fine. People’s inability to read the rules properly and then complain about how it actually works is bull.

"Q: How does the Rend characteristic of attacks interact with the Bastiladon while it has a 1+ Save characteristic? A: An unmodified save roll of a 1 always fails. When a save roll is modified by the Rend characteristic of an attack, it can never be modified to less than 1. When a model has a Save characteristic of 1+, modified save rolls of 1 are successfully saved. This means, while the Bastiladon has a Save characteristic of 1+, only unmodified save rolls of 1 will inflict damage regardless of the Rend characteristic of the weapon used for the attack."

Can you articulate how, exactly, I am demonstrating an inability to read the rules properly?

Edited by NinthMusketeer
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2 minutes ago, NinthMusketeer said:

I was head AoS judge at the last LVO, what's your qualification?

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that to come across argumentative, I’m just sick of people complaining about how the rule works when it’s always worked that way and no one seemed to have a problem with it before.

additionally I get a bit extra salty about the complaints because the only unit so far (to my knowledge) with a 1+ save is the Bastiladon, a Seraphon model, and I love me some reptiles and dinosaurs and seeing people complain about them is upsetting.

talking about the bastiladon though, the 1+ save is actually a nerf from its old rules. It used to have a 3+ save ignoring rend (specifically only ignored rend so you could still buff it somehow) AND a 4+ mortal wound save. It’s save didn’t degrade like it does now (or maybe it did but not as quickly?)

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13 hours ago, Mutton said:

We're already there. Plenty of units have ridiculous armor/ward saves with rerolling dice. Almost every game you can expect to be against some kind of -1 to hit, some armies easily getting to -2 or -3 to hit. It's why so many warscrolls deal mortal wounds now, they have to in order to get past all of these stacking fortress armies like Lum, IDK, Seraphon, etc.

We've had a crazy escalation of defensive power since the beginning of 2.0, and it needs to go. Give us a cap on debuffs and stop letting units get 2+ armor saves.

I don't think we're quite there yet. Watching a batrep between DG and DA and it was a lot of dice-rolling for very little returns. Then you also remember that the vast majority of armies don't have those rules and you end up in a pretty bad situation.

That said, I agree, less is more and the  rules needs to be more consistently applied with a design document every single battletome team must adhere to. The results have been pretty uneven. Then again, GW can't do major releases for everyone. However, the least we can expect is more sensible quality control and testing.

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1 hour ago, Joseph Mackay said:

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that to come across argumentative, I’m just sick of people complaining about how the rule works when it’s always worked that way and no one seemed to have a problem with it before.

additionally I get a bit extra salty about the complaints because the only unit so far (to my knowledge) with a 1+ save is the Bastiladon, a Seraphon model, and I love me some reptiles and dinosaurs and seeing people complain about them is upsetting.

talking about the bastiladon though, the 1+ save is actually a nerf from its old rules. It used to have a 3+ save ignoring rend (specifically only ignored rend so you could still buff it somehow) AND a 4+ mortal wound save. It’s save didn’t degrade like it does now (or maybe it did but not as quickly?)

The rule was never a problem because everyone assumed GW would go out of their way to break the system by giving a model a 1+ save characteristic. And now it has in effect 2+ ignoring rend re-rollable (because yeah, it's gunna be by some means); it is in essence a model that MUST be countered with mortal wounds or cannot reasonably be killed. But even light MW output will obliterate it in short order. It is an extremely poor warscroll design that is almost tailor-made to create unfun experience on the table.

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1 hour ago, Joseph Mackay said:

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that to come across argumentative, I’m just sick of people complaining about how the rule works when it’s always worked that way and no one seemed to have a problem with it before.

additionally I get a bit extra salty about the complaints because the only unit so far (to my knowledge) with a 1+ save is the Bastiladon, a Seraphon model, and I love me some reptiles and dinosaurs and seeing people complain about them is upsetting.

talking about the bastiladon though, the 1+ save is actually a nerf from its old rules. It used to have a 3+ save ignoring rend (specifically only ignored rend so you could still buff it somehow) AND a 4+ mortal wound save. It’s save didn’t degrade like it does now (or maybe it did but not as quickly?)

Having 1+ not ignoring rend and mortal wound save 4+ would be fine. The bastilladon currently only has only one tool for dealing with it, and that's not one that's equally distributed among armies.

In fact, I would have no problem with a lot more mortal wound saves, but that's mostly because I don't feel like Mortal wounds are a neccessary mechanic, just giving them high rend would be perfectly fine.

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On the subject of saves it always struck me as odd that someone at GW decided that saves should be applied the way they did instead of like every other game (and how it used to be in Warhammer) where it directly modifies your save not your role.  I mean, we had 1+ save stuff in WHFB too (I think it was super ultra rare though like only on characters with specific magic items) and you auto-saved against no modifiers and you had a better chance with modifiers since a -2 would give you a 3+, and so on.

Yet someone thought it would be neat to completely throw real math out the window and apply save mods to the die roll rather than the stat.

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I have been looking into a few other game systems as my area has once again been further locked down. I have realized exactly how hard game balance is and how different systems are designed to handle it differently. Fantasy Flight's deck building is something I always found really off putting, but it is easier and cheaper to buy a pack of cards than a full book. The Middle Earth Strategy game seems to work like battalions in AOS mixed with special rules for allies which seems simultaneously like a great balancing mechanic and also really frustrating... I would want to run the Fellowship with Rohan, Erudamn it! I think of the game systems I have checked out, that 40k seems to have the most rock, paper, scissors army building mechanics (anti-air, anti-armour, anti-horde etc.) with only space marines having real access to everything, which feels very frustrating as I do not like their lore aesthetic or ubiquity.  

But even in these smaller game systems true balance seems to be elusive. In Star Wars Legion if one army is either over powered or under powered that is 1/4 of the game. I think sadly AOS and 40k having a large number of armies within tiers at least allows you to say; 'hey I guess I can play my Nighthaunt if I find a Beast of Chaos player, and I will have to run Lumineth if I want to play against KO'. This is far from ideal but at least means that everything at least has a chance of winning. 

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2 hours ago, NinthMusketeer said:

I think players should absolutely ask that every army have some reasonable means of defeating every other army.

At the most basic level, every army does. You can defeat any opponent by controlling the objectives, and every army is capable of doing this. There are differing aspects of speed, resilience, damage output, body count and so on, and some battle plans favour certain army compositions over others, but in the end the only thing that matters is scoring points from objectives.

Anecdotally, for instance, I have a friend who plays Beasts of Chaos and floods the board with Ungor Raiders in MSU. They barely inflict any damage, but they're so numerous that he can win a decent share of games just through focusing on board control, even against "top meta" tournament lists. Does that count as "a reasonable means" of winning for BoC players?

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19 minutes ago, Kadeton said:

At the most basic level, every army does. You can defeat any opponent by controlling the objectives, and every army is capable of doing this. There are differing aspects of speed, resilience, damage output, body count and so on, and some battle plans favour certain army compositions over others, but in the end the only thing that matters is scoring points from objectives.

Anecdotally, for instance, I have a friend who plays Beasts of Chaos and floods the board with Ungor Raiders in MSU. They barely inflict any damage, but they're so numerous that he can win a decent share of games just through focusing on board control, even against "top meta" tournament lists. Does that count as "a reasonable means" of winning for BoC players?

Yea, but it’s basically a wargame. Can’t blame people for wanting to kill at least some stuff at some point. 
Also, any unit should run the risk of being killed, at least if focused upon by a solid chunk of the opposing army. Where’s the suspense in a technically unkillable unit?

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1 minute ago, Beastmaster said:

Yea, but it’s basically a wargame. Can’t blame people for wanting to kill at least some stuff at some point. 
Also, any unit should run the risk of being killed, at least if focused upon by a solid chunk of the opposing army. Where’s the suspense in a technically unkillable unit?

Yeah, totally. I certainly wouldn't be able to stomach playing something like that BoC army more than once, it's way too dull and grindy. I'm more interested in where we draw the line on what counts as "reasonable means". How hard do you have to work during the game, and how much can you be forced to compromise your vision of what you want your army to do, before it becomes "unreasonable"? Any army can technically win any game of AoS, but which armies do people specifically feel have no reasonable way of doing so?

I don't think we should have unkillable units, for sure. Nothing annoys me more than ham-fisted bodge rules like Morathi's "no more than 3 wounds per turn" rule, which is such a clear admission that the damage system doesn't work the way the designers want it to. Or absurd resilience like Gotrek's, which might as well just say "This model is immune to damage" and save everyone a lot of dice rolling. But the fact remains that the inability to kill certain units does not preclude any army from winning the game.

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6 hours ago, Kadeton said:

At the most basic level, every army does. You can defeat any opponent by controlling the objectives, and every army is capable of doing this. There are differing aspects of speed, resilience, damage output, body count and so on, and some battle plans favour certain army compositions over others, but in the end the only thing that matters is scoring points from objectives.

Anecdotally, for instance, I have a friend who plays Beasts of Chaos and floods the board with Ungor Raiders in MSU. They barely inflict any damage, but they're so numerous that he can win a decent share of games just through focusing on board control, even against "top meta" tournament lists. Does that count as "a reasonable means" of winning for BoC players?

No, many armies have no reasonable expectation, no matter what they do, at holding objectives against another army.

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1 hour ago, stratigo said:

No, many armies have no reasonable expectation, no matter what they do, at holding objectives against another army.

Well, that's what I'm asking. Which ones, and against which armies, and why? Let's talk about some specific examples.

People tend to talk about these things in terms of definitive absolutes, as though winning is literally impossible in some matchups. Since I've personally seen games where the "worst" armies (BoC, BoK) beat the "best" armies (Seraphon, Kharadrons) I know that's pure tosh. Yes, the odds are heavily stacked against them and they will lose far more often than they win - but that's not the same thing as not being able to win.

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2 hours ago, NinthMusketeer said:

Having the odds stacked heavily against you just due to choice of army sounds rather unreasonable to me.

Good start. I think everyone would agree with that at some level. So the question becomes: how heavily?

At what point do you personally think it becomes unreasonable? If you only win 45% of your games? 40%?

From what I've seen of the various stats thrown around on here, the worst armies in the game are languishing around the 40% win rate in tournaments - they're winning 2 in 5 games on average against random opponents at the competitive level. That seems a long way from "unwinnable" to me.

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10 minutes ago, Kadeton said:

Good start. I think everyone would agree with that at some level. So the question becomes: how heavily?

At what point do you personally think it becomes unreasonable? If you only win 45% of your games? 40%?

From what I've seen of the various stats thrown around on here, the worst armies in the game are languishing around the 40% win rate in tournaments - they're winning 2 in 5 games on average against random opponents at the competitive level. That seems a long way from "unwinnable" to me.

We also need to factor in popularity since the number of players matter when measuring outcomes. For example, an unpopular army is more likely to be used by a player who is stubbornly trying to make their preferred army work at all cost whereas a popular meta-chaser build will attract people who just want to win and will use whatever is the most powerful army. The former might inflate the number of wins whereas the latter will usually deflate the number of wins. 

In addition to popularity + win/loss ratio, consistency matter a great deal too. As in, you can barely snatch a win or you can steamroll everyone and do it over and over again. 

The top tier army all rate highly on all their factors. Having low tier armies which manage the odd win here and there does not show they're a viable army. In short, how you win needs to be factored in. I believe there is a platform in development trying to solve this for AoS (saw it on one of thehonestwargamer YT vids).

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10 minutes ago, pnkdth said:

Having low tier armies which manage the odd win here and there does not show they're a viable army.

This sounds like you have quite a specific definition of "viable". Could you expand on what you mean by that?

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There are three tiers in AoS

-Shelf tier

-Playable tier

-Broken tier

Armies cannot play against an army in a higher tier what so ever unless the higher tier army tries to lose. Imagine trying to play Sylvaneth (shelf) vs Beastclaw (playable). It would be a one sided slaughter unless the ogor player made an all grot list. However the gap is even wider between playable and broken. It is impossible for an army that isn't broken to fight

-Kroak-nado

-Teclis castle

-Tzeentch

Just simply isn't possible unless the players make huge mistakes and forget their laundry list of special rules

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12 minutes ago, Cronotekk said:

Imagine trying to play Sylvaneth (shelf) vs Beastclaw (playable).

Interestingly, I've played that exact matchup as the Beastclaws, and was as surprised as anyone when the Sylvaneth alpha-strike basically crippled my army in the first turn and went on to win the game.

Later that tournament, I absolutely smashed a Teclis castle with my Beastclaws. It was one of the most one-sided games I've ever played.

Could that Sylvaneth list have taken down that Lumineth list? I don't know. But I hope you'll understand when I give your statements about "impossible" cross-tier matchups a resounding HMMMMM.

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6 hours ago, Kadeton said:

Well, that's what I'm asking. Which ones, and against which armies, and why? Let's talk about some specific examples.

People tend to talk about these things in terms of definitive absolutes, as though winning is literally impossible in some matchups. Since I've personally seen games where the "worst" armies (BoC, BoK) beat the "best" armies (Seraphon, Kharadrons) I know that's pure tosh. Yes, the odds are heavily stacked against them and they will lose far more often than they win - but that's not the same thing as not being able to win.

yes, it is indeed technically possible to win a game as beasts against sreaphon. If the seraphon player is deliberately throwing the game, or you are rolling the same odds to win millions in a casino. Sure. 

 

11 minutes ago, Kadeton said:

Interestingly, I've played that exact matchup as the Beastclaws, and was as surprised as anyone when the Sylvaneth alpha-strike basically crippled my army in the first turn and went on to win the game.

Later that tournament, I absolutely smashed a Teclis castle with my Beastclaws. It was one of the most one-sided games I've ever played.

Could that Sylvaneth list have taken down that Lumineth list? I don't know. But I hope you'll understand when I give your statements about "impossible" cross-tier matchups a resounding HMMMMM.

 

Yes, you alone are the great player able to put the rest of the community to shame and beat the best armies and players in the game withany army you choose to take.

 

Do you also regularly win the lottery?

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20 minutes ago, stratigo said:

yes, it is indeed technically possible to win a game as beasts against sreaphon. If the seraphon player is deliberately throwing the game, or you are rolling the same odds to win millions in a casino. Sure. 

Yes, you alone are the great player able to put the rest of the community to shame and beat the best armies and players in the game withany army you choose to take.

Do you also regularly win the lottery?

I don't get this comment. It's two datapoints with a 50% win rate. Doesn't paint @Kadeton as a good or bad player.

Getting a few big hairy things into Teclis' face could end his T-posing quickly. Nowhere did Kadeton state how lucky the dicerolls or poor the placement by the opponent was.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like AoS's power creep, and think there is systemic unbalance, but no need for a personal attack.

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6 minutes ago, zilberfrid said:

I don't get this comment. It's two datapoints with a 50% win rate. Doesn't paint @Kadeton as a good or bad player.

Getting a few big hairy things into Teclis' face could end his T-posing quickly. Nowhere did Kadeton state how lucky the dicerolls or poor the placement by the opponent was.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like AoS's power creep, and think there is systemic unbalance, but no need for a personal attack.

I'm dead tired of people going "Ah, well I totally went to a tournament with my jank all dryads list and smashed everyone, thus the balance is fine". There's no point in this exchange unless Kade is just being contrary or earnestly thinks their ability to beat teclis that one time means balance is okay, and I have no patience for it. 

 

My eyes roll out of my head every time someone does this. It's a pointless exchange. It's based off one person's subjective experiences, ones that might not even be real. 

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