General Lumineth Realm Lords Rules Discussion

[BaylorCorvette]

I won't retype out what has been stated in this thread several times. But I will echo the biggest problem with LRL is the NPE they bring. Last weekend I competed in a two day, 5 game tournament. I ended up finishing 6th overall which is a bit better than I was anticipating, one of my wins was against LRL. There were three LRL lists, one finished 2nd, one finished 4th and the other finished in the lower half, but that list was both running Teclis and Eltharion and such was very light on bodies. 
The annoying thing with LRL is the opponents inability to interact with the game, ranging from auto cast spells to dishing out mortals (via spells or just about any unit on 5 or 6 to hit), the ability to Hero snipe without LoS and not caring what negative modifiers To Hit you have because you're just looking for mortals is very frustrating too. All of this is amplified by getting double turned by LRL. You basically don't play AoS for 30+ minutes if that happens.

Fortunately from all of the LRL leaks it looks like most of the new models that are coming aren't ridiculously powerful, so adding in unit variety will be a step away from the NPE. Obviously the meta lists will still exist and it will be very annoying to play against but LRL players that want to play something more casual will have a lot more units to pick from which is great.

[Landohammer]

12 minutes ago, whispersofblood said:

1) What this argument continuously fails to address is where is the accountability of the player base to learn something new and evolve. I would also point out that once arguments persistently break down to nebulous perspectives on on abstract ideas that the thing itself is probably fine and it is the viewer that must evolve and contend with reality. The reality is that nothing, and no combination of "NPE" in the faction in question is wholly new in itself and that what is happening is that people are letting their feelings bleed across multiple discrete aspects of this faction. How can you have a lack of agency but have outcomes which match your desires? Are you seriously arguing that LRL players are losing the game by their own choice? A "fair" distribution of rules? Who cares mate, factions get the rules they need to implement that narrative the designers want to show. 

2) You realize of course that Archaon and Nagash are better than Teclis and therefore cost more. This discussion has just continued to highlight for me that most people don't  know the warscrolls outside their primary faction well at all. The previous play who said Archaon was "Locked down", that's a ridiculous statement not only is it basically impossible, but what value does such an extreme corner case bring other than to colour a discussion which requires a deep understanding of the game with ill-feeling? And to be frank, I don't believe these things happened.

3) Dawnriders are good unit, a very specific unit that is good at the things its good at, and not very much else. The problem is people play on autopilot, fall into traps and then call the traps "NPE". That's unacceptable and we should be holding each other to a better standard than that. LRL aren't Tau, they don't put out that much range damage at all, its hyperbolic internet hearsay. Also, Ta'u are terrible in 40k. 80 Sentinels puts out 25 dmg for 1120 points, that is pathetic in this game. It is ridiculous that I have to keep debunking all of these objectively untrue statements. LRL just barely have enough to play the game (As in the game on the board, scoring points to win the game), their thing instead of dmg is constraining the opponent which if people here are to believed about their playing results seems to fail more often than not. Examples like "I couldn't do all the things I wanted to do, but I won the game regardless." Come on you must be having a laugh, that statement includes the premise that you don't need to do those things. People just lean on this they aren't OP statement so that they can't be held to task for providing actual evidence beyond their own alleged emotional state at the alleged time of play.

4) Some degree of people choose to build around a gimmick, but that isn't what the game is about. Most gimmicks are easy to dismantle, which is why most netlists only go 3-2 the majority of the time. They come up against a competent player and swiftly lose. If you build to a gimmick then that choice includes the assumptions that you can lose to gimmicks. As to how to interrupt LRL? Single model units, measuring ranges, thinking of ways to score points so that the LRL has to come out of their shell, force 2 Battleshock tests. You know... play the game. Frustration usually is the precursor for learning, and frequently passes when a person finds a path to their objective. 

We as a forum need to separate Negative Play Experience and Overpowered as two distinct things. You can be one or both. Tau is a good example of an army that (at least in 8th edition) provided NPE but wasn't necessarily OP.  Oldhammer Dwarfs were likely both, at least for a hot minute.

Negative Play Experience is, at the end of the day, an opinion. We can argue until we are blue in the face, but you are never going to convince me that those 10  games vs LRL  were fun and fair. I was literally there lol. Also I am primarily a Sylvaneth player so I have absolutely no issue with losing games. I do it quite a lot lol. 

But here is the kicker: I won MOST of those games. And I think overall LRL are an A-  faction at best (at least at the moment). But I find some of their mechanics damaging to the game and the popularity/volatility of this thread seems to support that opinion. 

 

[Khaedhras]

So, I'll start by saying that I'm a LRL collector and player. Of course, this means that I know and love my faction, and I'm obviously biased towards it. Nevertheless, I'll try to remain as objective as possible while giving my opinion.

The leitmotiv of the discussion, from my point of view, can be summed up as the LRL playstyle giving the impression of not being interactive for the opponent, and hence the claims of NPE. However, I believe that this issue causes very strong opinions and discussions because, in the end, we are moving into the territory of personal feelings towards something, which unavoidably steer the discussion into the terrain of completely subjective matters.

For instance, there are many like myself who do not feel that the army is not interactive for the opponent. I firmly believe that there are many ways to play against it and to circumvent the gimmicks. A few examples: kill Teclis ASAP, focus the Cathallar, play the long game with objectives. Managing to circumvent the entirety of the LRL playstyle is, in my opinion, an interaction by itself.

Nonetheless, there are many people here who don't believe the latter to be a valid form of interaction, and of course it is a valid opinion that should be listened to and respected. I can for sure empathize with the talk about Teclis+Cathallar+Syar, and understand many of the points that have been raised in the previous pages about auto-successes and denial of gameplay mechanics. As a matter of fact, in my previous paragraph I already mentioned these elements as something to consider vs LRL and it probably didn't come as strange that I mentioned those specific aspects - I can see why they come off as the most problematic, after all.

However, feelings and their validity are not the main point that I want to discuss with this rather lengthy block of text. I would like to shift the focus towards one issue that has not been pointed out so far (or at least, if it was spoken about, I have missed it, in which case I apologize). We have been playing the Teclis+Cathallar+Syar list... Because we didn't really have any other realistic options so far. When the army popped into existence, we were not expecting to have more units (+new battletome, etc) so near in the future. By all means, I pictured myself stuck with wardens, sentinels, and dawnriders for the foreseeable future. The Cathallar was effectively the only non-named hero in the Vanari roster - thus, the only one that could take artifacts and command traits. 

Obviously, I would refrain from throwing the most competitive lists and destructive combos against my friends or even against random people in a friendly environment within my LGS. After all, I'm a human being who doesn't feed on the suffering of other people nor on forcibly removing the fun out of my enemies' carcasses. And I think that many LRL players share my mentality, it has been repeatedly stated in this thread and in the LRL discussion forum. In that sense, it is my opinion that the talk about outright refusing to play vs LRL in friendly environments is unnecessary. As I'm able to empathize with the pleas against LRL, I'm sure that many of you who are reading this can also empathize with me when I say that some of the things that have been said about our beloved faction are hurtful, and to me, this one is the most hurtful one. In the end, people are reasonable, and communication is a key pillar in our society - if you have reservations about playing vs something in particular, why not try to talk and ask for something different instead of downright barring the possibility of having a fun match for both of the players? Many of us LRL would love to play a few matches with a different playstyle other than Teclis+Cathallar+Syar and test, say, the strength of a pure Alarith list. 

But as much as I love my mountainous (a)elves, it is not realistic to play them and expect to win matches in a semi-competitive or competitive environment. In the context of a tournament, I would expect everyone to bring their best and try to be top dog. As we say in Spain, I'll also go there holding a knife between my teeth - meaning, I'll give it my best and put up a fight to the best of my abilities and use very single trick I can get my hands on. After all, why would I put myself at a disadvantage knowingly and willingly when everyone else goes there with a "no quarter given nor asked" mentality? I don't know a single player who has gone to a tournament with a pure namarti list, with five runesons in their roster, or sporting stalliarch lords when petrifex elite was at their prime, after all.

My point is, the new units and scenery, apart from coming as a complete and unexpected surprise, are going to provide us with more options for list building. I am dying to get my hands on the new stuff and build a list based on Hurakan units and their movement shenanigans, or to start a list through a Lord Regent and a couple of heroes other than those we already had, for balance and diversity purposes. As many have stated before me, I don't think that this will be "everything we had + 41k other tricks". The points just won't allow for it, and most of the leaks for the new units don't point in the direction of the roster being bonkers. I firmly believe that in friendly environments, the potential NPE feelings for the faction can, should, and will disappear through the variety introduced by this new toolbox. Competitively speaking? Prepare for our best combos, as we will for yours - playing against each other's playstyles will be a different experience, but hopefully, a positive experience nonetheless.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk

[Lucky Snake Eyes]

18 minutes ago, whispersofblood said:

1) What this argument continuously fails to address is where is the accountability of the player base to learn something new and evolve. I would also point out that once arguments persistently break down to nebulous perspectives on on abstract ideas that the thing itself is probably fine and it is the viewer that must evolve and contend with reality. The reality is that nothing, and no combination of "NPE" in the faction in question is wholly new in itself and that what is happening is that people are letting their feelings bleed across multiple discrete aspects of this faction. How can you have a lack of agency but have outcomes which match your desires? Are you seriously arguing that LRL players are losing the game by their own choice? A "fair" distribution of rules? Who cares mate, factions get the rules they need to implement that narrative the designers want to show. 

2) You realize of course that Archaon and Nagash are better than Teclis and therefore cost more. This discussion has just continued to highlight for me that most people don't  know the warscrolls outside their primary faction well at all. The previous play who said Archaon was "Locked down", that's a ridiculous statement not only is it basically impossible, but what value does such an extreme corner case bring other than to colour a discussion which requires a deep understanding of the game with ill-feeling? And to be frank, I don't believe these things happened.

3) Dawnriders are good unit, a very specific unit that is good at the things its good at, and not very much else. The problem is people play on autopilot, fall into traps and then call the traps "NPE". That's unacceptable and we should be holding each other to a better standard than that. LRL aren't Tau, they don't put out that much range damage at all, its hyperbolic internet hearsay. Also, Ta'u are terrible in 40k. 80 Sentinels puts out 25 dmg for 1120 points, that is pathetic in this game. It is ridiculous that I have to keep debunking all of these objectively untrue statements. LRL just barely have enough to play the game (As in the game on the board, scoring points to win the game), their thing instead of dmg is constraining the opponent which if people here are to believed about their playing results seems to fail more often than not. Examples like "I couldn't do all the things I wanted to do, but I won the game regardless." Come on you must be having a laugh, that statement includes the premise that you don't need to do those things. People just lean on this they aren't OP statement so that they can't be held to task for providing actual evidence beyond their own alleged emotional state at the alleged time of play.

4) Some degree of people choose to build around a gimmick, but that isn't what the game is about. Most gimmicks are easy to dismantle, which is why most netlists only go 3-2 the majority of the time. They come up against a competent player and swiftly lose. If you build to a gimmick then that choice includes the assumptions that you can lose to gimmicks. As to how to interrupt LRL? Single model units, measuring ranges, thinking of ways to score points so that the LRL has to come out of their shell, force 2 Battleshock tests. You know... play the game. Frustration usually is the precursor for learning, and frequently passes when a person finds a path to their objective. 

So imma address some of this because i believe you're both missing some of the nuance the other is bringing to the discussion. I'll get the 40k comparison out of the way first because it's only tangentially related and because i used to be a tau player back when i played a lot of 40k. Tau where really good in 8th edition because competitive formats favoured killing power and killing based objectives, the edition change completely changed scoring to favour objective control (something tau struggle with) and made the board size significantly smaller making getting into melee easier, which also works against tau. Tau are bad because the game literally changed around them and besides comparing 40k and aos shooting is a poor comparison when in 40k almost everything has a ranged weapon and, cover is more readily available and look out sir outright denies shooting heroes instead of a -1 to hit (which sentinels don't care about since they fish for 5 and 6s anyways). The damage output of sentinels may be small but it's compensated by the range, ignoring line of sight and a good support spell (guiding light) to let them do that damage reliably to whatever they need to target. In a game where you can't outright deny their shooting you can kiss your support hero goodbye. 

As for player accountability to learn something new and evolve, what's their for say an ironjaws player to learn? They can only reasonable fit one or two single cast wizards in a list... against an army of all wizards. Their warchanta is great... but he has to stay close to melee units to buff them meaning he's within range of sentinels who don't care about line of sight or look out sir... The entire army has mediocre bravery so those 10 brutes are eating despair plus mountain call then cathalar shut down. It's not like ironjaws can't win, they can and do but what counterplay is their for an army that just has tools you yourself have no tools to counter? I've seen the ironjaws win, it was purely a game of using pigs to hold the lumineth back and scrape by a win on VP with next to nothing left alive. A win is a win but ****** what more could the man have done to not give up every auxiliary to his opponent? You imply in point 3 that people have no right to complain if they win, but that's a false notion. People enjoy the game in different ways, not everyone has fun in an uphill battle and for some people the fun is in making combos happen. So win or lose, watching your combo or even the basic mechanics of your army fall apart because of a matchup your army has no real tools against can be very disheartening. Things can feel bad without dominating a game man, some things just feel bad to play against, you can look to my earlier post where I rant about vanari for being copy pasted trash and praise the creativity of the temple units for my own feelings on lumineth. And yeah, their emotional state is arguably the most important factor, this is a game after all, the point of a game is to geta positive emotional state out of it.

as for point 4) yeah people choose to build around gimmicks... gimmicks that gw purposefully puts in and encourages us to use. But here's where I'll start agreeing with you more. Your right that a competent player can beat some scrub running a netlist, we saw a lot of that on the 40k side during the rise of the marine meta. It was pretty wild seeing the second market for marine stuff go wild. As for your tips against LRL? Well aside from the battleshock tip in which case you're gonna be eating a battleshock in return which is just bad for some armies, yeah this applies to most castles, it's just a shame most of these castles include enough damage to force your hand and enough chaff to walk onto objectives. Lumineth is on the weaker end of castle lists but seraphon is the prime example of this being a hard thing to beat. Sure measure ranges, but 30" covers a lot of the table so you gotta make sure that's damage your willing to take. Personal advice for anyone going against sentinels, have something scary in your army be a distraction carnifex as we say in 40k. If you have means of giving it MW saves or healing then use it to pressure the opponents bubble and just be a pincushion while literally anything else takes objectives. Sad truth is sacrificing key buff heroes is necessary to score points in this matchup and as unfun as that is for some people it's the cost of beating lumineth in their current state. Lando needs to understand that yeah some armies require a playstle you might not enjoy doing if you want to win. But on the other hand approaching teh game with a "get good" attitude can be pretty toxic to a community and the skill gap required for some armies to reliably beat lumineth reaches a point of kinda being unreasonable in a casual setting.

And man as someone whose used nagash in both LoN and OBR, he is not comparable to archaon or even teclis. Nagash has the melee output of a 300pt hero, fair enough he's a wizard hero, and hes casts 8 spells at a good casting bonus. But he's less wounds than teclis with a worse after save (6+ compared to 5+) his spell list is smaller than Teclis', his casting degrades unlike Teclis', his save is better that much is true and he does have a table wide heal... but your left with not many units to heal due to his cost. His command ability is decent so at least there's that... in LoN who are starved for cp and would rather use it to revive a unit or OBR where taking him vastly hampers your RDP generation and reroll 1s to hit and save are readily available by other means...  Nagash seems like a good warscroll until you realize Teclis does the whole mega mage thing consistently despite any damage he takes and archaon has a warscroll that slots more elegantly into the multiple factions he can join. Nagash tries to do both but is kinda kneecapped by still following aos 1.0 design philosophies. Nagash just needs an update to make him less antithetical to his factions and suffer less for his low wound/point ration so he can be impactful for longer in games and I hope that comes either in BR: Teclis as part of headline fight or in the upcoming gravelords book.

 

[Lucky Snake Eyes]

55 minutes ago, BaylorCorvette said:

I won't retype out what has been stated in this thread several times. But I will echo the biggest problem with LRL is the NPE they bring. Last weekend I competed in a two day, 5 game tournament. I ended up finishing 6th overall which is a bit better than I was anticipating, one of my wins was against LRL. There were three LRL lists, one finished 2nd, one finished 4th and the other finished in the lower half, but that list was both running Teclis and Eltharion and such was very light on bodies. 
The annoying thing with LRL is the opponents inability to interact with the game, ranging from auto cast spells to dishing out mortals (via spells or just about any unit on 5 or 6 to hit), the ability to Hero snipe without LoS and not caring what negative modifiers To Hit you have because you're just looking for mortals is very frustrating too. All of this is amplified by getting double turned by LRL. You basically don't play AoS for 30+ minutes if that happens.

Fortunately from all of the LRL leaks it looks like most of the new models that are coming aren't ridiculously powerful, so adding in unit variety will be a step away from the NPE. Obviously the meta lists will still exist and it will be very annoying to play against but LRL players that want to play something more casual will have a lot more units to pick from which is great.

Lol I've heard some complaints locally that a lumineth double turn is 30 minutes of hero phases and I'd laugh if LoN hero phases didn't take just as long for all those invocations.

[NinthMusketeer]

I have a basic question:

What out of the new stuff is as bad or worse than Light of Eltharion, Teclis, or Sentinels for gameplay experience?

[kahadin]

So, I just want to throw my 2 cents in.

I played my first game against lumineth with blades of Khorne blind (I knew nothing out lumineth at all). I was in a bad mood all game and was complaining about how unfun and busted they were. I then summoned 10 fleshhounds and handily won the game on points. I could have probably summoned a bloodthirster or 30 bloodletters in a very fair and fun to play against manner, but I really needed the flesh hounds reroll charge, speed and model count.

My second game against them I played Tzeentch and shutdown all their magic. I was in a very good mood this game and laughed as my flamers burned all of the elves. It was super funny when the spirit of the mountain killed himself by charging my flamers and taking so many mortal wounds from hurting them. Super fair and super fun for me. I assume my opponent was having just as much fun at the time. I did have an unfun moment when I realized my pink horrors would sit out the whole game on my objective.

My third game was with new slaanesh. This was another unfun win for me. I was very disappointed with my bravery and the playstyle of new Slaanesh, but I'm pretty sure it would have been fun playing against Kharodrons or something and I'd like new slaanesh.

I'm getting ready to play LrL a fourth time and I'm sure it will be unfun as usual, I'm hoping my opponent instead brings Nagash grimghasts or Ossiarch bonereapers (Petrefex of course). Something fun to play against that promotes a positive play experience.

[Lucky Snake Eyes]

11 minutes ago, NinthMusketeer said:

I have a basic question:

What out of the new stuff is as bad or worse than Light of Eltharion, Teclis, or Sentinels for gameplay experience?

Nothing is worse at least not in my own opinion. But I can see where at first glance the hurikan movement shenanigans feels like it'll make them untouchable. Which it won't but people will still see a 24" move and shout broken. Personally I find giving an army of all wizards more ways to buff casting can be a bit of a feels bad, especially for armies who don't have many unbinds, they'll save them for things the wizards are casting because teclis' 10+ cvs are too high only to have every wizard rolling high thanks to better reliability. Loreseeker is gonna definitely cause some salt tho if him getting 40k style obsec is true since it's a concept that hasn't been applied to aos before.

[BaylorCorvette]

50 minutes ago, Khaedhras said:

 

For instance, there are many like myself who do not feel that the army is not interactive for the opponent. I firmly believe that there are many ways to play against it and to circumvent the gimmicks. A few examples: kill Teclis ASAP, focus the Cathallar, play the long game with objectives. Managing to circumvent the entirety of the LRL playstyle is, in my opinion, an interaction by itself.

 

I play in competitive tournaments, my most recent tournament was a 2 day event this past weekend that saw Lumineth go 2nd & 4th overall. "Kill Teclis" is easier said then done. If you don't take the first turn and kill him he then has protection of Teclis making him MUCH tankier. On top of that he can burn aetherquartz to have a 3+ save and then all out defense for re-rolling ones and that's assuming you can get to him, generally he will be screened good at least early on. My match up this past weekend I was able to dictate turn order and I took the first turn and was able to wiggle my Chaos Lord on Manticore with Sword and Lance to hit Teclis on an Alpha Strike. Despite the fact that I was able to make the Chaos Lord fight twice AND he had the Chaos Warshrine prayer to re-roll all Hits and Wounds, Teclis survived with 3 wounds remaining and that was without protection of Teclis.

I agree killing the Cathallar isn't that difficult.

Play the long game isn't exactly super easy either. For instance in this past weekends tournament when I played against Lumineth, I was able to squeak out a victory on Focal Points, but at the end of T4 I literally had nothing left in my starting army, thankfully Khorne summoning got me enough bodies to zone out and take objectives on T5 to win it. However the long game isn't super easy when LRL have archers dealing mortal wounds on 5 & 6 and not needing LoS and Teclis using Spell Portal to nuke nearly your entire army with mortal wounds via Searing White Light.

Having played against LRL in a competitive two day tournament and winning my one match up against them, I will say they are (obviously) beatable, you just have to try and play the objectives and understand that Teclis does what he wants when it comes to the magic phase and there really isn't any way around that, in addition to the LRL player being able to target what they want most of the time by utilizing Spell Portal and Archers.

I do think after seeing a lot of the leaks of the new units and for the most part don't seem over the top it will be good for the LRL faction as a whole. As mentioned LRL only have so many ways to be played currently, kind of similar to Slaanesh last year. However by pretty much doubling its army selection it will allow for much more variety of builds.

[The Red King]

I'm not a tournament player and I dont love or hate LRL but from a layman's perspective this thread looks really familiar. Invariably when something is OP (tzeentch flamers, Petrifex OBR, etc.) You get the same defense "learn to play around it, get better, stop whining" and, again invariably, GW comes in a few months later and nerfs it because as much as "mob balance" is probably a bad idea, usually when a majority of the player base says the same thing is too strong, they're right.

[Ganigumo]

3 minutes ago, NinthMusketeer said:

I have a basic question:

What out of the new stuff is as bad or worse than Light of Eltharion, Teclis, or Sentinels for gameplay experience?

I'm not gonna speculate on stuff we haven't seen yet, as some of the rules could be absurd if they get pushed (any kind of pile-in bonus on the 'roos will be awful, it'll be like old skinks retreating instead of fighting) but Move Like the Wind. I'm in the camp that stopping pile-ins IS NPE, but Move like the wind is like blocking pile-ins, but I still have to move the 60 grots anyways. 

A lot of things in the game are NPE, and NPE can roughly be broken down into two categories; reducing interactivity, and preventing the opponent from being able to play the game. That said just because something is NPE doesn't mean it doesn't have a place in the game, these kinds of effects can often add interesting twists on the game that needs to be planned for and strategized around, as an example for blocking pile-ins you need to ensure you aren't getting your unit tagged on the side, and make sure you charge deep. The problems arise when you're putting these effects on overpowered units, or compounding them. For example. Lumineth have access to double activations, total eclipse, and Move like the wind, in order to properly engage these units you need to engage in only 1 combat at a time, charge deep, and ration CP, all at the same time.

There are plenty of other armies with NPE, Hearthguard deathstars and GK on Terrorgeist (also old slaanesh) are  good examples since they fight first, fight twice, and obliterate anything near them, if your army relies on combat you just have to avoid them or throw things into the grinder. Magic doms like Kroak, Nagash, and Teclis (also sort of LoC). The worst part of magic doms isn't their casting (although kroak is way undercosted) its the fact that they pretty much completely invalidate the opponent's magic as well. GW doesn't pay enough attention to how these abilities compound to create situations where the answer is to just walk into the obvious trap because the only other option is not to play.

tl;dr NPE abilities aren't bad by default, they force you to play differently, but when too many are present lots of armies can't manage to play around them all so they just have to walk into it which is what makes the game unfun. 

[Mutton]

3 minutes ago, The Red King said:

I'm not a tournament player and I dont love or hate LRL but from a layman's perspective this thread looks really familiar. Invariably when something is OP (tzeentch flamers, Petrifex OBR, etc.) You get the same defense "learn to play around it, get better, stop whining" and, again invariably, GW comes in a few months later and nerfs it because as much as "mob balance" is probably a bad idea, usually when a majority of the player base says the same thing is too strong, they're right.

Players are good at identifying problems. They're very bad at finding solutions for them.

[whispersofblood]

1 hour ago, Lucky Snake Eyes said:

1. So imma address some of this because i believe you're both missing some of the nuance the other is bringing to the discussion. I'll get the 40k comparison out of the way first because it's only tangentially related and because i used to be a tau player back when i played a lot of 40k. Tau where really good in 8th edition because competitive formats favoured killing power and killing based objectives, the edition change completely changed scoring to favour objective control (something tau struggle with) and made the board size significantly smaller making getting into melee easier, which also works against tau. Tau are bad because the game literally changed around them and besides comparing 40k and aos shooting is a poor comparison when in 40k almost everything has a ranged weapon and, cover is more readily available and look out sir outright denies shooting heroes instead of a -1 to hit (which sentinels don't care about since they fish for 5 and 6s anyways). The damage output of sentinels may be small but it's compensated by the range, ignoring line of sight and a good support spell (guiding light) to let them do that damage reliably to whatever they need to target. In a game where you can't outright deny their shooting you can kiss your support hero goodbye. 

2. As for player accountability to learn something new and evolve, what's their for say an ironjaws player to learn? They can only reasonable fit one or two single cast wizards in a list... against an army of all wizards. Their warchanta is great... but he has to stay close to melee units to buff them meaning he's within range of sentinels who don't care about line of sight or look out sir... The entire army has mediocre bravery so those 10 brutes are eating despair plus mountain call then cathalar shut down. It's not like ironjaws can't win, they can and do but what counterplay is their for an army that just has tools you yourself have no tools to counter? I've seen the ironjaws win, it was purely a game of using pigs to hold the lumineth back and scrape by a win on VP with next to nothing left alive. A win is a win but ****** what more could the man have done to not give up every auxiliary to his opponent? You imply in point 3 that people have no right to complain if they win, but that's a false notion. People enjoy the game in different ways, not everyone has fun in an uphill battle and for some people the fun is in making combos happen. So win or lose, watching your combo or even the basic mechanics of your army fall apart because of a matchup your army has no real tools against can be very disheartening. Things can feel bad without dominating a game man, some things just feel bad to play against, you can look to my earlier post where I rant about vanari for being copy pasted trash and praise the creativity of the temple units for my own feelings on lumineth. And yeah, their emotional state is arguably the most important factor, this is a game after all, the point of a game is to geta positive emotional state out of it.

3)  yeah people choose to build around gimmicks... gimmicks that gw purposefully puts in and encourages us to use. But here's where I'll start agreeing with you more. Your right that a competent player can beat some scrub running a netlist, we saw a lot of that on the 40k side during the rise of the marine meta. It was pretty wild seeing the second market for marine stuff go wild. As for your tips against LRL? Well aside from the battleshock tip in which case you're gonna be eating a battleshock in return which is just bad for some armies, yeah this applies to most castles, it's just a shame most of these castles include enough damage to force your hand and enough chaff to walk onto objectives. Lumineth is on the weaker end of castle lists but seraphon is the prime example of this being a hard thing to beat.

4) Sure measure ranges, but 30" covers a lot of the table so you gotta make sure that's damage your willing to take. Personal advice for anyone going against sentinels, have something scary in your army be a distraction carnifex as we say in 40k. If you have means of giving it MW saves or healing then use it to pressure the opponents bubble and just be a pincushion while literally anything else takes objectives. Sad truth is sacrificing key buff heroes is necessary to score points in this matchup and as unfun as that is for some people it's the cost of beating lumineth in their current state. Lando needs to understand that yeah some armies require a playstle you might not enjoy doing if you want to win. But on the other hand approaching teh game with a "get good" attitude can be pretty toxic to a community and the skill gap required for some armies to reliably beat lumineth reaches a point of kinda being unreasonable in a casual setting.

5)And man as someone whose used nagash in both LoN and OBR, he is not comparable to archaon or even teclis. Nagash has the melee output of a 300pt hero, fair enough he's a wizard hero, and hes casts 8 spells at a good casting bonus. But he's less wounds than teclis with a worse after save (6+ compared to 5+) his spell list is smaller than Teclis', his casting degrades unlike Teclis', his save is better that much is true and he does have a table wide heal... but your left with not many units to heal due to his cost. His command ability is decent so at least there's that... in LoN who are starved for cp and would rather use it to revive a unit or OBR where taking him vastly hampers your RDP generation and reroll 1s to hit and save are readily available by other means...  Nagash seems like a good warscroll until you realize Teclis does the whole mega mage thing consistently despite any damage he takes and archaon has a warscroll that slots more elegantly into the multiple factions he can join. Nagash tries to do both but is kinda kneecapped by still following aos 1.0 design philosophies. Nagash just needs an update to make him less antithetical to his factions and suffer less for his low wound/point ration so he can be impactful for longer in games and I hope that comes either in BR: Teclis as part of headline fight or in the upcoming gravelords book.

 

1. DMG isn't compensated by range, doing 4 wounds to a warchanter means you are eating the dmg from his buff. Either an attack kills something or it doesn't. And, most of these heroes are cheap enough to take a spare, and good enough that even if the model isn't killed 2 provides some tangible benefits. This is the adapt and overcome phase of the game, lists don't get to remain static. Lambent light is an 18" spell meaning you are putting your vulnerable piece in range of the spell more often than not. This is what I mean by player accountability. 

2. Well models have relative value. If you buddy plays LRL maybe take warchanters instead of Spell Casters, if you are going to a tournament you are hedging anyway there are lots of situation in which a teleport isn't useful and many that you can't be sure you'll get the spell off. A lot of armies can spec into a magic dom if they so choose, its just by their nature that LRL rock a lot of Unbinds and potentially several at +1. Teclis only has +1 to unbind, and requires range. I don't think he could be much worse at unbinding than that and remain Teclis. The Warchanter needs to be within 12" at the start of the hero phase which means it could be anywhere between 18" and 21" away from the unit that you want to hit with the buffed unit. But, what is the alternative here? That these sorts of great buff pieces should be invulnerable and risk free? Don't just say of course not, offer a tangible alternative.

I don't know what to make of your example. How else could a Hammer v. Anvil game go? In the end the Hammer won. Again, what is the alternative that is preferable here? I play Orruks I have probably about 4000 points sitting in my flat. I'm not sweating about hand of gork mate, it is nice but the faction is pretty fast. It also can include 2 free Might Destroyers moves, and has lots of CP generation available. No one should cry for poor Orruks. 

3. The more you lean into a gimmick the harder the snap back is, that is a fundamental principle of building into a skew. What you are advocating for is a lack of consequence. You as the designer of your army get almost complete design freedom, what comes with that freedom is the consequence of writing yourself into a corner. If you build to rock you necessarily will have an uphill battle against paper. The game doesn't have to be that way, YOU chose to be that way. The game does need to have reasons not to skew though and besides a few corner case most skew lists aren't very good.

I utterly reject the notion that a game of AoS is against your opponent's army. You are playing attempting to gain as many VPs for yourself and restrain how many your opponent is gaining. You each use your models and rules in creative ways to achieve this. Sure it is narrative for Orruks to charge headlong into their opponents, Orruks also mostly lose in the lore unless they have armies much larger than the enemy. So if you play that way... guess what the game mostly follows that narrative. It sounds like your friend was cunnin' and used his models creatively and won the game, that is what they are supposed to do. 

4. This is just it, people want to spam the most "efficient" units in their book. Here is the stark reality you need to fill roles, or you won't have the tools to play against proper armies. Monsters are good, they don't take Battleshock and you can clip units reducing attacks. Some monsters have bad warscrolls, this is also true. Cheap chaff is good you can secure objectives for a low investment. The answer here is to grow, learn, and read not to moan that the game should move to you.

5. Nagash has a the same number of Wounds as Teclis, a 3+ save, 4+ against MW, a 6+ DPR from the word go , cast 8 spells at a value of >10 often than not, and can Heal. I would say they hit about the same in combat. Nagash is also generally in armies that don't have issues with bodies, and such needs to impact the ability of those armies to hold objectives. He also has the problem of having to go into multiple books at the same time. To get anywhere near Nagash Teclis needs to cast a spell, and use a consumable resource. Nagash is firmly and obviously objectively better, he also has access to about a million endless spells. 

@The Red King There is an important distinction here those armies were winning several open events, repeatedly. I think LRL have won, a single event in France last summer.

Edited March 26, 2021 by whispersofblood

[BaylorCorvette]

2 minutes ago, Ganigumo said:

I'm not gonna speculate on stuff we haven't seen yet, as some of the rules could be absurd if they get pushed (any kind of pile-in bonus on the 'roos will be awful, it'll be like old skinks retreating instead of fighting) but Move Like the Wind. I'm in the camp that stopping pile-ins IS NPE, but Move like the wind is like blocking pile-ins, but I still have to move the 60 grots anyways. 

From the leaks I've seen, for the most part the new LRL stuff looks alright balance wise. The only thing that sticks out as being crazy is the named flying fox. 24" movement, 12" move after shooting. 10w, 5+ save, 5+ FNP, -2" to enemy pile ins within 3", After charging 1MW and -1 to hit for enemies within 3" on a 3+, D3 MWs to anything it flew over, Bow attack profile is 18", 4 attacks, 2+ to hit, 3+ to wound, -3 rend, D3 Damage. However it is 300 points, so it is one expensive dude.

[madmac]

8 minutes ago, The Red King said:

I'm not a tournament player and I dont love or hate LRL but from a layman's perspective this thread looks really familiar. Invariably when something is OP (tzeentch flamers, Petrifex OBR, etc.) You get the same defense "learn to play around it, get better, stop whining" and, again invariably, GW comes in a few months later and nerfs it because as much as "mob balance" is probably a bad idea, usually when a majority of the player base says the same thing is too strong, they're right.

When an army is obviously OP its also almost inevitably tearing up the tournament scene, which is very evidently not the case with LRL, who are played heavily in tournaments to mostly middling effect. They do above average, nothing really special. They are far from being the strongest army in the game, which is why even this thread is full of "Power doesn't matter!" disclaimers from the people venting about Lumineth,  and why seemingly 90% of the anecdotes in this thread about their horrible play experiences end with the LRL player losing for some mysterious reason.

I think the most you can say about LRL balance-wise is that even if one or two units are arguably OP or undercosted in a vacuum, it's not enough to elevate the army to being truly OP overall. As it is, I suspect that just nerfing Sentinels and/or Teclis would cause their competitive performance to nose-dive into lowish-tier.  The new units they are getting may allow them to adapt, or not, none of them that I've seen seem particularly scary. 

 

[The Red King]

1 minute ago, madmac said:

When an army is obviously OP its also almost inevitably tearing up the tournament scene, which is very evidently not the case with LRL, who are played heavily in tournaments to mostly middling effect. They do above average, nothing really special. They are far from being the strongest army in the game, which is why even this thread is full of "Power doesn't matter!" disclaimers from the people venting about Lumineth,  and why seemingly 90% of the anecdotes in this thread about their horrible play experiences end with the LRL player losing for some mysterious reason.

I think the most you can say about LRL balance-wise is that even if one or two units are arguably OP or undercosted in a vacuum, it's not enough to elevate the army to being truly OP overall. As it is, I suspect that just nerfing Sentinels and/or Teclis would cause their competitive performance to nose-dive into lowish-tier.  The new units they are getting may allow them to adapt, or not, none of them that I've seen seem particularly scary. 

 

I tried to qoute just the last bit. Sounds like, and we probably agree, atrocious INTERNAL balance then. So it seems they need work in your estimation as well.

[Indecisive]

20 hours ago, Athrawes said:

If my opponent uses a command ability to make their unit ignore a battleshock test that I worked hard to set up, and it costs me the game, how is that fun for me? If my opponent uses a command ability to make a unit pile in and attack twice, how is THAT fun for me?

The answer, it's not, and it's not supposed to be. 

These NPE witchhunts are getting ridiculous. Wanting every rule to be fun for both you and your opponent makes the game boring, and is unreasonable, and I believe impossible to achieve while maintain a dynamic game full of 20+ distinct armies and even more playstyles. 

 

Definitely.

Sitting and watching someone pump a brick of Evocators with Gav and shoving them up my nose is hardly peak interactivity. 

[Feii]

38 minutes ago, Mutton said:

Players are good at identifying problems. They're very bad at finding solutions for them.

is that Maro speaking :O 

[Lucky Snake Eyes]

7 minutes ago, whispersofblood said:

1. DMG isn't compensated by range, doing 4 wounds to a warchanter means you are eating the dmg from his buff. Either an attack kills something or it doesn't. And, most of these heroes are cheap enough to take a spare, and good enough that even if the model isn't killed 2 provides some tangible benefits. This is the adapt and overcome phase of the game, lists don't get to remain static. Lambent light is an 18" spell meaning you are putting your vulnerable piece in range of the spell more often than not. This is what I mean by player accountability. 

2. Well models have relative value. If you buddy plays LRL maybe take warchanters instead of Spell Casters, if you are going to a tournament you are hedging anyway there are lots of situation in which a teleport isn't useful and many that you can't be sure you'll get the spell off. A lot of armies can spec into a magic dom if they so choose, its just by their nature that LRL rock a lot of Unbinds and potentially several at +1. Teclis only has +1 to unbind, and requires range. I don't think he could be much worse at unbinding than that and remain Teclis. The Warchanter needs to be within 12" at the start of the hero phase which means it could be anywhere between 18" and 21" away from the unit that you want to hit with the buffed unit. But, what is the alternative here? That these sorts of great buff pieces should be invulnerable and risk free? Don't just say of course not, offer a tangible alternative.

I don't know what to make of your example. How else could a Hammer v. Anvil game go? In the end the Hammer won. Again, what is the alternative that is preferable here? I play Orruks I have probably about 4000 points sitting in my flat. I'm not sweating about hand of gork mate, it is nice but the faction is pretty fast. It also can include 2 free Might Destroyers moves, and has lots of CP generation available. No one should cry for poor Orruks. 

3. The more you lean into a gimmick the harder the snap back is, that is a fundamental principle of building into a skew. What you are advocating for is a lack of consequence. You as the designer of your army get almost complete design freedom, what comes with that freedom is the consequence of writing yourself into a corner. If you build to rock you necessarily will have an uphill battle against paper. The game doesn't have to be that way, YOU chose to be that way. The game does need to have reasons not to skew though and besides a few corner case most skew lists aren't very good.

I utterly reject the notion that a game of AoS is against your opponent's army. You are playing attempting to gain as many VPs for yourself and restrain how many your opponent is gaining. You each use your models and rules in creative ways to achieve this. Sure it is narrative for Orruks to charge headlong into their opponents, Orruks also mostly lose in the lore unless they have armies much larger than the enemy. So if you play that way... guess what the game mostly follows that narrative. It sounds like your friend was cunnin' and used his models creatively and won the game, that is what they are supposed to do. 

4. This is just it, people want to spam the most "efficient" units in their book. Here is the stark reality you need to fill roles, or you won't have the tools to play against proper armies. Monsters are good, they don't take Battleshock and you can clip units reducing attacks. Some monsters have bad warscrolls, this is also true. Cheap chaff is good you can secure objectives for a low investment. The answer here is to grow, learn, and read not to moan that the game should move to you.

5. Nagash has a the same number of Wounds as Teclis, a 3+ save, 4+ against MW, a 6+ DPR from the word go , cast 8 spells at a value of >10 often than not, and can Heal. I would say they hit about the same in combat. Nagash is also generally in armies that don't have issues with bodies, and such needs to impact the ability of those armies to hold objectives. He also has the problem of having to go into multiple books at the same time. To get anywhere near Nagash Teclis needs to cast a spell, and use a consumable resource. Nagash is firmly and obviously objectively better, he also has access to about a million endless spells. 

1) spell portal is in like most LRL lists going around the local meta, so teclis isn't exposing himself most of the time to lambent light and searing light. Sure there's a chance the 5 wound buff hero only takes 4, but in my experience it's rarely that low. Yeah lists aren't static, but some armies don't have a lot of options to vary up those lists.

2) risk free buff pieces is not what I'm advocating for but you said yourself the warchanter by the end of the turn is at best 21" away from the unit he buffed, and if your using said unit to hold back the enemy castle from an objective that means the archer with 30" range is probably in range or a short move away from hitting that warchanter. I'm not saying support heroes need to be harder to kill, but I am saying there should be a better way of keeping them alive than staying 36" away from the fight, because many support heroes don't have that kinda range to buff. Yeah my buddy that i used for the ecample won his game by walling out the enemy but at the same time isn't it kinda strange when he had to master the movement phase and pray to the dice while all his opponent needed to do was move forward and "point and click" targets with impressive range with no worry for unbinds or his opponent getting cover or saves?

3) Sure ****** is gonna suck when your gimmick is broken, but man do some armies just not have the option of dodging gimmicks. Fyreslayers is a good example, another friend of mine runs them and the army is so reliant on heroes in general that sentinels have a field day. Sure there's a relic for a 4+ save against spells but once the slow moving heroes are riddled with arrows the lumineth player can start taking the fight to the duardin. And yeah I never implied the game was about fighting your opponents army, it's always been about scoring? At what point do I say you need to kill off your opponents army to win? All I'm saying is you can find the game unfun despite the win.

4) Not every army has good monsters and not every army has cheap chaff, and sure cheap chaff is great but if their bravery sucks all it takes is a few dead from sentinels to force a battleshock that hopefully isn't made worse by mountain call (i'm bad at remembering spell names but it's the bravery debuff one) and now your forced to make a decision (provided a hero is close enough) to spend 1-2 cp keeping them around. This is actually the niche use i see dawnriders in, archers damage objective holders to force a battleshock while dawnriders double move onto it. Didn't even need to charge and risk other combats because the battleshock gave them the model count to take it.

5) he doesn't get the 4+ and 6+ against mortals, his casting degrades unlike teclis, LoN has no problems with bodies but like i said CP is a problem for them and nagash isn't the fastest old man in the realms. As for OBR sure 40 mortek is only 440pts, but they're slow and need RDP to go faster or use their rerolls. RDP being a resource you only get 1 of from nagash (plus d3 if you cast arcane command) when you take nagash in OBR you actively are making a choice to hinder yourself when it comes to access to teh resource that makes OBR as good as it is, Nagash is antithetical to their design by nature of eating up points that are better used on more cheaper heroes or katakros. Nagash doesn't even get direct damage spells in OBR, he gets some decent to great utility spells tho. As for endless spells... newsflash teclis gets access to just as many and is more likely to have the points to spare for them.

[Lucky Snake Eyes]

28 minutes ago, madmac said:

When an army is obviously OP its also almost inevitably tearing up the tournament scene, which is very evidently not the case with LRL, who are played heavily in tournaments to mostly middling effect. They do above average, nothing really special. They are far from being the strongest army in the game, which is why even this thread is full of "Power doesn't matter!" disclaimers from the people venting about Lumineth,  and why seemingly 90% of the anecdotes in this thread about their horrible play experiences end with the LRL player losing for some mysterious reason.

I think the most you can say about LRL balance-wise is that even if one or two units are arguably OP or undercosted in a vacuum, it's not enough to elevate the army to being truly OP overall. As it is, I suspect that just nerfing Sentinels and/or Teclis would cause their competitive performance to nose-dive into lowish-tier.  The new units they are getting may allow them to adapt, or not, none of them that I've seen seem particularly scary. 

 

Yeah something can be underpowered and still feel like ****** to play against. Personally for me it's how lazy vanari are with their sunmetal rule. I mention in my initial post in this thread that the reason they drain the fun out of the game for me isn't because of their mediocre damage output, it's because I'm never rolling saves when my opponent is running teclis and all vanari. Sure high rend exists but it's never across an entire army. Meanwhile Vanari don't care how much you debuff their to hit or wound, they only care about rolling a 5 or 6 anyways and it's just lazily copy pasted across enough units to form a cohesive 2000pt army. It's just taking a mechanic that removes defensive options (armour, hit/wound debuffs and in the case of sentinels line of sight) and giving it to an army's worth of units that kills it for me. Several ways to play defensively are removed in favour of "just don't get hit".

[Walrustaco]

48 minutes ago, Ganigumo said:

Magic doms like Kroak, Nagash, and Teclis (also sort of LoC). The worst part of magic doms isn't their casting (although kroak is way undercosted) its the fact that they pretty much completely invalidate the opponent's magic as well. 
 

pls don't call them magic doms lmao

[zilberfrid]

17 minutes ago, Walrustaco said:

pls don't call them magic doms lmao

Magic masters then?

Though, when they make a new Kroak, maybe they will take design ques from "Magic Dom"...

[JonnyTheKing]

1 hour ago, madmac said:

When an army is obviously OP its also almost inevitably tearing up the tournament scene, which is very evidently not the case with LRL, who are played heavily in tournaments to mostly middling effect. They do above average, nothing really special. They are far from being the strongest army in the game, which is why even this thread is full of "Power doesn't matter!" disclaimers from the people venting about Lumineth,  and why seemingly 90% of the anecdotes in this thread about their horrible play experiences end with the LRL player losing for some mysterious reason.

I think the most you can say about LRL balance-wise is that even if one or two units are arguably OP or undercosted in a vacuum, it's not enough to elevate the army to being truly OP overall. As it is, I suspect that just nerfing Sentinels and/or Teclis would cause their competitive performance to nose-dive into lowish-tier.  The new units they are getting may allow them to adapt, or not, none of them that I've seen seem particularly scary. 

 

Yeah I do not think they are OP at all, they just have some unfun warscrolls that need some point adjustments at the very least. 

Edited March 26, 2021 by JonnyTheKing

[BaylorCorvette]

Warscrolls are up

https://www.games-workshop.com/en-NZ/searchResults?N=737771287+1692982392+3206404541+3637769477&Nr=AND(sku.siteId%3ANZ_gw%2Cproduct.locale%3Aen_NZ_gw)&Nrs=collection()%2Frecord[product.startDate+<%3D+1616839620000+and+product.endDate+>%3D+1616839620000]&view=all

[Beliman]

The leak was real. There are a lot of good things to play with.

I can't wait to read BR:Teclis and find out what's happening in Chamon!