Are underpowered boxed game warscrolls an active design choice by GW?

[PlasticCraic]

On 4/8/2021 at 4:40 PM, zilberfrid said:

I'm sorry, that turned into a rant about infantry hero prices.

There was still the kernel of an important point in there.  You can totally run Thundrik as a generic Khemist if you want - I don't think anyone disagrees on that.  He is very similar aesthetically to the point of being pretty much a repose, so nobody would be in any doubt as to what it is.

So your choice (in AUD terms) is either buy a Khemist for $40, or buy a Khemist for $40 and get a heap of extra cool and useful models for free.  It's not hard to see why this causes a minor headache for GW.

They want and need rules overlap to bring people across from one system to another, hence Underworlds Warbands get AOS rules.  But where their different game systems have different price points, in this case Underworlds being cheaper than AOS for models that are of at least the same quality, that creates a pricing conflict and can undermine (to a small extent) the pricing strategy in the core game.  

I'm not sure that making the boxed game rules underwhelming completely solves that, because as noted above even if Thundrik was totally unusable you could still run him as a Khemist, but as a broad strategy it could at least help in situations where there is no direct analogue for the boxed set models. 

i.e. The fewer incentives for the large cohort of people already invested in the higher-price-point system to flood their armies with models from the lower-price-point system, the better for GW.

Either way I tend to agree with the comments in here saying that it's happened too many times to be anything other than a conscious choice.  Although FWIW there are still some interesting nuggets out there in the Underworlds and Warcry warbands (and even the KO dude in CC).

[NinthMusketeer]

If only there was some way GW could make single-character clampacks more appealing to the customer! Or at the very least distil their lack of appeal down to a certain metric, a numeric value even.

 

But to be fair, it is $30 for the normal Khemist. So he is a wee bit cheaper.

Edited April 12, 2021 by NinthMusketeer

[zilberfrid]

2 hours ago, NinthMusketeer said:

If only there was some way GW could make single-character clampacks more appealing to the customer! Or at the very least distil their lack of appeal down to a certain metric, a numeric value even.

 

But to be fair, it is $30 for the normal Khemist. So he is a wee bit cheaper.

You mean like bringing their prices to about 33% of what they now are? That would be comparatively reasonable.

[Fairbanks]

2 hours ago, zilberfrid said:

You mean like bringing their prices to about 33% of what they now are? That would be comparatively reasonable.

Remember how Clampacks were $20 two years ago?

All because the animal they get Clampacks from was moved to the endangered species list.

[Fairbanks]

No, but I nominate the guy writing them to write Lumineth Realm-Lords 3: A Cap to the Knee.

[Beer & Pretzels Gamer]

I have no insider information but to me this foolish consistency has always read less as the hobgoblin of small minded pricing strategy and more as the interaction of a separate team interpreting another departments rules.  By this I mean these rule sets always feel like they are written by an entirely different group of rules writers, ones who obviously spend most of their time writing for different rule sets, than are writing the battle tomes but that they have been given a set of commandments like:

- different weapons MUST have different profiles

- named characters MUST have unique characteristics

- no copying existing war scrolls (even when the model is obviously meant to be a direct equivalent to one...)

This combination seems to result in a perverse creativity where these separate rules writers feel like they are churning out these really “cool” war scrolls.  Yet they never actually play nice with the AoS rule set once they’ve been filtered through this process.  Could this be corrected when these war scrolls are reincorporated into a battle tome?  Absolutely.  But the fact that these seem to be the war scrolls least likely to get any sort of tweaks in the new tomes just screams to me corporate territorialism with a whole bunch of NIH (not invented here) syndrome.

this all being office politics would stink but to me would be all too common a basis for what we are all seeing...

 

[stratigo]

On 4/7/2021 at 2:35 PM, NinthMusketeer said:

I get the impression they are extra careful to make sure warscrolls like those are not too strong, because they have seen the amount of bad sentiment it quickly generates. That said, these warscrolls also tend to not be getting the same level of allegiance ability support due to being sub-faction locked or in the case of cultists non-markable (bar Idolators).

If cultists were fully markable then the bloodwind spoil would be rounding up bullgors to keep up with all the cheese production.

The cultists are weird to me cause they aren't, like, part of a boxed game. They're their own kits.