Discussing the quality of rules in AoS

[Enoby]

It's news to no one that certain battletomes and warscrolls in AoS are less well received than others; occasionally this will be due to power reasons (whether too much or too little), but lately I've seen a rise in complaints about boring battletomes - written by the so called "bin guy". Not that this "bin guy" is one person, but rather he represents the uninspiring battletome - the battletome with boring warscrolls, little synergy, and most importantly unrealised potential. 

I'm sure you have a battletome in mind when you think of a "bin guy" book, but I think the specifics of each battletome are less important than the question of why it happens in the first place, and if there is anything that can be done to stop it. 

Often the battletomes brought up under "bin guy" are Sylvaneth, 2021 Slaanesh, Beasts of Chaos, Blades of Khorne, and a potential new contender of Soulblight Gravelords. I've also seen people put Idoneth (pre Morathi) and Nighthaunt on here too, but I know very little of those armies. While some of these armies are weak, the complaints are much less about power and much more about a lack of creativity in the books or warscrolls.

As it's the most recent example, I'll use Gravelords - specifically the complaint that vampire lords are boring. There's no individual customizability on them (besides the standard artefacts and command trait that everyone gets), which some find a big disappointment compared to their more heroic status in Fantasy. Of course, the small heroes don't need to be customisable, it's just nice to have - more in line with the narrative. I think this is where the crux of the issue lies for some, a perceived lack of 'effort' or 'creativity' when a rule that would have been very cool and narratively fitting to have isn't included, despite similar rules (such as mount traits) being in other books. Often these "bin guy" books feel like the bare bones of a battletome, going by the numbers. 

The other issue is that some warscrolls are unbelievably poor. And this does not mean all warscrolls that aren't optimal fall in this category, but more things like the Wight King whose command ability doesn't properly work, or the infamous Slaangors. While not every warscroll will be fantastic in a tournament, some seem to have had close to no thought at all. I think it's interesting to consider why this is the case; I doubt it's intentional, especially as poor rules likely only lead to worse sales, so is it incompetence? Being rushed? Regardless, it leaves a bad taste in people's mouths and seems poor for the health of the game.

And then there is the possibility that this is on purpose, especially with the supposed changes in Broken Realms Kragnos - another supposed "Bin Guy" book. It may well just be that they are making a move to scale down the power of AoS, and on its own I'd say this was a good thing. However, it's become pretty apparent that people don't enjoy these nerfed or bland warscrolls and battletomes - there's no excitement for them. Players become disheartened, especially when stronger AoS 2 battletomes don't seem to be touched.

I wanted to create this thread to discuss this as, judging by the rumour thread and some army threads, it's on a lot of people's minds. So what do you think?

[Mcthew]

Thanks for this thread. Without venting too much, I think that toning down power is a good thing, if it is done for every faction. 

The main problem is that AoS 3.0 battletomes don't consistently show that.

(I say AoS 3.0 battletomes in that it's unlikely you'll see another edition until AoS 4.0 appears on the horizon, so that includes Soulblight, Hedonites and Lumineth.)

The disparity of rules writing between the 3 is stark. One of these tomes is definitely more powered than the other 2 (no guessing which). This doesn't bode well for AoS 3.0 which would need to nerf much of their rules within months of release which would make GW appear incompetent.

I echo what others have said that the lore, rules and models are showing a disconnect in AoS, more so recently. And I have not felt more disinterested by new releases recently than any other time during AoS because of this.

It is not unusual, sure, but it's gotten more obvious in the last year or so.

[MothmanDraws]

8 minutes ago, Mcthew said:

Thanks for this thread. Without venting too much, I think that toning down power is a good thing, if it is done for every faction. 

The main problem is that AoS 3.0 battletomes don't consistently show that.

(I say AoS 3.0 battletomes in that it's unlikely you'll see another edition until AoS 4.0 appears on the horizon, so that includes Soulblight, Hedonites and Lumineth.)

The disparity of rules writing between the 3 is stark. One of these tomes is definitely more powered than the other 2 (no guessing which). This doesn't bode well for AoS 3.0 which would need to nerf much of their rules within months of release which would make GW appear incompetent.

I echo what others have said that the lore, rules and models are showing a disconnect in AoS, more so recently. And I have not felt more disinterested by new releases recently than any other time during AoS because of this.

It is not unusual, sure, but it's gotten more obvious in the last year or so.

The disconnect for the voice of slaanesh is so strange, the greater daemon in glutos wand gives him +1 to cast, and glutos himself is a 2/2, the contorted epitome gets to re roll its and thats just 2 heralds on a mirror and has better anti magic defence. Unlimited range really is just going to be a feels bad for opponent as I sit outside of unbind range hoping for a 50/50 to turn of their heroes. So being the child of slaanesh means you just get better range(considering half casters are 9-12" move is not that big) and know stuff but are barely better than a herald at actually using it.

[AaronWilson]

I don't think GW intentionally produce under the curve books, but I do think they unintentionally make books that far above the curve which sort of pushes them into a spiral of continuing the trend. That said not every book is made on that bell curve some fall way short (Hedonites of Slaanesh is a good example). 

The rules quality has always been a real mixed bag, I'm not sure if there is a disconnect within the rules team or there is a lack of communication between the rules writers or between the play testers but there certainly are books that are released that you just think "how was this said to be okay?"

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

First off, I don't think we should currently be looking at points when talking about the quality of GW's rules. Points can always be changed, and chances are points will be changed across the board in a few weeks when AoS 3 comes out. It's fairly plausible that (for example) Kragnos looks expensive now, but will be in line with everything else after the update. Just want to get that out at the top of this post before I go into my experience with the Gravelords tome:

 

Since I have spent the last few weeks deep-diving into the Soulblight Gravelords tome, I have a bunch of ~o p i n i o n s~.

Here's something I wrote in the Gravelords thread that is pertinent to this thread as well:
 

Quote

 

There are several places where the book sets you up to think that you can do something cool, but then when you look closer you are actually fairly limited. Like with Locus of Shyish only doubling up lore spells, and then not even doubling up Pinions. There are really very few instances where that ability actually matters outside of Mortarchs casting Lore of Deathmages spells.

Another example is the Vyrkos allegiance ability that gives you reroll casts. Sounds really good, but then you notice it's only on vampires and they don't really get any worthwhile spells.

Or the way that Deathrattle Skeletons regenerate now. Half the models you lost back in each combat activation! And Vanhel's lets them activate twice! But then it doesn't work for models lost outside the combat phase and you still need to take huge battleshock tests.

Basically, what happens way too often that you look at the book, see a potentially cool interaction, and then it turns out that you can't actually do the cool thing.

Still, I am feeling overall positive about the book. There are certainly more viable, fun builds in there than before and we have a lot of good warscrolls. The changes to gravesites, while nerfs compared to LoN, were probably needed. The old unit return was just too strong. It suffocated the design space in the rest of the book. The new Endless Legions, Invigorating Aura and Deathly Invocation are weaker, but that means that our warscrolls can be better and we are not as reliant on SUMMONABLE units and multiple small heroes. The new deep strike and resurrection not needing heroes or command points to work really makes the play style of the book a lot more dynamic and less likely to result in death stars. So although it's not everything I wanted, I think it's a good book that should be fun to play.

 

Something I did not touch on in that quote are places where warscrolls were just bungled. Like Black Knights, which currently don't have any role in the army, Wight Kings, which don't really do anything or Fell Bats, which got a new, good looking, expensive kits, but are a 70 point trash unit that does not deal any damage and can't take a punch. This kind of thing just sucks, same as the Slaangor. And I really don't understand how it happens. Related to that are the nerfs to spells and abilites that were not even every good in the first place, like Vile Transference.

There are also a few criticisms of the book which I can understand, but don't necessarily share. One of these is that nearly all heroes are on a 3+/3+/-1/2 melee profile in the Gravelords book. I personally don't see that as lazy or anything, because I don't think the basic melee profile should be focussed on as a means of expressing what the individual characters are about. 3+/3+/-1/2 is servicable. It means the characters hit and wound most of the time and their attacks are above average quality. It also means there is room for them to be buffed, which is nice in an army that has a lot of buffs to hit and wound to offer. Instead, I find it more interesting if characters are differentiated by their other abilities, which I think the book does a good job doing.

The lack of customizability on Vampire Lords is another point. It would be cool if it was in there, and the Anvil of Blood has some fun abilities in it that would not have been game breaking (although it also contained plenty that might have been). But at the same time, this kind of customization was never promised anywhere. It would be cool to have, but a lot of things would be cool to have. I don't really think it's fair to call the absence of an extra layer of customization that was never promised bad rules writing.

[Infernalslayer]

It might just be my perception of things but there seems to be a pattern lately. Battletomes for brand new armies with all new models often get the "sin guy" treatment (Ossiarchs and Lumineth come to mind) while battletomes for revitalized/updated armies usually get the "bin guy" treatment (Slaves to Darkness, Slaanesh 2021, Gravelords). 

I don't know if this is intentional to make the completely new armies more attractive, or if the persons working on updating older armies try to stay close to the original designs and warscrolls which are for the most part outdated and powercrept by newer armies.

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

1 minute ago, Infernalslayer said:

It might just be my perception of things but there seems to be a pattern lately. Battletomes for brand new armies with all new models often get the "sin guy" treatment (Ossiarchs and Lumineth come to mind) while battletomes for revitalized/updated armies usually get the "bin guy" treatment (Slaves to Darkness, Slaanesh 2021, Gravelords). 

I don't know if this is intentional to make the completely new armies more attractive, or if the persons working on updating older armies try to stay close to the original designs and warscrolls which are for the most part outdated and powercrept by newer armies.

I am honestly not even sure about OBR at this point. Now that the petrifex +1 to saves allegiance ability has been removed, the army seem to be fairly solidly middle of the pack, without anything that stands out as clearly overpowered (internally or externally). It's an army with a solid strategy, but many obvious weaknesses.

LRL has more of a case for being a "sin guy" book. But then again, so do Seraphon, Tzeentch and DoK. And those were old, established armies.

[Greybeard86]

I think the disparity in power between warscrolls is intentional. Other companies to it too, to cater to "power gamers" and reward "system mastery". The fact that what is "good" and "bad" varies is, in my opinion, also intentional. The goal being to shake up the meta to "keep things interesting"; of course, it also helps with model sales.

The whole "keyword mess" is part of an intentional push by GW to try to get hyper focused armies on the table. I think this is a residual influence from the original "warband" design of AoS 1. This might change with the demise of battalions as we know them now.

Finally, I also think that AoS is struggling to find an identity. It is currently in the transition between "almost no rules, skirmish, let's all meet in the middle and braaaawl" to "armies are cool, big units, more complex rules and combos". I honestly don't know what kind of a game it will be in a couple years.

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

3 minutes ago, Greybeard86 said:

I think the disparity in power between warscrolls is intentional. Other companies to it too, to cater to "power gamers" and reward "system mastery". The fact that what is "good" and "bad" varies is, in my opinion, also intentional. The goal being to shake up the meta to "keep things interesting"; of course, it also helps with model sales.

On that front, I think the Gravelords battletome is at least pretty good! There are few units in there that you would absolutely never take (be it that they are severely outclassed or just don't have a role).

The biggest offenders are the Wight Kings and Black Knights. Other than that, it's mostly the side game units (Underworlds and Cursed City) and the odd alternate build of a kit (Bloodseeker Palanquin from the Mortis Engine kit).

This is something the Gravelords gets right, in my opinion: All three types of unconditional battleline are good. Nearly all hero units have a use. Units that are not battleline are either worth building around or throwing into a list unsupported, so you can make them work. For all the faults of the book, not being able to run the units you like is not one of them.

[Greybeard86]

3 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

On that front, I think the Gravelords battletome is at least pretty good! There are few units in there that you would absolutely never take (be it that they are severely outclassed or just don't have a role).

The biggest offenders are the Wight Kings and Black Knights. Other than that, it's mostly the side game units (Underworlds and Cursed City) and the odd alternate build of a kit (Bloodseeker Palanquin from the Mortis Engine kit).

This is something the Gravelords gets right, in my opinion: All three types of unconditional battleline are good. Nearly all hero units have a use. Units that are not battleline are either worth building around or throwing into a list unsupported, so you can make them work. For all the faults of the book, not being able to run the units you like is not one of them.

Except is you are planning a Mousillon inspired army based on Wight Kings and Black Knights conversions, inspired by the new mounted Wight King.

Having weak options is just bad form, IMO, every kit should be viable in a suitable build. Clearly that is not the case, even in the arguably better internally balanced books.

 

[Frowny]

I see it as an inappropriate balance between doing too much, and not thinking things through and thus doing too little. 

LRL are a good example of too much done poorly, independent of strength. Formations, Double activations, Weird pile-ins, elemental themes, all units are wizards and in addition,, somehow collecting stuff like dwarves, also animal themes. At the end, I'm not really sure what their thing is. This is just confusing. In addition, they are pointed very competitively for a lot of feels-bad rules. In addition, a lot of their warscrolls have outrageous numbers of rules backed up by lots of 'in additions' and more hidden rules, just like my paragraph above. Its a lot, and not in a good way. I'm not even sure LRL is a balance problem- you could easily point them correctly to be overall balanced with a few iterations of +/- 10-20 pts here or there, but you'd still be left with this incredible complexity creep for not much gain.

In the fat middle, you have excellent books like IMO DoK or Idoneth. Interesting interactions, but not too many, a good set of allegiance abilities that do interesting things, but not 4 sets of allegiance abilities like LRL. Almost every unit is playable and has reasonable in-faction interaction. A few things could be nerfed slightly (like eels or maybe the bow snakes+morathi combination) but overall, good internal and external balance. And the FEEL like they are supposed to and play like they are supposed to. The tides are *chefs kiss* in terms of FEELING like a nautical army, power level aside. 

On the mid- lower end of things are Soulblight. While Soulblight, I think is appropriately balanced in terms of power, there are a bunch of things that are just odd. Like why is the werewolf-type faction also the best wizards.... I thought they were the most feral? Why do they buff summonable units? Why are all the cool cursed cities models locked behind a useless include-them-all-for-800 pts thing? Why are zombies so outrageously fast and sneaky with their 6 inch pile-in and attack? It feels like they didn't read their own fluff when writing their own rules in a lot of situations. That isn't to say it isn't a reasonably strong book- models like Manfred are absolutely brokenly incredible, while lots of other things like wolves, blood knights and Vargheists are all somewhere between strong and useful role-players. Much of thecan be strong and interesting in the right situations. Its more that numerous aspects of the battletome don't seem to make sense or interact with each-other. However, there are still interesting warscrolls, the complexity isn't overwhelming and you can definitely do some cool stuff.

On the bottom of the barrel are armies like Sylvaneth and Slaanesh. Sylvaneth allegiance abilities and terrain are basically the same thing, leaving them with really only 1 thing. All of their suballegiances are variations on rerolling 1's WITH a condition that hardly impacts play. Most of the warscrolls are themselves OK, but without meaningful allegiance or suballeignace abilities, they struggle to actually do what they are supposed to do. You could keep dropping their points and eventually they'd be a strong army, but they would never FEEL like sylvaneth without a battletome rewrite. Slaanesh seems similar.

Note that these thoughts are all mostly power-level agnostic- you could drop the points of sylvaneth until they are strong army, but it wouldn't feel like a sylvaneth army. You could also change the LRL points until they are a very weak army, but they'd still be incredibly complicated and with a lot of negative moments. 30 inch, no line of sight, MW only archers are hard to make fun for the opposing player. 

[Scurvydog]

I see the good vs bad as a matter of effort most of the time, but also thought put into how much can be done with an army, not just how powerful or balanced it is.

I will go straight to some examples (just my personal choices).

Sublime tomes:

LRL: This is clearly a "upper tier" book. So much effort has been put into the warscroll and to make them unique and do all kinds of stuff. We see new unique mechanics everywhere, not just a few, but nearly anything is new, with many varied sub factions with unique battleline options, characters with never before seen mechanics. All in all rules that for good and bad forces a LOT of choices to be made both with list making and in game. Unfortunately they also have a lot of NPE rules that make them quite horrid to play against in competitive settings, but you can do so much more than that with the army though. They also got the full terrain + spells treatment.

DoK: This is a book with a limited model range but with a lot of mileage in each of those available units. Many playstyles are available and viable. Interesting sub factions, spells, prayers and artifacts to make an army your own.

Tzeentch/KO: I will just bunch these together, they are top meta for a reason, but that they are more than just cookie cutter meta armies. They have tons of unique mechanics only seen in their books and make clever use of the core game rules to do something quite different. They have some broken outliers but that seems to be due to "over enthusiastic" choices, rather than neglect or lack of effort.

Disappointing tomes:

Gravelords: I don't even play them, although I did play some LoG but sold my nighthaunt army in the end. Usually with new tomes and new model ranges I get some kind of tingle in the back of my head to try it out, with ideas like "would this and that not be cool!?". I got none of that here, the new models I find cool, but the rules entirely underwhelming and worst of all uninspired and outright boring. They barely got changed from LoN and frankly got more boring in many ways. They have few aspects that really stand out and it can be hard to nail down what they are supposed to do really well. Traditionally this would be THE attrition army, but so many armies just survive better now, magic is meh, they got no shooting and no wizards with significant modifiers, so they will be bullied out  or not participate in almost all phases of the game.

Orruk Warclans: This is most likely a bit controversial to put here, but I really think this is an example of lack of effort from GW as a whole, not just bin vs sin. As an Ironjawz player this was so incredibly disappointing to me. Is my army strong? Yes. Do I sometimes just destroy my opponent turn 1? Yes. Is it fun? well... not always. No new models were added, no endless spells/prayers or whatever and no terrain. This was even 2 battletomes before, baked into 1 book with basically only half the choice and subfactions afforded other armies, where the compensation is supposed to be an amalgam allegiance, that has hardly any synergies between the 2 types of orruks due to keyword conflicts. So much wasted potential and every Ironjawz army play almost entirely the same. While not meta either, just look at FeC how to make some variation with very few kits. Every single Ironjawz list is based on Warchanters every time. Some will surely disagree with this, but I can't help but just lament would could have been.

Stormcast: This must be the current golden standard of a Bin tome. It is just filled with nonsense, terrible internal balance even at the time of release. They somehow managed to write over 30 battalions for this allegiance where people use just about 0 of them on regular basis. That must be some kind of award worthy achievement for failing to write useful and engaging rules. They even chose to go the route of stormhosts and customization, yet every single unique hero kit is tied to the same "default" Hammers of Sigmar keyword. Hoping for better times in AoS 3.0 but for AoS 2.0 they really got the short end of the stick. We see the same pattern in 40k for marines, the first new edition book is always marines, they get a power bump, but quickly creep sets in and marines only use a few gimmick lists. Then they get a new Codex later in the edition and they sit comfortably well until a new edition rolls out. Stormcast started with this, but never got the followup book and has just been in a sad state outside some gimmick builds. Honorable mention here is also the Nighthaunt book released at the same time, what an absolute Bin book too.

 

 

Edited May 28, 2021 by Scurvydog
wording

[PrimeElectrid]

It is interesting that the idea of bin guy/sin guy is gaining steam now when the concept has been around for yonks, if only indirectly. 8th edition definitely had bin and sin books and I, an old grognard, distinctly remember the arguments whether GW does/doesn’t make new models OP to sell them (they don’t and never have).

What all of this boils down to is consistency, or the lack thereof, whether that’s whole tomes or individual units as in the past. You can’t even draw any trends: sometimes sin guy is a brand new arm, sometimes it’s a refresh. There’s no pattern to it. This was the same with models: sometimes a new model was strong, sometimes a new model was weak, sometimes an old weak model was made strong, sometimes an old strong model was made weak, sometimes an old strong model remained strong, sometimes an old weak model remained weak.

This inconsistency can only suggest that GW rules team have too much work to do and not enough time available to ensure everything is at roughly the same level. There is no control for quality. Unfortunately to us mere mortals it appears that every book is a coinflip.

Actually the other suggestion is that lead times and release schedules are so out of whack that what we’re seeing here is delayed different design ethos ie all the sin stuff written at one time and all the bin stuff at another, under different leads/principles/policies, but the actual releases are intermingled.

[Gaz Taylor]

+++ Mod Hat On +++
Can we not use Bin and Sin to describe whoever worked on an Battletome? It’s not nice way to give feedback.

Im all for criticising but please make it constructive. If you can’t do that, please don’t post (and if you can’t do that we will look at warnings and bans). 

[Scurvydog]

10 minutes ago, PrimeElectrid said:

It is interesting that the idea of bin guy/sin guy is gaining steam now when the concept has been around for yonks, if only indirectly. 8th edition definitely had bin and sin books and I, an old grognard, distinctly remember the arguments whether GW does/doesn’t make new models OP to sell them (they don’t and never have).

What all of this boils down to is consistency, or the lack thereof, whether that’s whole tomes or individual units as in the past. You can’t even draw any trends: sometimes sin guy is a brand new arm, sometimes it’s a refresh. There’s no pattern to it. This was the same with models: sometimes a new model was strong, sometimes a new model was weak, sometimes an old weak model was made strong, sometimes an old strong model was made weak, sometimes an old strong model remained strong, sometimes an old weak model remained weak.

This inconsistency can only suggest that GW rules team have too much work to do and not enough time available to ensure everything is at roughly the same level. There is no control for quality. Unfortunately to us mere mortals it appears that every book is a coinflip.

Actually the other suggestion is that lead times and release schedules are so out of whack that what we’re seeing here is delayed different design ethos ie all the sin stuff written at one time and all the bin stuff at another, under different leads/principles/policies, but the actual releases are intermingled.

The difference is also how quickly a META is formed and how the game is covered. Instead of metas formed in small forums, clubs and stores, information spreads very fast, and rules are picked apart quickly and "netlists" are formed, youtubers provide the "hot takes" and battle reports etc put them to the test. As such any design flaw is exposed and potentially exploited much quicker than ever before. 

BR Kragnos is not even seen yet, but we already pretty much know what to expect and judged the viability of different things. Also the very prevalent disappointment already going around is telling, it seems many, myself included, lost all interest in preordering Kragnos based on the terrible rules and point costs and the model is not even up for preorder yet. How GW can be oblivious to this is baffling. You can even go to Facebook for example and see the community articles about Kragnos preorders and you will also easily find negative feedback. 

It boggles the mind at times how GW can have so little insight into how their players perceive the game and what they present to them. The community has on many occasions identified something as broken the second the rules are available, yet GW apparently never picked up on that and keeps it that way for months and months, upsetting the balance of the game (looking at you spell in a bottle and Tzeentch!).

[Infernalslayer]

3 minutes ago, Gaz Taylor said:

+++ Mod Hat On +++
Can we not use Bin and Sin to describe whoever worked on an Battletome? It’s not nice way to give feedback.

Im all for criticising but please make it constructive. If you can’t do that, please don’t post (and if you can’t do that we will look at warnings and bans). 

Apologies as English is not my 1st language, is the "bin" and "sin" terminology considered an insult. I only first discovered these terms in these forums and understood them as abbreviations for "not interesting/not competitive battletomes" vs "powerful/competitve battletomes".  

[PrimeElectrid]

7 minutes ago, Scurvydog said:

The difference is also how quickly a META is formed and how the game is covered. Instead of metas formed in small forums, clubs and stores, information spreads very fast, and rules are picked apart quickly and "netlists" are formed, youtubers provide the "hot takes" and battle reports etc put them to the test. As such any design flaw is exposed and potentially exploited much quicker than ever before.

While true, this has also been the case for at least ten years, and more realistically 20. Lists, battle reports, and tournaments were being discussed on GW forums that long ago, and later independent sites like Warseer, Bolger and Chainsword, and others, or dedicated forums like listeria online, druchii.net, ulthuan.net, etc.

It has definitely accelerated in the last 10 years but it is not a new phenomenon.

Kragnos at least puts an end to the “GW makes new units OP” myth.

Edited May 28, 2021 by PrimeElectrid

[RexHavoc]

I've no horse in this race, as I don't really follow new rules or tomes as I'm someone that stuck with the older edition and has no current plans to use any book past 1st or 2nd ed. But from the outside my view on this is:
 

• Its a narrative game made by people that want to make stuff for narrative/fun reasons but are very likely to be be headed up by suits with sales/money over, meaning that rules will sometimes boosted depending on what they want/need to sell more of.
• Whilst we know that there is a team putting together the AoS content, we've no idea who is coming or going in that team or how constant it is on a regular basis. Things will get overlooked if battletomes are being put together with some bits from the main team, a warscroll from the intern, a battalion from a chap that left and didn't leave the rest of the rules that they made to go along with it... The change in BL staff and then comments from one of their team that suggests that this version of AoS is moving away from Lore/style that was being worked towards at the start of Soul wars might have had an affect on the rules as well. 
• AoS already has a terrible identify crisis on its hands. Born from the left overs of WFB, which it is still trying to sell kits from. And they probably don't want to stray too far into the old world styled content for fear of loosing sales on its release when people can port over their AoS collection. Its a weird in the middle game that will always suffer for it.
• Excellent games don't help push sales. If everything was polished and checked before release, they couldn't then flip the next book or GHB or update which all help push more model sales during 'dead' release periods.
• Different people like different things. I suspect some of the design team all have something they like the most from AoS and that gets incorporated in to their side of the design.
• Laziness/reward scaling. Why would they bother making a balanced battletome when they know it will sell anyway. Even with all the complaints as of late, they sell out of almost everything and keep reporting huge profits. Why would they eat into those profits by play testing more or spending time updating books after release when that will not guarantee any more sales.
• The short lifespan of editions/books. They must have some pretty tight deadlines for many of these books to get them done before they have to start working on a new version. Theirs also the chance that a book being made now isn't being tested against books we have access too- delays may mean they were designed to play with now outdated lists or lists that might be released in the future. They might be play testing a whole bunch of rules and lists right now to only see half of them scrapped before the whole lot ever sees a release.
• GW doesn't do feedback or community interactions. It just happens that they do stuff that sometimes matches what people have asked for and it looks good on them to pat themselves on the back. Its purely coincidental. If they listened and acted on all the feedback they got, we'd all be playing a fully developed single edition, that is both updated and never changing at the same time, that was both perfectly balanced and bursting with narrative, paying €1 per model max, alongside support for every game they ever ditched and would have all received a free copy of Cursed City by now. 
• One thing GW has always been consistent with, and that is being inconsistent.

[Chikout]

16 minutes ago, Infernalslayer said:

Apologies as English is not my 1st language, is the "bin" and "sin" terminology considered an insult. I only first discovered these terms in these forums and understood them as abbreviations for "not interesting/not competitive battletomes" vs "powerful/competitve battletomes".  

Bin is the British English for trash can. It's essentially saying you should just throw the battletome away, that the writers work has 0 value. 

[Chikout]

Regarding the actual topic, I don't think it's debatable that the battletomes vary in quality and power both internally and externally. The wight kings command ability that literally does nothing is a good example. There's no way around it, it's just a bad rule and unfortunately there's a few of those in almost every battletome. 

There's no question that gw is capable of producing great rules. Aside from the points cost the DoK battletome is excellent. There's just no consistency. 

I think a big part of the problem is the increase in the number of books which did not result in a increased number of rules writers. As far as I'm aware there are just 3 rules writers in the AoS team and there have already been 8 books this year. That means each writer is expected to do 2 books a month. It's no surprise the quality control is poor. Gw needs to double the size of the rules writing team and add a couple of developers to do what we all do and kick the book back when they see a problem. 

Unfortunately gw isn't particularly likely to do that. In a year when no-one could play together, they made more money than ever. 

 

As to what the community can do, it always surprises me that we are happy to tear expensive models apart for conversions but wouldn't dare to adjust a few numbers in our own games. 

Edited May 28, 2021 by Chikout

[Elmir]

Personally, I'm happy we will be seeing an AoS third edition coming up... Even if second edition didn't feel like it lasted very long due to lockdowns. 

That being said, I don't think AoS3 is going to help a lot to fix a lot of balance issue the game faces right now, as most of the NPE/balance issues right now are heavily tied to single warscrolls/allegiance abilities and not so much the general rules (except maybe excessive shooting). 

I'm also not a big fan of Psychic awakening style books bringing a couple of pages of rules for multiple factions... This type of rules diffusion killed everybody's interest in 40k locally, and they are bringing it to AoS now. It's just not nice to drag along multiple books to field a single army. 


The day GW decides to dump the battletome/expansion book as a rulessource and swaps to a way more flexible card system (to do targeted fixes to bad warscrolls/abilities, both in OP or UP sense), this game has a shot at being better balanced while still being practical. 

[MitGas]

I've never played HH but apparently the rule set (and its internal balance) was vastly superior to 40k's thanks to Alan Bligh (sadly RIP). Looks like a "shot caller" akin to Alan that helps the actual writers work on the balance is all that's really needed. Certainly not an easy job (especially because AoS' units are way more different to each other than specialized marines) but it has been possible in the past, so it can be now. 

What's a true positive is that unlike at the start of AoS, the writers got a lot of data for the existing battletomes by now, so tweaking some of them to be better or slightly worse in order to get an overall more balanced game should be somewhat easy. They'd only need to use said data - like in Slaanesh's case they had a slightly stronger army and nerfed it so that it's now in lower tiers. Dunno why they'd be that drastic.

[Beer & Pretzels Gamer]

My starting assumption is that the tome writers are passionate about their jobs, want to write good tomes and aren’t under undue pressure from suits to write rules that sell models.  Naive?  I don’t think so.  Arguing against the last point is the inconsistency of war scroll strength AND the fact that we don’t have a bunch of rage quitters that then come on these forums and leak details about all the problems in the writers room or the battles between the writers room and the suits.  Given in how many other mediums such leaks are regular I feel comfortable with this starting point.  As regards the former, again it is partially the lack of negative turnover spilling into the forums as output demands has intensified that gives my confidence this is a group of people who love what they do.  More than that though is the fact that there are enough tomes where their desire to do a good job shines through.

If so many longtimers weren’t reminded us that these issues have always been the case I’d be inclined to put the issue down to the above mentioned increase in publishing pace.  With the historical pattern though at most this may be an aggravating factor.

What I keep coming back to then is this.  In my opinion AoS has a reasonably solid set of core rules.  Writing a tome and the war scrolls then in as an exercise in where to color within the lines and where to make exceptions.  From the outside looking in what seems to be missing is an overall design philosophy regarding this.  So we see some tomes that have very few exceptions and others that appear to be entirely exceptions (I have no experience with LRL but this seems to be a consistent complaint in these threads).

Why is this happening?  Well what is the one thing we definitely know?  That with AoS the model design comes first.  Now how could that interact with the writing room?

Especially given the pace of publishing I do not think that they can ever start completely from a white sheet.  Of course when dealing with an existing army they don’t have to but even with something like LRL or OBR I fully believe they are starting from templates such as single cast wizard, foot melee hero, foot battleline, etc.  There is also a menu of “standard abilities” to choose from such as +1 damage on charge or unmodified hit rolls of 6 become 2 hits, that are deemed non-controversial to start building out a standard template.

Beyond that though if this functions like many creative groups I am familiar with than there are semi-regular brainstorming sessions where unique abilities are pitched on a standalone basis.  These sessions may or may not be guided by some area if focus tied either to an edition update or some lesson learned from previous tomes.  The vetted and approved new unique abilities then are ready to be drawn upon when a new tome is written.

Finally, I am sure each new tome has a tome specific brainstorming session where, once they know what new models, if any, there will be, new abilities are pitched.  Once this has happened there will be a lot of back and forth between which abilities become allegiance, which go on war scrolls and if those which specific war scroll.

From the complexities of this process it can be seen how divergent outcomes can arise.  The writing team just might not find much inspiration in a model or abilities with good fit for the overarching structure there working with and thus we end up with a war scroll that’s not too far from template and thus “boring” as some suggest Fell Bats are fir Soulblight. In other cases they may have already given a similar alternative unit the workshopped ability and thus struggle with what to give the other model in the dyad (as may have happened between Blood Knights and Black Knights in Soulblight).  In other cases abilities that made sense in an early draft get left in later when changes elsewhere now swing the interaction created to either be OP or non-functional. (I think we are often too quick to forget how many moving parts there are in a battle tome…).

Sometimes thus process will have been difficult and the compromises evident on the table.  Yet it is equally easy to see how it can yield the other extreme.  The commentary around LRL to me reads as exactly what I would expect if there had been a build up of new abilities that the writing team has been desperate to use but just hadn’t been able to fit into previous tomes.  Now the model makers have given them a ton of crazy models that throw the doors wide open and a but if a free for all ensues resulting in too much novelty.  (After drawing down the list maybe not surprising that subsequent times feel less inspired?)

Is this GW’s process? Of course I don’t know.  But creativity is messy.  Creativity on a deadline doubly so.  So while there could be some narrowing of the differentiation between tomes with a more consistent design philosophy (e.g. each tome gets a limited number of selections) I would never 3xo3ct uniform quality across tomes.

 

[Zappgrot]

While i tink the battle tomes varry a bit in strength both internaly and externaly. I don't think AOS is all that bad.  40K has a way worse 7th 8th and now 9th see codexes that dominate the competative scene solo. While also haveing armies that might as well just stay in the box for all the power lvl they contain.  HH is lot better but even there you see that some armies can't compete at all. (good luck playing word bearers vs iron warriors).  And some battle tomes might be a bit bland. But I heavily prefer that over the way 40k is now. Whit  dozens of  inbalanced relics, warlord traits and  stratagems all  fighting for the players atention. It makes 40k a combo fest where some combos break te game in to while others are comleet snoze.  Makeing the game less fun to play. You get the impresion that list building matters way more then what you do in the actual game. (well appart from lucking out on who starts or not) I pray to the dice gods that aos 3.0 stays bland.  Cause if it gets as "spicy"as 40k It might end up giving me indegestion and going down the toilet. 

[RuneBrush]

4 minutes ago, MitGas said:

I've never played HH but apparently the rule set (and its internal balance) was vastly superior to 40k's thanks to Alan Bligh (sadly RIP). Looks like a "shot caller" akin to Alan that helps the actual writers work on the balance is all that's really needed. Certainly not an easy job (especially because AoS' units are way more different to each other than specialized marines) but it has been possible in the past, so it can be now. 

The Age of Darkness ruleset benefits from a huge amount of preparation and planning right at the beginning of the project.  Alan and the team round him, did things like working out the rules for all the primarchs at the same time to ensure there wasn't any power creep.  Having a standard marine as a "datum" has also helped because it's really easy to compare anything new to multiples of that basic unit (if that makes sense).  I think with it being more of a historical game there was a lot more conversation between the designers and the sculptors - you don't see the scenario we have in AoS where some armies don't have endless spells or scenery pieces because nobody has designed them