AoS 3 New Rules Discussion

[Ganigumo]

1 hour ago, Gauche said:

Interesting seeing the doom and gloom people with the leaked changes and WHC shown changes. I think people who only play AoS are in a unique position since they've never really gone through a modern GW Edition change. It's kind of a waste to apply any of these changes to the game you currently know and play, it will be an entirely new game soon. No existing army lists are likely to survive for a whole host of reasons. The tricks you know will change or won't work anymore. The meta will completely change, etc. etc.

Try not to think of the changes in terms of games you've played or armies you've fielded but instead just look at how they change individual units. Build from there as more is leaked. It's the best way to keep yourself from going crazy. Source: Gone through almost every 40K Edition change and several other big system changes.

Now if a change legitimately makes you frown I can't say anything against that. I'd just advise taking a "Wait and see" approach. Many small changes look stupid but make sense when you get the whole picture. That's part of the reason I wish GW didn't drip feed changes but what can you do?

IMHO aos is the best ruleset warhammer has ever had, so such a big departure seems like a recipe for disaster to me. Its much easier to break a working system than to improve it, especially if you do a lot.

1 hour ago, Darkhan said:

I hate this. I've always hated 40ks pictograms as I find them way harder to read than words. On top of that Warlord and command entourage are clearly the strongest, since they're how you get extra CPs and the only way to get extra artifacts. Battle regiment is third since it lets you go first. The other 3 exist for when you can't fit one of the others into your army (like SoB or bcr...).

The worst offense of this BY FAR is that they're Boring like i'm not excited to take any of these. In game terms boring is worse than bad, and if this is what we got they should've just removed battalions entirely.

[Gauche]

4 minutes ago, Ganigumo said:

IMHO aos is the best ruleset warhammer has ever had, so such a big departure seems like a recipe for disaster to me. Its much easier to break a working system than to improve it, especially if you do a lot.

I hate this. I've always hated 40ks pictograms as I find them way harder to read than words. On top of that Warlord and command entourage are clearly the strongest, since they're how you get extra CPs and the only way to get extra artifacts. Battle regiment is third since it lets you go first. The other 3 exist for when you can't fit one of the others into your army (like SoB or bcr...).

The worst offense of this BY FAR is that they're Boring like i'm not excited to take any of these. In game terms boring is worse than bad, and if this is what we got they should've just removed battalions entirely.

I agree AoS has the best ruleset GW has made in some time but that's not to say the game doesn't have a ton of issues. Removing Battalions is a change I celebrate, without it I have zero interest in the game. Changing how First Turn works is another huge problem and the game needs way more Terrain interaction.

So far nothing I've seen hurts the good parts of the game, it makes it better. 8th to 9th 40K was the same way, the Codexes is where GW is dropping the ball there. They've been doing excellent on their Core Rules for games, they still need a lot of work on army balance.

[Ganigumo]

Just now, Gauche said:

I agree AoS has the best ruleset GW has made in some time but that's not to say the game doesn't have a ton of issues. Removing Battalions is a change I celebrate, without it I have zero interest in the game. Changing how First Turn works is another huge problem and the game needs way more Terrain interaction.

So far nothing I've seen hurts the good parts of the game, it makes it better. 8th to 9th 40K was the same way, the Codexes is where GW is dropping the ball there. They've been doing excellent on their Core Rules for games, they still need a lot of work on army balance.

Battalions were interesting with unique effects built for your army that let you represent a narrative piece of your allegiance. They could've been balanced while still being interesting. Instead we threw the whole thing out for 40k style detachments (but they're optional) which is just pointless complexity.

 

If the power or composition was an issue change the points, if access was the issue write some more (or even generic ones), if reducing drops was the issue make them not deploy at the same time. Or just write better designed books. Throwing it out in this way is just giving up on it because they're too lazy to try fixing it. 

I've never understood why people wanted to get rid of battalions. Its not like they'll magically get better at writing balanced rules when they do so we'll just be in the same spot down the road with a different issue.

[Gauche]

And they should get rid of them, their balance was awful. They still exist for non-Matched Play, and that's where I think they belong. The problem is the community is stuck on Matched Play being the ONLY way to play, it isn't. It's for competitive minded folk like myself. The other methods are fine too, for example Crusade is MEGA popular with 40K Players now and the new PtG system for AoS is based on it.

The reason I approve removing them is that the less rules there are the less chance GW has to ****** up. AoS is way easier to balance because Toughness and Strength don't exist and Invulnerable Saves don't exist. That's not changing. Will there be broken Warscrolls, Allegiances, etc.? Yup. But it's just one less thing for competitive players to worry about and that's my biased point of view.

[Nozdormu]

3 hours ago, Reinholt said:

Coherency is needlessly complicated as they have written it. I would not be shocked to see GW revise it. Just be within x" of the unit leader is probably the easiest way to make it work, and allow all units to have a designated leader for movement and if that one dies, you nominate a new one at the end of the phase. Also, major changes to weapon ranges or the 40k style rank fighting will need to be introduced, or GW will primarily have nerfed their model sales because 32mm+ bases only work in 5 or less units for 1" weapons.

Not the easiest but impossible because not every unit has a leader  Rule that must exists a model that has every other models in unit within x inch would be simpler.

Edited June 10, 2021 by Nozdormu

[zilberfrid]

12 minutes ago, Ganigumo said:

Battalions were interesting with unique effects built for your army that let you represent a narrative piece of your allegiance. They could've been balanced while still being interesting. Instead we threw the whole thing out for 40k style detachments (but they're optional) which is just pointless complexity.

If the power or composition was an issue change the points, if access was the issue write some more (or even generic ones), if reducing drops was the issue make them not deploy at the same time. Or just write better designed books. Throwing it out in this way is just giving up on it because they're too lazy to try fixing it. 

I've never understood why people wanted to get rid of battalions. Its not like they'll magically get better at writing balanced rules when they do so we'll just be in the same spot down the road with a different issue.

I agree to a point.

Batallions were interesting, the two armies I have models for were designed to neatly fit a battallion.

But.

They were hopelessly unbalanced, just a few lines making or breaking a whole book.

It wasn't the batallion specific rules that made them the most unbalanced, it was the "Command Point + Artifact + Turn priority" blanket rule.

Apart from wording around wounds and damage, AoS 2 in its core game wasn't terrible, it went wrong with the battletomes.

For me, they are the same as mortal wounds. They could be a good thing if rules writers showed any restraint when using them.

They did not, so it's better to lose it.

Edited June 10, 2021 by zilberfrid

[Sception]

I wish they had picked another benefit for Battle Regiments.  I always hated single drop deployment for battalions, I wish they had ditched it entirely instead of leaving it around for even one core battalion.

[Ganigumo]

1 minute ago, Gauche said:

And they should get rid of them, their balance was awful. They still exist for non-Matched Play, and that's where I think they belong. The problem is the community is stuck on Matched Play being the ONLY way to play, it isn't. It's for competitive minded folk like myself. The other methods are fine too, for example Crusade is MEGA popular with 40K Players now and the new PtG system for AoS is based on it.

The reason I approve removing them is that the less rules there are the less chance GW has to ****** up. AoS is way easier to balance because Toughness and Strength don't exist and Invulnerable Saves don't exist. That's not changing. Will there be broken Warscrolls, Allegiances, etc.? Yup. But it's just one less thing for competitive players to worry about and that's my biased point of view.

A good analogy for balance is a set of levers. If you remove a lever the rest of the levers matter more, so each mistake they make at the other levels will have a bigger impact. In the short term balance is going to be worse. ALL of the most impacted factions seem to be the weakest ones, while the strongest factions like lumineth, seraphon, Tzeentch, KO, seem to make out like bandits at every single change.

The new pointing means we're gonna have to deal with 30 model blobs of Pinks and Sentinels. Horrors can still chaff nearly as well as before, since you can just put a triangle at the ends of the line and splitting means that unlike every other unit in the game they won't break coherency, reinforcement limits hurt melee units more than shooting ones, and 32mm+ bases far more than 25mm bases, Tzeentch's flamer buffs are all AOE and so being MSU doesn't make them harder to buff, Unleash hell exists.

"Matched Play" needs to be more inclusive because its how people can play "fair" pickup and casual games. People need a fair set of rules so that when they come to a table for a game it isn't a one sided slaughter. If we need to separate "Matched Play" from "Competitive Play" so be it, but we need something to keep sides fair for casual games.

 

2 minutes ago, zilberfrid said:

I agree to a point.

Batallions were interesting, the two armies I have models for were designed to neatly fit a battallion.

But.

They were hopelessly unbalanced, just a few lines making or breaking a whole book.

It wasn't the batallion specific rules that made them the most unbalanced, it was the "Command Point + Artifact + Turn priority" blanket rule.

Apart from wording around wounds and damage, AoS 2 in its core game wasn't terrible, it went wrong with the battletomes.

Yeah the balance went horrible with the battletomes, but thats not something an edition change can magically fix, which is why removing them doesn't fix the issue, the battletomes themselves need to be fixed. Seraphon's battalions are pretty bad although they may not be as oppressive with the kroak change.

[Gauche]

2 minutes ago, Ganigumo said:

A good analogy for balance is a set of levers. If you remove a lever the rest of the levers matter more, so each mistake they make at the other levels will have a bigger impact. In the short term balance is going to be worse. ALL of the most impacted factions seem to be the weakest ones, while the strongest factions like lumineth, seraphon, Tzeentch, KO, seem to make out like bandits at every single change.

The new pointing means we're gonna have to deal with 30 model blobs of Pinks and Sentinels. Horrors can still chaff nearly as well as before, since you can just put a triangle at the ends of the line and splitting means that unlike every other unit in the game they won't break coherency, reinforcement limits hurt melee units more than shooting ones, and 32mm+ bases far more than 25mm bases, Tzeentch's flamer buffs are all AOE and so being MSU doesn't make them harder to buff, Unleash hell exists.

"Matched Play" needs to be more inclusive because its how people can play "fair" pickup and casual games. People need a fair set of rules so that when they come to a table for a game it isn't a one sided slaughter. If we need to separate "Matched Play" from "Competitive Play" so be it, but we need something to keep sides fair for casual games.

 

Yeah the balance went horrible with the battletomes, but thats not something an edition change can magically fix, which is why removing them doesn't fix the issue, the battletomes themselves need to be fixed. Seraphon's battalions are pretty bad although they may not be as oppressive with the kroak change.

For what it's worth I think they will separate Matched from Competitive a bit with the GHB. Those Missions will be more competitively tuned and may have additional rules if 40K is anything to go by and it has been thus far.

I disagree that all they're doing is removing a lever. They are removing one but they're re-assigning the weights as well. Command Abilities are way more important now, Monsters/Heroes may be big. If you like Battalions I have nothing to say about that, your preference is yours. But I think it opens things up more, it divests a ton of army power from that one thing (as a poster above correctly pointed out), it's less rules to remember at the table, etc. One of the things I like the most about AoS is the simplicity compared to other games and removing Battalions adds to that, for me. Of course no change will ever be universally loved or hated.

[Ganigumo]

1 minute ago, Gauche said:

For what it's worth I think they will separate Matched from Competitive a bit with the GHB. Those Missions will be more competitively tuned and may have additional rules if 40K is anything to go by and it has been thus far.

I disagree that all they're doing is removing a lever. They are removing one but they're re-assigning the weights as well. Command Abilities are way more important now, Monsters/Heroes may be big. If you like Battalions I have nothing to say about that, your preference is yours. But I think it opens things up more, it divests a ton of army power from that one thing (as a poster above correctly pointed out), it's less rules to remember at the table, etc. One of the things I like the most about AoS is the simplicity compared to other games and removing Battalions adds to that, for me. Of course no change will ever be universally loved or hated.

We've removed some complexity with battalions, but we've added far more than we've removed between the many new command abilities, special abilities, and new coherency. The game is clearly more complex than aos2 was and we haven't even seen all the rules yet.

The problem with rules available to everyone is that they're the same for everyone, and its just an access issue. It doesn't lift the floor or raise everyone up equally, it raises armies with better access up more, and currently most of the armies with the best access to the new rules are the strong ones. Unleash hell is a good example, its incredibly powerful but only useful with strong shooting units which are not equally distributed.

By removing battalions armies with weak battalions are less effected, and armies with good battalions are hit hard. The armies most reliant on battalions are actually not the top tier armies, as they often have other assets that work in conjunction, but rather the weaker armies that rely on them like BoC and Gitz (who are about to get absolutely dumpstered in this transition).

Ultimately In order to fix the balance they need to redo battletomes, again, or actually point things properly in the GHB neither of which are going to happen any time soon.

[Rachmani]

Isn’t a GHB basically upon us, with 3.0

So point changes are imminent.

[Gauche]

6 minutes ago, Ganigumo said:

We've removed some complexity with battalions, but we've added far more than we've removed between the many new command abilities, special abilities, and new coherency. The game is clearly more complex than aos2 was and we haven't even seen all the rules yet.

The problem with rules available to everyone is that they're the same for everyone, and its just an access issue. It doesn't lift the floor or raise everyone up equally, it raises armies with better access up more, and currently most of the armies with the best access to the new rules are the strong ones. Unleash hell is a good example, its incredibly powerful but only useful with strong shooting units which are not equally distributed.

By removing battalions armies with weak battalions are less effected, and armies with good battalions are hit hard. The armies most reliant on battalions are actually not the top tier armies, as they often have other assets that work in conjunction, but rather the weaker armies that rely on them like BoC and Gitz (who are about to get absolutely dumpstered in this transition).

Ultimately In order to fix the balance they need to redo battletomes, again, or actually point things properly in the GHB neither of which are going to happen any time soon.

I find myself disagreeing so I'll probably give up the fight here but my last $0.02. The new complexity...isn't complex. Coherency will take you one game to adjust to, I promise. It's not a new concept in the genre or from GW and it's been tested thoroughly. New Command Abilities you can write on a notecard, they're very simple as well. What new Special Abilities, the Monster/Hero stuff? Again, fits on a notecard and is pretty easy to grasp, I hope.

Unleash Hell looks strong at first glance but we don't have the whole picture. What if Terrain starts playing a bigger part? Now shooting isn't as good (I'm hoping for this personally). What about tagging them in Combat to get around it? As far as I know that still exists. That's the problem with making negative judgements without 100% of the picture.

There are no weak or strong armies from the past, this is a new game. New Points, new Missions, rules changes, and of course new Army Books will come. No one has any idea what the weak and strong will end up being and it's way too early to even guess based on what we know. Even if an army has taken NOTHING but nerfs from the rules that have been shown there's plenty more to see.

Ultimately to fix balance the community needs to stop buying rulebooks and force GW to move to digital rules that get updated once a quarter, like some games do. But that will take a very long time since GW is great at churning customers and people get very defensive about piracy because it's a "bad word". Otherwise nothing will ever change, there's no financial incentive for it to. Anything else is treating the symptoms, not the disease.

 

I do hope you like 3.0 and find some enjoyment from it. Never fun to see someone fall out of love with a game for any reason.

[Ganigumo]

2 minutes ago, Rachmani said:

Isn’t a GHB basically upon us, with 3.0

So point changes are imminent.

While true its not like they've ever been particularly good at pointing. Spider riders haven't budged an inch since Gitz came out for instance.

Just now, Gauche said:

I find myself disagreeing so I'll probably give up the fight here but my last $0.02. The new complexity...isn't complex. Coherency will take you one game to adjust to, I promise. It's not a new concept in the genre or from GW and it's been tested thoroughly. New Command Abilities you can write on a notecard, they're very simple as well. What new Special Abilities, the Monster/Hero stuff? Again, fits on a notecard and is pretty easy to grasp, I hope.

Unleash Hell looks strong at first glance but we don't have the whole picture. What if Terrain starts playing a bigger part? Now shooting isn't as good (I'm hoping for this personally). What about tagging them in Combat to get around it? As far as I know that still exists. That's the problem with making negative judgements without 100% of the picture.

There are no weak or strong armies from the past, this is a new game. New Points, new Missions, rules changes, and of course new Army Books will come. No one has any idea what the weak and strong will end up being and it's way too early to even guess based on what we know. Even if an army has taken NOTHING but nerfs from the rules that have been shown there's plenty more to see.

Ultimately to fix balance the community needs to stop buying rulebooks and force GW to move to digital rules that get updated once a quarter, like some games do. But that will take a very long time since GW is great at churning customers and people get very defensive about piracy because it's a "bad word". Otherwise nothing will ever change, there's no financial incentive for it to. Anything else is treating the symptoms, not the disease.

 

I do hope you like 3.0 and find some enjoyment from it. Never fun to see someone fall out of love with a game for any reason.

I don't disagree that the new stuff isn't complex, but neither were battalion effects, and it's just more stuff to keep in mind while playing, which isn't something I think the game needed more of. Its the same kind of shallow complexity 40k is full of (that I also don't like).

[Gaz Taylor]

10 minutes ago, Gauche said:

But that will take a very long time since GW is great at churning customers and people get very defensive about piracy because it's a "bad word".

No it’s illegal. Simple as that.

 

[Sception]

Overall very weird.  There are bits I don't like - I think 40k style coherency is a mistake in a game without 'over the shoulder' attacks for instance, unless they intended to increase all melee ranges to 2".  And the 'reinforced unit' business feels wrong for a battle scale game.  Going from 2nd edition's design philosophy of "we want your armies to look like armies, which means we want you to field big units, so much so that we'll even give max size units a points discount" to third edition's philosophy of "actually it turns out anything other than msu is bad, so bad in fact that we're going to put a hard cap on the number of units you're even allowed to increase above starting size" is... well, it's jarring to say the least.

But while I disliked it out of hand, both of my current planned casual 2k lists already fit within the restriction without having to make any adjustments, so I'm trying not to overreact.

On the other hand, some of the monster stuff is cool, I like the sound of more active & less self-sabotaging predatory spells.  There's certainly bits I like.

I guess I'm skeptical, but still pretty eager to see the full picture and give the new game a try.

[Rachmani]

34 minutes ago, Ganigumo said:

While true its not like they've ever been particularly good at pointing. Spider riders haven't budged an inch since Gitz came out for instance.

I don't disagree that the new stuff isn't complex, but neither were battalion effects, and it's just more stuff to keep in mind while playing, which isn't something I think the game needed more of. Its the same kind of shallow complexity 40k is full of (that I also don't like).

If GW was so bad at so many things, pointing, balance etc. how could you make a reasonable argument, that removing army specific battalions would overall only benefit the more powerful armies. According to your logic it should be completely random which army benefits and which doesn’t. Unless your point was actually that a specific army - my guess would be Gloomspite Gitz - could/should/would end up on the weakened side.

In that case your actual point would be „I don’t loke it, because it nerfs Gloomspite“, not the overall weakening of weaker & strengthening of stronger armies.

[Sleboda]

2 hours ago, Gauche said:

Invulnerable Saves don't exist

Somewhere in the recent rules releases, maybe even here on this forum, there was a reference to "ward saves." It looks like Invulnerable Saves are coming to AoS.

[Sleboda]

1 hour ago, Gaz Taylor said:

No it’s illegal. Simple as that.

 

🎶 Did you ever know that you're my heeeeero? 🎵

[Indecisive]

Reading this Reinforcement business.

Literally why. I honestly don't see why I should bother with that in any sort of friendly game.
It just seems annoying. The example I saw touted somewhere was Anvils + 12 man Raptor blobs and I'm just like, sounds like the problem in that case is Raptor unit size or the CA, not meriting everyone else's listbuilding to get weird because of it.

[Sleboda]

2 hours ago, Gauche said:

Ultimately to fix balance the community needs to stop buying rulebooks and force GW to move to digital rules that get updated once a quarter, like some games do.

First off, the concept of "the community" acting as if it were a single mind is as off as when people say "the fans" could lower ticket prices for football games if they would just stop going. Not only can you not get millions of people to act as one, even if you get many to do so, there are millions (or thousands or whatever) more ready to swoop in and do the thing you don't want them to do.

I listen to a lot of sports talk radio, and every time I hear a caller talk about how "the fans" should do something, I twitch and my eyes roll.

"The community" is not an acting body. It's hundreds of thousands of individuals with individual wants and desires. We really can't base any course of action on the assumption that "the community" is some sort of cohesive body.

Secondly, if GW ever drops physical books, I'm out. There is just something ... real ... about a book. The smell. The sound of a turning page. The lack of glow straining the eyes.  The fact that it doesn't go *poof* when the power runs out.

No, give me physical books as a vital part of my hobby experience. This is a physical hobby, with WYSIWYG physical models, physical dice, physically applied colors, physically present opponents, and physical books.

I also love video games. Heck, I play more Hearthstone than pretty much any other game currently - physical games included, but this hobby of ours is different and it would be worse off for the loss of any of its physical elements.

Edited June 11, 2021 by Sleboda
Typos

[SpiritofHokuto]

7 minutes ago, Indecisive said:

Reading this Reinforcement business.

Literally why. I honestly don't see why I should bother with that in any sort of friendly game.
It just seems annoying. The example I saw touted somewhere was Anvils + 12 man Raptor blobs and I'm just like, sounds like the problem in that case is Raptor unit size or the CA, not meriting everyone else's listbuilding to get weird because of it.

The thing is there's multiple such instances of particular units & buffs combinations that were oppressive in how much force they could project.  The intent was probably to curb that along with conga-lining screens, and while obviously we haven't seen all the rules yet from what we've seen I'd say they've only been partially successful.  

Vince's Kragnos video handily shows that while the efficacy of screens has been diminished, it hasn't been by a whole lot if you know how to position properly. 

And certain oppressive unit & buff combos aren't going to have been affected by the Reinforcement mechanic unless the new GHB savagely curtails them via points increases and unit sizes.   

[Fred1245]

1 hour ago, Ganigumo said:

While true its not like they've ever been particularly good at pointing. Spider riders haven't budged an inch since Gitz came out for instance.

I don't disagree that the new stuff isn't complex, but neither were battalion effects, and it's just more stuff to keep in mind while playing, which isn't something I think the game needed more of. Its the same kind of shallow complexity 40k is full of (that I also don't like).

Battalion effects were MASSIVELY more complicated than this for 2 reasons.

1. These all have the effect of taking an existing ability you have (command ability or enhancement) and making it free once per battle. With the exception of the one drop battalion, you already know exactly how these function just by knowing how CAs and Enhancements work. Previous battalions could end up being basically anything and would often require specific faction knowledge to even know what they DO.

2. They are consistent across factions: I've played against the changehost dozens of times and I still don't know exactly what it does and if my opponent was using it correctly or not. With these I can look at his army and know EXACTLY what his bonus is and EXACTLY when he can do it just based on knowing the core rules. Remember, it's never been only YOUR battalions you need to know the rules for.

Whatever else they do these cut down on a lot of complexity, minimize the amount of bespoke memorization players need to do, and help curb unfair play(both intentional and unintentional).

[Fred1245]

26 minutes ago, Sleboda said:

Somewhere in the recent rules releases, maybe even here on this forum, there was a reference to "ward saves." It looks like Invulnerable Saves are coming to AoS.

Those are Feel no Pains, aka 'death saves' aka that thing we already have.

 

AoS already has invul saves in the form of treating AP-3 or higher as being massively more valuable than mortal wounds.

[Ganigumo]

1 hour ago, Rachmani said:

If GW was so bad at so many things, pointing, balance etc. how could you make a reasonable argument, that removing army specific battalions would overall only benefit the more powerful armies. According to your logic it should be completely random which army benefits and which doesn’t. Unless your point was actually that a specific army - my guess would be Gloomspite Gitz - could/should/would end up on the weakened side.

In that case your actual point would be „I don’t loke it, because it nerfs Gloomspite“, not the overall weakening of weaker & strengthening of stronger armies.

I do actually think the strength of armies hurt/buffed by the battalion changed is generally random. Which is the point, it doesn't improve balance at all, it just shakes things up while cutting an interesting piece of the game out, but everyone always pushes back saying it does make the balance of the game better. There are winners and losers at both ends of the power spectrum, but the ones at the bottom are hurt more, because armies at the bottom have less they can fall back on, armies like Gitz, Beasts of chaos, Khorne, and Slaanesh. So from my perspective the conversation should be around whether shaking the meta up like this is worth what we're giving up, which I don't think it is. I'd rather we have just taken power out of battalions being present, or solved the accessibility issue by introducing general battalions alongside warscroll ones (raising the floor of battalion quality and buffing some strong armies) because then we're being honest about the problem we're solving instead of shaking everything up and praying things land in a better spot (which they wont, because while its "random" whether high or low tier armies are hurt by the change, we actually have the benefit of being able to predict the winners and losers because the armies themselves actually exist, and top tier armies generally aren't using battalions as a crutch).

My argument about the stronger armies getting better is mostly aimed at the other rules changes, although seraphon (specifically) will definitely benefit from the new battalions, as the strongest armies are already abusing things like teleports, shooting, and 25mm bases, all of which seem to be getting better, or are impacted less by the changes. 

 

 

18 minutes ago, Fred1245 said:

Battalion effects were MASSIVELY more complicated than this for 2 reasons.

1. These all have the effect of taking an existing ability you have (command ability or enhancement) and making it free once per battle. With the exception of the one drop battalion, you already know exactly how these function just by knowing how CAs and Enhancements work. Previous battalions could end up being basically anything and would often require specific faction knowledge to even know what they DO.

2. They are consistent across factions: I've played against the changehost dozens of times and I still don't know exactly what it does and if my opponent was using it correctly or not. With these I can look at his army and know EXACTLY what his bonus is and EXACTLY when he can do it just based on knowing the core rules. Remember, it's never been only YOUR battalions you need to know the rules for.

Whatever else they do these cut down on a lot of complexity, minimize the amount of bespoke memorization players need to do, and help curb unfair play(both intentional and unintentional).

1) Yes but the new ones are boring.
2) You know your rules, and your opponent knows their rules, and if you're unsure ask. its a social game and nobody should be expected to know the rules for their opponents army before starting the game.
If complexity was the issue they should've just removed them entirely instead of giving us something boring to keep track of.

[Sleboda]

4 hours ago, Fred1245 said:

Those are Feel no Pains, aka 'death saves' aka that thing we already have.

 

AoS already has invul saves in the form of treating AP-3 or higher as being massively more valuable than mortal wounds.

I get that, but I had not seen the actual use of "ward save" until that bit to which I was referring. It is, as far as I can tell, a new term for AoS, and it wasn't just a misguided player slang term. It was in print from GW.

If I see it again, I'll point to it.

Edited June 11, 2021 by Sleboda