AoS 3 - how does your army fare?

[chosen_of_khaine]

Yeah, I was worried about my Idoneth and Lumineth price hikes until I looked at my friends Sylvaneth and saw that his lists went up just as much...

I don't really see any specific armies being winners or losers, everyone is bringing 1 or 2 fewer units

[Feorag]

58 minutes ago, chosen_of_khaine said:

I don't really see any specific armies being winners or losers, everyone is bringing 1 or 2 fewer units

Did you not see the slaanesh hikes?

[zilberfrid]

1 hour ago, chosen_of_khaine said:

Yeah, I was worried about my Idoneth and Lumineth price hikes until I looked at my friends Sylvaneth and saw that his lists went up just as much...

I don't really see any specific armies being winners or losers, everyone is bringing 1 or 2 fewer units

Your Lumineth won big (especially if you spam Sentinels and Loreseekers), armies like Fyreslayers and Beasts lost the will to live.

[Marcvs]

12 hours ago, SentinelGuy said:

Living City can only choose the life realm. I was having a talk with a mate earlier and we thought that only Excelsis will be able to use the battalions in the Generals Handbook as they are based in Ghur.  

Are you sure the battalions in the GHB require your army to be based in Ghur and not the battle to take place in Ghur? Personally I think it's the second, and I also think that all battles under GHB2021 will take place in Ghur, so everyone will have access to those battalions

[whispersofblood]

27 minutes ago, Feorag said:

Did you not see the slaanesh hikes?

While I agree the HoS points increases seem aggressive. (the points on the KoS are insane), I think GW is reasonably worried about the summoning. Especially as all armies are smaller than they were. 

If I wasn't more interested in my other factions I might have given HoS a whirl, but the uninspired nature of the warscrolls lost me eye.

22 minutes ago, zilberfrid said:

Your Lumineth won big (especially if you spam Sentinels and Loreseekers), armies like Fyreslayers and Beasts lost the will to live.

Fyi my LRL list with no Teclis and only 20 Sentinels went up about 250 points. So I wouldn't say we won. 

Teclis list will lose anywhere between 20-30 bodies. It's a big difference in a build designed to essentially chip damage its way to victory. Especially how the game is now about actively claiming your battle tactics and keeping control of the board to deny your opponent as many Primaries as possible and keeping them out of reach of their battle tactics. 

Even without the points increases I think the core change to the game basically killed the Teclis + Sentinel spam build as a competitive force. But, it may have still dominated the casual fight to the death meta. Which is how most people seem to talk about the game online.

All that being said I'm generally ok with the points changes now that I've had a chance to look at all my armies. Except BoC and Nurgle which I think are going to be problematic. 

[boombyeyeah]

My Stormcast are happy, looking forward to next battletome. Vindictors, Sequitors, Liberators seem all reasonable for their price tag.

My Nurgles have mixed feelings, Blightkings without rend battalion and 25p more could be finally outclassed by a full demon build.

My Gloomspites. I have only squigs, and they don't care. 

[SentinelGuy]

1 hour ago, Marcvs said:

Are you sure the battalions in the GHB require your army to be based in Ghur and not the battle to take place in Ghur? Personally I think it's the second, and I also think that all battles under GHB2021 will take place in Ghur, so everyone will have access to those battalions

That could be it. I'm not 100% sure yet.

[MothmanDraws]

2 hours ago, whispersofblood said:

While I agree the HoS points increases seem aggressive. (the points on the KoS are insane), I think GW is reasonably worried about the summoning. Especially as all armies are smaller than they were. 

If I wasn't more interested in my other factions I might have given HoS a whirl, but the uninspired nature of the warscrolls lost me eye.

Fyi my LRL list with no Teclis and only 20 Sentinels went up about 250 points. So I wouldn't say we won. 

Teclis list will lose anywhere between 20-30 bodies. It's a big difference in a build designed to essentially chip damage its way to victory. Especially how the game is now about actively claiming your battle tactics and keeping control of the board to deny your opponent as many Primaries as possible and keeping them out of reach of their battle tactics. 

Even without the points increases I think the core change to the game basically killed the Teclis + Sentinel spam build as a competitive force. But, it may have still dominated the casual fight to the death meta. Which is how most people seem to talk about the game online.

All that being said I'm generally ok with the points changes now that I've had a chance to look at all my armies. Except BoC and Nurgle which I think are going to be problematic. 

The thing with summoning for hedonites though is out of the chaos gods their summoning isnt that much crazier or some undead summoning, we get 1 unit a turn, outside of very specific builds we cannot get a turn 1 summon(which require us to go 2nd and opponent to perfectly spread damage for us), turn 2 and 3 are usually turns we get something out. 

But slaanesh summoning requires you to play anti to the game, you dont want to kill units(runs counter to what sigvald, dexcessa and keepers are good at), you want to spread damage thin and you want your units to all take damage and deal with low bravery and opponent knows easily how to counter it (wipe units). The new secondaries are variations on kill stuff or take objectives so now we have to give up the depravity from killing the unit to score. Our army is glass with poor bravery so dies to stiff breeze. We have great output on all our heroes, but most of them die to focus fire (they are solid at doing stuff and fixing themselves up if they take minimal damage).

The general consensus on the Hedonites in 3rd was that they were priced for 3rd and even looking at playing field now the old points would have made hedonites not amazingly pointed but decent. Slaanesh players were finally starting to look positivly on their army with 3rd ed rules feeling like they explained the previous high cost somewhat, then we find out that no we must pay more for it.

[stratigo]

4 hours ago, Fred1245 said:

That's more a problem with your opponents than the army. DoK got hit almost as hard by their new book as Slaanesh did outside of Morathi and Blood Stalkers. If people are still struggling against the Blood Stalker, Blood Sister, Morathi, Screens combo everyone's been running since the Witch Brew nerf, that's on them.

they really didn't. Having to change up how you play to find the power isn't a nerf to an army, just to the way you play them

[stratigo]

2 hours ago, whispersofblood said:

While I agree the HoS points increases seem aggressive. (the points on the KoS are insane), I think GW is reasonably worried about the summoning. Especially as all armies are smaller than they were. 

If I wasn't more interested in my other factions I might have given HoS a whirl, but the uninspired nature of the warscrolls lost me eye.

Fyi my LRL list with no Teclis and only 20 Sentinels went up about 250 points. So I wouldn't say we won. 

Teclis list will lose anywhere between 20-30 bodies. It's a big difference in a build designed to essentially chip damage its way to victory. Especially how the game is now about actively claiming your battle tactics and keeping control of the board to deny your opponent as many Primaries as possible and keeping them out of reach of their battle tactics. 

Even without the points increases I think the core change to the game basically killed the Teclis + Sentinel spam build as a competitive force. But, it may have still dominated the casual fight to the death meta. Which is how most people seem to talk about the game online.

All that being said I'm generally ok with the points changes now that I've had a chance to look at all my armies. Except BoC and Nurgle which I think are going to be problematic. 

It won't lose nearly that much because it's dropping the battalion it used to take. The net loss in much lower.

 

[Fred1245]

1 hour ago, stratigo said:

they really didn't. Having to change up how you play to find the power isn't a nerf to an army, just to the way you play them

It didn't change up how you play the army. That same combo was what was used as soon as broken realms Morathi dropped. They just nerfed it in multiple, multiple different ways (which was mostly fair, the previous version was bonkers).

The problem was they nerfed everything else too so that same unit combo was still the most powerful way to play the army. It was just much worse.

Nothing changed about how the army played, the numbers just got worse.

Now the numbers got worse again with an average 20% bump, second highest of any faction as far as I can tell.

[Skreech Verminking]

4 hours ago, whispersofblood said:

Fyi my LRL list with no Teclis and only 20 Sentinels went up about 250 points. So I wouldn't say we won

It’s not that bad, a skaven list a friend of mine enjoyed playing went up another 600points.

That is a lot for a new edition, now the questions just reminds how this will impact the skaven in total, I’ll be very interested in seeing the results, as soon as I’m able to play again

[zilberfrid]

6 hours ago, whispersofblood said:

Fyi my LRL list with no Teclis and only 20 Sentinels went up about 250 points. So I wouldn't say we won. 

Teclis list will lose anywhere between 20-30 bodies. It's a big difference in a build designed to essentially chip damage its way to victory. Especially how the game is now about actively claiming your battle tactics and keeping control of the board to deny your opponent as many Primaries as possible and keeping them out of reach of their battle tactics. 

Even without the points increases I think the core change to the game basically killed the Teclis + Sentinel spam build as a competitive force. But, it may have still dominated the casual fight to the death meta. Which is how most people seem to talk about the game online.

Loreseekers take care of objective management.

250 points is 12.5% increase on average, which is certainly not the biggest around.

Between the buff to max size Sentinels, more terrain to increase value of LoS ignoring, command abilities, shackles, Teclis not needing to roll so not chancing rolling two ones, free Shining Company and the secondary goal of keeping a wizard alive in an army of wizards, I don't see any nerfs, also, denying the opponent the chance to do stuff is exactly what Lumineth do.

[Doko]

If EVERY unit in every tome would had got a 15% increase nobody would be mad.

Smaller map so smaller army.

The problem is as overpowers units got the smallest nerfs and underpowers unit got the biggest nerf.

 

Sentinels-7% nerf

Archaon-5% nerf

The big kharadron ship- almost 0%

Tzenth horrors-got even a 5 points buff!!!!

 

But then we have:

Sylvaneth the worst army of tye game got durthu-15% nerf

Citys of sigmar gyrobomber(gyrocopter had any use but nobody ever never used a bomber)- 20% nerf

Fyreslayers vulkites-13% nerf

 

Dont makes sense how good units got even better and how bad units have got worse with these new points

[whispersofblood]

4 hours ago, stratigo said:

It won't lose nearly that much because it's dropping the battalion it used to take. The net loss in much lower.

 

Teclis himself accounts for 80% of the cost of the battalion, but also if you didn't take the battalion which I don't believe most people did, you are automatically down 10 bodies, changes to the cost of the other units make you lose at least 10 more bodies. I think there is a Teclis build but a) its very manageable to play against imo, and b) it doesn't have anywhere near the killing power people suggest. It sometimes comes across as if people just have ptsd.

6 minutes ago, zilberfrid said:

Loreseekers take care of objective management.

250 points is 12.5% increase on average, which is certainly not the biggest around.

Between the buff to max size Sentinels, more terrain to increase value of LoS ignoring, command abilities, shackles, Teclis not needing to roll so not chancing rolling two ones, free Shining Company and the secondary goal of keeping a wizard alive in an army of wizards, I don't see any nerfs, also, denying the opponent the chance to do stuff is exactly what Lumineth do.

Well first of all, no they do not, a loreseeker is 160 points now, you still need to find the points to take the first one. Secondly, objectives account for less than half the points when determining the score, and even if the LRL player holds all but 1 objective for all 5 turns they finish with 5 extra points. Its the active scoring that is important, and quite a few of these give bonus points for completion with a monster.

being able to take more models isn't a buff, you pay for models. Also for every unit you want with 30 models you need to take a unit of Wardens for. So its privilege that is paid for, as are allegiance abilities, and every faction has native synergistic Grand Strategies, so the cherry picking can be brought to an end.

Lastly I didn't say the army was nerfed. The lack of nuance isn't appreciated. What I said was LRL aren't a "winner" in the point changes and many army lists are going to need a re-design as most factions will. Then another re-design once they play a game and understand you can't just turtle with Teclis and hope to deny your opponent the models to secure objectives. 

I'm actually very excited to get my IJ on the table as I can't wait to smash and bash my way through sections of the board. One of the things that has helped me appreciate the points changes has been writing lists for all my factions. It gives me a strong point to relate the changes across armies and see what factions can include. My BoC and my IJ are huge winners having gained a lot and not having to pay much in the way of point increases to get it.  

[tripchimeras]

4 hours ago, MothmanDraws said:

The thing with summoning for hedonites though is out of the chaos gods their summoning isnt that much crazier or some undead summoning, we get 1 unit a turn, outside of very specific builds we cannot get a turn 1 summon(which require us to go 2nd and opponent to perfectly spread damage for us), turn 2 and 3 are usually turns we get something out. 

Yep this is the key on slaanesh.  You are capped at 1 unit a turn.  And based on what you are bringing to the table base at this point, I'm sorry, you could summon a keeper once a turn all game long and the top tier armies would still just plow through slaanesh at this point.  This is a SLIGHT exageration, but not as much of one as it should be.  Look in theory MSU will help slaanesh sumoning, but msu also makes it that much harder to NOT kill the units you target, and if you are playing for summons your army is all 180pt 11 wound archer units and blissbarb seekers and its just not going to go well for you anyways.  You just can't replenish your troops fast enough at 1 summons no matter how much depravity farming you do.  Realistically T1 and T2 you will build up depravity points at a good clip, but there will be basically nothing left to support your summoned units by end of 2 against any remotely competitive list.  I am sure there is some janky list in this book somewhere still that if played perfectly and utilizing a bunch of gamey loopholes that it can compete at some level.  You can find something like that in almost every book.  But it just doesn't justify the drubbing GW gave them.

Gits changes were bad, Fyreslayers were tragic, Beasts of Chaos were ugly, but all of these are older books that are going to be getting replaced soon anyways.  Slaanesh is brand spanking new, came out of the gate way overpriced and just got destroyed again.  To me its by far the most bizarre of the point changes.

On the positive side a lot of armies I think got done really well.  Love warclans changes, love SoB, love S2D.  All felt like they got really solid changes that either keeps them in similar good place (warclans), improves list flexibility (SoB), or gives them a needed buff (S2D).  Think Seraphon are still going to be really strong but I think the pt changes largely were decent and they should be a little more manageable.  I think DoK, LRL, and Cities are clear winners to me.  DoK got pretty big pt hikes, but they are pt hikes that just don't fundamentally change their army comp, and I really don't see changing their OP level enough.  Same with LRL.  Cities just got plain BETTER.  Like ALL of their monsters got reduced when every other army saw big pt hikes on monsters, and they really weren't bad to begin with (especially phoenixes).  And lets not get started on how much better Hallowheart and tempest eye got.  What on earth was GW thinking making Iron Drakes conditional battleline???  That is going to be one hell of a no fun experience waiting to happen.  They were great before, now you are talking about ALSO giving them ability to stand and shoot, reducing cost of soulscreem bridge for them, AND they can now have a 3+ save in combat.  Big winners for individual units.  I also have nightmares thinking about whatever horde armies are left trying to play vs gyrocopters.  Think about 60 goblins trying to take an objective from some random chaffe unit with 2 gyros behind them backed up by hawkeye and celestial huricanum.  Thats 120 3+ 3+ -1 rend stand and shoot shots...  Look I know that's an edge case, but just wanted to throw that out their to demonstrate how good Cities can be now.

[stratigo]

I think irondrakes will have the same issues they always had. They're just too slow. The bridge can't port around an entire army anymore. Maybe a unit with a bridge supporting cavalry? I think cavalry is the winner in CoS. They perform well in MSU

[whispersofblood]

@tripchimeras I'm pretty happy with BoC. What's your thinking on them not being well served? I agree I'm really excited by my IJ right now, there is some hideous stuff coming for the top tables. 

[tripchimeras]

11 minutes ago, whispersofblood said:

@tripchimeras I'm pretty happy with BoC. What's your thinking on them not being well served? I agree I'm really excited by my IJ right now, there is some hideous stuff coming for the top tables. 

I think I mentioned BoC, more for effect 3rd changes overall have on them then pts specifically.  Like they didn't get hit hard in pts in relation to everyone else, but they were also already near the bottom of the pile, and they weren't helped that much either.  I think they potentially get hit somewhat hard by things like reinforcements, coherency etc etc.  Like I think they benefit from monster changes for instance because they've got a lot of cheap monsters, but they are still 0-4 for behemoths and don't have way around that, so feels like having meh cheap monsters doesn't help as well as it could.  

I also don't play BoC though, so totally could be wrong.

Edited June 18, 2021 by tripchimeras

[MothmanDraws]

7 minutes ago, tripchimeras said:

Yep this is the key on slaanesh.  You are capped at 1 unit a turn.  And based on what you are bringing to the table base at this point, I'm sorry, you could summon a keeper once a turn all game long and the top tier armies would still just plow through slaanesh at this point.  This is a SLIGHT exageration, but not as much of one as it should be.  Look in theory MSU will help slaanesh sumoning, but msu also makes it that much harder to NOT kill the units you target, and if you are playing for summons your army is all 180pt 11 wound archer units and blissbarb seekers and its just not going to go well for you anyways.  You just can't replenish your troops fast enough at 1 summons no matter how much depravity farming you do.  Realistically T1 and T2 you will build up depravity points at a good clip, but there will be basically nothing left to support your summoned units by end of 2 against any remotely competitive list.  I am sure there is some janky list in this book somewhere still that if played perfectly and utilizing a bunch of gamey loopholes that it can compete at some level.  You can find something like that in almost every book.  But it just doesn't justify the drubbing GW gave them.

 

I think the other thing to look at with points in summoning is how efficient is the army outside of it, summoning is an army mechanic and replaces stuff like light of the bad moon, aetherquartz or other ability values in an army.

lets say for example you on average get 2 big summons in slaanesh a game, 2x30 daemonettes or 2x keepers in old points that was bringing a value of between 660-680, so slaanesh playing to decent level was managing to get out 2700 ish point armies over course of a game. The other ability the army has is exploding 6s which is ok, but really with size of units outside of 30 blocks of daemonettes was like 1-2 hits here and there, nothing crazy. Even with summoning people felt like slaanesh was between 10-20% overcosted with a summoning tax, as a force which is working out to between 2-400 points(lets call it 300), this would on average leave the value of our allegiance ability and summoning as being worth about 400 points average as the value our summoning can bring which is about the points for your 3rd turn summon. So at that point slaanesh is playing sub optimally(cant kill enemies, has to deal with enemy units therefore being stronger), has worse base units, all in hopes that the 3rd turn summon is enough to turn the game.

its also worth noting that that 400 we were getting was the value of our allegiance ability effectively and whatever synergy/troop quality we lost to be a summoining army, so up against whatever points value in addition aetherquartz would be giving you, or bad moon, which are value bonuses to armies that can not be turned off unlike summoning. Though if I was to make a guess I think with the lack of synergy in the army most hedonites are rocking up with a 1600-1750 pt army vs a 2300 pts (decent army with 100pts from internal synergy/allegiance ability value) in the hopes that if they play perfect they will stagger out 2700 points of value across the game.

There is a clear intended design for slaanesh, its supposed to be a slow burn army as it toys with enemy, it wants to maim them first turn to make them impotent, then 2nd turn let them live and play with their food before 3rd turn finishing the deal. However outside of sigvald very little hits hard enough turn 1 to gut punch the opponent and our units cannot take the punishment back due to either being too few in number or being elite pricing but not durable.

Technically the new points mean we are getting more raw value out of summoning with the 2x30 blocks or 2 keepers being 840 in value, but god knows how much the actual army is paying for the ability to work towards unlocking that value with id argue we are paying 25-30% overcost. The actual hedonites units dont have the staying power to fight at 70% the size of a normal army, with only ability they can rely on being there is exploding 6s which they have to rely on to get the engine going to actually find the value in the summoning. I legit think gw priced hedonites on assumption that army can get 6 keepers over whole game, vs the mostly likely outcome being 1-3, 3 only really happening if you are massively outplaying opponent.

[CommissarRotke]

My only real gripe with Stormcast changes is that Liberators went up from 90 to 95, which means they'll still end up being the core battleline pick until our new book hopefully updates warscrolls.

I think the battalion and priest changes will do amazing for us, and the shooting changes/buffs are very welcome for the Judicators I still need to build.

We really need to wait on the battletome but so far I'm going to enjoy applying the new changes to Stormcast!

[SentinelGuy]

57 minutes ago, stratigo said:

I think irondrakes will have the same issues they always had. They're just too slow. The bridge can't port around an entire army anymore. Maybe a unit with a bridge supporting cavalry? I think cavalry is the winner in CoS. They perform well in MSU

Smaller table size and objective placement will help them - at some point the enemy has to come into range. Well, unless you're spamming Lumineth Sentinels.

Edited June 18, 2021 by SentinelGuy

[stratigo]

8 minutes ago, SentinelGuy said:

Smaller table size and objective placement will help them - at some point the enemy has to come into range. Well, unless you're spamming Lumineth Sentinels.

Maybe, but only getting a couple of shots off isn't as efficient as getting to shoot every turn

[SentinelGuy]

8 minutes ago, stratigo said:

Maybe, but only getting a couple of shots off isn't as efficient as getting to shoot every turn

I think the new edition may have quite the impact on shooting - there's the new generic mist spell, the requirement for more terrain, unit cohesion changes, the change to the bridge endless spell etc. I wouldn't be surprised if we see most shooting units having to relocate a bit more to get range or get away from enemies. Irondrakes cost a lot but they do have some of the best armour for ranged units, and even if they only shoot once instead of twice (if they move), they're still able to do some damage. With enemy units potentially running in smaller sizes, it's possible that Irondrakes can be run smaller as well, which means more tasty torpedo shots from the champs. I've already decided to break my 30 block down into 3 x 10 for a few games to try it.

[Skreech Verminking]

14 hours ago, SentinelGuy said:

I think the new edition may have quite the impact on shooting - there's the new generic mist spell, the requirement for more terrain, unit cohesion changes, the change to the bridge endless spell etc. I wouldn't be surprised if we see most shooting units having to relocate a bit more to get range or get away from enemies. Irondrakes cost a lot but they do have some of the best armour for ranged units, and even if they only shoot once instead of twice (if they move), they're still able to do some damage. With enemy units potentially running in smaller sizes, it's possible that Irondrakes can be run smaller as well, which means more tasty torpedo shots from the champs. I've already decided to break my 30 block down into 3 x 10 for a few games to try it.

And then you face that one skavenplayer using two blocks of 60 clanrats.

dumdumduum😂

nah have fun it really sounds like a pretty great idea