3.0 Actual Games Conversation

[LuminethMage]

11 hours ago, stratigo said:

The all about mortal wound thing is a serious worry for me. Means only, what, like a quarter of the armies in the game are actually viable? Hope your army gets blessed by the mortal wound fairy, or just go home?

Like I said, it was one game, and the LRL I had (100% Vanari and Scinari) tend to rely on MW anyway. Plus I ran into a lot of 3+ save units on the other side. It's probably not every game. On the plus side, units might not always just get deleted outright. I do think MW will be important, but generally speaking I found the game very balanced, and it's also good to have some tanky units in the game. I had serious problems taking down his Radukar for example - which is good. 

It might be an issue for lists like mine - because outside of MW, LRL often just do 0/-1 rend, 1 damage attacks. That's how they are build. I can see it being a bit like this against enemies like Stormcast, but then I think that's their thing, low models, hard to take down. (You can build different list, like with our mountain spirits, and those might get more popular over AoS 3). 

It was pretty good to see that we had still both around half of our armies left start of BR 5, although we were constantly fighting, I prefer that to what happened often before - at start of T2 nothing much left if one side got the double, or fastest end of 3, basically everything was over. 

I could see low MW output armies struggle against some opponents though. Concern about that isn't totally unverified in my view, but right now I'd look more on all the exciting new things we get, and see how it goes. 

[stratigo]

4 minutes ago, LuminethMage said:

Like I said, it was one game, and the LRL I had (100% Vanari and Scinari) tend to rely on MW anyway. Plus I ran into a lot of 3+ save units on the other side. It's probably not every game. On the plus side, units might not always just get deleted outright. I do think MW will be important, but generally speaking I found the game very balanced, and it's also good to have some tanky units in the game. I had serious problems taking down his Radukar for example - which is good. 

It might be an issue for lists like mine - because outside of MW, LRL often just do 0/-1 rend, 1 damage attacks. That's how they are build. I can see it being a bit like this against enemies like Stormcast, but then I think that's their thing, low models, hard to take down. (You can build different list, like with our mountain spirits, and those might get more popular over AoS 3). 

It was pretty good to see that we had still both around half of our armies left start of BR 5, although we were constantly fighting, I prefer that to what happened often before - at start of T2 nothing much left if one side got the double, or fastest end of 3, basically everything was over. 

I could see low MW output armies struggle against some opponents though. Concern about that isn't totally unverified in my view, but right now I'd look more on all the exciting new things we get, and see how it goes. 

 

Most people do 1 damage 1 rend attacks. LRL just get that plus easy mortals. 

 

Mortal wound spam is really bad for the game. Because how do you price saves? Like a 3 plus save monster is a complete nightmare to kill. It's so easy to stack saves to get to a two plus and not worry at all about rend. So, do you assign a bunch of points to those monsters? Then LRL, or Tzeentch, come in and go "lul saves? What's that?". So do you cut the cost of that monster because there's three or four armies that dumpster it? But then it becomes way too cost effective verse most armies in the game.

 

How do you derive a good value for high armor saves if a bunch of armies mostly ignore it? I mean, nighthaunt literally withered on the existence of having unrendable saves that GW values too highly.

 

So, high save monsters are super pushed and they very easily get a bunch of save buffs and it's just a complete terror. Except against LRL. So, LRL get a big ol' boost from GW pushing high save monsters because LRL don't care about all those saves. It's a feedback loop here. Worse yet, the very existence of LRL (and, like, tzeentch) could actually just trash the meta GW is trying to push because mortal wounds are an inherently unbalancing mechanic. Because when an army like LRL exists, it suppresses the value of good saves, but if those saves get valued to compare to a LRL army, then units that have them instead dumpster every army not as graced as LRL. And this is an issue that just compounds unless every army gets the same easy access to mortal wounds as LRL.

 

Mortal wounds are fine in an even spread across armies in small numbers to act as a balancing mechanism for high save units, but are terrible when unevenly distributed with some armies getting just far too many

[LuminethMage]

3 hours ago, stratigo said:

 

Most people do 1 damage 1 rend attacks. LRL just get that plus easy mortals. 

 

Mortal wound spam is really bad for the game. Because how do you price saves? Like a 3 plus save monster is a complete nightmare to kill. It's so easy to stack saves to get to a two plus and not worry at all about rend. So, do you assign a bunch of points to those monsters? Then LRL, or Tzeentch, come in and go "lul saves? What's that?". So do you cut the cost of that monster because there's three or four armies that dumpster it? But then it becomes way too cost effective verse most armies in the game.

 

How do you derive a good value for high armor saves if a bunch of armies mostly ignore it? I mean, nighthaunt literally withered on the existence of having unrendable saves that GW values too highly.

 

So, high save monsters are super pushed and they very easily get a bunch of save buffs and it's just a complete terror. Except against LRL. So, LRL get a big ol' boost from GW pushing high save monsters because LRL don't care about all those saves. It's a feedback loop here. Worse yet, the very existence of LRL (and, like, tzeentch) could actually just trash the meta GW is trying to push because mortal wounds are an inherently unbalancing mechanic. Because when an army like LRL exists, it suppresses the value of good saves, but if those saves get valued to compare to a LRL army, then units that have them instead dumpster every army not as graced as LRL. And this is an issue that just compounds unless every army gets the same easy access to mortal wounds as LRL.

 

Mortal wounds are fine in an even spread across armies in small numbers to act as a balancing mechanism for high save units, but are terrible when unevenly distributed with some armies getting just far too many

Oh ok, just another LRL are OP rant I don't engage in those anymore, leads to nothing. Whatever floats your boat there, have fun playing AoS3!

[Kadeton]

3 hours ago, stratigo said:

Mortal wound spam is really bad for the game. Because how do you price saves?

I don't think you factor mortal wounds into the price of armour at all. That doesn't really make sense - you're not baselining the unit based on its own capabilities, but on the capabilities of every other unit in the game. That's too volatile a calculation.

Instead, just factor mortal wounds into the points cost of the units inflicting the mortal wounds. Basically, those units should only approach cost-efficiency when using their mortal wound output to attack high-armour targets.

[Envyus]

On 6/29/2021 at 3:58 PM, Gailon said:

I'm curious about this, because I'm not sure I see it. I'd like it to be true. Most people will take a Warlord battalion and take an extra artifact, but that seems equivalent to people taking a warscroll battalion, which seemed fairly common,

Two extra artifacts requires 6 leaders, 4 of which have less than 10 wounds. Not sure how many people will push for that? (genuine question) And it pretty much concedes the choice of who goes first in most games.  

It does, that’s why I said it’s a choice.

[zilberfrid]

5 hours ago, Kadeton said:

I don't think you factor mortal wounds into the price of armour at all. That doesn't really make sense - you're not baselining the unit based on its own capabilities, but on the capabilities of every other unit in the game. That's too volatile a calculation.

Instead, just factor mortal wounds into the points cost of the units inflicting the mortal wounds. Basically, those units should only approach cost-efficiency when using their mortal wound output to attack high-armour targets.

If I have armour that means I can reduce the effect of incoming rend 0 fire to 1/3, that's quite good. Effectively triple the wounds, which through healing and battleshock may be even more.

Throw in some save rerolls, and it gets better.

If there is rend on the table, armour still does something, as do the rerolls, perhaps double the effective wounds, perhaps an increase of 50%.

If the majority of the damage output is mortal wounds, my armour is useless, and all points spent on it over chaff are wasted.

Because it often is on to hit with new warscrolls, can't even try to stack -1 to hits. Because it isn't a spell*, can't unbind.

Prevalence of mw's on hit absolutely devalues armour.

*If the mw is increased by a spell, was that spell cast in unbinding range, and do you have the luxury to spend an unbind on that?

Edited July 2, 2021 by zilberfrid

[Kadeton]

13 minutes ago, zilberfrid said:

Prevalence of mw's on hit absolutely devalues armour.

Yes, of course it does. But you shouldn't factor that into the cost of armour. Instead, you increase the cost of units that can inflict mortal wounds (because that's a very valuable ability). Mortal wounds become expensive, and therefore rare... thus increasing the effective value of armour again.

The point is that you baseline the unit's cost based on its own abilities, not what's available to certain other armies - because then your heavy armour will be balanced against just those armies but overpowered against everyone else. If heavy armour is devalued because mortal wounds are too common, the solution is not to make armour too cheap, it's to make mortal wounds less common.

Anyway, I think we're off topic.

[Reinholt]

16 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

A couple more games played, feel ever more confident in saying grand strategies and battle tactics are not particularly well designed, it's too hard not to succeed at them with a well-built list. They also significant increase the importance of good list-building, which I am not convinced is a great change. In a lot of ways, these mechanics seem to serve more as traps for the unwary or noobs than something that actually adds a lot to game strategy. 

IMO grand strategies should just go away completely - they promote skew in your list-building, which is precisely the opposite of what secondary objectives are supposed to do in a game, and also punish bad list-builders for no real apparent reason. They just don't actually add anything that I can see, and the skew promotion is actively toxic towards incentivizing TAC lists. 

Battle tactics are more solid conceptually, they just need to be more interesting and less auto-succeed. Maybe even give your opponent some ability to influence your choices, i.e. once per game, they can veto the choice you make, forcing you to take a different one that round (with the one you didn't choose going back into the pool so you can choose it next turn if you want). It doesn't seem brilliant right now to have a situation where a well-built list will almost always score 10 out of 10 unless it gets tabled, and where scoring any less than that feels like a catastrophic loss.

I am also a little concerned about how powerful tabling your opponent now is with the interaction with grand strategies and to a lesser extent battle tactics. With the new objective scoring, you really can't get so far ahead on the primary that you can survive being tabled, aside from maybe being tabled on the bottom of T5. If you get tabled any time before that, even the bottom of T4 or top of T5 when you're going second, it's very unlikely you are going to have any chance of winning, unless your opponent has been playing extraordinarily badly while also tabling you. 

Interestingly, unleash hell hasn't so far been a big issue in any of the games I've played. 

 

This has been my experience with a few more nuggets thrown in:

1. The coherency rules are a massive buff for 5 person or less units, units on 25mm bases, and shooting units. They are a massive nerf for anything that wants to melee on a >25mm base that doesn't have 2" or better reach (maybe more depending on base sizes). Just keep this in mind when you build armies. Back to @yukishiro1's point but I think the overwhelming majority of AoS games will now be won in the list building stage.
2. Unleash Hell has been a huge issue in my games, but that may have to do with my choice of army (Shootcast, as well as 1 game with my new SBGL army). Anvils + Unleash Hell has been downright unpleasant, and I've been testing a unit of 6x hurricane guys since they haven't moved in my opponent's phase so the interaction with Unleash Hell is pretty fantastic.
3. Armor saves being easier to amp up is going to lead to very high rend (-2 / -3) or MWs being even more valuable. The latter were already the most valuable thing already.
4. Command points are plentiful, hero actions are useful if you don't get smoked immediately.

In short, I think the story of AoS 3.0 so far for me could be summed up as this:

1. Build a list with a plan to win using the new tactics
2. Balanced armies will likely perform worse than specialists designed to maximize grand strategies / battle tactics
3. The strong got stronger and the weak got weaker, in terms of things that were already good vs. bad

[stratigo]

15 hours ago, Kadeton said:

Yes, of course it does. But you shouldn't factor that into the cost of armour. Instead, you increase the cost of units that can inflict mortal wounds (because that's a very valuable ability). Mortal wounds become expensive, and therefore rare... thus increasing the effective value of armour again.

The point is that you baseline the unit's cost based on its own abilities, not what's available to certain other armies - because then your heavy armour will be balanced against just those armies but overpowered against everyone else. If heavy armour is devalued because mortal wounds are too common, the solution is not to make armour too cheap, it's to make mortal wounds less common.

Anyway, I think we're off topic.

This is a strong should I agree with.

 

GW doesn't though

[Fred1245]

On 7/1/2021 at 9:11 PM, LuminethMage said:

Like I said, it was one game, and the LRL I had (100% Vanari and Scinari) tend to rely on MW anyway. Plus I ran into a lot of 3+ save units on the other side. It's probably not every game. On the plus side, units might not always just get deleted outright. I do think MW will be important, but generally speaking I found the game very balanced, and it's also good to have some tanky units in the game. I had serious problems taking down his Radukar for example - which is good. 

It might be an issue for lists like mine - because outside of MW, LRL often just do 0/-1 rend, 1 damage attacks. That's how they are build. I can see it being a bit like this against enemies like Stormcast, but then I think that's their thing, low models, hard to take down. (You can build different list, like with our mountain spirits, and those might get more popular over AoS 3). 

It was pretty good to see that we had still both around half of our armies left start of BR 5, although we were constantly fighting, I prefer that to what happened often before - at start of T2 nothing much left if one side got the double, or fastest end of 3, basically everything was over. 

I could see low MW output armies struggle against some opponents though. Concern about that isn't totally unverified in my view, but right now I'd look more on all the exciting new things we get, and see how it goes. 

Sucks for armies that rely on large numbers of low rend attacks for damage and don't do much in the way of mortal wounds.

Things like Witch Aelves are basically worthless against 2+ or 3+ saves, especially when AT BEST they'll be 5+ themselves. So THEY still get deleted outright but they can't delete things themselves anymore.

[Fred1245]

On 7/1/2021 at 10:24 AM, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

You would hope that armies that are not offensive enough to break through high saves should at least be defensive enough to bring high save units themselves and excel in the objective game that way.

Still, I also hope AoS does not become a game where things don't die from normal combat, but mostly just from mortals.

Melee DoK crying in a corner, lol.

[Starfyre]

Had two games with the new edition today and enjoyed them!  

Command points were plentiful, the heroic actions useful but with only 1 of us having a monster, and only 1 monster at that, we didn't really get to play too much with the Monstrous Rampage rules. Coherency only became a minor issue once. 

We tried the grand strategies and battle tactics in our second game, after getting to grips with the new additions in the first game. They made a difference, I won the second game by denying my opponent's grand strategy in the last combat phase of turn 5. That being said, I don't think we quite got all our army rules correct - but then again, there is SO much to remember, so many little fiddly interactions.  

I wouldn't say either of our armies were geared toward exploiting the rules, just two fairly casual lists - 1500pt SCE Celestial Vindicators versus FEC. But with so many ways of scoring extra VP with Monsters, can appreciate there's going to be ways of exploiting those.

Core Battalions were interesting - I went for a Warlord, Battle regiment and Hunters, whereas my opponent crammed everything into a Battle Regiment, and chose to go first both games. Going second, the extra CP from the Warlord battalion wasn't worth it.

My only gripe so far is how small the text in the GHB is! We also only played on a half size board, using the 2 boards from the 40K command edition because that's all that's fits on my table. So the game was fast.

Looking forward to more - and a new SCE battletome as well!

[LuminethMage]

On 7/3/2021 at 12:27 PM, Fred1245 said:

Sucks for armies that rely on large numbers of low rend attacks for damage and don't do much in the way of mortal wounds.

Things like Witch Aelves are basically worthless against 2+ or 3+ saves, especially when AT BEST they'll be 5+ themselves. So THEY still get deleted outright but they can't delete things themselves anymore.

It depends. For example, my Bladelords are just like that. No rend, no MW, but they can do a ton of attacks on the right targets, similar to the numbers of WE. The Bladelords were pretty good in my last match for example (which was a rematch again against SBL). If you have enough attacks you still do damage. The way I play LRL (a lot of MSU Vanari plus Scinari) means besides MW I usually only have a low number of 3/4/0 1 damage or 3/3/-1 1 damage attacks. You usually end up saying something like this to your opponent: 3 MW and 1 W at no rend. Or 5 MW and 2 W at -1. It just seems to be difficult to say anything as a LRL player here without being jumped at. That's why I said that my one game experience should be taken with a grain of salt.

In my first match the BL didn't get much play, they did though in the 2nd. We played another match last Saturday where I had 15 Bladelords altogether. And they did ok, because I managed to get them into the right targets. Zombies, Skellies, Gravegard and a Vampire Lord. 5 of them got absolutely deleted by Gravegard though 😅.

A bit more in detail: They were able to do some damage, like 10 W out of 40+ attacks (2 (all out attack)/3/0 1 damage) for example against 4+ save with 6 ward. Which is probably more like Witch Aelves would feel. 10 W doesn't sound great in terms of AoS2, but your opponents also often field smaller units, so it might be enough to take out or at least cripple an opposing unit. 

I can see WE-like units having issues against certain armies, like Stormcast, but then DoK also have access to MW causing units. I think the new editions wants you to mix your units, and none being the best choice for everything. It doesn't want you to bring a whole army of WE, but mix-in some of your Snakes for example, or use Spells/Prayers to get your MW. Isn't there a prayer now which can cause MW on a 6? That might be just the right thing for your WE (even if it's not reliable). We all will have to test around a bit what works. 

I also understand that some factions will have problems at the start, because the rely on units which might be less useful than before or do not have access to MW, but I hope these will be fixed.

Edited July 5, 2021 by LuminethMage

[JackStreicher]

Alright.

I had a game yesterday which was very fun.  It was the first AoS 3.0 Game of my brother who enjoyed it (he‘s a comp. 40K player).

I‘ll attach some images but I won‘t write a whole detailed report ^^

we played 5 rounds.
I had:

Legion of Night 

2x Blood Knights, 1x Vargskyr, 20 Skeletons, 1 Radukar the Beast, Necromancer, Vengorian Lord, 1x Dire Wolves, 1x Vargheists, 1x Terrorgheist 

He played the Taker Tribe with 2x Megas (Krakeneater and War Stomper), 1x 3 Giants, 3x1 Giant.

Highlights: The Vargskyr tanked the Warstomper for 3 Combat Phases.

A Giant snatched up a Blood Knight and put it into its (huge) bag xD, the Warstomper felt inspired and picked up the Castellant (last model) and tossed it into the Vengorian (missing). - Cinematic end for the one Knight Unit ^^
 

Magic: out of 10 times I could cast, I managed 5... the rest was failed (3/5) with a 3, and two were unbound by the Krakeneater’s Magic lantern. So I managed to cast 2x Fading Vigor to hinder the Warstomper and 1x Flaming weapons on the Vengo. The Vengo failed all of his „wildness“ tests and only managed to use a command ability once in the whole game... I really think this ability makes Vengos really bad in this edition ^^
 

Giants won 25 : 21 as I failed to kill the last Mega off to grab the objective. The mega would‘ve been dead if he hadn’t had thrown one of my blood knights against a house before it could strike

It was a very fun game with Giant doing Giant stuff and the Terrorgheist actually being good! (Lost a Knight to the exploding Terrorgheist 🤣) „What is this, bats? Oh no, not bats, that‘s my weakness uuuurgh!!“

I wrote this on my cellphone, so please forgive my autocorrect :D

Edited July 5, 2021 by JackStreicher

[Xil]

I really don't like the new edition. I have lost all interest in the game over my last 3/4 matches. 

Shooting is mandatory, MW spam is still king and if you play an army that has no wards you just plug 600 points in the first hero phase of your enemy and shake hands. 

Core rules might be OK ignoring the shooting stuff. 

But The Battletome balance is soooo much worse than ever before. Especially the FAQ effed up so much and kicked some armies hard again, which already were down in the dirt eating the waste products of the few top tiers. 

Edited July 5, 2021 by Xil

[JackStreicher]

33 minutes ago, Xil said:

I really don't like the new edition. I have lost all interest in the game over my last 3/4 matches. 

Shooting is mandatory, MW spam is still king and if you play an army that has no wards you just plug 600 points in the first hero phase of your enemy and shake hands. 

Core rules might be OK ignoring the shooting stuff. 

But The Battletome balance is soooo much worse than ever before. Especially the FAQ effed up so much and kicked some armies hard again, which already were down in the dirt eating the waste products of the few top tiers. 

Curious. Against which armies did you play? The two games I played were more enjoyable than any 2.0 or 1.0 game I've ever played

[Beliman]

4 hours ago, JackStreicher said:

Curious. Against which armies did you play? The two games I played were more enjoyable than any 2.0 or 1.0 game I've ever played

I've got the same feeling. I only had one uphill game that could be won by points.

[LuminethMage]

Same here, both games were decided very late (the last at bottom of 5), and could have gone both ways. Having more to do in your opponents turn (redeploy etc.), the battle tactics, new battalions, hero and monster actions are all good additions to the game in my view. 

Would really want to know which armies and what lists made for such a bad game. There'll still be imbalances of course, especially until some of the really old battletomes get new editions, but generally speaking AoS 3 feels better to me than AoS 2. 

Edited July 6, 2021 by LuminethMage

[yukishiro1]

I did have one game that resembles what the guy's describing, but in the opposite way. It was against FEK. I just absolutely blew them away with my Tempest's Eye list, it wasn't pretty. There was just nothing he could do except watch everything die. He killed maybe 400ish points of my army before I effectively tabled him at the end of T3. 

That said, I think FEK got screwed more by the edition change than any other faction. I just don't see how they ever win a game at this point, they have absolutely nothing going for them. Comfortably the worst army in the game at this point, IMO. 

Edited July 6, 2021 by yukishiro1

[KrispyXIV]

I think I've got 3-4 games of full fledged 3.0 in now, with two today using the GHB.  I've not been playing AOS long, but 3.0 feels like a significant incremental improvement over 2.0.  I didn't notice any real drop in relative power for my DoK, and my experimental games so far with Hedonites have been a lot of fun.  

The dynamics have definitely changed from 2.0, and seem to favor survivability and making sure you can get your battle tactic every turn by having an army thats capable of doing at least a few different things - and managing your tactics by not 'wasting' the more easily accomplished one's too early in the game when you should have pushed for one that was a bit harder, but most doable while you still have most of your army on the table.  

[Voand]

Sorry if this is the wrong space to reply but - 

I'm beyond a layman but it really seems to me like the new edition is favoring specialized lists with lots of hero/monster characters gaining extra points on their tactics/being able to easily pick and complete a tactic every turn and a list leaning on this pretty much stomps any old style list focused on sitting on objectives when it comes to points.

Have you guys found this to be the case and how do you feel about it either way?

[stratigo]

23 minutes ago, Voand said:

Sorry if this is the wrong space to reply but - 

I'm beyond a layman but it really seems to me like the new edition is favoring specialized lists with lots of hero/monster characters gaining extra points on their tactics/being able to easily pick and complete a tactic every turn and a list leaning on this pretty much stomps any old style list focused on sitting on objectives when it comes to points.

Have you guys found this to be the case and how do you feel about it either way?

You want to score at least 2 points on primaries a turn, but that isn't super hard, so focusing in on secondaries is pretty important.

 

I suspect some strong lists are gonna be ones where secondaries are hard to score against. Ultra tank skew.

[whispersofblood]

6 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

I did have one game that resembles what the guy's describing, but in the opposite way. It was against FEK. I just absolutely blew them away with my Tempest's Eye list, it wasn't pretty. There was just nothing he could do except watch everything die. He killed maybe 400ish points of my army before I effectively tabled him at the end of T3. 

That said, I think FEK got screwed more by the edition change than any other faction. I just don't see how they ever win a game at this point, they have absolutely nothing going for them. Comfortably the worst army in the game at this point, IMO. 

Yeah I've been really thinking about FEC and OBR as of late. I think people who are dedicated to FEC are going to need to completely rethink how they build armies for this edition. 

And for OBR I think they are fine at the game, they just are like TK were in WHFB playing a completely different game to the rest of us. I think we might see more from them once the excitement from the new rules becomes more normal and people are looking to play something different. 

[stratigo]

The petrifex FAQ change might make OBR good enough to play at competitive levels. 

[Kadeton]

Played my first actual game of 3rd Ed this evening, Beastclaw Raiders versus the new Stormcast from Dominion, at 1250 points. Since this was the first game of 3rd for both of us, we went with a simple Open Play mission instead of the full Grand Strategy, Battle Tactics, etc.

Overall: I had a really good time! Having plentiful command points felt like a huge boon to the Beastclaws, especially using All-Out Attack on Mournfangs. I certainly felt the loss of warscroll battalions - without the Eurlbad, my units were doing a lot less damage. The deadliness of attacks felt somewhat lower in general (given the use of All-Out Defense, ward saves, and more healing) and fights tended to drag out for several turns rather than just being over immediately. I forgot about Monstrous Rampages (not doing that again, they would have made a huge difference!) but I enjoyed the Heroic Actions. The extra stuff-to-do (more CP and better generic commands, heroics etc) did seem to create more of a sense of engagement and active participation.

I'll try to arrange a game against something more shooting-heavy, because I do want to see how Unleash Hell and other controversial shooting elements work in actual gameplay, but as a first impression, this was great - more fun and more engagement than most of my 2nd Ed games. Also, Yndrasta is a total beast who tanked my Frostlord for five turns and eventually took him out. Definitely felt heroic!