3.0 Actual Games Conversation

[yukishiro1]

Well, a certain kind of ironjawz, anyway. Doubt you'd see much success with an infantry-focused army of primarily ardboyz and brutes. 

It's early to say for sure obviously, but I am concerned that we are seeing the same kind of builds being successful across all factions. It suggests that they haven't struck the balance right between various unit types. Unless it's just that everyone's still doing the obvious stuff and there are counters we haven't come up with. But I haven't seen much evidence of that yet. 

[JackStreicher]

26 minutes ago, Sleboda said:

I got in another game last night.

2K Ironjawz vs. Gitz. The scenario was the one where battleline trump non-battleline and you can destroy objectives.

It was over fast. In my Ironjawz army, it's four heroes and four battleline, with the wizard teleporting units. By my turn two I was up 10 VP's and only two objectives remained. Plus, the Gitz had no battleline left and their colossal squig was dead.

It appears it's by design, but we are firmly back in the days of Herohammer now. One of my mawkrushas didn't even end up having to fight.

Also, a single redeploy likely won me the game, or at the very least made the quick win possible. I think that's going to be the sneaky power move winner for this edition. I am very sad that the "tactical genius" army, Bonereapers, is the only one that can't use this new and exciting part of the game. Ironjawz, though, are in good shape.

I also don‘t see what the Gitz could do against 2x cabbages. Due to the new edition those guys are broken as hell 😅 - though, heals itself, flies and gets stronger with every kill while being super Killy. And that is before allegiance abilities ^^

[Sleboda]

13 minutes ago, JackStreicher said:

I also don‘t see what the Gitz could do against 2x cabbages. Due to the new edition those guys are broken as hell 😅 - though, heals itself, flies and gets stronger with every kill while being super Killy. And that is before allegiance abilities ^^

Well, if the game only cared about kills, I might agree, but objectives and battleplans are king, so I don't. She had two Manglers plus the colossal, so she could have diverted me, delayed me, or even sent them after my battlelines to make sure her more plentiful battlelines could claim/destroy objectives. She had 2-3 times the number of Command Points I had, so she had an advantage there.

I tell you what I find stunning about Mawkrushas now. 2+ save and 5+ ward on one. Ouch! I really think the Amulet of Everyonetakesit will be FAQ'd out, or maybe limited to models with fewer than 10 wounds.

The boost it gets on models with higher wounds is not right. In the olden days, whippersnappers, models paid more points for the "same" piece of equipment based on how good the model was. For example, heavy armor on a grunt might cost 3 points, but on a lord level character it was 16 points. That was because even though the effect was the same (+2 to armor save), it was better on a model with more wounds and better stats that take advantage of the armor. The amulet is much better on a 16 wound model than on a five wound model. And mega-gargants? Fuhgeddaboutit.

Edited July 15, 2021 by Sleboda

[JackStreicher]

27 minutes ago, Sleboda said:

I tell you what I find stunning about Mawkrushas now. 2+ save and 5+ ward on one. Ouch! I really think the Amulet of Everyonetakesit will be FAQ'd out, or maybe limited to models with fewer than 10 wounds.

Agreed. Yet don‘t forget: The cabbage base size can really block opponents from getting on objectives

[Sleboda]

9 minutes ago, JackStreicher said:

Agreed. Yet don‘t forget: The cabbage base size can really block opponents from getting on objectives

Indeed it can!

It can also make it hard to place the model itself where you want it, especially with a good full board of terrain.

[JonnyTheKing]

On 7/13/2021 at 4:11 PM, Enoby said:

Just curious, which tactics do they struggle with?

I found they struggle with the ones that require you to shift stuff off objectives

[Enoby]

Just finished a game of Slaanesh vs Warclans. Without going into too much detail, Slaanesh won but the Warclan player said he really didn't like how much the hero healing ability came up, especially on Glutos.

Like many have already said, it does appear that 3+ save big heroes have had a big boost, and it can feel like a slog to cut through them only for them to heal up.

[dicebod]

Had my first game of 3.0 against @Athrawes' Lumineth - a quick rundown of the armies:

Hedonites - Lurid Haze, w/ Sigvald, A Lord of Pain, the Contorted Epitome and a Chaos Lord on Karkadrak; my troops were 2x units of Hellstriders, 2x units of Slickblades (the riders aren't done yet), and a 10 man unit of Twinsouls (proxied in this game as Chaos Warriors).

Lumineth - Helon, w/ a Lord Regent, Cathallar, Loreseeker and Wind Mage; his troops consisted of a big block of 20x Wardens, 10x Sentinels, two units of Bladelords (one 5x, one 10x), two units of 5x Windriders and a Spirit of the Wind.

(so it should be pretty obvious that these aren't truly "optimized" lists on either side, which I'll get into later)

We rolled up Feral Foray from GHB 2021 - Hedonites had 4 drops w/ battalions, Lumineth had 6 so I placed first and chose to take the first turn.  The small table size (and deployment map) played to both armies' strengths, to the point that I was able to charge both units of my Slickblades and Sigvald (outflanking via Lurid Haze) into his lines first turn, killing his Cathallar (deployed forward on his shrine), a handful of Bladelords from the smaller unit and 9 of the 10 wounds off of 1 Windrider unit. Bottom of turn 1 he was able to wipe the one unit of Slickblades through a combination of attacks/battleshock (ouch), and heavily damage the other. Objective-wise though we were pretty much tied, except for the fact that my opponent missed out on scoring a battle tactic early game.

From there, the momentum shifted back and forth, with him burning one of my backfield objectives (from the mission rules) in turn 2 and then again in turn 3 (because of the realm rules). However, key summoning meant I was able to drop bodies on objectives to effectively lock the down while my harder hitting units were able to whittle him down.  Of special note was Sigvald, who tremendously benefitted from Heroic recovery to kill 10 Bladelords, 4 windriders and the wind spirit. On the Lumineth side his warden blob was able to take advantage of their re-roll hits triumph to obliterate my warlord.

So I have a couple things to say here:

• White hot take, but Slaanesh is competitively underrated. The army can hit reasonably hard and the summoning is good, probably the best in the game. Yes the starting force is small but getting the summoning engine ramped up brings a lot of momentum to the army. Would be very curious to play against a very offensively-focused army.
• Lumineth in a non-sentinel spam army list is not nearly oppressive as the community suggests. We had a close game with the two armies that are considered to be opposite ends of the power spectrum. Sure this is one game and we both probably made the same amount of game-altering mistakes, but as WHW has shown player skill means so much more than army power (in general). Also the cap on modifiers in 3.0 makes all the debuffs Lumineth has at their disposal much less oppressive.
• Also there was some awful rolling from the Lumineth - my favorite (sorry @Athrawes) was when his Loreseeker failed to cast Protection of Hysh and spent his Aetherquartz to re-roll it...into a double 1 miscast and 3 mortal wounds!

Overall really liked 3.0 and am pumped to play more. @Athrawes is a good player and despite what the internet says we've always had nailbiter games with Hedonites vs. Lumineth.

A few pics:

 

[Christopher Rowe]

Just had my first 3.0 game as well. My Seraphon vs a friend's Ossiarch Bonereapers. We played for about three hours and got to the halfway point in the third round before he conceded (I'd just removed the only objective marker he controlled). There's so much to keep track of, so much going on all the time, but I really had a great time and so did he. We have a lot to learn. I think I'll need ten or twenty games with my army (maybe ten with this Coalesced list and ten with the Starfolk for variety) to really onboard all the new rules and the abilities of my own army. Still, big thumbs up from me.

[Xil]

2 hours ago, dicebod said:

Had my first game of 3.0 against @Athrawes' Lumineth - a quick rundown of the armies:

Hedonites - Lurid Haze, w/ Sigvald, A Lord of Pain, the Contorted Epitome and a Chaos Lord on Karkadrak; my troops were 2x units of Hellstriders, 2x units of Slickblades (the riders aren't done yet), and a 10 man unit of Twinsouls (proxied in this game as Chaos Warriors).

Lumineth - Helon, w/ a Lord Regent, Cathallar, Loreseeker and Wind Mage; his troops consisted of a big block of 20x Wardens, 10x Sentinels, two units of Bladelords (one 5x, one 10x), two units of 5x Windriders and a Spirit of the Wind.

Had the same experience with Sylvaneth vs Hedonites.

Hedonites are not to be underestimated. Their summoning is top of the chain in my opinion. Especially vs armys that are reasonabley durable but have mediocre output. That said, sadly that Sylvaneth don't have the killing power to carve through all the summoned Demonettes that occupied the objectives. And even though all but one unit of the Hedonites starting army was gone it severly outnumbered the Sylvaneth.

Edited July 18, 2021 by Xil

[Ragest]

Well, concerning all matches i've seen or watched those are my thoughts

S+ tier: tzeentch with archaon, ogors

S tier: gargants, ogors, dok, slaves with archaon, tankrusha+kragnos

A tier: soulblight, sylvaneth, kharadron, seraphon, slaneesh.

B tier: lumineth, skaven, idoneth, cos, fec, obr.

C tier: fyreslayers, stormcast, nurgle, khorne.

Anyone in my community is playing nh, boc, gitz or pure ironjawz/krules/bonesplitterz so idk.

Edited July 19, 2021 by Ragest

[yukishiro1]

Slaanesh isn't a terrible army in 3.0 with the new book, but it's a very frustrating one. Whoever thought making a summoning system that strong and then nerfing the rest of the book to be terrible to compensate was a good idea...don't let them develop any more battletomses, at least not as the lead developer. It's not that they end up being terrible...but an army can be decent and still be an unsatisfying experience to play with.

It's like the opposite of Lumineth - Lumineth is much more frustrating for your opponent to play against than it actually is strong, Slaanesh is terribly frustrating for the Slaanesh player but actually fairly solid at winning games when played in the very unintuitive way you have to play to make it work. Two sides of the same flawed design coin. 

[Xil]

21 minutes ago, yukishiro1 said:

Slaanesh isn't a terrible army in 3.0 with the new book, but it's a very frustrating one. Whoever thought making a summoning system that strong and then nerfing the rest of the book to be terrible to compensate was a good idea...don't let them develop any more battletomses, at least not as the lead developer. It's not that they end up being terrible...but an army can be decent and still be an unsatisfying experience to play with.

It's like the opposite of Lumineth - Lumineth is much more frustrating for your opponent to play against than it actually is strong, Slaanesh is terribly frustrating for the Slaanesh player but actually fairly solid at winning games when played in the very unintuitive way you have to play to make it work. Two sides of the same flawed design coin. 

yes, my gaming buddy and i designed Slaaneshii lists that can tank a lot of damage to 'farm' depravity points and in return can chip multiple units. Its not about destroying enemy units wholly counter to the usual approach of list. In the games we played he had always enought points for summons for each round and chose Demonettes to flood the table. Its actually disgusting.

[Enoby]

4 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

Whoever thought making a summoning system that strong and then nerfing the rest of the book to be terrible to compensate was a good idea...don't let them develop any more battletomses, at least not as the lead developer.

I believe (talking to a playtester and I think a community article in 2019), the Slaanesh books were developed by JJ, who has left very recently. I'm not sure what it means for the future of the books, but it would be interesting to see the new direction the next writer takes. 

That said, Slaanesh is a lot more fun to play than it is to list build for. The lack of synergies means you don't get any 'aha' moments, but at the same time it means every unit has to stand on its own with a plan to use them and so they become a more tactically involved army. They look a lot less fun than they actually are, and unfortunately there are quite a few AoS personalities (on YouTube and Twitter especially) who have had maybe one game with the book (at the very most, often 0 games) and then say the battletome is the worst ever written and is competitively rubbish to boot. I think this tars the community view of them.

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

12 hours ago, dicebod said:

Also there was some awful rolling from the Lumineth - my favorite (sorry @Athrawes) was when his Loreseeker failed to cast Protection of Hysh and spent his Aetherquartz to re-roll it...into a double 1 miscast and 3 mortal wounds!

That's why winners don't do drugs. Those Lumineth need to kick their Aetherquartz habit!

 

7 hours ago, Ragest said:

S+ tier: tzeentch with archaon, ogors

S tier: gargants, ogors, dok, slaves with archaon, tankrusha+kragnos

A tier: soulblight, sylvaneth, kharadron, seraphon, slaneesh.

B tier: lumineth, skaven, idoneth, cos, fec, obr.

C tier: fyreslayers, stormcast, nurgle, khorne.

Ogors are so fat they need two tiers.

I find it interesting that you rate Kragnos so highly, though. Can you say more about that? Also, Lumineth below Slaanesh is definitely a hot take.

[TenshiHammer]

I've had a couple of 600pts. Path to Glory games (vs Soulblight) and a pitched battle at 1500pts (vs Lumineth).

The game is fun.

600pts. is fine to learn the basics, but the impact of every action is far greater. There's not a lot going on, so no hard choices on where to spend the CPs, losing a unit is a huge loss,...

Pitched Battles are nice. The secondary ways to earn VPs every turn are cool.
I managed to go first every round, but lost my general Turn 1 to  lots of shooting, so was starving for CP the entire game.

I want to play more... (but if it isn't against Lumineth, better)

[Ragest]

1 hour ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

That's why winners don't do drugs. Those Lumineth need to kick their Aetherquartz habit!

 

Ogors are so fat they need two tiers.

I find it interesting that you rate Kragnos so highly, though. Can you say more about that? Also, Lumineth below Slaanesh is definitely a hot take.

I have two guys going with that kragnos list, and is a very simple one. You go ij with no clan to make your tankrusha with a 2+ save, 5++ ward and 4+ ignoring spells from one side and kragnos to another. Both are winning almost every match, just losing vs my dok.

Talking about lumineth, I haven’t see any lumineth player winning a match in 3rd, including myself. Is the worst army to score in this ghb, i was thinking to place them even lower. Nobody is playing lumineth in my community, i'm going with dok sylvaneth because i got tired of them. Lumineth is the most frustrating army to play with the pure swingy damage.

Slaneesh is pretty good imo, but going the opposite as slaneesh should be. Is not about alpha, you need to stall a little bit and know when to charge. Glutos is an amazing tank and decent wizard, sivgald is the perfect counter to the new 5++ ward spam, tankrusha or gotrek and the chariots are good vs 2+ saves.

Edited July 19, 2021 by Ragest

[whispersofblood]

2 hours ago, Ragest said:

I have two guys going with that kragnos list, and is a very simple one. You go ij with no clan to make your tankrusha with a 2+ save, 5++ ward and 4+ ignoring spells from one side and kragnos to another. Both are winning almost every match, just losing vs my dok.

Talking about lumineth, I haven’t see any lumineth player winning a match in 3rd, including myself. Is the worst army to score in this ghb, i was thinking to place them even lower. Nobody is playing lumineth in my community, i'm going with dok sylvaneth because i got tired of them. Lumineth is the most frustrating army to play with the pure swingy damage.

Slaneesh is pretty good imo, but going the opposite as slaneesh should be. Is not about alpha, you need to stall a little bit and know when to charge. Glutos is an amazing tank and decent wizard, sivgald is the perfect counter to the new 5++ ward spam, tankrusha or gotrek and the chariots are good vs 2+ saves.

I've found with LRL its just as unintuitive as HoS, which is probably why building HoS list has helped me build LRL lists that have been doing a bit better in 3rd.

You have to

a) build to achieve your secondaries; LRL don't really have monsters that people are going to immediately include, so you are not getting tons of bonus points. If you don't include monsters you need to make sure you get every single battle tactic you select, every game. 

b) You can't build and play a defensive game and win games. Now that modifiers are limited to +1/-1 to die rolls and army of 4+ saves, is just an army of 4+ saves. So you need to actually engage in combats and be decisive, because if you let people decide when and with which units they are going to fight you aren't going to be able to special rule your way to victory.

c) the magic isn't actually super impactful, and the shooting isn't incredibly impactful either. It's all quite tame damage wise.

Generally you have really plan your list, and include maybe 1 cute thing from the list of things that LRL can do and maximize the efficiency there.

HoS similarly has a bunch of random units that you want to take that probably aren't even worth the read. But, at its core it has a simple, playable, even good strategy if you can ignore all the noise.

[dicebod]

1 hour ago, whispersofblood said:

I've found with LRL its just as unintuitive as HoS, which is probably why building HoS list has helped me build LRL lists that have been doing a bit better in 3rd.

You have to

a) build to achieve your secondaries; LRL don't really have monsters that people are going to immediately include, so you are not getting tons of bonus points. If you don't include monsters you need to make sure you get every single battle tactic you select, every game. 

b) You can't build and play a defensive game and win games. Now that modifiers are limited to +1/-1 to die rolls and army of 4+ saves, is just an army of 4+ saves. So you need to actually engage in combats and be decisive, because if you let people decide when and with which units they are going to fight you aren't going to be able to special rule your way to victory.

c) the magic isn't actually super impactful, and the shooting isn't incredibly impactful either. It's all quite tame damage wise.

Generally you have really plan your list, and include maybe 1 cute thing from the list of things that LRL can do and maximize the efficiency there.

HoS similarly has a bunch of random units that you want to take that probably aren't even worth the read. But, at its core it has a simple, playable, even good strategy if you can ignore all the noise.

This is my experience playing against LRL as well (as said above I only have 1 game of 3.0 under my belt so take this with a grain of salt!). The biggest change hitting them in this new edition really has to be the cap on modifiers: they can't pile on a huge heap of debuffs like they could in 2nd and as you said the general save in the armor is middling. I think it may be time to reevaluate the inclusion of units like stoneguard for their durability and decent damage output and of course the mountain spirit.

[Baron Klatz]

@Sleboda

Sorry to bother you but what's that  giant skull in the ranks? Is it the Purple Sun endless spell made into scenery or just a customized spell?

Loving this thread, btw. Every battle report is a joy to read!

[Sleboda]

Ha! It's a Halloween decoration from a pet shop. We use it as a shaman's hut.

 

[WindstormSCR]

On 7/19/2021 at 4:27 AM, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

Ogors are so fat they need two tiers.

 

I think the reason for this is because BCR style ogors can be absolutely devastating, while gutbuster ogors focusing on ironguts/leadbelchers are decent but not as obnoxious as the BCR variants. they both play very differently from each other.

while gluttons are dead as a doorknob, the rest of gutbusters fares decently enough, and for BCRs the combination of enough monsters to make use of the extra VP opportunities, ward on stonehorns, and extra healing on top of heroic surge healing, it gets stupid very fast.

assuming you burn a mawpot trigger, a bloodgullet Frostlord with the splatter-cleaver can heal something on the order of 5d3 in a single turn

[LuminethMage]

On 7/19/2021 at 10:52 PM, dicebod said:

This is my experience playing against LRL as well (as said above I only have 1 game of 3.0 under my belt so take this with a grain of salt!). The biggest change hitting them in this new edition really has to be the cap on modifiers: they can't pile on a huge heap of debuffs like they could in 2nd and as you said the general save in the armor is middling. I think it may be time to reevaluate the inclusion of units like stoneguard for their durability and decent damage output and of course the mountain spirit.

Stoneguard aren't that much more durable though. They have the same 4 up save. Yes, they ignore rend 1, but you can easily replicate this with your Warden (double 1 out of aetherquartz, Mystic Shield, AoD, and because of how it's written as soon as you face something with rend 2 you are in exactly the same position as with Warden (Stoneguard don't subtract, just ignores rend 1, so it doesn't stack with increased saves). And for that you give up a spell and a lot of damage. 

Maybe if you go into Ymetrica for ignoring rend 2, but then, you also lose out on a lot of other stuff. 

I think in a way that's good, because Lumineth are aelves, so they shouldn't be super durable. 

Mountain Spirit and/or Avalenor might be something though. But again, as often with LRL, there are quite a few drawbacks which aren't always apparent. Avalenor being locked into Ymetrica and only having -1 rend, and the Mountain Spirit not being a hero, so you can't improve them in any way as you can with hero monsters which are the big winners generally it seems. But still, yeah I think they should be something for people to look into. 

Edit: 

I'm also really happy that you enjoyed your game against LRL. I understand that they can be sometimes a bit frustrating to play against - and some people might enjoy that more than others - but I feel it's also often overstated how bad it is, or how powerful LRL are. Sure, if you play with 60 Sentinels - that's probably not a lot of fun (in my view for both parties), but many factions can do the equivalent to that. In the same way @Enoby feels about some "influencer" talking the Slaanesh book down, I feel about people pushing a bit of an unfair narrative about LRL.

Also happy to hear that people are coming around a bit on Slaanesh, they have such beautiful models, so it's great if the battletome isn't a total catastrophe. 

Hope you two have many fun matches in the future! : )

Edited July 23, 2021 by LuminethMage

[LuminethMage]

On 7/19/2021 at 9:06 PM, whispersofblood said:

b) You can't build and play a defensive game and win games. Now that modifiers are limited to +1/-1 to die rolls and army of 4+ saves, is just an army of 4+ saves. So you need to actually engage in combats and be decisive, because if you let people decide when and with which units they are going to fight you aren't going to be able to special rule your way to victory.

This is something I felt so much in each of my 3 games so far - in AoS 2 I often sat snuggled within my comfy castle with a nice and easy -1 to hit (at least) on almost anything. In AoS 3 I'm almost constantly on the attack (and after the first charge the -1 is gone anyway), so much so that my opponent was wondering what happened to all the -1 to hits : ). 

This might change a bit though if people add Avalenor/SoM to their lists, people use Alumnia and Ballistas more etc. 

[Liquidsteel]

On the subject of Lumineth, the triple/quadruple fox with Sevireth, Wind Mage plus 30 sentinels is quickly gaining popularity within my circle and people are furiously building them. If people hated playing regular Lumineth, wait til you start facing off against this, foxes box you in turn 1 so you can't move whilst shooting off your key untits, then move away in your shooting phase so you can't charge. The Sentinels shoot your shooting/ranged (if you have any) and that's the game, unless you can teleport out and/or have reserves/summoning in order to escape.

 

Edited July 23, 2021 by Liquidsteel