New FAQ Discussion Thread (27.08)

[Greyshadow]

My first impressions is that the problems seem to be of a technical nature. The FAQ is suppose to be a commentary of the rules as they stand. It seems like GW are treating the save stacking as an Errata issue that they will address as they update the tomes. I don’t think this was the right approach in this case although I can understand how we ended up here. 

 

[alghero81]

Apart the fact that it seems that Wyldwoods cannot be placed anymore outside of your deployment zone (clear oversight) what else is wrong with the new update?

They restored Sylvaneth shooting through it and the fact that all pieces have to touch each other so you can choose how big you want the block.

[KrispyXIV]

2 minutes ago, Greyshadow said:

My first impressions is that the problems seem to be of a technical nature. The FAQ is suppose to be a commentary of the rules as they stand. It seems like GW are treating the save stacking as an Errata issue that they will address as they update the tomes. I don’t think this was the right approach in this case although I can understand how we ended up here. 

 

Again, either that or the core rulebook as it's printed is intended to define any ability that negates wounds on a roll as a ward (which would then, by definition, mean they happen prior to allocation).  If you assume that, then the FAQ makes perfect sense.  

People are assuming a lot - most of the old wound negate abilities say "each time you allocate a wound", not "when" or "after".  That could also interrupt the wound allocation process and apply "before" as per the description of wards....

[Marcvs]

18 minutes ago, Belathor said:

gold medal

flamespyre and frost phoenix with their save easily being a 3+ 5+ amulet 4+ annointed 6+ luminark. also if you kill the flamespyre he comes back on a 4+ for good times

 

Platinum: all that but you run it in settler's gain with Teclis casting protection of teclis for another 5+

[MitGas]

Now people suddenly understand much more why GW pays so badly! 

[NauticalSoup]

35 minutes ago, MitGas said:

Now people suddenly understand much more why GW pays so badly! 

You get what you pay for 😛

[Overread]

Forgeworld is impossible to predict and honestly I don't think even FW know what's going on week to week with their releases. I think politically and resource based within GW they are on a knife edge for some projects getting funding or not and AoS seems to have a perpetual short straw. They've basically stripped it several times in terms of models. 

 

I'm surprised the Chaos Dragon is gone, it was one of the newer additions. It might still return (FW has an error which misslists out of stock as sold out alongside the political/resource issues which makes out of stock and out of production notices almost worthless), but so far AoS has just lost stuff. 

We "might" see some return when Old World returns as technically the only AoS stuff was the stormcast heads (Chaos Dragon was released during AoS, but was an End Times model originally, it just took ages to finish); however like I said its impossible to predict. 

[Grimrock]

2 hours ago, Greyshadow said:

My first impressions is that the problems seem to be of a technical nature. The FAQ is suppose to be a commentary of the rules as they stand. It seems like GW are treating the save stacking as an Errata issue that they will address as they update the tomes. I don’t think this was the right approach in this case although I can understand how we ended up here. 

 

Yeah this is kind of what I'm thinking. One thing I haven't seen considered is the possibility that GW has left the abilities like this because armies may need them when the new 3rd edition army books start coming out. For example, 9th edition 40k has had a general trend of massive escalation. Factions typically get a huge boost when their book comes out, to the extent that it often seems pointless to put an 8th edition codex against a 9th one. At the beginning of 9th GW gave a huge boost to a lot of armies by buffing up generic weapons for free (ie. increasing damage on all heavy bolters, increasing damage on melta weapons, increasing strength on power weapons, etc). Maybe this wound negation stacking and save stacking and all the abilities that look so broken are just there to give existing books a fighting chance once the stormcast and orc books drop and we start getting into the swing of faction releases. Might just be best to wait and see how everything looks when the books eventually drop. Stormcast in particular have always been the armor faction so it will be very telling once we see how they are built and what their abilities are. 

Edited August 29, 2021 by Grimrock

[Belathor]

2 hours ago, Marcvs said:

Platinum: all that but you run it in settler's gain with Teclis casting protection of teclis for another 5+

Get this man out of here. He’s a genius!

[Belathor]

2 hours ago, Marcvs said:

Platinum: all that but you run it in settler's gain with Teclis casting protection of teclis for another 5+

Wait. Is there an item that gives us a 5+ after thats not a ward save? Then it could theoretically be, 3+ 6+ priest ward, 4+ 5+ 5+ 6+ And just be wasting your opponents time. They wont want to shoot it because of the damage reduction but how many dang dice you roll its cracking me up

[Belathor]

3 hours ago, Marcvs said:

Platinum: all that but you run it in settler's gain with Teclis casting protection of teclis for another 5+

Ok i dug into it more. You were on the right track. The official Most annoying model with save stacking

flamespyre phoenix in settlers gain with stone spirit armor.

 

3+ armor save 6+ generic priest ward save 4+ annointed, 5+ protection of teclis 5+ Salvation of Hysh 6+ Stone Spirit 6+ Luminark and some say he is still rolling to this day

[CeleFAZE]

7 minutes ago, Belathor said:

Ok i dug into it more. You were on the right track. The official Most annoying model with save stacking

flamespyre phoenix in settlers gain with stone spirit armor.

 

3+ armor save 6+ generic priest ward save 4+ annointed, 5+ protection of teclis 5+ Salvation of Hysh 6+ Stone Spirit 6+ Luminark and some say he is still rolling to this day

And this is why I'll never run a Slaanesh list without Sigvald until this gets sorted.

Run it in tandem with a frostheart for the -1 to wound and you have a truly nigh unkillable model.

Edited August 29, 2021 by CeleFAZE

[Belathor]

1 hour ago, CeleFAZE said:

And this is why I'll never run a Slaanesh list without Sigvald until this gets sorted.

Run it in tandem with a frostheart for the -1 to wound and you have a truly nigh unkillable model.

I did the math as is he takes 1 damage on average from a gotrek who rolls 2 6’s to hit. About to run the numbers on irondrakes don’t have high hopes for em.

 

Edit: fully buffed max size irondrakes unit. Its 5. 5 damage on average to our fiery feather friend.

Edited August 29, 2021 by Belathor

[TheGrimKnight]

I am pretty excited I am to see the old order models such as the warrior priest and freeguild general on horse have the cities of sigmar keywords in their FAQ. It says it's not "match play legal" but they have match play points so at least in my local group itll be fine. 

 

The priest doesn't seem to have a normal prayer on his warscroll, but 90 point curse doesnt seem bad. 

[Greyshadow]

I am also delighted with the new Legends Warscrolls! I was planning to run most of the Freeguild units that were updated so this is super appreciated. Many thanks Age of Sigmar team!

[ArcaneLore74]

Thanks for clarifying!

[NinthMusketeer]

On 8/27/2021 at 1:18 PM, Landohammer said:

Thanks. I....I actually don't think he is that good. ::ducks thrown tomatoes::

My meta is full of Tzeentch, LRL, Slaanesh and Archaon at the moment. So him and his endless spells get shut down or ignored 

The Warsong combo is usually 345-390pts. So when strong antimagic pops up, its a huge handicap. 

Woa there this is Sylvaneth we are talking about, let's not start throwing out hyperbolic phrasing such as "good"!

[Beliman]

9 hours ago, Belathor said:

3+ armor save 6+ generic priest ward save 4+ annointed, 5+ protection of teclis 5+ Salvation of Hysh 6+ Stone Spirit 6+ Luminark and some say he is still rolling to this day

What kind of sorcery is this???

Btw, talking about weird rules, do anyone know how to disembark from an skyvessel? It seems that their interaction is nerfed or buffed if we follow the rules (dependes on your interpretation). I saw some tournaments and people are just playing like 2.0, so...

Edited August 29, 2021 by Beliman

[Zeblasky]

At the same time my fears have been made real and Warscroll overwatch is indeed made mostly useless. Now it's an ability that you rather never use both on Sisters of The Watch or on Handgunners. Instead you'd definetly want to spend a CP for a long range Unleash Hell to get double the damage on Sisters or to get a 4+ overwatch on Handgunners. Sister may yet survive this out of the nowhere nerf due to their versatility, but for Handgunners it's a death sentence. Due to their mediorce shooting damage they were balanced around always having a ready 4+ to hit overwatch, not once per phase per whole army 5+ one. Crossbows now are simply much superior.

[MitGas]

12 hours ago, NauticalSoup said:

You get what you pay for 😛

Yup! Well, sucks about the sylvaneth woods... the horror warscroll dilemma with the "slain" mechanic is funny though. Saul Goodman would find a way to only have a single Pink split in each phase!

[The World Tree]

3 hours ago, NinthMusketeer said:

Woa there this is Sylvaneth we are talking about, let's not start throwing out hyperbolic phrasing such as "good"!

Sylvaneth are actually decent in 3.0 (the current faq up notwithstanding)

[JackStreicher]

7 hours ago, Greyshadow said:

I am also delighted with the new Legends Warscrolls! I was planning to run most of the Freeguild units that were updated so this is super appreciated. Many thanks Age of Sigmar team!

I am not. They‘ve slaughtered the War Mammoth (yet they did only edit the Monstrous Arcanum one?)

Also: At least one mage is missing the whole wizard paragraph...

 

idk, updating the keywords only would‘ve been enough. Changing the warscrolls and removing rules however... they should either support legends or not support it at all (as they’ve claimed before). This half-hearted change did no good imo. (And yes, I am mostly Mad about the Insanely expensive mammoth losing rules and keywords for no reason).

Edited August 29, 2021 by JackStreicher

[Landohammer]

On 8/29/2021 at 7:33 AM, The World Tree said:

Sylvaneth are actually decent in 3.0 (the current faq up notwithstanding)

I know there are some Alarielle and Warsong fans out there (i'm not one of them) but Sylvaneth really benefited because of the update to wyldwoods that let you "scatter" them rather than drop a single cohesive piece. This gave them a massive boost in mobility. 

That combined with the Treelord ancients new aura command ability which can quite often make nearly the entire army +1 save, pushed them up probably 2 tiers. (From D- to B- IMHO). Though I'm not a fan of Alarielle or Warsong, I do appreciate that they offer the army additional tools, so in the big picture I think they are also helping the faction.  

While I'm pretty sure the FAQ disabling the teleport was a mistake, I'm not entirely sure the change to "scattering forests" was. If that was intentional and remains intact I imagine Sylvaneth will probably continue to lanquish in C+ tier, with the only exception being a few highly skilled players with skewed lists. 

If they don't fix the teleport for 6 months we are in biiig trouble though. Its the only primary allegiance ability of note in the faction. 

[NinthMusketeer]

On 8/29/2021 at 3:49 AM, Zeblasky said:

At the same time my fears have been made real and Warscroll overwatch is indeed made mostly useless. Now it's an ability that you rather never use both on Sisters of The Watch or on Handgunners. Instead you'd definetly want to spend a CP for a long range Unleash Hell to get double the damage on Sisters or to get a 4+ overwatch on Handgunners. Sister may yet survive this out of the nowhere nerf due to their versatility, but for Handgunners it's a death sentence. Due to their mediorce shooting damage they were balanced around always having a ready 4+ to hit overwatch, not once per phase per whole army 5+ one. Crossbows now are simply much superior.

Eh, sometimes it isn't a choice between stand & shoot or unleash hell; it's just stand & shoot or nothing. I agree that crossbows are better though, hangunners really relied on stacking hit buffs to be on par with them. The rend doesn't mean as much anymore either.

[Zeblasky]

On 8/31/2021 at 12:24 AM, NinthMusketeer said:

Eh, sometimes it isn't a choice between stand & shoot or unleash hell; it's just stand & shoot or nothing. I agree that crossbows are better though, hangunners really relied on stacking hit buffs to be on par with them. The rend doesn't mean as much anymore either.

I agree it's less of a choice, and more of a "spend a CP for a twice as much (Sisters) or just more (Handgunners) powerful attack from a long distance while being safe" or "get a free complimentary attack for one unit when it's being compromised and when you have no chance to use long range UN in this phase anyway". And the simple fact is that you will rarely use "stand and shoot" not just because it's one per phase together with UH, but because if you have a chance to use a long range version of it, even on a second big unit, you will use a CA most of the time anyway.

This change transformed warscroll overwatch from an unconditional charge deterrence into a consolation prise of 1 CP for when you messed up. Not terrible in itself, but terrible for units that were priced around old functionality. Sisters would still be a great alternative to Irondrakes if they would have been priced at 160 as well (quite less tankiness, quite less buff potential as well, worse bravery, better default damage, more speed and range), while Handgunners need to go down to 95 points, probably even 90.

 

Also, I do not believe that hit stacking was the main reason for Handgunners success. By default Handgunners are better only versus 2+ save, while Crossbows give much better damage versus 5+ save or worse. And in the AoS 2.0 Crossbows gave better benefits from hit and wound stacking on them if compared to Handgunners with the same buffs (excluding 2+ save). You could aslo stack +2 to hit on Crossbows from outside sources instead of +1 on Handgunners, so Crossbows were and still are a prime target for a General on foot CA, and with 8 extra range as a stationary gunline position behind screens they were quite superior. But there were 3 things that made Handgunners slightly better - long rifle, mobility and overwatch. Long rifle was great with mass MSU Handgunners, and when moving, handgunners lost only +1 to hit instead of +1 to attack, which was a small price to pay for not standing still the whole game. And their overwatch gave them a great spike in damage, so they would usually do around the same damage as Crossbows during the game anyway.

But now Handguns were soft nerfed by hit and save stacking as well as getting their overwatch hard nerfed, while Crossbows got Unleash Hell instead. Sooo yea.

 

Edited September 1, 2021 by Zeblasky