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Stormdrake Guard Are Beyond Absurd


Aphotic

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31 minutes ago, Enoby said:

If an army is winning a lot at a pro scene then there's a good chance it will also be strong at a casual scene too; it's rare that a meta army will be too complicated to use at a casual level to good effect. Thus a nerf can work at the casual and pro scene when based off the competitive scene, which is how it currently is. 

On the other hands an army can be an absolute casual stomper and struggle against better players/armies. If you're nerfing this noob stomping army it might become useless at higher level play, but if you try to buff it to appeal to the better players then the casuals will have even more trouble... 

One could argue that the only people that should care about balance are the best players. Only these people will know enough about the game and the different army to really see the differences between a S faction and a A faction. 

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Age of Sigmar has a core problem still unsolved: the "competitive" lists of mostly every army in game are based on spamming a unit. 

ScE with raptors or drakes, Orruks with gruntas, Lumineth with Sentinels, Dok with Stalkers, Fyreslayers with HG, Idoneth with eels, Nurgle with flys...

 

2 or 4 Drakes are not a problem, 11 are, the same as 60 Sentinels, 30 Stalkers etc.

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29 minutes ago, Ragest said:

Age of Sigmar has a core problem still unsolved: the "competitive" lists of mostly every army in game are based on spamming a unit. 

ScE with raptors or drakes, Orruks with gruntas, Lumineth with Sentinels, Dok with Stalkers, Fyreslayers with HG, Idoneth with eels, Nurgle with flys...

 

2 or 4 Drakes are not a problem, 11 are, the same as 60 Sentinels, 30 Stalkers etc.

I think there's a tension within the design of the game that results in this. The rules designers seem to want AoS to be a fairly permissive game, where fluffy spam lists (like the CoS 10 Steam Tank list) are possible, so they don't seem to want to put in stuff like the army composition restrictions Warhammer Fantasy had or the "rule of 3" from 40k. But on the other hand, spamming one thing exclusively is generally a strong competitive strategy in games where you get to list/deck/team build. Simply because if you have a strong option (like Stormcast Dragons) that are much harder to counter than they are to use, a spam list will likely be able to muscle past what few counters the opponent's balanced/take-all-comers list happens to bring by sheer mechanical force. Maybe you need to trade a few of your dragons unfavourably against their counter, but once their counter is gone all your other match ups are in your favour.

So to remedy this situation, the designers would have to craft a core game that actually rewards bringing varied lists in some way. Which is a lot harder than simply preventing players from bringing too many copies of the same warscroll by fiat. Maybe there is a path towards this through battle tactics and grand strategies, but since those are also kinda bungled right now we will have to wait for the next GHB at least before we could possibly see a rules change that makes the meta more favourable to mixed arms lists.

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59 minutes ago, Kadeton said:

I wouldn't say that Flesh Eaters stopped being top tier because people learned to play against them. GW just eventually noticed that they had a particular combo that was too strong, and nerfed them into the bottom tier with their usual subtle approach.

GW did nerf them but they remained strong for a long time. I think FECs slide to obscurity had more to do with people learning to play around the specific threat ranges of Terrorgheists (denying the run & charge spell made it much easier to just deploy out of their range) and learning the basic tactics of how to screen & counterattack.

There was also a meta shift towards shooting/magic after the Tzeentch, KO, Lumineth, and Seraphon battletomes were released. All those "fight first fight twice" melee armies that plagued the first half of 2nd edition were always weak to ranged damage, but GW decided to backload all the shooting battletomes into the second half of their edition.

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I think you’re all playing the wrong game if you’re looking for balance.

the whole debate on casual vs competitive is a idiotic debate because AoS or 40k have never been balanced.

GW has proven time and time again that they’re either incapable or just don’t believe in balance.

Balance in AoS has only gotten worse over time and the amount of unfun play experiences too. I see more and more people complaining about the game too.

 

 

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Im glad people are bringing this up cause its been relevant to me lately:

I have been wondering if it would be more interesting/fun if the games were set to where you could ONLY take C tiered units or lower in each game.  Curious to know if then the C tier would be the new S tier in this case or if the game would be swingier and more varied than the constant "chasing the meta" format that matched play inherently turns into.

I just realized yesterday that I really don't enjoy matched play anymore in its current format.  (I play stormcast, though dont have the stormdrakes yet myself)   I do in my codex have like 60 choices of beautiful models/units, fluffy epic heroes that I spend dozens of hours thinking/learning about while I attempt to build and paint to high detail: and unless I want a fighting chance I have to basically reduce that to like 8-12 choices, and 4 of the twelve have to more or less be mandatory picks or switch the whole list or whatever from my custom stormhost.  Granted im not a world class player, but have been playing fairly regularly with fantasy, 40k, and AOS since 2006 and while yes: I can win easily enough, ), but I don't think its fun or fluffy to play with spamming fulminators or even worse-longstrikes.  Its just boring and none of my opponents seem to enjoy it.  That being said: if I bring a unit of anything below C I get tabled 90% of the time and that gets old after like 5-6 games even if I know its going to happen.

Im seriously considering playing narrative only from here on out.

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48 minutes ago, PJetski said:

GW did nerf them but they remained strong for a long time. I think FECs slide to obscurity had more to do with people learning to play around the specific threat ranges of Terrorgheists (denying the run & charge spell made it much easier to just deploy out of their range) and learning the basic tactics of how to screen & counterattack.

 

I assume its also cause the models are old and kinda ugly (and not in the dynamic nurgle way); an army of half naked trogs doesnt seems scream super epic fantasy to me, but maybe thats me.  I know they were miserable to play against with gristlegore, only thing I could do is run shootcast at the time or get really lucky with evocator spam lists...2.0 had its issues thats for sure.

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2 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

I think there's a tension within the design of the game that results in this. The rules designers seem to want AoS to be a fairly permissive game, where fluffy spam lists (like the CoS 10 Steam Tank list) are possible, so they don't seem to want to put in stuff like the army composition restrictions Warhammer Fantasy had or the "rule of 3" from 40k. But on the other hand, spamming one thing exclusively is generally a strong competitive strategy in games where you get to list/deck/team build. Simply because if you have a strong option (like Stormcast Dragons) that are much harder to counter than they are to use, a spam list will likely be able to muscle past what few counters the opponent's balanced/take-all-comers list happens to bring by sheer mechanical force. Maybe you need to trade a few of your dragons unfavourably against their counter, but once their counter is gone all your other match ups are in your favour.

So to remedy this situation, the designers would have to craft a core game that actually rewards bringing varied lists in some way. Which is a lot harder than simply preventing players from bringing too many copies of the same warscroll by fiat. Maybe there is a path towards this through battle tactics and grand strategies, but since those are also kinda bungled right now we will have to wait for the next GHB at least before we could possibly see a rules change that makes the meta more favourable to mixed arms lists.

The other way to do it is with mechanics that specifically discourage spam. For example, what if instead of all your dragons being able to move in the same hero phase, it was a command ability (that could still only be used once per unit per game)? So that way only one unit per turn could use it. And what if each enemy unit could only be shot once per phase with dragon breath? Rationalize it with some silly stuff about mixing streams. Or go even further and say you only get one dragon breath per turn, period - say they have to suck stuff out of the atmosphere to do it and that means only one unit can do it per turn, I don't care. 

In that world, you can still spam dragons if you really want to, but you can no longer direct breaths from several units against the same hapless target to guarantee a kill, and you can no longer get your entire army into combat T1 and tie up their entire army. Suddenly spam becomes much less attractive, while still possible for the determined player who really wants to do it. But it requires thinking about what interactions and units are likely to be abusive when spammed, something GW has shown virtually no ability to do. If anything GW loves to do the opposite and come up with mechanics that actively reward spam - 3.0 subfaction bonuses are almost all in this category, for example, which is really disappointing to see. 

Edited by yukishiro1
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5 hours ago, Aphotic said:

I'm unsure why winning a 5 game GT is a measure by which we assess if something is fun to play against, engaging, or broken and abusive. I  don't think that's a good standard. But I do think you'll see them winning plenty in the coming weeks.

Hnnn your title is saying that the unit is absurd,nothing about npe.

And yes the winning tournament record is the best measure to see if some unit is broken.

If a unit is being spammed but cant win a tournament then or it isnt broken or there are many more broken units in the game(as gargants,morathi,every lumineth unit,horrors,belakor,almost any seraphon unit).

The fact are that 340 for his stats are too much and they arent winning any tournament even triying be abused with spam builds etc. But i can agree that are npe for a army that dont can screen or deal with first turn charge but then every ironjawz book is bigger problem then

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1 hour ago, Doko said:

The fact are that 340 for his stats are too much and they arent winning any tournament even triying be abused with spam builds etc.

A 10 Stormdrake list just took 2nd (4-1) at Clash of Swords in the UK, and another 9 drake list took 2nd in the Polish Team Championships over the weekend. They are being played, they are placing well.

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4 hours ago, Ragest said:

Age of Sigmar has a core problem still unsolved: the "competitive" lists of mostly every army in game are based on spamming a unit. 

ScE with raptors or drakes, Orruks with gruntas, Lumineth with Sentinels, Dok with Stalkers, Fyreslayers with HG, Idoneth with eels, Nurgle with flys...

 

2 or 4 Drakes are not a problem, 11 are, the same as 60 Sentinels, 30 Stalkers etc.

In my view this mostly happens because many of those "spam-able" units don't really have many hard counters or else perform too many roles too well.  For example, if your opponent spams 60 sentinels and minimal protection for them, many armies don't have an "anti-ranged" that can just crush that.  It's not that there aren't ways to beat 60 sentinels, but there aren't enough options to shut down ranged play in most armies.  Basically what I'm saying is that there isn't enough "rock-paper-scissors" in the game.  I get that rock-paper-scissors sounds bad, but I actually think it's pretty important to limiting spam lists without making up very arbitrary rules that literally just do more to dictate list building.

For example, what if there were melee units in the game that were decently fast (without flying) that were actually immune to unleash hell and had a 4+ ward specifically against missile weapons (and MWs caused by missile weapons).  They'd have decent combat stats as well of course, but not amazing for their points.  Spamming them would be ill-advised because against non-missile armies, you'll be crushed, but taking 300-400 points of them could be reasonable given that they have potential to clear out enemy ranged.  By the same token, you could have a semi-fast (like 6-8" move) skirmisher unit that specializes in killing chaff.  Now you combine those two units and you have a potent combination to clear the chaff protecting your opponents missiles and then punish them with you anti-ranged.  Ideally, 1k of counter-missile units should easily handle 2k of pure missile spam. 

Obviously my specific unit ideas are mostly ****** (came up with them on the spot during lunch), but the idea here is you want some units to be really really good against other units.  That way someone with a balanced force who runs 500 points each of different battlefield roles (with room for variation and partial spam on a role or two) should fare far better than someone who pretty much makes 1.5k points of one role with minimal battleline/leader requirements filled.  That's the goal you try to get to and I think AoS gets there by doing a better job of making units that counter certain types of other units well.  Of course this concept gets even cooler when you have units that can perform hybrid roles to a certain extent, but those units as well should have clear counters available in the majority of armies so that the new standard doesn't immediately become "spam hybrid units".

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They just need to make more effort in not making units without counters in the first place. There's enough room in the basic rules for units that counter one another using core game mechanics...until you start creating units that ignore the basic rules. Sentinels are a problem because they effectively ignore range, LOS, look out sir, and armor. I.e. all the normal rules in the game that limit shooting units. Stormdrake are an issue because they are fast, fly, are tough, have MW ranged shooting, can move twice, can shoot in the hero phase, etc etc - again, all things that ignore the normal rules of the game. If either of these units ignored only one or two aspects of the core game they wouldn't be so problematic. I.e. Sentinels had only 18" range and did mortals on wound rolls instead, they'd still ignore armor and LOS, but you could play around them by outranging them and LOS would do something. If Dragons were fast but lacked ranged weapons and were relatively squishy (say a 4+ instead of a 3+, and no spell shrug), you could play around them by utilizing screens and counter-chargers. Alternatively, they could be tough and retain shooting, but not get to double move, and have only an 8" base move. Then they're still great flying tarpits but you can play around them because they can't be anywhere at any time. 

GW typically runs into problems when it piles too many "breaks core game concepts" onto a single unit. But they just can't seem to resist doing it. It's one of the great frustrations of the game that GW is so ill-disciplined when it comes to resisting the temptation to throw the kitchen sink onto a warscroll because <reasons>. 

Stuff that ignores core elements of the game should generally be rare, and you should hardly ever see units that ignore multiple core game elements. And above all, those units, if they do exist, certainly shouldn't be spammable.

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9 hours ago, Nizrah said:

Because its IMPOSSIBLE and horribly wrong to balance game with the casual players in mind. Game must be balanced with compepetive and tournaments stats. AoS is a game of deployment and movements, the diffrance between new player, good player and pro player IS HUGE.  

GW games, except Warhammer Underworld’s, are NOT meant to be competitive games.

matched play, and the GHB in general, along with the tournaments gw run, are purely about throwing you guys a bone

covid showed that the tournament players aren’t as important they like to think they are, gw sales were greater during a time where there were no tournaments 

controversial opinion, but AoS1 (pre GHB) was the best form of AoS, as for one thing it was absolutely clear what the game was intended to be, and it turned off a lot of the hyper competitive tournament focused players who tend to ruin the experience of other players. Matched Play, and the apparent widespread adaptation of that style of play has harmed the game more than it helped 

 

back on the topic of Dragons though, I’ve played 2 games using them (only one unit with lances) and here’s my thoughts
-game 1 was vs Knights Of The Empty Throne. This game just exasperated the reasons why save stacking needs to go away, the Varanguard in this list were always on a 2+ rerolling saves even AFTER the dragons rend, and as such I couldn’t get through them. The 6” pile in they had, that they can seemingly do even if they ran without needing to charge, AND being able to attack twice was just an utter trash experience of a game. Everything else in the list wasn’t worth targeting/was hidden behind the varanguard anyway, so they had to be focused on - everything other than the dragons did even worse.
-game 2 was vs a heavy shooting based Freeguild Cities army. This game was more enjoyable, and the dragons just folded under weight of dice.

I don’t know what the right points for them is, but I’m not convinced they’re worth 340pts while Dracoths are only 220-240pts. Additionally, the 2 named ones are missing abilities the little ones have which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me? (the 4+ ignore spells, and the ability to slay a model after fighting)

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If you had had a full list of dragons you would have obliterated that KotET list - they can only engage a unit or two of yours, and you then use the others to pick off their buff pieces with MW shooting + melee and the whole thing falls apart completely because Varangard have terrible damage output (SCE players think dragons are bad output for the points, but Varangard are even limper noodles for their points aside from the single turn of double attack). 

That's actually a great demonstration of why spamming certain kind of units can be much more of a problem than just a unit or two in a mixed list. A unit or two can be played around, mass dragons largely can't be played around so it comes down to list composition and if you have the masses of non-magical MW or very high rend attacks needed to win the match. That's the trouble with skew lists - they overwhelm your ability to cope by taking so much of the same thing that a well-balanced list can't handle it. The way to balance that is to discourage or place hard limits on skew through game mechanics, but in AOS GW tends to go in the other direction and actually reward it, which is just bizarre from a game design perspective.

KotET is basically another spam list incidentally and another example of GW going out of its way to promote said spam lists. 

 

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9 hours ago, Ragest said:

Age of Sigmar has a core problem still unsolved: the "competitive" lists of mostly every army in game are based on spamming a unit. 

ScE with raptors or drakes, Orruks with gruntas, Lumineth with Sentinels, Dok with Stalkers, Fyreslayers with HG, Idoneth with eels, Nurgle with flys...

 

2 or 4 Drakes are not a problem, 11 are, the same as 60 Sentinels, 30 Stalkers etc.

Part of the problem with spam is how small a lot of the armies ranges are still.

im going to use fyreslayers as an example because of how much it annoys me and goes against their lore.
Fyslayers have: Vulkite Berzerkers (Battleline), Hearthguard Berzerkers (conditional Battleline), Auric Hearthguard (conditional Battleline). The other 10~ warscrolls are all heroes. GW can’t restrict the use of Hearthguard or Aurics because you would create a situation where they literally have NO options or variety and every Fyreslayer list would be the exact same with only a choice of heroes (I’m assuming a Rule Of 3 like 40K, although I suspect if AoS did it, it’d be Rule Of 2). The issue with Hearthguard spam is that in the lore, they are a bodyguard unit not the main fighting force, and therefore in game SHOULD be restricted. Additionally, both the Auric Runefather and Auric Runemaster, there is only EVER one of each per lodge in the lore, but in game you can take 6 if you wanted 

AoS3 just made Hearthguard spam better and even more of an auto take 
+ward save (vulkites lost theirs in the latest book)
+min size 5 so don’t care about coherency
+2” melee just to add extra insult to the above
+cheaper than vulkites (less models but how much better they are makes up for it)
Vulkites
-lost their ward
-1” melee on 32mm bases
-min size 10
-instead of the ward they used to have, they got a once per game ability to attack upon death - however you have to activate it at the start of the phase so they might not even take any casualties (should have just been a copy paste of the Blood Warriors ability or kept the ward)
-more expensive than Hearthguard 
-shields are +1 save rather than changing the characteristic so All Out Defense is largely unusable 

as a side note, I feel Fyreslayers have been broken (not op, just they don’t work properly) since their AoS2 book. It is my belief that they did the points based on what the army was doing and how it played, THEN, they changed the rules and didn’t adjust the points - this is mostly visible in the cost of the foot heroes who saw the biggest changes in what they did vs do now 

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On 1/9/2022 at 1:43 PM, Joseph Mackay said:

They’re weak to mortal wounds, like pretty much everything. 

They have 9 wounds apiece, their stats don't bracket, and they have a 4+ spell ward. 

Especially in a drake spam list, they're one of units in the game that are LEAST weak to mortal wounds. 

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9 hours ago, PJetski said:

The only thing that needs to change with drakes is removing the d6 breath because random mortal wound spikes are not fun to play against

Yep the d6 mw creates too many feel Bad's. The other change I'd like to see is making the Double move 1 stormstrike unit per turn. That doesn't effect singular units but nerfs alpha strike spam lists.

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They just shouldn't have the double-move, period. They have way too many rules on that warscroll to be healthy. They should either lean towards speed or towards durability, a unit that does both is extraordinarily hard to balance, especially when it can be spammed. They should also probably lower the range on the breath to either like 6", or make its damage scale based on the target - only 1MW against single-model units with 10 wounds or less, d3 against everything else, on a 2+ to hit (so minuses to hit impact it). Right now it's much too effective at sniping small heroes, which really doesn't make much sense. They're fire-breathing dragons, not precision snipers. 

Remove some of the bad rules and lower their points back down to ~270 and you have a unit that's not broken any more. 

But let's be realistic, none of that is going to happen. GW doesn't change warscrolls except once in a blue moon, it's too much work and if they cared more about warscrolls being right they wouldn't have designed this warscroll the way they did in the first place. Look at how many years and tries it took them to finally more or less fix horrors, another prime example of GW's inability to resist "give it all the rules" syndrome.

Edited by yukishiro1
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18 hours ago, AaronWilson said:

It's however loads of fun, you just got to roll some dice and accept the game for what is is, or don't play it. 

It's not loads of fun to play against. That's the point. The notion that something can be broken and if you don't enjoy playing against it hey that's your problem is sad to hear. Maybe the problem is with the broken units, not the players. Maybe people want the game to be better than it is.

On 1/9/2022 at 8:35 PM, Doko said:

They are usefull due to movility and tanking,but they are overcosted and fulminators are so much better

News flash: Fulminators are broken. Pointing at fulminators and saying they are adds nothing to the conversation. Fulminators are stupid and need a nerf but it's apples to oranges because it is impossible for fulminators to do the specific thing a SDG spam list can do.

SDG are a very poorly designed unit. How the designers of the Stormcast book thought that giving one warscroll 7 different abilities and powerful synergies would be okay is baffling. This unit cannot be fixed with points. You can nerf it to the ground (500 points for 2?) so it becomes unplayable, but at any reasonable point value the unit will be a problem because of spamming them and the unique problems they cause. They need a warscroll rewrite.

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Yep, fulminators are broken in a pure efficiency sense, but they don't zoom across the board T1 and tie up your entire army with undegrading 9W models with 3+ saves and 4+ spell shrugs. It's a different sort of broken. Ideally they should just lose 1 attack on each rider (or only go to 2 damage on the charge), but again GW doesn't do warscroll fixes so they'll probably have to go up points instead. 

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11 hours ago, Freejack02 said:

A 10 Stormdrake list just took 2nd (4-1) at Clash of Swords in the UK, and another 9 drake list took 2nd in the Polish Team Championships over the weekend. They are being played, they are placing well.

Which, at the moment, is as good as pre-dragons SCE lists with raptors, fulminators and the like were doing.

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They aren't going to do a lot of 5-0s precisely for the same reason that makes them auto-win against so many lists - if they do come up with a list with the tools to kill them, they don't do nearly so well. That's how skew lists work - they are great unless you come up against the list that's skewed against your list. 

Dragons definitely would have gone 5-0 at their old points cost; at their new points I don't think they'll be one of the strongest 5-0 lists in the game, but that doesn't mean they aren't really unfun to play against with a more mid-tier list. And that's a problem of its own. 

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5 minutes ago, Marcvs said:

Which, at the moment, is as good as pre-dragons SCE lists with raptors, fulminators and the like were doing.

Agreed, but I think raptors and fulminators are definitely considered "above the curve" in terms of power - therefore dragons can't really be said to be sub-optimal. 

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8 minutes ago, Freejack02 said:

Agreed, but I think raptors and fulminators are definitely considered "above the curve" in terms of power - therefore dragons can't really be said to be sub-optimal. 

Of course not, they are *good*, likely as good as the lists consistently doing well (gargants, the two versions of LRL, legion of the first prince, seraphon dynos&sallies, morathi&the bowsnakes...) all of which can be absolutely oppressive in more casual settings, most of which can come close to tabling you on a bad double turn, none of which has deserved a whole thread lamenting they are "beyond absurd".

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