Stormdrake Guard Are Beyond Absurd

[Yondaime]

7 minutes ago, ibel said:

can u tell more ?!

dragons could not kill plaguebearers and drones and lost to the atrition game and to the so many debuffs nurgle pull of

[Yondaime]

3 minutes ago, Doko said:

Yes +1 this.

Is absurd this post.

Data have showed us that dragon spam havent won anything,also fullminators and raptors are around 7th in rankings.

So we need others 6 posts about armys more absurds than dragons or any sc unit before take serious this post

I really hate to be that guy this time but i'll say

 

People who complain so much about dragon after nerfs have close to 0 experience in high competitive tables

there, now i fell like an ******

[ibel]

2 minutes ago, Yondaime said:

dragons could not kill plaguebearers and drones and lost to the atrition game and to the so many debuffs nurgle pull of

Really ?! Okay i believe Plaguebearer and Drones would make not enough DMG.

I still believe a Glootkin-BK or PusgBK CounterCharge List could be a counter to 11 Dragons. Maybe i find something who try this against me.

[whispersofblood]

17 minutes ago, ibel said:

Really ?! Okay i believe Plaguebearer and Drones would make not enough DMG.

I still believe a Glootkin-BK or PusgBK CounterCharge List could be a counter to 11 Dragons. Maybe i find something who try this against me.

It sounds like you've not played new Nurgle. I think it's relative rarity is going to make it a sleeper book, and general lack of competitive Stans will depress it's winrate.

I think the best way to think about SDG is to go back to HoS 2019. The KoS warscroll was largely what it is now, which is pretty unimpressive. But you have to think about the state of the game that it was released into. 

There was a lot of alpha bunkering/striking doing explosive early damage with high movement and glass cannons. HoS were essentially immune to Alphas, not only that the army got stronger over the game not weaker. So if you weren't more circumspect about how you did your damage you would likely lose quite early. Also the variety of objective games was much lower, and shooting was basically non-existent. GW could release the exact same book today and it would be strong but it would likely just gatekeep combat armies. 

SDG similarly gain the majority of their power from how the game is played. AoS 3 is meant to be a much longer game and closer game. SDG spam specifically is highly resistant to giving up Battle tactics as they:

a) lock you out of movement based BT

b) it's very difficult to muster the strength to remove a unit in a turn after they have hit your lines

c) the shooting meta has basically destroyed screens as a useful tool for some time, and coherency rules have significantly impacted players ability to make them

d) their monster keyword and MW shooting make SDG when spammed extremely good at completing BT at range

e) lastly they have enough defences to be able to ride their luck which in games over only 5 turns can determine games alone.

To give SCE players their do. SDG combat damage is infact middling, and they do have a "low" model count (for any real purpose though each SDG is 5 models without the weakness of being 5 models). I would almost go so far as to say they are quite bad if you just take a unit of 2 in a list. Even taking a 4 man hammer is kinda meh at the competitive level.

However, these things aren't poor enough to make their situation strength or meta strength not overwhelming when spammed. If armies were say limited to 4-6 of them then it might be, but upwards of that number the MW shooting curve evens out and the dmg becomes intolerable when considering how the game is won.

Ironically they have all the things that Sentinels don't that prevents Sentinels from domination. Sentinels might seemingly kill things easily but their impact on the scoreboard is low, the LRL player usually has to do something else to score points. SDG do a lot even if they never kill anything in combat in a turn when spammed, often picking up points as a consequence of doing whatever it is they want. 

[CommissarRotke]

As an SCE player I can tell you I was really disappointed to see so many units lose their unique abilities, only for SDG to have way too many on their scroll... would love to see more internal balance in our book so players don't feel like they need to spam dragons!!!

[yukishiro1]

1 hour ago, whispersofblood said:

However, these things aren't poor enough to make their situation strength or meta strength not overwhelming when spammed. If armies were say limited to 4-6 of them then it might be, but upwards of that number the MW shooting curve evens out and the dmg becomes intolerable when considering how the game is won.

Yeah this is really what it comes down to and why people have to play against it to really realize the issues. GW have created a massive problem for themselves by letting them be battleline. It should be undone, but it can't be, because they've advertised the ability to make a whole army of dragons so heavily and people have invested accordingly that there'd be a major protest if they were removed from the battleline list. But without that the scroll has to be fixed, you can't just adjust points or you'll end up at a point where there is no use for them except in a spam list. 

I don't think they're going to win 70% like Slaanesh did or anything, or even necessarily dominate at 5-0 because there are some lists with the tools to beat them. But it's such bad game design to have matchups be decided simply by a rock-paper-scissors list comparison, and that's very much what dragon spam is. It wins or loses (and mostly wins) really before the game even starts. It's like SoB but with even less ability for your opponent to do anything other than react and crunch the numbers.

[JackStreicher]

Mhm. Just to ignite the fuse and watch the explosion:

 

imo dragons are fine.

 

deal with it

[Beliman]

1 hour ago, Enoby said:

In Malifaux, for example, there are overpowered and underpowered crews (armies) but the most powerful are along the "this needs toning down" lines and the least are "this isn't quite doing what it should be" and can usually be solved with a few tweaks. I don't think, in Malifaux's 3rd edition, there's been any crew that could wipe someone else out first or second turn.

Malifaux is in a weird spot right now. It has the alternative Masters that are miles away than other Masters (generals), but instead of tabling the opponent in a double turn, both players can play until the last turn and even try to win. That's impossible in AoS. 

Imo, that's because AoS doesn't still not know what it wants to be. Yes, it's a wargame with objectives and a lot of layers to not fall appart behind (tactics and strats), but the units and gameplay doesn't follow that principle.

Denying or capturing objectives usually comes with "kill that unit in one hit". Only a few can use the "I'm 30 models muahaha" mechanic but that's one of the worst mechanics to use (and take in mind that only a few have that mechanic...). 

Malifaux has a "schemer" role exactly for that. Units that can deny or take objectives, move faster or have tricks to debuff other schemers. That type of things is well known for the community and the game. 

Conquest and Asoiaf have objectives too, and both of them have main core mechanics based on objectives. From units that can change their role (ambushing after turn 3 to backdoor objective objectives) to units that don't let enemies capture X objectives (something like bravery-checks or even looters that steal your objectives).

What I'm saying is that units that have good dmg, can take a punch and can capture objectives (movement/teleport) are going to be good no matter what. Bill Souza used a few dragons for his Fyreslayers list exactly because of that. I'm not saying that they are broken, just pointing out why their warscroll seems to be really good.

[Enoby]

28 minutes ago, Beliman said:

*snip*

I agree. Not to get too much into other games, but you're right that AoS is a wargame with objectives but doesn't really have units that interact with them (besides a few specific examples like SoB and Brutes). 

For those who don't know, in Malifaux, to score an objective it's very likely you'll need to do something active, and objectives are randomised per game (you get a set of 5 schemes and 1 strategy). You choose what you're playing after finding this out, and tailor your list to be the best at the given schemes (choosing 2 of 5) and strategy, as well as who can deny them. I'll try not to go too deep into the mechanics, but some schemes will have you run around to the opponent's side and actively use (using 1 of the maximum 10 per game) actions to put down a marker. Other schemes just need you to stand still in the middle and not die, while making sure no one else is near you. 

So you could have a very expensive, tough to kill, very damaging, fast model that's great in one situation but very poor in another. This gets even more complex with counter scheming. What this ends up meaning is, in general, most crews look different every time they are played - or at least different in small ways. 

In Age of Sigmar, usually when a unit is good, it's good in every situation because objectives are captured passively or battle tactics are won doing things you'd probably do anyway.

For example, Broken Ranks requires you (preferably using a monster) to destroy a battleline unit. So long as you pick this at the right time, there's no downside to trying to go for this. Units that are already good at killing will be good at this, in the same way that units which are good at killing will be good at clearing and objective and taking that.

In Malifaux, Outflank requires you to drop two markers using two models at the side of the board. This will often require three actions per model (so six overall). This means that cheap models have an advantage over stronger models because you can take more of them and each of their actions is 'worth' less compared to your general action count. On the downside, these models will be low impact in damage and often a lot easier to kill, and so would be much worse at a scheme like Assassinate (try to kill the opposing leader).

To try and bring this back on the topic of Stormcast and their dragons, I think the homogenisation of what makes a good scroll in AoS is what makes Stormcast so hard to balance for as they have so many warscrolls. The Dragons, regardless of if they're "OP" or not, seem to have the overall best stats for their points in the book and fullfill the "best unit" role best. However I don't really see a solution to fixing this without a big rules overhall as it's quite fundamental to AoS's current design; even upping the points of the dragons won't solve the fundamental issue that SCE players face of a lot of their book being overshadowed by the next best unit.

(Note, I should add that the Malifaux design isn't necessarily perfect and it can be very new/unskilled player unfriendly, whereas AoS is much more open and inviting as a game regardless of skill level. Skill certainly does matter in AoS, but the skill floor is much lower.)  

[Joseph Mackay]

9 hours ago, Clan's Cynic said:

Remember when GW themselves said they didn't expect people to spam Iron Hands Dreadnoughts, despite there being stories of playtesters warning them exactly that was going to happen?

Either they're wilfully ignorant, do not care, or are woefully naïve when it comes to these situations.

Over the years there have been many times where we’ve seen that the GW rules writers are horrified by what the community (more specifically, the competitive/tournament scene) are doing.

fact is, the rules writers play mostly narrative, and so they write rules with that type of play in mind. AoS is largely a narrative game (AoS1 before the GHB is proof of that), matched play was simply them throwing a bone. They don’t really care about the competitive scene, and frankly I don’t think they should.

if the rules writers are mostly, or even, purely narrative players, they are never going to be able to write rules with the competitive scene in mind, because they don’t think the same way about the game.

[yukishiro1]

And yet the vast majority of AOS games are matched play. The reason they brought back matched play is because there was an economic imperative to do so, because it's what the customer wanted and demanded (and was doing on his own in the absence of GW doing it, triggering GW's biggest fear - losing control of the hobby). 

Matched play is what the average customer wants. If GW's current rules writers aren't up to the task, it would behoove them to find some people who are.

I also don't think we can chalk up dragon spam to the designers not thinking people would do it, because they deliberately went out of their way to make it possible in the book via the conditional battleline rules. This isn't an oversight in the sense of it not occurring to GW that people would do this, this is an oversight in the sense of them having deliberately gone out of their way to make something possible that shouldn't have been possible.

There is no way to run a fluffy dragon spam list that isn't problematic. It's not like people are combining dragon spam with some extra magic ingredient that elevates it from mediocre to extremely powerful. It's just all there on the warscroll - unless you deliberately play badly you are going to roflstomp virtually any other "narrative" list with it. 

 

 

 

Edited January 11, 2022 by yukishiro1

[Joseph Mackay]

1 hour ago, yukishiro1 said:

And yet the vast majority of AOS games are matched play.

 

 

This is exactly what I was talking about earlier when I said the competitive/tournament players think they’re more important. Matched Play is the vast majority that gets talked about, not what is actually played. The internet as a whole, is a very loud, but very small minority of overall players.

matched play was them throwing you guys a bone, but it is 100% NOT how AoS is intended to be played. That’s not to say you can’t or shouldn’t play that way, but you need to realise and understand that the game wasn’t designed for that, and as such there will be ‘bugs in the system’ that gw probably won’t address, because they don’t need to.

i personally don’t think the dragons deserve the negative attention they’re getting right now, and I think 90% of it is just anti Stormcast bias. People getting salty if the poster boys they don’t like beat them. we have a few of them in our tournaments who get really mad about it if the good Stormcast player beats them simply because ‘Stormcast suck and shouldn’t be able to win against me’ and I think a lot of that is what’s going on here, with a sprinkling of jealousy that Stormcast get an army of dragons and everyone else doesn’t. People were, and probably still are, legitimately angry that the dragons ended up being Stormcast units

just for openness sake, these are the armies I play: Cities Of Sigmar (Disspossessed exclusively), Fyreslayers, Stormcast, Seraphon, Flesh Eaters, Ogors, Gloomspite Gits (Squigs and Troggoths), Bonesplitterz, Kruleboyz, Beasts Of Chaos (Warherd exclusively), Kharadron Overlords, Sons Of Behemat. So I’m not bias because I play them

[Aakkxxzz]

So... Where are all of these people who play Narrative AoS instead of Matched? 

Judging by amount of representation each mode sees in pretty much any online space (forums, subreddits, Youtube channels, etc), Narrative players look like a significant minority as far as "number of games played" is concerned. 

There are definitely people who play kitchen-table games, and people who run Narrative campaigns with their friends. There are definitely people who mostly collect models and read books, who might play a game or two with Open rules. 

But for as often as I hear the argument that "Matched players are the minority," there doesn't seem to be much evidence for it.

The people who are actively playing this game, on a regular basis, and playing it the most, are - by a significant margin, I'd bet - Matched players. 

 

Edited January 12, 2022 by Aakkxxzz

[Clan's Cynic]

I think some of the confusion comes from peoples differences between what's a narrative games vs Narrative Play and what the definitions are. The majority of people play AoS casually, or narratively (lower case) but still work within the Matched Play boundaries. At the end of the day, AoS is still a game where you're trying to beat your opponent - even if you don't necessarily care too much about the result - and for that reason people will want to steer around broken combos and totally weak armies, or else there isn't really much of a game there.

Narrative Campaign Weekends at GW's own official 40k events only used Power Level for one event before swapping over to Matched Play. After 2.0 I don't think any of the AoS events ever used anything but Matched Play. Those are still narrative games.

Look at Horus Heresy for another example. That's a system where the overwhelming majority of people are playing (lowercase) narrative games, but I'm willing to bet if GW were to introduce a Narrative and Match Play divide, almost all of them would still be using Matched Play (points), simply because most people still want to have an (in theory) balanced game to play, whilst still being fluffy.

The majority of historical wargames are what would be considered narrative, but again, most of them use points to hash out games that aren't recreating specific battles.

 

Edited January 12, 2022 by Clan's Cynic

[yukishiro1]

58 minutes ago, Joseph Mackay said:

This is exactly what I was talking about earlier when I said the competitive/tournament players think they’re more important. Matched Play is the vast majority that gets talked about, not what is actually played. The internet as a whole, is a very loud, but very small minority of overall players.

I don't consider myself more important. I just know that every single person I know who plays AOS plays matched play. Every single one. Maybe 1 in 10 also plays narrative, but not a single one doesn't play matched, and 9 out of 10 play only matched. Maybe these hordes of narrative players are out there and they actually outnumber us matched play players, but if so, I don't know how you'd demonstrate that because they're completely invisible both locally and on the internet. I hope you'll forgive me if I don't just take your word for it that most AOS players play narrative, because it absolutely does not seem to be the case based on every single metric I can assess. Every person I know. Most of the stuff you can see on the internet. Most of GW's own events. It's all the matched play rules. That doesn't mean it's all cutting-edge competitive; most of it isn't. But it's all matched play as the basic framework.

I also don't really see how dragon spam being problematic serves a narrative interest. Do narrative players like rules that box them in their deployment zone T1 and then keep them there all game? Honest question. I would think that narrative players would like games where fun narrative things happen, not where their opponent moves into combat with them T1 with their whole army because it all moves 24" + charges and then the rest of the game is just rolling out combats. Is that fluffy and exciting? 

You would think that if you were right about narrative players being the majority and narrative players liking rules like Stormdrakes have, the game should be absolutely full of units with similar scrolls, right? Not the exact same abilities, but a similar idea in terms of warscrolls being absolutely stuffed full of rule after rule. But that isn't how warscrolls in this game look. Stormdrakes are very much the exception, not the rule. 

 

Edited January 12, 2022 by yukishiro1

[Orbei]

5 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

There is no way to run a fluffy dragon spam list that isn't problematic.

The idea itself that dragons need a fluffy spam list option seems dumb to me in the first place. Why do these ultra rare dragons, a species only recently returned to the realms, get an option to be spammed as battleline in the first place? If dragons of all things can be battleline what is the point of battleline restrictions. Just let people play whatever they want because there's no reason 11 dragons is more fluffy than 13 doomwheels or 7 GUOs. 

[Joseph Mackay]

3 hours ago, Aakkxxzz said:

So... Where are all of these people who play Narrative AoS instead of Matched? 

Judging by amount of representation each mode sees in pretty much any online space (forums, subreddits, Youtube channels, etc), Narrative players look like a significant minority as far as "number of games played" is concerned. 

There are definitely people who play kitchen-table games, and people who run Narrative campaigns with their friends. There are definitely people who mostly collect models and read books, who might play a game or two with Open rules. 

But for as often as I hear the argument that "Matched players are the minority," there doesn't seem to be much evidence for it.

The people who are actively playing this game, on a regular basis, and playing it the most, are - by a significant margin, I'd bet - Matched players. 

 

Because the narrative players generally don’t need to discuss the most op units/lists online, or argue about rules interpretations. They simply don’t NEED the internet like the matched players seem to.

matched play is the loud minority and narrative is the quiet majority 

[Joseph Mackay]

2 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

 

You would think that if you were right about narrative players being the majority and narrative players liking rules like Stormdrakes have, the game should be absolutely full of units with similar scrolls, right? Not the exact same abilities, but a similar idea in terms of warscrolls being absolutely stuffed full of rule after rule. But that isn't how warscrolls in this game look. Stormdrakes are very much the exception, not the rule. 

 

Eels, Evocators, 2+ rerolling saves and pile in 6” after running Varanguard, Morathi, almost the entirety of Lumineth, Tzeentch, Slaanesh are just some examples (admittedly all AoS2 books but still). Now sure, a lot of that isn’t on the units warscroll but rather allegiance abilities, command abilities and other buffs stacked onto them, but the end result is similar 

[Freejack02]

4 hours ago, Joseph Mackay said:

Matched Play is the vast majority that gets talked about, not what is actually played.

4 hours ago, Joseph Mackay said:

matched play was them throwing you guys a bone, but it is 100% NOT how AoS is intended to be played. That’s not to say you can’t or shouldn’t play that way, but you need to realise and understand that the game wasn’t designed for that, and as such there will be ‘bugs in the system’ that gw probably won’t address, because they don’t need to.

Would love to see some actual proof to back up these claims. 

What we do know is that the original AoS was not intended to be played "competitively", that is true... and it was so poorly received, so universally looked down on by the majority of their playerbase, that they changed the vision of what the game would be moving forward and wrote Matched Play into the system. They made a complete 180, because they saw that if they didn't, someone else was going to scoop up those competitive fantasy players - and I don't think they would have done that if matched players were really the minority. 

[Carnelian]

For anyone  who wants "proof" that many ppl don't care about playing matched play, just go to hobby discords and hang out or listen to all the hobby podcasts that aren't focused on matched play

Hell, a significant number of people who go to the big matched play tournaments will tell you that their preferred method of play is to play narratively or that they're at the tournament primarily for the painting awards

[Joseph Mackay]

18 minutes ago, Carnelian said:

For anyone  who wants "proof" that many ppl don't care about playing matched play, just go to hobby discords and hang out or listen to all the hobby podcasts that aren't focused on matched play

Hell, a significant number of people who go to the big matched play tournaments will tell you that their preferred method of play is to play narratively or that they're at the tournament primarily for the painting awards

This. We had tournaments regularly getting 40-50 players in Wellington NZ, we struggle to get 20ish now (depending upon who the TO is) as most of the people who play AoS only went to tournaments for fun, to play more games, more experience. They stopped going when the competitive players became too much and ruined the fun as it got to a point where you couldn’t avoid playing them (the ‘weaker’ players used to end up playing against each other at the ‘bottom’ tables, while the better players/armies would knock each other out. It seems that’s no longer the case as the bottom players somehow end up against the top players, and I think that’s what drove them away)

[Aakkxxzz]

1 hour ago, Joseph Mackay said:

Because the narrative players generally don’t need to discuss the most op units/lists online, or argue about rules interpretations. They simply don’t NEED the internet like the matched players seem to.

matched play is the loud minority and narrative is the quiet majority 

I'm not saying that people aren't interested in the hobby for other reasons, like lore or collecting or painting. They absolutely are. And that's the majority of the base; I don't dispute that at all. 

I'm responding to the argument that they're "playing the most," which they're absolutely not. Not by any measurable related metric. Being interested in models/painting/lore/etc isn't the same as playing games, and it isn't related to rulesets or balancing. 

That said... totally willing to be proven wrong here. But claiming there's a secret "silent majority" ain't it. 

[yukishiro1]

Most GW customers don't play the games at all, or do so only very infrequently. But that's a different question than how they play when they do play. If players who don't use the matched play rule are the majority, they're scarily good at keeping it quiet. As I said, in my local community, they essentially don't exist. I can't remember the last time I saw someone looking for a narrative game as opposed to a matched play one. That doesn't mean people don't play casually, but they do it within the matched play rubric. Maybe my local community is completely unrepresentative of AOS players across the world, but I would need some evidence to believe it beyond just someone on the internet saying so. 

But this whole argument is completely besides the point because if you play narrative you don't care about batteline restrictions anyway. That's explicitly a matched play thing. The thing that makes the drakes so problematic in matched play is being able to be spammed, and there is zero reason why you have to allow that in matched play to allow it in narrative or open. If we are supposed to believe GW doesn't take matched play seriously and doesn't devote resources to it because of all the secret narrative players, why are they going out of their way to let you spam the unit in matched play? That doesn't make any sense. It's internally inconsistent. This isn't a case of GW not paying attention to matched play, it's a case of GW creating a problem for itself in matched play by going out of its way to allow something dubious that is completely irrelevant to non-matched play. 

Incidentally I think this is actually evidence of matched play's dominance - if GW felt comfortable telling people "if you want to spam drakes, just play narrative, that's what most people do anyway!" they'd just do that. 

Edited January 12, 2022 by yukishiro1

[Freejack02]

40 minutes ago, Carnelian said:

For anyone  who wants "proof" that many ppl don't care about playing matched play

I know that some people like and play Narrative, maybe even a whole lot of people. What I am refuting is the "vast majority" are running narrative battles/campaigns - that's a giant assumption that just can't be backed up by anything more than hyperbole. 

[Abstract_duck]

1 hour ago, Orbei said:

The idea itself that dragons need a fluffy spam list option seems dumb to me in the first place. Why do these ultra rare dragons, a species only recently returned to the realms, get an option to be spammed as battleline in the first place? If dragons of all things can be battleline what is the point of battleline restrictions. Just let people play whatever they want because there's no reason 11 dragons is more fluffy than 13 doomwheels or 7 GUOs. 

@Skreech Verminking incoming

Edited January 12, 2022 by Abstract_duck