Stormdrake Guard Are Beyond Absurd

[Gitzdee]

28 minutes ago, Freejack02 said:

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. 

I dont know about majority running narrative battles/campaigns. However i do think the majority of people are painters and collectors who maybe play a few games a year (matched or not) and dont care one bit about 1 warscroll being slightly broken at some point. Most people including myself dont play tournaments and dont min/max their lists and play with what they own already.

[Freejack02]

12 minutes ago, Iksdee said:

I dont know about majority running narrative battles/campaigns. However i do think the majority of people are painters and collectors who maybe play a few games a year (matched or not) and dont care one bit about 1 warscroll being slightly broken at some point. Most people including myself dont play tournaments and dont min/max their lists and play with what they own already.

That I agree with - I think there are many, many people that just collect/build/paint and don't have a large interest in playing the game. Buddy of mine does exactly that; he's been collecting/playing for 6 years now and has maybe 15 games total?

[Skreech Verminking]

2 hours ago, Abstract_duck said:

@Skreech Verminking incoming

Yes-yes.

 

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

11 hours ago, Joseph Mackay said:

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.

I don't really believe that is true. I definitely don't think the rules team plays mostly narrative games during their design process. What I think is more probable is that they play a lot of "as intended" matched play games with mixed arms lists that take a little bit of everything. Because that's a fairly common pitfall for designers: They have an idea how the game is supposed to be played in mind, but don't enforce it through the rules. And then in their testing they overlook the edge cases, because the intended design works fairly well.

I also think we should more clearly make the distinction between tournament play and matched play. I don't think the designers are especially focussed on tournament play, but they are definitely focussed on matched play. Especially since narrative play still uses matched play as its foundation. Even if they preferred the narrative game mode, they would still have to go through the matched play rules to make sure that it works.

5 hours 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.

I don't really believe that line of thinking holds up. Look at DnD discussion online: That game is all about non-competitive narrative play, and you still see a lot of focus on the game mechanics. Plus, in the case of DnD, you also see a lot of narrative talk that you don't really see for AoS.

[RuneBrush]

20 hours ago, TheGrimKnight said:

I agree with this, though doesn't that rule not work for troop choices which I guess would be similar to our battle line units? but over all I agree that outside standard battle line choices (,I play CoS so like freeguild guard) it should be limited to X amount per army. A varied list makes for more interesting games then spamming a single unit for your army like the dragons. 

There's lots of ways it could be implemented in truth, but with varying levels of complexity.  The way it worked in WHFB was that you had limits on the percentage of points you could spend on something (e.g. no more than 25% elite troops) and then each individual unit had a hard limitation (e.g. 0 ~ 2).  It wasn't perfect, but generally prevented one super unit being spammed.  AoS has a much easier system that doesn't actually require maths, the downside is that it makes it a lot more difficult to prevent people creating an army that consists entirely of one unit - even more so in that some generals open up certain units as becoming battleline.  Limiting a warscroll to being no more than 50% of your army would actually be the easiest counter (we've already got that for a single unit in some circumstances), but it would break some armies from being viable.

[RuneBrush]

12 hours ago, Joseph Mackay said:

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.

Probably worth mentioning that the team writing the rules now aren't the same people who wrote the rules 6 years ago and certainly now includes a number of people who do and have played games on the competitive scene.  The books are written 2 to 3 years in advance, so there's a certain amount of crystal balling needed to try and make sure that they don't dominate the competitive scene.

I'm also going to be controversial and say that there are more games played in a non-competitive setting than ones played in one - the difference is that friendly games played with a mate don't have the visibility that a gaming club or 100 person tournament has.

[Marcvs]

39 minutes ago, RuneBrush said:

the difference is that friendly games played with a mate don't have the visibility that a gaming club or 100 person tournament has.

and also that there's a lot of social contract involved in "playing with your mates" so most problems can be solved or greatly reduced by good communication and understanding of what kind of game will be played

[KrispyXIV]

1 hour ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

I also think we should more clearly make the distinction between tournament play and matched play. I don't think the designers are especially focussed on tournament play, but they are definitely focussed on matched play. Especially since narrative play still uses matched play as its foundation. Even if they preferred the narrative game mode, they would still have to go through the matched play rules to make sure that it works.

Yeah, I've never personally seen a non-matched play game being played, nor even heard of a game being played without using the matched play rules in actual real-life.  Never even heard it discussed.

Plenty of non-tournament, relatively casual matched play game though.  Stormdrake spam is a huge issue in this category, and this category is the majority of games I've seen or am aware of...

[Warfiend]

1 hour ago, RuneBrush said:

The books are written 2 to 3 years in advance, so there's a certain amount of crystal balling needed to try and make sure that they don't dominate the competitive scene.

This argument gets thrown around a lot and it’s a really bad one.

for the lore part I understand it takes a while to write stories. But for the rules they could and should reflect and adjust them a month before the book goes into print. 

It’s just a lazy excuse

Edited January 12, 2022 by Warfiend

[Rachmani]

You can play both narratively & with matched play rules simultaneously. As soon as you stay away from the spam, take units that you like (while still keeping an eye on the point costs) the gaming experience shifts immensely within matched play. 

I own a Kharadron Overlords Army for example. They‘re a fleet of explorators, looking for treasures to grab/find and Aethergold to mine. Naturally they *all* fit in boats. Not one dwarf has to walk if there is no narrative reason. That makes them low on bodies, something I have to deal with in game, in matched play. I still brought them to a few tournaments before covid. 

Long story short, there is a big bulk of players that are in between the two extremes. Wargaming is not binary.

That also makes balance important for everyone, but less than it appears.

[Enoby]

It should also be noted that current narrative play is very similar to matched play in that you use points and the unit restrictions are quite similar to the matched play restrictions. I'd say current Path to Glory is a lot more complex than most matched play games due to all of the steps after a game.

I imagine, as @Neil Arthur Hotep said, when people say that most AoS games are narrative and that the devs play narrative, I think what they mean is that most games aren't cutting edge competitive or designed to be. The game is very likely mostly played at a 'build a 1k-2k point army you like the look of' level, and designed around that philosophy which is why so much can slip through (as well as time constraints and other pressures). It's not a 'narrative' game to make a story about Sir Ethal Brightshield, Lord Castellant and his 100% liberator retinue if it's played using matched play rules. It's a matched play list with a story and a theme, which from my experience is the most common way to play.

Narrative, in a AoS design sense, is synonymous with Path to Glory, which is rarely played from my experience (though I do play it). 

While the argument might be "the people playing narrative styled matched play lists" don't care about balance, I don't think this is necessarily true. They may not play the most powerful thing, but they'll not enjoy it if their themed faction they've put a lot of love and care into gets obliterated turn 2. 

TL;DR - 'true' competitive is likely a minority, as is 'true' P2G narrative, but casual matched play with a theme is likely the most common.

[pnkdth]

22 hours ago, Yondaime said:

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

Going 5-0 only matters to tournament players. I've seen excuses been made for 4-1 armies because "they're not a true 5-0 army thus not a problem" yet outside tournaments such armies can be utterly devastating. A fleeting glance at THW data app and you can see just how dominant a certain set of armies actually are because the moment you don't bring tuned competitive armies all day all the time these 4-1 sleeper armies start laying down the hurt. What I mean is it isn't enough to just nip 5-0 armies at the buds, you gotta trim many of the 4-1s too.

The secret sauce to a healthy game is an appealing game for novices/intermediates where people who attains mastery or expert level are rewarded for their efforts. Otherwise the competitive scene will dry up and the meta will become too predictable.

That said, all they need to do is to remove the conditional battleline and the unit is fixed. The issue is not just its power but what happens when you have an entire army of monsters + abilities to excel in every important aspect of 3.0. Which is why I call them SoB 2.0. They're looking to be yet another list you can cruise control yourself to victory with (while beating way better players than yourself).

[TheGrimKnight]

I feel there are two matched play game type people play. Matched- narrative, and Matched- competitive. 

I'm a casual player, and unless playing at a tournament, so is most the people in the area I live. There are a few players who go competitive regardless. When aos came out, I was excited but then I was turned off on how there wasnt a point system. I didnt start really playing until they started fixing "matched" rules. most people I've met in my gaming group are like me in that they want a point "blanace" but still play a Matched- narrative game type.

Just to also clarify I havent played agasint the dragons yet, but feel like playing against a spam list at a pickup game would make me just fold and do something else. 

[stratigo]

On 1/11/2022 at 8:51 AM, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

It's certainly a possibility, but after everything I have read from people who worked on GW rules design, I have never seen anyone say that higher-ups push them to make units or books overpowered to push sales. I have seen talk of executive meddling in other areas, but not that one. So personally, I think it's a case of something else going wrong, like the rules writers not having the time or ressources they need to ensure a better level of balance. Say what you will about how Wizards of the Coast handles Magic: The Gathering (there is certainly plenty to criticize), but the level of care and testing they are putting into their rules design definitely put GW's efforts to shame.

I mean there was the Hewitt interview that literally said that.

 

It doesn't happen as often as people presume. Rountree doesn't come down the the writer room every week and demand they up the power of X unit because the sales team told him they should. But it DOES happen every once in a while. But usually not, and you can never know why a particular unit got the love, wether a suit went "Make it good" or the person writing is was just "I am so full of cool ideas! Let's put all of them in" or "Eh, here's something for this unit, I'm not really gonna check it because i don't care about this faction". I mean, I think this one is because the rules writers went "Dragons are Fing cool! Give them all the rules!" It's a problem when you hire for people with passion and no experience cause they cheap. They tend to let their passion run wild, cause that's the thing keeping them in the job. And, like, they aren't paid to playtest thoroughly.

 

21 hours ago, JackStreicher said:

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

 

imo dragons are fine.

 

deal with it

Dragons are not fine.

 

Deal with it.

 

14 hours 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.

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

 

Match play is overwhelmingly the way the majority of players play because it is the only easy, no thought needed, way to create an army and select objectives. Even people playing narrative campaigns will default to match play games because it is by far the easiest way to play, and the one that give the most appearance of balance. Which is actually important. Vanishingly few people make an army to lose all their games.

10 hours 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 

 

Narrative players never organize? they never feel done wrong by an op power list and complain about it?

 

How many 'narrative' games do you play in a given week mate? Who with?

 

 

[Gaz Taylor]

2 hours ago, TheGrimKnight said:

I feel there are two matched play game type people play. Matched- narrative, and Matched- competitive. 

I strongly suspect this is the direct they will end up it. It feels this is what they will do with 40K and I wouldn’t be surprised if that gets ported to AOS. I think that would solve a lot of the concerns/issues some people have.

[Rachmani]

It’s honestly the smart thing to do.

Almost everyone needs some kind of measurement. Even rather narrative guys & gals? You may not want to win at all costs but maybe you wanna make sure your playing partner has a good time also?

When I play for fun with my buddies we‘re just as concerned about our opponents fun as we are about our own. We need points, we all do. Just to different extremes & for different causes. 
That‘s why I think people are way less in disagreement than it appears, just the approaches to fixing stuff are different.

[Lord Krungharr]

Looking forward to fighting these so-called dragons with my Sons of Behemat......and also my Bonesplitterz.  They must have some good potent marrow in dem bonez!

[Joseph Mackay]

9 hours ago, Warfiend said:

This argument gets thrown around a lot and it’s a really bad one.

for the lore part I understand it takes a while to write stories. But for the rules they could and should reflect and adjust them a month before the book goes into print. 

It’s just a lazy excuse

I don’t know about AoS, but with 40K 9th edition, the play testers said all the codexes were written at the same time, so theoretically should be balanced against each other. But because gw release them piecemeal and so slowly, certain books are stronger than maybe they should be, because the other books aren’t out yet, and so they have to keep adjusting points or erratas which changes how things were supposed to play out

[NauticalSoup]

3 hours ago, Joseph Mackay said:

I don’t know about AoS, but with 40K 9th edition, the play testers said all the codexes were written at the same time, so theoretically should be balanced against each other. But because gw release them piecemeal and so slowly, certain books are stronger than maybe they should be, because the other books aren’t out yet, and so they have to keep adjusting points or erratas which changes how things were supposed to play out

You're gonna need to source that claim, cuz it seems pretty far from reality. By all reports, GW essentially doesn't playtest. When testing outside the design team does occur it seems very little if any feedback makes it into the release product save for FAQ/errata-type cleanup. There's also the very obvious change in vision and design goals that shift from book to book across an edition from the ground up in army design. Broad cross-book mechanics like purity rules or core seem to have a different concept of their ideal use as the edition develops which shouldn't happen if the armies were designed at the same time.

Most importantly, there's absolutely no way the design team has the excess capacity to front-load that amount of material at the start of an edition cycle. Just look at the amount of piecemeal supplements designed for old rulebooks from the previous edition which are released years into the current edition cycle.

No, they're flattening their development resources across the life of an edition, because GW is a business and they run all their projects with the aim of keeping up a release schedule. There is literally no benefit from their perspective to building a codex then sitting on a finished product for two years before it's time to release it when you could start that work eight months before and finish it just in time to send it to the printers.

[Zeblasky]

Okay, I am a little bit late for the discusion here, but I'll throw my 2 cents.

Are dragons overloaded with rules? Yea, probably, they could lose one or two and get rebalanced, but I honestly don't care much here.

Are dragons breath attacks too sqingy? Yea, on average 2 dragons shoud deal 3.66 mortal wounds, but in my experience they can deal from 0 to 12 mortal wounds (yes, I did roll 2 sixes once already), so that is something to think about.

Are dragons just too good, especially when massed? Eeeeh, while I could be wrong, I personally do not think so, as I believe them to be quite overrated as of now. Are they good overall for their points? Yea. Are they good at everyhing? Eh, not quite. Their damage is decent, but even with spears and shooting they do as much damage as fulminators with shooting and fighting WITHOUT charging, although eating a model compensates for that. Double shooting is cool, but even on 6 dragons that's 11 extra wounds on average once per game. Their tankiness for the cost is decent as well, but truly great things about them are their manevurability and their contesting potential. Are they good as a middle cavalry? Yes. Should you mass a whole army of them? No, I do not believe so, as there are a lot of things that can destroy such a one dimentional build, especially if Stromdrakes players does not get the priority.

Is 11 dragons build too easy to stomp casual lists with? Sure, but hey, it's not just Stormdrakes that can do that. You can also just spam full army of Fulminators or Idoneth Eeels with Leviadon for overwhelming damage, go with good old Sentinels or BoltBoyz for sniping, go with Ironjaws and their move across the whole board and kill anything with 3 rend alpha or just go with Nurgle, place your 4x2 Pusgoyle Blightlords in your opponent face turn 1 and watch him suffer.  A lot of builds can still kill casual lists without much skill or counterplay involved, no news here.

Oh, and mark my words, once meta catches up, you will see a simular thread here about Pusgoyle Blightlords. Now those things are actually crazy, both fast (especially with premove), very tanky and quite damaging thanks to mortals on charge and after combat (versus infantry ofc) and Diseased. 4 of them in practice kill Annointed on Frost Phoenix in 2-3 turns (had this happen to me in 3 games with such situation).

Edited January 13, 2022 by Zeblasky

[feadair]

1 hour ago, Zeblasky said:

Is 11 dragons build too easy to stomp casual lists with? Sure, but hey, it's not just Stormdrakes that can do that. You can also just spam full army of Fulminators or Idoneth Eeels with Leviadon for overwhelming damage, go with good old Sentinels or BoltBoyz for sniping, go with Ironjaws and their move across the whole board and kill anything with 3 rend alpha or just go with Nurgle, place your 4x2 Pusgoyle Blightlords in your opponent face turn 1 and watch him suffer.  A lot of builds can still kill casual lists without much skill or counterplay involved, no news here.

This.

When talking about balancing, I think it is critical to look at actual data. The best source I am aware of is http://thehonestwargamer.com/aos-stats-centre-state-of-the-meta/. The data suggest that there are problematic factions with excellent win rates, but SCE has not been among them. Instead, it is Seraphon, Lumineth and Sons that have displayed a worrisome combination of high win rates and prevalence. It may be that Stormdrakes will change this in the future, but so far we have anecdotes rather than conclusive evidence of this. 

Edited January 13, 2022 by feadair

[Slayerofmen]

1 hour ago, NauticalSoup said:

You're gonna need to source that claim, cuz it seems pretty far from reality. By all reports, GW essentially doesn't playtest. When testing outside the design team does occur it seems very little if any feedback makes it into the release product save for FAQ/errata-type cleanup. There's also the very obvious change in vision and design goals that shift from book to book across an edition from the ground up in army design. Broad cross-book mechanics like purity rules or core seem to have a different concept of their ideal use as the edition develops which shouldn't happen if the armies were designed at the same time.

Most importantly, there's absolutely no way the design team has the excess capacity to front-load that amount of material at the start of an edition cycle. Just look at the amount of piecemeal supplements designed for old rulebooks from the previous edition which are released years into the current edition cycle.

No, they're flattening their development resources across the life of an edition, because GW is a business and they run all their projects with the aim of keeping up a release schedule. There is literally no benefit from their perspective to building a codex then sitting on a finished product for two years before it's time to release it when you could start that work eight months before and finish it just in time to send it to the printers.

They do in fact play test externally for 40k that's why a large amount of change that comes to the game are so similar to the way the US events handle events and adapt the game a good chunk of their play testers are there. The core foundation of 9th was built on ITC scoring principals 

 

 

[zilberfrid]

1 hour ago, Slayerofmen said:

They do in fact play test externally for 40k that's why a large amount of change that comes to the game are so similar to the way the US events handle events and adapt the game a good chunk of their play testers are there. The core foundation of 9th was built on ITC scoring principals 

Is it a playtest meant for rebalancing or market research a la D&D's Unearthed Arcana?

[yukishiro1]

GW has playetesters, but the program isn't very serious. They're unpaid members of the community who are given the carrot of early knowledge of what's going to be good or bad in return for providing nominal feedback. I'm sure most of them do it in good faith, but GW shows little inclination to follow that feedback, the program isn't run in anything approaching a systematic way - it's basically just "here's some rules, play around with them and tell us what you think" - and there are in-built incentives to the system too that are really unhealthy re: the playtesters' incentives because they tend to be competitive players and/or influencers who stand to benefit from that inside knowledge. Again, I'm not accusing anyone who playtesters of operating in bad faith, and I know for a fact that many of them do try their uptmost to improve on GW's often hilariously flawed balance in the test rules they get...but the incentives built into a system inevitably impact behavior, and the incentives built into the GW system reward people for not rocking the boat very much with their feedback. 

Unless and until GW gets more serious and starts shelling out for actual paid testers who participate in an organized system, it's basically more of a way to reward insiders and bribe influencers than a real playtesting program that produces rigorous results. And despite all that...they often do flag problematic things that GW then just completely ignores in favor of getting the books out the door, broken or not broken. 

Edited January 13, 2022 by yukishiro1

[Aakkxxzz]

2 hours ago, feadair said:

This.

When talking about balancing, I think it is critical to look at actual data. The best source I am aware of is http://thehonestwargamer.com/aos-stats-centre-state-of-the-meta/. The data suggest that there are problematic factions with excellent win rates, but SCE has not been among them. Instead, it is Seraphon, Lumineth and Sons that have displayed a worrisome combination of high win rates and prevalence. It may be that Stormdrakes will change this in the future, but so far we have anecdotes rather than conclusive evidence of this. 

Almost all of the HWG stats are pre-FAQ, so take them with a grain of salt. A month from now we should have a better idea of what the post-FAQ meta looks like.

My best guess:

Drake spam is going to be a consistent 4-1 army with occasional 5-0s. They have some rough matchups but they can dumpster any armies that aren't built to handle them. Sons of Behemat looks like they counter them pretty effectively. Stormcast are going to be a weird army to track, though, because (a) they have a few different really viable builds and (b) the results get skewed by their popularity. 

Lumineth aren't going to be nearly as dominant. Sentinel point increase hurt them, and the change to Unleash really hurt them. It seems like a lot of people are trying to figure out alternatives to the old Teclis+Sentinels build, maybe there's something out there. 

Same for Seraphon not being as dominant in the coming months. Salamander and Bastiladon point increases hurt, and the change to Amulet hurt. They'll still be strong but not on top. I would bet they slide into the 55% win rate range, an army that's strong but no longer oppressive.