Stormdrake Guard Are Beyond Absurd

[Abstract_duck]

41 minutes ago, Aakkxxzz said:

 

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.

This, in itself, would be a big problem IMO. Competitive is all about the meta, and making lists that interact well with the meta. But, having lists which are auto-win or auto-losses against certain other factors, be it other lists or objectives, is bad for the game. Even if you are playing non-competitively. Even more so, if you play non-competitively. Especially in a game as long as AOS If my MTG deck get's wrecked by RDW, it's 10 minutes of my life. In AOS, with its long setup, it might be your game of the week or month that is ruined. 

[Kasper]

It feels a bit like what Ironjawz can do. If the opponent's army isnt well-equipped to deal with an alpha or simply isnt screening/deploying properly, it can be a bit of a "gotcha" moment. At least with Ironjawz theres no real way for them to deal with your screens, especially if they are in Hunters, as they are a pure melee army.

Theres also the huge variance with the breath attacks where they can either whiff real hard, deal ok damage or just rinse the opponent's army. You are likely to remember the last part much more than the former two.

Some units are simply not very good if you bring few, but a critical mass happens when you amass a certain amount of them. Drakes seem to be one of those where they just get better once you reach a certain number. 

Its certainly not a fun experience at all for your average Joe to roll up and put his toys on the table.  

[Feii]

On 1/9/2022 at 11:49 PM, yukishiro1 said:

The mass dragon list is a problem that people don't seem to really quite understand until they actually face them. Comments like "they don't actually hit all that hard," "they're weak to mortals" etc are a prime example of this - yes, that's true on paper...until you have 9-10 of them hitting you T1 and then grinding you down because you literally can't move any of your army because they're all either engaged or moveblocked by the huge dragon footprint. There are a lot of lists - even otherwise competitive lists - that dragon spam will just beat no matter what with absolutely no chance for the opponent to do anything, and that's a big problem for the game. They are a prime example of a broken warscroll - they just have so much powerful junk crammed onto their scroll that they are always going to be auto-takes or never-takes from a balance point of view, depending on their pointing.

And the particular way they are broken makes spamming them more valuable than not spamming them, which is the exact opposite of what's good for game health. They are the ultimate skew list and unless you have one of the small handful of lists that specializes in doing masses of non-spell-based mortal wounds, you have basically lost the matchup before it even starts. It's a recipe for NPE and bad feelings. 

Building a warscroll that can cross the entire board and charge in a turn, that has mortal wound shooting output, that has 3+ saves, is a monster, has decent combat output, can spread out to have ridiculous board coverage, and has a spell shrug...it was just a terrible idea. 

To be clear, it's not an unbeatable list. But it's a list where your ability to beat it is basically dependent on you having copious amounts of a very specific set of tools, and that's a disaster for the game. Auto-wins and auto-losses are terrible for creating a good competitive game. 

 

The thing is outside pure dragon list they are not that great. 
 

the whole SCE battletome will age extremely badly. Literally a coinflip battletome reliant on double turns and insane damage output that shouldnt be in the game. (Corgi dragons, raptors, meteor hammes)

 

I almost want to say that stormdrakes should have been handled differently. Cap them per army but then give us a battalion to play a pure dragon army etc.

[AaronWilson]

They could of just put a hard cap on the drakes. Explain it as they're an extremely precious resource to the Stormcast and this deployed sparingly. You can only take 1 Knight Draconic & 4 Stormdrake guard per 2000 points, etc. 

[pnkdth]

3 hours ago, Aakkxxzz said:

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. 

Exactly, the THW data on SCE is going to be wonky until they reset for current events.

As for SCE, they seem to have a few builds being cooked up with high potential so it is going to be interesting to see which ones will end up being the favourites. Stardrake spam, I imagine, would actually be quite fun to pilot + get you a solid outing even if you aren't a regular tournament player despite its copy/paste format so I expect the list to make regular appearances.

As you mention, probably won't stomp the top of Tier 1 all the time but much like many other Tier 2 & 3 stompers it won't stop people from noticing the total win rates and stats building up below the top placings. That said, there might pop up a certain build which undermines this kind of list to the point no one takes it but on the other hand SoB showed us that plenty of people are happy as can be with a reliable 4-1 result.

-

To further illustrate but what I mean by 4-1 armies having a huge impact on the larger game consider the image below and LRL. They have a rough 50/50 shot at tier 1, resting comfortable along many other armies. However, when you look at Tier 2 & 3 you notice how they suddenly shoot up in win rate %. LRL is a popular army to hate on, I know, and this examples extends to all of the offenders at the top (LotFP, Seraphon, DoT, DoK, SoB, and so on). Whether SCE will be added to this list remains to be seen.

The most interesting army of them all has to be SBGL though who somehow managed an approximate 50% across all tiers.

[Wordy9th]

SBGL being the “good guy faction” in relation to its win rates has been commented on by a few people I’ve seen.

im bringing a fairly standard and balanced SBGL army to a tournament soon so it’ll be interesting to see how it fares against all this nonsense  

[Gitzdee]

30 minutes ago, pnkdth said:

 

Why doesnt purple tier include Bonesplitterz and Big Waaagh?

[NauticalSoup]

9 hours 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 

Pulling in data from events =/= playtesting, and I would hesitate to call what they do (described in @yukishiro1's post earlier) 'playtesting' which is why I said essentially. We know 9th was based on data accumulated over the course of 8th, but that's not what the original claim was.

Edited January 13, 2022 by NauticalSoup

[Zappgrot]

To mean it does not really matter if the dragons are tournament winning or not. They are just not fun to play against. They just allow to little counterplay. Units that can cross the entire board in one ga and deliver a strong local punch should just not exist.   What is the fun in playing against something that eliminates meaning full choices.   

[feadair]

9 hours ago, Aakkxxzz said:

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.

Absolutely. In the light of the stats, there was a clear justification for rebalancing Seraphon and Lumineth, and Sons should have been an obvious target, too.

[feadair]

7 hours ago, Kasper said:

Some units are simply not very good if you bring few, but a critical mass happens when you amass a certain amount of them. Drakes seem to be one of those where they just get better once you reach a certain number. 

Its certainly not a fun experience at all for your average Joe to roll up and put his toys on the table.  

The problem is that there are a lot of armies that will crush the casual list of regular Joe. We cannot nerf them all on that basis, right?

[feadair]

8 hours ago, Abstract_duck said:

This, in itself, would be a big problem IMO. Competitive is all about the meta, and making lists that interact well with the meta. But, having lists which are auto-win or auto-losses against certain other factors, be it other lists or objectives, is bad for the game. Even if you are playing non-competitively. Even more so, if you play non-competitively. Especially in a game as long as AOS If my MTG deck get's wrecked by RDW, it's 10 minutes of my life. In AOS, with its long setup, it might be your game of the week or month that is ruined. 

Fair enough on the competitive side. It is not good if there are auto-win or auto-loss situations. That is probably really difficult to design around and balance, though. And I am not sure Stormdrakes are the biggest problem there is (more data needed).

Having said that, I do not think you can really start nerfing to achieve balance for the casual play. That would require a major overhaul of the top units of most of the factions, I would guess. There are plenty of casual lists that will auto-lose to any well-tuned tournament list.

True enough for RDW. But when you arrive to the FNM with your pile of midrange cards, and face a sea of blue decks with Tef5ri tuck as the win con, it is not going to be fun or fast. (I still sometimes wake up screaming...)

[Mattrulesok]

Surely we're having the wrong conversation here? the stormdrake warscroll is fine if a little overdesigned but we have yet another list that is all spam and oppressive against the majority of armies it plays against. 'Fixing' the dragons doesn't fix anything because we'll just see more spam lists appearing in other armies regardless, salamanders, skinks, eels, pigs, blightkings, horros, foxes and sentinels have all been strong, competitive and often oppressive lists against the majority of armies just within the last year, there are even more spam lists if you go further back in time. Hell we even had thundertusk spam that was tearing it up for a while not that long ago, a warscroll almost everyone agreed was underpowered but when spammed created an overwhelming amount of mortal wounds that many armies had no possible counter to.

 

Don't ruin one of the few interesting warscrolls in SCE (most are just strong melee profiles with little to no utility) in an attempt to balance the game, treat the problem not a symptom of the problem.

[annarborhawk]

So, confession, I got 5 boxes of dragons because I think the models are gorgeous. I thought they would be fun and good, but not broken good. or unfun to play against.

Anyway, my default list is not the maximally 10xSDG and 1xKD (because that would have taken 6(!!!!) boxes). Instead, it's 8xSDG and 2xKD - so a bit less powerful (and two drops instead of one).

I was thinking, would a list of Karazai, 1xKD, and 6xSDG be an acceptably toned-down list for casual play. (I think the two greater dragons are overpriced), or do you think that's still a snicker-dragon-spam-that-guy list?

just fishing for opinions

[Dingding123]

I'd like a system that for every non-hero unit a player brings with 10+ health they must also bring a hero to keep it in line. That way it's impossible to spam big stuff for the sake of spamming it.  

Edit: okay they have 9 wounds LOL

[yukishiro1]

Just remove the conditional battleline and the dragons are probably ok (if still stupidly overbloated as a scroll). But that's difficult for GW to do at this point given how many people have already bought the spam list. 

Edited January 13, 2022 by yukishiro1

[Zappgrot]

1 hour ago, annarborhawk said:

So, confession, I got 5 boxes of dragons because I think the models are gorgeous. I thought they would be fun and good, but not broken good. or unfun to play against.

Anyway, my default list is not the maximally 10xSDG and 1xKD (because that would have taken 6(!!!!) boxes). Instead, it's 8xSDG and 2xKD - so a bit less powerful (and two drops instead of one).

I was thinking, would a list of Karazai, 1xKD, and 6xSDG be an acceptably toned-down list for casual play. (I think the two greater dragons are overpriced), or do you think that's still a snicker-dragon-spam-that-guy list?

just fishing for opinions

The dragons are likely not fun to play against. Just like mawcrushers few ppl like stuff that moves 24 inches and then charges. So don't ask us. Ask whoever you are playing against if it's a casual matchup. 

[Kasper]

2 hours ago, feadair said:

The problem is that there are a lot of armies that will crush the casual list of regular Joe. We cannot nerf them all on that basis, right?

Theres a significant difference between straight up wiping your opponents army turn 1 or top of 2 with an alphastrike, versus having an army that overall is stronger and likely will win at the later turns. At least theres a game, people roll dice and will have fun for longer than 30-45 mins. 

Its an interesting discussion though, what do you reckon is best for the health of the game? That casual games are fun and enjoyable or that everything comes down to rock-paper-scissor balance at a 5 game tournament level? Ensuring people dont get utterly crushed at your "Average Joe" level does not exclude top level play being fun and somewhat balanced.

Edited January 13, 2022 by Kasper

[yukishiro1]

IJ is different because you can do stuff against an IJ list - you will get crushed and lose T1 if you deploy badly, but once you learn that and pick what you want to sacrifice to absorb the initial charge, you can fight back because the army isn't super resilient and doesn't have the tools to just sit there tying you up. 

The problem with the dragon list is that literally the entire army can be on you T1 sniping your heroes with MW shooting that ignores look out sir before locking you down in a way that you can't break out of if you lack the right tools (i.e. copious non-magical MWs). It's frustrating not because you lose all your models immediately - you don't, the output isn't actually all that high - but just because there is literally no counterplay for a lot of lists. You get tagged T1, and then you lose. Game's over with no opportunity to do anything at all. And even the lists that can beat it generally do it by generating enough output to smash through, not by anything tactical. The whole game just comes down to whether your list rolls enough of the right sort of dice. And nobody really enjoys that. 

Three solutions that would work:

1. Remove conditional battleline.

2. Remove the hero phase move (and probably reduce the move to 10", too).

3. Remove the spell shrug and put them on a 4+ base. 

There are probably others too, but these are all easy and each would probably fix the problem on its own, albeit in different ways. Solution 1 retains their flavor but limits them in a way that stops the SCE player from being able to utilize spam to lock down the entire opposing army, solution 2 stops your ability to cross the entire board in one turn to tag the army in the first place, giving the opponent time to get out and start establishing board control prior to getting hit, and solution 3 makes them squishy enough that the alpha strike bunker doesn't work any more. 

My vote is for solution 1, but I doubt GW would want to do that because of the anger it would (justifiably, given how much GW hyped up the all-dragon army) create among people who have dropped hundreds of quid on an army they can't use any more. So I think more likely is that the scroll gets toned down and/or points go up again, which unfortunately probably ends in a place where nobody takes them except in spam lists. 

Edited January 13, 2022 by yukishiro1

[Zeblasky]

4 hours ago, Zappgrot said:

To mean it does not really matter if the dragons are tournament winning or not. They are just not fun to play against. They just allow to little counterplay. Units that can cross the entire board in one ga and deliver a strong local punch should just not exist.   What is the fun in playing against something that eliminates meaning full choices.   

Well, then why are you fine with Idoneth (can run, shoot and charge their whole army across the board), Ironjaws (3 units, including Mawcrusha), Living City (ranged deepstrike plus 1 unit charging)? It's not something new.

[yukishiro1]

This feels like a rehash of the debates about moving after translocate and how SCE players brought up other factions that can do something similar, but never with the same sort of reliability. 

Idoneth do that a fixed turn of the game (and can't run and both shoot and charge, it's one or the other IIRC), typically turn 2 unless you invest in flipping the tides and using the right subfaction, and only the eels and sharks move fast enough to reliably get off a T1 charge that way. IJ, as mentioned above, have counterplay since they can't clear screens. LC is limited to 1 unit per turn because of the command ability and they have to have ranged weapons, etc. 

Dragons, meanwhile, just move 24" (with the option to charge in the hero phase too) with the whole army whenever you need them to, in addition to being able to shoot and charge in the hero phase as well, etc etc. It's just not the same, just like moving after translocate was not the same as the things SCE players pointed to to try to justify keeping it in the game. 

FWIW I'm not a big fan of T1 alpha strikes generally and I'd be happy to see those options go away too. 

Here's two more possible solutions which are much less drastic:

4. No hero phase move turn 1.

5. Change hero phase move to a command ability, so it costs CP and you can only do it on one unit per turn. 

Edited January 13, 2022 by yukishiro1

[whispersofblood]

2 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

Just remove the conditional battleline and the dragons are probably ok (if still stupidly overbloated as a scroll). But that's difficult for GW to do at this point given how many people have already bought the spam list. 

 

I'm not sure this is necessarily true. I wouldn't state at this point that the terminal level of SDG is 10 + KD. Even without being battleline you can comfortable field KD+7 and tbh it might be better at playing the breadth of GHB2021 battleplans.

[yukishiro1]

Yeah, maybe. But it'd be a start at least. And it wouldn't fit into a one drop any more (assuming you want more than two units of dragons), either, so that'd be something too. 

Edited January 13, 2022 by yukishiro1

[novakai]

I think it too late to change conditional battleline, since they advertise making a dragon only list and that was the draw. Also that seem like one of those heavy handed changes that AoS team never if rarely will ever do. 
 

I can only see them changing the spell shrug to a different number and reworded the shoot in hero phase ability or just the usual minimum point change.

are it could be simply that as more books come out it becomes easier to deal with it or every book will start having this one absurd spam unit list and that just the name of the game for this edition.

[Doko]

5 hours ago, feadair said:

The problem is that there are a lot of armies that will crush the casual list of regular Joe. We cannot nerf them all on that basis, right?

Yes this is the best answer to the original post