New "balance" change gets everything wrong

[Ormly]

I read the recently published Battlescroll: The Hunt, and gave it some thought. I was initially excited, but it's rubbish.

First, the disclaimer: No, AoS isn't balanced, and my expectations are appropriately low. That said, I'm still keen to take aim at lazy stumbles in the wrong direction.

The basic concept is wrong It is effectively something like this: "Some factions are at a disadvantage playing against some units. So we'll dangle some VP in front of bottom-tier factions, which they can earn by overcoming that imbalance themselves. The imbalance that will remain in place. There, all better."

It gets cause and effect backward. Instead of addressing the cause of VP imbalance, this change tries to fix the score instead. Fix the imbalances and the VP will fix themselves. Doing it this way is a lazy handicap in place of an actual change in balance.

Focus on units instead of armies. Explain to me why (for example) if Beasts of Chaos takes Be'Lakor, they should have to offer bonus VP to their Seraphon opponents.

This doesn't help bottom tier factions, and needlessly screws with top tiers. If you're a competitive player, why would you take Stormcast over Lumineth now? In that match-up, Lumineth can now get extra VP for killing your most popular units -- an advantage they did not need, because the balance there was already about as good as AoS gets. Competitive players are probably an unhappy lot just about now, and this shouldn't even be about them.

This is lazy. Balance is hard, I get it. But it's kind of galling that people were paid to come up with this slapdash solution -- one that puts all the burden on players to carry around a unit priority spreadsheet and try to sort out for themselves how to get the VP advantage that would have simply emerged from better-balanced armies. Don't give me a balance fix with assembly required.

Some of it is good: It's about time it was worth something more to kill a Mega-Gargant. Not that it helps much with balance, other than (again) to shuffle the top-tier meta, since factions that struggle with Mega-Gargants over the course of the game will still get tabled after getting those precious few bonus VP from the one they do manage to kill (if any).

What I like best about this change, though, is that it's the only admission of overarching design mistakes ever to come out of GW (that I'm aware of). They have accidentally confessed that any armies they labeled "Prime Hunters" are so poorly designed that the only thing they could come up with was a blanket handicap for them.

[yukishiro1]

Yeah, pretty much. It's just a big mess. If you want to be positive about it you can say "well at least they've finally in a roundabout way admitted what a mess they have on their hands," and if you want to be less positive, you can say "yeah but they are also basically saying they can't fix it and are just going to try to stick on a whole new band-aid mechanic because they can't fix the underlying problem."

 

 

Edited March 14, 2022 by yukishiro1

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

1 hour ago, Ormly said:

It gets cause and effect backward. Instead of addressing the cause of VP imbalance, this change tries to fix the score instead. Fix the imbalances and the VP will fix themselves. Doing it this way is a lazy handicap in place of an actual change in balance.

This is why I do not like it, as well.

This new battlescroll will likely have an effect of pushing tournament win percentages closer together, towards the 50% mark we would see in an imaginary ideal version of AoS. But why do we care about win percentage? Because it is a statistic that serves as a measure of how well the core mechanics work and how good armies are compared to one another. But these new rules don't actually make the core game play better. If anything, they make it play worse because you now need to memorize another semi-arbitrary list of units.

These rules are an example of working backwards from a desired result. GW wants better looking tournament stats. They get there by implementing a rule that affects VP for the current over- and underperformers directly. But it doesn't just matter that the end results look good. How we get there also matters. Otherwise, we might as well flip a coin to determine the winner. Perfect 50% win rate achieved in one easy step.

[oggurt_da_bog_zombie]

Agree with everything here, and I'd add that its sorta the ultimate setup for a NPE "gotcha" moment. New(ish) player comes to the first tourney/matched play game and isn't aware of this rules update or doesn't have the of priority targets committed to memory, they setup their freshly painted unit -- that happens to be on the priority list -- and their opponent who is very aware of these rules goes after it. Opponent manages to kill the priority target early in the game, and then says "I get an extra VP (or two, if it was reinforced or a Mega) because I killed your priority target" and the new player is like... "what have I done to deserve this!?".

I for one am not good at memorizing things like this, and can imagine being very unhappy if you get "gotcha'ed" in a competitive play setting. If this new priority target rule is here to stay forever, its yet another thing all players are expected to be updated on by... waiting every few months and downloading the latest PDF?

Edited March 14, 2022 by oggurt_da_bog_zombie

[Koala]

More Rules for the Rules God!

 

( And i must say that i feel deeply disgusted by the audacity of calling this "a satisfyingly different approach to balance". Like more rules to fix problematic rules/balance hasnt been a staple of GW gamedesign for decades. And it rarely works)

[CeleFAZE]

Like, they just don't seem to understand that the problem with the biggest offenders is not that they aren't rewarding enough to kill, it's that they just don't get killed to begin with, on top of punching up far beyond their weight in points. 

Reinforced Dragons run in living city with an allied battlesmith to rally them on a 4+ aren't getting killed by any of the low tier armies. It doesn't matter what the piñata is filled with if it's made of hardened steel and all you've got is a plastic bat.

Gargants seem to be the only army that this truly impacts.

[Indecisive]

It's just hilarious, on so many levels.

Looking and seeing Priority Targets such as Salamanders Pack and Pink Horrors alongside Morathi and Belakor. But no Nagash.
Or them giving Gitz and Bonesplitterz Prime Hunters like that solved anything. Go kill those gargants and Morathi you grots, get those points😄

[Dingding123]

I mean why not give pure Gitz/etc lists 10% more points to work with instead?  Sell more pieces, right?

Edited March 15, 2022 by Dingding123

[novakai]

10 minutes ago, Dingding123 said:

I mean why not give pure Gitz/etc lists 10% more points to work with instead?  Sell more pieces, right?

It seem this topic before and the argument is because you run the risk inflating people collection and then suddenly taking those point and units away once they get update with their tomes. I get if you only see GW as a profit machine that sell more pieces sound reasonable but their always a fine line that you shouldn’t be cross in game design.

Example that is bring up sometimes is that Cygors is probably worth like 80pts but they would never push it that low because they value it as 200 pt ish point monster even if it not worth and pointing it so low causes problem future updates.

I guess it also goes against their point cost model that they do for pricing too ( that sort of inflated)

[Kadeton]

I guess this is the de-facto topic for discussion of the battlescroll? It feels like the title sets things up for a very negative discussion, but oh well. I'll be a somewhat dissenting voice, I suppose.

I broadly agree that this doesn't do much to address the weaknesses of the worst-performing armies in the game. (And it manages to miss Khorne, Kharadrons and Flesh-Eaters off the list of losers, which is a bit of a worry. Khorne in particular seems to be a huge blind spot for GW.) However, I don't think it was really intended to, the whole prime hunters aspect feels very much like an afterthought. I guess I had no expectations that bottom-tier armies would see any major shake-ups outside of updated battletomes anyway.

Where I think this is an interesting change is in how it affects list choices at the top of the meta - addressing "problem" units not by adding cost, but by adding risk. That's a novel idea, and I'm curious to see how well it works.

This approach also seems far more flexible and responsive than changing points. With any given points change, people have to shuffle around what units are in their army, and some builds will just become impossible to fit in the points limit. Even minor changes to points have knock-on effects which cause major disruption, so they have to be carefully considered. The risk of giving up some extra VPs is a far gentler pressure. Adding or removing a unit from this list can be done trivially without breaking anyone's existing army, so it becomes a simple trigger of "We're seeing this unit on the top tables too often, make it a priority target."

And when the next "top meta" unit emerges to take advantage (e.g. I see a lot of speculation about Sentinels coming back)? Next battlescroll, they go on the list. Quick, clean, simple.

In terms of helping the worst factions, we're clearly not there yet, but I think there's potential there too. For instance, everything currently has a reward value of 1 or more, but there's no reason they couldn't add units as priority targets with a reward of 0 - denying them the bonus points from killing other priority targets without giving up any of their own, but also giving up bonus VP to any of the prime hunter factions. I'm interested to see how this idea evolves over time.

[novakai]

Well I fully don’t expect low tier armies to get much help until their battletome comes out, so I didn’t expect battlescroll to help out with that problem.
 

 I just don’t like they added another scoring method that seem very match up dependent and extremely arbitrary. It hard enough to remind people to do their battle tactics as is.

[Doko]

Its the worst balance never seen in a game lol.

 

Even the fake after release a extense and complete set of changes for 40k we didnt updated aos because we hadnt data was better than this.

 

Who think that give 1vp for kill one umbalanced unit is better than.......balance that unit?

Also wont change nothing as top tiers vs top tiers both have broken units and gonna balance it.

And underpower armys gonna be tabled in two turns and wont kill anithing,so nothing change

[yukishiro1]

I just don't think it's a level of complication and book-keeping that is worth piling on top of all the other weird scoring modifiers the game is already awash in. You shouldn't need to consult like 3-4 different tables to score at the end of a round, it's almost comically excessive at this point. 

 

 

[Kaizennus]

I agree for the most part. I think that overall this is a pretty useless balance update that doesn't accomplish much and does seem a little lazy.

However, I am open to more of this "lateral" style balancing. The idea of making balance changes that aren't focused on points and warscrolls is an area that isn't explored enough. There are lots of ways this can be approached: army restrictions, terrain rules, battle plan design, etc.

I think the idea of "kill points" is in itself kind of a neat idea, but I would rather it be something applied to every unit in the game. I think it could be an interesting additional stat line that could help balance the way games are scored. From my experience, many players actually really enjoy... killing things.. and I've played more than a few players who didn't really feel that engaged by chasing victory points on objectives or tactics (for what it's worth, I don't include myself in this group) and for these players a kill point system could be fun for them.

However, something like that would need to be a full fledged change, like in a new edition or at the very least a new GHB. The half-measure we got instead is kind of silly.

[Kadeton]

1 hour ago, yukishiro1 said:

I just don't think it's a level of complication and book-keeping that is worth piling on top of all the other weird scoring modifiers the game is already awash in. You shouldn't need to consult like 3-4 different tables to score at the end of a round, it's almost comically excessive at this point.

Where I think they've made it too complicated is in caring about whether a target unit was killed by another target unit or not. It would have had a very similar effect on game outcomes even without that stipulation, but it would mean you could just add in the bonus VPs for any dead target units at the end of the game, similar to Grand Strategies. Of course, if your army doesn't include any priority target units, you can do it this way now.

What 3-4 tables are you consulting though? I don't think I've ever looked up a table to score at the end of a round, and I won't be looking up this one either - you know if your faction are prime hunters or not, and you can mark the priority targets with their reward value on your army list or warscrolls depending on what you use. After a couple of games, this will just be part of the routine.

[Skreech Verminking]

i think this meme describes the new rules perfectly:

[OG SCE]

On the positive side, GHB 2022 must be coming soon.  Hopefully this is just a short term bandaid to get us there.   If nothing else, this may cause a few players to reevaluate their lists.  Vanguard Raptors are already squishy, for example.  I'll probably drop them to avoid sacrificing extra VPS.  God knows I lost so many by trying to use Hydras and Kharibdryss in Ghur this season.

Lorewise, its good to see that the Bonesplitterz can become a little more hunter centric again.  Shame its too much to hope for for microfactions like the Scourge Privateers in COS to get a similar buff in a one page update though

[Grimrock]

3 hours ago, Kadeton said:

I guess this is the de-facto topic for discussion of the battlescroll? It feels like the title sets things up for a very negative discussion, but oh well. I'll be a somewhat dissenting voice, I suppose.

I broadly agree that this doesn't do much to address the weaknesses of the worst-performing armies in the game. (And it manages to miss Khorne, Kharadrons and Flesh-Eaters off the list of losers, which is a bit of a worry. Khorne in particular seems to be a huge blind spot for GW.) However, I don't think it was really intended to, the whole prime hunters aspect feels very much like an afterthought. I guess I had no expectations that bottom-tier armies would see any major shake-ups outside of updated battletomes anyway.

Where I think this is an interesting change is in how it affects list choices at the top of the meta - addressing "problem" units not by adding cost, but by adding risk. That's a novel idea, and I'm curious to see how well it works.

This approach also seems far more flexible and responsive than changing points. With any given points change, people have to shuffle around what units are in their army, and some builds will just become impossible to fit in the points limit. Even minor changes to points have knock-on effects which cause major disruption, so they have to be carefully considered. The risk of giving up some extra VPs is a far gentler pressure. Adding or removing a unit from this list can be done trivially without breaking anyone's existing army, so it becomes a simple trigger of "We're seeing this unit on the top tables too often, make it a priority target."

And when the next "top meta" unit emerges to take advantage (e.g. I see a lot of speculation about Sentinels coming back)? Next battlescroll, they go on the list. Quick, clean, simple.

In terms of helping the worst factions, we're clearly not there yet, but I think there's potential there too. For instance, everything currently has a reward value of 1 or more, but there's no reason they couldn't add units as priority targets with a reward of 0 - denying them the bonus points from killing other priority targets without giving up any of their own, but also giving up bonus VP to any of the prime hunter factions. I'm interested to see how this idea evolves over time.

I agree with most of your points in theory. This could be an interesting kind of 'soft nerf' to over performing units without the feel bad of 'max 1 unit per army' or a huge points hike. The main problem I see is I think you're putting a little too much faith in GW to evolve and grow the concept. It just doesn't seem to be the way they work with AoS these days. Like you said they already missed some glaringly obvious choices like making Khorne a hunter faction. If they're making mistakes that big the first time around then I have doubts they've been given the time or resources required to make this a viable long term balancing strategy. I'd be happy to be proven wrong but I'm expecting this to be pretty short lived and maybe phased out at the GHB. Or worse, forgotten for months after a new book comes out and thereby unduly punishing units or buffing factions that were rebalanced by the release. 

[yukishiro1]

43 minutes ago, Kadeton said:

Where I think they've made it too complicated is in caring about whether a target unit was killed by another target unit or not. It would have had a very similar effect on game outcomes even without that stipulation, but it would mean you could just add in the bonus VPs for any dead target units at the end of the game, similar to Grand Strategies. Of course, if your army doesn't include any priority target units, you can do it this way now.

What 3-4 tables are you consulting though? I don't think I've ever looked up a table to score at the end of a round, and I won't be looking up this one either - you know if your faction are prime hunters or not, and you can mark the priority targets with their reward value on your army list or warscrolls depending on what you use. After a couple of games, this will just be part of the routine.

The things you now potentially need to know to determine a score:

1. The objective scoring rules for the mission

2. The battle tactic

3. Whether any of your units you killed something with is a monster (depending on (2))

4. Whether any of the units you killed is a monster

5. Whether you play a Bin army

6. Whether your unit is a Sin unit

7. Whether their unit is a Sin unit

8. How many times their Sin unit was reinforced

9. Apex Predators on top of all that if you play that mission

10. Your grand strategy.

That's a ton of things to have to think about every round, and I'm not convinced that it makes for a better game than if you only had maybe 3ish. It undoubtedly slows things down and creates more decision paralysis the more layered scoring rules you pile on top of each other. 

There's too much score-related book-keeping already in the game, it didn't need more. 

[Kadeton]

1 minute ago, Grimrock said:

I agree with most of your points in theory. This could be an interesting kind of 'soft nerf' to over performing units without the feel bad of 'max 1 unit per army' or a huge points hike. The main problem I see is I think you're putting a little too much faith in GW to evolve and grow the concept. It just doesn't seem to be the way they work with AoS these days. Like you said they already missed some glaringly obvious choices like making Khorne a hunter faction. If they're making mistakes that big the first time around then I have doubts they've been given the time or resources required to make this a viable long term balancing strategy. I'd be happy to be proven wrong but I'm expecting this to be pretty short lived and maybe phased out at the GHB. Or worse, forgotten for months after a new book comes out and thereby unduly punishing units or buffing factions that were rebalanced by the release. 

I guess so. I'm not normally one to be optimistic about GW's choices, and you're right that there's every chance this just quietly disappears without a trace in the future. But this is the kind of experimental solution that I'm always happy and surprised to see - GW so rarely breaks out of their established habits that it's exciting just to see them try.

This reads very much like a first draft to me. They clearly haven't put a huge amount of planning or playtesting into it, which is pretty much par for the course, and it will need more development in order to succeed. But the thing about this approach is it has no permanent impact - existing independently of the points and warscrolls means they can tweak the values, change the rules, or scrap the whole thing entirely if needed, any time it's necessary. You don't invalidate the battletomes when assigning priority targets in the way that you do when updating the warscrolls, and you don't ****** up everyone's built armies in the way that you do when changing the points.

Obviously a fully-balanced game with all the points and warscrolls on par with each other would be better. But that's the system we've always had, they've been trying to do it that way for decades, and they demonstrably can't get it to work. At least this is trying a different approach!

And I don't think this is a "long term balancing strategy", at heart. It suggests to me that they're building three separate balance cycles which work in tandem, depending on how permanent and impactful the changes will be. The long-term balance pass is the version release of the battletome itself, where the warscrolls are updated. The mid-term balance pass is updating the points of those warscrolls. The short-term balance pass is seeing whether any units need to be added to or removed from the priority target list.

New books that come out are totally exempt from being priority targets or prime hunters until the battlescroll is updated, so they've at least foreseen that specific concern and addressed it.

[Kadeton]

3 minutes ago, yukishiro1 said:

The things you now potentially need to know to determine a score:

Sure... but you don't need to look any of them up. You're not going to forget what army you're playing in the middle of a game and have to check on a table.

[Chikout]

I think a lot of the complaining is misdirected. The core problem is the ghb and the points updates that will presumably accompany it.

That book is already written. The cut off for points changes was about new year. Due to the way these rules are put out gw can't change any points right now incase they invalidate the ghb before it is even released.

I doubt it was the rules team who made the decision to release rules in that way but they have had their control over the game limited by this system. 

They also seem reluctant to change warscrolls unless they can put them in a book. This may also be a top down mandate. 

Given all the constraints gw have put themselves under, this isn't a bad idea. 

A big potential issue with points changes is that it prevents people from being able to play the models they want or forces them to buy new ones to compete. Let's say I have 4 megas and the points on all of them go up to over 500. Suddenly I can't take 4 in a list and my £125 model becomes worthless. Not only that but I have to buy and paint some other gargants to fill out the points. 

This sidesteps that issue. I can still take 4 megas but I'm at about of a disadvantage if I do. 

It probably won't help the lowest tier armies but it might give the b tier armies a bit of a leg up. 

It is a bit more bookkeeping but really not much more and it can easily be written on your army list. 

As for new players surely one of the first pieces of advice would be to read the tournament pack and the latest FAQs. 

I'm curious to see how it plays out. 

[yukishiro1]

The vast majority of AOS players have not even memorized all the scoring rules for each battleplan, much less all that other stuff.

If you can memorize and hold in your head all those things you're not representative of even the average AOS player who plays regularly and attends some events, much less the average AOS player (who plays probably once every couple months on average). 

AOS3 is already butting up on the edge of being realistic to finish in the 2.5 hour rounds you need to be able to finish games in to play in competitive events (which is what these rules are aimed at) with both players playing thoughtfully and not having to rush. We obviously disagree and to you this doesn't add significant complexity and therefore time to the game, and that's fine and I will take your word for it that it won't do so for you, but I am quite confident that it will for the people I play with (assuming the result isn't just that nobody ever takes Sin list units any more). 

I mean FWIW I agree it's not the looking it up per se that takes the most time, it's integrating that into your strategy as you play. For example battle tactics probably add a solid 20-30 minutes to a game of AOS3 vs not having them, but even if you have to look them up every time, 75% of that time is spent thinking about them rather than looking them up. But thinking about the consequences of all the moving parts is part of having said moving parts.

In any game where Sin list units are involved it is going to add significant time to the game (or force you to compromise elsewhere) in order for players to take into consideration the Sin list rules while planning and executing their actions, especially if there are Sin list units on both sides, in which case you end up with this weird minigame on top of the normal game where you're trying to wear down their Sin units with yours without actually killing them, so you can score the points by finishing them off with something else. Or where the owner of said Sin unit is deliberately trying to fail battleshock on their last model to deny the other player the points. Etc etc. There are a lot of non-obvious ways this can come into play and impact strategy and therefore game time and mental load. 

 

 

Edited March 15, 2022 by yukishiro1

[AaronWilson]

What a crazy, convoluted & long winded way to balance your game without actually achieving the end goal?

Don't worry nighthaunt, when you're tabled by turn 2 against drakes + longstrikes, you'll score 1 vp for the 1 drake you killed!

Absolute madness. 

[Bosskelot]

4 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

I just don't think it's a level of complication and book-keeping that is worth piling on top of all the other weird scoring modifiers the game is already awash in. You shouldn't need to consult like 3-4 different tables to score at the end of a round, it's almost comically excessive at this point. 

 

 

They've somehow made it more complicated than 40k's scoring.