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The Mortal Wound Pandemic, and Dealing With It


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With third edition we have seen a proliferation of every army getting easy access to MW-attacks. That is, attacks which inflict mortal wounds on unmodified 6s to hit. I will be honest; to me this is the worst aspect of 3rd edition. For decades, Warhammer Fantasy understood that the sequence is hit-wound-save and skipping one roll was OK but skipping two was not. Poison attacks allowed hits of 6 to wound automatically, killing blow allowed wounds of 6 to bypass armour. Only in AoS have we been treated to entire armies rocking 'poison' which burns through the thickest armour like it isn't there. I find it deeply unfun because it goes from a tactical game of averages to repeated gambling--literally rolling the dice to see if you get lucky. And this is coming from someone who is VERY guilty of exploiting such mechanics to a cheesy degree. I have slaughtered more opponents than I can remember with MWs on 6s to hit. It was barely fun then for the novelty, it certainly isn't fun now.

 

Do you have the same issue, or am I just crazy? Does your local community have any particular house rules or techniques for dealing with this? Remember to keep all discussion friendly!

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I completley agree with your point. AoS started with Hit, Wound and Save rolls for each attack. But with fixe'd rolls for the first time as a main core mechanic, we ended with damage output as a main "hidden" stat, and  MW are unnfortunately part of it. It feels bad because we skip save rolls and that makes the whole mechanic a lot worst.

I just want to add that some units have mortal wounds on hit by using venoms (kruleboyz) and others have mortal wounds on To Wound using venoms too (assassin). I don't understand why there isn't any rules unification. If one venom is worst than the other, just trigger with a roll of 5+ or even 4+ if you want.

Same with a lot of other mechanic, like mortal wounds on charge, eating whole models, etc...

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I di agree with you guys a lot.

personally I wouldn’t mind it if they changed a lot of the mortal wound abilities, but I don’t think that all of them must be changed or should be changed or at least I don’t know how certain units could get changed.

something I’ve also been missing a lot is that of a similar status for all kinds of weapons.

while I do agree that the weapons of heroes should be something special I sometimes do wonder why a halberd of like a stormvermins has a different status to that of what a halberd of like for example skellies does.

why spears are so extremely different to one another, when they aren’t really that much that different.

 

but that is another discussion worth to talk back to.

personally I do think changes must be made.
while I loved the poison tule in warhammer fantasy 8th edition where you were able to skip the wound role, I’m not certain how well it will do in aos. In fantasy having poison gave you a change to deal with the higher toughness units, as otherwise you would have wounded them on 5s, 6s or were unable to do so.

in aos, something like toughness doesn’t really exist so doing it that way would make poison extremely weak.

but what we can do is take a few ideas of other poison weapons.

a good inspiration for that I believ would be the poisoned wind thrower gauntlets from the stormfiends, which shoots out a -3 rend d3 damage attack.

so what if we change the rend characteristic of the poisoned attack to -3 as it is for a weapon that shoots out poisonous clouds of death.


i also think that all sun-metal weapons of the new high elfs should do the same as the poison rule I just gave as an example.

while these changes can be changed with an faq in my opinion with ease, I do wonder how it could be done with the Warplightning cannon, in a way that it doesn’t directly loose it’s ability to shoot. should slight changes be made instead of rewriting the whole warcsroll 

 

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The mortal wounds mechanic is horrible, but unfortunately it is very appreciated because it speeds up the game ... it should be deeply revised, together with other serious defects of the game such as too high movements and too common teleports.

Uniforming some similar rules across warscrolls would also help the game.

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I don't mind the mechanic itself, but I think it should be much more restricted than it currently is. Having some powerful characters doing them is fine: it makes them feel powerful whilst ultimately not being overpowered because they don't have that many attacks. Having blocks of Lumineth Sentinels sitting masses of Mortal Would on 5+ arrows is just obnoxious.

Basically GW need to stop throwing in Mortals on 6+ as the default extra kick for units. Extra hit or bonus rend are both viable alternative which aren't anywhere near as nasty, or even Mortals on a 6+ to wound for that matter.

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1 hour ago, Debello90 said:

The mortal wounds mechanic is horrible, but unfortunately it is very appreciated because it speeds up the game ... it should be deeply revised, together with other serious defects of the game such as too high movements and too common teleports.

Uniforming some similar rules across warscrolls would also help the game.

It speeds up the game by removing interaction outside of your turn. That isn't a good thing.

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It's odd, because I feel like MWs have actually toned down in 3.0 as compared to 2.0. We still have them, and there's still a lot, but they aren't as bad as they used to be.

2.0 was full of the dreaded MW "in addition," which made certain units absolute blenders. Now, baring a few exceptions, MW simply replace the hit-wound sequence (and the units that do get the "in addition" rule have fewer attacks to begin with.)

None of this is to say that we wouldn't be better off with fewer MWs out there, just that I'm surprised people seem to think it's worse now than it was before.

 

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Well... suffice it to say, being the internet and all, I wasn't expecting total and universal agreement. If the community really is this united I hope GW takes notice. Even random initiative would have some defenders in the thread by now!

And yeah, as others have mentioned some additional USRs/UWeps would help things. Would there be interest in starting a community thread for us to create, at least, fan-made terms for certain not-USRs?

Edited by NinthMusketeer
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Still been playing less then a year, but I do think mortal wounds really need to be less common. Just feels off and takes away a lot of tactics.

Reminds of Star Wars Legion where the only real goal was just to get as many crit rolls as possible. Did not matter what you were attacking with what, all that mattered were the crits.

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Some units with high MW output are costly in points, or blow themselves up (see Skaven), or are easily killed.  But plenty have none of those drawbacks.  There's probably some sort of algorith used to determine points cost, but I wonder how well it's designed, or if it has loopholes for aelves (seems like GW loves aelves). 

I wholeheartedly agree any unit doing MW on hits of whatever, should be doing it on wound rolls of whatever instead.  Except my Warp Lightning Cannons.

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I actually dont mind mortal wounds. Things need to die for this game to nit become stale and boring. I think too many units have ward saves though. Correct me if im wrong but to me it feels like the number of wounds per model has gone up and kind of interacts with the more killy units. I actually want things to die faster. This is a battlefield with many units, i want things to die to be honest. Not getting melee battles that last for 5 rounds. The most fun thing of whfb was that everything died to almost anything. So i dont mind MW as a mechanic at the moment.

I do think MW are lazy design and dont represent what a unit or model does. It doesnt feel like a special skill anymore, just like teleports, high movement or objective secure abilities. Many armies get access to the same things. But thats another topic.

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1 hour ago, Gitzdee said:

I actually dont mind mortal wounds. Things need to die for this game to nit become stale and boring. I think too many units have ward saves though. Correct me if im wrong but to me it feels like the number of wounds per model has gone up and kind of interacts with the more killy units. I actually want things to die faster. This is a battlefield with many units, i want things to die to be honest. Not getting melee battles that last for 5 rounds. The most fun thing of whfb was that everything died to almost anything. So i dont mind MW as a mechanic at the moment.

I do think MW are lazy design and dont represent what a unit or model does. It doesnt feel like a special skill anymore, just like teleports, high movement or objective secure abilities. Many armies get access to the same things. But thats another topic.

Imo, you are right.

Things need to die, the problem is how. As you said, it's warhammer, but my experience with wargames is that the fun is inside maneuver and using the perfect unit for the right job.

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15 hours ago, NinthMusketeer said:

Well... suffice it to say, being the internet and all, I wasn't expecting total and universal agreement. If the community really is this united I hope GW takes notice. Even random initiative would have some defenders in the thread by now!

I guess GW designers just made a conscious choice to prioritise speed and simplicity. I would also like them to split MW into poison and killing blow, but the current approach is acceptable.

Since you mentioned the random initiative, there is a nice Goonhammer interview with Jiwan Noah Singh, AOS LVO champion... 

I played a little fantasy and some 40k in middle school, stopped for a while, then fell back into 40k in 8th edition I think?  It was fun but I swapped over to AOS because I felt it  was a significantly more interesting game with the double turn and such.

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6 hours ago, Beliman said:

Imho, hai ragione.

Le cose devono morire, il problema è come. Come hai detto, è Warhammer, ma la mia esperienza con i wargame è che il divertimento sta nelle manovre interne e nell'usare l'unità perfetta per il lavoro giusto.

My models cost me hours of work, I would like to have fun with them, not seeing that in the third round there are a couple of units left on the battlefield... the beginning of the third edition was nice because more models remained in the field at the end battle.

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I totally agree mortal wounds need toning down. 

To be honest, and perhaps I'm just burnt out from AoS, but I think damage needs to come down in general. I played a game of Slaves to Darkness vs Gloomspite Gitz the other day and it felt like playing rocket tag, where the dice rolling phase may as well have been skipped and replaced with taking whatever unit got charged off the table. 

I can definitely see the appeal of short games, but isn't that the point of skirmish games? When I set up a battlefield and 2000 point army that I've spent hundreds of hours painting, I don't want to see Archaon get killed immediately by 20 Squigs. 

I can understand things taking a while to kill being seen as boring, but at least to me, I get bored and disenfranchised watching units dissolve into fine mist when charged by pretty much anything. I prefer units scrumming it out and having the opportunity to retreat and countercharge.

I think what made games like Malifaux appealing to me is that there's usually some way your opponent can fight back - even if you go into them with some combat monster, because of the cheat mechanic and soulstones, you can have most models (especially the important ones) stick around long enough to play with.  

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4 hours ago, Enoby said:

I totally agree mortal wounds need toning down. 

To be honest, and perhaps I'm just burnt out from AoS, but I think damage needs to come down in general. I played a game of Slaves to Darkness vs Gloomspite Gitz the other day and it felt like playing rocket tag, where the dice rolling phase may as well have been skipped and replaced with taking whatever unit got charged off the table. 

I can definitely see the appeal of short games, but isn't that the point of skirmish games? When I set up a battlefield and 2000 point army that I've spent hundreds of hours painting, I don't want to see Archaon get killed immediately by 20 Squigs. 

I can understand things taking a while to kill being seen as boring, but at least to me, I get bored and disenfranchised watching units dissolve into fine mist when charged by pretty much anything. I prefer units scrumming it out and having the opportunity to retreat and countercharge.

I think what made games like Malifaux appealing to me is that there's usually some way your opponent can fight back - even if you go into them with some combat monster, because of the cheat mechanic and soulstones, you can have most models (especially the important ones) stick around long enough to play with.  

Yeah, whilst I get people wanting to avoid game long make combats, I do feel like the damage/survivability equation had seeing a bit too much towards damage for by liking. I spend ages painting a character, usually whilst doing so imagining lore for them, and then they get lifted in a single round of combat or shooting: it's a bit disappointing.

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It does feel like GW thought that they had way too much mortal wounds options and their solution was to just give a ****** ton of stuff ward saves. Then they realized that they had to many ward saves and then just gave more stuff mortal wounds lol.

I have gotten use to the fact that everything in this game more or less one shots everything else. Sort of wish they had a rock/paper/scissors combat, but i guess that what 40k is there for?

Edited by RyantheFett
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I don't dislike the amount of damage so much as how erratic it is; often the difference between causing a dent and obliterating the target is just a matter of how many 6s there were on the hit roll. Wound roll, save roll? These shouldn't be minority factors compared to how many 6s the hit roll gets.

Figure an attack at 4+/4+/rend -/D1 attacking a 3+ save:

-With no rend it will take an average of three save rolls to fail one

-It takes an average of two wound rolls to succeed once and generate a save roll

-Therefore it takes an average of 6 hits to generate 3 saves to get one attack past armor. Put differently, each hit is worth 0.166 damage. Unless...

-It turns out 6s to hit do MWs instead! So that 6 turns straight into 1 damage; it is worth literally six times as much as a normal hit. If 10 attacks are made and roll 1-2-2-3-3-4-4-5-5-5 that is a totally average roll with 5 hits. It also deals less average damage than if the roll was all misses except for one 6.

Now that may seem a skewed example but there is a reason I picked it; it's from the starter box.

Edited by NinthMusketeer
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In my opinion the save should be divided between the save given by the armor and the save given by magical abilities or by the model's agility. The player would then choose which one to use and mortal wounds and rend would only take away the armor save usually...models like the Aetherwings are ridiculous to have saves - they should be able to dodge blows easily while flying...so they could have save armor - and save agility/magic 4+.

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3 hours ago, Debello90 said:

In my opinion the save should be divided between the save given by the armor and the save given by magical abilities or by the model's agility. The player would then choose which one to use and mortal wounds and rend would only take away the armor save usually...models like the Aetherwings are ridiculous to have saves - they should be able to dodge blows easily while flying...so they could have save armor - and save agility/magic 4+.

That's exactly how Conquest works. Every unit has a Defense (D) stat and Evasion (E)  that can't be rended. There isn't any type of "ward save" ******. Of course AoS has a lot more warscrolls than Conquest, but the whole game is based on the same basics and it feels really well. You will not see venoms triggering on one roll and other venoms in a completely diferent roll because Potato.

Just to add what @Enoby said, Malifaux (that is a lot harder to learn and play, but is really rewarding) is a bit diferent because all attack profiles can target (mainly) two defensive stat. Some will target Defense (DF), that it's usually tied to physical damage. Other attacks target Willpower (Wp), that it's something like Bravery/Inteligence but is used for a lot of things like  resist spells, ignore deceives, resist drinking beer (yes, that's an attack too), etc... and even used as an attack stat (like magic). There are a few rare attacks that target Size, (Sz) like trying to eat someone, other attacks target Movement (Mv) like a bomb under your feet and you use movement to go away as fast you can.

Another thing that I miss in AoS is all the mechanics that try to stop that Feels bad moments. Malifaux has the "cheat fate", a mechanic that let's you change a "roll" (flip a card) and replace it with one from your hand (something like destiny dice but a lot more integrated). Middle Earth has something like that too.

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Absolutely the same issue with MWs in general.

A Hellpit abomination Tokio-Drifting into my 30 Witch aelves (me not knowing about its ability). Dealing 30 mortal wounds.
10 Gossamid Archers inflicting 13 Mortal wounds with one volley removing my elite unit
My Snakes rolling hot: 8x6s removing the enemy hero

It's just too much and it has been for a while.
It has basically divolved to:
This unit can hit very hard with a Stick: 6s to hit are mortal wounds

This unit has thorns! 6s to hit are mortal wounds

This unit breathes: 6s to hit are D3 mortal wounds
If the unit casts "even deeper breaths" onto itself it deals MWs on a 5+!

cotton wo... SAY NO MORE: 6s to hit are mortal WOUNDS and the unit get 60 attacks pre buffs!

With all this Mortalwound-ality the game has become more like chess than ever: "Piece A removes piece B after movement". 

 

 

Aside from MWs:
Games can take longer. I can only echo that painting up my models takes ages. Seeing them removed before my turn even starts due to some spell or whatever kills the fun for me right away.

Another point is pick-up-games. I had my best friend visit me for my birthday. While talking about games we had in the past I realized that we used to have stories and names for our characters, armies and why they clashed - it was  engaging and fun (fun fact: White Dwarves used to have battle reports like that too!)
Then I realized why I burned out of AoS (and I am still burned out): Games have become a meaningless rolling of dice, stacked with completely senseless Battle Tactics and Grand Strategies. -> Why am I supposed to sprint across the map now? And then I need to hold three magical scoring points and kill a unit- WHY!? How is this relevant to anything?
The game has gradually been pushed towards competetive play and it has lost itself along the way (imo), it has become utterly replacable by any other game that actually offers some narrative.

As I've mentioned in another thread: I am currently leading a boarding actions league for my pupils. Since the interest was moderate I integrated a story
and the applications numbers doubled. (pupils have to apply for attendance so we can estimate how much we have to prepare for said evening)

---> I'll try to get back into AoS by making games actual narratives again. I only have to find someone who is interested in this kind of play as well (this doesn't mean any player has to field weak lists or anything)

 

 

Concerning what @Vasshpit said:
I agree, they could even make them more faction specific to reflect the quality of wargear a faction has at its deposal by simply adding two Pages of wargear and its rules to each battletome.

It's still bothering me that Blood Knights lances lost 1" reach for no reason other than the profile being combined with swords?
Some lances granting +1 dmg and an additional rend on the charge whilers grant +1 to wound? It's so weird and incoherent (especially to new players)

Edited by JackStreicher
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