Kadeton

"Being an adult" is mainly about understanding context. In a game with a friend, getting too serious about base sizes probably breaks the social contract, and is inappropriate for that context. In a tournament, treating the game as a serious competition is absolutely expected, and that would include making sure that everything is on the correct base (but not to the extent of throwing a tantrum about it, obvs). "It's a game" is the bit that makes it sound snide, IMO. Games can be just for fun (kick-arounds in the back yard) or they can be very serious (the Olympics) and there are many shades in between. Being an adult is a matter of understanding what level of seriousness is called for in context and acting appropriately - this is a skill that children lack. Not having a go, just a thought that I wanted to get out of my head before moving on.

It seems kind of self-evident that if the units you're taking as threats are just getting deleted or aren't actually threatening to the enemy, then they don't qualify as threats. In order to fulfil the list requirement of a threat, they need to be a threat. If the threats you chose aren't actual threats in your meta, then you chose wrong. So while there is a kind of basic requirement to pick competitive (aka "OP") units, I agree with Belathor: as a list-building consideration, that happens around "Level 0" as part of an understanding of which units available to you are universally good value, situationally good value, or poor value. Everything after that is sound advice, and shows why a lot of people who know enough to pick the strong units can still struggle to convert that strength into a reliable winning strategy.

Yes, but that's just the Rend on your weapon profile, much like the Save on your warscroll. On top of that Save, there's universal stuff like Mystic Shield, All-Out Defence and Finest Hour, to create a "stack". On top of most units' base Rend, there's... ******-all, really. What I'm hoping to see in future are universal ways to spend limited resources (e.g. command abilities, spell casts, etc) to gain additional Rend and make units temporarily better at breaking through armour.

It's strange that there are so many universal ways to stack saves, but almost no ways (outside of niche abilities in certain tomes) to stack Rend. I suppose it's the sort of thing they can always introduce in future GHBs as the game shifts to other realms.

I think that's almost as strange a requirement, to be honest. "This makes me so mad!" "Oh yeah? Please give me a complete list of the reasons why you're mad, so that I can critique it for you." Okay, fair enough - thanks. I suspect that's where I'm struggling to relate - I would generally prefer to avoid an unnecessary fight with someone who's clearly worked up, even if it means keeping my thoughts to myself. I think that's actually a pretty big and important point of difference between some of the perspectives here, actually! To some people, this forum is a "neutral venue" where strangers can discuss subjects of common interest within a strict framework of politeness. To others, this forum is a community space where they hang out with their friends. To the second group, it's like when one of your mates has a bad day and you take them out to the pub and let them rant it out until they feel better. To the first group, it's like when a crazy person comes up and shouts at you in the street for no reason. Ah, the ambiguities of internet spaces.

Person A: "GW have screwed me over yet again. God, it makes me so mad!" Person B: "Well, it doesn't bother me. Therefore, it shouldn't bother you either. Your feelings are incorrect." Person A: "What the... **** you!" Basically all I've been saying here is that I can understand and even relate to Person A. I don't condone them being rude to Person B, but I get it, you know? From their perspective, Person B was rude to them first. What I don't understand is why Person B felt the need to get involved in the conversation at all, what they were hoping to achieve, and why they were surprised when it blew up in their face. If someone can give me a better grasp on that perspective, I'd genuinely appreciate it. It's like when people show up to a protest to espouse the opposing view, and are then shocked when they end up getting punched in the face. Like... what did you think was going to happen in that situation? Everyone was just going to go "Oh, he makes some reasonable points. Welp, pack it up everyone, it turns out our problems aren't real after all!"

Sure, it's not nice to deal with. But that's the difference between a random bunch of strangers and a community - we come together to support each other, even when someone's having a bad day and lashing out about it. And if you're not up to supporting someone while they work through their anger right now (which is totally understandable!) then you don't have to. There are enough people and enough conversations on here that you can just go and talk to someone else instead. By and large, the angry threads around here are well signposted and fairly self-contained, so they're easy to avoid if you're looking for something more positive. I don't want to put words in your mouth, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds to me like you would say "the problem" is that too many people expressing their anger is making these boards unpleasant to visit. In contrast, I would say "the problem" is that GW frequently makes choices or mistakes that genuinely upset a lot of people, and never takes responsibility for them, which fosters frustration and bitterness in the community. So it's entirely possible that we're talking about different problems... but the problem I see certainly isn't "completely inside the people who are really angry". IMO, anger itself isn't the problem. It's only one symptom of the problem.

The basic problem is that when posting here, people aren't trying to reach GW any more. (Edit: Except for @relic456, apparently. ) They post here because they feel they can't get through to GW. Since they've been lead to believe that GW will never listen to them, they've given up on being constructive - at that point, they're looking for nothing more than somewhere to vent their anger. That's not being aggressive for the sake of being aggressive, I don't think - quite the opposite, really. It's being aggressive for the sake of bringing that anger back under control and regaining emotional balance. Having an outlet for anger that has nowhere else to go is a healthy thing for the individual, but it's not so healthy for a community to be filled with angry people. The mods don't get enough credit for the work they do in finding a way to balance those needs, and I don't envy them that task. It would be great if people didn't have quite so much anger to express as a result of their hobby. There are certainly ways that individuals can work on their own sense of calm and perspective, which everyone does to some extent. There are also plenty of ways that GW could help make the community more positive and healthy, but honestly they don't seem to think it's worth the effort.

I don't think it's particularly necessary to build an "argument" when all you want to do is express that you're angry about something. That's an odd requirement: "This makes me so mad!" "Oh yeah? Justify that emotion in detail, please." Constructive criticism for GW: Invest in giving your employees the training they need to succeed in their role. I totally agree that this should be the preferred method. The fact that people come to complain on TGA and other sites instead indicates that the proper channels aren't working effectively - people who use them don't feel heard (lack of acknowledgement or lack of commitment) and they lose trust in the process. That's when they seek out others who feel the same way to amplify the message and make themselves heard. It's why I think GW's approach of never admitting that anything they do is less than the most bestest thing ever is so wrong-headed. When people constantly point out your mistakes and failures, and rather than acknowledging them you insist that everything is awesome, they feel dismissed and lose confidence in you; over time they become jaded and cynical. A little honesty would go a long way. I support and agree with this. I just also think that we (as a community) need to keep in mind that when people are coming here to express their strong negative feelings, it's because GW has failed them by making them feel dismissed and powerless. They're not trying to stir up negativity for its own sake, just looking for validation because this site is part of their support network. If they also end up feeling silenced and marginalised here (either by other posters or moderation) that's when things turn nasty.

I generally regard screens as something that other people use to try (and usually fail) to stop my Stonehorns.

I will be shocked if Stone Skeleton stacking with Amulet of Destiny (and all the other not-ward-saves stacking on top of each other) is allowed to continue for any longer than it takes them to scramble to fix it. It's a ruling that threatens to break the game completely.

Absolutely excellent choices, in both cases. Best of luck.

People aren't angry at you. They're angry at GW, for a host of entirely legitimate reasons - personal, subjective reasons, yes, but that doesn't make them less valid. If you choose to elect yourself as GW's advocate and place yourself directly in the way of that anger, it's going to feel like people are attacking you personally. That's the inevitable consequence of making that choice - next time, unless you want to repeat the same experience, try making a different choice. Nobody is asking for you to try to change their minds, so they're unlikely to appreciate it when you do. It's good to empathise. Try empathising with the people who are angry, and it will be much easier to avoid saying anything inflammatory that will make you an inadvertent target for their anger.

Agreed. Polite and constructive discourse is only effective after the problem is acknowledged and a genuine commitment is made to address it. Getting to that point, especially when the other party is doing everything they can to deny that a problem exists, is extremely difficult to do quietly.

So we know how abilities that trigger "when" allocating a wound interact with wards. How about abilities that trigger "each time" you allocate a wound, like Stone Skeleton? Does "each time" happen "before" or "when"?

Yeah, but a lot of rules still reference them. They're seemingly clarifying that where that happens, it refers to maximum possible reinforcement size, not the unit size.

I'll take your word for it on that one! It doesn't surprise me at all though - Path to Glory is often played at relatively small army sizes, right? I can't see something like Frostlord being fair at 1000 points in Matched play, or in Path to Glory. There's just nothing you can field at those levels that can hope to threaten them. That's certainly where I'd want to look at finding ways to reduce their power (or just ban them entirely), but I don't currently play those sorts of games so I can't really comment. I agree with this conclusion, but I prefer the opposite path in navigating it. The role of hero monsters has certainly changed - and, in my opinion, for the better. I think a legendary hero riding a dragon, or a mega-gargant, should be damn near impossible for ordinary people to take down. But that doesn't mean that those ordinary people shouldn't be able to win the battle against that hero by, for instance, sacrificing their lives to distract or delay them while their allies achieve a vital objective. That's a great narrative, and IMO more interesting than "Oh yeah, Gammy Hans and his lads punked out Archaon the Everchosen... again." So the challenge shifts from "How do we make hero monsters play like they did before?" to "Hero monsters are different now, how else does the game need to change to accommodate that?" Yeah, the points for hero monsters (and/or regular monsters) will need some adjusting along the way, for sure. I'll have a proper think about it and get back to you.

It's possible that I just haven't played enough games to actually see a situation where one army is capable of fighting a valiant rearguard action to hold on to a slim point advantage despite getting smashed. So far, the games I've played have been very decisive. That said, in a tournament situation that extra 3 point differential can be important even if you're already totally winning, because VP diff is often used as a tiebreaker for overall placement. Again, I'm not saying that's a good thing - I really don't like tournament scoring that encourages you to insist on continuing to crush an opponent who has already lost - but it's possible that this was a consideration in the design. I would certainly like to see the current Strategies replaced with ones that require active gameplay decisions and open up counter-play beyond "Table me or I get points." I actually liked the Sons of Behemat one as a model for this, which is why I'm not too concerned - it showed that the designers are at least thinking about how to make them more interactive, and they just need the current stupid ones out of the way to open up the design space.

At the moment, I actually think that house rules which change the scoring aspects of the game (missions, objective layout, battle tactics, grand strategies) would have a much greater impact on how fun and interesting (and balanced!) games of AoS are than changes to the Core Rules. I don't particularly agree that monster heroes are "the problem", for instance. They're individually dangerous and nearly impossible to kill, yes - but that's not a problem in itself unless killing them is essential to victory. The fact that many of the missions funnel both armies into a big melee over two or three objectives in the center of the table, where extremely resilient monster heroes can easily dominate the game, is what makes it untenable for armies which can't compete in that arena. Missions which forced the armies to spread out and cover the whole table would have a huge impact on the meta - those monster heroes can't be everywhere, and most of them require support from other units to reach their full potential.

That hasn't been my experience at all, though I'd say my local meta might be more geared towards tournament-level play between strong, highly-skewed lists. In that context, Grand Strategies only really matter when the game isn't close at all, i.e. when one side is getting tabled. It's impossible to deny a Strategy without wiping your opponent off the board in most cases, so it becomes purely a win-more mechanic in an already devastatingly one-sided game. In games that are close, it never comes up. Don't get me wrong - that's still a terrible design, and we're in complete agreement that the current list of Strategies is a joke. The silver lining, once again, is that Grand Strategies aren't part of the Core Rules. Just like the poorly-designed missions and the lackluster Battle Tactics, they'll be rotated out with the next GHB, and the design team can take another crack at coming up with something better.

I played my Beastclaws against Lumineth this week. Still very strong this edition - I got a bit lucky with Frostlords surviving the hails of Sentinel shots on 2-3 wounds and then healing up to fight on. Also, one of them went on a Monstrous Rampage and knocked over the Shrine, killing the Cathallar general who was hiding inside, after which the Lumineth army rapidly fell apart. Very satisfying! At the moment I'm still running Boulderhead for triple Metalcrunchers, but I'm increasingly tempted to shift to Bloodgullet. The Splatter-Cleaver's healing is just crazy, and I'd swap my HoSH for a HoTT. Bringing a Butcher would be great. Apparently I should really bring Hrothgorn as well. Anyone tried Beastclaws focusing on a healing build for brawling over objectives?

No. That would be a data point. If every tournament started seeing an unusually high proportion of Doomwheel lists that performed significantly better than the average, that would be a problematic list.

However, it's completely reasonable to compare your entertainment options and decide that spending your money elsewhere would provide a lot more value. Which it seems to me is all @HollowHillsis saying.

Yeah, I'm not at all familiar with how 40K works these days. They lost me in 5th Ed, I was briefly interested in 8th Ed but found that the reasons I quit hadn't been addressed, and I haven't looked back. But that does sound like they've made some very positive changes to missions and scoring, which is great to hear. Hopefully some of that makes its way across to AoS in future. I think I'll reiterate the change that I've seen, though. Killing power was entirely the determining factor in 2nd Ed games, and it meant the meta was dominated by the armies that could put out the most damage (especially at range) into the most valuable targets. Now, though, that's not the case. The most valuable targets simply can't be killed (at least reliably) in a lot of cases. The glass-cannon armies that dominated 2nd Ed just get hosed, because the "cannon" part of their strategy has been blunted but the "glass" part is as much of a weakness as ever. Instead, the armies that dominate are the ones that can tank it out while also competing for objectives. The most notable effect was for the Sons of Behemat, a lower-middle-tier army in 2nd Ed which is now a top-tier powerhouse in 3rd. Their killing power is poor to middling, but their survivability is pretty good and their objective-holding abilities are off the charts. In 2nd Ed only the first one mattered, but in 3rd it's the other two that are pushing them to the top. That's really where I'm coming from when disagreeing that killing power is the path to victory and 3rd hasn't mitigated that. It has! There's still only really one clear way to win, but it's no longer bound up in how well you can remove your opponent's models and nothing else. Where I think you might be coming from is that you'd like to see more than one way to win. I totally get that, and I would love for that to be the case. And hey, if 40K has managed that, maybe I should give it another look.

Ah, I was thrown off-track by the term "non-interactive". I assume you just meant "non-lethal" instead. On the face of it, all that's doing is changing what constitutes "power to win". I would presume that some armies are better equipped than others to achieve these non-lethal objectives - they might have more survivability, more mobility, other unique advantages. Do correct me if I'm wrong, and the ability to complete non-lethal objectives is somehow independent of all those factors. In which case, you haven't reduced or mitigated power differentials overall. You've made some power differentials less important, and others more important - there are still relative "haves" and "have-nots" in terms of the ability to win. That might, by chance, mean that balance improves, but it certainly doesn't guarantee it - an army with an overwhelming advantage in completing non-lethal objectives can produce just as "unwinnable" a matchup as one that can table you. So really, it sounds like you'd just prefer that the game de-emphasised killing. Which is a totally fair preference!