Kadeton

Interestingly, I've played that exact matchup as the Beastclaws, and was as surprised as anyone when the Sylvaneth alpha-strike basically crippled my army in the first turn and went on to win the game. Later that tournament, I absolutely smashed a Teclis castle with my Beastclaws. It was one of the most one-sided games I've ever played. Could that Sylvaneth list have taken down that Lumineth list? I don't know. But I hope you'll understand when I give your statements about "impossible" cross-tier matchups a resounding HMMMMM.

This sounds like you have quite a specific definition of "viable". Could you expand on what you mean by that?

Good start. I think everyone would agree with that at some level. So the question becomes: how heavily? At what point do you personally think it becomes unreasonable? If you only win 45% of your games? 40%? From what I've seen of the various stats thrown around on here, the worst armies in the game are languishing around the 40% win rate in tournaments - they're winning 2 in 5 games on average against random opponents at the competitive level. That seems a long way from "unwinnable" to me.

Well, that's what I'm asking. Which ones, and against which armies, and why? Let's talk about some specific examples. People tend to talk about these things in terms of definitive absolutes, as though winning is literally impossible in some matchups. Since I've personally seen games where the "worst" armies (BoC, BoK) beat the "best" armies (Seraphon, Kharadrons) I know that's pure tosh. Yes, the odds are heavily stacked against them and they will lose far more often than they win - but that's not the same thing as not being able to win.

Yeah, totally. I certainly wouldn't be able to stomach playing something like that BoC army more than once, it's way too dull and grindy. I'm more interested in where we draw the line on what counts as "reasonable means". How hard do you have to work during the game, and how much can you be forced to compromise your vision of what you want your army to do, before it becomes "unreasonable"? Any army can technically win any game of AoS, but which armies do people specifically feel have no reasonable way of doing so? I don't think we should have unkillable units, for sure. Nothing annoys me more than ham-fisted bodge rules like Morathi's "no more than 3 wounds per turn" rule, which is such a clear admission that the damage system doesn't work the way the designers want it to. Or absurd resilience like Gotrek's, which might as well just say "This model is immune to damage" and save everyone a lot of dice rolling. But the fact remains that the inability to kill certain units does not preclude any army from winning the game.

At the most basic level, every army does. You can defeat any opponent by controlling the objectives, and every army is capable of doing this. There are differing aspects of speed, resilience, damage output, body count and so on, and some battle plans favour certain army compositions over others, but in the end the only thing that matters is scoring points from objectives. Anecdotally, for instance, I have a friend who plays Beasts of Chaos and floods the board with Ungor Raiders in MSU. They barely inflict any damage, but they're so numerous that he can win a decent share of games just through focusing on board control, even against "top meta" tournament lists. Does that count as "a reasonable means" of winning for BoC players?

Nah, I'm with Ninth on this one. You can read and understand how the Rend rules interact with 1+ saves, and still think that the outcome is stupid. Fortunately my army puts out a ton of mortal wounds, so 1+ saves aren't an issue for me... but if we see the kind of reduction in the ability to spam mortal wounds that many people are calling for, then the 1+ save rules will still be stupid and they'll also become a problem for the game in general.

Definitely not an "Auto-lose every match" list, though it's a long way from the most powerful lists the Beastclaw can muster. It's got some nice synergies like auto-casting all the Huskard's prayers, and throwing snowballs is always fun (if sadly no longer very effective). But the Frostlord is going to have to do most of the heavy lifting at the end of the day, and if you lose him early you'll struggle to keep up. Thundertusks just aren't very good in melee, and even with the Huskard's healing they will die fast to the amount of damage most lists can put out. Since you asked, I'd suggest two variations of a generic "strong" Beastclaw build: 2x Frostlord on Stonehorn Huskard on Stonehorn Stonehorn Beastriders 4x Mournfang Pack 2x Mournfang Pack Eurlbad battalion This is my preferred tournament list. Two Frostlords are just too fast and deadly for many (even top-tier) armies to cope with, and the Eurlbad gives a solid damage boost to everything else. Frostlord on Stonehorn Huskard on Stonehorn Stonehorn Beastriders 3x4 Mournfang Pack Eurlbad battalion This is basically the "lite" version of the first list - a bit gentler for friendly games where you don't want to table your opponents in the first few turns. The main draw for this one is that you can build it with only three Start Collecting: Beastclaw Raiders boxes, so it's the cheapest tournament-ready army in the game (while still being a blast to play and easy for new players to pick up since it has such straightforward mechanics). However, if what you really want to do is run a pack of Thundertusks, you should go for it! Always follow your heart rather than what anyone on the internet tells you is the "right" choice. Having an army you love and connect with is way more important.

I must admit, I still think of Destruction as "the Greenskin faction" and feel like Mawtribes and Gargants were just lumped in there with them along with a ham-fisted retcon about how the Great Maw was Gorkamorka all along. They don't seem well aligned to me. But then, I also don't think the Grand Alliances serve any purpose at this point, and are just ham-stringing the lore development of various independent races. The Broken Realms series seems to be setting up the old Alliances to be broken apart, so I'm hoping the next edition of the game will do away with them altogether, replacing them with a universal ally matrix instead.

It doesn't get much more aggressive than the Beastclaw Raiders! Take a Stonehorn-heavy list and smash your opponents' forces into paste. They're incredibly fast, can put out genuinely shocking amounts of damage and a ton of mortal wounds, and are tough enough to go toe-to-toe with the game's heaviest hitters. Thoroughly recommended!

While running Destruction Soup does make thematic sense, the Broken Realms so far have been mainly about the Grand Alliances breaking apart. Morathi drove a wedge through Order, and Teclis shattered the unity of Death under Nagash. The general trend seems to be that GW wants to move away from Grand Alliances entirely. I suspect that we'll see Destruction go the same way.

I kind of agree with this, but at the same time I suspect there's quite a narrow "sweet spot". If units are too slow or take too long to kill, the game becomes a dull slog. Keeping the game moving at a good pace (e.g. melee being quick and decisive, units having the speed to jump on tactical opportunities) is a good thing. But power creep is always going to be pushing us out of the sweet spot and having to be reined back in.

Yes. They're a useful element of the abstraction, a mechanic for saying "armour and resilience offer no defence against this attack", which is entirely appropriate for things like hearing the scream of a Terrorgheist, being zapped by an Arcane Bolt, or being trampled to death by a Mawkrusha. That said, I don't think they should ever have been used as an abstraction for "this mundane attack is extra deadly". Anything that uses the Attack Sequence should use it consistently, and vary the To Wound and AP values for special effects, rather than short-circuiting to Mortal Wounds on certain rolls.

Personally, I think this is a scope problem, and I'm not sure why GW's writers keep painting themselves into that corner. When the objectives of Chaos or Death (or Destruction, if they ever got any attention) are "break into a Stormvault" or "sack a city" or "bring down a hero" or even just "capture some more territory", then they can be allowed to win, as we've seen many times. "End the game" just isn't a good objective for a villain to have, because there's never any tension or doubt about what the outcome has to be. Just give them smaller, more achievable goals! It doesn't always have to be the end of the world at stake. Because Sigmar sits on his throne and twiddles his thumbs, while Teclis gets off his butt and makes things happen? I dunno.

Less so for Chaos, demonstrably. Chaos already won the setting, dominated the Realms for thousands of years, and life went on (albeit chaotically). The Chaos Gods have never had "wipe everyone out" as their objective, so there will always be people who can eventually fight back and rebuild. If Nagash succeeds in the scheme that he always attempts because he's just not a very original thinker, everybody dies. Life stops. Chaos ends. All is dust. Game over.

Just as a quick alternative viewpoint, one faction and their god can put away Nagash. This is GW's opportunity to show that GA: Death can be so much more than just Nagash, his dominance was the major thing holding Death back from actually being interesting.

This is a patently false assertion. Some rules state that something happens when a model "is slain", and other rules have criteria that require that a model "has been slain". That's a clear distinction of tense.

Not to get too much into it here (there's a much more in-depth discussion on the Rules forum), but it's because the rule doesn't actually say the model counts as slain. Instead, the model counts as having been slain. Rules that key off a model being slain (in the present tense) won't take effect, but rules that key off a model having been slain (in the past tense) will. But a model that counts as having been slain and a model that has been slain are treated identically by the rules in every respect.

This is the best answer, IMO. There's no distinction (and no need for a distinction) between "This model has been slain" and "This model counts as having been slain" - when something "counts as" something you treat it as that thing in all respects. But the timing is important. There is no moment at which you can say "This Pink Horror is slain," and split it into Blues. It never, in the present tense, is slain. But at every moment after you remove the Pink from play, you can legitimately say "This Pink Horror has been slain." Any rule that references it having been slain (in the past tense) will take effect as normal.

Not having a go at you in particular, but the willingness of a seemingly large portion of the playerbase to accept that "counts as xxxx" literally means "does not count as xxxx" is utterly baffling to me.

"Balance" is also hugely subjective and is ultimately down to personal experience. An understanding of both balance problems and negative experiences is approached by looking at the breadth and consistency of complaints. It's not about any one person's opinion, but to what degree players share a common opinion.

I think it's worth noting that NPEs have nothing to do with balance. A mechanic or unit can be (a bit) overpowered and still be fun and engaging for many players, or can be fairly balanced or underpowered and still be a negative play experience for many players. Lumineth are a great example of this - I haven't found them to be exceptionally good at winning games, I just don't enjoy playing against them because their mechanics are anti-fun for a host of reasons detailed at great length in recent threads, and it sounds like quite a lot of people share that opinion. Both NPEs and balance issues are serious problems for games, and dismissing NPEs as a concern because they're about "feelings" or are "subjective" or whatever is just limited thinking. But this thread is specifically about balance, so it's probably best to focus on that side of the discussion. My personal balance bugbear at the moment is the Akhelian Leviadon (post BR:M upgrade). That thing is bonkers good for 340 points - fast, flying, hits like a freight train, 2+ save, decent ranged attacks, and a massive aura of +1 save which now stacks with cover (bringing those flipping unrendable eels to a 2+ save). And it can still be buffed to the moon by an Akhelian King's redonkulous stacking Lord of Tides ability to become the ****** destroyer of worlds for a turn. Pure madness.

The games that I've lost have generally been because I split my attention across a lot of different areas of the table (against very mobile armies like Kharadrons) and then got isolated and shot to pieces. Or just run into things that do more damage than you can handle (e.g. staying in combat with Deepkin on their everyone-strikes-first turn instead of retreating, or getting alpha-struck by Sylvaneth). Mostly, my games are fairly one-sided - the Stonehorns are fast enough and tough enough that they will get into combat, and they tend to destroy whatever they fight (if you're worried about winning the fight with one, try charging with two or three). If you get a double turn the game is often just over on the spot, so it's usually best to force your opponent to go first if you can (and you usually can, the list above has only two drops). They either come closer and make your charges easier, or they do nothing and waste 20% of the game. I haven't had any trouble holding objectives, except against Sons of Behemat. But that's okay - we hit harder than the Sons, and they have even fewer models, so you can table them by turn 3 or so and then catch up on points. Feel free to let your opponent jump onto objectives first - you want them to put their models where you can get to them with a charge, and after the dust settles (if they're not all dead) then you'll usually outnumber whatever is left. Otherwise, the Eurlbad battalion ability pretty much sums up this list's whole approach: Crush, Mangle, Tenderise. There's no real subtlety or clever tricks here, it's just a really tough, brutally hard-hitting melee avalanche that throws out tons of mortal wounds and can kill basically anything that gets in the way.

Welcome to the Mawtribes, @Rotbinger So from three Start Collecting sets, my suggestion would be: Frostlord on Stonehorn Huskard on Stonehorn Stonehorn Beastriders 3x4 Mournfang Pack Eurlbad battalion (Boulderhead Mawtribe) This happens to be exactly 2000 points, and is a really solid list. As far as loadout options I'd recommend Blood Vultures on the Huskard and Beastriders, and Ironfists on the Mournfangs. That said, the Mawtribes models are some of the easiest to magnetise due to their size, so if you feel like experimenting with that you can build them to have all the options available and swap them out as you like.

There's always a trade-off. If there wasn't, they'd just be doing it already. In the case of balancing points costs better, I see two main potential trade-offs. The first is prior to a book's initial release - just put more effort into getting the balance of points right in the initial printing. More effort means more time (i.e. a slower release schedule), more cost (i.e. a higher sticker price on books), or some combination of the two. And since no matter how much testing and balancing you do, there will still be things that slip through, we have the second trade-off - collect more ongoing data to identify and address balance problems. That means more post-release changes in Errata or the GHB, more people getting mad about their newly-bought armies being "invalidated". And of course, that work also requires additional effort, which has to translate into slower releases or higher prices.