Kadeton

Your entire post is pretty much "I can't do reading comprehension" in so many words. See how reductive and dismissive that sounds? Try engaging with the actual points raised instead. Nowhere have I said that raw damage is the problem, or that damage from shooting units should be reduced. To reiterate: the problem with shooting is the freedom to apply that damage to any target within range, with no trade-off and no counter-play. I don't mind losing games. I don't like low-interactivity games where I can't force my opponent to make difficult choices. I don't like having no tactical options to disrupt or interfere with my opponent's game plan beyond "Hope they roll badly". I don't like being bored. That's a great question, and I'm open to the idea of changes to those specific mechanics too. But that's a discussion of individual unit power level and balance, which is separate to the discussion of tactical interactivity that I'm pursuing. Deepkin, hmm? You mean the army with a central mechanic that completely restricts freedom of targeting for shooting? So like, the exact thing that I've been suggesting would be a good way to reduce the dominance of shooting armies, except taken to its furthest extreme? And they're doing well, you say? What an amazing coincidence.

I think you've gotten confused about who you're replying to. Okay, so which is it? Are support heroes irrelevant (in which case making them invulnerable would also be irrelevant to the strength of an army) or are they important (in which case allowing ranged units exclusively the power to kill them with impunity is a problem)? Being able to shield characters from shooting attacks by "putting units in the way" is literally the exact thing I'm asking for. It makes thematic and mechanical sense. But - crucially - the 'Ard Boyz allow for significantly more interaction and possible counter-play. The Sentinels don't put out the same damage per point, but they do it without restriction or retaliation. I'm not singling out Sentinels as a problem, by the way, so there's no need to try to defend them by listing off examples of other problematic shooting units. The lack of meaningful tactical counter-play to shooting is what I have an issue with.

Regardless of the points involved, the fact is that taking 5 wounds off a 5-wound support character is vastly more valuable than taking 5 wounds off a battleline unit, in almost every case. You can protect your important characters from death in melee - why not death from shooting?

There's a thousand miles of nuance separating "tone down shooting" and "nerf shooting to irrelevance". Stop talking about them like they're the same thing. Lumineth are extremely close to having no need for positioning (of their Sentinel units). The main complaint about shooting as a core mechanic is not that it doesn't require positioning, it's that there is little to no positioning-based counter-play. Against melee units, you can counter-play them by manoeuvring your units to force them into engagements on your terms. The only way to limit a shooting-focused unit's freedom of engagement is to stay outside of their range, which is not a feasible tactic in an objective-based game. KO is at the top only because it can teleport and has overwhelming firepower. If KO were a melee-focused army, they would not dominate the meta regardless of their ability to teleport - again, this is because melee can be counter-played, and shooting basically cannot. KO would still be an extremely competitive army even if they lost the ability to Fly High. I'd like to see it change to 100% of armies, but that's somewhat of a tangent. Hedonites and DoK dominated a meta that had nothing like the shooting we see in the game now. In particular, Hedonites were egregious because they broke the primary balancing factor of melee, alternating activations (on top of insanely low summoning costs). A problem exists in which all the top meta armies are shooting armies, and you can approach that in two ways. The way you seem to be advocating for is to nerf the top armies. That's a perfectly reasonable approach to balance, but it doesn't address the core problem with a lack of counter-play to shooting. The way I'm advocating is to address shooting's basic problem, and then buff any armies for whom the impact of that change puts them below par. Is your reluctance to even countenance that approach due to a fear that GW will neglect the "buff the weak ones" part of that process? In that case, why do you have any confidence that they would follow through with the "nerf the strong ones" part of yours?

Hey, you were the one saying people wanted to get rid of the "shooting playstyle". I'm saying the shooting playstyle isn't, and shouldn't be, a thing at all. You can't get rid of something that doesn't exist, but you can tone down the shooting aspect of the game as a whole to prevent "shooting as a playstyle" from becoming a viable option.

Saying "Maybe shooting should suffer additional penalties under certain conditions" is not remotely the same thing as saying "Get rid of shooting". That said, no army's playstyle should just be "shooting". If an army can focus solely on one phase of the turn and more or less ignore the others, and still win games, that's an indication that something is seriously wrong with the fundamental mechanics.

It's certainly simple and straightforward. I'd hesitate to say "boring", because running over enemies with monster trucks hasn't gotten old for me yet and I've been playing them for years now. But yes, the only real tactical decision you'll make while playing is "Who gets smashed this turn?" It's a fun decision to make, but if you're looking for tactical variety you're not going to find it with the Beastclaws.

Malifaux has somewhere around 600 unique unit types. I haven't been able to find a full list, so I'm not sure of the exact number. Sure, maybe. But most people aren't looking for "inspiration", they're just looking for a consistent game experience. You said it yourself: The corollary to the above is that just putting the "official" stamp on something doesn't mean it will get played. I've never seen an Open Play game of AoS even though it's an official way to play, for instance, but I've seen hundreds of Matched Play games. Even when there are multiple competing "official" standards, one will always win out eventually and become the de facto single standard in all but the niche edge cases. That's because having a single standard just saves a lot of headaches. You could build an extensive toolbox of rules that could be mixed-and-matched to build whatever ruleset you liked, but I guarantee that after a few months, maybe a year, the player base would reach a broad consensus on the "correct" way to play the game, which would then become the standard. House rules absolutely would exist, they exist for literally every set of game rules ever played.

For sure. This is the very definition of "house rules". It doesn't need official support. Unrealistic or not, the armies that are possible in Matched Play are (in my opinion) the only ones that a new player should stumble into. Having a new player build something like an Extremis Chamber force and then not be able to actually play it is the worst possible outcome for the game. More experienced players with regular opponents are more than capable of arranging house rules to accommodate whatever the heck they want amongst themselves. But a list built using the Core Rules should be valid anywhere. Fair enough. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that your experience of the game is not the "normal" or "intended" experience. The good news is, when you're playing a solo game, you and your opponent will always agree on any house rules you want to use. You literally don't have to care about the "official" rules in any way. The rules only exist to create consistency of expectation between players. Let's leave aside the topic of "Should meeting engagements exist?" for the moment. You know the breakout box that says how many points, Battleline, Leaders, Behemoths, allies, etc you need for a battle-forged army? Just add another column to that box for Meeting Engagements. Everything else is scenario rules, not Core Rules. I'm not sure which bit you wanted to focus on here, but the bit that stands out to me is this: I was never exposed to "power gamers" talking about Cities of Death and "ruining it", neither with Storm of Magic. Nevertheless, I never played them. The reason? They simply weren't the standard way to play, and it was far easier to find people who just wanted standard games. Power gamers weren't the problem - non-standard rulesets were. Honestly, I think this was all they really needed to do. The issue wasn't needing to codify different ways to play, it was just to reduce the toxicity of the player base. Promoting fairness and sportsmanship over winning, as well as just flushing out a lot of the entrenched toxic players and bringing in new blood, was definitely needed... but I don't see how the Three Ways helped, honestly. This is absolutely the right answer.

Toolbox rules are great in theory, but the need that they fail to address is setting consistent expectations. Everything else is in the domain of house rules, or a problem to be addressed separately. With multiple rulesets, or a toolbox of options, the Extremis Chamber army of Stardrakes and Dracoths will be valid... sometimes. This might encourage people to build it, and they will then be disappointed when nobody wants to play their particular set of rules. In a consistent ruleset, it will never be valid, so you always know that if you want to bring it, you need to discuss that rule exception (i.e. a house rule) with your opponent in advance. And if GW ever wants it to be valid, they can just rewrite the Stormcast battletome to allow that build. Also, I'm not sure about your meta, but in mine there's very little experimentation with the rules. From the discussions on here, I'd say that's fairly consistent across the board. People generally just want certainty that they can show up to a game and have a good time, and they choose (by default) the ruleset that most consistently delivers that experience. I've never heard anyone in my local group talking about building an army for anything other than the Matched Play rules - even if they decide to dabble in using some of the Narrative missions, they'll still use a Matched Play army to do that. No matter what, one ruleset will always "win" and become the de facto standard, because things go much smoother if everyone has the same expectations. It therefore saves everyone a lot of time if you just define the standard from the outset, rather than presenting multiple standards and letting the playerbase figure it out. I'm not suggesting any instances of "Do not use this rule..." It's not necessary. From your examples: Meeting Engagements don't need to use different rules to Pitched Battles; Narrative battles can be played just fine using the Matched Play rules; if all your battleplans are saying "Don't use a rule" then that rule simply shouldn't be a Core Rule, or you should design your battleplans differently. These are all example of unnecessary differences which add no value. In general, GW really needs to step away from constantly making exceptions to the rules, and instead either work with them as they are, or change them. Consistency is the best approach.

Neither of us are GW rules writers, so the specifics of our preferred implementations don't really matter. But a target priority rule of some kind, designed to curb the freedom of targeting enjoyed by shooting units when compared to melee units, is definitely something I would like to see for AoS3.

I think GW really needs to re-think the "3 ways to play" idea entirely. When your options for ways to play are "Reasonably balanced", "A bit less balanced and with wonky missions" and "Unbalanced", then most people will gravitate towards the "reasonably balanced" option. Even when they're not competitively-minded, players are generally looking for a game that feels more or less fair. The first step to addressing this would be to ensure that all the ways to play use the same rules. No more "matched play only" rules, or similar - something is either a rule or it's not. As soon as you divide your game into two or more rulesets, one of those will become the dominant or "default" way to play, and the others will die out. Then, make the ways to play actually different ways to engage with the game. A Crusade-style campaign is a genuine alternative to one-off pickup games, for instance - that's the kind of distinction that works. A skirmish version would also be a good "way to play" if Warcry didn't already exist as a separate game. You shouldn't (in theory) need to make tournament play any different from pickup games. If you do, it's because you've stuffed up the balance of the game - just work harder to address that instead. I don't agree with this at all. Malifaux (just as an example) only has 50 points in a standard tournament game, with most models in the 4-8 point range, and has much better balance than AoS. More granularity in points is almost never the answer, simply because a unit's value can't be quantified in isolation - it's the interaction with other units (both friendly and enemy) that establish its "true" value in a game. Instead, I'd look at things like points penalties for multiples of the same unit. Bringing a bunch of one type of model is a pretty good indicator that you're building an army based around getting extra value out of that specific unit, or simply that the unit is itself under-valued - so make the points reflect that focus. It wouldn't have to be much: perhaps +20 points for the second one, +40 points for the third, and so on. That would do far more to address the overwhelming efficiency of tournament lists than haggling over whether a 180-point unit should actually be 181 or 182 points.

I would think of it in terms of the unit being focused on the closest threat, not as an obstacle. Sure, you can turn your back on the red unit to fire at the orange, but your archers will be distracted by the immediate danger coming in right behind them, and that will make them less accurate. We have precedent in the way the Idoneth work. If the red, blue and orange units were Idoneth, the green unit would only be able to shoot at red. That's by far the simplest model to adopt for this, just make it less restrictive. Shoot at red, no penalty. Shoot at anything else, -1 to hit. Anything more fiddly than that is over-complicating the rule, IMO.

To somewhat counter the shooting meta, I'd like to see something that had an effect on target priority without making shooting worthless. Something as simple as -1 to hit when targeting anything other than the closest enemy unit would still allow the shooting armies to make a tactical choice, but would allow their opponents to "screen" at least somewhat, much like it's possible to screen against melee. Deepkin can still keep their superior version of this to totally dictate targeting (though they should lose their 2+ rerollable saves, let's not have any 2+ in the game please) but it would give everyone else a bit of a leg up.

One thing I'd actually like to see is to make endless spells be actually endless. There's all this lore about them going wild and rampaging across the realms causing havoc, but what actually happens in the game is that some wizard just dispels them, usually right before casting them again. What I'd prefer is: You cast your endless spell, and it comes into play as a Bound version under your control. Nobody (not even the wizard who cast it!) can dispel an endless spell once it's in play, but they can (by successfully "dispelling" it) cause it to become no longer Bound. The side that paid for the warscroll can make a casting attempt in order to make it Bound again. (This is just for "Predatory" spells, obviously, which would be synonymous with "Endless". The rest - the ones which only ever benefit the caster - would just be spells that happen to have models.)

No reason I can see, most likely just an error in the software. Slaanesh units are allowed as allies for any Slaves to Darkness army.

If we're doing outlandish wishes, then I'd like unit-based alternating activations. (If we're keeping IGYG, then do more to make the double turn work as a catch-up mechanic and not a win-more mechanic.) More down-to-earth, AoS could stand to steal several mechanics from 40K at this point, especially morale, characters, and the +1/-1 cap on most modifiers. Also the superior missions and army objectives. General design consistency would be good too. For instance, if we want to represent "this unit is really tough", is that achieved by a penalty to wound rolls against them, a better armour save, more wounds, damage reduction, or an after-save? Just pick your mechanic and stick with it across the board, instead of reaching into the random grab-bag of rules every time and seeing what falls out. Similarly, figure out how a shield works once, and then apply that same rule to every shield in the game. And so on.

The horse thing is just an example... you just know that carelessly-written lore entries would be contradicting each other all over the place in short order, and then the players would be up in arms about how such-and-such a change doesn't make sense because of blah blah blah. It would be cool to see small but meaningful lore changes, for sure. In some ways, I like the total disconnect between stats changes and lore, since I'm more focused on game balance as a priority (and I'm more than happy to make up my own lore), and not linking them allows the designers to make arbitrary changes in the name of said balance. I tend to think of stats changes as an adjustment of the abstraction model rather than indicative that anything actually changed in the in-game world. But doing it the other way is definitely a neat idea, and I'd love to see a game company attempt it some day! I just strongly doubt it will be GW. It's a double-edged sword, I think. Things are certainly vague, but that vagueness allows the players much greater freedom to come up with their own narratives, since their stories won't conflict with what's "canon". Charitably, I assume that's what the writers were originally going for, even if they seem to be dialling it back a bit and bringing in more pressure to nail down dates and events to conform to "official" records. It's absolutely not consumer-friendly, I agree. Personally I have no qualms about not buying the books, so I'm unaffected by the current wave of disillusionment about battletome value. Fundamentally, that's the real issue with GW taking this idea on board: they're comfortable with the current value proposition of battletomes, and their sales data tells them they're right to be comfortable. You've suggested a really interesting way to add value to the tomes, but their business mindset says the current cost to value ratio is what the market will bear, so if they're going to add value then they also need to increase cost. However that shakes out, they'll be targeting roughly the same level of consumer satisfaction, so a lot of players will still be unhappy. Keeping an undercurrent of simmering resentment that's never quite boiling over into actual revolt is GW's intent - it's what makes "business sense". Anyway, depressingly bland evil nature of the business world aside, I really like your idea.

All of this sounds excellent... for players. From GW's perspective, I would imagine this just sounds like a lot more work for less return. And they definitely don't want to "allow players to retain old units", unfortunately. More broadly, I also think the lore in AoS strongly resists being tied down to specific dates and events. The setting is (intentionally) too vast for an individual event on the scale of a battle or a plague to propagate sweeping changes across the realms. Only world-shattering events like the Necroquake are significant enough to be felt everywhere, and become part of the ongoing lore. Take the "shortage of horses" idea as a justification for a points increase in a cavalry unit as an example. For starters, where is this horse shortage occurring? If it's localised, say to Hammerhal, then why are my cavalry from the Living City affected? Okay, let's scale it up - some terrible horse-plague has swept like wildfire across all the realms. But wait a sec... why has the Horsepocalypse only affected Freeguild Pistoliers, and not any of the other units that use horses? Do we need to account for why all those other units weren't affected in their lore entries, too? I think it's a lovely concept, but it would be much more suited to something like the Old World, where units are actually tied to a specific time and place, instead of being from vaguely everywhere. Also, it's not something that GW would actually want to do within their business model. That said, you could absolutely do this for your own army, building up a book of lore for your regiments and heroes as they change over time, recording significant victories and defeats, and so on. That could be a really cool creative hobby project to do alongside modelling and painting. Edit: Now I want to write a chronicle or saga for my Beastclaw Raiders army, written by the terrified Freeguild soldier who's bound, gagged and dangling from a meathook on the back of my Frostlord's Stonehorn. That guy's really been through some stuff.

I would interpret that as only boosting the portion of the ability that affects Ossiarch Bonereapers within 18" (+1 to hit), but not to the part that affects Mortis Praetorians within 18" (+1 to save). But ultimately it's just a poorly-written rule, and very open to interpretation. We have no way of knowing the real intent.

The Ever Vigilant ability happens "After armies are set up, but before the first battle round begins". Initiative order is determined "At the start of each battle round". (Core p.228) Since the first battle round hasn't yet begun when Ever Vigilant is used, initiative cannot have been determined at that point. That does leave Beer & Pretzels' very good question about what happens when both armies have a similar redeployment ability - this isn't currently covered in the rules or FAQs as far as I'm aware. I would imagine that if we ever got a ruling, it would be that the player who finished deploying first could decide whether they would use their ability first or second.

Bloodgullet is definitely the exception! Everything works with that, mainly because the Splatter Cleaver is totally amazing, the only unit you need to include to take full advantage of everything is a Butcher (and Gluttons if you care about the command trait, which you don't need to), and nothing else is restricted. I guess the restrictions aren't as hard-and-fast as I made out, but certainly for Beastclaws there's a lot of pressure to focus based on your tribe, both in terms of which units can benefit and in what alternatives you're forced to give up by making that choice (e.g. running Beastclaw heroes without Dig Deep... yuck!). And while you might run your Underguts list as Bloodgullet, presumably you'd never run them as Boulderhead or Thunderbellies? You're right that CoS is even more restricted though, and I'm probably overstating the case that Ogors are toward the end of that scale rather than somewhere in the middle compared to other armies. Gloomspite is another example... perhaps as a general trend, the battletomes that are made up of two or more micro-factions mashed together are worse off than those created as a more coherent single faction? I don't know. Maybe it's all in my head!

I think more than most battletomes, the Mawtribes tome has really blatant CHOOSE THIS TRIBE IF YOU WANT THESE UNITS signposting. Some armies have the option to take similar composition, but switch up their sub-faction to modify their playstyle a bit... we don't really do that so much. Most of the tribes only give any benefit to an extremely narrow set of units, and you'd need a really compelling reason to take anything else. Straightforward and brutal is definitely the Beastclaw's greatest strength. Strike first, strike hard, no mercy.

It's definitely worth thinking about. In general I'd say that Boulderhead is still the better choice, but depending on how much first-turn shooting there is in your local meta then Winterbite might be a solid alternative choice. You'd be giving up 1 wound on all your monsters, the Brand of the Svard, the Lord of Beasts trait, and the Dig Deep command ability. Unless you invest heavily into Sabres or Yhetees, you're not getting any value from the mandatory Winterbite trait and command. Sadly Lumineth don't really care about -1 to hit, they're just fishing for natural 5+ results to deal mortal wounds. KO would probably hate it, though.

Yeah, I've played against KO quite a bit recently (with Beastclaws), and the KO really have to play smart and get a bit lucky to win. The game is definitely stacked in the Ogor's favour. I find we can hold our own against most of the top armies - LRL in particular have a real uphill struggle. The only one I've had proper trouble with are the updated Idoneth. The shark nets preventing pile-in can be a big problem, the turtles hit harder than a Frostlord, and if you can't overwhelm them before turn 3 they will destroy you in their "always strikes first" melee phases. That's a tough game.