Kadeton
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Posts posted by Kadeton
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6 minutes ago, Neck-Romantic said:
Potentially gutting both my hammer and my anvil. Feelsbad
Yeah, potentially. On the other hand, we haven't seen the scrolls for either the Spirit Hosts or the Bladegheists yet, nor the faction or subfaction abilities. We have no idea how all this is going to shake out.
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49 minutes ago, EnixLHQ said:
Yeah, that's a blow. Hopefully that's been moved to another hero or is accessed in another way.
It seems unlikely. Almost all rerolls are getting stripped in 3rd Ed battletomes, it helps speed up the game.
36 minutes ago, Neck-Romantic said:Wonder whats happening to bladegheists then, too. Their synergy with the ST doesnt make sense now too (or is at least less intrinsic)
The specificity of that ability always seemed strange to me. Torments having two units that uniquely keyed off their presence, when every other character just worked the same way with all units, felt unnecessary.
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1 hour ago, Boggler said:
Armies that just get to do stuff tend to do better.
Aren't basically all the armies that are "doing better" at the moment based around command abilities that let them attack twice in a turn, combined with tons of mortal wounds? Barely anyone gets by on just solid stats these days.
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1 hour ago, Raviv said:
Corvus Belli (makers on Infinity) announced they are about to release a fantasy miniatures wargame - "warcrow".
I've not been on the hobby long enough to know whether such competition affects GW in any way, but we'll see.
I was trying to work out what "Warcrow" could possibly mean, when it dawned on me that "Corvus Belli" is Latin for "Crow of War". Still no idea what it refers to, but I guess it's a phrase they've been thinking about for quite a while.
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I'm with Colin. More stories about people in the Realms is great! Ways to represent those characters in the game is good too. Exclusive rules for named versions of generic characters is not.
I would rather have something similar to an expanded list of command traits (or a more involved version, like the Anvil of Apotheosis) and use those to represent whatever characters I wanted. Or a set of "regiments of renown" options for representing famous units, without having to have separate warscrolls for them. Generic base plus customisation is a good way to do things, IMO.
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11 minutes ago, That Guy said:
Also, Olynder warmaster please.
Olynder buffs in general please! She should be a centrepiece hero on par with the likes of Be'lakor, Yndrasta, the other Mortarchs, etc., in that mid-300s point range.
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1 hour ago, zilberfrid said:
It is a change since 3rd, before, warscrolls were freely available. You could play the game with warscrolls and basic rules.
So they were there, but have since regressed.
I'm not sure it's really a regression in terms of attitude. When the warscrolls were available they were treating them like a discounted product to drive sales, i.e. a loss leader. The most basic rules were provided so you could technically play, but if you wanted to play the "proper" game with the real rules you still had to buy the battletome, the GHB, etc.
By contrast, companies which provide genuinely free rules treat them more like an essential service or infrastructure. They simply absorb writing and distributing rules as part of the cost of doing business. It's not about "giving the rules away for free", it's ensuring that the rules and any updates are always available to anyone who needs them.
From the consumer's perspective it's a subtle and possibly academic difference, but it says a lot about corporate culture, IMO.
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17 minutes ago, zilberfrid said:
If only GW had a way of distibuting warscrolls over the internet. Free warscrolls, as it were, downloadable from their store...
Ah, imagine! Yeah, distributing all their rules for free has really helped Wyrd reduce the pain of making errata and seriously lowered the barrier of entry to the game. I don't think GW is there yet, in terms of its corporate culture - they still think of information as something that they "own".
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48 minutes ago, Malakithe said:
If there was actual beta testing of rules among the community then stuff like this wouldnt be necessary in the first place. The issue with that is its almost impossible to have a good sample size of beta testing among every faction for new rules.
It doesn't really work like this, unfortunately. No matter how much beta testing you do, you will still end up with balance problems that will need fixing after release. My main beta experience is with Wyrd (Malifaux and The Other Side), where they run multiple independent testing groups for their closed betas for months (sometimes years), often accompanied in later phases by open betas where the whole community can provide feedback. Despite doing a huge amount of testing, they still need to put out regular errata to address ongoing balance concerns.
Now, don't get me wrong, Malifaux is a way more balanced game as a result - the additional testing is absolutely valuable and a very good thing to do. I'm just saying that no matter how much effort you put into balancing, it's never "done", and you will always need to issue further errata down the track as new meta-problems emerge. "Stuff like this" will always be necessary.
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12 hours ago, zombiepiratexxx said:
Glad I wasn't the only one to
at the disconnect between the "fluff" and the warscroll there. I know GW like to hype things up but these guys definitely aren't marksmen of any kind.
Hardly without precedent, though. "The Hunter's Glaives wielded by these long-dead warriors always point compass-like towards their next victim, striking deep and true when hunter and prey come together." = 4+ to hit.
I'm assuming the Craventhrone Guard are primarily a bodyguard unit. After several games using Hexwraiths in the Emerald Host, I've found it's really annoying to have bodyguards that want to rush off into combat and leave the hero they're supposed to protect behind. Having a ranged unit in that role means they can stay back to help protect the squishy buffing heroes, but still contribute to the fight - even though their crossbows might not be the best shooting attack in the game, it really suits a unit that's hanging out with the plethora of aura-based heroes we have who want to stay close to the fight.
8 hours ago, Darkrich said:If we consider our existing units, most only have one real rule. Grimghasts can reroll hits, done. Chainrasp can reroll 1's to wound, done. Harridans exploding 6's, done. Ghost shooty bois, we ignore cover.
I really hope they streamline some of this away, actually - preferably in favour of something like army-wide Frightful Touch. I've played a bunch of games with them now and I still struggle to remember which units have which special rules. It doesn't seem to follow any particular pattern, just a random scatter-shot. Both Grimghasts and Hexwraiths use scythes, for instance: why does one unit have Reaped Like Corn and the other Frightful Touch?
3 hours ago, Iksdee said:I would love more bravery related mechanics. I think it fits into the army really well.
I would really like to see this too. The main problem is that some armies have exceptionally high bravery across the board (e.g. Death armies, demons), so anything that works reliably against them is probably devastating to normal armies, and anything which doesn't will be useless in those matchups and consequently very hard to balance. But I'm hoping they'll have some creative ideas in this space.
Awlrach looks amazing, I look forward to painting him up.
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5 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:
I don't see how it really accomplishes that. Either it nerfs the best units hard enough that people take the next-best unit instead, or it doesn't, and they keep taking the best unit. And nobody is going to stop taking something like Morathi because she gives up an extra VP. It just isn't gonna happen. VP are such a non-granular measure that if they somehow managed to get it just right so that (say]) fulminators are now exactly balanced with concussors, that'd just be complete dumb luck that it happens to line up that way. But in 99% of situations the nerf will either go too far or not far enough, and therefore not so much promote build diversity as just shuffle the pack a bit on what the ideal spam build is.
It might shake out that way in the end, but I don't think this is as clear-cut a decision as you're making it out to be - mainly because different people seem to be reacting in wildly different ways to this change (everything from "All these units are in the bin now" to "This makes no difference whatsoever"). The community doesn't yet have a good baseline for judging the adjustment to a unit's worth that comes from being a priority target, so its psychological effect on listbuilding varies from person to person.
Compare that to adjusting points or warscrolls, which always has exactly the effect you describe - the unit is either still the best choice, or it's unplayable garbage and immediately replaced by the new best choice to the accompaniment of much complaining. Avoiding such a consistent response is a good thing, IMO.
The majority of balance conversations are dominated by theoretical mathhammer rather than extensive play experience, but the effect of a bonus VP is not mathhammerable in the typical "points per damage/points per wound" way. That's one of its main strengths, along with not invalidating printed material or existing armies.
5 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:If they had really cared about list diversity they'd have introduced a progressive points handicap for spam. I outlined one way to do it in another thread, but the basic idea is just that each additional unit beyond the cap costs more. I.e. say the first unit of dragons costs you 340, then the next costs you 360, then 380, etc. This promotes actual unit diversity by making it progressively less attractive to pick the same unit over and over rather than taking something different.
This would be much more effective at reducing spam, for sure. I hope they arrive at something like this eventually.
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I really hope that our other heroes will step up in the new tome, and running Nighthaunt without Nagash will be at least on par competitively. I would much prefer to play a Nighthaunt army, not just Nagash and a handful of ghosts.
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Oof, that's some brutal luck! In an army that's already heavily luck-based, bringing Nagash with his jackpot Hand of Dust and push-your-luck multi-casting mechanics is really doubling down.
I didn't really get the idea of a "slot machine" army before playing Nighthaunt. Previously my main experience was with Mawtribes, and while they give extremely powerful bonuses for lucky rolls (e.g. bulk mortal wounds on the charge), their core stats are solid enough that even if they don't get those benefits they can power through. But with Nighthaunt, even if you set everything up right with all your charges and auras working together, not getting any Waves of Terror on your big turn probably means you're sunk. They just don't have any staying power in a fair fight. But other times you hit the jackpot, and the opponent is crushed before they know what hit them.
I'm hoping they level that out a bit in the new book. Not so overwhelming when things go right, but correspondingly less underwhelming under merely normal circumstances.
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I really like the idea of the Scriptor, though I think they flubbed it a bit on the ability description. He shouldn't be recording just a name, he should be writing the story of how the target will die, which is then unfolding on the table as he writes. That would explain why sometimes it takes a few turns to get to the part where the target actually dies - writer's block is a terrible thing. I also really like the image of him writing down a particular cause of death, but the hero sidesteps it at the last second and survives, so the Scriptor furiously scratches that sentence out while glaring daggers at them, and starts writing an even more horrible end.
It does seem to be an ability that's more suited to narrative games, and honestly I think that's fine - people should play more narrative games anyway. Too much matched play is what leads to the kind of bitter negativity where this ability sucks and therefore everything sucks and Nighthaunt will always be terrible because GW hates us or whatever. Before the tome comes out I'm not going to presume, and after it comes out I'll play with it regardless.
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6 hours ago, Lord Krungharr said:
IMHO a Priority Target should never get extra points for killing a Priority Target.
That's exactly how it works already.
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35 minutes ago, JackStreicher said:
We heard you guys loved mortal wound shooting, so we removed the range, the hit roll, the wound roll and the save roll and got straight to the spicy mortal wound part. But worry not, there is also no counterplay (except more shooting, or idoneth)!
I don't disagree with the gist, but there is at least simple counterplay to this ability: kill the Scriptor Mortis before it goes off. But yeah, there's definitely the potential for feel-bads with this ability, in that the outcome is extremely swingy, based on only a few dice rolls and could easily mean the difference between winning and losing.
That said, Nighthaunt and mortal wounds have always gone together. Olynder has like four different ways to inflict mortal wounds. I expect that will continue to be a heavy element in their theme, whether or not the trend continues with future armies.
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40 minutes ago, novakai said:
Case and point would be if Morathi and Bow snake are all of a sudden reasonable in the next incoming tome, are they going to taken off the list or they made another mistake with them and they be kept on the list
As soon as the new tome is released, they're off the list automatically. That's how the list works, whether they update it or not.
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Nice thematic ability on the Scriptor Mortis: https://www.warhammer-community.com/2022/03/18/heres-how-to-write-the-story-of-your-opponents-doom-with-the-scriptor-mortis-from-arena-of-shades/
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2 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:
People like to frame their complaints in terms of balance, and that is understandable, because if your army does not play well against others that will probably also result in more lost games for you. So the army's janky design and inability to satisfyingly play the game result in imbalance as well. But the imbalance is not the root of the problem, and fixes aimed at competitive win percentage will only improve the game for a tiny minority of players.
This is really insightful. Balance is just one symptom of design problems, but it's not the one that actually impacts players the majority of the time. Fixing balance (in terms of win rates at competitive events) doesn't fix dissatisfaction with the way an army feels to play.
Case in point - giving out extra VP for killing over-performing units will go some way to levelling out the win rates on top tables among the armies that can get to those tables. But most people seem to feel that this is the "wrong" way to do it, and I think you've hit the nail on the head as to why: it technically "improves balance" without making any real changes to the way the game feels to play.
2 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:You can see people trying to make sense of this in the State of the Game thread, where some are currently arguing the somewhat paradoxical position that Beasts of Chaos are only good because they are underpointed, but would be bad if pointed correctly. On the face of it, that makes little sense: How could a different point level be correct if it would make the army bad? But I think we can intuitively understand the position: Winning with Beasts currently still kinda feels like you are winning with a janky army that doesn't really play right, but you are getting away with it because you get to buy raw stats (models, wounds, damage output...) cheaper than anyone else.
I don't think I can genuinely understand this position. Intuitively, for me at least, getting to buy raw stats (at least in terms of bodies and wounds, Beasts still have pretty poor damage output) cheaper than anyone else is exactly how a horde army should feel. I can't understand why anyone would think they should have higher points, although I can see how the pervasive attitude of "It's Beasts of Chaos, GW will find a way to ruin them somehow because that's what they always do" might lead you to expect changes in that vein - just not to think that they were justified.
2 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:The problem with the game as I experience it is that the 3rd edition update made a lot of 2nd edition tomes play pretty badly by invalidating things they could previously do, but not giving them the means to take advantage of the tools that the new edition offers. This hit bottom tiers more strongly than anyone else. All the tomes that are currently suffering are the same ones that were already not in a good place before the switch to 3rd, with the addition of OBR. At the same time, good armies with deep benches were not only able to adapt to the new state of the game, but could even exploit the new mechanics to excell. What's more, it feels like the current bottom tier is deteriorating as more battletomes come out. The gulf between, for example, Skaven and other armies becomes wider as more updates come out, not narrower.
I'm definitely feeling the "2nd Ed Battletome effect" playing Nighthaunt. Not because I lose, but because so much of what makes 3rd Edition interesting and fun is just straight-up denied to them. Mystic Shield and All-Out Defence don't work at all, Finest Hour can only be used offensively, Monstrous Rampages aren't for you. The wealth of options and decisions that 3rd Edition armies get (and even other 2nd Edition armies get to a lesser extent) just aren't there, and the game feels flat and empty. I'm actually really looking forward to seeing what they come up with to make Nighthaunt work in 3rd Edition.
But I'm not mad that this Battlescroll didn't 'fix' Nighthaunt despite them being Hunters now. I'm fine with waiting for a battletome for that kind of broad, sweeping change - to be honest, while it can suck to be left waiting, I wouldn't want a massive overhaul of my entire army happening every few months.
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I have always been a reluctant painter. I struggle to start painting projects, and then when I manage to start I struggle to finish them. It's the chore you have to slog through in order to play, and that makes it really hard to stay motivated. HOWEVER...
For the past couple of months, I've been building up a Nighthaunt army. They take Contrast paint like it was made for them. I started out slow, aiming for one model every day; lately I've been smashing out whole units (reinforced units even, since a lot of Nighthaunt unit sizes are bizarrely tiny) in every painting session, and they look awesome. I'm pushing my painting skills, figuring out blending, glazing, edge and specular highlighting, trying out new stuff - I'd never used static grass for basing before, and now I love it. For the first time ever, I'm genuinely enjoying the hobby, not just the game. I spend the day looking forward to my next hobby session, and thinking about what I'm going to work on next.
That's not really 3rd Edition positivity, I guess - but the prospect of having a new Nighthaunt book soon, as well as crossbow-ghosts and that fantastic Scriptor Mortis sculpt, is definitely keeping me engaged.
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8 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:
AOS is played with 2000 vs 2000 points (or whatever point total you choose). You don't set out to play an inferior force against your opponent's superior force; the whole premise is that you pit equal forces against one another.
The way you've phrased this suggests symmetry - both armies with equal strengths, ability to inflict and resist damage, control the board, etc. Is that actually the expectation?
I would say the premise is that at the same points value, both forces have (roughly) equal chances to win the game. Winning the game is decided by VP - it doesn't matter whether the forces are asymmetric if the "weaker" side has more chances to score the VP they need to win. Those aren't "free points", they require you to overcome significant challenges.
Does the Hunt achieve equal outcomes for underperforming armies? No, clearly not, it would be insane to expect that GW could nail that on their first draft of a brand-new mechanic. Is it a step in a positive direction? I would say yes.
8 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:The reason that forces are unequal is because GW is bad at balancing the game, not because it is supposed to be that way. I suspect almost everyone would prefer their 2000 points to be equal to the opponent's 2000 points than to get bonus victory points for their army being inferior.
Yes, I would assume so. GW is bad at balancing the game - that's why efforts like this, trying to find novel and creative mechanisms to approach balance in different ways, rather than continuing to smash their heads against the same brick wall over and over, are a welcome sight for me.
You seem to be suggesting that GW could snap their fingers and achieve perfect balance overnight if they only tried. I would suggest that the process of (institutionally) getting better at balancing is a slow, tedious process - but this is the kind of change that indicates progress on that path.
8 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:This is all within GW's power to fix. That's why this feels bad. It feels like GW admitting it is incapable of balancing its game so it's just going to give people handicaps instead.
I don't really understand this view. Handicaps are a totally valid and sensible way of balancing games, and are used extensively across a whole range of sports and board games in order to produce more equal outcomes in friendly competition.
You also seem to be putting "add a simple handicap system" and "balance the entire game" forward as equal alternatives - those are definitely not undertakings of similar effort. This is a minor update - the kind of major balance passes for under-performing armies you're looking for happen when their battletomes are updated, not in a one-page PDF.
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3 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:
What this system does it it just gives you sympathy points for having a bad army and bad units when you're playing against someone with a strong army and strong units. But your army is still bad, and theirs is still good. They still stomp you and you still feel inferior throughout the game. You just score more points than they do.
I don't think what people with bad armies wanted was for their armies to still be just as bad but to win because GW said they get extra points.
This might be another one of those differences in perspective, but doesn't that seem like a good way of recognising the struggle of a weaker side?
Let's say you're, just to pick an example out of thin air, a plucky Ukrainian militia going up against the full might and resources of the Russian Army. They're occupying your city and taking the strategic objectives, but every time you manage to take out one of their tanks with an RPG, doesn't that feel like a win? Obviously it would be better if NATO backed you up with armoured divisions and fought the enemy on more equal terms, but the hopelessly-outgunned guerilla forces are still the heroes of that story, and every bit of damage they can inflict under those circumstances is its own small victory.
I don't mind playing the underdog - I've been building my Nighthaunt and having fun with them, even though they lose way more than they win. If I manage to take down a unit of Stormdrakes, damn right that feels like a win... and now there's a chance the game's outcome might reflect that sense of achievement too.
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55 minutes ago, Neverchosen said:
it is strange that having a segmented grenade styled grip makes something look inherently modern even though that could have been crafted historically. Either way I think it is 40k related and probably something Imperial Guard... but every time I make a guess about something related to 40k I am instantly corrected, because it is clearly some iconic weapon used by some unit that I should totally have heard of... oh this is clearly Inquisitor Igor Ironeye's prosthetic harpoon hand. 🧐
Not so much a grip as it is just an actual grenade, which explodes when you stab somebody with the lance. It is indeed an iconic (and utterly ridiculous) weapon used by the Imperial Guard, specifically the Rough Riders. Well predicted!
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56 minutes ago, yukishiro1 said:
The vast majority of AOS players have not even memorized all the scoring rules for each battleplan, much less all that other stuff.
Oh, neither have I, but a) those haven't changed, and b) you look them up at the start of the battle, you don't need to check them again. You might look at the battle tactics as a reminder at the start of the round. You should already know which units are monsters.
When you build your list, you're aware of which units that you put in are targets. There's like three at most for any given army, and if you're in the competitive scene at all you probably already know the entire list off the top of your head, because they're the ones that people complain about all the time. I really don't see how it's difficult to go "Oh, that's the last Fulminator gone. They're a target by the way, gain 1 VP." And if you're really in the position where you can't remember whether Morathi is a target, when a unit dies just glance at your army list, where you put a big red mark next to their entry to remind yourself.
56 minutes ago, yukishiro1 said:(Assuming the result isn't just that nobody ever takes Sin list units any more).
This is a totally acceptable way of completely avoiding any additional complexity from this update, if you struggle to remember this sort of thing. And it achieves the goal of reducing the prevalence of these units without nerfing them into the ground.
56 minutes ago, yukishiro1 said: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.
I think you're right in that we must play quite differently - I wouldn't spend more than a minute at most considering what battle tactic to do in a given turn. There's almost always a clear, most-easily-achievable option, and then you've still got 55 seconds left to ponder whether there's actually another one that is a little harder to do right now but might not be achievable later. Once you've decided and announced it, you don't need to think about it again, just spend the turn doing whatever is was you needed to do to achieve it.
56 minutes ago, yukishiro1 said: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.
Yeah, as I said that's the major point where I hope for an improvement in the second draft of this idea. If it didn't matter whether a target unit was the one that struck the final blow, then all that extra consideration just evaporates and you can play as normal. (Failing battleshock doesn't deny the points, by the way.) You could leave counting the VP until the end of the game at that point, so none of this would appear in your end-of-turn scoring list at all.
But in terms of consideration required, this is a very different prospect to battle tactics. Tactics are declared, and restricted to the turn; if you fail, you lose that scoring opportunity forever. Hunt rewards always happen regardless of when they occur, so they don't need to exert strong influence on your target priority. Though let's face it, all of these units are almost always the highest-priority targets available anyway.
at the disconnect between the "fluff" and the warscroll there. I know GW like to hype things up but these guys definitely aren't marksmen of any kind.
AoS 3 - Nighthaunt Discussion
in Death
Posted
Of course, you can call it anything you want! Nobody (including you) has any way to know whether you're actually correct until we have the book in our hands. And even then, it's unlikely to be clear one way or the other - people have a strong tendency to react as if any given change is a catastrophe, and then only work out that things are better than they used to be over an extended period of time.