whispersofblood

Imagine thinking flamers aren't one of most offensive shooting units in the game...

They are to zone out the deployment zone and protect against alpha strikes, not sacrificing for bonuses to cast, marauders can be used as batteries and since they are undivided won't suffer from battleshock, you can also sacrifice the Godsworn hunt to start.

The artefact gives the Wizard Keyword. 😉

Unless you have access to direct damage spells on mass you can't really deliver damage to the opponent's army. If you think about the factions that do damage at range they have like 2-3 ranged MW spells doing at least D3, and shooting. Cultist is an alternative substructure to run a combat army, it is a more control build rather than a buff and fight styled force which is why say Archaon isn't ideal because his spell selection is pretty meh in S2D. Here is what I've kind of sketched out for a Cabalists build. Chaos Lord General - Mighty Ritualist Artefact - Spelleater Pendant Undivided Theddra Skull-scryer Mask of Darkness Chaos Sorcerer Lord Whispers of Darkness Mark of Slaanesh Be'lakor Binding Damnation 10 Chaos Knights Ensorcelled Weapons Mark of Slaanesh 5 Chaos Knights Lances Slaanesh 5 Chaos Knights Ensorcelled Weapons Undivided 3x20 Chaos Marauders Barbarian Axes Undivided 18 Untamed Beasts Godsworn Hunt Its basically a combat army designed to turn off enemy units so you can hold them up with anything and push through where you need to with power pairs.

I wanted my colours to all be quite bright so I went with white. But, there is much less room to cheat with a white basecoat and you have to create all the contrast. If you have the option mechanicus spray is a pretty good all round choice.

If you are tight the only new units worth investing in are exalted seekers and Glutos.

I want to touch on the 40k point for a second. Yes 40k has more protection for characters than AoS, however 40k has many AoS level heroes in a game where even the most mediocre of units can pump out 10-15 dmg after saves, from18-24" at minimum sizes. We are talking about shooting magnatudes of power different here. I'd also suggest even with this protection people aren't using those models so the issue seems to be that it's the lack of doing anything not necessarily that these characters are getting killed. On to what you asked me specifically. Basically every faction has a specific purpose to why it shoots. Most factions can't muster the damage in the shooting phase to actually directly win the game. Most factions use shooting as a lubricant for their primary strategy. LRL for example use shooting to make up for their extremely lack of agility on the table. They need the threatening range attacks to get the opponent to advance, rather than just try and camp objectives. The pressure created by the a tangible threat to the cogs of the opponent's army. Without that threat LRL basically can't play the game as the lack the movement or in place of the movement that toughness to sprint onto objectives and hold out. KO uses its shooting to thin out combat threats to its otherwise fragile pieces. Which is why the point drops made such a massive impact previously they didn't have enough wounds to make the strategy work. This is similar to how each faction gets to combat; teleport/redeployment, run+charge, fly, >3 pile-ins, etc. How I as the player interact with all of these is different on the board and by the decisions I make. And, I specifically take certain units to deal with, for example including screening units. As shooting continues to be integrated into the game I expect players to take units specifically to deal with shooting. Cheap fliers for example are pretty low value at the moment if you can't get enough bodies to screen. These units present a challenge to shooting armies and the controlling player. Do I take more models to tank the shooting, do I take fast vanguard type units to engage and threaten shooting units? The shooting player has to decide if they want to shoot the primary targets or the units that threaten the shooting units. My original argument has been that this sniping issues presents as a problem with shooting, when it is probably a problem with heroes. It could probably be resolved by adding 2-3 wounds to most foot heroes, and leaving the points as are, or making LoS -1 to hit and +1 to saves.

This is a game play problem not a rules problem. If you aren't equiped to put pressure on shooting units to make that decision less binary then you failed to come prepared to engage in shooting, as the player who is being shot. The reality is that shootings needs teeth for it to be worth interacting with and we need shooting schemes to make that interactivity interesting.

The book is not a good piece, but that is separate and distinct from the ability to game. The army is playable, and points drops can even make it a strong book, it would still be bad though. The immense level of non-cooperative mechanics makes building a list an exercise of labour and frustration rather than love. What you want is an experience where I see fiend bloods, love the models, run to the book and there is some guidance and sign-posting on how to make an army utilizing those models. Even ignoring that fiend bloods are a bad combat unit, how can you go about using them? This book is very similar to the the GSG book in that they have hyper-siloed each thing essentially down to what it says on the warscroll. For example there is only 1 model that interacts with the mortal keyword they have just dropped a massive release on... how does that make any sense from a design perspective? Points doesn't address why the DoK book is good and why the HoS book is bad. But, points will let people play the army for the foreseeable future so they should be addressed.

Are 15 Chaos Warriors actually better than 10 Painbringers?

It really underlines the importance of having a diverse product range, so that customers can self-select into their prefered spending habits and GW can maximize the the spending from each category of consumer via a product that that consumer optimally values.

Most consumer research in relation to pricing shows that people initially increase their spending, but then the spending equalizes at about the same rate after the emotional impact of the initial discounting subsides. Humans react to the idea of getting a deal, but their expectations very quickly realign with the new pricing scheme. GW's pricing model is basically directly imported from other low utility, consumption based industries, where its difficult to increase demand, but easy to increase short term hype. You can see the change in their financials when they switched from low volume/large releases, to high volume/small releases somewhere around the last few years of the Kirby Era where it became about selling out every new release, every month, via trade and digital. The newest model is interesting, but tied to their much improved manufacturing where they have a high volume of releases, that have a ton of plastic content. I'm curious to see the impact in the financials a year out, and if they can keep it up without leaving lots of money in people's pockets from lack of supply.

I haven't played any games yet so take this with a pinch of salt. The Units I think are slightly overpriced are Slickblades, Lord of Pain, Hellstiders, (Bladebringers)Hellflayers, and Exalted Chariots. Twinsouls I think might be correct, Blissbarb Seekers and bizarrely Seeker chariots seem slightly too cheap to me. Painbringers are actually a good elite infantry unit, I'm just not sure 2 wound infantry are good at playing the game such as it is. But, if you compare them to other 2 wound infantry they are definitely head and shoulders above many elites, and are mostly self sufficient. And, if I was to play them it would be in Nobles of Excess, and the army would be about infantry. 20 Painbringiners in the battalion is 740 points for 20 wounds behind a 4+ with mv 6, and can fish for MWs, that isn't unreasonable. I think you need a DP engine though to get the summoning going before turn 3, and you need some way to get pressure on the enemy early. So clearly I think there is a viable build there, I think if you are playing competitively it is hard to look passed the opportunity to finally use Fiends, Glutos is a fantastic model and you can easily. glutos - 400 2x harps - 300 (Good at generating DP, since they can do dmg to enemy wizards just by being on the table) The Masque - 130 (good for summoning) Viceleader - 130 (Heal spell for Glutos) 20 marauders - 160 20 Marauders - 160 10 Daemonettes - 110 6 fiends - 360 Supreme Sybarites - 150 Mesmerizing Mirror - 60 (Generating massive amounts of DP) 1960 I think this is a strong list to build from, and would fit probably best into Lurid Haze.

If you feel singled out and attacked that wasn't my intent, perhaps in trying to respond to the entirety of the arguments presented by yourself and the survey that continues to be brought up. I've never argued that people's enjoyment doesn't matter to the contrary it matters very much, however, I would argue the first step should be determining if people's expectations are inline with reality. I've not asserted that you believe these things, I responded with likely outcomes, based on the history of the game. My position is mostly about trade offs what is worth it, what is better, what is probably worse and supplying evidence of such. Its unfortunate that the alternative can only rely on a survey of what people feel, but the question I'm fundemntally asking is what is the alternative and why is it better at making people feel good about the game as a whole. Which is why I asked the slightly obnoxious question. "Shooting is uninteractive" so what? Agency vs interactivity is from the WHW show, not specifically you. I would have quoted you if that was the case, I'm not shy if I thought you were being disengenious I would have said so. Again this is an open forum like I said before while a post is nominally a responce to yours it also is done in a way that anyone can read it and gain some insight and perhaps think about their own games in a new way. Either way you are free to bow out, as the larger conversation about interactivity seems intractible, between it doesn't feel good and the alternatives create a game people have said they don't like.

The points are definitely on the Conservative side. But, I think we are talking about 10 points here or there. Actually I think bliissbarb seekers should be 200 and Slickblades 180. But we shall see.

1. My argument is that players aren't correctly identifying what those decisions actually are. For example; Being able to screen in game, in a decision you make before any models touch the table. If you don't decide to do that at list construction you don't have agency in game when someone shoves a Mawcrusher into your army. The first time its reasonable to feel bad but once you know it can happen you can make changes to stop it, if you can't figure it out for yourself you have excellent forums like this to help find answers. Now we could argue that it should be made so that a Mawcrusher can't do that, but there are consequences to that change. As a community we should be weighing those consequences against the objective of satisfying people's feelings, it is only worth it when it does cause more negative consequences. Shooting has deep roots in how you think about the models you are going to put down. And, no the rules of the game cannot support people choosing an assortment of whatever models they think look coolest and give them a decent chance of winning on the table, that isn't how choice works. Making a choice means accepting the logical consequences of that choice, it is a fundamental component of the world we have observed. 2. The game isn't static and we shouldn't want it to be, that is how most of GW's competitors end up in the graveyard. First of all, we asked for this. Do you remember for the last few years the "shoot the heroes" meme? We asked for the ability to interact on the table with universally untargetable buff pieces. This isn't a theoretical debate the game state was bad, HoS on paper weren't 70% good. But, in the game state we had at the time they were the perfect counter. Which was buffing up your most offensive unit and getting it across the board while you use the cheapest battleline units available to collect objectives. If you windup kill machine was a battleline unit, you had a 10-15% points bonus on your opponent which let you buy more or better support (Worst offender? DoK). The game state was a collection of hammers of various sizes and buff pieces, ever match was very similar and for lack of a better term boring. If units didn't interact with that scheme they had little to no value. The introduction of good and useful shooting units not only broke up that meta, but introduced more varied play. The game is intrinsically about combat nothing can change that, but having shooting that is in reality a threat opens up the utility of new types of units. Units which are fast, but not very durable are good for dealing with the majority of these shooting units, We have seen these units increase in representation, and where they didn't exist previously being added to factions. Light cavalry has seen a resurgence, an increase in these sorts of units has made units which target them more viable as well. For the first time in AoS we are actually seeing well-rounded armies that for the most part look like an army you might imagine. Can you point to a time where list diversity of rule and models has been better? Let us look at the stats such as they are of what we have going on, in the most recent state of the game and what is winning the most. (Obviously this is only "competitive" games since that is the only thing we measure) The current rankings are this 60+: Seraphon, IDK 55-59: DoK, Legion of Chaos Ascendant 50-54: FS, DoT, OM, MN As you can see most factions are winning less than 50% of their games, of what is left that can by your definition is DoK, Seraphon and DoT satisfy impact in the shooting phase. The rest are almost exclusively combat factions. So to me this is the situation, even if I accept that the shooting phase as a matter of course lacks interactivity. So what? The game as a whole has never been in a better place with so many factions in and around that fat middle we have desired and been vocal advocates for. There are 11 factions between a 40% and 54% winrate out of 24 factions. HoS will probably move into that section as well, so fully half the factions in the game are not just viable but well into the game. Further feelings are generated by the interactions between a person's expectations and their own liver experience, they are also aggressively contagious things. It is one of the things that has made us such a successful species. In nature we run a million individual experiments where win lose means live or die to determine what is true and what is false. We have intellect and what we should be doing is deep diving into the guts of the game to determine if the truth is our expectations are misaligned with reality or if our experience has alerted us to a problem in reality. I'm suggesting a) we aren't doing that and b) that when I've looked under the hood of the game even assuming there is a lack of agency in that particular phase its worth the cost overall. Remember people's expectations have been set by 5 years of a game without any effective shooting, except for a few fringe cases, and change was going to illicit a reaction. 3. The slight of hand in this thread to conflate interactivity and agency isn't productive. AoS as a game has massive amounts of agency its starts from the moment you pick that first box up off the store shelf. It can be compromised by a lack of knowledge but, having a lack of agency means a lack of independence in your ability to make choices. Agency is not compromised by negative outcomes of your exercise of free will. Interactivity is about the interplay of two players and how their expression of their agency, the choices and actions they make, impact the other participant. I believe we fail the community when we render that phenomenon down to the specific interaction of rules, rather than a holistic appreciation for the exercise of each players agency. Continuing on with that thought I believe that AoS and wargaming in general is in a tricky spot. We have kind of quasi-professionalized it, but there really isn't the rigor behind the scenes to increase the accessibility and benefits of that to the common player, in the same way that sports has benefited from advanced analytics. Youth and amaeture sports has improved immensely precisely because those involved can go on the internet and learn a great deal without the painful and time consuming work of discovery. I think a lot of these problems are a symptom of the lack of accessibility in the game due to the inequality of talent, time, and money in our society. The perfect example of this is Pile-in, very few players do this correctly live, even when they know the rules. And, it results in outcomes that the game otherwise wouldn't produce. That's a bad mechanic.

LRL struggle to do spike dmg generally, outside of the Mountain Spirits, they need to get a lot of models into place to allocate attacks. Glutos also has multilayered defences, -1 to hit, high armour, DPR, lots of wounds and 3 heal spells (which keeps him safe from chip damage). Negates the power of the Cathallar by making Hedonite units immune to battleshock, and +1 Bravery from turn 1 Also he can pin large portions of the board as LRL don't have teleports of flying units.

Thanks for your explanation, as it gets to the guts of what I am trying to say. The feeling of a lack of agency doesn't necessarily indicate that a lack of agency exists. We can agree on this yes? My frustration is with the obsession with causative thinking, the idea that the moment of realization or resolution of a process is the "thing" in itself. Perhaps it's the Johnny in me, but the process involved particularly in the shooting phase is a very long one and involves the individual choices of both players. The defending player has a lot of power over how effective the shooting player's attacks will be. If you don't participate in that process through either ignorance or choice then the results are as they are. So the question that hasn't really been answer is if the full process can satisfy the player base's need to feel involved.

xG and xA are more about player analysis, but it the idea could be used to analyze player impact and the normalize winrates. xG(expected goals) is a measure of how likely a player would be to score a goal from the position they are shooting from. A tap in would be 0.9 for example, a shot from 30 yards or a very oblique angle would be 0.1. The best players consistently over preform their xG, however. So in theory rather than using the mean winrates we use median winrates as a substitute for xG we would have a expected wins (xW) for each faction, and then have it as a per match stat. So the final stat would be how likely a player near the median skill level would be to win a one of match against the full range of AoS factions represented in competitive play. This stat would need to be reworked fairly often as meta representation could have a pretty large impact. This also lets us isolate player skill on the scene as we can identify players who are consistently outperforming their xW. I think mean is a worse measure for this because the winrates of measured games can never actually be represented by a mean. Players win games at a rate of 33.333 in a 3 round event or a rate of 20.000 in a 5 game event. This is quite a extreme difference in data points that you want to minimize the impact of player skill determining faction expectations.

It seems like your opponent's deployment let them down. How do you think it would have gone if you reracked and went again? For players who feel they will struggle with LRL, Glutos can almost single handedly dominate that match up.

I'm looking forward to when we can run proper analytics on our stats. I'd like to develop Xg type models and do proper deep dives on gaming strategies. I'd love to be able to qualify the winrates by expected wins by the players involved.

Sigvald is a sticky one. He checks a number of boxes that Eltharion does. They just I don't believe are very strategically valuable boxes. That being said if you take him he will kill stuff, which isn't something you can say about every warscroll in the game. In @Enoby's list Sigvald could easily replace 5 Painbringers or 5 twinsouls just less effeciently, when it comes to the objective game. But, off the top of my head he is more survivable than both, especially in Lurid Haze. Easily providing 6 DP a battleround.

@yukishiro1I'm not actually trying to convince you, I'm putting forward arguments so that people who haven't settled into their camp have a balanced perspective. Also, so that there isn't a sense of universality amongst the forum on a clearly contentious issue by pushing back with an unsupported subjective narrative you'd like to push. Call me condescending if you must but the fact of the matter is you haven't demonstrated a singular example based on anything but your say so that the game as a whole containing threats to the small segment of 5 or less wound heroes in the game is actual a reasonable reason to cite NPE. You've regularly failed to address what the alternative to the current situation is or why it would be more "fun and enjoyable". I've argued that the medicine is better than the sickness in this case and supported it with evidence. A survey which say "it's not nice" is not compelling evidence to make a change with negative forseeable consequences. I've also demonstrated several pieces of interactivity involved in the shooting phase as is with examples of units which actually exist. And I regularly post in various faction threads to help players solve in game problems with a little for thought and information. You can resort to ad homonym attacks if you'd like, but stomping your feet like a child denied sweets only underlines the lack of substance behind your argument. The best argument you've been able to make is that some segment "casual players" will be able to take heroes. Those heroes won't die to shooting now, and probably not magic shortly after. Therefore some players (a minority by your own words) will feel better about their games. I'm perfectly clear on what you are arguing I just think it's a vapid position to advocate for. And, believe once the reality is demonstrated people will be better equipped to deal with how they feel.

Depends on the board, if people leave gaps he gets deployed up the board as a bully unit on a 2+ generating DP and stopping people's movement, also he can cast the mirror up field turn 1. He is also good in a variety of Battleplans You're right! Totally forgot about the 1-4, yeah it is just a draft afterall. I'd probably go with more Bestigor if I'm honest.

I specifically used impact rather than strength to not confuse damage and good mechanics. IF it does not produce excess damage, and shooting does not determine the outcome of games What is NPE about it? And, why is changing the game better than educating people and aligning their expectations with quality mechanics? Thundertusks were as good as Sentinals at shooting, and at the time were quite capable in a fight, I should know I played mixed Destruction. Combat dmg was generally much lower after the stonehorn was done running amok a thundertusk was more than suffeicent to do clean up.