whispersofblood

Yup pretty much, and if Glutos didn't come with a 3+ save I probably wouldn't include him either. I was working on a Depraved Drove list before I moved to LRL so I'm pretty familiar with how it would game, but yeah its not terrific. Maybe I'll throw it into a TTS event at some point. I think Johnnys can find a build they like, but Timmys and Spikes are definitely hurting.

This is basically what I've figured out so far for a "competitive" HoS build. Invaders- Lurid Haze Glutos - 400 (general) Doombull - 100 (general) Doombull - 100 (General) Doombull - 100 Great Bray-Shaman - 100 w/ rod of misrule Great Bray-Shaman - 100 w/oil of exultation 10 Gors 10 Gors 10 Gors 10 Ungor Raiders 10 Ungor Raiders 10 Ungor Raiders 10 Bestigor 10 Bestigor 10 Bestigor The Depraved Drove Doomblast Dirgehorn The Burning Head Mesmerising Mirror Basically a 2 drop that is about generating DP, controlling the board, and holding objectives. The key is just turning up the pressure from turn 1 and crippling my opponents units systematically.

Your interpreting my post defending Sentinels, I am not Sentinels don't need to be defended because... I'm demonstrating that shooting as whole is not as impactful as people claim and therefore your feelings about shooting are about your expectations and not what is happening in the game on the board and stopping people from being successful in the battleplans. Your distinction between mw/high rend/low rend/no rend is a forced distinction, the game is determined by unsaved damage and that is the volume that must be measure against. The math on those shooting units shows that while Sentinels and their MW ability evens out their dmg curve, they also just generally do less damage. By the way they don't do much more dmg against a 5+ save or a 6+ save, both units do. Which is exactly what you want to see as a trade off. We also don't want to live in a world of universal utility, no LoS shooting is rare so the value of standard anti-shooting strategies and tactics is retained. A corner case doesn't negate that. I expected you would bring up Line of Sight, but here is the reality. That is your interaction. Against Crossbows or other shooting units, you choose between being in the optimal position to provide buffs and being out of line of sight. Against Sentinels you don't have a the benefit of being out of line of sight, as a defence mechanism. So you choose other forms of interaction I showed that cover is a useful rule, also you can interact with the casting of Power of Hysh. The math shows that being in cover, and trying to stop a otherwise normal wizard casting significantly interact with the ability to sentinels to remove units at full range. Strategically if you build a list that keeping said hero alive is necessary then you have to increase the pace of your game and the delivery of that strategy, this is what makes each game and match up unique. Again battling against universal utility. There is a difference between interacting with a mechanic and having agency in the game. Pushing the former infantilizes gamers, the later allows growth and divergence of skill levels. Here is why Sentinels are not like Thundertusks; Thundertusks want to get into combat, that alone completely changes the dynamic of the unit, it wants to or is capable of charging killing units in combat and claiming objectives. Almost no shooting unit can do that. Therefore Thundertusks were better than Sentinels, and guess what? A Thundertusks at the time was more expensive than 20 Sentinels. You also haven't contended with this. Your hypothesis is not showing up in nature, in a space which incentivises reducing interactivity. Why do you think that is? I do understand what you are saying, you think its feels bad. I'm saying that guess what most things in life aren't actually about what you feel and if you spend sometime with it you can change how you feel about things with information and weighing up potential outcomes from changing those things. Plato believed that truth is to be discovered; that knowledge is possible. He held that truth is not relative, as sophists would have us believe. Truth is objective; it is what we reason, usand applied correctly. In modern times sophism has made a massive resurgence and guess what? Peoples outcomes have deteriorated along side it.

@Enoby I'm not sure I can get this to work 😅 but lets work it out logically it might be there and I just cant see it. 1. Get onto objectives or at least the well over the midfield: Maybe 2x10 Twinsouls? Mv8+ Run satisfy that need to control the board and take aggressive positions. 2. I think 5 painbringers can probably hold an objective against a lot so as a follow up unit they are probably decent. 3. The next question is if you aren't charged how do you generate enough damage over turns 2 and 3 to win the game? 4. I think you need to summon bodies, which means generating DP... So at least one unit of Blissbarbs of some variety seems necessary, so what if you took blissbarb seekers instead of slickblades? 5. Marauders are probably best, but Daemonettes might fit the points better as the flanking lighter troops See if you can make that work with what you are picturing?

I worry you don't have the model count to make any of this matter. I think pretty soon players will realize that it's better to not charge HoS so as to limit the ability of the army to charge. I see this list being screened quite a bit even by units that may want to fight so that your DP returns are two turns removed. I think with this sort of set up you need to be able to get on the objectives very early and force the opponent to fight you off them. With that in mind what changes would you make?

I've figured out the problem with your position. You have a knowledge gap, it doesn't seem you know what most shooting units do in terms of damage in an army. Which follows because I don't think most people actually understand how much unsaved damage armies have to deal with during the course of an average game. For 300 points in CoS army 20 Freeguild Crossbows and a general put out 11.1 unsaved damage against a 4+ save target, at 29" with 1 CP spent. For 280 20 Sentinels do 7.08 dmg at 36" with 1 spell cast, or 4.72 dmg without the spell cast. In the bracket I will put 2 units of 10 Sentinels, with two spell casts (6.71/4.49) For 320 20 Sisters of the Watch do 10.56 dmg at 24" (If you take 2 units you actually gain 1 attack but for simplicity sake I'll do them as 1 unit) Against a Hero (4+ save) The crossbows do 8.4 unsaved damage for the same spend, and CP The Sentinels do 6.27 dmg with 1 spell cast or w/o 3.8 unsaved damage (5.95/3.71) Sisters of the Watch do 7.135 unsaved dmg MW, rend, no rend, damage is damage. You need to sort out your feelings, and deal with meat and bones of the naked mechanics MW on ranged units are mostly used so that ranged units have a predictable damage curve over the course of their game. It means you can take a unit of Sentinels or Blood Stalkers and have a reasonable expectation that regardless of the match up they will do some damage over the course of the game. Because here is what happens if you if you put that hero in cover. Crossbows: 5.54 unsaved dmg Senintels: 6.27 Dmg with spell, 3.54 dmg w/o (5.95/3.46) Sisters of the Watch 6.44 dmg Do you notice how swingy the the Crossbows are? They go from being the best unit to the worst unit. So here is your interactivity, put your heroes in cover, and dispel the spells you think harm your ability to win the battleplan the most. People are getting freakout by super fring corner cases and wind-up merchants, the reality is that there is no problem and people are getting swept away by their feelings. If we believe that combined arms strategies have a place in the game then shooting has to be able to carry its weight in the game that we actually play not the game inside people's heads. In WHFB plink shooting had a place, the game was about manipulating your opponents movement with fast cheap units, units of 5 or 10 wounds with lowish Leadership and poor saves. In that context 10 shots, 4+/4+ no armour modifier could play a role. Kill two warhounds and there was a very good chance they would run away. But, even that became points less when units like Dark Riders showed up with 4+ saves and High Leadership. The way you and seeming the people in this camp want to place shooting into AoS doesn't exist. It would be better if you aligned your expectations with the reality of the game we play and this idea of NPE could be used to focus on more relevant problems. Things like factions which can't effectively play a range of battleplans, due to no flexibility in movement, and deployment or an inability to kill models and take objectives. Your intent is in the right place but your analysis is flawed. If your hypothesis was correct you would see Spike type players maxing out on shooting. What is happening is the opposite, even in the most egregious examples of "NPE" Sentinels are being maxed at 20/30 in a list by some of the most competitive and skilled players in the community. Because they know what I've been trying to communicate to you, Battleplans are won by movement and combat, full stop. Factions with reasonable shooting add them in to improve the delivery and reliability of their combat units, not to deal the damage that wins the game. So unless you are going to change the argument to that having shooting makes being your combat too effective, but in that case it would show up in the winrate, and without adjusting for player skill it seems the factions with these shooting units and without shooting units are equally distributed across tiers. There are only two factions that fit into this narrative that represent with over a 50% winrate. Seraphon, and DoT, neither are winning games because of their shooting. They win games because they have shooting units they can drop on an objective that either obliterate the holding unit, or also have a lot of hard to remove bodies themselves.

I 100% agree that some section of the player base feels shooting is a NPE. That doesn't mean necessarily it is bad for the game or balance. And, I would say that the Warhammer Weekly survey actually really points to players feeling a lack of agency. But, I would temper that feeling with players not being willing to engage fully with their choices in the game for any number of reasons. To me it said people don't align their expectation with their preferences.

I maybe have combined two posters, apologies. Most support heroes are irrelevant, Id say only about 2% of foot heroes are relevant in the game. Most the those heroes fall into the two camps I've described a) tough and resistant to most shooting (The Warchanters, Chaos Lords, etc) or cheap and very impactful (skink priests). There are some that sit somewhere in between like Hags which have some durability, and are very impactful. Remember Look out Sir is a placement rule, you get -1 to hit for being near friendly models, so we already have a screening rule. Yes Shooting has less risk, but remember crucially they don't take board space, you would be more correct if the game was about killing models. But, its not. The game is about killing specific models in specific places and taking control of those places. Shooting units don't do that. They at the very best can hold the position they are deployed near against the most undetermined attacker. If you teleport 5 Ard Boyz you should kill 8 Sentinels in one round of combat, they are horrible at objective control. I generally include Iron Skull Boyz just for this task. I think generally we need to take a more expanded view of what interaction actually means. It can't be limited to rolling dice at each other and putting up screens. Think about it this way. Shooting without extreme mobility is only truly capable of doing damage. When has there been an army which has dominated AoS solely on its ability to do overwhelming amounts of damage (assuming shooting can even be shown to do that much damage). Its pretty clear that Sentinels even spammed don't do that much damage, so what units are we talking about here? I would say we are already there. There isn't an example of a shooting unit that does 5 wounds to a single model with any sort of save (That people will include in an army) for equal or less points than those heroes cost. I think the closest example is actually the Mortek Crawler and its 200 points, and a hero of its own to get close to being reliable at killing cheap heroes. A warchanter on a piece of terrain is basically not going to die to a Crawler, and has like a 50/50 to survive against 20 Sentinels, I'm not even certain an Ironclad can just remove one without some serious effort. Basically what I am saying is that it feels like there is a problem, but there hasn't been an actual example of where these things are true. I play or have played a lot of factions and I can't think of an example of a model I'm afraid to field because I might play against shooting. That is the risk reward system built into highly synergistic army builds and I think that is a good tension to have and I believe it is well balanced at the moment. It is my belief that there is a clash of playstyles and preferences happening in this discussion which is being made totally absent from the core objective of the actual battleplans.

And the Johnny list as promised. Godseekers KoS - 340 Sinistrous hand Speed-Chaser Enrapturing Circlet Progeny of Damnation KoS - 340 Sinistrous hand 5 Slickblade Seekers - 200 5 Slickblade Seekers - 200 5 Blissbarb Seekers - 180 5 Blissbarb Seekers - 180 Seeker Chariot - 130 Seeker Chariot - 130 Seeker Chariot - 130 Seeker Cavaclade - 140 Basically the idea is pin as much stuff in as possible with 6" pile-ins, using the 2" reach on the Slickblades to do some moderate dmg, without taking much back yourself, and doing moderate damage with the Blissbarbs around the table particularly to heroes. Seeker Chariots are good a blocking and with retreat and charge can get around the board quite well. But you need to lock down units with the no retreat from the general and locus no pile-in no retreat, denying the enemy pile-ins and grinding away until you can summon, expendable daemonettes to charge and finish units off. But, the real strength is pinning units in place. I think it is a really rewarding Johnny list, that is low enough drops to be competitive. But I anticipate the most seen list will be some honed version of the first one I posted.

To build on what I said earlier, here is what I imagine the archtype of a competitive Timmy build would be. Glutos - 400 KoS - 340 Bladebringer on seeker - 190 Bladebringer on Seeker - 190 6 Fiends - 360 20 Daemonettes - 220 11 Blissbarb - 160 11 Blissbarb - 160 Fomoroid Crusher Supreme Sybarites Geminids - 60 The ability to heal your heroes in the hero phase after earning depravity off of them with the fomoroid using the footprint of the fane seems like fane seems like a decent engine. You could easily gain 4+ Depravity in your hero phase. He also has a shooting attack that can do some damage in the mid to late game. You will want to position your fane pretty aggressively though. Basically it is designed around getting glutos and the 6 fiends into the the opponents army pinning them in with -2 to hit, and -1 to wound on the fiends, and then retreat and charging with the bladebringers, healing them up as you go along. Glutos should be able to keep the fiends pretty healed up. I think putting no retreat on the KoS will be useful in a Godseeker build, but in invaders obviously it will be the +1 wound artefact or Rod of misrule. There is a bit of a choice to be made between the fly spell and the heal spell on the KoS, but the blade bringers can either go Hero phase ranged dmg or heal spell. Imo Glutos should be spamming Judgement of Excess as the horde spell, as the Bladebringers have other more useful spells then Hysterical Frenzy. I would consider going Lurid Haze even if just for the CMD ability to put Glutos on a 2+, CP generation, and the ability to deploy the bladebringers up the field Daemonettes are really just a screen and early DP generation. Real daemonettes get summoned in to play for board control. edit** you can also take Daemon Princes instead of the Bladebringers but you lose locus

You used the word investment, and set that as a metric for discussion so don't move the goalposts. And, no its not vastly more important for a few reasons. model count is how you win the game, having more models that you can move and put on objectives is the primary concern of the game Most good armies actually don't rely on support heroes Those that do use support heroes have extremely tough ones( Warchanters for example of 6 wounds and 4+ save for 110 points), or have extremely high utility paired with a low price or consistent durability(Hags and Skink heroes) I can't think of a hero that is actually vulnerable to over 200% the points of Sentinels if I'm honest, I suppose Chaos Sorcerer Lords Also you don't want to live in a game where support heroes are invulnerable to dmg most of us have a lot of experience in list design from WHFB its not a space we enjoyed. But, lets talk about how you protect characters from melee. It is almost never by making them resistant to actually attacks or dmg, it is by putting units in the way. Now if you look at that literally its not comparable to how you would play against shooting. When you abstract it out though it changes how you see the game. Putting units in the way is about changing the threat profile of the pieces on the board. Here is how you stop people targeting your heroes assuming they are key to your plans. You put pressure on their armies ability to win the game. Meaning you aggressively target their non-shooting units, and make them move their shooting units in ways they don't want to. Now they have to choose do they shoot your heroes, thin your lines, or stop you from killing their own objective scoring models. 80 Sentinels puts out about 25 dmg in the controlling players turn total (1120 pts), you can manage that even if you don't enjoy taking it. 10 Ard boys fyi with a warchanted and a teleport put out 12 dmg against a 4+ save unit (and 25 against a 5+ save unit) for a total of 420 pts, with significantly fewer points of failure fyi. Its difficult to compare across factions, but I would start by saying that OBR are significantly more resistant to deathball synergies than LRL so the need to be able to kill support pieces isn't as much of need. But, They are still quite excellent at it, the ordinary Crawler is hitting heroes on a 2+ with 4 attacks for 40" away. It does need Line of Sight though and for 200 points with the obligatory hero will kill a 6 would hero on a 4+ pretty regularly. I think its a reasonable situtation, crawlers are more swingy then the 80 points more worth of Sentinels when it comes to targetting heroes. On the other hand 20 sentinels will never do 20 dmg, or break coherency. Also remember that a crawler on a slight above average roll 8 on a 2d6 can slay a 5 wound hero form 40" away. I think people need to just accept that all damage is damage and not get so triggered by MWs.

The bolded is just not true at all, and needs to stop being repeated. It takes 280 points of Sentinels to put out the dmg needed to kill a 5 wound hero using only their own stats and abilities. 9 shots 3 hits, causing 3 MWs for 140 points. People are out here acting like Sentinels have 2-3 shots a model.

If there is one thing GW does consitently well is give factions an identity. The reality is that sometimes it doesn't hit the right cord with people who want to buy those models. Could it be better and clearer? Yeah 100%, this book is not clear on what you need to be doing to be successful. Take for example Depravity and summoning. You probably only need to summon twice with this army, right after you engage, and again in the clean up turns. You probably want some extra to summon an emergency KoS though. But, as most gamers do we look to maximize the effects of any rule we are given (not to say that is wrong), but there isn't very good sign posting. @Feii What you are describing is an expectation problem, not a rules problem, lets be careful not to conflate the two. S2D are a perfect example of this, I still think the 2 best lists in that book haven't been used in the mainstream yet. But those list are so different from what the average S2D player would imagine that they basically do not exist even though the rules for it are there. You bring up a good point with player psychology. I think its reasonable to say that most people on these sorts of platforms are Timmy/Spike Hybrids, and the most vocal tend towards the Spike side not the Timmy side. Spike can't stand the idea of losing when he believes he should have won and looks outward. Personally I'm a Johnny/Spike, I enjoy winning my way, but its honed to the point where I expect to win 85%+ of my matches, and am unhappy with myself when I lose, and look inward. This HoS book is a horrible ruleset for a Timmy/Spike; though there is a list for that profile which I'll post in a bit. Because this faction seems to rely on adhering so close to an esoteric playstyle to be successful, if you can't pull it off its not checking either box. It's not impressive, loud and fun, nor is it a consistent winner because the skill cap is so high. This is great news if you are a Johnny or tend more strongly towards your johnny side in a hybrid, as you are going to be playing the game in a way that is very off meta. If you think you are a Spike or are positively correlated with Spike you should run, and just wait for the next shiny models to catch your eye. This book will make you extremely unhappy, just leave it alone.

AoS by design has as few restrictions of players actions as possible, so general changes to shooting are unlikely. That being said there are no armies which rely on shooting to win the game, nor is it a solid general strategy. If that was the case CoS would be the undisputed and statistically obvious dominating faction in the game. No army can put out the ranged power that CoS can, period. LRL isn't one of them statistically regardless of how people feel about Sunmetal weapons. People are acting like LRL are putting out monstrous and unseen levels of dmg, my original concern about LRL was that as an army their dmg arch was too low! Its difficult to balance for all levels of gameplay, because 80 Sentinels (Keep in mind 80 sentinels cannot include Teclis) don't worry a competitive player the second time they see it, its just not good enough at most missions. The problem really isn't "shooting", per se. The real problem is the extreme generosity and disparity in the spread of that generosity some factions possess. The object of this generosity is maneuverability. Ranged attacks are a poor substitute for being highly mobile, the factions that consistently do well are one that are (subjectively)highly mobile. This has been true since the original GHB. The Battleplans are all a race, to hold a position other than the place you started before but at least longer than your opponent. Killing your opponents models and suffering as little damage yourself can go some way to helping keep them off objectives but it doesn't get you onto the objectives yourself. Mobility+Shooting now there is a challenge. Extreme Mobility alone can win the game, HoS are perfect use case of this. No one would have cared about HoS, locus and depravity if they were a Mv4 faction, without the ability to apply those rules where they want and need them they are useless in the game. I think the Fly High rule on KO vessels was a mistake, it allows for too perfect a game plan. I think KO have bad match ups, I also think there is game play against them. I just think it creates too wide a gap between the type of game most people in this hobby are capable of playing and what a person of average intelligence can do after some practice with KO. Also I think the book is almost completely unaffected by its absence, from the perspective of being able to fully enagage in the game. I think Skinks are a similar problem, but far less difficult to deal with. Dealing with skinks just takes some preparation and diversity in your armylist. I think most people think about AoS the way Ironjawz play, and prefer the game to be like that. Personally I would find that shallow and constraining and prefer the clash of personality we currently have, but need to keep our eye on how disparate we let mobility get faction to faction.

So. I've spent the weekend thinking, reading and listening to various podcasters. Here are my thoughts on this episode of the roulette wheel that is battletombs. I think the media on this release was horrible, which didn't help set the expectations of customers and reviewers. I think besides the strong/weak discussion there is a question of accessibility. I don't think the HoS book is very accessible. There is a mappable playstyle, it's just hidden beneath layers of units which don't seem well suited but it's there. The book is going to be contentious for a long time similar to LRL there are going to be some players who do quite well and many who do quite poorly. Rob @ HWG said on stream they are worse Ironjawz. And, he is 100% correct if you play this army like am army that wins the game by choosing targets and charging. It will be quite poor for you: the units just aren't packing an IJ level of punch or the level of combat tricks you would need to pull that off. The faction is a movement heavy army which will require a lot of delicate precision(lol) to take advantage of. Now I can completely understand that isn't what a lot of players wanted, nor the experience they enjoy or are even capable of pulling off. But, it seems that is what GW think HoS should be doing. I'll post a proof of concept list shortly but I just wanted to get some thoughts down first.

Often it seems like people have no experience or limited with WHFB, and thus don't know why some of the things they think are unfair or NPE exist in AoS and why they are good here.

How many dice are these units rolling?

It looks like the Allegiance abilities are mostly forgettable, once people play a few games I think it will be clear that summoning and winning the objective game aren't necessarily correlated. I think the primary gain is having the ability to put down 20 daemonettes turn 4/5 to turn a match. It sounds like its the end of the movement phase as well so the masque has seen a bump in utility. I still think Marauders will be a quality unit for the faction, Glutos looks beastly and a must have. Sigvald less so, seems to be in the Eltharion place as in the model you hate to not include, but is probably ok if you do take him. The seekers look tanky I think this book will provide a good platform to improve my initial HoS build from summer 2019, so I'm happy if the points are decent.

I dunno if it's a language thing but you could take a little bit off the top regarding your aggression mate. Anyway for the most part TTS is fine, it replicates some aspects better than. Other aspects and it's a good tool for learning competitive AoS as you can undo. It doesn't have the feel though, and pile-ins aren't necessarily better. TTS does eliminate the cost and painting factor which is probably behind the over representation of Archaon.

If that's the case you should easily be able to find an example we can discuss. You're argument is that the game is populated with list and factions which can give away the turn reliably, force through the double and win the game with little or no risk, for the reasons you are saying. Surely for such a strong assertion you can find a single list that satisfies this argument?

Contrast red is fine, but you have to highlight anyway to get a quality look, so it's really a question of what you are going to undercoat with I think.

If people aren't chucking all their ranged attacks at cathallers they get what they deserve. They are such an integral piece even without goading arrogance. It will be interesting to see if we get any heroes that change battleline to put some strategic pressure on this default choice.

So KO, DoT and LRL are why you think the core rules need to change? Can you copy paste examples please.

I think it would make more sense if you could show an army list or something that takes advantage of what you are describing.

The bolded doesn't make sense. There is no double turn without both players having played a turn. How are getting alphaed if you are getting double turned? Generally the opposite is true fyi alpha top of 1 and loses are strongly correlated.