Saxon
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Posts posted by Saxon
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4 minutes ago, Marcvs said:
If you are hobby oriented or just don't play in tournaments, you will most likely never play against those lists anyway so no need to feel pressured to play "the broken stuff out there".
That is entirely dependent on your gaming group though. Even if you dont play tournaments there's no guarantee you won't have regular opponents who create very optimised lists. Sometimes it's not even on purpose. Some models people like are just really good compared to others.
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4 minutes ago, Marcvs said:
You say that "winning tournaments" is not the problem, but then base you assessment on "lists popping up on the webstites tracking tournaments".
If winning tournaments is not the problem, what's stopping you from playing whatever list you want? Of course, but this has been said in every topic, you should have a clear communication with your opponent to be on the same page (i.e. we're not playing competitive lists, we're playing funny lists, fluffly lists etc)
Well only because I suggested cities weren't much better since the battletome came out and I think it was actually you who linked me to tournament lists. Carried from there as a precedent. Perhaps I expected too much for my free people in particular from a book covering several factions in one hit?
Simple answer to what you're asking is because its still nice to win every now and then without spending hours math-hammering and this social contract in gaming is idealism. The frequent issue i have is that I create a list based on models I like and try to incorporate a diverse one. If my opponent just happens to love models that happen to actually have good synergy and be extremely good too, isn't it unreasonable to expect them to do things differently? My group is also 50% waac players which complicates it further.
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2 minutes ago, Marcvs said:
Here you are changing the definition of the problem. If the problem is "all the same unit", defensive and offensive eels by definition do not fit into it, just as a list with both pistoliers and outriders, or a list of horrors and flamers (exceedingly rare to see only horrors)
The fact that some units emerge as the best in their role is intrinsic in list/deck building games. You can try as much as you want to balance them but if two units end up (to simplify) costing 100 pts, the one with a 101% return will always be taken over the one with 100% return in the high competitive end of the game. To counter this you can try to have ALL units perfectly balanced, which of course risks eliminating rules diversity and is likely doomed to fail because there are a lot of moving parts in AoS with allegiances/sub-allegiances/buffs/battleplans. Or, you can try and force players to include more roles in the army, which is arguably done better by 40k at this time (both because of army building restrictions and secondary objectives). This IMHO would require greatly expanding (or merging) quite a lot of armies so it's not a viable short term solution.
I think I actually agree with the part about the massive amount of moving parts in AOS. Its an extremely complex game compared to other systems available. Its a fine balance between boringly the same and convoluted and tedious.
I dont really like 40k but the primary/secondary objectives is a step forward for GW.
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18 minutes ago, whispersofblood said:
That is the nature of any game where you select the pieces a player can take.
But also, you are wrong about what is winning events. And, you ignore anything not winning events as not competitve. If a list with a decentish player can go 4-1 it's competitive, even 3-2 is a 60% win rate.
CoS have at least 3 builds in the 4-1 range; pistoliers, PG and hammerhal combat builds
OBR: Basically every warscroll in the faction has shown up in competitive play globally.
IDK: turtles and sharks are showing up in lists post Broken Realms, even zero eel lists have been played. I've seen Namarti builds being put into production as well so they will start showing up.
Well of course because I'm not talking about what's winning events, that tends to change every time a new release comes out. If you restrict your view of what is competitve to what wins tournaments specifically, the range gets even smaller. I dont think I ever mentioned winning them specifically. I also never mentioned that not winning a tournament made something uncompetitive?
Diversity is good. Singular builds are bad. Given the volume of units available to cities of sigmar, the common lists popping up on the websites tracking tournaments and competitive play isn't as large as i would expect it to be.
As far as limited range coming up across many gaming systems, probably true.
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3 minutes ago, Marcvs said:
Phoenix guard spam, irondrakes + bridge, tempest eye with kharadron units, and these are just the lists I have actualy witnessed in tournaments I have myself played on TTS or in real life -and real world tournaments are almost nonexistent at the moment. There aren't many books with a larger number of viable "decently competitive" lists -apart from the very top ones of course. I don't know much about those lists using "sigmarine" support heroes, though of course the occasional knight azyros or knight incantor pops out here and there.
Your definition of spamming is "all non-leader non-monsters" are the same unit. Let's use this although of course you are easily excluding half the units in a list with this definition. So what are the competitive lists that are doing well using this format? Even IDK do not fit the description right now as both defensive and offensive eels are used, while sharks and turtles are having a resurgence thanks to broken realms. The only strong list commonly seen fitting that description is Fyreslayers with HB, then we could add *some* OBR lists with only mortek guards (but that's because your definition excludes the heavy presence of crawlers) and some seraphon lists only have skinks. So we are doing... fine-ish?
Isnt that a problem when there are so many units available? So much diversity to make it seem like several units in cities are actually useful.
Armies doing this well:
-cities spamming pistolliers/outriders
-mortek
-eels be they offensive or defensive ones.
-grimghast spam in nighthaunt.
-horrors in tzeentch
I exclude fyreslayers due to their tiny range. OBR are similar but mortek guard in big blocks is a boring list to fight.
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2 hours ago, Marcvs said:
Sorry but again, Cities has several builds that can do well in competitive environment and this is visible in the results of the few tournaments happening in real life https://www.warhammer-community.com/2020/10/22/metawatch-warhammer-age-of-sigmar-1-list-building-with-dan-street/ as well as on TTS. Sure enough, it's not among the "top tier" factions and it does not have one "killer list" and, being a huge book, it is difficult to master so that many casual builds will end up feeling very weak for lack of synergies.
As for the "spamming units seems to be the way": what is your basis for this conclusion? Where do you see this prevalence of spammy lists? Also, what is your definition of "spamming"?
Several as in 2 or 3 max with 1 being phoenix guard heavy and the other two using sigmarine support heroes? My difficulty was having a singular faction (freeguild), in order to have a somewhat decent list i had to bring in models from other armies. On its own, freeguild even with the update are low tier.
As for spamming, for me it's running singular units outside heroes and monsters. Remember when running blocks of grimghast reapers was a thing when nighthaunt weren't bad? These days I see eel only armies in IDK. No thralls.
To me it indicates that warscrolls need to be more balanced to give these units a purpose. I dont get why GW wouldn't address this to ensure their full range sells well.
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13 hours ago, Marcvs said:
I don't think that asking for an increase in the minimum requirement of battlelines does what you think it does. As of today the most "spammy" part of armies are often battlelines. In fact, quite a few of the strongest armies are strong because they have good options for battlelines and can just spam them: skinks in Seraphon, pink horrors in Tzeentch, eels in Idoneth, hearthguard berzerkers in Fyreslayers, mortek guards in OBR and so on. You might not like playing against minumum battleline but how do you like playing against 3x20 hearthguard berzerkers? or 3x40 skinks, 27 eels and so on?
Take also into account that rules *already* encourage you to invest in your battlelines, due to some battleplans having bonuses for them (Shifting objectives) or only allowing battleline to score (The Better Part of Valour), while NO battlelplan gives bonuses to all other units apart from Leaders and Monsters.
Including forced "slots" in AoS might seem like a good idea to import from 40k, but those proposing it should take into account what it would do to armies which already have a very limited roster: you might improve "internal" diversity (Fyreslayers must now take bersekers AND vulkite AND auric guards) while destroying the "external" one (every Fyreslayers army is now the same combination of units for lack of options in differnt slots).
Whilst i agree it limits it, doesn't this suggest a lack of diversity in GW in general. Instead of throwing out new armies maybe they need to improve the units available to existing ones first and make warscrolls more balanced for underused units.
Like does any play ever use glaivewraith stalkers? They're the most pointless model in AOS with the coolest lore....
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12 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:
There are a lot of points that could be made here.
I think I could agree that Nagash and 2x5 wolves at 1000 is pushing the boundaries of what an acceptable list should look like. But it's important to note that this list is not exactly mechanically encouraged. It really sucks at playing the objective game, and everything in the LoN book encourages taking a few big units over multiple small ones. The appeal of that list (I suspect, I came back to the game just after LoN was dominant) is probably more that you can play it after painting just 11 models, as opposed to the usual 50 or so you need for a 1000 point LoN list. Arguably, what's wrong with this list is more that Direwolves are unconditional battleline than anything else.
As for Treelord spam, I think it's important to enableTimmys (players who like big, stompy monsters and doing flashy stuff on the table) to play the game in the way they want to. Again, it's not like those lists are mechanically any more encouraged than lists with a lot of different units. They are generally quite bad, as the rules stand at the moment.
Finally, I think that this is a good example for the point I was making earlier about awareness of the social contract of the game. On aspect of that is that in casual games, you should try to ensure that your opponent has a good time, too. I think that would definitely include not bringing these types of lists all the time, if you are able to. Although as a very enfrenchised player with a large model collection it's easy to forget how significant of a barrier putting a fully painted, diverse list on the table really is.
It was a very popular list because at 1000pts it was very difficult to beat with a lot of scenarios. Dogs ran at objectives, nagash murdered everything. I think they upped points on dogs so this list is no longer viable unless Nagash got a reduction which i don't know about. I brought it up because it was a niche example of how unit slots would stop nonsense lists like this.
The thing i find hard is when you see someone dropping one of those lists on the table, you're the bad guy for not wanting to play against it. It's legal so how can you be against it. Rather than upset the apple cart because 3/4 of the players i play regularly play min battle line lists with bulk monsters, i usually just humour them resulting in a boring game for me where i usually get stomped in 3 or 4 turns and then get accused of being a bad sport if i don't want a rematch. I don't play particularly competitively.
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3 hours ago, Popisdead said:
Nope. One of the best books they've done. A LOT of extensibility, a lot of warscrolls improved, units available across a lot of units. and they've made two new cities and incorporated even more options with DoK. There isn't a book with as many warscrolls.
I would be surprised to see anything hilariously outclassed. The book pre covid was placing quite well and since then it's been doing still well.
As a Wanderer player I'm happy with what the book offers in just TE and LC. So many list options, so many things to try.
Perhaps stop making sweeping judgements of doom and consider looking at why you aren't doing well with it.
The freeguild which i have is basically a minor stat improvement to hit for most units, yawn. The artefacts are meh, the battle traits are meh. You're also locked into the cities which really makes magic hard unless you go magic heavy and the wizards are woeful unless you bring sigmarines.
I like to use a diverse list which is easily punished in an AOS game these days where spamming units seems to be the way. I have a pistollier/outrider list with Demigryphs which goes alright. It's a bit boring to play though.
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This looks better than my win/loss/draw ratio spreadsheet 😛
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On 1/10/2021 at 9:24 PM, Neil Arthur Hotep said:
But if we get some mechanics that encourage more internally diverse lists, I would want it to happen through positive reinforcement, not additional restrictions. By restrictions I mean something like the old Warhammer Fantasy allotments of certain percentages of core, elite, rare and command units. I am quite happy that AoS at the moment does a lot to allow you to build whatever list you want (10 Steam Tanks? Sure, go for it!). I'd hate to see that go away. I would also not want the pendulum to swing too far the other way where we end up with mostly soup list on the table and everyone starts complainin that themed armies are unviable.
I really hate playing against armies that bring the absolute bare minimum battleline. I remember when it was all the rage to bring nagash and 2 units of 5 dogs to small games. Or minimum units of tree revenants and then Treelords and Durthu until the cows come home. Yawn.....
I do like the idea of slots to try and 'flesh out' armies to prevent 1) spam, 2) bland repetition 3) playing against monsters only.
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Just now, Marcvs said:
well, these are all very competitive tournaments -qualifiers for the French equivalent of the "Masters", so yeah, the filth is to be expected ^^"
Honestly I cant even deal with 15 blightkings 😁
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4 minutes ago, Marcvs said:
here (page 29) https://www.aosff.fr/sites/aosff/files/2020-10/Listes Coupe SE 3.pdf
and here (page 9) https://www.aosff.fr/sites/aosff/files/2020-10/ListesSUD-OUEST.pdf
you can find two Cities list that went 4-1. Both have no phoenix guard, the second has a bit of irondrakes but not the classic big block, and the first 2 knights azyros. This goes to show the flexibility of the book -though it must be said that both were piloted by excellent generals.
Interesting to see the heavy use of darkshards and outriders/pistolliers! Thanks.
Some of the other lists on those pages you linked are disgusting and the reason why I play casually. 50 blightkings 😬
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4 minutes ago, Marcvs said:
I don't know about your local meta and your list / playstyle, but Cities of Sigmar certainly has some solid "mid-to-high tables" builds (generally focused ardound soulscream bridge + irondrakes and/or phoenix guards), though it is certainly a complex book to master.
It's not a huge dataset but here in France Cities did pretty well in the handful of tournaments which happened in between lockdowns (three events, 5 games, 2 dayers, competitive oriented), ending with a 73% win rate across 3 armies and 15 games -though they never did better than 4-1. Also in France, in a big TTS event with a pool phase + swiss tournament finals, Cities had a 61% win rate, with 6 armies and 20 games. A Cities player also ultimately won the event, going 3-0 in the pool phase and 4-0 in the finals phase.
Cities also won a recent event on TTS (48 players, 3 games). This was a special event, which banned some strong factions (but, for instance, KO was still available), but still it was competitive oriented https://tabletop.to/hammertime-the-fat-middle/ladder
I would love to know how armies without phoenix guard and irondrakes do.... or armies that dont incorporate stormcast heroes.
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On 1/5/2021 at 12:57 AM, lare2 said:
You've got Naggy and Arkhan which would lean towards Ossiarchs (OBR)... but this would pretty much negate every other model you own and you'd have to buy a lot more. OBR are probably the most competitive Death around though if you really wanna push down the competitive scene.
The other benefit is that they've been hit hard by the nerf stick so a lot of people are offloading their OBR so you might be able to get it on the cheap 😆
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1 hour ago, Popisdead said:
It's lauded as arguably one of the best books they've released with consistent performance across the board. If it isn't YOUR playstyle, maybe take a step away.
Sounds good. Find happiness and if you don't get this game, don't beat a dead horse.
Best books? According to everyone? OK.... It's as if rules have been quickly hashed together to mash the forgotten model ranges into a somewhat playable force. It's an improvement on the tome-less rules but it's not one of the best.
Sadly i have armies collecting dust because cities of sigmar vs. something like Orruc Warclans, OBR or Lumineth is hilariously outclassed. The only joy i get out of three of my armies these days is when we put our low tier armies up against each other.
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On 1/5/2021 at 3:00 AM, yukishiro1 said:
I agree AoS has a big lethality problem, but the trouble with toning down damage is that in a game where the winner is determined by how many objectives you can control each turn, without extreme lethality, games then just become about who can force one more model (or counts-as one more model) onto an objective than the other side.
GW has kind-of backed themselves into a corner here with the way scoring works. It needs to change to something more dynamic in order for lethality to be able to come down significantly.
Whilst not a big fan of how 40k plays (even the new edition), their secondary objectives seem pretty cool. In a game where the primary motive may seem impossible, you can give yourself a fighting chance by taking your secondary objectives and preventing your opponent from taking theirs.
I think it also diversifies the list building as well as the tactics as you're not solely focused on one thing. Definitely feels more dynamic and variable which I think is a positive thing.
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14 hours ago, Kadeton said:
For those of you who see power creep as a problem, what do you plan to do about it?
I now play different game systems more frequently.
GW won't ever change when their profits are so high so i don't give them my money. I play with what i have.
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Edit: Double Post
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I think the biggest issue AOS faces is the staggered nature of the army releases as well as the frequency of the releases to keep the hype going. Add this to the extremely high price point for a playable army and its a difficult situation to manage.
It would be hard to fit new rules which need to be both balanced and thematically appropriate into existing sets of rules. I think it has been frequently discussed on this forum that play testers are not given sufficient time to fully test out rules which results in some really offensive rules (Slaanesh, Petrifix, Tzeentch and KO to name a few). You also have non-game related factors such as marketing to think of. Whether true or not, it's not a big stretch to expect the marketing team to suggest a wow-factor rule or two to make the faction stand out.
Personally, I was defeated by how quickly my Legions of Nagash army went from relatively top tier to virtually unplayable within the time it took me to paint a mortarch and a hundred skeleton warriors/zombies. This is extremely discouraging given the very high price point for games workshop. You invest into an army with a reasonable expectation that it will be playable and gets stomped every game. I can see why a lot of people would leave the game if this happened.
I was sucked back in when cities of sigmar got a battletome but that tome seems like a half baked effort to shut people up like me who were vocally annoyed by some many WFB armies being neglected. One or two builds are playable but its not a particularly competitive tome unless you build deliberately offensive armies which isn't my play style.
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2 minutes ago, Evil Bob said:
I never stated a personal position on this nerf.
Again my points were
- GW is uneven with their rules balancing. Lazy game development one would expect from a monopoly.
- They can react to pressures. Deal with one problem while ignoring the broader systemic ones.
This “fun” talk falls under politics. The loudest people got their way. A book filled with mediocre faction options that can chill until the next release. I’ll cross my fingers for Null Myriad to get a decent magical resistance and not this 5+ nonsense.
GW rule making is lazy. I think its been argued to death on this forum.
Fun is subjective. But bottlenecking tactics to beat an army is just poor. My favourites:
--just tar pit them
- kill the heroes
- but they're slow!
Yawn. Its a shame because the mortem crawler is a really cool model.
GW will always have trouble when they stagger releases the way that they do. Hard to maintain balance when things change periodically instead of all at the same time.
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3 hours ago, Overread said:
I think part of the issue is that the best way to beat Ossiarchs is to go for distraction/delay/tarpit/avoidance tactics rather than a straight kill. Which is not intuitive to many gamers. With the +1 to every single models save in an army that already has generally very good saves. This shifted those tactics from desirable to essential whilst a straight killing match would favour ossiarchs very heavily.
This isn't to say that some models need/benefit/are not broken with a +1 to their save, but that the effect rolled out over the whole army was overpowered.
In the end since the chance we've seen more opening up of using other Ossiarch subfactions and those same counter tactics still work on the Ossiarchs. But you can also try to kill them too.
It's also extremely boring tactics to have to use every time you play a faction which for a time was extremely popular.....
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On 12/18/2020 at 10:16 PM, Santious said:
I agree 100% they completely destroyed the bonereapers, feels like just another death army when they are supposed to be super elite . And I also agree that its sad that GW nerfs things without doing much investigation only cause people get super salty, they make their new new fancy armies ridiculous to only nerf them first errata without much thought. So the 2020 general handbook was a slap in deaths face from making their elite army a joke to taking away our power of double or triple negation. Its death but now we just as fragile as everyone else without being really good at something else.
People got salty because the original rules were super potato but it made a lot of WAAC players buy a heap of models really fast haha. Triple negation is a terrible mechanic.
What it has done is make people think about tactics rather than running the same boring core list and murdering.
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On 12/18/2020 at 6:13 PM, Evil Bob said:
I just wish GW was more even handed with their nerfing. Serephon kept an option for easy free unit teleport. Lumineth have a crazy -1 To Hit ability and cheap mortal wound spamming archers. My thought on this is GW sometimes nerfs things to appease the loudest people.
Game balance is something they tend to save for poorly written rules or fixes from old battletombs when the next one comes out. Look at how many iterations SCE had to go through. They still need help because people who think they are playing an army of Sigmar’s chosen don’t feel it.
It's hard to argue that the nerf for Petrifix wasn't necessary. Whether or not they got the nerf right is another thing. The way Petrifix played originally was just unfun to come up against. You know it's bad when multiple Youtube channels have to put forward warnings on videos about the army.
AoS Power Creep
in Age of Sigmar Discussions
Posted · Edited by Saxon
I think you have made a very good point in this post i have been trying to make for several messy and unco-ordinated posts regarding my second problem and the difficulties I personally face in the game.
To expand on personal experience. My opponents (2 in particlar) love the optimisation side of things. They get joy out of a combo coming off. 1 of them is a terrible loser. I would expand the social contract to ensuring that both players get to play their style even if it means getting regularly stomped. I've played a specific nurgle list about 8 times with 3 different armies and im 0-8 against it!
I guess this is the gripe with GW. A lack of diversity can be punished due to under performing warscrolls and very specific requirements to obtain any reasonable synergy.