Joseph Mackay
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Posts posted by Joseph Mackay
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15 hours ago, Honk said:
Then I demand a discount Nagash 800 points for FEC… 👻
Nagash is just a placeholder until Ushoran The Carrion King returns
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On 12/23/2021 at 6:34 AM, PrimeElectrid said:
SCE did very well yes; but also have lost almost all their tools/ delivery mechanisms to get melee units into combat. Both can be true.
There is exactly one way of reliably boosting a charge in the Stormcast book: one thunderstrike unit per turn from 7” out of scions under 4w with an imperatant; assuming you aren’t playing Tooth and Nail. That’s it. No other sources of +x to charge exist. That’s a huge number of caveats. SCE start moving after teleport and GW nuked it to rapturous applause.
Meanwhile that same GW hand out a 3d6 charge aura with just a 12” clause to every single destruction unit, every turn, in armies that can really abuse it way more, like it’s no big deal. So yeah a little salty.
m4 paladins: can you help us get into combat? GW: no, you move or roll a 9+ unaided
m4 ardboys: can you help us get into combat? Gw: sure here’s a teleport and a hero phase move and move again and a 3d6 charge and a musician
With the exception of Ironjawz (apparently), Destruction as a whole is the weakest set of factions in the game, vs Stormcast who, arguably aren’t “great” (I disagree however) but always seem to have a few negative play experience tricks (Gavireals old command ability stacking to guarantee charges from deepstrike, Evocators and Sequitors being purposely undercosted to sell new models, to name a few). I main Bonesplitterz in AoS3, I have no sympathy for Stormcast and any nerfs they may receive or tricks they can’t do that others can
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1 hour ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:
It seems there is a general move away from mixed armies this edition. First with the removal of Grand Alliance allegiances and now with the changes to coalition rules for Chaos.
I get why GW is doing this. While it suck for people to have the option to play a mixed, lore friendly army taken away, it sucks even more when the best way to play a certain army is to mostly run models from a different army. Plus, it must be a nightmare to balance S2D and Beasts units across 5 or so extra factions.
Ultimately, what I think is overall worth criticizing here is the change in direction: One moment you can build mixed armies and are even encouraged to do so, the next they are more of a "I guess the option is there if you want it, but it's not going to be good" thing. AoS is a hobby where you expect longevity for your armies. This is the opposite of that.
I have personally stopped including coalition units in any of my lists except in the most minimal capacity. Even in Cities of Sigmar, I don't really feel like including Stormcast or other coalition units is really all that stable. It feels like you are just setting yourself up for your list to break when any of the inidividual armies or the core rules are updated the next time. If I built a Living City list that contained Sylvaneth and Stormcast, that list could potentially break with the next Cities, Sylvaneth or Stormcast tome, as well as any other rule updates such as new GHBs or I guess Battlescrolls now. That's just too much of a risk for me.
I was building a Grand Alliance Order army of Duardin just before AoS3 released…
I can *sort of* still do it via Cities Of Sigmar-Tempests Eye, but the restrictions mean how I wanted to do it doesn’t work anymore (for a start, Fyreslayers were supposed to be the majority of that army, or at least a 33% even split with the other Duardin)
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5 hours ago, Beliman said:
But how do we know that Gotrek is not OP? I mean, data shows only a fragment of the whole picture:
- KOs are doing right (not the best, not the worst armies). A few 5-0, some 4-1, but 80% of this lists had a Gotrek.
- The other lists that don't have Gotrek are struggling a lot more, but the data is so small that the numbers are just anecdotes.
The thing is, KOs have good numbers in competitive and Gotrek will not take so many 5-0 spots. That's the result that I can see for so many other armies that are using/abusing Gotrek. Some of this armies can't even kill a Giant by themself and Gotrek allows exactly that, giving a tool (in other words, A LOT OF DAMAGE) to armies that are in need of update, but data will say otherwise.
If the army using Gotrek is purely Duardin (Kharadron, Fyreslayers, of Disspossed/Cities) then it’s fine. Everyone else using him is an issue
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43 minutes ago, Zeblasky said:
To be fait about Blissarbs, they are a unit in a faction that has summons and can use those summons quite effectively at that, both for objective capping and opponent killing. Every unit in their roster costs around 25% more because of that, otherwise it would not be fair.
This. Slaanesh summoning is included in the points for every unit in that book
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4 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:
The most GW thing ever would be to release it on the 24th and break something fundamental about the game in the meantime, like last time when they allowed ward stacking...then go on vacation for two weeks.
This is 100% what I expect to happen
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20 hours ago, Geoffreyvt said:
Anyone had any interesting lists and battles with our big dragon friends? Seeing a lot of SDG out there, but few Krondys and Karazai...
I know their points are a bit steep with 600,but it should be possible to run a fun list with them, right?
First game I played after buying Krondys, I ran the following list. I won vs another Stormcast list
Allegiance: Stormcast Eternals
- Stormhost: Hammers of Sigmar
- Grand Strategy:
- Triumphs:
Leaders
Krondys, Son of Dracothion (600)
Lord-Celestant on Stardrake (500)
- Stormbound Blade
Lord-Celestant on Dracoth (215)
- Stormstrike Glaive & Thundershield
Battleline
2 x Dracothian Guard Desolators (220)
2 x Dracothian Guard Fulminators (230)
2 x Dracothian Guard Tempestors (220)
Total: 1985 / 2000
Reinforced Units: 0 / 4
Allies: 0 / 400
Wounds: 79
Drops: 6
as I don’t have the battletome, I largely ignored any allegiance abilities etc except for Blaze Of Glory
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Things I would like to happen:
-Spirit Of Gorkamorka applies to all melee attacks - no minimum models requirement (I don’t necessarily agree with the suggestion of applying to shooting as well, but I kind of have a bias against AoS shooting in general so anything that buffs shooting will never get my approval - Unleash Hell was the WORST change to AoS)
-Big Stabbas get their run and charge ability back
-some sort of anti-monster stuff (immune to Monstrous Rampage, +1 to hit/damage or something vs monsters, extra attacks if they kill monsters, something like that)
-Kruleboyz and Ironjawz can be taken as Coalition Units. I wanted to supplement Bonesplitterz with the monsters from Kruleboyz but Big Waaagh is the only way to do it now and I don’t want to lose the Bonesplitterz stuff.
-points drops of 10-30pts for all the units. Heroes are probably fine though
-Wardok gets the Priest keyword back. Dok have Wizard-Priest units so there’s no reason why we had to lose our one-
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38 minutes ago, Neverchosen said:
I feel it was odd that Kroak did not have a generic Slann build in his box... 🤔
he does..you just need the opponent’s consent due to the larger base size and silhouette 😛
(I built my Kroak with the mask, and plan to buy a second one for a generic Slann using the maskless face and removing most of the swirly magical bits around him)
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3 hours ago, Ganigumo said:
Hopefully those rumors aren't true 🥶. We need to get the battletome machine rolling, there's a bunch of factions in desperate need of an update.
Please no, we don’t need another AoS 2/40K 8th assault of rush job books with no models (except spells/terrain/a hero)
we need proper releases for most of the armies this time: Fyreslayers, Seraphon, Skaven, Beasts etc all need new/updated/more models
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21 minutes ago, Overread said:
Yes and no.
Lets say the threshold for "fast selling" is 5 kits in stock in their warehouse. If GW only ever prints 6 of a specific kit then it only takes one sale for it to enter the "fast selling" category. If they only sell 1 a week then its going to appear in the "fast selling" list for quite a long time because they are unlikely to feel pressure to print many more even once they are down to 2 copies because they are only selling at a very slow rate of 1 a week.
Fast Selling mostly came around because GW lost the ability to just bump things up the printing list at a whim. In the past if something suddenly became popular (a rule update, a bit of marketing etc...) GW could quickly just shift the production line around and bump the popular thing up and get it out into the market fairly quickly, certainly in the UK with some lag for overseas. Today everything is snarled up so things might run out of stock and stay out of stock for a while, even in the UK market. So the fast selling is more of a "get this now because it might vanish for a few weeks" - and its more applicable overseas where those markets have to wait for shipments so there can be weeks/months of lag right now.
To add on to this, for what it’s worth.
by the time the Seraphon battletome was released, the Stegadon kit had been ‘temporarily out of stock’ in New Zealand for almost a year (this was before covid was a thing). It STILL hasn’t come back in stock since, except for the 5~ copies of the Broken Realms box the whole country received
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3 hours ago, readercolin said:
Ehh, most factions take some time at the bottom of the barrel.
Kharadron Overlords were one of the top armies in 2.0 because they had a ton of damage and a ton of ways to deliver it. They are now one of the worst armies available, because their damage is done via rend -1 with a sprinkling of rend -2, and save stacking basically laughs in their face. Do we see anyone outside of KO players shedding a tear for how their army plays now that they have effectively been nerfed out of the game?
Slannesh was one of the the top armies for a while and at one point reached nearly a 70% winrate in competitive. Now they are bottom of the barrel because their new book nerfed them to heck and back. Do we see non-slannesh players shedding any tears for them now that they have fallen off the face of the earth?
Flesh Eater Courts were the terror of the battlefields for quite some time, and were kings in the "strikes first" meta that existed for a while. Then they got nerfed, and new books came out that had strategies that countered FEC, and went from top tier to the lower end of the mid tier. And is anyone shedding any tears for FEC players?
Fyerslayers were a terror running around with 3 blocks of 20 hearthguard berzerkers. Now they can run a maximum of 2 blocks of 15... leaving them with another 6 blocks of 5 that they can't reinforce because of the reinforcements limit. They also used to stack saves with various aura effects, but while previously they could get to a 3+, now they are capped at a 4+ because their base save is a 5+. The entire playstyle got taken out back and shot... but I am not seeing anyone shedding tears for them outside of the fyreslayers threads.
I could keep going on with more examples. What happened to Cities of Sigmar with the irondrake bridges of doom? What happened to the 6 monster Beastclaw Raiders lists? What happened to the seraphon players who bought into Saurus? What happened to the poor souls who were doing good with Bonesplittaz? How about the people that went deep on Skyfires when they were good? How about the entirety of Ossiarch Bonereapers, who can't use any of the nifty new features that came out with 3.0 because they don't use command points, but were terrors until petrifex elite got nerfed?
I would advise you to stop focusing how how it is affecting your one army. Things change over time, and Stormcast will get a few months to podium before falling back into obscurity like most armies. Yes, there are a few that come out and never amount to anything (looking at you beasts of chaos), but anything that ends up at the top of the pile for a while inevitably gets that final nerf that pushes them over the edge into the dumpster. Yes, it will be nice if after they are done nerfing, Stormcast still have a few lists that can reliably go 3-2, but if we're honest, that is about the power level that most armies should be at.
No one sheds a tear when oppressive or overpowered armies are nerfed
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8 hours ago, Naem said:
But wouldn't the better way to fix this giving the big centerpiece modells some kind of protection against these kinds of attacks maybe? Maybe better artefacts or some special skills rather than nerfing the fun units of other armies which become also less viable against everything by the nerf.
No, because this just makes those models impossible to deal with for the armies that don’t have Longstrike Raptor or Fulminator class units (like Bonesplitterz maybe)
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10 hours ago, EntMan said:
Battle Mages in particular but also various Freeguild seem to show up quite frequently on the "selling fast" tab on the webstore, for what it's worth.
I think this is a stock levels thing with the webstore. The older kits, they probably keep less of them in stock these days, and when stock levels hit a certain amount the webstore classes them as ‘selling fast’ or things like that. So naturally the older kits with less stock on hand, will hit those points faster than newer kits with heaps of stock
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16 hours ago, Enoby said:
Also, no matter how much you don't like a book, don't call for someone to be fired over it. There are so many reasons the book could have turned out like it did, including trying to fix the issues of the previous book (which came from a lot of community pressure).
Unless we’re talking about Robin Crudance. how the hell he still has a job there, let alone got promoted to head rules writer for 40K, after the abomination that was his 5th edition Tyranids codex, I will never understand
(context: in a White Dwarf article, I don’t remember which one nowadays, he expressed hatred against Tyranids killing his Imperial Guard in games. He wrote the 5th edition codex with a bias against them)
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On 11/11/2021 at 9:57 AM, Enoby said:
Unfortunately I think it's just the case that Xenos hardly sell as well as Space Marines. While it was ridiculously priced, Blood of the Phoenix stuck around for ages. In addition, the Ork box didn't sell out too quickly (nor did the limited edition book). It's a vicious cycle - not just about a lack of model support, but having the fanbase behind it not being as large or invested.
I don’t like this narrative because it’s a self fulfilling prophecy that GW caused themselves. Space Marines, and Imperium in general, receive a much larger share of releases throughout the year than all Xenos and Chaos releases combined, so of course they’re going to have higher sales. People get sick of waiting and leave, or go and play one of the few factions GW actually seem to care about supporting.
Blood Of The Phoenix is very concerning because GW don’t seem to do any sort of market research into why something sold badly, all they care about is that it didn’t sell very well. I fear GW will turn that into a “the fans don’t want new plastic aspect warriors” narrative, when the truth was that box was way above the price point of every other dual army box at that point ($350nz vs $495nz), and it was a terrible box for exiting players as most Eldar players would already have the older stuff. The pairing of Eldar vs Dark Eldar was a poor choice in my opinion too, as most Eldar fans tend to like one and not the other, and due to the older models in the box it was harder to sell the half you didn’t want
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On 11/11/2021 at 9:02 AM, The Red King said:
Sometimes I legitimately wonder if GW has seen the 3rd party xenos releases and decided it's not worth trying to catch up so please just play space marines.
I hope the rumored eldar range refresh hits early next year and makes this comment age like milk.
I fear this is why Seraphon haven’t been updated properly. Stuff like the Lost Kingdom miniatures puts the GW stuff (pre-2013 at least) to shame, and someone decided “well, so many people bought their stuff already so we just won’t bother”
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1 hour ago, ChaosUndivided said:
The Slaughterborn Warcry guy would make an awesome replacement for marauders but he sure looks like he's on a 32mm base which doesn't bode well.
Even assuming they are a marauder replacement going from 25mm to 32mm base is huge nerf. It seems very unlikely due to all the previous cultist being on various size bases and odd model count that this one will be different.
Which is frustrating because it leaves marauders with lil to no design space left. So either they look almost identical to this guy but are not this warband or they are squatted.
Bloodreavers and Kariac Acolytes are on 32mm and they’re basically god marked Marauders. I think expecting updated Marauders to remain on 25mm is just setting yourself up for disappointment and hoping for something you KNOW isn’t happening. If the Warcry stuff didn’t replace Marauders then I’m 100% sure any updated ones will be on 32mm
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In regards to all those advocating piracy and obtaining rules by means other than paying for them:
YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED TO THE RULES UNLESS YOU PAY FOR THEM. YOU HAVE NO RIGHT OR ENTITLEMENTS TO PLAY A GAME IF YOU HAVEN’T PAID FOR THE RULES.
I don’t agree with some of the GW business decisions or prices, but as someone who also makes content where copyright, theft and/or piracy is a potential issue, well yeah i hate piracy more than I hate the prices.
removing free warscrolls, and digital books, is short sighted and bad for the growth of the game. It speaks more of old, out of touch with the world, dinosaurs, running a company. Removing digital books and going exclusively with apps, just like video games, every time a company tries to protect its content via DRM methods, they’re only harming legitimate customers and effectively being anti-consumer
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17 hours ago, HollowHills said:
Yeah this is true, but that 2k list probably cost about the same as any 2k list for Idoneth money wise.
To be honest I hope they don't change too much with the warscrolls as Idoneth are quite well balanced at the moment.
I'd like to see Morrsarr go down in cost a bit. I think 170 is probably fair in the current edition. 195 makes them hard to justify.
Morrsarr Guard spent so long being undercosted, I think it’s only fair they stay overcosted for a while
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20 hours ago, RetconnedLegion said:
I’d be surprised, Dreadfleet wasn’t a great seller.
I feel like part of the problem is at least half the factions weren’t represented in the game, so if you were one of the unlucky factions then there was nothing to draw you in ( I was purely a Lizardmen player back in those days, and although I liked the game, without lizardmen I had no reason to buy it)
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So here’s my thoughts:
the rumoured Gloomspite Gitz vs Beasts Of Chaos box, I very much doubt because of how ‘recent’ the current Bullgors are and I just don’t see them getting updated. However, the plastic Doombull? Yes I could see that. Additionally, I think the Jabbersythe makes no sense in the context of that box
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11 hours ago, HollowHills said:
Honestly, I don't know if this was just a troll meme or if it's true.
When Idoneth came out there was a lot of backlash from online trolls and WHFB players. People were unhappy with the whole "flying shark" meme.
After this alleged "leakers" on 4chan claimed they had sold poorly.
This could be untrue because Idoneth have generally had good representation at events, largely due to being a top tier army for most of their history and seem to be middle of the pack for popularity on general polls.
We also know that GW profits were very good in 2018 and that the strategy of releasing new armies has continued from them on.
It could be true because anecdotally I'm the only Idoneth player in my local scene and I don't see a ton of interest in them online.
GW also didn't provide them with a 2nd edition book or model release, so maybe they are lower priority.
Personally I would like to see all smaller Aos factions get new units to bring up their overall roster and diversity a bit. Basically Lumineth wave 2 for everyone.
Locally, everyone who wanted the army only wanted eels and sharks etc. they spread out the release and people got sick of waiting and moved on to something else. 99% of the players I’ve seen with them have been hyper competitive tournament players
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I think it would be hilariously ironic if this Warcry thing gave us Chaos spiders as ‘payback’ for Destruction stealing Kragnos 😂
all joking aside, if it really has anything to do with spiders then it should be Spiderfang Grots. Factions stealing stuff from others is getting a bit tiresome personally
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The Winter Rules Update
in Age of Sigmar Discussions
Posted
I agree with the general consensus, that the armies that are struggling the most were untouched, and the same largely applies to those overpreforming armies.
I fear my long running issue with tournament data continues to distort the reality of the situation. Ironjawz is doing really well, Bonesplitterz are not, both are considered ‘Orruk Warclans’ in the data, so Bonesplitterz go untouched.
now in saying that, I don’t actually think Bonesplitterz are that bad, just a little overcosted, and like all 32mm base 1” range models they struggle with the coherency rules.
my hope for the next Battlescroll update is that they revoke the coherency rules. I get what they were trying to do, but all it’s actually done is ****** over 32mm or larger base models while the 25mm hordes they were trying to nerf don’t care. Half the unit of a 10 man 32mm base models are now wasted because they can’t fight. To make the issue worst, they also bumped up the minimum unit sizes of a lot of them, based on what you get in the box, so that you can’t ignore it - eg Squig Hoppers, are largely ruined by this change as it makes it much more difficult to use their flyover mortal wounds ability in 10s, meanwhile Boingrot Bounders, made from the same kit, got to stay at 5 models when they can actually function properly at 10 models due to their 2” lances..
and then there’s Fyreslayers. People already weren’t taking Vulkite Berzerkers because Hearthguard are so much better, but now nobody ever will take them as the coherency rules just make the difference between them so much greater in Hearthguards favour