Vakarian

Balance has been a hot topic on here of late, and a serious part of the problem among AoS players, and GW, seems to be that no one really knows how factions are doing outside of the reports posted by some (very industrious and much appreciated) folks like the Honest Wargamer and AoS Shorts (I’m sure I’m missing some, I’m sorry!). Here’s a though based on how another popular gaming company with a vibrant and growing competitive scene does things: track every tournament round via a computer system, run by TOs, that reports tournament results to GW. GW can then act at the 6-month intervals based on serious feedback from all competitive events. Will GW actually do this? I doubt it, and they don’t have to - but it’s worked well for Corvus Belli and Infinity so far. Yes, I know that GW is at least an order of magnitude greater in representation (and yes, I actually mean a real order of magnitude), but computerizing this takes out most of the work. Here’s Infinity’s 6-month stats, provided by Corvus Belli themselves to the community, taken from every tournament played worldwide in the last 6 months. This is what a balanced tabletop game looks like.

Although they aren’t as good of pictures (not that the one above is great, in working in a poorly lit room with an iPhone camera), here are some individual shots from when I finished each model.

Since this is a Warcry-specific project I figured I would start by posting this here. I wanted to build and paint a Warcry Stormcast warband, and because Vanguard got released first, that’s what I started with. But I wanted to make the modeIs look a bit different, so I threw some kitbashed parts together for my leader, and swapped Sequitor heads without helms for the traditional Vanguard helms. I’ve just finished the first three models: the Hunter Prime (sword swapped to give him the “Blade of Heroes” relic in an obvious way), a Gryphound, and an Aetherwing. I’ll post the remainder as I go, and though I don’t move fast, Stormcast don’t take too long at least. The remaining Gryphounds and Aetherwings will all be painted to look like different, real animals. The Gryphound here was basically a test, browns could be a lot of things, and the Aetherwing was painted like a gyrfalcon. Enjoy!

Those new warbands look awesome, and very flavorful by what rules they can apply! I’m especially excited by both of the Tzeentch options. Cool to see that the Horrors split, but have to spend ability dice to do it, so it should be limited somewhat instead of overwhelming the opponent. Stormcast are gonna have a hard time building lists with enough activations without Aetherwings, but Prosecutors look *awesome*.

This wording is very clear (in English) that the ability to choose who goes first on the first turn is conditional upon a tie in the roll-off. The FAQ establishes that wasn’t ever GW’s intent, but the rule they actually wrote can’t logically mean anything else when applying English grammar. It’s a moot point now, however, and I personally prefer the FAQ’d version, as it gives some benefit to building low-drop lists.

Many of the non-Chaos warbands have leader and non-leader versions of a profile, so the models can still be used together. Still, it would be odd, as none of the Chaos warbands currently have that option. If it's the elite runemark (they are too similar), the Bestigor Destroyer doesn't have it, yet the article text says he's capable of using the ability.

Really excited to see how the Tzeentch warbands work! Although I wonder how they will make the demons work (pinks/blues/brims, primarily). Want to see Sacrosanct show up sooner rather than later for Stormcast. It seems odd that they're releases 9 of the new, TOC warbands now, leaving just 6 for the next release (presuming they're going to drop the remaining 6 all at once).

Perhaps Spire Tyrants, like some of the "other" non-Chaos warbands, have multiple leader options? Or maybe GW just made a mistake on that one.

This is fundamentally the issue with GW not taking balance seriously. Most people aren’t tournament-level competitive players... but I haven’t met *anyone* that actually likes losing every game.

@Nos can’t like that post enough. GW just approaches the game’s development and testing with a different mindset than most of us would desire. If that mindset happens to line up with the players’ then all works out well. If I understand the general sentiment well enough (including yours and mine), it’s that we wish GW would balance the game to require less player agreement at the beginning, because gaming casually in a store or club usually defaults to matched play rules (to use the current system’s nomenclature). A system like Infinity does that very well; GW could do it better. Although I still hold that their current place and most recent releases seem to be better for that than some of the slightly older releases (like Slaanesh).

I think this is about as accurate a summation of the long-standing GW mindset as I’ve seen. That said, I do think they care about balance - to the extent that they want people to enjoy the games in addition to the models. I just don’t think they care about high-level competitive balance on a level with a company like CB (in fairness, CB also cares more about the models and the backstory than they do about the game itself - but they care more about the game than GW does, and it shows). Like I said above, though, I’m willing to stick with GW so long as books like the recent KO and Tzeentch books are options, because the models and setting are lovely, and the game is fun if balance remains anything close to “reasonable.”

GW clearly doesn’t engage in deep and extensive play testing, or doesn’t listen to the play testers when they do. That’s the first and largest change they need to make to begin achieving balance - find serious play testers, and actually listen to them. From what I’ve heard from some other members on this board, it appears to be an issue of listening to the play testers rather than not play testing at all. It seems that when rules do go bad in AoS, it’s because the designers just really wanted that rule to go through for whatever reason. Edited to add: so that this post doesn’t sound completely at odds with my first post, I should add that the newer books have generally seemed better play-tested, so maybe they’re improving? Slaanesh is still an outlier though.

A few people have mentioned it in the thread already, but Corvus Belli (Infinity’s producer) has managed to consistently maintain inter faction balance between a game with 20+ factions for years now (counting “sectorials,” the game’s take on sub factions that trade restrictions on broader unit availability for increased availability of certain units and the ability to play with “linked” groups of models in a skirmish game). There are certainly still “winners” and “losers” in Infinity factions - some are considered more capable at base level than others, and some are definitely more difficult to play well. But, the best tournament players will often win tournaments with the “worst” factions because the game is relatively well-balanced and player skill truly matters. That said, Infinity lacks, to a larger extent, intra-faction balance. There are some units you just never use, and some units you must play in certain factions to be competitive. However, any unit can still perform, especially in casual rather than competitive games. AoS has bigger issues with both forms of balance, although I’ll grant that GW has a much larger world of options to balance than CB does. There’s a fundamental difference between skirmish and massed-battle games that makes it harder to catch all of the balance issues in AoS (or 40k). Speaking as someone who cares heavily about balance (both in competitive and casual play, because frankly bad balance hits casual play worse than competitive play), GW does need to do a better job about reviewing books and listening to feedback. All that said - I’m willing to keep giving GW a chance. The new KO book looks like they really listened to the players. The new Tzeentch book seems to make multiple playstyles useable, even if Changehost is still the best option for competitive play. The nerf to Gristlegore made FEC manageable while keeping them functional and competitive. Only the Slaanesh nerf has really whiffed lately (I’d add my frustration with the SCE Sacrosanct points increases that were totally unwarranted, but SCE is one of the best examples of both bad inter- and intra-faction balance in AoS so, oh well). TL/DR: it’s hard to balance games with lots of options. Corvus Belli’s Infinity is a good example of how it can be done (even if it still has issues). Modern GW seems to be trying in ways they haven’t before so I’ll continue to extend them goodwill for the foreseeable future, even though I won’t be swapping competitive Infinity play for competitive AoS play.

That's a great point - SCE (especially Sacrosanct Chamber) were in a good spot until the points increases and new factions were released. There was really no need for the increases on any of the Sacrosanct units (other than maybe the Evocators), and now there's no reason some of them shouldn't even go down a little bit. But, what SCE really need are updates on the Stormhost abilities, Warrior Chamber warscrolls, and Vanguard Chamber warscrolls. Extremis Chamber (Stardrake especially) could stand to either have another points drop or gain some additional fighting ability for their current points. Whether GW will actually want to spend a lot of time updating all those warscrolls to be better balanced (especially internally, so there's actual reason to use different units other than liking the models) is another story. The updates in CoS and KO leaves me somewhat hopeful, even if an SCE update is probably still a ways off.

Hammers trait could grant a 6++ or +1 to save after save if granted by another source, then the Castellant’s lantern could be a 6++ or even 5++. Edited to add: Castellant save in Hammers would be either 5++ or 4++ depending on which it got to start. 4++ might be a bit OP though especially if SCE get army-wide 3+ armor save.

The lightning bolt on its own is Stormcast Sacrosanct Chamber.

Your leader can still suffer temporary injuries. The basic idea is you shouldn’t have to hide your leader in the back and never use him because your campaign will be over if he dies. As an old Mordheim player, I really appreciate this. I would never use my leader in a combat role, ever, because if you lost him, you were out of the campaign for good. Buying a new leader wouldn’t cut it. Importantly for Warcry, you have one safe artifact and a command trait on your leader. If leaders can die, there isn’t much point to playing campaigns, as you have no model that can safely hold an important artifact and no guarantee that you’ll always have access to a command trait. Your opponents can easily pull ahead simply because their upgraded leaders haven’t died and yours has. Run your campaign the way you want! But there are reasons GW finally protected leaders in the game, and IMO it’s a very positive change.

Yea, I’ll try to stick to giving it something that isn’t completely immersion-breaking. I’m enjoying the narrative aspect of Warcry enough that I’d rather play something suboptimal that’s cool rather than stick something on the kitty that doesn’t make sense. It’s just cool that it can be upgraded at all.

Thank you! That’s kind of what I was hoping too, even though it seemed odd and I thought I couldn’t. My Rocktusk will also be looking for that status! The kitty is *mean*.

Kind of a random question - can models with the beast runemark (like a Rocktusk Prowler in Untamed Beasts or Gryph-hound in Stormcast) receive lesser artifacts, artifacts of power, or command traits? I thought I had read somewhere, back when the game first arrived, that they can’t. Now I can’t find that anywhere in the rules and am wondering if it was just something I assumed. It seems like they shouldn’t be able to, but I’m not sure where it is in the rules despite looking several times for it. Long story short is I’m wondering if I could put an artifact or command trait on a Rocktusk Prowler, etc. Thanks!

Now that the Tome of Champions is out, any rumors or ideas when cards will drop for the 15 new warbands? I haven’t seen any hints but hoping it will be relatively soon.

Those three points drops are now reflected in the Azyr app; I haven’t seen any others in it. At least Stardrake and Dracoline lists can fit a little more support in now. I’m somewhat excited to try out a 6x Dracoline list. Very disappointed the unnecessary Sequitor nerf didn’t get reversed though. Their points cost remains ridiculous in comparison to new books.

Seems like a nice drop on Evocators on Dracolines if this is true! And good, if not great, drop on the Drakes.

So it seems like they’re better playing full aggro then? I haven’t had a chance to get them on the board yet myself.

Just to confirm, you know that you can't charge more than once per round with a model? Once a model has charged, it can't move or attack again the rest of the round. Also, each time a model attacks, if it rolls any successes, it can push its opponent back one hex, even if the opponent successfully defends. Basically, models shouldn't be dying every time dice are rolled; it'll take upgrades before most models can one-shot an opponent. Balancing your deck with upgrades and gambits is pretty essential (I haven't looked through the starter Beastgrave decks yet, so I'm not sure how they were composed, but the starter decks in Nightvault at least had a decent balance and were playable, if subpar, out of the box). If you get a spectacularly bad draw to start (all upgrades, for example), you can mulligan (discard the whole hand and draw again from the remaining cards). Keeping the decks at or close to the recommended 20 upgrade/gambit cards and 12 glory cards helps keep the chances of drawing an entirely useless hand low on turn 1. I struggled with the game at first, too - I started with Nightvault and thought the magic rules were just bad and the dice rules were finicky at best. Then I played a few more games, and learned that tournaments play best out of three games for each pairing, and became more comfortable with how the game works. It's a lot of moving parts for a GW game (deckbuilding + area control + objectives + killing the enemy), but it's a lot of fun and plays fast once you get used to the different dynamics. Hope you like it after a few more tries!