Belper

Bigger base sizes would be a MASSIVE nerf to witch aelves and sisters of slaughter. Not being able to fight in two ranks would mean a unit of 30 would be significantly overcosted at 300.

At 80pts their offense is totally irrelevant. They're 2 wound bodies with a decent resilience profile, an 8" move and a huge footprint. They don't need to kill anything. They just need to clog up the board, which they can do very well for very cheap. At 80 at least. What other issues it causes with the faction is totally irrelevant. If they didn't want DoK to have a unit that can snipe, they shouldn't have made a unit with bows. (Also, not for nothing but I don't think it's unreasonable for any 300pts of shooting to be able to off a five wound character with no defensive bonuses no matter what faction they are.)The point is that until their offensive output is significant enough to be worth at least some percentage of their point cost, they're ultimately so terrible that they can't be balanced by points reductions.

This x100. It's my go to example for a unit that is too terrible for points changes to fix. At 160 it was useless, at 140 they were useless, at 120 they're useless, at 100 they're useless, at 80 bring 70 of them because by that point you're paying for the base stats so the fact that it's output is godawful pathetic is irrelevant.

Some armies the battleline is the best thing you got. DoK witch aelves and SoS are both incredible, Tzeentch pink horrors had to be nerfed at least twice, Skinks used to be so good you'd take 40 of them as just allies, Sequitors are probably the best unit stormcast had before they got nerfed.

Especially considering their current rules are a lopsided mishmash of nonsense that functions more like 3 armies glued together than as one cohesive force.

I hope not. Those rules were introduced into 40k as lazy patchjobs covering up the fact that GW can't make a book without 1 or 2 units head and shoulders above everything else.

The only aspect of the game that needs an overhaul is the Magic Phase, in my opinion. As it is it's fundamentally pretty broken on the simple basis that a handful of armies (Nagash, Tzeentch, Lumineth) both dominate casting and can completely shut down a non-magic focused armies only casters with no meaningful counterplay. Running a Medusa or other small caster to support your forces becomes almost a liability against the magic heavy factions because you're never realistically going to get a power off unless you manipulate ranges like crazy. You're also not likely to STOP any casts with a single mage because of all the bonuses Nagash and the others have kicking around.

Depends on the army. PA basically rewrote the book on Grey Knights and Admech but barely affected Genestealers and Nids, for example. Sisters didn't actually get a single army specific rule in any of the books, even.

I just want them to fix the dead warscrolls. They keep dropping Stalkers and Avatars and it keeps not doing anything the make them better. Until a blood stalker is 80pts and you're taking them just because they're 2 wound bodies, they'll never be useful. Also, let min-morathi use her command ability. She already loses it when she's big, why does she have to be the general too?

This also goes along with a fundamental misunderstanding of competitive play that a lot of players who aren't competitively minded seem to have: Competitive play IS narrative. The difference between what we call competitive play and what we call narrative play comes in two places. 1. Is that narrative play doesn't really have the capacity to accept landslide losses the way competitive play does. A competitive player gets destroyed they tend to change their list and the way they play and work to fix their mistakes(though plenty of blaming stuff for being OP or UP still happens) whereas narrative players tend to discount those results and work to change the GAME(whether through modifying rules or handicapping factions/players) to prevent similar blowouts. This means that you often get less feel bads but at the same time you're essentially wearing kids gloves which is both detrimental to the experience of the superior player, as well as allowing individuals to blame systemic imbalances for personal failure even more readily than players already do. It's sort of like not keeping score in little league. 2. The interesting part of the narrative for a competitive player is almost entirely what happens DURING the game. The interesting part for the narrative player tends to lean towards things that happen before and after the game. Narrative players find a lot of their drama and tension in the way the result of a game impacts the greater design space they've built for themselves. Competitive players find ALL of their drama and tension in moment to moment gameplay.

Considering 'well balanced' is a largely subjective term, he isn't dismissing 'well balanced' games, he's stating that those games aren't actually 'well balanced' as he would define the phrase. Example: You could argue that chess isn't particularly well balanced because of the first mover advantage white gets. This is more or less a myth. 'Powergamers' tend to be thrifty a lot of the time. The nature of needing to build, assemble, and paint 'new hotness' units in order to actually be able to use them limits the amount of full faction changes to people who either have pre-existing collections, ridiculous amounts of money, or people looking to enter into factions like space marines that can be acquired(especially prepainted) relatively cheaply. You'll either see a large percentage of their army being purchased second hand or through discount box sets, or they simply stick to a handful of factions and only make purchases that are relevant to those factions. Sure, if one UNIT get broken to hell and gone people will flock to that, but the number of individuals who have the combination of time and money to create tournament ready armies of brand new factions essentially out of the blue, within the time frame where their powerlevel is significantly above curve, is very small.

No they didn't. There were 0 Sisters of battle rules in that supplement. (Ephrael Stern was imperium not really sisters).

Gavriel was the best list until people got smashed by it enough times to play learn how to play against it. Now it's shootcast.

No? Why would it? Warcry scenery ( at least the starter set's) is terrible for sigmar. It doesn't block los, doesn't provide cover...it's just not very good.

So it looks like only 1 model can take a long rifle. That's really different yeah? Or did I just not read the old warscroll right?

Can't thorn anything not a wanderer.

Not sure if she had those CAs before but the Sorc on Drag is an amazing single model piece if you can spare the CP. I would run her with dual frosthearts for some monster mash goodness.

Anything with decent range is gonna pop that big boss like a balloon. Even DoK (with Morathi) have enough sniping to put ruck out of the game with 12" wholey. That said, just enormous blocks of arrowboyz with the busted allegiance trait will still do amazing damage to anything but stormcast even without ruck.

Or you could just kill him with large amounts of low quality attacks. It only takes 48 wounds to kill him on average (assuming no rend) a unit of witch aelves does 20 more damage than that without mindrazor OR full rerolls. Plus he's not going to be in a decent charge range until turn 3 without investment and the more you invest in him, the less he'll do. So you get Cogs, that's 180pts minimum extra. The you need run and charge, that locks you into specific armies and costs even more points. If he hits a chaff unit at any point he's pretty much out of the game and you don't really have enough points left after putting 700+ into Gotrek already to keep board control. If he goes up against Legions of Nagash he pretty much auto loses because any movement debuff will put him out of the game. That said, if you take him with DoK, he'll be absolutely brutal. Two units of WE, a Cauldron 2 Hag Queens a medusa and another battle line is only 1370 and is fairly difficult to deal with as is. Adding Gotrek puts it to 1890, which still leaves you room for Cogs. Edit: Bad math.

Why kill him? If you ring around the rosy him with a cheap unit like dogs or Khinerai, you lock him out of the game for at least 2 turns.

Most missions make later turn VPs worth more and limit your ability to jump ahead early with roughly mirrored starting objectives. On the majority of missions if you leap out on mid board or opponent deployment zone objectives too early, they can devastate your forces and out score you regardless. Star strike for example is a mission where holding the center objective for turn 5 is the same value as holding it for turn 2+ turn 3. I'm almost always down in points turn 1-turn 2 but by turn 3 I have enough board control that I can lock you out for the rest of the game.

I think bravery as a whole works best as a mechanic that you have to expend resources to ignore. Losing huge chunks of your forces in with no recourse feels awful. Having it there as a boogieman you have to build your list around is just a better way to deal with it, in my opinion.

I straight up used normal witch heads and just gave them the whips to differentiate them.

SoS trade a slightly longer pile in for 75% of WE output. I would never run 2 units of WE anymore but I also would argue that SoS simply don't do enough damage to be worth running 60. I also personally think that the Slaughtertroupe is and has alway been wildly overrated.

I know it's a thing at the moment but desolators and drakesworn templar are still pretty subpar and unreliable and the fact that you don't have any meaningful defense against mortal wounds or magic means that you could lose most of your offensive ability to a single endless spell. You're also going to have to choose between exploding to bravery or doing nowhere near enough damage. If you lose 3 raptors or 2 desolators in the same turn it's pretty much over.