NinthMusketeer

I thought your post came from a much more considered position than it evidently did. It is my mistake; I need to remember kids play the game too.

I certainly see your point, and I do agree that it is a factor. However there are several observations which have led me to think the problem lies more on hero-monsters; -In Path to Glory, which has a completely different scenario structure, they are still the dominant force on the battlefield. -While some details have been altered the scenarios we have are very much the same ones we've had for years. They really haven't changed much from 2nd to 3rd, but the role of hero-monsters very much has. -When regular monsters try to behave like hero-monsters do, they die. Even with equivalent point values. Monsters still need backup to avoid getting surrounded and picked off. For hero-monsters I do not feel that is true, at least to the extent it should be. That said I do feel what you said is a factor, I'd certainly like to hear any more thoughts you have on it. Which is an entirely respectable opinion, but if you don't like house rules in the first place why did you click on a thread explicitly about them?

Neither my version nor his have any impact on 6+ ward save items.

It brings up some questions; who are the haves and the have notes in this? What are the hero-artifact combos being used, and why do they throw the balance out of whack? A given artifact in the context of a certain army (or even specifically keyword within it) is very different from making that artifact available to everyone. I don't feel like runesmiters on magmadroths are really crushing the meta. As for your second point; your answer is FAR more restrictive than mine. It severely limits army customizability, and it's a stance that you have expressed very defensively. Why do you feel you need the 1-2 double so badly?

No. I don't feel like monsters are really the problem; hero monsters are. If anything regular monsters right now feel a bit pointless, because they are so much less effective than their counterparts.

I am happy to receive critique. I am not happy to receive baseless insults. Can you explain how the math is shakey?

I would be super excited to see additional options for the cultists, but I'm hesitant to hope because it would be a lot of miniature design for relatively small appeal. Failing that I'd settle for conversion kits to 'adopt' certain units in. I would like to see a detailed pass through on the AoS armies to ensure the stats represent the unit. I was hyped to see my Nurgle Daemons getting stats, hype which completely died when I saw that a plaguebearer is the same toughness as a baseline human. And there are a lot of instances like that with a total disconnect between the unit's identity and its stats. Obviously balance could be improved. I am not totally on board with the 'AoS armies better than cults' perspective but I do think the hero options (that is, warcry versions of models that are heroes in AoS) are in particular need of adjustment. Many simply have notable stat increases for a trivial cost.

Well I have hundreds of games under my belt starting from the launch of AoS where I contributed to fan comps before the first GHB. I built my local community from the ground up, created an entirely remastered version of the original Path to Glory, have both participated in and run numerous events both narrative and competitive (including third edition ones), served as a judge at LVO, and tested these house rules with my local community to see their efficacy and collect feedback. What's your experience?

Warhammer always has it's rough edges. Every game, every edition has it's own set of issues that players need to deal with while waiting for GW to (maybe) address them. But we all play Warhammer anyways and a lot of us love it despite those flaws because there are a huge number of fun things going on as well. Accordingly this thread is not about fixing problems outright, but easy band-aids that can be applied to take the edge off bad rule areas and allow the good more room to shine. They do not change the rules of the game but act as 'polite agreements' to avoid certain aspects, and thus preserve the core gameplay experience. YMMV of course, so take what you like and please comment if you have ideas of your own! Heroes with a wounds characteristic of 10 or more cannot be given the Amulet of Destiny artifact. A 5+ ward is a statistical 50% increase in wounds; on average, it will take 3 damage for 2 wounds to stick. So a 10-wound hero with a 5+ ward will need an average of 15 damage to kill, which is far too great a boost for one artifact to give. Let alone factoring in healing and heroes with larger wound pools. A model cannot perform a monstrous rampage in the same turn it carried out a heroic action. Third edition buffed heroes and buffed monsters. That double-buffed hero monsters, leading them to dominance of casual and competitive tables alike. This reigns the effect in just a little, and creates more interesting tactical choices rather than free double-dipping. Round 2 automatically uses the same turn order as round 1. Random initiative is a matter hotly debated since the dawn of AoS, but both sides can agree that a round 1-2 double is the most influential. Further, the best way to recover from that is to get a 2-3 double in return but in matched play this comes with a hefty penalty (the player going second in round 3 can remove an objective). This makes a round 1-2 double even stronger. On the other hand, a 2-3 double can be a serious tactical choice; being able to pull an objective from the field may very much be worth giving up that opportunity for.

Yes, because that simply isn't enough doomwheels! (But in all seriousness, that would be one data point as Kadeton explained above.)

It doesn't help that LRL are noob-crushers, both for opponents and the player. They have a learning curve just to play, and they have tactics like wimdy bois that new players cannot be expected to know how to counterplay. Unfortunately the narrative lacks nuance--LRL are OP but only a fraction of that sentiment gets into why. Generally this leads to GW just nerfing the whole faction without paying attention to most of it working perfectly well. Were I a LRL player that would be my fear, but trying to counter the whole narrative is a fruitless endeavor. Better to try and steer it in the right direction before it's too late and the incoming nerfs hit everything be it innocent or guilty. Sidenote: If something hits 60% win rate at tournaments, it's a problem. Period. Anything that gets that high for even a month is going to DESTROY the casual field, because that is a win rate against everyone else's top cheese and heavily skewed towards 50% to boot.

See though, not being upper tier at tournaments doesn't mean something isn't overpowered and it certainly doesn't mean it isn't OP on the casual level. There are plenty of things that tournament regulars can deal with which are oppressive to normal players. Tourney builds show up with the expectation of encountering, countering, and exploiting cheese. But that isn't something that applies to the whole game, nor should it. Lumineth may not have a strong streak of winning tournaments but they have certainly been doing well. So sure, they aren't the most OP thing out there but that is an EXTREMELY high bar to measure against. If anything, feeling a need to measure against that in the first place is a sign that something is too strong. We should never forget that ONLY overpowered builds do well at tournaments. Sure there will be some statistical outliers here and there but broadly speaking even skilled players with average armies do not perform better than bad players showing up with netlists. Players who do well in tourney play are both running OP armies and are good at exploiting them. The point being that for Lumineth there is something present to exploit. Something you (by my impression) want is to push back against the 'LRL OP' narrative. Despite what I said above that is something I entirely agree with; the nega-hype around the army exceeds the extent to which it is OP. But I think fighting that directly is trying to swim upstream; people exaggerate into hyperbole based on no evidence at all let alone when there actually is some! A better approach, IMO, would be to try and steer the attitude in the correct direction: Sunmetal weapons. That one rule is the source of people's frustrations. There is a lot which goes into a Lumineth cheese build but without that keystone it falls apart. It's brainless to use and there is little to no counterplay available. It takes the entire concept of LRL as a skilled high-finesse army and chucks it out in favor of blunt, reliable MW output.

Remember that win rates at tournaments are massively skewed towards 50%. Winners fight winners, losers fight losers. To see the real win rates one would need to look at the results of round 1 games only, where matchups are fully randomized. 60% win rate indicates there is a huge problem. The other issue with taking these rates at face value is, as always, they don't show the lists. What this data does not show is that top tourney lists are overwhelmingly built the same way; top-loaded with heroes and hero-monsters, only a third or so points spent on actual units. In that regard the meta is less diverse than it has ever been. In simple terms, the devs overlooked that buffing heroes & buffing monsters was going to double-buff hero monsters.

Sure, but if one looks back over this page it is easy to see the discussion is not about imbalances related to 3rd and mostly about the broader concept which isn't really on topic for a thread about gameplay in 3rd edition.

Balance is terrible, but balance was terrible in 2nd, and in 1st before that. The only time balance wasn't terrible was when fans made the point costs. The point being that it isn't a 3rd edition thing, so maybe better for another thread? 'Balance in AoS' would make for an engaging topic.

Well there's always Road to Renown!

I think the fundamentals are great--the best thing about PtG3 is the fundamentals. A few rough spots but nothing that can't be fixed with house rules. The biggest drawback to the core of PtG3 is outside the system itself; by using the same army building as matched play it will be host to all the same paradigms and imbalances. That OP character will still be OP. The auto-take artifacts will still be taken. The best sub-faction will still be the one everyone uses. When I play narrative it is specifically because I want to get away from all that, which leads to my personal dislike of PtG3 even though I recognize the quality of the system. But this also isn't a problem with the rules of PtG3 but rather a problem with GWs legendary incompetence at balancing. The real problem with PtG3 is that while it has a great set of fundamentals, that's it. There is nothing built on those fundamentals. All those fun and thematic ways to gain renown don't mean much when progression barely exists. Lingering casualties stacked on your favorite unit lack impact when the most efficient way to clear them is to delete the unit and re-add it to clear everything. There is structure for running a campaign but no campaigns to use it in. Players are just left with a system to track the progression of their force but with nothing to progress towards be it for individual units or the army as a whole. But there is still fun to be had. Campaigns goals can be created by individual communities. Extra ways to spend xp can be house rules in. And every army is coming in at the same level so there is camaraderie in making the 'wild west' of PtG3 work. For now. Soon there will be 3rd edition battletomes packed with content to give flesh to the skeleton of PtG3. And that will make things so much worse. Because then there will be haves and have-nots with a sharp divide between the two. When everyone is dealing with the same content issue there is still parity and a shared experience. Once battletomes hit some armies will, in a practical sense, be playing an entirely different game system. Even if they are by some miracle not getting a massive power boost from it, that disparity of status is a massive fun-killer. Players feel left out to dry for showing up with the army they like. The entire idea of forging a unique identity goes out the window because only those with new battletomes get the chance. It tears out the heart of what makes a narrative system fun. And we know this because that's where 40k Crusade is at. Ultimately my message is to enjoy what you can while you can and keep fingers crossed that GW will step in with White Dwarf and/or supplements to make sure everyone gets their extras in short order. 2022 EDIT: Nevermind, they just opted to not add any substance with subsequent releases.

This time around more experience has not altered my initial impressions (posted last page). I would add that the biggest difference I have found is the scenarios--they don't play or feel the same way matched ones do (which is good). But overall PtG3 just feels like Matched with extra steps. Also high model count units are handled badly by the system because they rake up casualty counts since they lose tons of models every game. Sure they can recover for a glory cost, but one is far better off just dropping them and paying to add a new unit at full strength.

9-man boltboyz, 6-man boltboyz, ballista, 3x swampcalla shaman meta list calling it now.

Big update! All warband tables have been updated to version 2.0, taking into account the changes of third edition. Broadly speaking they are quite similar in function, but tables have been restructured & consolidated, a swathe of new options that can be taken as initial followers have been added, most non-monster heroes gained an additional starting follower, and warscroll battalions have been added! This is the first set of tables done for third edition AoS, I expect there to be some rough edges and at least one typo somewhere so as always please let me know if you have any feedback!

When people talk about something being difficult or impossibly impractical to achieve, there is an unspoken 'unless you are playing Skaven or Tzeentch' after it XD

I have deeply mixed feelings about Berserk. While there are indisputably a number of elements that are simply excellent, for me they were tarnished by others that strayed from dark fantasy to 'dark fantasy'. I can see the pragmatism behind including such elements due to the ease of boosting popularity with certain crowds. Yet for me it takes Berserk down from being truly great to being merely good, even if it increases my respect of the author for his skill. What I see here is a memorial to the better parts of Berserk, overlooking certain other elements. And that makes me happy.

Chimeras just die. Consider: it is more difficult to kill 15 marauders than a chimera.

Well if we go by precedent it will be an extremely reliable effect; so much the Swampcalla Shaman's potency is that his ability is guaranteed if the conditions are met. There is no roll to see if it activates, there is no means by which the enemy can stop it. It just goes. And as any experienced tourney player can tell you; consistency trumps potential. Sidenote; C'mon, unit wholly within 12", at least one model within 3", and not in combat. For an ability you want to use on ranged troops anyways. Those aren't difficult hoops to jump through. There are a lot of savvy players out there extremely happy it is that instead of a spell which can fail, be unbound, etc. Side-sidenote; Kruleboyz are already stacking a really powerful allegiance ability on top of a full set of army allegiance abilities. I feel like that just must not be clicking for some people. The allegiance abilities Orruks have already been rolling with PLUS the best ability out of the Lumineth battletome. This is not going to be a weak army.

SIX KRAKEN EATER ALL YOUR OBJECTIVE ARE BELONG TO BEHEMAT