NauticalSoup

IP is why Age of Sigmar is so wacky but it's not why WHFB died in a fire, or why 40k nearly did around the same time.

Certainly as much as people like to throw blame around in new and exciting ways, everything I can remember that made me stop playing WHFB was directly a result of a game design or business decision made by GW. It was... not a short list. The players, in my experience, are largely interchangeable between the two games. Maybe this is unusual but in our local club Sigmar was revived following it's embarrassing launch by a small group of grognards, ex-WHFB players. There was zero interest in it before they started running games and convincing people to try it out. Given 40k never lost its grip here I suspect if they hadn't been part of the prior WHFB community Sigmar may never have gotten a foothold here without them, their buy-in was critical to persuading people that AoS was worth trying out.

Sort of a tangent I just wanted to throw out that this isn't necessarily the case. Like a priority roll can easily determine if my maw krushas are stuck eating another screen turn 2 or if they get to hollow out your army and possibly even close out the game. In a way this means they have the potential to matter more in melee versus melee, since the shooting list goes over the screen and does full damage twice, whereas my melee list can take advantage of a double to do significantly more damage on the second turn than I did on the first. If a game shakes out with no doubles the screens can keep the melee units off the meat of your list for a surprisingly long time.

I have met many people, Sigmar players and prospectives, who are ambivalent to the double turn. I have met many more who absolutely hate it. What I have never encountered in person (seriously, not even a single time in any of the events I've attended or clubs I've played at) is someone who actually likes it. It's always the most lukewarm indifference or grudging tolerance. I think the pro-double turn crowd is massively overrepresented in online communities and extremely rare among the larger pool of casual players that make up most circles. We have been mixing in games without it and the experience is mostly the same, but the lack of a double does tend to exacerbate unbalanced matchups since a predictable game devastatingly favours the better army which no longer risks getting blown out by RNG. I am becoming increasingly convinced the reason the double is such a sacred cow is it obfuscates a lot of the balance problems. Yes, at higher level play you can mitigate the double risk significantly, but let's be real - most AoS play is very very far beneath the level of play at which a clutch double isn't going to decide most games on its own.

As a stormcast player, this but ironically haha These days I am nearly always proxying my sacrosanct units as their strike chamber counterparts, no real reason to branch out when the warscrolls are so boring 😛

No way to know. CoS was always a refugee range, and dark elves are one of the factions in Sigmar that will likely get ripped out of CoS and rolled into a new army as Lumineth did with high elves just before CoS got an independent tome. If you already own the models then no harm really, but I would certainly factor in that CoS is one of the last 2.0 tomes in the game that hasn't been updated and we know their counterpart Dawnbringer Crusades is coming before buying anything new.

No the battlescroll was buffs, that's not what I meant - just the lists haven't really changed much in quite a long time and the buffs and nerfs both haven't significantly affected list construction. The good units from when the book came out are still the good units etc.

Good to see SCE weren't nerfed out of oblivion but the book's internal balance is still clearly pretty bad when some pretty harsh nerfs to the premier choices don't really justify pivoting to any of the other 80 warscrolls we're sitting on Entire chambers worth of units collecting dust on my shelf...

I have seen it I had this discussion with my ogors buddy just the other day, since most artillery is pretty bad and either needs to be cheap or do what the ironblaster can. Personally I'm hoping for the latter- arty doesn't synergize with buffs and is usually slow I think you ought to get a good bang for your buck as a result!

So sad I really miss my ballista battery 😞

The one thing I would immediately change on here, is to carry over 40k's ability to shoot characters when they are the closest model. This has to be the potential as it is currently worded to be extremely frustrating in some cases - I can say this with confidence having previously run bodyguarded Talonmasters in 40k who could shoot you but not be shot back due to janky character shields.

Sadge. Wurrgog was earned but a 25% increase on big stabbas is crippling. I love big stabbas and it's going to ravage the army's wound count to spam them now - and there's no way to build a BS army without spamming something. Doesn't help that the win rate was definitely helped by the Inkarnate, which was also nerfed. The good BS shell went up by like 300 points it's legitimately one of the biggest points nerfs I've seen since playing AoS.

On the contrary, you posted purely to dump on a sculpt - I posted purely to dump on a guy who was dumping on a sculpt. I'm just matching your negativity with my own while correcting some of your wackier claims (and my post wasn't strictly negative, I think the phoenix is a very pretty sculpt and said as much).

lol absolutely not, the AoS range isn't considered better than 40k's by anyone who isn't a part of our narrow community. Half the AoS range is liked because it's old and recognizably Warhammer, either from Total War/Vermintide fans or people who remember the time before Sigmar, and the other half is a colossal mixed bag. Wet elves, naked dwarfs, tree-people and fantasy space marines have their fans but in absolutely no reality are these widely considered superior to 40k's offerings. You're lucky if you don't routinely bump into people who hate half the armies on aesthetics alone! And the phoenix is a great model. The fact that it is static isn't inherently bad, it does the job and looks infinitely superior in multiples to a modern day monopose monster- I think literally the only kit in the AoS range that does what the phoenix is trying to do better is the stormcast dragon, but that's cheating since it's a monster kit that builds two discreetly posed guys with options. I certainly don't think it's fair to ****** on the phoenix for its age and then immediately go for the significantly older and plainer LOTR Eagles! Those things are at least 10 years old (maybe older!) and it definitely shows on the assembly. Especially in a CoS thread, this entire faction exists for those of us who like our old WHFB range.

I mean this is just so specific as to be meaningless, no? This isn't a category of players it's like- a specific guy Rosewater played EDH with. At least that's how it sounds to me. Super duper ultra tangent though so I'll leave it here we don't have to agree and I've said my piece

When I was playing it was only in the company of Spikes so at least where I was Timmy only came up as the punchline to a joke. Johnny only seems to come up in high minded discussions of game concepts as you say, but that to me suggests it isn't all that useful. It would actually make more sense if it were a minis game concept because of the modeling/painting stuff, MTG has this weird 'he's the combo guy' but also Spike is the combo guy... so Johnny's combos are uh... more complex but also bad, I guess? I understand the appeal I just have a strong dislike of pseudopsychological buckets, saw way too many of them when I worked in HR and they're all based on junk science. We just have a strong innate desire to recognize patterns even where they don't necessarily exist- and it's not like Rosewater knew anything about the psychology of players anyway, he just made it up from whole cloth and like many things he's said it became gospel just because he was the one who said it. Edit: also I'm not making up the casual/comp thing! Spikes is literally the name of the competitive sub for MTG, definitely that's a way the terms get used

That was certainly Rosewater's intent but they were always wishy-washy categories that don't capture any useful information. In common parlance Timmy usually just means 'casual' and Spike just means 'comp'. Don't think anyone ever uses Johnny since it's just Timmy 1.5 lol

Timmy is a term from the Magic the Gathering community. Often it is derogatory but the original intent of the term was to describe someone who 'plays for fun', mostly a term used to differentiate them from competitive players (which MTG calls 'Spikes'). So here he's using it to describe an army that is made for reasons other than to be the most face-crushing meta netlist you can put together. There's a third category but it's rarely referenced because most people in it are still probably a one of the previous two.

It was... inevitable

Wait, can you actually do this? I don't think you should be able to. He can order them in Big Waaagh but you can't take other orruks as allies in Warclans, you can only pick units that are tagged for your subfaction. Although if you could I still probably wouldn't...

Given that wards explicitly do one thing, negate wounds, a ward 'against the abilities of endless spells' isn't really a coherent way to read it.

Unfortunately, having the first book in the edition cycle (and a rather average book at best) means this is just how it's going to be as time goes on and more armies get books. I've never played any edition or season of any GW game that didn't have at least a little creep, and usually it's closer to a lot. Nighthaunts have a 10/10 book for sure, expect to be punching up against them for the foreseeable future and to add them to the list of uphill matchups you expect to lose. It could be worse though... could be playing Fyreslayers 😛

Gotta second this if I'm honest. I love the Ardboy/Black Orc, I have almost 50 of 'em, I have no particular desire to replace my own but the sculpt is showing its age and is tragically out of sync with the different direction they decided to take Ironjawz in. I think the old sculps will continue to look fine and dandy if they update them for new players and those who like to have new sculpts. There are two issues of course: one is that the Ironjawz SC box is second to nothing for value and it's going to be sad if/when it goes away. The other is that Ironjawz need more units more than they need a resculpt of an existing unit. But if we discount these practical issues with the list, a new Ardboy with an Ironjawz aesthetic and proportions would be nifty indeed!

I think it's an exaggeration to say they wreck melee armies. I'd rather play into Kruleboys than almost any other shoot-heavy army. It's definitely better than it was though.

In other words, you just keep doing what you were doing and eat the nerf. If that's how it shakes out it would suggest a large majority of SCE's options need tweaks to be effective.