Neil Arthur Hotep

Is there a new short story? I did not get the mail from GW yet. Could you share the link?

I can agree for any particular instance of a person experiencing a loss of agency in a game. But I also believe that if we look at the reactions of a lot of people and see a pattern that certain mechanics are more likely than others to provoke a feeling of a loss of agency, that's probably indicative of the actual existence of an actual loss of agency. I also believe the distinction between a mechanic actually resulting in a loss of agency and it just provoking widespread experience of a loss of agency is somewhat immaterial, since it should be adjusted in either case (although maybe in different ways). Just to be clear, I don't think the problem with shooting is that when an opponent shoots at my guys, that I can't decide to spend a command point and nullify their attack in that instant, or something like that. I think most AoS players just want to feel that the decisions they make in the lead up to being shot at matter. I can agree that for the longest time, you could defend against shooting by making use of the mechanics that are in the game. But I also believe that since the introduction of Bonereaper catapults, more and more armies have shooting that is much more non-interactive than before. Longer range makes it harder to counter with good positioning and screening. Mortal wounds shooting makes cover and armour matter less. Mortal on hit remove the benefit of Look Out, Sir, as well. And the extra benefit from garrisons (lol). Easy access to teleports make line-of-sight a non-issue and further weaken counterplay from positioning and screening. No single one of these factors invalidates your decisions when responding to shooting by itself. But they all play a role in making shooting more something that just happens to you than something you feel you respond to. The more of these properties your opponent's shooting has, the less your decision matter. I keep coming back to Lumineth archers because they hit all of those points at the same time, by weakening or removing counterplay in the form of positioning, line-of-sight, penalties to hit and cover/armour in general. Off the top of my head, OBR, Lumineth, Seraphon, Kharadron Overlords, Tzeentch and Daughters of Khaine all have shooting options that hit at least some of these factors. The new Slaanesh archers seem to fall into this category, too, but it remains to be seen how they shake out. I definitely think that the shooting component of these newer releases are less interactive than they were before. We can see the difference in rules and claming they make the game less interactive is not just conjecture. We can provide an explanation of why we think they have this effect. And since we have only really been seeing complaints about shooting really ramp up after these armies became a thing, I think we also have real-world statistics that back up our theory. By the way, I believe a lot of people feel the same way about magical dominance, because it has a lot of the same issues. We'll see how GW deals with these trends. Maybe the plan is to give most armies access to solid shooting units and then introduce an overall rules tweak that allows for new ways to counter play against it. That's essentially the situation in 40k, where most armies can pull off decent shooting, but there are also more ways to deal with it (to my understanding; I don't play that game). That would not be the worst solution to the issue in my opinion. But I believe if GW's design of ranged armies keeps progressing the way it has been recently, the current counter play options are not enough to satisfyingly interact with the mechanic anymore.

Personally, I mostly answered that the recent price increases have not yet made me buy less, but I think that's because money is not really the limiting factor for me, but time. I like to paint most of my stuff before buying new models, so while I am working through my backlog I usually feel little incentive to buy new stuff. And since I don't get much painting time, this lasts for a while. Plus, I have just not felt a need to buy into any post-Sons army yet. Like, even if the Mega-Gargants were a lot cheaper, I probably would not have bought one just on a whim. I don't feel that impulse very strongly when I still have models to work on that I have actual plans for. We will see what happens when Cursed City and Gravelords roll around. Especially for Gravelords, it could see the price becoming a deciding factor. If I can pick up a workable list for relatively cheap, I'll probably go for it. If they turn out to be more expensive, I'll probably finish some of my ongoing projects first.

@yukishiro1 has already given an explanation of what NPE is about, but since you asked me directly I'll write out my take on it, too. "Negative play experience" is about how certain aspects of the game feel when you encounter them. One definition I have seen is that it refers to all those espects of the game that bore or frustrate players. But frequently the term gets linked to mechanics remove interesting decisions from the game, or prevent interesting things from happening. I think this makes sense: Feeling like your decisions don't matter is frustrating, and feeling like things don't progress is boring. Negative play experience need not, but can be, linked to the power level of a mechanic. A mechanic that feels like it takes away your player agency and is likely to win games is more easy to perceive as problematic. I think the wave of "always fights first" that AoS had for a while is a good example of that. If you watch the Warhammer Weekly episode on NPE, that's still the most disliked mechanic by number of votes. But mechanics can result in negative play experience even if they are not particularly powerful. As an example, there exists a Magic deck with the game plan to slow down the opponent's game and counter their spells until it can resolve a card that ends the game in a draw. This deck is obviously incapable of ever winning a game, by it's own design, but it would be terrible to play against none the less. An example of very mild NPE that has nothing to do with power level from AoS are Legions of Nagash Skeleton Warriors. A block of 40 gets 120 attacks naturally, but up to double that with buffs, and possibly attacks twice from a spell. Their damage is still not good, but watching an opponent resolve 400+ attacks for very little effect in game is still a bad experience. Why should we care about NPE? Because in games, it's not just the outcome of the game that matters, but also how you get there. By that I mean how much you enjoy playing, how many interesting decision you get to make and how much it feels like your choices influenced the outcome. I think this becomes most salient from the perspective of a game designer. Imagine you design a game that is well balanced, but the all people you ask to play it tell you they don't enjoy an aspect of it. You probably should not just tell those people "You just don't understand the game, get better and learn to live with it." That would probably just make people stop playing, or never start at all. And that's a situation that we want to avoid. NPE is a problem especially when we are concerned with growing the game and retaining players. I don't think that it should be controversial that how enjoyable a game is to play is another quality games have that can make them better or worse, independent of balance. Since you are apparently a Platonist about truth, I assume you are also one when it comes to good and bad. You should not have trouble accepting that, objectively, one rule set of a game can be more fun than another. You might want to say that we should not put any stock into what any one person things is fun or not about a game. After all, a person can always be mistaken about what they want, or maybe they just don't understand the game, and in any case they can just go play a something different. But what I am talking about are not the feelings of any one person, but a look at the response of a larger section of the player base. From the statistics we have, about a third of players say, AoS shooting is an NPE (top 1 and 2 are "activation wars" ~45% and "magical dominance" ~42%, two other extremely non-interactive mechanics). But of those players, 50% say shooting is the worst thing in the game. 75% say it's in the top two. That is absolutely data that should not be ignored, regardless of how good shooting armies are in tournaments right now. It's not about what any one person does not like or can't deal with, for whatever reason. It's about the response the mechanic generally provokes.

I don't know why you think I am the correct target of your agrument, then. I don't believe I have argued anywhere that all shooting is too strong and need to be nerfed. I thought I had made my position pretty clear a few times that I think the power level is not too high except for a few units (such as Sentinels). That's what my previous post was about. The real concern in my eyes is just that people don't currently enjoy the shooting mechanics of the game. No more, no less. To me, that suggest that we should look at changing it in some ways. I have not suggested that those changes should involve reducing the impact of shooting across the board. Please stop talking like I have never played a game of AoS and don't know that being able to take objectives is good. I have not argued that shooting damage wins games by itself and won't be defending that position. I have argued that Sentinels are overtuned. But that is not in conflict with the fact that top lists run 20 to 30 of them, since I don't believe a unit needs to beable to be spammed and win tournaments to be overtuned. I also don't think that tournament performance is very relevant to discussions about NPE. A mechanic can be non-interactive or unfun to play against without winning tournaments. And tournament players are willing to put up with a lot more NPE than other players, typically. You leave my boy Plato out of this! Anyway, even if I agree that "most things in life aren't actually about what you feel", the context of a game not being fun is a very plausible exception to "most things". I see being fun to play as one of the essential functions of a game. Therefor, a good game is one that excells at being fun. A very Aristotelian position. If you are into philosophy, look up some contemporary papers about how to handle disagreement between people with equal access to information some time. Might be instructive. Also, one last thing: I don't understand your point here. When Thundertusks were still able to snipe stuff with six mortal wound snowballs, they were absolutely terrible in melee for their points and could not capture for beans. If they were worse than Sentinels in terms of shooting, but also not good at the objective game and more expensive than 20 Sentinels, it seems to me that should support my position that Sentinels are overtuned and that a unit can be bad for the game in terms of play experience unrelated to their pure, mechanical strength.

Gravelords are doing quite well for an army that does not even exist.

No, that's not correct. I am aware of the math, I just come to different conclusions from you. I think this is because I value high-rend or mortal wounds higher than low rend damage. As a heuristic, I view a mortal wound to be about twice as good as a no-rend wound. That's just my quick rule of thumb. That is because that's their value when calculating against a 4+ save. If you take the average relative value against all armour saves, it's more like 2.5 no rend wounds per mortal, but since saves are not equally distributed, that's not a very useful number. Of course I am aware they will perform better per wound against high armour and worse against low armour units. That's basic stuff. But mortal wounds a lot more valuable in some respects. For example, you can't really hope to overwhelm 3+ or 2+ armour with no rend in AoS as it is currently, with the amounts of damage units deal and how much that damage can be buffed. But you can hope to deal with a low-armour unit in a pinch if all you have is mortal wound spam. That makes me value mortal wounds higher than no rend wounds. As such, even though in some situations Sentinel damage output is low, I think because it is high quality it should be valued highly. I do not believe that I have claimed that it was the damage of Sentinels that makes me think they are overtuned. What I actually believe is that they are overtuned in other ways. To pick up your comparison with Freeguild Crossbows, I think the difference is pretty clear. Crossbows have a shorter range, can't move and need to stay above 10 units to get their extra attack, and need a command point and support hero to reach their full potential. To be fair, though: You'd probably bring a Freeguild General anyway if you have other Freeguild units, and you can in theory replace him with 10 more crossbows and get similar numbers if you don't. Crossbows have to deal with all the usual counter play options to shooting, like cover, line-of-sight and Look Out, Sir! Lumineth Sentinels, by contrast, have higher range, are self-buffing and have no additional rules they need to watch out for to reach their full damage potential. The range difference is significant, at 24" with no movement Crossbows can only hope to hit units deployed right at the line turn 1, while Sentinels have a much easier time hitting high value targets at 30" with the possibility to move 5". A 24" circle is only about half the area of a 35" one, if you want to put it in terms of area control. And as a bonus, Sentinels don't care about line-of-sight due to their warscroll ability, and don't care about cover and negative to hit modifiers due to dealing their damage as mortals on unmodified 6s. I can tell you that if I was building a competitive Cities list, if allying in 20 Sentinels was an option, I'd probably go for it every time over Freeguild Crossbows. Given that Crossbows are a native unit with synergies in the army, I think that's fairly telling. I already view the damage output of Sentinels as competitive compared to Crossbows, and all their other upsides just push them even further into the lead. If you think Crossbows are not the right comparison, try Hellstorm Rocket Batteries, which have a 36" threat range and are therefor a closer comparison in terms of their role in the army. They will end up looking even worse, head to head. Even in the post you quoted, I was not talking about the problem with Lumineth Sentinels being that they can shoot up most of an opposing army. I don't think that is what they do. Instead, I think they make it too easy to remove high value targets, such as the Freeguild General you included to buff the Freeguild Crossbows in your comparison. In that role, reliably removing or at least highly damaging high value targets every round, they are exceptionally good. And I am not surprised tournament lists take 20 to 30 of them. That's what I would expect. Dedicating 420 points to deal with any hero problems you might face seems like a super good deal. And that brings us to the point I am actually arguing: The really egregious thing about Sentinels is not just that they are extremely good in their role, but also that they are extremely non-interactive, which is what causes negative play experience. @Enoby made a good point that Sentinels are a lot like old Thundertusks, which were also not overpowered in the sense that they were winning tournaments, but still bad for the game in the sense that everyone hated playing against them. I find that when we look at the data, and it says that of everyone who thinks shooting in it's current form is a problem, over half of them think it's the worst or second worst problem in the game, we need to take that seriously regardless of whatever other metrics you want to look at. And I think responding to that very real concern with just "git gud" or "you don't know what you really want" is not good enough.

It certainly seems like the miniature count of the box might be high. We will definitely see 8 heroes and 5 bosses, that much is confirmed. The different bosses seem to have their own underlings, so far skeletons, zombies and those wolf-vampires are confirmed. The map on the website also mentions "the spectral dead" and "carrion horrors". Potentially, that could mean a unit of ~5 models of a distinct type for each boss. That's around 40 miniatures or so, all in all.

That's all completely fair, of course. I actually believe that the shooting units in most armies could actually use a bit of a buff, if anything. If we get ranged attacking to a more equal position between armies first, I think the argument to make core rule changes becomes stronger, because then we are not trying to fix the outliers with a nerf to the mechanic in general. For what it's worth, I can't even come up with a core rule change that would fix the problems that the top shooting armies cause without destroying the viability of shooting in general. So my stance is that we should fix the outliers with warscroll changes/errata and tweak the core rules just for a more positive experience (without decreasing power). I think you make two good points here, which are that we need to remember that AoS needs to be balanced non only for tournament play, but all levels of play. Arguably, it should even be balanced with more weight given to casual play, since that's how most people actually play the game. The other point is about mortal wounds being too common. I believe that the function of mortal wounds in AoS is to be the damage type that you use when you want to avoid putting too many die rolls on an attack. Magic, for example, would be a bit weak and feel kind of bad if there was the possibility of the target getting a save after you win both the casting and unbinding rolls. It makes sense that magic deals it's damage in mortal wounds after that. Same with incidental damage effects. I still generally like mortal wounds on 6s to hit/wound, because it's just less of a hassle compared to extra damage or extra hits. But in general, mortal wounds are a very strong mechanic. The only thing that holds them back from being the best way to deal damage in the game is that mortal wounds attacks are usually low damage. So once we get into the territory of mortal wounds being able to take out units on their own, especially at range, I think mortal wounds are starting to be misused as a design tool. Of course, it's hard to exactly put a finger on where the line is. I don't think making use of bunch of 1d3 mortal wounds abilites from like five different sources in your army to fairly reliably take out a 5 wound hero is a problem. But being able to include a unit in your list that can just do this on it's own with little opportunity cost does not seem ideal.

If Gravelords get confirmed, I think we will see at least one model. Although it could be one we have already seen, like the axe zombie or new vampire lord.

Shooting, by it's nature, has some big advantages over melee. Shooting phase is before combat In melee terms, that translates to "always strikes first on your turn". If you are out of range, you can't get attacked back That's as if a melee unit could not be targeted after attacking. Long attack range This means that you don't have to make charge rolls to attack. You also don't have to do a lot of positioning like you would have to if you had to actually charge. We could view it kind of like a melee unit teleporting in and out to attack. But without even having to have room to stand like that would require. Natural drawbacks are that you only get to shoot on your own turn, and that you have to deal with line of sight and Look Out, Sir! Everything else is warscroll dependent (minimum ranges, lower damage). Not being able to shoot units outside of 3" when attacked is not a drawback. That's just what melee has to always deal with in the first place. In theory, good warscroll design should be able to balance the benefits and drawbacks against each other. That's why I think the currenty shooting problem is a problem of overtuned units and factions. In the past, GW has managed to strike that balance fairly well. I think nobody would seriously argue that Cities of Sigmar shooting is unbearably noninteractive, for example. But some recent units have a bit too much going on. People bring up Lumineth Sentinels, not necessarily because they are the strongest shooting unit (although I want to stress that contrary to what some people in this thread say, I think they are very strong), but because they bring together all the worst non-interactive aspects of shooting with another non-interactive mechanic, dealing their damage as mortal wounds. Imagine them as a melee unit, see if that helps understand why they are frustrating: We are talking about a unit that can charge from 30" away, does not need to roll to charge, teleports back to safety after, strikes first, can't be attacked back and does their damage as mortal wounds. The drawback is that their damage is comparatively low for their points. I think that just sounds insane. Personally, I think it's worth adressing the overtuned shooting units that exist (here's hoping that BR: Teclis moves the mortal wound damage of Sentinels to their aimed shots only). But due the natural advantage of shooting over melee and the natural non-interactivity of shooting mechanics, I think tweaking the core mechanics to make them a less negative play experience would also be worth trying.

I can see it after taking another look. Especially the hair. Interesting, though! It means we have another rumour engine that is obviously Death, but we know nothing about.

The bishop being a necromancer makes sense. We will see if that pans out. For the kneeling vampire guy, we have a rumour engine which is a better match than the new silhouette, though: But you are right about the pauldrons. That probably indicates that the new wolf-vamps and the kneeling guy are part of the same knightly order or that they are his underlings.

What turned me around on this point was Warhammer Weekly's recent episode on negative play experience. On that episode, a lot of participants (though not all) of their survey identified shooting armies as an example of NPE. And of all those that did, around half rated having to play them as the most or second most egregeous form of it, way ahead of any other mechanic. At that point, there needs to be some kind of design tweak no matter what the numbers say. Perception of a problem is a problem in it's own right when it comes to games, where an enjoyable play experience is part of the goal.

Nagash: *invents Bonereapers* Nagash: We can rebuild him, we have the technology. *Six Million Souls Man theme plays*

I'm not in favour of constantly bringing back old characters for no reason except nostalgia, but if they brought back Krell as a Bonereaper that would at least be an interesting spin on it. That said, I don't think it's very probable.

Surely, though, a middle ground between support heroes being invincible and support heroes being instantly deleted by certain armies is possible. At least it should probably require a much higher commitment in terms of points to kill a five wound hero turn one with shooting or magic than such heroes usually cost. And even then, not getting a lot of counterplay against shooting or magic is a pretty big feel bad situation. That alone warrants taking another look at the mechanic.

From left to right: Left is one of the unrevealed heroes, middle is probably the Wolf himself, right is one of the climbing vampire/wolf guys from the trailer. EDIT: Totally didn't see that the original post already had the same commentary. Something else, then: If we see a bunch of heroes and big bads revealed this weekend, that could mean an earlier release of Cursed City than we predicted based on the "one reveal a week" schedule (under the assumption that Cursed City gets release soon after all major characters are revealed).

You think so? I personally can't make heads or tails of this one. The hand on the right is definitely the claw hand holding the skull from that one rumour engine, but that shape around the waist looks like a Lumineth decoration. It definitely would be a surprise if a clawed hand doing magic with a skull was part of a Lumineth model. I can't really make sense of what's happening on the top of that silhouette either. It looks like some sort of wooden appartus with a rope. One side of the rope seems to attach to the miniature's other hand (not the one with the skull). Can't really make out what the other side connects to. The wooden contraption (if it is that) reminds me of these images:

So that OBR axe from the rumour engine was for the Underworlds warband as suspected.

If it's the same deal with the Lord of Pain for Slaanesh, you probably won't have to pick up the box. You can just buy the Lord of Pain now with the proper release of the faction. It's not box exclusive anymore. If they release the plastic Vampire Lord that was leaked early as part of a duel box, that should not be a concern, because we have seen that a single miniature clam pack exists for it.

I was thinking of a unit of 20, should have made it clear. 280 is still far below the going rate for other artillery that does the same thing. The closest other thing I can think of is OBR catapults, where you really need two (400 points) to do it reliably. I definitely don't think anything in any book before OBR can do this reliably, at 30 inches and for such a low point cost.

GW's marketing team is probably in a bit of a weird place with Gravelords. People who really pay attention know that the faction is coming, but it seems like the original plan was probably not to reveal it until after BR: Teclis (if the theory that they will be that book's Hedonites holds up). Given the name of the upcoming preview show, I expect them to reveal that Gravelords are a thing next sunday, but I have no idea what that means for their release schedule. I wonder how they are going to do the release. I expect both the models from Cursed City and the Underworlds warband to be playable in Gravelords. But will they be keyworded as Legions of Nagash until the battletome releases (which will probably be in May at the earliest), or will they just hold back the warscrolls until then? Or maybe they will just own it and give them the Gravelords keyword without any rules that make use of it. I also wonder if they would be willing to release Gravelords hero in a duel box, and what that box would be branded as. I mean, calling it Lumineth vs. Legions could be OK, especially if they put the new Vampire Lord in there, but it would be uncharacteristic of GW to put out warscrolls that are going to need an update fairly soon afterwards.

Correct me if I'm wrong (I did not buy BR: Morathi and mostly know the narrative second hand), but in BR: Morathi the duel box was Daughters vs. Slaanesh, even though the Slaanesh plotline only started after the events of BR: Morathi. Or was there a big Daughters/Hedonites showdown in the book that I am forgetting?

I have been thinking about how to balance shooting for under the assumption that we still want ranged-focussed armies to be viable, but don't want the playstyle to be dominant. Plus, there are some armies around that basically have no shooting, so we have to take this uneven distribution of the mechanic into account as well. Currently, this uneven distribution makes it hard for core rule changes to help balance the mechanic. Something like a simultaneous, alternating shooting phase does nothing for armies that don't have access to shooting. To the contrary, depending on the implementation (like if you could shoot back on your opponent's shooting phase), it would just make things worse for them. For what it's worth, I think there are some restrictions that made shooting weaker than melee that have been in the game for a long time, they were just not part of the core rules: Shooting units did less damage than melee units on average (even if they get to shoot and attack in melee in the same turn). Shooting range was usually low enough so that a fast melee unit would be able to charge a shooting unit on their turn even from max range. If you had long range shooting, those pieces were immobile, fairly weak and frequently had a minimum range. I think for a moment last year we had an army that could do strong shooting, but was not oppressive: Cities of Sigmar. If you compare Cities shooting to current top shooting armies, the difference in power becomes pretty clear. Cities shooting is mostly mid range, around 18". Anything above that is either no rend or artillery. Definitely no 30" mortal wound bombs. Cities still has some of the strongest shooting in Irondrakes, but they you need to jump through a lot of hoops to make them work. You need to keep buff heroes around them and not make a move with them maximize to their damage, need to use Soulscream Bridge to get them where they need to be and need to properly screen them to prevent a counter charge. Compare that to Lumineth Sentinels: Basically self-sufficient (they need magic to buff their moral wound output, but they can cast the spell themself), and can reliably take out a 5 wound buff hero turn 1 from anywhere on the board with their 30" range, and for a fairly small investment. Even if you are not planning to spam them, a unit can basically go into any army an be great value. This is why I think fixing shooting is hard. I think the problem is not with the core shooting mechanics, but that we have several overtuned armies that can put out too much damage at too high ranges. Which is way harder to fix. I for one am hoping for a bunch of warscroll rewrites, but it seems like GW is going the opposite way and just giving everyone good shooting.