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yukishiro1

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yukishiro1 last won the day on June 18 2022

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  1. The first go of Grand Strategies was a total miss. They added nothing to the game because they were so passive to achieve. All they did was make skew lists and tabling your opponent better, the exact opposite of what a secondary objective should do. 0 out of 10, do not pass go, do not collect $200, Billy Madison quote, etc. Just a total failure. Sorry if that sounds harsh but it's how I feel. Something this undercooked should never have made it into the game, they should have just held it back until they had something that actually made the game better instead of worse. This time around they got better at creating GSes that aren't just "win more" or "take a skew list," but they're still not great, and on balance I still think they are more of a detriment than a bonus. Especially because the side effect of making them harder has made the imbalance between them much more apparent, with bad consequences for competitive play particularlry with regard to the ones that are book-specific. I would give the new GSes about a 4/10. I would give them a 6/10 without the book-specific ones. Battle tactics are better, with the major problem being the imbalance stemming from the wildly differential levels of power of the book-specific ones. Maybe a 6/10 on these, which would go up to an 8/10 if there wasn't the book-specific balance problem. TBH I am still not 100% sold on the idea that BTs are the way to improve scoring in the game, but if they're going to use them, this is a better implementation than the first one, and on balance I think it's better than not having them - even if the best thing of all might be to have something totally different instead.
  2. Most of the time in a game of AOS is in moving, thinking about what you're going to do, and rolling dice. Time spent moving models is the hardest thing to reduce, though you can use things like movement trays to reduce the early game time you need to spend. When moving units with a lot of models, unless it's going to matter a lot or you play with people who are super sticklers, a lot of time can be saved by only measuring the model closest to your opponent carefully and then just moving up the rest of them in the same formation they were in before. Sometimes movement matters and you have to carefully measure every model but in a lot of cases it really doesn't matter and all that matters is that closest model since that's what is determining what your charge is going to be. Time spent thinking is the thing that benefits most from playing lots of games. But you can also address it by running through turn simulations on your own - just walk through a turn on your own. It works better if you have an actual board/table/mat to put your models on as if it was a real game, but even if you don't, you can just walk through stuff like your hero phase even without the models out. The other big thing you can do is start planning out your turn on your opponent's turn. Dice rolling is the easiest thing to cut down time on. Organize your dice in groups of 5 or 10 (I like 5, some people like 10) and have them there on the side of the board to be easily picked up in the amounts you need without having to count out each time. Use a dice tray to roll in. Picking out failures then rerolling successes its usually faster than the opposite. Learn your attack profiles for your main fighting units by memory so you don't have to look them up.
  3. Yes, this is one of those things that seems like an error, but has never been corrected despite years of opportunity to do so. So despite being clearly depicted as a particular individual daemon, Skulltaker is not in fact a unique unit in the game rules. Now why you would ever want to take more than one, that's a different question...🤣
  4. What sort of list do they play? Fyreslayers can be a very effective counter to melee-heavy DoK because of the fights first, especially without Morathi since nothing else in the book can really survive being hit first. DoK are strong in a tournament setting because they typically start on a higher points value than everyone else because of the GS/BT list. But that's particular to a tournament setting in a lot of ways, it doesn't necessarily translate to more casual games between more casual players. And the new book is significantly less forgiving than the old book - you can't just yeet your army up the board and rely on a bunch of rerolled wards to keep you alive due to sheer math. It's become more of a finesse army that is less easy to play than it used to be.
  5. It depends on the specific fight on death ability - for example, the fyreslayers fight on death that comes from the Auric Flamekeeper specifically says it can only be used if you haven't already fought. But the base rule in 3.0 is that unless it says that you can't fight twice with it, you can (though as noted above, you can never fight three times in a phase for any reason). This applies to most fights on death effects, including death frenzy.
  6. I don't think pre-game terrain placement, faction or otherwise, counts as an "ability." If so that would also mean you aren't allowed to place any terrain on this battleplan either, you'd have to play on planet bowling ball. Which is obviously not intended. I guess you could argue that placing faction terrain after the game has started would technically be an ability, so RAW you wouldn't be able to add trees (of the Sylvaneth or Nurgle varieties) or the boats from the artefact, but again this seems so clearly unintended that I'd honestly giggle if anyone tried to tell me I couldn't do it, no matter what the setting is.
  7. RAW it's technically possible but I certainly wouldn't try to play it that way myself, it seems so obvious to me that it's just a drafting error with how a normal move is defined. It makes absolutely no sense for a normal move to have additional restrictions in the movement phase that it doesn't have in other phases.
  8. I've seen this played and argued for every possible way, and I'm wondering if there really is a clear answer, because the FAQ answers are about as clear as mud, given that they only refer to really weird bodyguard abilities that specifically include negation of the wound in them, rather than simply stating that the wound is allocated to a different target. So let's take a really run-of-the-mill bodyguard example - Immortis Guard from OBR. How does this actually work in the current version of the game? Wards are supposed to be rolled before allocating a wound, so do you get to roll the ward for the hero first, and then if it fails, you get to roll a 2+ to allocate it to the Immortis? Do the Immortis get to roll their ward as well? The two FAQs GW has sought fit to provide say, first: This doesn't apply to the standard bodyguard wording because the standard bodyguard wording, unlike the two examples given above, makes no mention of negating a wound. The first wound isn't negated and a new wound isn't conjured into being. It instead takes the same wound and transfers it to a different target instead. The second one is similarly unhelpful: Again, this addresses rules that negate wounds; the standard wording on the bodyguard rule doesn't negate a wound, it transfers it. So it would seem to me that the hero can roll any ward roll they may have before rolling the bodyguard rule? Note that a prior version of the AOS 3 core rules FAQ specifically prohibited this via answer that stated that bodyguard rules were used instead of wards, not in addition to them, but that FAQ was removed a while ago, and nothing I can see in the core rules defines a bodyguard rule as a ward. On the question of whether the Immortis Guard can take their ward roll, 14.3 says you can only make one ward roll per allocated wound. If we read it at the same wound being allocated to the Immortis instead of the hero, this would imply to me that you can't take a ward roll after the bodyguard, if you already took one on the hero. Though if the hero didn't have a ward or you chose not to take it, you could arguably then take it on the Immortis unit since a ward save hadn't yet been made as to that wound? Am I totally lost here? Does anyone have a better answer than "you can take one ward save per bodyguarded wound, whether on the bodyguarded unit or the bodyguard unit?"
  9. Sure. It's in the troops role, it's not a leader, so it's eligible. The fact that it's a hero doesn't change that.
  10. The FAQ only applies to things that set the characteristic to a set value, not that apply modifiers. Modifiers still go on in the normal PEMDAS order - you do multiplication and division first, then addition or subtraction. So if you're say M6 with a +3 spell you still go down to M3 then back to M6. What the FAQ is saying is that if you had a spell that sets your movement characteristic to, say, M2 - not -2, just to a flat value of 2 - that'd override any bonuses that were applied earlier. So it wouldn't matter if you had a +3 movement before that, you'd still end up with M2, not a M5.
  11. The fundamental problem is baked into the system. Going from a 3+ to 2+ is too much of a damage reduction compared with going from a 4+ to a 3+. It always has been and it always will be. 2+ saves simply shouldn't be achievable except in exceptional circumstances. The rule should always have been that you can't get better than a 3+ save unless you have better than a 3+ save naturally. The issues with save stacking go away at that point, and if save stacking isn't so valuable any more, people stop doing it so much, which means the issue with rend values being mitigated by it largely go away as well. The prize of the 2+ save is just too large and it distorts the whole game.
  12. Well, it's mostly auras, but it'd also effect things like arcane bolt. I.e. you could cast arcane bolt from one model then discharge it by measuring based on a different model in the unit. I guess potentially you could also argue that things like flaming weapon would hit the whole unit as well if you were interpreting the "caster" to be the entire unit, which could maybe be situationally powerful on the right unit. I think I agree that based on that language everything effects only that particular model, has to be measured from that model for all purposes, and effects would go away if that particular model dies, but that seems like a terribly awkward and cumbersome rule to play with in practice.
  13. Wow, how did I miss that? Thanks. Do you think that also implies that any aura that comes from "the caster" also goes not from the entire unit but only from the specific model, so you need to keep track of which model cast the spell to know how large the aura is? Or would the aura project from the entire unit? I.e. is "the caster" that particular model or the unit as a whole, even if it's measured from that particular model? If it's the specific model, that would also imply that the effect ends if that particular model dies even if the rest of the unit survives, I guess? I want to say it's the whole unit just because from a bookkeeping perspective anything else seems a bit excessive, but that gives me as the player using that unit a bit of an advantage and I don't want to take it if I'm not entitled to it.
  14. I could have sworn there used to be a FAQ on this, but maybe I'm imagining it or maybe I'm getting it confused with the one in 40k? I couldn't find anything current, though I may have missed it. Although most WIZARDs are single models, there are some units where the whole unit counts as a WIZARD (at lest when certain conditions are met, usually if there are more than X of them). Sisters of the Thorn are an example. How does one measure effects to and from these models when using spells? 19.2 merely says that "the range of a spell is always measured from the caster," but it doesn't define "the caster." When you have a multi-model WIZARD cast a spell, is the entire unit the caster, or do you nominate a single model within the unit to be the caster? This can matter quite a bit for effects that require something to be wholly within X" of the caster. Similarly, for effects that create an aura in an X" bubble from "the caster," do you get the bubble from the entire unit, or only from a single model you nominate as the caster? My inclination is to say that unless I've missed a FAQ it's the entire unit in both cases, and that ends up being a disadvantage in certain circumstances (e.g. when casting a spell that requires wholly within) but an advantage in others (i.e. getting a big bubble from auras), and you just live with those little quirks. Is there some FAQ I've missed somewhere, or do people have other thoughts on how to handle this?
  15. Mortals are another prime example of a lack of interactivity. You pay all these points for your nice big armor save...and then you don't get to roll it. Anecdotally there's a huge difference between how people to react to taking damage with even an armor save of a 6+ and how they react when they don't get to roll any dice at all. That doesn't mean mortals shouldn't exist at all. But I question the wisdom of their current approach of putting more and more sources of MW into the game as a rock-paper-scissors game between wounds, armor saves and mortals. I don't think people generally actually find rock-paper-scissors mechanics to be fun, especially not when they are determined by choices you make before the game starts, because again that means you lack agency in the game itself.
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