yukishiro1

GW basically never changes wound characteristics except in tomes. There's no reason in theory why they couldn't, but in practice, they just don't. I can't see that changing. Probably the most realistic change is to lose the spell shrug and make the hero phase move a command ability, and drop their points by 25 per double (10/15 per single, I don't think it matters which). At that point the spam list is probably fixed because only one unit gets to cross the whole board per turn and you're vulnerable to all MWs, not just non-magic ones. But at 315 they're a lot more attractive to non-spam lists, even if you do have to spend a CP for the hero phase move, which is still an absolute steal.

I don't think this is true in this particular case. Does anyone enjoy playing against SDG spam? If not, it isn't subjective and context dependent in any meaningful sense. A subjective judgment that virtually all players share is something to act upon, not something to dismiss as subjective. People don't play games to be miserable. We know SDG spam is strong (just not precisely how strong). We know it's a terrible game experience for the opponent that makes the game not even feel like a wargame any more because the movement phase becomes irrelevant and it just becomes a dice-rolling exercise to see if your list can beat a certain profile. We know there's no real strategy or tactics involved in playing against the SDG spam list, except if you count spamming a counter in the list construction phase. I don't think you need to know anything more than that to know it's a bad design that should be remedied. The difference with your stardrake list is that list was miserable to play against if you didn't know how to play the game. SDG is not fun to play against no matter what. I mean maybe I'm wrong, maybe some people love being boxed into their deployment zone T1 by a bunch of flying, ranged MW-spewing dragons and having the whole game be "can I get enough damage through a 3+ save and 4+ spell shrug to break out and be able to actually play the game?" But if those people exist, I haven't met them - and you haven't either, judging by the fact that you agree it's a miserable experience. They don't even need to be nerfed per se, just changed. You could lower their points at the same time you toned down the scroll, if you wanted to. What needs to happen is just some change made so you can't box your opponent in T1 with resilient stuff they can't break through unless they spam counters themselves. You could do that by preventing spam, you could do that by making them squishier, or you could do that by limiting the hero phase move or removing it entirely. Some of these options would have quite limited or no impact outside the spam list, and might actually improve them when not spammed if you also modestly dropped their points at the same time.

If any of those other 4-1 lists are as miserable a play experience to play against as SDG, they probably should be changed too (I think SoB and Foxes probably come the closest, but neither are on the same level as SDG spam). I don't think anybody in this thread is saying SDG are the unbeatable meta-defining army, the problem is that they are both strong and an extremely bad experience to play against, because nobody wants a wargame where movement is irrelevant and your gameplay experience is just rolling dice against a single profile and seeing if you have enough of the right sort of dice to win.

The problem with this it relies on only a few armies getting these magical scrolls that force everyone else to spam the counter to them or lose. If every faction has a scroll like that, the game just degenerates into rock-paper-scissors because you can't cover all of them, and a competitive game that comes down to comparing lists and determining the winner before the game even starts is not a good competitive game. In point of fact, Sentinels don't do that, though. Sentinels require adaptation for some armies, and I personally think they're a terrible scroll (which we disagree on and isn't worth getting into here), but they don't require you to spam a specific thing in order to win the way that beating SDG spam does. If anything, they require you not to rely on a specific type of unit - the buff hero - rather than forcing you to spam something in particular to counter them. SoB are the closest analog to SDG spam in that they both present you with a profile and say "you have to be able to kill this quickly or you lose." But the difference is that the profile SoB gives you has a much wider range of possible stuff that can hurt it, while also giving you some options to play around because they have quite a small board footprint and much more limited movement. So while SoB requires you to "spam" damage, it gives you a lot of options of what type of damage you want to spam. SDG require you to spam a very specific sort of damage to counter them. I honestly don't think there's been another spam list in recent AOS history that requires you to counter-spam it with such a narrow category of counters. I think we more or less agree on the bigger point re: a scroll's value being in whether it enlarges gameplay options or constricts them. SDG spam definitely seems to constrict gameplay options, and that is neither fun nor stimulating. Facing a SDG list, you barely feel like you're even playing on a game on a board any more; you're virtually playing one of those old JRPGs where your guys are on one side and the NPCs are on the other and you take turns whacking each other, and you better hope you have the elemental spell that corresponds to the enemy's weakness equipped on your characters, or you're just going to lose.

Which is problematic itself, because there's no way to reign in that list short of deliberately playing really badly. It's impossible not to stomp everybody unless they have the tools to beat it. The guy who's just playing dragon spam for fun is going to have a harder and harder time finding people willing to play him once they realize how unengaging and lame the experience of facing that list is. Which is going to ultimately mean he doesn't enjoy it either, except maybe in the very short term. It really isn't good for anyone to have powerful faceroll lists (whether or not they go 5-0). It's like the SoB problem but worse. It's not good for the competitive game, and it's not good for the casual game either.

It's been carefully explained many times in this thread already why SDG are especially problematic when spammed (even if they don't regularly go 5-0 because the lists that do counter them are strong counters precisely because there's so little actual play in the SDG spam list - it mostly wins or loses at the stage of comparing your two lists, there's little room for player skill to influence things either way) - if you don't agree that's a problem, you aren't going to agree, and I don't think anyone repeating it a fifth or sixth or tenth time is likely to make any difference.

Even if every faction had the tools necessary to beat dragon spam, it still wouldn't be a good game experience, because matches would still come down to rock-paper-scissors re: whether you spammed the counter tools or not. That's the fundamental problem with skew lists. Typically skew lists aren't *that* big a problem in AOS because damage spillover and the lack of a toughness stat means that everything is at least relatively good at killing everything else. An entire army of 9W flyers with a 3+ save that cross the whole board in one turn while spamming ranged MWs and locking down your whole army are so skew, though, that they end up overwhelming the ability of the mechanics to cope. You need to tailor against the list to have a chance (or have a list that just naturally does the counters). If everyone is having to list tailor to stand a chance against a particular list, that's a good sign there's a problem with the list. And of course, in this case, most factions can't tailor to beat dragon spam even if they wanted to. I think the comparison with gargants is actually interesting. There were a lot of complaints about how gargants introduced a DPS check to the game, and that is true, they basically do - but at least there are multiple ways to pass a DPS check against models that are on a 4+ whose survivability is really just based on a high wounds characteristic, because all forms of damage basically work against that profile. There are far fewer ways to pass a DPS check against models on a 3+ with a 4+ spell shrug that cross the whole board in a turn, especially when they can also put out 10-15ish ranged MWs a turn to snipe out whatever pieces you do have that could help you against that profile.

That wouldn't stop the dragon spam list, they don't take more than 4 separate units of SDG anyway. You could even limit them to 3 and it wouldn't be a big problem for the list, they could still do 2 sets of 4 and one set of 2 (or a single if they prefer taking a foot hero in addition to the KD), with the 3" coherency you still cover enough of the board that way. Implementing a rule of 3 style thing in AOS has lots of problems because of how divergent different factions are in terms of the options they have. I'm in favor of the general concept, but the details get problematic quickly.

Yeah, maybe. But it'd be a start at least. And it wouldn't fit into a one drop any more (assuming you want more than two units of dragons), either, so that'd be something too.

This feels like a rehash of the debates about moving after translocate and how SCE players brought up other factions that can do something similar, but never with the same sort of reliability. Idoneth do that a fixed turn of the game (and can't run and both shoot and charge, it's one or the other IIRC), typically turn 2 unless you invest in flipping the tides and using the right subfaction, and only the eels and sharks move fast enough to reliably get off a T1 charge that way. IJ, as mentioned above, have counterplay since they can't clear screens. LC is limited to 1 unit per turn because of the command ability and they have to have ranged weapons, etc. Dragons, meanwhile, just move 24" (with the option to charge in the hero phase too) with the whole army whenever you need them to, in addition to being able to shoot and charge in the hero phase as well, etc etc. It's just not the same, just like moving after translocate was not the same as the things SCE players pointed to to try to justify keeping it in the game. FWIW I'm not a big fan of T1 alpha strikes generally and I'd be happy to see those options go away too. Here's two more possible solutions which are much less drastic: 4. No hero phase move turn 1. 5. Change hero phase move to a command ability, so it costs CP and you can only do it on one unit per turn.

IJ is different because you can do stuff against an IJ list - you will get crushed and lose T1 if you deploy badly, but once you learn that and pick what you want to sacrifice to absorb the initial charge, you can fight back because the army isn't super resilient and doesn't have the tools to just sit there tying you up. The problem with the dragon list is that literally the entire army can be on you T1 sniping your heroes with MW shooting that ignores look out sir before locking you down in a way that you can't break out of if you lack the right tools (i.e. copious non-magical MWs). It's frustrating not because you lose all your models immediately - you don't, the output isn't actually all that high - but just because there is literally no counterplay for a lot of lists. You get tagged T1, and then you lose. Game's over with no opportunity to do anything at all. And even the lists that can beat it generally do it by generating enough output to smash through, not by anything tactical. The whole game just comes down to whether your list rolls enough of the right sort of dice. And nobody really enjoys that. Three solutions that would work: 1. Remove conditional battleline. 2. Remove the hero phase move (and probably reduce the move to 10", too). 3. Remove the spell shrug and put them on a 4+ base. There are probably others too, but these are all easy and each would probably fix the problem on its own, albeit in different ways. Solution 1 retains their flavor but limits them in a way that stops the SCE player from being able to utilize spam to lock down the entire opposing army, solution 2 stops your ability to cross the entire board in one turn to tag the army in the first place, giving the opponent time to get out and start establishing board control prior to getting hit, and solution 3 makes them squishy enough that the alpha strike bunker doesn't work any more. My vote is for solution 1, but I doubt GW would want to do that because of the anger it would (justifiably, given how much GW hyped up the all-dragon army) create among people who have dropped hundreds of quid on an army they can't use any more. So I think more likely is that the scroll gets toned down and/or points go up again, which unfortunately probably ends in a place where nobody takes them except in spam lists.

Just remove the conditional battleline and the dragons are probably ok (if still stupidly overbloated as a scroll). But that's difficult for GW to do at this point given how many people have already bought the spam list.

GW has playetesters, but the program isn't very serious. They're unpaid members of the community who are given the carrot of early knowledge of what's going to be good or bad in return for providing nominal feedback. I'm sure most of them do it in good faith, but GW shows little inclination to follow that feedback, the program isn't run in anything approaching a systematic way - it's basically just "here's some rules, play around with them and tell us what you think" - and there are in-built incentives to the system too that are really unhealthy re: the playtesters' incentives because they tend to be competitive players and/or influencers who stand to benefit from that inside knowledge. Again, I'm not accusing anyone who playtesters of operating in bad faith, and I know for a fact that many of them do try their uptmost to improve on GW's often hilariously flawed balance in the test rules they get...but the incentives built into a system inevitably impact behavior, and the incentives built into the GW system reward people for not rocking the boat very much with their feedback. Unless and until GW gets more serious and starts shelling out for actual paid testers who participate in an organized system, it's basically more of a way to reward insiders and bribe influencers than a real playtesting program that produces rigorous results. And despite all that...they often do flag problematic things that GW then just completely ignores in favor of getting the books out the door, broken or not broken.

Most GW customers don't play the games at all, or do so only very infrequently. But that's a different question than how they play when they do play. If players who don't use the matched play rule are the majority, they're scarily good at keeping it quiet. As I said, in my local community, they essentially don't exist. I can't remember the last time I saw someone looking for a narrative game as opposed to a matched play one. That doesn't mean people don't play casually, but they do it within the matched play rubric. Maybe my local community is completely unrepresentative of AOS players across the world, but I would need some evidence to believe it beyond just someone on the internet saying so. But this whole argument is completely besides the point because if you play narrative you don't care about batteline restrictions anyway. That's explicitly a matched play thing. The thing that makes the drakes so problematic in matched play is being able to be spammed, and there is zero reason why you have to allow that in matched play to allow it in narrative or open. If we are supposed to believe GW doesn't take matched play seriously and doesn't devote resources to it because of all the secret narrative players, why are they going out of their way to let you spam the unit in matched play? That doesn't make any sense. It's internally inconsistent. This isn't a case of GW not paying attention to matched play, it's a case of GW creating a problem for itself in matched play by going out of its way to allow something dubious that is completely irrelevant to non-matched play. Incidentally I think this is actually evidence of matched play's dominance - if GW felt comfortable telling people "if you want to spam drakes, just play narrative, that's what most people do anyway!" they'd just do that.

I don't consider myself more important. I just know that every single person I know who plays AOS plays matched play. Every single one. Maybe 1 in 10 also plays narrative, but not a single one doesn't play matched, and 9 out of 10 play only matched. Maybe these hordes of narrative players are out there and they actually outnumber us matched play players, but if so, I don't know how you'd demonstrate that because they're completely invisible both locally and on the internet. I hope you'll forgive me if I don't just take your word for it that most AOS players play narrative, because it absolutely does not seem to be the case based on every single metric I can assess. Every person I know. Most of the stuff you can see on the internet. Most of GW's own events. It's all the matched play rules. That doesn't mean it's all cutting-edge competitive; most of it isn't. But it's all matched play as the basic framework. I also don't really see how dragon spam being problematic serves a narrative interest. Do narrative players like rules that box them in their deployment zone T1 and then keep them there all game? Honest question. I would think that narrative players would like games where fun narrative things happen, not where their opponent moves into combat with them T1 with their whole army because it all moves 24" + charges and then the rest of the game is just rolling out combats. Is that fluffy and exciting? You would think that if you were right about narrative players being the majority and narrative players liking rules like Stormdrakes have, the game should be absolutely full of units with similar scrolls, right? Not the exact same abilities, but a similar idea in terms of warscrolls being absolutely stuffed full of rule after rule. But that isn't how warscrolls in this game look. Stormdrakes are very much the exception, not the rule.

And yet the vast majority of AOS games are matched play. The reason they brought back matched play is because there was an economic imperative to do so, because it's what the customer wanted and demanded (and was doing on his own in the absence of GW doing it, triggering GW's biggest fear - losing control of the hobby). Matched play is what the average customer wants. If GW's current rules writers aren't up to the task, it would behoove them to find some people who are. I also don't think we can chalk up dragon spam to the designers not thinking people would do it, because they deliberately went out of their way to make it possible in the book via the conditional battleline rules. This isn't an oversight in the sense of it not occurring to GW that people would do this, this is an oversight in the sense of them having deliberately gone out of their way to make something possible that shouldn't have been possible. There is no way to run a fluffy dragon spam list that isn't problematic. It's not like people are combining dragon spam with some extra magic ingredient that elevates it from mediocre to extremely powerful. It's just all there on the warscroll - unless you deliberately play badly you are going to roflstomp virtually any other "narrative" list with it.

Yeah this is really what it comes down to and why people have to play against it to really realize the issues. GW have created a massive problem for themselves by letting them be battleline. It should be undone, but it can't be, because they've advertised the ability to make a whole army of dragons so heavily and people have invested accordingly that there'd be a major protest if they were removed from the battleline list. But without that the scroll has to be fixed, you can't just adjust points or you'll end up at a point where there is no use for them except in a spam list. I don't think they're going to win 70% like Slaanesh did or anything, or even necessarily dominate at 5-0 because there are some lists with the tools to beat them. But it's such bad game design to have matchups be decided simply by a rock-paper-scissors list comparison, and that's very much what dragon spam is. It wins or loses (and mostly wins) really before the game even starts. It's like SoB but with even less ability for your opponent to do anything other than react and crunch the numbers.

I dunno, I'm pretty sure we've had more than one thread on LRL...🤣

They aren't going to do a lot of 5-0s precisely for the same reason that makes them auto-win against so many lists - if they do come up with a list with the tools to kill them, they don't do nearly so well. That's how skew lists work - they are great unless you come up against the list that's skewed against your list. Dragons definitely would have gone 5-0 at their old points cost; at their new points I don't think they'll be one of the strongest 5-0 lists in the game, but that doesn't mean they aren't really unfun to play against with a more mid-tier list. And that's a problem of its own.

Yep, fulminators are broken in a pure efficiency sense, but they don't zoom across the board T1 and tie up your entire army with undegrading 9W models with 3+ saves and 4+ spell shrugs. It's a different sort of broken. Ideally they should just lose 1 attack on each rider (or only go to 2 damage on the charge), but again GW doesn't do warscroll fixes so they'll probably have to go up points instead.

They just shouldn't have the double-move, period. They have way too many rules on that warscroll to be healthy. They should either lean towards speed or towards durability, a unit that does both is extraordinarily hard to balance, especially when it can be spammed. They should also probably lower the range on the breath to either like 6", or make its damage scale based on the target - only 1MW against single-model units with 10 wounds or less, d3 against everything else, on a 2+ to hit (so minuses to hit impact it). Right now it's much too effective at sniping small heroes, which really doesn't make much sense. They're fire-breathing dragons, not precision snipers. Remove some of the bad rules and lower their points back down to ~270 and you have a unit that's not broken any more. But let's be realistic, none of that is going to happen. GW doesn't change warscrolls except once in a blue moon, it's too much work and if they cared more about warscrolls being right they wouldn't have designed this warscroll the way they did in the first place. Look at how many years and tries it took them to finally more or less fix horrors, another prime example of GW's inability to resist "give it all the rules" syndrome.

If you had had a full list of dragons you would have obliterated that KotET list - they can only engage a unit or two of yours, and you then use the others to pick off their buff pieces with MW shooting + melee and the whole thing falls apart completely because Varangard have terrible damage output (SCE players think dragons are bad output for the points, but Varangard are even limper noodles for their points aside from the single turn of double attack). That's actually a great demonstration of why spamming certain kind of units can be much more of a problem than just a unit or two in a mixed list. A unit or two can be played around, mass dragons largely can't be played around so it comes down to list composition and if you have the masses of non-magical MW or very high rend attacks needed to win the match. That's the trouble with skew lists - they overwhelm your ability to cope by taking so much of the same thing that a well-balanced list can't handle it. The way to balance that is to discourage or place hard limits on skew through game mechanics, but in AOS GW tends to go in the other direction and actually reward it, which is just bizarre from a game design perspective. KotET is basically another spam list incidentally and another example of GW going out of its way to promote said spam lists.

They just need to make more effort in not making units without counters in the first place. There's enough room in the basic rules for units that counter one another using core game mechanics...until you start creating units that ignore the basic rules. Sentinels are a problem because they effectively ignore range, LOS, look out sir, and armor. I.e. all the normal rules in the game that limit shooting units. Stormdrake are an issue because they are fast, fly, are tough, have MW ranged shooting, can move twice, can shoot in the hero phase, etc etc - again, all things that ignore the normal rules of the game. If either of these units ignored only one or two aspects of the core game they wouldn't be so problematic. I.e. Sentinels had only 18" range and did mortals on wound rolls instead, they'd still ignore armor and LOS, but you could play around them by outranging them and LOS would do something. If Dragons were fast but lacked ranged weapons and were relatively squishy (say a 4+ instead of a 3+, and no spell shrug), you could play around them by utilizing screens and counter-chargers. Alternatively, they could be tough and retain shooting, but not get to double move, and have only an 8" base move. Then they're still great flying tarpits but you can play around them because they can't be anywhere at any time. GW typically runs into problems when it piles too many "breaks core game concepts" onto a single unit. But they just can't seem to resist doing it. It's one of the great frustrations of the game that GW is so ill-disciplined when it comes to resisting the temptation to throw the kitchen sink onto a warscroll because <reasons>. Stuff that ignores core elements of the game should generally be rare, and you should hardly ever see units that ignore multiple core game elements. And above all, those units, if they do exist, certainly shouldn't be spammable.

The other way to do it is with mechanics that specifically discourage spam. For example, what if instead of all your dragons being able to move in the same hero phase, it was a command ability (that could still only be used once per unit per game)? So that way only one unit per turn could use it. And what if each enemy unit could only be shot once per phase with dragon breath? Rationalize it with some silly stuff about mixing streams. Or go even further and say you only get one dragon breath per turn, period - say they have to suck stuff out of the atmosphere to do it and that means only one unit can do it per turn, I don't care. In that world, you can still spam dragons if you really want to, but you can no longer direct breaths from several units against the same hapless target to guarantee a kill, and you can no longer get your entire army into combat T1 and tie up their entire army. Suddenly spam becomes much less attractive, while still possible for the determined player who really wants to do it. But it requires thinking about what interactions and units are likely to be abusive when spammed, something GW has shown virtually no ability to do. If anything GW loves to do the opposite and come up with mechanics that actively reward spam - 3.0 subfaction bonuses are almost all in this category, for example, which is really disappointing to see.

They feel like a prime example of a unit that's abusive against older armies. There was a shift partway through 2.0 and especially with the 3.0 books towards putting out a crapload of non-magical mortal wounds, something that is generally quite rare in the older 2.0 books. Having a list that completely crushes most older armies with basically no counterplay is really not a good thing for the game. GW thinking it was ok to let dragons be battleline - and at the truly ridiculous original 270 points to begin with - is a prime example of how far the company still is from taking balance seriously.