yukishiro1

On the topic of digital rules, I have recently been getting into SW: Legion, and I just want to say what a massive difference it makes to have all the rules freely available online - and, even better, they have a forum where you can post questions that they answer with official answers from the developers. Like a rolling FAQ that you don't have to wait months for; often the responses come within just a day or two. GW is really missing such a massive trick here sticking with this medieval print approach.

This definitely does not belong in an "Unpopular Opinion" thread...

This would have been a great one for the Unpopular Opinion thread. 😁

I doubt it. But even if so...just reduce his points, Issue fixed, gameplay experience improved for everyone. I see no loss to making rend actually relevant to killing stuff with high armor saves. That is literally what the mechanic is supposed to be for. Yet in 3.0 it largely doesn't function that way, which is just weird. Why have a mechanic that doesn't actually do what it is specifically meant to do? +1 save before rend, not after, fixes all the issues with save stacking in a way that doesn't end up rewarding masses of crappy attacks. Rend actually becomes an important thing to put in your list for cracking tough targets. And a 3+ save stops being some magic superpower compared to a 4+, which also doesn't make sense.

I really think the simple solution is just to cap the amount of +save you can get at +1 before rend, not after rend. This means rend becomes a counter to high armor saves, as it should be - that is the whole reason the mechanic theoretically exists. The current meta where the best way to kill a big hero is to drown it in low quality attacks with MWs on 6s is absurdly stupid from a "how things ought to work" kind of way. And instead of save stacking, it rewards spreading your +to save out across the army instead, which is what you ought to be doing with a game mechanic. Models with a 3+ still end up with a 5+ against even rend 3 with a +1 to save, so it's not like they have no armor save at all, but it makes them actually vulnerable to high rend in the way they should be. Then just go back and errata all the +1 to save effects on warscrolls to improve the save characteristic instead, and you're done. I'm not convinced you'd need to even change points because I'm not convinced the designers actually point in save stacking when pricing stuff - that's kind-of the problem right now.

There's no reason it has to be tied to battletomes. GW just finally admitted that with the 40k "patch" they put out today - it is indeed possible in 2021 to make tweaks to the rules without putting out a new hardback book to do it. edit: Blah saw mod post after posting.

Everybody is having trouble with production, but that would actually be an opportunity for a more forward-looking company - if they can't get the minis out right now, why not focus instead on the fixing up the rules? I mean I understand that it's not the same people working on both, but what are the rules people doing right now? They clearly have more time between releases than they anticipated, so why not spend some time fixing stuff we do have? It's hard to escape the feeling that AOS is being put on auto-pilot at the moment because, well...it is.

Yeah, the breakdown between MWs and all other forms of damage is turning into a significant issue. And it doesn't feel like the distribution of MWs really makes any sense. A unit of charging chaos knights shouldn't be less scary to a buffed 3+ save model than a bunch of zombie chaff. And putting curse on said 3+ model shouldn't result in it evaporating to said chaos knights whereas without the curse it's virtually untouchable. IMO they have never really figured out how to replace toughness, and this is just another sign of that problem. In AOS 2 monsters tended to suck because they weren't any tougher to kill than anything else; now that is still true except for the ones with high saves, which become inexplicably difficult to kill except with MW-spam gimmicks. But it all dates back to not having a toughness stat that could allow you to buff the survivability of big monsters without the need to buff their saves, and that allowed for making them difficult to kill vs different types of attack profiles without having to come up with a gimmick like MWs that just bypasses all the rules and becomes the king of damage output. MWs on the to hit roll in particular are very questionable from a design point of view because it makes RNG such a massive feature in damage output. They have all these stacked mechanisms designed to smooth out the RNG...and then they toss them to the side for the best, strongest kind of damage. It's bizarre.

That one's definitely a feature, not a bug. 🤣

The BR releases were great for existing players, but they went OOP almost immediately, and were marketed around a concept GW knew they were about to nuke with the new edition, so it's hard to see them or something like them coming back. If they think even SCs offer too large a discount to players, the chance of them doing more discount sets like the BR ones seems really small. Just to add a little more on the combat patrol thing and newer players generally - it feels like something that is a bit out of time. It might have worked 10 or 20 years ago when the wargaming market was so much less developed, and the choices were mostly either GW or something based on an IP with no recognition outside of wargaming. These days, we have a plethora of non-GW games based on well-known IPs - the SW games, SOIAF, etc, essentially all of which offer a better actual gameplay experience than GW games, and which also offer cheaper entry-level sets with much less need for hobbying. SW: Legion is $120* for a starter set that gives you the rules plus two armies, and the game is actually playable with those armies, not in theory but in practice. You can have fun with either of the two SW: Legion starters for $120, it's not a "you can technically play this but the game barely functions" kind of thing. At least where I live, people don't start GW games to play the games any more. There are other better options out there if that's your main orientation. People get into GW games because they love the miniatures, because that is what GW has over the competition - SW: Legion models are fine for what they are, but they're fundamentally functional, not ornamental. Nobody (well, almost nobody) starts SW: Legion because they want to hobby. The trouble with Combat Patrol is it's trying to compete in an environment it just can't compete in. If you want to play a sci fi miniatures game, and your choices are spending $140 on a Combat Patrol that doesn't even give you the rules, and that gives you 1/4 of the standard army size, or spending $120* and getting the rules + two armies you can absolutely play with in a Star Wars game...it isn't much of a contest. GW can't win that fight. What they can win is the fight for hobbyists...but you don't do that with boxes where the pitch is "you can play a tiny game with this." Ironically, Start Collecting boxes feel much more in tune with the current reality in the wargaming market than the newer Combat Patrol boxes do. *In fact it's more like $60-80 at actual prices, because you can typically get Legion stuff for a bigger discount than GW stuff, and the price just went up anyway so a lot of stuff is still available at the older lower prices.

I dunno, that hasn't been my experience at all. "Pay 1.5x as much, get a lower % discount than you used to, and get an amount of models that is just enough to be intimidating to paint for a new player but not actually enough to play the game in anything like a balanced state" isn't a great sales pitch. The great thing about Start Collecting is that it gives a new player just the right amount of models to start with from a hobby point of view - not so few that it feels pointless, not so many that it's overwhelming. There's a reason it's called "Start Collecting," not "start playing." It recognized that getting people into the hobby is about, well, getting people into the hobby. The Combat Patrol model requires a much larger initial investment both monetarily and in terms of commitment. And for someone with that level of commitment...they'd probably just rather pick out their own stuff instead of being saddled with whatever GW thinks they should have. It seems to be aimed at a new customer profile that doesn't really exist out in the real world. I've seen several new would-be players look at the combat patrol and then say "nah, I'm good" or actually change factions to something that still has a SC box because it seems less daunting. From what I can tell Combat Patrol seems to be popular with existing casual GW customers who want to start a new army and don't really care that it's not optimal, not with completely new players (or with competitively-minded players, since you typically end up spending more when you figure in that most Combat Patrols have some trap choices that end up being higher than the discount). AOS SCs are also mostly at or over 500 points already, and there isn't any 500 point matched play system even in theory in AOS. It seems like they'd need to go up to 1000 points to get something that would have any gameplay-based justification to it, and that would require pricing well above what Combat Patrols are priced at, unless they are willing to actually give bigger discounts for the new boxes than for the old ones, which seems unlikely.

Combat Patrol for the box just means "more expensive with less discount than the Start Collecting used to be," it doesn't actually mean anything in terms of being able to field a legal army necessarily. It's just a way to squeeze more from the customer while still making them think they're getting a deal. Some executive in the bean-counting department obviously made a decision a year or two ago that Start Collecting was offering too large a discount so they decided to do a double-whammy and both increase the purchase price of the starter sets while also reducing the discount percentage. Looking back, it was one of the first signs that the relatively customer-friendly policies that started when Roundtree replaced Kirby were ending and GW was moving back to focusing on extracting more and more money from existing customers rather than growing the player base. Traditionally this phase lasts ~5ish years and results in significant financial trouble for the company followed by a change in management; we'll see what happens this time I guess.

Holy ****** stuff is overpriced in Japan. 🤣

1000 point models shouldn't be in 2000 point games, period. The problem really comes from that more than from save-stacking per se. When you have models worth half an army you have to make them absurd to possibly be able to deliver on their points. And the things you have to do to do that don't generally make for good games. There really shouldn't be anything in 2k games that are more than 500 points. If that means toning down the power of God models, or having some sort of summoning mechanism that means they only enter the game from around T3 and then have a discounted points cost to account for that, it'd be better for the game.

Not giving the Darkoath the cultist keyword is just dumb. They wouldn't be competitive with Marauders even with it except in Idolators where they get the marauder charge thing, and even then it's sorta questionable due to the base size difference. It's like GW has some compulsion to make warcry stuff bad...even when they design a scroll that doesn't totally suck, they manage to cripple it somehow.

BoC already got their reboot, it's called Kragnos.

For stuff in the UK factory and warehouse, sure, I buy that, they're close together. But if you have to send an unsold box of X back halfway across the world to be melted down, the economics of that start to look quite different. These days plastic is expensive enough that it might still be worth shipping unsold stuff back to the UK to be made into new stuff, but I doubt that was the case pre-plastic spikes, and I kinda doubt GW would have paid a premium back in the day to do that. But I obviously don't know for sure.

The trouble with Khorne is the warscrolls mostly suck, so you basically have to run STD units as your main force to be competitive, with the Khorne units basically just heroes + min battleline. The overall faction rules are solid. Blood tithe is the best-designed allegiance ability in the game. Easy to understand, easy to use, but it has a tremendous skill ceiling because you have so many options and it can be used in so many weird and interesting ways since you can use it in your opponent's hero phase too. My fear is that when they update it they'll gut the allegiance ability and we'll end up with something possibly stronger but much blander and less interesting than we have now.

Nighthaunt, Gitz and Beasts need tomes the most, but that's almost never GW's criteria.

That has to be the worst promotion ever. Get vouchers (not even a discount!) for less than the third-party discount for shopping on GW's webstore, if you're a W+ subscriber. And whatever vouchers you get are issued Dec. 3 and have to be used by Dec. 25. Between this and the "2 weeks of W+ free well actually not free at all, it's really just 50% off the first month, you still have to pay despite us advertising it as free" promotion it feels like they have two marketing guys competing for who can create the more underwhelming promotion.

Yeah, GW has definitely historically destroyed product rather than sell it at a reduced price tag. I don't know if they still do it. And I don't know if plastic sprues can just be tossed back into the vat and boiled down and then remade into a different sprue, or whether there'd be any economic reason to do that rather than just binning them - and I kind-of doubt GW would pay more to have them sent back to the factory for reuse if it was cheaper to just bin them. These days it might actually be worth shipping it back to the factory to be melted down though, with prices up as much as they are.

Yeah, I have to say, just painting two sets of untamed beasts has been about my limit. The first set was fun to paint, the second set was pure tedium because they're basically exactly the same as the last set (I think two of the models have marginally different weapon swaps) and having done all that detail and flesh once already, I have zero desire to do it again. I'm very glad there's no reason I'd ever want more than that.

Oh, cool, I'm glad they kept it that way.

Yeah, there's a reason you only really see golems and beasts; I don't think the recent change to make them battleline is going to change that much. And having them be battleline actually arguably nerfs untamed beasts competitively because it means they give up an extremely easy break the ranks, whereas before you could just park them 3" from your opponent's army and move block with no risk of feeding them a no-brainer battle tactic.

Yeah, they don't really fit one another in terms of scale if they're meant to be equals. Like for Untamed Beasts, there's 3 small ones, 3 medium ones, a lion, and two that are pretty clearly character-sized, or, at a minimum, unit champion sized. So if you wanted to build marauders that looked coherent, at best you're looking at like 3-4 per 9 box you can use to create a coherent unit. Which becomes ridiculously expensive to get even a unit of 20 (over $200), which is really the minimum size you'd want to run marauders. It also doesn't help that they're almost all monopose (sometimes 1-2 in the kit have a weapon swap), which means that any large unit is going to have lots of doubles. Unless you go for something really weird and like buy a bunch of different warbands and mix them all together for your marauders, who then end up looking thematically incoherent. Some people maybe like that, but it certainly isn't your typical AOS unit where individual models look "of a part" with the others. The new darkoath warband does look like you could probably adapt them for use as marauders pretty easily (if you don't care about WISYWIG and many of them not having shields), though you'd still need to buy 3 boxes for a 20-man unit, so you're looking at probably $150 for something that normally costs $40.