yukishiro1

Lazy way to deal with the problem, but better than doing nothing. Maybe when they have some time they can come up with a more interesting effect that isn't so problematic.

Stuff like this proves that GW is capable of acting relatively quickly when it really screws the pooch, at least in so far as fixing what it screwed up. That's different from not messing up in the first place, but at least it shows the company can move relatively quickly when it feels pressured to do so. The lesson we should take from this is that community outcry is exactly what is required when GW messes something up. We absolutely can get them to pay attention, and we can get them to fix things in a decent timeframe...but only when we force them to by generating so much protest that it spurs them into acting. If there hadn't been this huge outcry, we wouldn't have got these fixes in the time frame we did. Obviously it's best to be civil when expressing that dissatisfaction, but it shows the company is responsive to overwhelming fan discontent. This is actually arguably the big change between old GW and new GW: new GW pays attention to social media. It's not necessarily any more friendly a company, but it is more aware of how it is perceived, and therefore more responsive to fan discontent. So that means it's up to us to make sure we use that lever in appropriate circumstances.

People say how horrible community comp is...but it's already happening. GW screwed up the ward thing so badly that the result has been spontaneous community comp. The vast majority of events have already stated they will be comping it. If we want to avoid community comp, GW is going to have to get serious about improving the quality of the rules it puts out, because right now, comp is required to make the game playable. If you're against comp you ought to be on the front lines demanding GW fix this snafu and up its game generally, because nothing feeds the demand for community comp like incompetent rules writing.

I think that's ok as long as they're not particularly powerful. The problem comes with stuff like Spellportal or Cogs that are remarkably powerful effects for certain armies. Like if Cogs just gave a +1 to cast in a 6" radius - or even in a larger radius - I think it'd be fine. It'd be better in some armies than others, but +1 to cast isn't such a big deal that it's going to break the game either way. The thing that is weird about it is that the alternate effect is not nearly as powerful - it's useful enough, but not even in the same ballpark as the extra cast. I honestly don't think GW understood how powerful the effect is - the power of the two options are so radically different that it doesn't make any sense, it's not a real choice. That suggests to me this is just a problem of not knowing their own game very well.

There are a lot of very bad foot heroes. There are a few good ones. But the good ones are almost all good because they're cheap buff pieces, not for what they actually do themselves. And GW has put themselves into a bit of a corner with the way that there is no significant character baseline protection in AOS, so any effective hero can easily be sniped out with either ranged attacks or spells. This creates a situation where it's really only the cheap ones that are worth taking. But that means you can't make foot heroes that are actually good in combat, because they'd be too expensive, and they'd just get deleted before they can do anything. It all goes back to that fateful and disastrous decision not to include character protection in the game (no, a -1 to hit doesn't count).

It's interesting to me that this FAQ finally pushed a ton of TOs over the line on comping. As far as I can tell, almost everybody is ruling that we're just going to ignore GW's snafu with the ward stacking, because it's either (1) a mistake or (2) such a terrible decision that we have to wrestle responsibility back from GW, because if they really meant to do that, they have no clue how to produce a good game. It'll be fascinating to see whether this is a one-off, or whether it's opened pandora's box and we're going to see the community comping future broken things as well if GW is either unable or unwilling to fix balance things itself.

Well, it's not impossible any more, with Ed Sheeran's Eye getting nerfed. Hard, but no longer impossible.

Shackles has an over 50% chance of not doing anything at all against anyone with a priest or a wizard, due to the fact that you get an attempt to unbind followed by an attempt to dispel before it actually does anything to you (except in really weird edge cases). Those aren't odds you can build a competitive list around. Cogs doesn't have that problem - get the cast off, and you suddenly double your casting potential across most of your list. It's just stupidly overtuned, and it warps the balance of certain things to a stupid degree. Quite a bit like Spellportal, actually. The game would be better off if they just removed both of these spells entirely, like they removed Balewind - which relieved almost everyone, whether they initially admitted it or not. Cogs could be nerfed instead of being completely deleted, Spellportal should just go because it's fundamentally not something you can really balance because the problem isn't Spellportal itself but the spells you can cast through it in a way they were never intended to be casted.

IMO the best thing they could do is just not let you use heroic actions on monster heroes, except for the CP generating one. Monsters get monstrous actions; non-monstrous heroes get heroic actions. Most of the balance problems in the game go away or are seriously mitigated, and you now have an actual tradeoff between monstrous and non-monstrous heroes, instead of the monster ones just being no-brainers that largely obsolete the non-monstrous ones. Put a special rider on Gotrek too preventing him from using heroic recovery (but not from using best day - he's a slayer, he doesn't try to stay alive but having his best day ever is the most slayerish thing ever) and there you go, 3.0's now in a much better state balance-wise, though save stacking probably still needs a nerf too.

You can always make two attempts to dispel shackles, and the second is always at the base casting value, so unless someone has zero priests or wizards on the table it's very difficult to make it actually impact your opponent. Cogs is just overtuned period, all the time. It's hard to understand how they could have thought it was a good idea.

Yes, it's well-known they're overtuned. Expect GW to do something about it in December-January, maybe, unless they decide there's "not enough data."

GW doesn't put much effort into attention to detail on the rule side - which is somewhat odd given they've built their empire on attention to detail on the modeling side. But it's been a consistent pattern going back decades. They pay their rules writers bottom-barrel wages (even by the standards of the industry, when you compared to places like WOTC that are similarly successful and large), they expect them to work for the company on their own time, and they clearly don't invest in professional proofreading at all, given the remarkably embarrassing typos that often make it into print in GW books and the lack of standard language. The rules writers seem to mostly be talented people, but they also seem like they've being systematically overworked and undercompensated, to the point where it's no great surprise that attention to detail suffers. As long as it continues to not hurt their bottom line, I doubt there's much chance of them reevaluating things and spending more money on producing rules more carefully. What incentive do they have to change? And we know from recent revelations how dysfunctional the management is, so even if someone did want to do that, they likely wouldn't be able to get it to actually happen given all the hoops they'd need to jump through. All that said...they are slowly getting more responsive. The fact that they managed a same-day response to the snafu - even just a "will talk with the rules people ASAP" - is a lot better than they would have done in the past. I don't think there's much chance of them investing greater resources to avoid these embarrassing mistakes in the first place, but I do think there are some signs that they may be getting quicker about fixing them once the community points them out.

No, they just FAQed that today to make clear that you can't. You just get to use it for free, it still counts as being used and therefore can't be used again that phrase. Crappy answer to have to give, but it is what it is.

It used to be you couldn't use the book competitively until it's got a FAQ. Maybe now we need to have a rule that you can't use a book competitively until it's got a FAQ to the FAQ. 😒 Of course, that'd mean you can't play AOS3.0 at all given these problems are created by the base rules...

You could do that before their FAQ answer, and it's what we all did. You can't do it afterward, because the FAQ answer explicitly contradicts that and says that any ability which negatives a wound when it is allocated, rather than before, is not a ward and can stack with a ward. There's no other way to possibly read what the FAQ says, other than to say "ignore what's actually written, they can't really mean that." The FAQ itself specifically differentiates between "before" vs "when," and says that the two can stack. This isn't an "us" problem, it's a "them" problem. GW wrote something that breaks the game. Hopefully they will speedily unwrite it. And hopefully nobody will take it at face value in the meantime.

That probably was their intent, it's definitely not what they actually did, though.

Restoring ward stacking is pretty obviously just a massive snafu - not GW's first, not the last. No serious tournament is going to allow it, and it is going to be fixed almost immediately. I wouldn't even bother adjusting your lists, it is never, ever going to survive, it's completely game-breaking. The very fact that the Chaos Warshrine 6+ got FAQed from a "ward save but not ward save" to be a ward save because they were making changes to it anyway shows you that GW's intent is that all these things are ward saves, they just haven't bothered to actually do the hard work of changing them. Disappointing to see that GW still can't manage to avoid breaking its game in fundamental ways, and what it says about their FAQ process that something like this could slip through without anyone noticing it, but it is what it is I suppose. At least they've already acknowledged it's an issue and promised a consult ASAP, I guess that's progress.

It isn't just a DPS check. As I said, it has some punch - two 30x marauders, some knights, and the means to buff them through the roof - curse, the normal reroll hits and wounds, double pile-in, etc. It's enough DPS to kill most things comfortably - any of those 3 units will delete almost anything when pumped up. It just isn't enough to reliably kill the unkillable AOS3 models - stuff with large wound counts, good saves, and MW protection. Sometimes it will - sometimes you'll curse something and then roll hot and delete it with 20+MWs - but sometimes it won't - your 3+ curse you can cast twice will fail, they'll snipe out your lord with overwhelming ranged damage on T1 or more likely T2 so you never get a chance to double cast, and then you're relying on 3+ curses you can't reroll from the shrines, etc. You need a plan for what to do if the DPS doesn't work. You can say "you have a bad list" - but A) it isn't and B) that's actually sorta making the point re: restrictive game design. This isn't a bad list - the whole point is that this list took Tzeentch Achaon to the bottom of T5 and would have beat him if not for the GS system. The game design should not be punishing me for bringing a list like this. This is a far better, more carefully thought out, interesting list than the Godhammer junk you see all over the place these days. Core rules like GSes that are rewarding Tzeentch Archaon and punishing my Idolators are rewarding and punishing the wrong lists. You can't build around targeting a GS because they're nonsense and building around targeting a GS in many cases means building around wiping the army, which takes us exactly back to where we were before in terms of GSes just increasing the focus on killing and rewarding the already-strong. Instead you end up just building your list to be difficult to deny the GS without being wiped, because that's what you can can control. Which again takes us back to that same point. It all comes back to rewarding tabling and list skew. In theory it could be more strategic, in reality it isn't. My views actually aren't that different from Vince's I don't think. I'm a fan of AOS3 generally, as I've said here repeatedly. The overall core rule system is significantly improved over AOS2. I'm not even saying it's necessarily terrible to have a game so overwhelmingly focused on smashing your opponent. This whole discussion was just pointing out that when you do have that game - and AOS3 is that game just as much as AOS2 was, in some ways more than AOS2 was - balance is critical because you're not leaving any escape valve for weaker armies to still compete. FWIW Vince expressed the same big two reservations I have re: the game - the 3 objective missions being generally problematic, and save-stacking and the problems that creates. IIRC they even mentioned GSes needing a rework because right now they are either pointless or stupid.

Well, I haven't either: because of the GS system. 🤣 It's rare it gets close to that, don't get me wrong, but it would have happened in at least one of those two games if not for the GS pushing him over the line at the last moment. It was me playing with my off-meta Idolators list that floods the board with tons of bodies and basically move-blocks the opponent from doing anything until he chews through them. It has some punch, but it mainly relies on curse to kill stuff that abuses save stacking, and even in Idolators that's neither super reliable nor does it work against everything - Archaon for example with his 4+ MW protection is almost impossible to kill even when cursed. So in some circumstances the list has to play by just trying to die slowly enough that you get far enough ahead on the mission that even if they chew through almost all your stuff by the end of the game, you can still win. And GSes just make that that much more difficult by kicking you when you're down.

In both my games where they ended up decisive, someone was hanging on by a thread in terms of forces left but with the scoreboard very close going into T5 - me one time, the other guy the other time - only to have the game determined because the GS gave the opponent 3 points for being the stronger army. So yes, they weren't close games in terms of who smashed better...but they were close games on the score board. So the GS in both cases ended up directly determining the game by punishing the player who was losing the smash game. Hence my comment about them doing the exact opposite of what they're intended to do. Most of the time the GS does nothing at all because you're either winning by so much that it doesn't matter and you get it but would have won even without those 3 points, or both sides get it, so there's no score differential. The only time the GS is actually going to matter is when it is going to serve to force a loss on someone fighting a valiant rearguard action. It's already almost impossible to win AOS while being tabled. But the GS system just takes away whatever remote chance you might have had - not only do you have to have been ahead going into the tabling, you have to have been so far ahead that you can absorb not only whatever they can score after tabling you, but an additional 3 points. It's an insult to injury sort of mechanic.

It's actually quite important what base size stuff is now, especially with the bizarrely finnicky coherency rules. Unfortunately there isn't much way around having stuff on the right bases if you want to play competitively, it isn't fair to your opponent otherwise. What you do in garagehammer is obviously up to the people you're playing with and likely isn't a big deal. But tournaments really do have to enforce the correct base sizes in order to create a fair competitive field. If they're undersized that's an easy fix though, you can buy some enlargers to use if necessary. It's when they're too big that there's not really any easy fix. If it's just one model it is generally easier to play around than if it's a whole squad - i.e. one character that should be on a 32mm but is on a 40, you can sorta work around, but it's hard to work around a whole squad that's on bases that are too large if it really matters that everything's done right.

This is the: "it doesn't matter that GSes do nothing but reward the stroner factions because they don't actually do anything most of the time anyway" argument, which is not a good endorsement for a game feature. FWIW, about 10, and 2. But the nature of it is that GSes are going to matter more when the games are close, and they are going to generally break ties in favor of the army that's better at killing. Hence their function in the game is to reward the army that's better at killing. Both of those games were games where someone was hanging on with a weaker army and then had their backs broken by the GS score putting their opponent over the top thanks to their stronger army book. That's not a good feature. Secondary objectives should provide an opportunity for the weaker army to compete via better play, and GSes do the opposite of that in practice. Now is it possible that a better list of GSes could be better? Absolutely. But the current list is a joke from a tactical point of view. All it really does it reward strong armies and skew lists for being strong and skewed.

GSes are the ultimate example of the new scoring system favoring the strong and hurting the weak. GSes have no function in the game except to give extra points to the army that smashes the opponent's army better than they get smashed. That's literally what they are. Every single one bar one (and even that one in practice) requires you to keep a portion of your army alive while smashing a portion of your opponent's army in order to get a differential score, i.e. for them to matter. They're either wholly irrelevant, or they give bonus points to the army that smashes better. They're exactly what a secondary objective shouldn't be - something that simply rewards you for killing better than your opponent. It's classic rich get richer game design.

Uh...yes? That's the whole point people were making? Why would I care if they are still doing epubs of stuff I don't want? This is one of the most curious defenses of a corporate decision to eliminate a product I have ever seen.

The lack of electronic books isn't speculation. There are no electronic books for 3.0. GHB 2019 and 2020 had e-pubs; GHB 2021 does not. The core rulebook does not. They discontinued them in 40k. They have never said there will be any for AOS 3.0. That one seems very clear: e-pubs are gone in AOS3, just like they're gone in 40k. People have been complaining about it non-stop since they did it in 40k, BTW, and GW hasn't budged an inch or even ever addressed the complaints. It's clearly a high-up business decision they aren't going to reconsider unless it really hurts their bottom line. They haven't come out and explicitly said anything re: warscrolls, but there aren't warscrolls online. Is it still possible they suddenly put the scrolls up when individual kits come out? Maybe. But it isn't looking good for free online warscrolls right now.