yukishiro1

Seems like a band-aid for a gunshot wound, the problem is less Archaon and more the combination of all the mechanics they've introduced that benefit models like his. Though it'd be enough of a black eye to GW that it might be worth doing just to get them to take things a little more seriously.

Yeah, though it'd probably be even more problematic if it wasn't. But that probably should have been a clue to them that they should have gone back to the drawing board... I am starting to feel like the biggest buff to big centerpiece models this edition isn't even the save stacking and heroic heals, as significant as those are. It's that only being able to be in one place at a time isn't nearly the disadvantage it used to be, because the board is not only significantly smaller, but the critical area of the board - where objectives are - has been reduced even more in most battleplans. The average number of objectives has decreased, and on top of that, they feel more loaded towards the middle on the majority of the maps. And of course even controlling the objectives at all is much less important than it used to be, given it's now only 50% of the scoring. All these things together are conspiring to make big centerpiece models much more powerful than they used to be, even before you consider their boosted survivability and how little they mostly went up in points compared to that boost.

Played against the Morathi-Gotrek-Snek list with a STD infantry list I deliberately set up to be counter-meta, to try to figure out if I can make that work. I gotta be blunt, the MGS list is gonna get nerfed hard whenever the first major balance adjustment is. It's just silly, as silly as Tzeentch Archaon (which I was totally wrong about the power of because I underestimated how much the battleplans matter, see below). I actually ran him pretty close up to T5, but the match was never really in doubt, largely because of the battle plan we rolled, the one with the 3 objectives all in a line in the middle where you roll a D3 each turn to see which objective is worth 2. Gotrek wasn't an issue, I got curse off and obliterated him with a marauder block and that felt good, but Morathi was, well, Morathi, and the Sneks did what Sneks do and sniped out my heroes, which I had absolutely no choice about because of said battleplan requiring everybody to scrum in the middle. By T5 my army just ran out of steam. I might have been able to win against a bad player who wasn't careful to screen the sneks so I couldn't drop some marauders on them, but that's hardly rocket science, and with that screening it was always going to be a massively upward slog to get anything on a plan so focused on the middle of the board. Which brings me to...battleplans that have the objectives clustered all in the middle are not good battle plans. I actually think I could have won this game on a battleplan that made a bigger portion of the board important, but too many of the new battleplans reward a style of gameplay that, to put it bluntly, feels pretty faceroll-y. Given how much the basic ruleset already rewards the big centerpiece models, I do not think emphasizing the moshpit in the middle version of mission design was a good idea, it ends up making the strong stronger while also removing strategy from the game. I've put this battleplan - Tectonic Interference, just looked it up - on my list of plans I will ask my opponent if we can remove from the possibilities.

I mean ok, but that's not the game we have. We have a game where GW made a bunch of stuff unkillable except with MW, but extremely killable with spammed MW, which they have also tossed onto almost every new unit they've put in the game. Then clearly didn't point the 3+ save, or MW, correctly to reflect the new greater value of each. If this is intentional, it's an odd sort of intention. They didn't really address the lethality of 2, they just changed what's lethal and what isn't. As well as adding a universal unreliable, short-range prayer that makes basically everything incredibly lethal if you can manage to get the prayer off.

Stuff that's effectively immune to everything except MW isn't a good design paradigm, and the problem isn't that we have too little stuff that's effectively immune to everything except MW. Empowering 3+ save models to be immune to non-MW damage doesn't fix the lethality problem in the game, it just widens the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Giving every faction haves doesn't fix that issue as a matter of game design, you still end up obsoleting a massive portion of your game design space for no apparent reason. AOS 2 did have a lethality problem. Widening the gap between MW and non-MW by making units capable of becoming effectively immune to normal damage - especially while throwing more and more MW into the game on just about everything, as evidenced by the new units - doesn't fix that problem. It just moves you to a gimmicky game state of 2+ rend ignoring saves vs MW spam.

They need to just make the maximum bonus you can get to save be +1, before rend modification, not after. I.e. a model with a 3+ can have +5 to its saves, rend -1 still means it's saving on a 3+. This fixes the issue with stuff that's effectively immune to everything but MWs, while still making high armor saves valuable. There's a small category of stuff that gets screwed by this - largely stuff with +1 to saves natively, e.g. Marauders - but you can fix that by just moving their save up a point via errata. I.e. marauders aren't a 6+ save with a +1 if they have shields, they just get a 5+ save if they have shields.

That's actually the post-edit version. The original version said shortly after release of 3.0 in July, now it says "before the first battletome." It also previously said it'd be part of Warhammer+ and be out before that release, but now it doesn't say that, instead saying it will "eventually" become part of W+. So that suggests at a minimum they're not planning to have it ready on August 25 any more. https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/06/24/a-new-warhammer-age-of-sigmar-app-is-being-forged-for-the-new-edition/ I thought they had even walked that back now, but I can't find it right now, so maybe it is still supposed to come out before the new battletomes?

Just like with the 40k app, they initially claimed it would be available at one time, then edited that post to remove the claim. Now there's no ETA, it's "soon(TM)". I very much doubt they're going to hold up the release of their battletomes for the app.

They just need to make it so only the unit being charged can shoot, that fixes most of the edge cases - irondrakes lose half their shots, sentinels and other squishy stuff have to put themselves in danger to do it, etc. Whoever thought it was a good idea to let you do it w/in 9" of whatever was actually charged...hoo boy, that was an odd decision.

I've been advocating that for a long time. GW evidently has no interest, which is too bad, as it would allow them to keep the double turn they are so wedded to while vastly diminishing the amount of games it ruins.

Exactly. If they are really doing this, it makes a mockery of their own reasoning they gave to us just a month or two ago - when they were already aware these were coming.

Faction-specific battalions are terrible if that is indeed what they are doing, they moved to this new system where everybody has the same options so you don't have to balance around faction-specific ones...only to go right back to the old system? It's crazy.

New battalions in a white dwarf article sounds like a complete disaster.

3.0 actually made the incentives to do the most powerful thing - go second T1, get the T2 double, effectively win the game by halfway through T2, then be free to give away the turn on T3 in order to be able to burn the objective of your choice and secure victory - even stronger. The rules designers don't appear to have recognized that it isn't T3 where they needed to incentivize going 2nd, it's T2, because it's the T1 to T2 double turn that is now the most important. It's like they were still playing the AOS of several years ago, before the shooting meta, when it really was T3 that was critical. But since then they've moved up the critical turn from T3 to T2 due to the proliferation of ranged attacks, teleports, out of phase moves, etc. It's the very rare army that can't hit their opponent hard from the bottom of T1 these days.

Yeah, it's a headscratcher for sure. There's no clear rationale for it other than "this is how it was before, so this is how it should continue to be." It's even more problematic in AOS than in 40k, because AOS is so much more of a front-loaded game, so being able to deploy with the knowledge that you get to choose who goes first is even more of an advantage than it would be in 40k. The only thing I can really think of is that they really want to push big god-tier models and drop count does do that since each one of those models costs so much. But that doesn't seem a particularly convincing reason for it, there are so many other ways to promote big models if that's what they really want to do, drop count is comparatively such small potatoes.

GW's previews aren't designed to give you information, they're designed to generate "engagement," by which they mean, people talking about it on the internet. "This thing's wicked! This is terrible! No it's wicked! No it's terrible!" is exactly what they're hoping to do. It's the modern marketing strategy that says that any reaction to your product, even frustration at being teased, is positive because it keeps people talking about the product and therefore keeps it in their minds. So yes, they're useless and frustrating from an objective point of view. But the point is to manipulate you into being primed to buy them, not to give you anything objectively valuable.

If they're a bad player, sure. Realistically Morathi hardly ever dies before T3 if the player using her is competent, unless the player wants her to. If you're taking the first turn you don't charge her into something that's going to deal 3 wounds back to her, unless they screwed up and gave you a really juicy target like a big block of sentinels or something like that...in which case that's a winning trade so you're happy to do it.

The main change is that it makes going high drop less of a disadvantage. For people who want to go low drop it's not going to stop them doing it, the advantages are still too high. But it does mean you don't get double punished for going high drop. It's a good change overall, though the better change would have been just to get rid of the drop system entirely and determine priority on the first turn with a completely random roll-off, after deployment, like 40k does.

But they don't actually do that. They could in theory, but they don't in practice. In practice they reward skew lists and punish balanced ones. Because this isn't a game you can play conservatively anyway. There's basically no LOS blocking, the board is tiny, mobility is huge, heroes can easily be sniped out of a crowd, etc. This isn't 40k where it's genuinely possible to shield your units from harm if you choose to. This is a game where the best you can generally hope for is to screen stuff for a turn, maybe two if you're extremely lucky. And then you come up against sentinels, and you can't even do that. So in practice, the only realistic way you can hedge in favor of your strategy is to take such a large percentage of your army as that role that your opponent can't chew through it all. A balanced list with a variety of units has a much lower chance of scoring a grand strategy than a list that just doubles down hard on something. That's the problem with them. They reward the precise opposite of what good game design should reward.

Grand strategies are just bad and should be axed or completely redesigned from the ground up. Right now they actively reward skew lists, the precise opposite of what they should do from a game design point of view. I honestly can't understand why they were put into the game in this form in the first place, it's so obvious they reward skew and punish balanced armies, and it is so hard to understand why any game designer would want to do that. And it's not like they actually add anything, either. Battle tactics are a good addition even if the specifics are a bit wonky right now, but grand strategies just seem like they have no real purpose except the incidental negative one they accomplish by rewarding skew.

I dunno, that sadly sounds extremely standard to me too. Malice is fairly rare, but disorganization, nobody taking responsibility for fixing a situation, dysfunction, and a general lack of care is sadly not in corporate environments. And what we know of GW is that it's super chaotic from a management point of view. Last minute decisions to axe products or change them in big ways, totally un-joined-up thinking between departments, botched attempts to change warehouse procedures, etc. Everything we know about GW is that it's a total mess organizationally.

I think that kinda goes back to winners and losers. The heal is irrelevant on a 5 wound foot hero with 7 bravery and a 5+ save. It's not irrelevant on Archaon or one one of the ten or twenty premier monstrous hero options in the game.

From my games, the gap between winners and losers - more in terms of units and lists than in terms of tomes - seems wider than it was in 2.0. Part of this is down to the power of save stacking and the reduced output caused by coherency changes rendering large numbers of units in the game basically hopeless at killing, the other part is due to scoring changes. In my experience so far, if your list can't score its grand strategy and 4/5 battle tactics, or reliably get all 5 battle tactics if it can't reliably get its grand strategy, it is not going to be genuinely competitive with those that can. Starting out more than 3 points behind is too large a gap to realistically overcome on the missions that have a scoring system which typically produces only a 1 or at best a 2 point swing on the primary towards the winning player. Similarly, if you don't have resilient monsters to run up the score with, your list better be able to kill the opponent's resilient monsters, or you've pretty much lost before the battle begins. The game hasn't really gotten slower and deadliness hasn't really gone down. Instead, it's become more unforgiving, with the gap between top-tier anvils and other units widening. The overall ruleset is a big improvement on 2, but it feels like it's being significantly distorted by bad save-stacking rules, and by battle tactics and grand strategies being almost 100% dependent on your own list, with very little ability of your opponent to disrupt them. A couple tweaks and the AOS3 ruleset could be in a really good place, but right now, there are big flaws to go with the big advantages.

Quite right. The turning of the descriptive term "poverty wage" into some sort of "insult" plays right into the hands of the people who want to keep you in poverty in order to enrich themselves. They want you to feel sensitive about the amount of money you make, and they want you to react angrily to anyone who suggests that that amount of money is not enough to support a reasonable standard of living, because then you are internalizing your own oppression. The amount of money you make has no impact on your moral worth as a person.

Wonder if it's a coincidence that they just put out a thing about paying all their employees a 5k bonus. Not suggesting that the bonus itself was prompted by these revelations - companies like GW don't move that fast - but I do wonder if they hastened the PR release to try to get ahead of the negative press.