yukishiro1

The measure of a corporation's value is, well, its value. Not the amount of profits it makes per year. Market cap is the most easily available measure of a corporation's value. This isn't complicated stuff, and it's downright weird to complain about how "the problem" is people who look at a company worth well over a billion dollars and call it a billion-dollar company. That's literally what words mean. What you make of GW being a billion dollar company is up to you, but it is inarguable that they are a billion-dollar company. To then rant about "political agendas" and "spin" and how "facts don't matter" is highly ironic. This whole post is bizarrely confrontational for no real reason that I can see. I didn't think it was controversial to say that a company with a market cap of 5 billion dollars is a billion dollar company, and I don't see why it warranted such an aggressive response. If "the problem" is people like me, I don't think I want to know what "the solution" is.

There's no rule that companies exist solely to maximize profit for their shareholders, that's actually a relatively modern idea that propagandists have certainly tried their best to backdate into history and pretend was the case all along, with some success in the popular sphere. But it has no historical basis, nor any actual legal basis. You will not find any Corporations Code anywhere that states that corporations have a legal duty to maximize profits to shareholders. It's completely up to the individual company's management (and therefore ultimately to its shareholders) what it chooses to prioritize. Now modern GW is certainly run on the basis of shareholder profit maximization. But that's not an inevitability, it's a choice.

GW sends "guy reads book on youtube" free books to read on youtube. Unless they did a 180 in the last three weeks (they sent him GBH2021 three weeks ago), they are not only fine with it, they actively subsidize it by giving him the material to read.

It's about them not being confident they can deliver better products for their pricey subscription service than randos on youtube.

Their market cap is currently sitting around £3.6 billion. Market cap is generally accepted as a shorthand for company value in the absence of any other data. The value of a company certainly isn't measured by its annual revenue, which is the number you seem to be quoting. GW might or might not "actually" be worth £3.6 billion, but it's certainly worth well over a billion pounds by any serious valuation.

You do not need to actively pursue your IP rights to keep them. That's a myth that people repeated enough on the internet that everyone started believing for some weird reason even though it had no basis in fact. You can enforce or not enforce your copyright rights precisely as much as you want to, it has zero impact on your future ability to enforce those rights; I guess it might theoretically impact your damages if you couldn't show that an infringing use was at your particular expense because of other infringers in the market, but that isn't remotely the situation here. Trademarks are subject to dilution, but dilution is when your trademark becomes associated with the generic product, not when people make products using your IP. I.e. if "Adeptus Astartes" starts meaning generic dudes in space armor, they might lose their trademark. But some dude making fan videos in the GW universe using GW's Adeptus Astartes is not diluting the trademark, if anything they're reinforcing it.

Yeah, Mystic Shield is really good, probably too good for its difficulty honestly, especially when you consider that everyone knows it. Though GW appears to have a bit of a thing this edition for making the generic choices better than the non-generic ones, which I hope is just bad design but I am afraid is a signal of power creep to come.

Yeah, that's a good example of an exceptional character that actually does do good damage yet doesn't already wound on 2s and/or have easy access to wound rerolls.

Oh hey, you're right, it does only last for the turn, guess we've been playing that wrong. Would still do it in a heartbeat to keep something alive from an alpha. +1 to wound might be important for some stuff I guess, but none of the Gods care a lot about it - Archaon often rerolls wounds on 3s, rerolling on 2s instead is a pretty marginal gain; same for Gotrek, the spellcasters don't have strong enough melee profiles for it to matter much, etc. It's a pretty rare character that does actually get a lot of use out of the +1 to wound, characters aren't usually built for doing efficient damage and if they are usually they wound on 2s already and/or have rerolls. The other reason using Finest Hour T1 is attractive is because it isn't competing with the heal the way it is in later turns. AOS is such a frontloaded game compared to WHFB or 40k that IMO anything you can do to boost your survivability T1 is usually worth doing.

If you didn't do it against a list that was clearly set up to alpha strike Archaon T1 and would be capable of killing him without it, you'd be making a very foolish choice. Finest Hour is almost always about defense, the +1 to wound is rarely significant - and you get the bonus on your own turn anyway assuming he survives, it's not like it's completely wasted. The biggest strength of Finest Hour is it allows you to put a + to save onto a character before you get a turn to cast, use abilities, etc. It potentially has more value T1 if you aren't going first than any other time in the game, especially in an Archaon list.

Well, what I was trying to say is that I think he meant with the +2 to save any of them can get from Best Day and All Out Defense. Not just the 3+ in the abstract. I mean if you start those sisters off the board presumably the Archaon player is going to realize what is about to happen and Best Day from the beginning of the first battle round, and then you can't alpha him whether you go first or not.

Is that the math if you're assuming the Archaon player isn't going to Finest Hour in addition to All Out Defense? Because that gives him a 3+ with +2 to save, which is putting him to a 2+ vs the sisters shots. With that, my napkin math says its more like 12-13 wounds, not 21.

Of course they can put pressure on youtube. But that's my point: they'd have to actually start doing that. We already know they were doing that to animation creators, and the change to the terms to purport to completely ban fan animations is in line with that. But there's no reason to think from this that they're going to start doing it with anyone else. I mean maybe I'm wrong and they are going to take this chance to suddenly start enforcing all these things against their own youtube partners they send free review copies to. But even for GW that'd be a bizarre and stupid u-turn, so I'm not going to assume they're going to just because they changed some text: re animations to try to promote Warhammer+.

So I looked into this a little more, as far as I can tell the only real change they made was to the bit outright banning fan films, which is obviously in response to their new Warhammer+ boondoggle service. I wouldn't worry that this shows any intention to do anything other than to ban fan animations, it's just about squelching the competition, which they have already done anyway by coming at all the successful animation producers and carrot/sticking them into signing up with GW. The other stuff was pretty much in there before and not enforced, I wouldn't necessarily assume they're about to start enforcing it now when they haven't been before. They were sending "guy reads book" guy free review copies of stuff as lately as GHB2021, it'd be pretty weird if they were ok with him reading that on channel two weeks ago but are now completely doing a 180.

Is that actually new? It reads like pretty standard GW-speak. And it obviously has no legal authority, GW can tell you what they do or do not "permit" as much as they want to, it's the law that determines what is legal and what isn't. Those guidelines mean absolutely nothing unless GW actually goes after supposed "violators." And they'd have to be literally dumber than a box of rocks to go after the plethora of sites and youtube channels that actively boost their sales. I mean they send review copies of their books to these people, why would they be doing that while also trying to shut them down? There's the guy who gets free review copies from GW and literally reads each one page by page on a video so you can read the text on every page if you want to. He's not some random dude, he's somebody who gets free review copies.

The big god models did see play in 2.0, but mostly in gimmick lists designed to abuse them in the most egregious ways through buff stacking. I'm not sure your math is factoring in best day, or that if you go second he likely has another +1 to save from arcane shield and/or oracular visions, meaning he's now on a 2+ ignoring rend 2, so saving everything in your army on a 2+ (with a 4+ for the mortals). Unless I'm missing a big something, 40 sisters + a dreadlord isn't putting out close to enough damage to kill Archaon through even the 2+ ignoring rend 1 that he can get from just best day and all out defense, much less if he's ignoring rend 2 also. Did you factor in that Ed Sheeran's Eye forces you to reroll 6s to hit, where your mortals come from on the sisters? That makes a huge difference to the math. But that would be another way to come at the issue - keep Gods very strong, but stop them from being buffed by anything else. It is kind-of silly when you think about it that Archaon depends on a stupid little chaos lord to be able to attack twice, or on a stupid little sorceror to be able to have oracular visions to improve his save. Or that Teclis gets different abilities depending on what particular group of his homies he's hanging out with at the time. And if you didn't have these buffs to worry about, you could balance Archaon on his own terms, not with how he interacts with other stuff. If his save couldn't be improved, he couldn't heal 2d3 a turn using heroic actions, etc, you could have him on a base 2+ with no issues, and he could do more damage too if you didn't have to consider him double fighting with the chaos lord, etc.

I'm not sure unbinds need to go away completely to address the problem, limiting range would probably be enough to make them more tactical and less braindead and to restore some internal balance to the magic system. Another option would be that "unbinding" just makes it more difficult to cast in the first place by, say, adding +1 to the casting difficulty if there's an enemy wizard within X" when the spell is cast. Or you could make it more dynamic by requiring the enemy caster to burn a casting attempt on their next turn in order to unbind. At least that way your wizard being neutered is lowering the power of the enemy's wizard by depleting their casts, you're not just getting passively neutered. There's a bajillion different things that could be done, on a sliding scale of how different they are from the current implementation, all of which would improve the situation by opening up more build diversity and increasing player agency.

This isn't really true, though. I mean yes, if you're 100% relying on something that doesn't work 100% of the time, that's a bad list. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about, say, teleport in slaves to darkness. It's not that you 100% need it to go off - but what you need is the *threat* of it going off to force your opponent to respect it. Magic doms take that threat away by lowering the percentage of getting the spell off to so low that they no longer have to respect it any more. Same goes for, say, wyldwood summoning. There are a lot of spells and factions like this in the game, and magic doms just totally neuter them. It's a "stronger get stronger" sort of dynamic that is not usually considered smart game design. It should be enough that your magic dom is good at doing his own magic, he doesn't need to also completely shut down the opponent's mages too, especially not in a braindead, passive way. Something like a w/in 12" unbind range (of caster or the target) creates tactical gameplay where it matters where you put your magic dom; they can shut down the enemy wizard, but only if they expose themselves to some level of risk. A 30" unbind on a table that is 48x60 is a joke, it means you move the model up on T1 and it covers effectively the whole board; even if you don't move up, you still cover like 85% of the board. There's no element of tactical thinking involved because you just do it incidentally. Incidentally shutting down enemy units is not great game design, control effects need some sort of tactical limitations to create a feeling of agency in the opponent that avoids NPE.

2+ saves are fine in a game like 40k where there's tons of AP -3 to -5 weapons and lots of basic infantry have 4+ attacks each, I don't think they're fine in a game where anything above rend 2 is virtually non-existent and basic infantry very rarely goes above 2 attacks per model. With a tiny number of exceptions, nothing in AOS has either the dice output or the rend to get through the number of 2+s ignoring rend 1-2 that they have put into the game via the new system. That sort of save should be something super rare, not something that dozens of heroes now have easy access to. I don't think it's good game design to have a system where MW are the only realistic way to hurt a large proportion of the strongest models in the game. Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect this is going to be the biggest issue with AOS 3 going forward.

IMO you just shouldn't be able to go better than a 3+ save period unless you have a 2+ or better as your base save, and you shouldn't be able to use heroic recovery on the same character more than once per battle round. Those two things would go a long way towards taming the regenerating unkillable super heroes (along with fixing the trait that lets you give a Mawkrusha a 2+ to just be a +1 to save like all the others, fingers crossed that one is addressed in the new codex). They'd still be useful, but they wouldn't be so faceroll any more. The problem with restricting just named characters is then you end up with weird situations where that 2+/5++ ignoring spells on a 4+ Mawkrusha is way tankier than even the tankiest of named characters, which feels odd too. I honestly don't think they really realized what they were doing by making it so easy to go to a 2+ save that ignores multiple rend on so many power pieces. The math difference between a 3+ and 2+ save and the ability to heal 2d3 wounds per battle round is what is pushing these models from "powerful" to " virtually unkillable without MW spam."

There's significantly more book-keeping and choices to make in AOS 3 than AOS 2. It makes for a better game overall, but it's undeniable there is a cost that comes with it in terms of complexity and mental load. I'm not sure it's great that the best solution for taming a game's complexity is to have a cheat sheet you just go through each phase to make sure you haven't missed anything, but that is the most practical way to deal with the issue.

The amount of power big models have to be able to concentrate in one area to be worth taking is so extreme that it also tends to end up making them easily oppressive to non-optimized lists. Alarielle IMO is an example of how hard it is to make a big model worth taking without some kind of ridiculous nonsense tacked onto them. It'd be better if Nagash, Gotrek, Archaon etc were more like Alarielle than if Alarielle was more like them.

But you really can't, not the way you can with the shooting example you just gave. The limitations on only attempting a spell once per turn means that if your strategy relies on getting a particular spell off and you're facing Teclis, you just can't. He just auto-dispels it. In theory you could out-range him, but on the current board that's totally unrealistic except maybe turn 1 if you go first. So effectively you just can't use that key spell as long as Teclis is alive. This is a mechanic that isn't replicated anywhere else in the game, it's totally unique to spellcasting. Other dom casters may not statistically be impossible to cast against, but they're virtually impossible. It'd be like if your five snakes' chance of doing damage went down to hitting on 6s and wounding on 6s if your opponent had a lot more snakes than you did. Yes, in theory you might still be able to do a point of damage once in a blue moon - but your unit is effectively unable to do anything simply because the other unit exists. It's fundamentally different. The whole reason we're having this discussion is that magic in AOS uses a dom sub system that no other gameplay system uses. One that I don't think hardly anybody actually enjoys. The most defense we've got of it is "expensive models should be good, and you can play around it," neither of which are actually a defense of the sub and dom concept. Expensive models can be good without a sub and dom system, and the fact that you can play around a bad system doesn't make it less bad. If you "dominate" the movement phase, your opponent can still move, you just move better. If you "dominate" the shooting phase, your opponent can still shoot, you just shoot better. If you "dominate" the combat phase, your opponent still gets to fight, you just fight better. It's only the magic phase where "dominating" means "stop your opponent from being able to do anything with their guys while you do everything with your guys." People accept this because it's how it's always been, not because there is actually a good design reason for it.

But these are both totally arbitrary. I could just as easily say: why can't one priest sense the other is invoking his God and respond by invoking his own God to intervene and counter the effect of the other God? Greek myths are literally full of that sort of politicking between Gods. On the other end, sure, wizards can unbind one another's spells - but why do they have to be able to do it in a 30" bubble? There's nothing in the lore to suggest that changing that range would somehow bastardize the nature of magic. Do you think there is some strong lore-based reason why the range is 24" in 40k and 30" in AOS? Really? Would the lore of unbinding be destroyed by moving to the 12" of the caster or 12" of the effect I suggested? This would have dramatic impacts on the viability of sub wizards - do you really think it would negatively impact the lore? It fits absolutely as well as the current system does. Wizards still unbind. They just wouldn't do it at quite such absurd ranges, ranges that now cover literally the entire table if the wizard is positioned near the middle. The point is all these choices are gameplay choices with gameplay effects. It's a cop out to say "it's fine that better wizards can totally shut down worse ones because of the lore!" when we don't apply that to anything else. It's one thing to say "I think it's good that we have a dom and sub game for wizards that doesn't exist for any other part of the game, I actively it enjoy it and think it's a good mechanic" - but nobody seems to be saying that. And it'd be truly silly to think we're stuck with doms and subs for wizards because of "the lore" when there is absolutely no need to be stuck that way.

But...why? We don't think the same way about priests. I don't see anyone getting mad that stronger priests don't shut down weaker ones. So why is part of being a strong wizard being able to not only cast your own spells better, but also more or less totally shut down lesser spellcasters? This feels like more a case of "it's how it's always been, so it's how it should be" rather than any actual reason. It's also not something we apply to any other area of the game, either. Stabbas hit and wound Archaon (almost, eye of ed sheeran aside) as easily as they hit and wound boglars. We don't say Archaon's a Godly fighter so Stabbas just can't hit him period, the game balances that interaction in other, more interactive, less binary ways.