yukishiro1

Unfortunately, not competitively, Archaon builds are heavily synergistic because he offers such a tempting target for all sorts of buffs that are all over the place in chaos. I mean, you *can* take Archaon without a chaos lord to fight twice, or a sorceror lord to reroll hits and wounds and add one to saves, etc etc...but it's not really competitive. Archaon's cost includes the assumption that you're going to be putting on those buffs, he's pretty underwhelming on his own without them.

No, that's not what the conversation was about. Responding to my post pointing out that All Out Defense has an outsized impact on boosting the survivability of 3+ save models vs All Out Attack does on boosting damage in that situation, you disagreed, saying: When someone called you on this by pointing out that no, -1 to hit would not be as beneficial as +1 save most of the time in this situation, you then said it was "simple math" that you were right. Which is just wrong, mathematically. In the situation we're talking about, a model with a 3+ save, it's very rare among the common profiles in the game that a -1 to hit would protect better than a +1 to save (except against MW obviously, as we all noted above). If you were trying to make something other than a simple mathematical claim that's fine, but why couch it in those terms if so?

Ironically, that's not how the simple math actually shakes out, though. Because of the way saves work, the relative values are important. For example, take a profile of 3+/3+/0/1 against a 4+ save - applying -1 to hit reduces the damage by less than applying +1 to save. The disparity becomes even larger vs a 3+ save. On the other hand, if you have a 5+/3+/0/1 profile vs a 4+ save, -1 to hit has more impact than +1 to save; if it was a 5+/3+/0/1 profile vs a 3+ save, -1 to hit is statistically the same as +1 to save. Etc etc. A blanket statement that the -1 to hit has more impact than the +1 to save is not only wrong as a blanket statement, it's also usually wrong in the specific circumstance we were discussing, when a hammer hits an anvil with a 3+ save. For a 3+/3+ profile, which is the most common hammer profile, you need rend 2 to make the two equivalent, and you need rend 3, which almost nothing in the game has, to make the -1 to hit better.

I dunno, is Gotrek actually that bad against the shooting lists we see these days? Against Skinks yes, sure. But against say Sentinels and Stalkers...I haven't done the math but I would think he'd actually be a pretty terrible target for them to shoot, they don't have a huge volume of attacks or high rend, and he has a 3+ ward for the mortals. Although he could theoretically be kited, that's where the rest of your army comes in, and when they have so many points invested in a god + shooting, they can't really afford to be kiting with everything anyway. I also think he's great against SoB, nothing in that army can really touch him, it all gets murdered by him, it all relies on being in melee, and you can't tarpit him because you don't have anything to tarpit with. I mean maybe a list that takes a bunch of individual mini gargants and just feeds them to him...but even so, he's making his points back that way. SoB rely on bullying people, but Gotrek means they're the ones getting bullied. He definitely needs the right list to make him work - IMO you need a fast-moving heroic monster, some fast units to block off space, and some effective shooting that you can use to pressure your opponent to either come within Gotrek's range and get smashed or stand off your shooting and get blown up. But I think he might actually legitimately be top tier now in that sort of list. His big weakness is movement and charge debuffing spells, those'll take him out of the game for sure, but at least right now those are pretty rare to see.

Both his defense and offense are better than the raw stats let on IMO. Defensively, his tiny base size protects him from the stuff he's most vulnerable to, massed damage 1 attacks, because those almost always come from big units that are going to generally struggle to get all their models in range to hit him, especially with the coherency changes in 3.0. Offensively, it's true you can pull models so he doesn't get to activate twice in some cases, but if you do, you're also creating more space on the objective for the Gotrek player to pile on to with a supporting unit. And of course the reducing spell and ability damage to 1 is pretty huge too in terms of improving his defensive capabilities in a way that common stats can't really put a value on since it's totally unique. He's definitely slow, but that's not all that much of a weakness against a big god lists IMO because they have to commit their god somewhere, and Gotrek stops them from committing to wherever Gotrek is. If your 660-970 point god is stuck running away from a 435 point model, you're not in a good spot in the game. So he becomes area denial that's actually quite points-efficient at that role, given how much cheaper he is than any of the gods. The big weakness of those lists is that they can't establish board control in more than one place; if you put a 435 point model + 100 point chaff unit in one place and they can't go there with their 1000 point buff castle, that means you have 1500 points against their 1000. Redeploy also gives him a small but significant mobility boost compared to 2.0. IMO he works well in a list that is otherwise quite fast and/or shooty, i.e. that can project power across the board effectively with its remaining 1600 points, while he stands somewhere with a big "no parking here" sign. I think he also does better in high drop than low drop lists, where you can afford to hold him back until after your opponent is forced to deploy their big thing, so you can match their deployment and then force them to waste a turn repositioning.

Yeah, the more I think about Gotrek, the more I think he's now legitimately very good, especially as a meta pick against heroic monster lists. Killing him is extremely difficult and points-inefficient except for stuff that generates truly stupid numbers of damage 1 attacks, and he eats most units in a single round, except for stuff that can pull models to be outside 3" so he doesn't get the double activation, or for truly tanky stuff like Archaon. And even then he will beat that stuff - even Archaon - and get great value while doing it. Heroic recovery on a model that reduces damage to 1 and has a 3+ ward has a massively inflated value - you used to be able to wear him down, now that's much, much harder. He can still be kited as easily as ever, but the board's gotten smaller and there's fewer objectives, so on a lot of battleplans if you want to avoid him you're essentially giving up on the primary. If people do stick with these heroes + buffs + junk lists, he'll dunk all over them.

I dunno, maybe FEC is stronger in a raw stats kind of way, but they also seem even more hopeless to me. I feel like with BoC and Gitz you can at least kind-of play the game, even if they're weak. They would work if they were just a bit less bad. Whereas for FEC...I don't see how this army is ever going to work in this edition without a new battletome that completely rewrites them.

Yeah Morathi is a hard counter too. With Archaon having no way to fall back and charge and the army not having enough board presence to protect him, the only way to get away from her is to forgo a whole round of combat and try to play for the double. Gotrek too I guess in theory, if anybody ever took him, which they probably won't. Though at only 435 points now and on the smaller boards...who knows, maybe he's viable?

A few lists can kill Archaon T1, but it's riskier than it used to due to how much he can heal now if you don't kill him. Often the better play is to kill his support instead, while just blocking him off with cheap junk until he loses his super buffs and is much less effective. His base is so huge that you can often moveblock him and vastly restrict his options re: what he can charge pretty effectively, and if he's only killing 100 points of junk a turn while you delete the rest of his army, you're winning that game easy. It's a list that does well against other badly balanced lists that take only a few big expensive units, but if you take a more balanced list and realize that focusing on him is usually a trap, it's really not that strong.

Oh, it definitely used to be a good list. I don't think it's nearly as good any more, though. Daemonrift is gone unless I've misunderstood how the new rules work (FAQ seems to say no endless spells except from your primary faction), and stuff went up enough in points that it's 45 points over now even without the 100 points of Daemonrift. If you want to keep the list's core functions (aside from the Daemonrift you already lost), you gotta swap out the pinks for another unit of screamers or something else cheap and crappy, and then you really don't have any board presence whatsoever except where Archaon is. Add on miscasts and a few other things - no more stacking CAs, the potential for archaon to get roared, etc and the list is quite a bit weaker than it used to be IMO. Terrible was probably an exaggeration, but if Archaon + Kairos ends up being a top list in early 3.0 I've obviously misread the game changes pretty significantly. Taking 1500 points of heroes just seems like a non-starter to me at this point.

The Archaon-Kairos list is pretty terrible IMO, I don't see how that wins against a smart opponent. They'll just kill everything but Archaon - it's not like Kairos is particularly survivable - and Archaon doesn't win games on his own, especially not in Tzeentch where his output is really not that great.

I do think it would have been better to limit it to only the unit that has changed, and instead of giving a -1 to hit, which has no impact on MWs on an X to hit or stuff that doesn't roll to it and can be countered by bonuses to hit, they should have instead said that when you make an unleah hell attack, roll one dice for each model in the unit within range, and it only gets to fire on a 4+. If it passes, it can fire according to its normal rules, with no penalty. This mitigates all ranged damage by the same amount (if you think 4+ makes it too weak, you could make it a 3+ instead), rather than rewarding fishing for MW attacks, and also greatly reduces the reliability of single-model units like Thanquol - you might still get to torch whatever charges him, but you might not.

Well, that's the issue. A lot of people have interpreted it that way, and the language itself is rather unclear. I agree with you that I don't think it's what they intended, but it's another case of GW writing rules badly. It would have been so easy to be totally clear about it, but they weren't, because <GW reasons>.

The lack of symmetry between all out attack and all out defense, and more generally between save-boosting and rend-boosting, seems weird. All out attack should have been an additional rend, or at least the choice of either +1 to hit or an additional rend. The current implementation makes 3+ armor saves too powerful vs non MW, and therefore requires MW to be on just about everything as a means of bypassing the artificially strong save the game has created for itself.

Yeah, IMO the Warmaster thing is badly worded and somewhat ambiguous as to whether "you can still use the army's allegiance abilities" means you can use them generally, but not on the warmaster unit, or whether you can use them on the warmaster unit despite them not having the necessary keyword.

Small point, but unless I've just missed it reading it over several times, priests can't unbind in 3.0 - they can dispel endless spells, but not unbind. I mean, some of them can because they have it on their warscroll - e.g. runepriests - but it's not standard based on the keyword.

I think battle regiment + command entourage is also totally viable, gets you in ahead of the 5 drop lists at only the cost of 1 cp once per game. If 5 becomes standard, it's worth paying the 1cp to go 4 if you can afford to do so. Makes it an interesting route to go. One thing that's quite interesting to me is how few total units people are taking. So many lists are coming in at the 6-8 total units mark, often with 3-4 of those in one synergistic castle, which to me seems problematically small in terms of being able to establish board presence on boards with 4+ objectives. A lot of these big hero lists barely have the ability to project significant power to two places on the board, much less three, and I'm not sure how well that is going to work on a fair number of the battleplans. I guess the calculation is that objective scoring is actually not all that important now. If I was a TO, I would try to counteract that by selecting at least one, maybe two battleplans that minimize the importance of secondaries. I'm not a big fan of how many points secondaries account for on the standard scoring plans, and if it produces these sorts of god + buffers + junk lists, it reinforces my opinion. I wish they had been brave enough to do away with drop count entirely and make it just a random roll-off like 40k is, it would open up so much more space for interesting list design and stop rewarding people for playing the predictable way.

Irondrakes are a weird one because when they're fully buffed and they stood still and outside 3" they're ridiculously deadly, but they also fall off so dramatically without those buffs. Overwatch hitting on 4s, wounding on 3s, rend 1 from something that charged them directly so they don't get to double shoot isn't all that scary... but overwatch from even just 20 that are double-shooting at -2 rend, hitting on 3s even in overwatch, rerolling 1s to hit, rerolling 1s to wound...there's very little in the game that doesn't obliterate. And that's not even all the buffs you can put on them, it's just the pretty easy ones. It makes them very hard to balance - they've always been hard to balance because valuing double shots if you don't move is very hard to do - but it just became even harder with unleash hell thrown in. Even more than Sentinels, they go from zero to hero based on whether they were buffed and whether they have support. If it was limited to only being usable if the unit itself was charged, the problem would obviously go away as you wouldn't get to double shoot any more, so you wouldn't have to consider that in their points cost.

You've already ordered from them. They have no incentive to ship your stuff fast. They'd rather ship stuff to stores fast to get it there on launch day so people who haven't bought it yet can make purchases. The preorders make it to the store too because if you're sending some you may as well send all of them. This is the reality of GW as a company. They care about the $. You can wait because you've already paid.

I mean, the easy thing if you don't care about optimization is just to run everything in two ranks. Then you can just mush models around the table however you want. The issue of course is that is super sub-optimal when it comes to fighting and positioning. For 32mm models, you can do them in base-to-base staggered rows and the second rank can still fight even if it only has 1" range. For anything that's a 6-man, do two triangles of 3 next to one another, and as soon as one dies you can pull one of the back models forming a triangle and you're down to 5 and don't have to worry about it any more. There's no great answer, it's the problem with GW's super clunky system, and why cloud coherency is the system most other games use, because it's much less clunky. But GW never wants to do what everyone else is doing, so we get this w/in X of two other models thing that works out to be a massive pain if you want to play well.

If you look on GW's site, they're currently projecting delivery "within 25 days" for all orders. I recently bought something from FW, and it took them about 10 days to ship it, but that wasn't a preorder obviously, was FW, and I have no idea how representative that was. I know someone who preordered a 40k codex through GW's web store and it didn't get put in the mail until a full week after the release date. Again, I don't know how representative that is. Another reason not to order from GW directly IMO, along with paying up to 15% more and not supporting a local games store.

Garrison rules have always been kinda funky and problematic in AOS. They can lead to all sorts of really weird results, but usually are irrelevant because it's so rare anyone actually uses them.

Oh wow, I hadn't even noticed that you can now dispel endless spells in both hero phases. That's actually a huge nerf, because if they dispel it in your hero phase,, that means you can't resummon it that turn, losing a whole turn of impact. And a priest loses nothing by doing so on your turn. We'd definitely been playing that one wrong, that quite drastically lowers the value of endless spells. More like "ending spells" these days, the chance of any one sticking around through to your next hero phase is pretty much nil.

I don't think it's anything as coordinated as a deliberate plan. It's more just a happy side effect from GW's point of view. Balance isn't a priority in GW's design philosophy - they're upfront about it, miniatures come first then they stick some rules on the miniatures that they think fit, rather than starting with a vision of a balanced game and figuring out what rules and minis they need to achieve that vision - and if that means that you get some nice churn as a side effect that prompts people to start new collections or buy new stuff, that's a bonus. But if they were actually trying to systematically distort the balance to promote buying certain miniatures, I think they'd be better at it than they are. I think we'd also know more about it. There are a couple infamous examples of the developers being told to deliberately overpower something to sell it - the Wraithknight being the most notorious - but there aren't many. Given how leaky GW is, if it was a regular practice, I think we'd know about it.

Thanks for giving your experience. It's all valuable. Especially the impressions of people who don't have large collections and can't just swap in what now works for what now doesn't, it's important to remember lots of people like you exist and so "what used to work doesn't any more, what didn't used to work now does" has real adjustment costs for many hobbyists.