yukishiro1

Being aware of the chances of things working doesn't mean you don't like a game, it just means you realize how the game actually works. Unless you have significant magical dominance, using geminids to shut down unleash hell is not a plan you can rely on. The odds of getting it off with a no + to cast caster through an unbind are worse than relying on making a 9" charge from DS with a reroll, which is a classic example of a bad plan that people make because they don't understand probabilities. I wouldn't put it in your list just for that purpose, again unless you have magical dominance otherwise. It might make sense in some lists even without magical dominance for other reasons, but if you're concerned only about unleash hell, there are probably better ways to spend those points in a lot of cases.

Sure, if you can get the spell off, not unbound, you're within range, you pass the 2+, and you devote the points to it. Without +s to cast, it's like only about a 35% chance of it working, assuming your opponent has an unbind (which everyone can have in the new edition). In a lot of cases it's probably better to just eat the shots and save the points, unless you have enough magical dominance to make it otherwise worth taking.

I don't think it's particularly overthinking to know how the minis you're buying are going to fit into a larger army before buying - especially when you also don't know what is still coming for that range beyond a couple more teased models. If you disagree, that's your opinion and you're perfectly entitled to hold it. But the thread is about reasons people think that Dominion doesn't seem to have sold like hotcakes the way Indomitus did. And I do think the uncertainty about one of the factions in the box is probably part of that. Not a big part - but they all add up. There's basically a ton of little reasons why people wouldn't rush out to buy the set, and they add up to something fairly significant in the aggregate.

Nobody's said anything one way or the other. Hence the point everyone is making re: the uncertainty. We have no idea at this point what the new Orruk Warclans book is going to look like at all. Is it going to have four different full faction allegiances in a single book - Big Waagh, IJ, BS, and KB? That'd be pretty much unprecedented. It's possible, but we don't know. We don't even know that IJ and BS are surviving as independent factions. Maybe it's all becoming Big Waagh? The point is that nobody knows. So the audience of people who want to buy a bunch of new minis without even knowing how they're going to fit into a larger army is going to be naturally reduced.

Late AOS 2.0 was broken by terribly balanced armies that ushered in an era of near-complete shooting dominance (plus the only faction that had tools to mitigate shooting). It wasn't so much the core rules as a bunch of disastrously balanced new tomes that repeatedly broke the game's tenuous balance. I didn't want a new edition, I just wanted them to fix the mess they had created with the ridiculous power creep. And the new rules changes if anything do more to boost the structural advantage shooting enjoys in the game, rather than diminishing it, so it's not like people are hyped for 3.0 because they feel like the base rules will address the biggest balance problem in late 2.0. That said, I do think 3.0 is generally a better ruleset overall. It just has a few very controversial features that turn people off and make them worried that GW hasn't recognized the shooting problem the game has - coherency and unleash hell, mainly. A lot of it is riding on the FAQs, and that's probably depressing sales too. Lots of people are adopting a "wait and see" policy to see how their faction and the game as a whole is impacted before deciding whether or how to jump back in. A wiser company would have released the FAQs ahead of time too - unless, of course, they're going to be disappointing. Then hiding them till after release makes sense, I guess.

Ah, you're right. Goonhammer was wrong, apparently. So you can include them, they just can't be your warlord.

No unique characters. Makes some sense when you think about it, but....it really exposes one of the big tensions with the whole Path of Glory concept, actually. Don't get me wrong, I don't like unique characters myself - but they are a massive part of AOS, much bigger than in 40k. GW has been pushing these big unique god-tier models for every faction - every single new release is full of them - and then you can't even use them in the new game mode.

Historically, yes. But Indomitus had balanced points values and legal 1000 point armies (ok, the space marines were 5 points over due to the plasma pistol and the necrons 5 points under, but whatever). I agree it probably doesn't make a huge difference, but it doesn't help that they've gone back to having boxes that don't even give you legal armies at the points values they're at. I think another big aspect is that crusade was a hugely hyped thing for 9th edition 40k. In practice, I don't know that that many people have actually stuck with it, but it was a major hype factor that got people buying the set - both to get the rules and because it made getting a new 1000 point army a lot more attractive. Meanwhile, Path to Glory has gotten basically zero hype or attention whatsoever as far as I can see. I mean, you can't even use Yndrasta in Path of Glory. Not a great plan to have the centerpiece model for your new edition not usable in your new game mode.

I don't think you read what I actually wrote re: when it'd happen at the end of the charge phase because that completely addresses the pistoliers issue, but it's not important. This is an objective-based game. If anything, the issue is that it'd be too powerful, not that it'd be useless.

What would you do with two Yndrastas?

Yeah, that's a good point too. The box composition is...not great. Points are really disparate for the two factions, and the Kruleboyz aren't legal to play as an actual army at 1,000 points either due to having too many characters and not enough battle line, which is a real head-scratcher. Like the ultimate example of GW design: make models first, come up with rules later, whether or not it makes your new model set actually playable or not.

It's really good for the game that AOS doesn't have one clearly favored faction - despite GW's efforts over the years to position SCE there, it's never worked. But one knock-on effect of that is that they don't have a nailed-on starter set that's going to instantly appeal to 50% or more of the playerbase, the way anything with space marines in it does. Add on that the other faction is another new army and it isn't clear how they're going to mesh in with anything else, and the natural customer for this set is only (1) stormcast players, and (2) people who are inclined to just buy whatever AOS starter set GW puts out. Both these groups are vastly smaller than their respective 40k contingents, and I think we're seeing that they're also a smaller group of people than GW hoped.

You mean like how unleash hell punishes every melee unit? Or how the new 1" of 1" coherency makes a large swathe of the units in the game remarkably worse? I thought we just got done saying that GW doesn't set the base rules based on balance considerations... You could put it at the end of the charge phase too, though - out of phase charges are bad mojo anyway - it would just key off having been shot that turn. So pistoliers would be fine, they are going to charge in anyway themselves.

Yeah, I don't think it's a question of deliberately trying to overpower their favorite factions. We know that the way GW develops is concept-based, not data-based or analytics-based. They didn't come up with unleash hell because they thought there was a need for it from a balance point of view, they did it because "that would be really cool!" and for whatever reason, nobody thought it'd also be cool to let you charge someone who shot you (a capability that would actually add much more strategy to the game by making the choice to shoot something have potential consequences instead of being pure upside), so it didn't happen. It seems to genuinely just be a coincidence that AOS has a ruleset more friendly to shooting than almost any other wargame in history. Not being snarky there, I really think that is the case. I don't think they set out to make the friendliest game to shooting in the history of wargames, but they've somehow ended up there. In what other game can you (1) shoot into melee with no penalty or chance of hitting your own guys, (2) shoot stuff in melee with you, again with no penalty except having to target the unit engaging you, (3) move out of charge range after they move into charge range with a reaction move, and (4) choose instead of moving to shoot at very close to full effectiveness, not only against something that charges the unit, but also against anything that ends a charge in a very generous bubble? And all this in a game with extremely limited LOS-blocking that's essentially played on planet bowling ball, and with very limited character protection as well. It's truly remarkable how friendly the base rules are to shooting. It doesn't necessarily make the game unbalanced - you can balance around those rules by making shooting really gimp in order to compensate for it being so hard to mitigate - but it does create a game where shooting is a remarkably brainless experience.

...sort of? Why is it that all the reactions are to melee or at least close proximity, and none of them are to shooting? I mean yes you can boost your save, but you can do that in melee too. Meanwhile, all the other reactions just happen to mostly strengthen shooting units while mostly weakening melee ones. Seems like a weird choice, even given their chosen theme of "reactions." Why not have a "reaction" that lets a melee unit immediately charge any ranged unit that shoots at it - an inverse unleash hell, if you will? Why does being charged give you the chance for a shooting activation, but being shot doesn't give you the chance of a charge activation? The latter would have done far more to mitigate the advantages of a double turn too, which was one of their stated aims.

Oh interesting, you're right.

To me the weirdest thing about unleash hell is just why it exists at all. What was the impetus? Did anyone really think the game was calling out for a buffed up version of overwatch - uberwatch, if you will? 40k moved in precisely the opposite direction in 9th edition, and the last year of AOS was dominated by shooting armies. It may not even end up being all that overpowered, but the question remains: why? Put another way: if AOS 3.0 hadn't had it, would even one single person on the internet have complained that what the new edition really needed was a much stronger version of overwatch?

Why would that stop unleash hell? You unleash hell after the charge is complete, this isn't overwatch. It'd take a hell of a positioning trick - very unlikely to be able to pull off with a model with such a large base to put the wall somewhere where it would allow you to get w/in 1/2 inch of the unit but still be outside of LOS of said unit. And even if you somehow managed it, unless you're charging from outside 9", they could just redeploy in a way to get LOS again, so at best you'd just be costing them a CP. Seems like one of those galaxy brain ideas that's very unlikely to work once it meets reality. Or did you mean putting the wall between the chaff unit you're charging and the vanguard-raptors? I mean I guess in theory, if your opponent was careless enough to leave room for that and your priest is close enough to do that in the hero phase and you pass the invocation check...still a hell of a lot of conditions to meet.

Slaanesh are 100% about summoning, which is just such a weird feel for an army to have: it's not about what you start on the table with, that's mostly just hugely overpriced cannon fodder for what actually wins you games. It also makes them basically auto-lose the new GHB mission that prohibits deep strike and stops summons from doing anything on the turn they come in. But that's a problem with that mission more than with Slaanesh in particular.

Sons of Behemat is the most obvious, there are some important synergies (e.g. keeping your minis in range of the run-and-charge bubble of your megas, but that's a very forgiving 12" bubble). Ogors are reasonably self-sufficient too, at least on the beastclaw side. In general AOS is an incredibly synergistic game though, at least competitively. Almost every faction relies heavily on buffing interactions that vastly increase the strength of units, and if you don't build into that, you will get stomped by someone who does.

GW has never yet been able to resist power creep across the course of an edition - in fits and starts of course, it doesn't mean every single release is better than what came before, but the overall trend has always been pretty clear, at least in the last decade or so after the release schedules became predictable. Anything is possible, but I definitely wouldn't bank on them finally breaking the habit now. There are all sorts of complex reasons that power creep happens - basically every natural pressure on game design leads that way. To resist it, you need a very disciplined and organized design plan for your game. And even the most enthusiastic GW supporters would have trouble claiming that GW's design has ever been either disciplined or organized. GW products have many strengths, but those are not among them.

I think it's very likely double shoot goes away for SCE in the new book, they've been removing double shoot/fight from 40k pretty ruthlessly, and it really skews the worth of Longstrikes in a kinda dumb way. It seems like they've finally cottoned on to the way that these subfaction-specific command abilities can inflate the worth of units and make it impossible to balance them with points. Lonstrikes are a pretty good unit without the ability, but they're absurd with it, and that makes it impossible to balance them unless you just make them total junk in any faction but Anvils. Maybe that's just the optimist in me, though.

And all that, for a garbage version that's less usable than just scanning the physical book and making a PDF out of it.

I don't think he was suggesting you use unleash hell, but use the throwing axes to clear screens. But that doesn't work either, throwing axes are so terrible that they will be lucky to clear even something as trivially easy to kill as a unit of aetherwings. The thing about doomseekers is also simply wrong. You don't get to fight on death if you die to unleash hell, that happens in the charge phase, not the combat phase, and doomseekers only get to fight on death if they die in the combat phase.

I very much doubt that's true. With the amount of griping that's gone on over the years about eels (not my example, even), I would be shocked if there hasn't been a thread about them previously. But even if so...so what? Why would that impact the discussion one way or the other? If it's just meant to be an insinuation that anyone who thinks there are issues with LRL design is somehow specifically biased against LRL for some unspecified reason, that seems like a "point" that doesn't lead anywhere. If there's some other relevance there, I'm not seeing it?