yukishiro1

You're puzzled about why a thread titled "General Lumineth Realm Lords Discussion" is about LRL and not IDK? I mean that's a funny example, we've had literally years and years of people complaining about eels, which continues through to the present day. Thereby illustrating that in fact no, people don't only focus on LRL. If you want to start a thread about IDK, go for it, nobody's stopping you. It's not really an effective response to a thread about LRL to complain that people should be talking about something else instead, it just feels like a "look over there!" sort of thing.

That seems like a straw man. I don't know anyone who focuses only on LRL. But the statement that all competitive armies are equally a pain to play against isn't true. The fact that you are citing other armies with powerful units is sorta telling - you're citing power, not the degree to which the army makes you unable to play with your guys. What causes LRL to be more disliked than other factions isn't the power level, it's the degree to which you feel like you can't really do anything with your guys - even when you win, which is quite an extraordinary thing to have "accomplished" from a design perspective. Playing against a competitive LRL army often feels like being the NPC - doesn't mean you can't win, NPCs win all the time, but that doesn't make it satisfying. People don't play wargames to not be able to do all the cool stuff their army can do, whether they end up winning or not. A control army is just a bad archetype for wargaming, it was a mistake from a design point of view to go so far in that direction with LRL, and it's the direct reason they are so disliked. To give a concrete example of good vs bad wargaming design - suppose that Tzeentch got destiny dice that could be used not to substitute for their own rolls, but for someone else's rolls instead. Although the total power of the effect might not be all that different, people's hate for the mechanic would triple or quadruple, because your opponent being able to auto-pass a charge is not nearly as frustrating as being able to make you auto-fail a charge. LRL's design veers too far into the "stop the other dude from being able to do stuff," it's the primary thing people don't like about it.

I agree, they're not going to change Sentinels to be less terribly designed any time soon. But people also aren't going to just give up and stop disliking them, either. That's what happens when GW goofs in a way it has a policy of not fixing: bad feelings all around. When that goes on long enough, you get what happened in 7th edition 40k or late edition WHFB. Now obviously Sentinels alone aren't going to ruin a game on that scale, but they're like a little mini version of that sort of flawed design. I guess my point is just that the negative reactions here aren't unwarranted. They're the natural results of bad design.

He wasn't saying it was a bad deal for Games Workshop...

The non-hero monsters in Cities aren't so hot, but an annointed on phoenix (both types I guess, but more the frost heart) is set to be one of the premier units of the new edition IMO.

The warscroll is just really poorly designed. The ability to do mortals at 30" range ignoring LOS is an extremely powerful ability to put on a unit, which is why the unit is otherwise so anemic. And then they tried to limit the power by making it only on a 6...only to allow you to get it to a 5+ rerolling instead. 20 Sentinels doing mortals on 6s isn't particularly oppressive; 40 Sentinels doing mortals on a 5+ rerolling is hugely oppressive. The mistake was in designing a warscroll that is so anemic at base profile fired at chaff, but so powerful when self-buffed and then augmented with a crazy debuff on a single otherwise resilient target.

Yeah, but the competitive ones are, and it's worse than with any other army. Telling people not to abuse the rules is never going to be a very good solution for abusable rules. The LRL tome is just weird, it feels like a book written for a different game than any other book. It's always going to provoke a lot of negative feeling for that reason.

Really disappointed about what feels like an extremely craven attempt to force people into subscribing by making it inconvenient not to. Retiring the old app is a terrible, very customer unfriendly decision - even before you realize how much better it works than the 40k app that they've been struggling for a year to make something other than terrible. The 40k model for digital rules (if you can even call that) is a complete disaster and seeing them move in that direction for AOS too is a major bummer. As long as W+ was just an animation service for people who wanted it I literally couldn't have cared less, now I feel like I am being nudged into spending 6 bucks a month instead of 1 for a product that is likely to be worse, not better. And that's just at launch. We all know how these things work, they start out comparatively innocuous and then start to make it harder and harder not to subscribe as time goes on. GW needs to stop trying to nudge people into doing things they don't want to do, and just offer a subscription service that gives full digital access to all the rules for a reasonable price per month. It's 2021, it's a joke that they make you buy physical copies in order to input a code to unlock access in the app.

Any shooting unit just became much better at shooting at melee units thanks to unleash hell (and better at avoiding melee or setting it up thanks to redeploy). Unleash hell amounts to a significant boost to any shooting unit that has enough output to be worth spending a CP on, which is a lot. There are a ton of shooting units in the game that fit this bill; they may not wipe out a charging melee unit entirely, but many of them do enough damage to put a significant dent in the chargers' output. To add to your list, Skaven and Cities are full of good shooting units that can put out a lot of damage. Buffed Irondrakes behind a screen that can stay further than 3" but closer than 9" so they get the double shots are seriously scary. Warpfire stuff for skaven is terrifying, as is anything that doesn't have to roll to hit generally. Even a pair of gyrocopters for 150 points becomes something that's a serious threat to a lot of battleline blocks. Aside from unleash hell, curse is an extremely powerful debuff against anything that relies on a good save, that becomes more powerful the more attacks you can deliver on the debuffed unit, which is a natural match for shooting units as the big advantage of shooting is that you're not limited by the amount of models you can get into melee range of the target. Though it's also unreliable and reasonably difficult to set up.

Definitely going to be FAQed, a lot of the artefacts in the game really break if you can take more than one. Cloud of midnight, for example.

Yep, Lifeswarm, Geminids, and Shackles are going to see a lot of play. One thing about Shackles that does tone it down a little bit is that all three pieces now need to be set up wholly w/in 3" of one another, and also wholly w/in 12" of the caster, which essentially means it's basically just one big base now, you can't spread it out any more like you used to be able to. The effective range is now only 18" instead of the 24" it was, and the footprint is massively smaller, so that's something at least.

Search youtube for AOS 3.0 endless spells, there's at least one video that goes through them warscroll by warscroll.

And yet they only made murder blobs of ranged units even more powerful. The problem with murder blobs is the amount of buffs you could stack onto one unit. And guess what...you can now stack more buffs on one unit than ever before, and then use that one unit even more efficiently than you could before...as long as it's a shooting unit. That's the weird thing about the whole thing. All this fiddly work to nerf melee in a game that has been dominated for the last year by ranged combat. Meanwhile, ranged combat only got deadlier.

I mean, the only thing I can think of is that if we take that supposed playtester's word and they've been testing this thing for 18 months...18 months ago was before they made ranged armies top dog. Back then, stuff like hearthguard or ardboyz or FEK horrors/flayers were a bigger deal (not the biggest deal, mind, but bigger relatively speaking), in a way they aren't any more. Maybe this was a change they made a decision on very early in the design process and then just refused to reconsider. It would be just like GW to create a new edition for the meta 2 years before the end of the prior edition, and then ignore everything they knew was coming next. In fact, things like unleash hell make a lot more sense in the game as it existed two years ago, too...

Yeah. The rules don't actually stop daisy chaining with trash, and they penalize units that don't feel like they needed penalizing. Putting aside whether "the game survives," to borrow someone else's phrase, it's tough to see how this results in a better game than using cloud coherency - which actually would stop daisy chaining, and also wouldn't nerf units that don't need to be nerfed in the process. But again, this is all because GW won't tell us what their intent is. Maybe they really did implement this rule because they thought Ogors were too good at fighting stuff (lol), and maybe they really don't care if you can still daisy-chain. We're all speculating because GW has a policy of not explaining the rationale behind the changes it makes.

Ah, so we're back to the "yes, that's true, but you shouldn't actually do it because you're not supposed to do that and if you do that or your opponent does that you're playing the game wrong." I think we just have a fundamental difference of opinion here. I think if the rules reward fiddly movement that's a problem with the rules, you think it's a problem with the players doing something you view as unintended. I don't think either of us is going to come around to the other person's view on this one.

Against an infinitely long, flat, evenly spaced enemy unit? Yes, sure. But the minute you start getting into real world conditions, it becomes more complex than that, whether you are inclined to admit it or not. If the purpose is to stop 15 man units of blood knights...why not just not allow that in the first place? Seems like a hammer for a scalpel sort of situation. Did anybody really think it was a big problem that 6 ogors could fight in a line?

To use the example given of 9 ogors, keeping 9 40mm models w/in 1" of 2 other models while also maximizing frontage against another unit that can be positioned in any number of different ways is definitely complex geometry. In fact, it's so complex that most people won't even try and will just settle for mushing them together. But if you actually try to maximize your efficiency, it becomes extraordinarily complex.

But all this is working around the clumsiness of the rule...when they instead could just have not adopted such a clumsy rule in the first place. Especially when there's a standard alternative most other games use that address this very issue, without these weird, clunky side effects. It's just really weird to me that they have gone in the direction of a very geometrically complex "solution" that creates so many problems of its own, when there are no apparent benefits to that approach. This is why some developer commentary on this rule would be so useful. We're all flailing around in the dark here trying to figure out what GW's intent was, when they could have just told us.

Why should they have to take a casualty before being able to function effectively? Isn't that a really weird way to structure your rules?

Well, in the context of a competitive game...yes, it is a flaw in the thing? If the way you wrote your rules allows people to "break" them by actually encouraging the precise opposite of what you intended, you need to fix the rules. And this is what GW does in practice. It doesn't keep broken things in the game and just tell people not to do that thing because it isn't intended, it fixes its rules to not be broken any more. Saying the problem is just that the models made junk by this rule need to be reduced in points is not wrong per se, but it seems odd. Do we really want bargain basement ogors because they can't fight effectively because of the rules of the game don't allow them to? Shouldn't we just, well, fix said rules of the game so they can fight effectively? Wouldn't that be the more satisfying fix? This is why it all comes back to the "why." Why was this change made? Was it actually intended to gimp models on 40mm+ bases? If so, why did they want to gimp these units? If not, why not just use cloud coherency instead, as it accomplishes the same thing re: curtailing daisy chains, without gimping these models at the same time?

If this is the intent, they've managed to do precisely the opposite of what they were intended. Saying the problem is that people are trying to make the most out of the rules they are presented is a bit strange. People will always try to make the most out of the rules available to them. If the result of the rules is the exact opposite of the intent, that's a problem with the rules, not with the users. More fundamentally, if they were trying to make things less fiddly...cloud coherency is the typical solution to this that you see all over most games other than GW games. It would be so interesting if GW would actually come out and make a statement about why they think this "w/in X" of X models" system is superior to the system most other games use to address this issue, which is much less fiddly and easier to use. What's the advantage of GW coherency? Maybe there is one, but if there is, it isn't obvious, and GW doesn't seem to have any interest in enlightening us.

"Things have changed" isn't an answer to "why did things change in this way?"

When someone says "the new coherency rules don't work" they aren't saying they literally don't work as in you cannot play a game with them. They're saying they don't add something positive to the game, and worse, add something negative. Even in WHFB, you could fight in two ranks baseline (albeit with less attacks for the second rank). A coherency system that forces some models into a position where they have to be in multiple ranks yet cannot fight in more than one rank seems like a very odd choice, as evidenced by the fact that (to my knowledge) no other edition of either 40k, AOS, or WHFB has ever adopted such a system. I don't think it's unreasonable to say "wow, this is super restrictive and it's not clear why because we have been provided zero explanation" when it is super restrictive by any prior standard. It also seems super weird in a system where the units most likely to be impacted must be taken in size intervals that are extremely unfriendly to the new rules. Why is the break point 5 models, when so many of the models most seriously impacted are 3 or 6 model units that cannot be taken in 5 mans to mitigate the harshness of the system? This suggests either remarkable carelessness, or a deliberate choice to make units on 40mm and larger (and even 32mm and larger to some degree) bad, which is difficult to understand.

Oh, I'm not saying you should take his word for it. Just that if you remove all the emotionally invested stuff about people being "ungrateful," the basic message of "give it a try with an open mind" isn't a bad one. What that doesn't require, however, is checking your brain at the door and just trusting that even if something doesn't seem to make any sense, there must be a reason for it. Because if we know anything about GW's rules from past practice...something not making sense because it, well, just doesn't make sense, is a definite possibility. Having an open mind just means being open to both possibilities - that something is there for a good reason even if it doesn't seem to make sense and that actually playing will reveal what the purpose of it is, or that no, there really is no good reason for this change, it really doesn't add anything.