yukishiro1

At this point, I feel like GW is pretty committed to showing everyone the finger when it comes to Sentinels. Soulsnare shackles looks pretty ridiculous for ranged armies, too. Just straight-up prevents any unit within 6" of any of the 3 models from being able to charge. Er...what? Getting harder and harder to see how this 3.0 ruleset doesn't empower ranged armies even more than they were empowered in 2.0.

Whatever the reason, I am glad to see it go (assuming it really is going). It was so stupid.

Only if you name him Harry.

The unique characters not being able to get spell lores seems like a Day-1 FAQ kind of thing. If that's the only thing in the rules that's definitively broken (as in, just doesn't work broken, not as in overpowered broken), that'd actually be quite a large improvement on GW's typical product.

The game would be literally unplayable with 1" to 2 model coherency and having to pile in based on the model not the unit. I am glad they spotted this change, the new coherency is extremely unwieldy even with it, it would have been absurd with the old system. It does amount to a big buff to units of 5 or less, though.

Yeah I can't believe they'd make the person who finishes deploying first have to go first, that would make people actively want high drops most of the time, not low drops. The secondary objective system seems super undercooked and not very well balanced at first glance. No terrain rules (ok, well no serious terrain rules) is a massive missed opportunity and is an x off one of the possible ways they could have made shooting less oppressive, so that's a big bummer. Nothing to make the super restrictive coherency rules work feels like a truly bizarre choice. They took the 40k rule, made it literally twice as restrictive, and then didn't include all the things that make the 1/2 as restrictive rule less restrictive in 40k. It's a double whammy.

The stupid thing about it is the giving total control over who goes first, even before deployment. It sets up games into a fixed pattern from the very off, which is lame. One of the best things they did in 40k recently was to make who goes first entirely random, it makes games much more interesting when people can't deploy with knowledge of who is going first and second. It's especially damaging in AOS to have complete certainly over who gets the first turn because of its interaction with the double turn. A large part of what makes ranged armies so powerful is that you can virtually guarantee you'll go second (unless you have to go first because you'll lose a key piece otherwise, but then you have control over that too), and then have a 45% chance of just winning the game outright, because a top-tier ranged army has an overwhelming win rate in games where it gets the double from T1 to T2. A significant proportion of AOS games effectively end on the roll-off for T2 because of this, and there's no world in which that is healthy. If you take away certainty over who gets the first turn, you reduce that percentage significantly because ranged armies have to deploy with the knowledge that they might have to take the first turn even if they don't want to. As long as drops give you total control, 1-drop ranged armies are going to continue to enjoy a baked-in advantage.

I hope they're smart enough to limit the advantage of lower drops to something less than guaranteeing choice of whether to go first, it's always been a terrible rule and it fits even less in a new world where they're trying to punish large units and encourage MSU. Obviously it still means something based on the fact that one of the battalions reduces drops, but I hope it's just like a "lower drops breaks ties on the roll-off for who goes first" or something like that instead of a thing that gives complete control to the lower drop player.

Most people who buy GW miniatures don't even play the games, at least not more than once in a blue moon. The rules are just an excuse to get people buying miniatures. GW is still a miniatures company, not a rules company - they're just smart enough these days not to say it out loud.

Yep, lots of other games have figured this one out already. But GW, for better or for worse, always seems to prefer trying to reinvent the wheel rather than just adopting a better, more elegant design that someone else came up with.

Yeah, "maybe the bad rules won't matter because nobody will take units impacted by them anyway" is not really something to fill people with hope. As for the complaints about kneejerk reactions...that's on GW for drip-releasing rules this way. They know what they're doing. This is precisely what they want to generate - "engagement." Modern marketing techniques revolve around rustling the jimmies, on the theory that it's better to have someone upset than not engaged at all.

GW designers: "6 men in a line shoulder-to-shoulder is IMMERSION BREAKING nonsense. But horses running sideways executing complex geometric patterns to satisfy our new coherency rule is is COOL AND CINEMATIC! 3.0: The Best Ruleset Ever Designed (TM, (R), (C), All Rights Reserved)."

And how stupid it looks. And how much strategy it removes from the game re: model placement and pulling. It's that very rare rule that manages to be both cumbersome in practice and to reduce tactical complexity.

Yes, the other dumb thing about these changes is that they are being put into a game where many units literally aren't allowed to take only 5 in order to avoid the rules. In 40k, even with the doubled 2" basic coherency range, it's extremely awkward to take say 6 models on 60mm round bases, or on 75mm oval bases...but you can always just take 5 instead. And that's what everybody does. It's a stupid rule that doesn't work for those units, but there is a work-around within the rules. In AOS, you literally don't have a choice - if your models are in multiples of 3, you either take 3, or you take 6. Nothing in-between is allowed. Things like gore-gruntas will be borderline unusable except in the 3-man configuration. There will literally be times when your 6-man grunta unit simply cannot charge a target 3" in front of them because there is no way to do so while keeping them all within 1" of one another, due to terrain and/or other models that prevent them from being able to end a charge in coherency.

They know full well that drip-feed pisses people off, the marketing calculation is that "engagement" is more important than positive reactions, so provoking a lot of angst is better than not provoking any reaction at all.

Whether or not the uber overwatch ends up being the disaster in the game itself that it initially looks like, it's a disaster from a PR point of view to release stuff like this without any reassurances that they understand that people have been frustrated for years now with how dominated by ranged attacks AOS is right now, and that although this certainly looks like it'll make it even worse, actually it won't because <reasons>. GW is so, so bad at acknowledging player concerns this way, which is a large part of why people are so distrusting of them. From reading GW's advertising copy for 3.0, you would think that the big problems with 2.0 were that shooting and magic weren't powerful enough, and that there were too few MWs floating around.

That coherency rule is a bit of a disaster with a base 1" coherency, unlike the base 2" you get in 40k. You literally cannot put 6 32mm base models in a straight line base-to-base according to that rule. So much of the strategy in model placement is removed by the rule; it somehow manages to be both awkward to enforce in practice and to dumb down the game at the same time, which is quite the combination. Also, not a fan of the "More MWs for you! And for you! And for you!" approach to game design. AOS is already overflowing with mortals, what it didn't need was even more ways to generate incidental MWs.

Disappointing to see their first rules reveal is that the most problematic phase of the game is essentially totally unchanged. Can still snipe heroes - even easier now with the - to hit capped - can still shoot into combats without penalty and no chance of hitting your friends, etc.

Taste is personal, I don't think it makes sense to get into an argument about it, any more than it makes sense to get into an argument about whether a particular shade of red is ugly or not. That said, to me, it sounds like caricature of GW's usual Copyrightable Doubleword (TM, R, All Rights Reserved). At their best, those can be atmospheric and catchy, even if they're faintly ridiculous. See Ossiarch Bonereapers as a good example of of this. While arguably a bit silly, this name matches the faction: it conjures up an image in your mind of ornate, risen skeletons who collect bones. It's flavorful and atmospheric. It fits. What do you get from Kruleboyz? It's...some orcs, and they're...cruel? Um, ok? It'd like be calling Idoneth Deepkin Desperate Aelfkin. Or Gloomspite Gitz Wackie Gobbos. It has the worst kind of Saturday Morning Kid's Cartoon feel to it, rather than the best kind.

LOTR orcs seem out of step with the rest of the setting and the orcs they already have. Weirdly understated for what the AOS aesthetic has developed into. Seems like another example of a game that still doesn't know quite what it's supposed to be. They'd be great models...in a different game. The faction name is also downright cringeworthy, there's no other way I can put it. That bit is 100% AOS, but in the worst possible, self-caricaturing way.

Sums it all up right there, sadly.

The big problem with AOS rules isn't with rules balance per se, it's with a lack of unifying vision about what the game is supposed to be in the first place. You can fix bad balance with points, but no matter how many points cuts you give a book like Slaanesh or Soulblight, it is never going to belong in the same game as a book like LRL, despite having been released at almost the same time. They represent two very different ideas of what the game is supposed to be in terms of complexity, interactions, amount of rules that break the normal rules of the game, hard counters, buff stacking, access to MWs, etc. That's the basic problem. This is not a problem GW has with 40k, interestingly. All the 9th edition codexes feel like they belong in the same game, even if they aren't all equally powerful. But AOS is literally all over the place.

It honestly feels like the biggest problem is that different books get different amounts of attention. You have high attention books like Lumineth, where the love the author had for the faction is dripping from every page, and then you have low attention books like Soulblight or Slaanesh, where it feels like the author was just checking off boxes. That may or may not be the truth, but the fact that that is the impression created is itself a problem. AOS desperately needs a high-level quality checker who makes sure to avoid creating that sort of impression. Right now the rules that get produced seem like they are being written by a couple different people who all have very different ideas on what the game is supposed to be.

Immediate DLC - whether just before, at the exact same time as, or just after - new army books is the new GW model. You're seeing it in 40k too. It isn't enough to charge people $50 for a new army book these days, ideally you charge them another $50 for the DLC too. If they had given you these in the new Slaanesh battletome as they obviously could have, it wouldn't be as easy to induce you to buy the new BR book.

Yep, this is exactly right. The three books show totally different attitudes to what the game is supposed to be. It's really floored me to see just how non-existent the overall supervision of the game is from a design point of view that these three books could be released at essentially the same time. They can't hire that design lead quickly enough, there's clearly a desperate need for a coherent vision. It stands out especially badly in contrast to 9th edition 40k books; there is plenty to complain about how GW has handled 9th edition 40k, but the new codexes themselves are very much "of a piece" with one another in terms of what the game is supposed to be. What we've learned over the last month or two is that different people on the AOS team have vastly different ideas for what the game is supposed to be, and they either don't communicate with one another or have agreed to disagree and just do their own things, and that desperately needs to be addressed.