yukishiro1

There's no such thing as "objective NPE." NPE is inherently a subjective feeling. That's the whole point of the term. There is no right or wrong, it's peoples' feelings. If someone feels something is NPE, it is NPE. The question is how representative their feelings are of the player bas a whole; if those feelings are widely represented, that thing is NPE; it's what the word means. And there's very much a problem if people don't enjoy playing a particular faction; you can say "it's not about only you," but the fact of the matter is that people play to have fun, and if they aren't having fun, they'll stop playing. We saw this with Slaanesh back in the day, when large numbers of players just refused to play against Slaanesh because the experience was miserable. I'm not saying LRL is that bad, but the point is that it's a huge issue for a game if there's a faction that people actively dislike playing against. Games need to be enjoyable for both parties, and if they aren't, you have a big game design problem on your hands.

The problem with LRL isn't really that it's overpowered - though who knows, after this release it may well be - but that it's just a tiresome, boring army to play against, because it's such a one-sided experience. They get like 3x as many rules as anyone else for no apparent reason, and the worst bit is that many of those rules are ways to get around the normal way the game is played. So playing against LRL is totally different than playing anyone else, but in a frustrating way, not a refreshing way, because they shut down the stuff you selected your army to do. People don't play games to not be able to do stuff with their dudes, or to not be able to mitigate what the other person does to their dudes, and LRL is designed around both those things. It's just a bad design archetype. Control armies are just fundamentally a bad fit for tabletop gaming, where the whole point is feeling a sense of agency. LRL make the other player feel like a powerless victim when they're working correctly, and that's not something anybody plays the game to feel. The new rules previews giving even more control tools (seriously - who on earth thought what LRL needed was more reliable casting and dispelling? really?) and even more ways to ignore the base rules of the game also suggest that, if anything, GW is going even further down this particular path, rather than realizing it's the wrong one to go down. It doesn't help that they are also a castle faction, another thing that tends to create stale game experiences. What AOS needs is not more ranged damage and tougher buff-stacking castles, and yet that's what LRL specializes in. It's no wonder people dislike them so much, even if they're not necessarily overpowered.

Ah, just what LRL needed: more ways to dominate the magic phase, and more ways to increase the CP gap between themselves and their opponents! I'm glad GW is on this, it was a crippling weakness of the faction that its casting was so unreliable and easily countered.

It's not so much about specific sculpts, it's about quality control. The thing about failcast is that, well, it just fails a significant percentage of the time and produces bad results. At first, GW was just sending out all the bad casts and hoping people wouldn't do anything about it, but they got so much bad PR from all the returns that they've gotten a bit better at checking the cast before OKing it to be sold. So there are less failcasts being sent out than in the past. That said, with the pandemic and production shortages, I wouldn't be surprised if GW has been tempted to once again scale back how carefully they inspect for failed casts, so it wouldn't shock me if you start seeing more bad casting again. Any time you buy a finecast product, you should carefully inspect it to make sure it's not faulty. If it has significant faults, contact GW and demand a replacement. I have never heard of them turning anyone down, though I have heard of people having to ask for replacements of the replacement because they still get sent a faulty cast even the second time around.

It's gonna be a nightmare to count how many attacks a unit gets on that alternate profile. Seems like a rule they came up with more because it sounds cool than because it's practical or good game design. Good to see they are keeping up the tradition of LRL being able to ignore all the normal rules of the game though with the auto-hitting profile.

Number three and four are taking the game in so amazingly wrong a direction that it's almost believable. I can totally see GW looking at AOS right now and being like: you know what this game needs? More shooting and more ways for shooting units to escape from melee units without getting hit!

I dunno, that doesn't really bother me so much, because there is plenty of counterplay to it. On those huge bases, you have to position really badly to let them do that. It may let them get onto the objective, but it's not going to stop you from being able to fight them, unless you really screwed up your positioning badly. If LRL were more like that and less like "lol here have some 30" range MWs that ignore LOS that you can't do anything about" I'd be a lot happier with the faction.

Or Sentinels. 😜

Sure, if you can survive a round of combat within 3" of the unit you want to push back. I mean I guess the play is you put it behind a line of spearmen or something and make it difficult for your opponent to fight the screen without also being within 3" of the mage (and assuming they have no way to crack the screen, i.e. no 3" range weapons, no double fight, no fight in their hero phase which is before you can use this, etc), who can then force them to fall back if they get a double turn, assuming they can't retreat and charge. I'm not sure how many units there are that fit that bill - I feel like a lot of the stuff that is going to be T1 charging you is goin to fall into one of those exceptions that make it not very useful - but I can see how it'd be really good in the right situation.

This immediately occurred to me too, but the models are on large enough bases that it's actually going to be difficult to do in a lot of cases I think. Your opponent's going to have to position pretty badly with the screening unit to allow you to fully clear them with a unit of these I think. I mean you'll be able to get over them, but probably not far enough that they won't be able to activate and fight you. I guess it comes down to whether they're any good in combat or not.

You can't use the fan till your opponent's movement phase. I think that makes it of pretty limited value, unless these mages also have some other "neat" rule that allows them to become immune to melee for a round or something.

Nobody cares about the Hurakan fighting, they aren't a melee unit. That's kind-of the whole point - the ability allows them to escape being fought. But it's only 3" unless they charge, so as someone else pointed out, they can't actually escape if they were charged (though they can likely mitigate the amount of models that can attack them), so that mitigates the NPE potential, though it doesn't remove it completely.

Oh hey, that's a good point, I forgot about you being eligible to pile in even if you aren't within 3" as long as you charged. That mitigates a lot of the possible NPE.

They really seem determined to make Lumineth the NPE army. Being able to fall back out of combat with your ranged units before your opponent can attack, thereby making them not even eligible to activate - not even as a command ability or relic or something, but just a base ability - is going to cause a lot of frustration, especially combined with the double activations the faction already gets. I'm not sure it's actually overpowered, but I'm really not sure what LRL needed was another way to troll the opponent by making them unable to do anything to you. Edit: though as the personal below pointed out, if you charge you can activate even if there's nothing within 3", so it won't apply to a unit that's charged them this turn, which mitigates a fair amount of the NPE potential. A pile-in that doesn't have to be towards the nearest enemy and that can actually take you out of combat is an extraordinarily powerful thing. I am not convinced they have really thought through the consequences of it.

"More targeted ranged MWs, just what LRL needed!" - Said nobody, ever. Sigh.

Tzeentch is probably too powerful - probably more powerful than LRL, incidentally - but it's mechanics aren't abusive and unfun to play against in the same way that LRL's are. That's the big difference in my mind. LRL is the most NPE army in the game right now by a country mile, even though it clearly isn't the most powerful army, which is obviously Seraphon.

Yeah, sure, in the abstract. But there's a continuum there too. The answer to "this is NPE" can't simply be "take a different list," unless it's something very broad like "you need to take screening units." In other words, the answer to Sentinels being NPE can't just be "well take bodyguard units since that's the only actual way to mitigate them," because most factions don't have them, nor should the only way to avoid a NPE be to take a very particular unit. In other words, the focus of the game is actually playing. List building is important, but if you're having to tailor a list extremely carefully to avoid an otherwise unavoidable NPE, that's a good sign that whatever is causing the NPE needs to be looked at.

You could call it boredom. You could call it lack of engagement. You could call it feeling like the game is happening to you rather than than that you are an active participant. You could call it a feeling that your choices on the table are rendered irrelevant because the unit ignores the normal game mechanics that allow you to interact with it. As to why...I think I've explained that is quite some detail now? It's because the unit ignores all the normal mechanics within the game for mitigating damage. It's range covers essentially the entire board, so you effectively can't stay away without conceding the game. The way its damage output works effectively ignores hitting, wounding, and armor saves. I don't think it's weird that that results in a feeling of a lack of engagement, because on a quite literal level the unit ignores virtually all of the normal levers the game gives you to engage with them. That's the whole point of the unit's design: to be something that just does its thing, no matter what your opponent does or what it's shooting at. And it shouldn't surprise anyone that when you exempt a unit from the normal rules of the game in a way that gives the opponent very little comparative ability to interact with it, that opposing player is going to feel like, well, they have very little comparative ability to interact. That's a natural result of the way the rules work. It'd be weird if someone didn't feel like Sentinels gave them far fewer options for mitigating their impact than almost any other unit in the game, because that's objective fact based on the way the rules work. Teclis' auto-casting is another example of the NPE inherent in the design of LRL: it ignores all the normal rules of the magic phase, just like Sentinels ignore all the normal rules of the shooting phase, and puts all the control in the hands of the LRL player, with extremely limited ability for the other player to have any impact. This is again a recipe for NPE that stems from feeling like you're not as involved in the game as normal, because quite literally, you aren't. Contrast this with the way casting works for a Lord of Change, for example. In practice, the Lord of Change is mathematically almost as reliable as Teclis - but critically for the purposes of NPE, that's not because it ignores all the normal rules and auto-casts and auto-dispels; it's just that it's very good at both casting and dispelling. Your chances of stopping its casting, or getting off your own casting around it, are low...but they're not a foregone conclusion. You'd be silly to rely on it...but it doesn't feel like a completely forgone conclusion. The problem with LRL's design is that the faction has tons of mechanics that feel like forgone conclusions the other player has no ability to impact. That's a recipe for NPE.

But this just isn't true, and is what I'm talking about. I've spent literally pages of text in this thread explaining the why, which comes down to a lack of agency. Sentinels cover 90% or more of the table with their threat range, they ignore line of sight, and they effectively ignore to hit modifiers, to wound modifiers, and armor saves. This means your options on the receiving end are extremely limited, and results in a feeling of the game happening to you, rather than you participating equally with your opponent, especially combined with the other elements of LRL - automatic casting, automatic dispels, doubling your CP costs, etc. I don't care whether I can still win that game or not, that's just a matter of tuning numbers - but I wouldn't suddenly enjoy Sentinels if their damage went down by 50%, it would still be equally lame to me the way they ignore all the rules of the game. You just don't buy it, and have basically settled on some version of "it doesn't matter that it's non-interactive, that's what competitive gaming is all about, all that matters if whether you can still win." But that's talking across one another - that isn't anything to do with what I find unenjoyable about the experience. We can discuss it till the cows go home, it isn't going to shift anyone's position because we have different fundamental assumptions about what matters in a game. I mean look at your question here: you're not interested in the actual "why" of how I feel, you're interested in probing whether my feeling is "correct" or not. That's talking across one another. From my rubric of game design, my lack of enjoyment of something (assuming it is representative of players as a whole and not just an individual quirk) is a problem regardless of whether I'm "correct" or "just emoting." In other words, if we had high quality survey data showing that a large number of players found Sentinels unfun to play against and that it was adversely impacting their enjoyment of the game, in my view, that itself is a reason they need to be changed. To you, it would be literally irrelevant based on what you've said here. That's a fundamental disconnect that isn't going to be bridged by talking over whether those feelings are "just emoting."

Right, and that's where the two camps come down. You're not going to convince people in my camp that it isn't a design problem if we don't enjoy playing the game against a given faction, just so as long as it doesn't overly impact the final score. And I'm presumably not going to convince you by saying it five more times that you should actually care about player enjoyment when it comes to game design, because if you are of the opinion that players don't actually know what they like or dislike or what they want or don't want in a game, you aren't going to care that I say I hate playing against LRL, because I can't be trusted to know what my own feelings actually are. So there's a difference in fundamental assumptions there that can't be bridged.

I don't think it is secondary. I mean the competition is part of the fun for sure, but there's a reason you are competing at AOS, not at some other game. I mean lord knows there's a lot of other games out there that are better tests of skill and competitive edge than this one. The reason you're (the general you, not you specifically) competing in this particular one can't really just be chance (or, even sadder, that it's casual enough that you can win without actually being all that good). Btw, not to derail the conversation, but the 2+ unrendable eels hit like wet noodles, not trucks, and only get the 2+ unrendable from T2 on if they manage to charge and be within the leviadon bubble (and even then, it's only on their half of the turn). The ones that actually hit hard are rendable and also don't get the +1 save on the charge. But the broader point, for me at least, is that you can interact with a list like that - yes, it may or may not work out the way you're hoping, but there's play. You don't just feel like an NPC who is having stuff done to you without having any options for doing anything back. Even something like Seraphon - while undoubtedly more powerful than LRL - isn't nearly such a drag to play, because Seraphon is more about doing its own thing really well than it is about shutting down your ability to do your thing. You'll probably lose, because they're just better...but the experience isn't nearly so frustrating for the person on the receiving end. Same for basically all the other top armies, with the noted exception of the WLV-in-a-bottle KO list - but at least there it's really just one extremely broken wombo combo that is the core of the NPE of the list. With LRL, it's the fundamental design of the faction that sets it up to make it a lame experience for the opponent.

But the end result is the same; whether you blame them for it or not, if the result is a game they don't enjoy, that's a failure of game design. The object of a game is to get people to play it, and to do that, you have to make a game people enjoy playing. If they aren't enjoying the experience, you're failing as a game designer, no matter how much you insist that it's just because they need to L2P and come to embrace their heroes getting sniped out at 36" with LOS-ignoring ranged mortal wounds. To say "yeah just accept that, you can still win!" It's missing the point: it's the mechanic itself that is causing the NPE, not whether they're losing the game because of it or not.

Meh, not a fan of the size. But for whatever reason (cough cough who am I kidding, $$$ is the reason), there seems to be a clear design instruction that every faction has to have a big named centerpiece model now. Oh well, I guess it's less temptation.

But that's really just saying the same thing. If a faction is making it impossible for other people to play their factions in an attractive way, that's a design problem. It all always comes back to "is this game fun?" and if the answer is "not when I'm playing X" that's a problem for the game designers, assuming the feeling is widespread.

Right...which is why you have to be very careful with those sorts of archetypes. LRL goes way too far. It's not just the Sentinels that ignore all the normal rules of the game. It's the spellcaster who also ignores all the normal rules of spellcasting. It's the board-wide spells that debuff your morale then prevent you from being able to autopass. We could go on for a while here. In general, people play wargames to do stuff with their dudes, not to sit there unable to do anything while their opponent makes all the choices. Mechanics which take away the ability of your opponent to do stuff with their guys need to be very carefully implemented to avoid NPE. Obviously this is a subjective opinion of mine re: LRL, but that's the only kind of opinions that exist. The only question is how widespread my opinion is. If a large proportion of the player base doesn't enjoy playing games of AOS against LRL, that by definition is a sign of major design failure.