yukishiro1

The Vindicare is pretty terrible, if AOS shooting was as bad as him I don't think anybody would be complaining. 😄 Ranged MWs should just be really rare, it's such a powerful effect that removes so much counterplay. They should certainly not be keyed off an unmodified to-hit roll, not in a game where your primary defense to being sniped is a -1 to hit and therefore where the mechanic completely bypasses the defense. It was a massive mistake to design a unit around the concept that they'd deliver most of their damage through mortal wounds at 30" range ignoring LOS. It's a real indictment of GW's design team that nobody spoke up partway through the design process and was like "guys...this is just bad. go back to the drawing board and figure out something else."

Personally, it's not that I can't afford the higher prices, it's that they leave a really bad taste in my mouth. Nobody wants to feel milked, even if they can afford it, and GW has gotten more and more upfront about the milking. The other big thing that bothers me about it is how tone-deaf it is to the ways the world has changed. GW has gone from being a moderately expensive hobby in a world with lower inequality to a premium-priced hobby in a world with massive inequality, and therefore feels like it's part of the problem, not the solution. And it is absolutely not justified by necessity. GW hasn't raised prices because it needs to to keep the lights on, it's raised prices because it can. It's doing better than it ever has. The prices makes it both difficult to get friends into the hobby, and, frankly, difficult to justify recommending that they do, unless I know they have more money than they know what to do with.

Well, to be fair to the guy, his argument seems to be "I don't care what people say is NPE, they need to be educated to set aside their feelings and realign their expectations so they can see the error of their ways." I think it's a really weird way to look at the world and certainly not advice GW should be listening to on how to set up their game, but if you really believed that, it makes sense you wouldn't care about what people say is NPE to them, because you genuinely believe you know better than they do what they should like or dislike.

Incidentally, I don't necessarily disagree with this. But the solution to the problem, to the extent there is one, isn't to give a small handful of armies the ability to delete the support heroes from anywhere on the board with no counter-play. That's piling problems on top of problems, instead of addressing them, and is part of what leads to the situation we find ourselves in now, where LRL are like "no I need this cheese to fight Seraphon!" and Seraphon are like "no I need this cheese to fight LRL!" and then Gitz are like "can i has cheezburger?" and Seraphon and LRL are like: "NO! go back to your corner." Also, to further illustrate the point re: what people don't like about shooting - the skink example is actually another good example of why restriction-free mechanics are NPE and people don't like them. The big issue with the skinks is that pretty much all their stuff just goes off automatically, with no fail points, and for the stuff that isn't automatic, it can be stacked so high it's practically automatic. This makes for a bad experience for the person on the receiving end. People don't like shooting because shooting is like uber-skinks: it just happens to you, with very limited options for doing anything about it other than sitting there and taking it and hoping GW has done their math well enough that you still have a chance.

Lol. You can't really have a discussion with someone capable of writing a sentence like this and not seeing the epic irony. P.S. It's not an ad hominem attack to say repeatedly telling people they need to be educated, to align their expectations, and to set aside their feelings is condescending. An ad hominem attack is an attack against the person - for example, "stomping your feet like a child denied sweets" - not a comment on their argument.

Nobody said any of that, certainly not me. There's not much point in talking to someone who misrepresents what you're saying to make it easier to argue against. Sentinels are an example of the problems with shooting in AOS because they so perfectly hit all the bases. The fact that many other shooting units are less problematic is part of the point being made - you have to be careful with shooting, because it has a tendency to become non-interactive and unfun very quickly do to its basic structure. If the game had a somewhat more limiting basic structure to shooting - like literally every other wargame does, there isn't a single other major wargame that has the lack of restrictions AOS does - you would have more design space to work with and wouldn't need to be so careful. Even Sentinels might be fine, for example, in a game with a meaningful Look out Sir rule and where you couldn't shoot into combats freely. When you have a basic mechanic with virtually no restrictions, that actually limits the design space, rather than expanding it. I'm not going to go into more detail until I've seen you're capable of reading what someone actually wrote, not rewriting it to make it easier to attack.

People have already explained this to you multiple times, you just won't or can't understand. You have an extremely fringe idea of NPE that takes no account of interactivity or fun, and that is not an idea shared by even a significant minority of the player base. You can talk about "educating" and "aligning expectations" (super condescending, incidentally), but if 80% of the population or more disagrees with your basic framework, it'll take a lot more charisma than is on offer here to change peoples' minds. You can argue till the cows go home that Sentinels being able to delete any small hero they wish, anywhere on the board, simply by the player pointing his finger at it is not actually NPE because it doesn't win games on its own. It is not going to change the mind of anyone who finds that a non-interactive, un-fun experience. We're talking about people's feelings as to what is fun and what isn't. Your repeated refrain to set aside your feelings is literally beside the point. People don't play wargames to set aside their feelings. People play wargames because they are fun and interactive. Remove those elements and people don't enjoy themselves, no matter how much you insist to them that they can still win the game. An element that is not fun and not interactive is not a "quality mechanic." Ranged units that do mortals on a 5+ rerolling from 30" ignoring LOS is not a "quality mechanic," no matter how that actually maths out, if the majority of the player base finds it oppressive and unfun. You don't get to tell other people what is or is not NPE for them, it's like telling someone they really should like cookies n crunch ice cream, and if they don't, they need to be educated to set aside their feelings and realign their expectations.

When your own example is wrong in precisely the way that illustrates the point, it's kinda telling. No, you can't screen out shooting the way you can screen out an alpha melee strike, because shooting, by definition, has longer range. How do you screen out a unit that can shoot 30" without LOS? Even something with a more reasonable range is by its very definition harder to screen out than something that has a 1-3" range. It's extremely easy to protect characters or small key units from a melee alpha strike; it varies from "difficult" to "completely impossible" to protect characters or small key units from ranged shooting in AOS. The logical equivalent to screening for melee is using terrain to prevent shooting. But that essentially doesn't exist in AOS as it's clearly intended and actually played (even if the rules technically would allow for it if tables were set up in a completely different way than GW wants you to, with lots of 5" tall solid walls). And yes, the fact that you get to do stuff in your opponent's combat phase is a fundamental difference that completely changes how interactive the phase is. Again, by definition, getting to do stuff in a phase = interactivity, not getting to do stuff = no interactivity. You have defeated your own point by illustrating two key ways in which shooting is non-interactive.

Yeah, that was a pretty silly statement. One of the biggest reasons IDK is good right now is that they are the only faction that actually has real counter-play against shooting, because of their special rule that enables you to actually interact with the opponent's shooting by forcing where they have to allocate shots. Also, IDK actually have a decent amount of shooting now between the turtles and the sharks. You're not gonna be gunning down whole units at range or anything, but the turtle will take about 2-3W off a standard 5W hero depending on buffs, armor saves, etc, which is not irrelevant. If you run a turtle + 2 sharks, that's actually enough to snipe out a 5W hero most of the time if you want to devote your shots to it.

I so want to play a game where that could happen. 😄

It's not really an option, though. The amount of mechanics in the entire game that allow you to pick and out and target a single model within a unit can probably be counted on one hand, and almost none of them have any significant range on them (e.x. the IDK spell is 12" range IIRC, aside from never being taken, so good luck on getting an IDK spellcaster within 12" of some sentinels alive, and good luck getting off a cast against one of the strongest magic armies in the game). And even if you somehow manage it...it's only reducing the output of one unit. Literally the only thing I can think of that is realistic is the once-per-game ability on the Mortek Crawler, which itself is the kind of non-interactive, "feels bad" ability that people don't like (and also wouldn't be worth forgoing the shooting on a 200 point model just to have a ~85% chance of removing a wizard on a single sentinel unit, statistically you'd almost certainly be better off just shooting the catapult in the normal mode and reducing their firepower that way). So you're basically saying "fight fire with fire," which is kind-of the point.

But that's the point: being shot at in AOS is not a fun experience, because there's no agency involved. Lumineth Sentinels are the ultimate example of this, because they literally remove any possible counter-play. You can't hide, because they can ignore LOS. You can't stay back, because this is an objective game and their absurd 30" range effectively covers the entirety of the board that matters. LoS and other to hit debuffs do nothing. To wound debuffs do nothing. Armor save does nothing. Being shot at by Sentinels is an entirely non-interactive experience. You don't roll any dice or anything, you just remove whatever model they point at, assuming they're not terrible at math. This is terrible game design, whether or not it's overpowered in the sense of winning games. People play wargames to have fun, not just as a test of strategy, and Sentinel-style shooting is not a fun experience to be on the receiving end of. That in and of itself makes it a bad game mechanic. And it's not only Sentinels. There is extremely limited agency involved in being shot in Aos, period. Consider the comparison to 40k. In 40k here are ways you can avoid being shot: 1. Terrain. 2. Look out Sir. 3. Engage in melee with a different unit. 4. Engage in melee with the shooting unit itself. Now some specialized units can ignore one or more of these normal limitations. But nothing ignores all of them. There's always something you can do to feel like you have some control over the experience. None of this exists in AoS. Terrain and LoS technically do, but they do not function with even 25% of the same impact they have in 40k. Engaging in melee straight up does nothing in AoS (well, except restrict the shooting unit to shooting what it's engaged with). Again, this is poor game design, whether or not the numbers balance out. People don't like game mechanics that make them feel like they're a spectator to the opponent playing the game, and that's how AoS shooting feels. No amount of "just suck it up, it won't actually win them the game" - even when true - refutes the "feels bad" involved.

They could have Filth tokens, like Lumineth have Aetherquartz.

Really hope they man up and rewrite the whole LRL book with the new release to remove the layered cheese and non-interactive game mechanics, in line with the new Slaanesh and DoK books. No more 5+ rerolling mortals at 30" range ignoring LOS would be a good first step. Which, of course, means that the rooriders are probably going to have mortals on a 4+ to hit.

Slaangors are the worst, but the 2W melee infantry is pretty terrible for the points, too. I have a feeling you may see a ton of MSU blissbarb seeker spam armies that are going to make people say "you know, actually, eels weren't so bad...at least they had to get into melee with you and live to T3 to power up." I'm not saying it's going to necessarily take over the game, mind you - just that people may get very sick of it. I am not convinced the internal balance in the new Slaanesh book is very good at all, though I hope to be proved wrong.

DoK book is a big nerf - an expected one, but a big nerf none-the-less. Changing stuff to "wholly within" fundamentally changes the way the army plays and is a massive decrease to threat ranges generally, and especially in the early game. Slaanesh looks underpowered until you consider summoning. I think we'll need to see how it actually plays out. Unfortunately, the nature of mechanic seems likely to lead to the same basic problems we had before re: certain builds being just much better than others because they take more advantage of the depravity generation.

But isn't that exactly what they did, by refusing to make any changes during the winter FAQ because of a supposed lack of data? To use your metaphor, they seem to have said "never again will we poop the bed! no siree!" while leaving the old poop right there in the bed with all of us. with the explanation that actually there's not a lot of data on how bad poop in the bed really is.

It's gonna be really funny if the second half of the Lumineth book comes out and makes Lumineth even more powerful in even gimmickier ways right after they toned down DoK and Slaanesh gimmicks.

Honestly, I doubt that's the case. One or the other is/was just a typo/mistake. The DoK book was very likely already sent to the printers by the time BR: Morathi was out.

Oh, I don't disagree. Just think it's pretty funny to see MWs on a 5+ to hit with 30" ranged attacks coexisting with "we can't give these units mortals on 6s to hit in melee, that's too powerful!" But then, I guess there wasn't enough data to know whether said 5+ to hit MWs rerolling was actually a problem or not.

Had enough data to know that DoK needed big warscroll nerfs, but not to know if Kroak was too cheap at 320. <Giggles>

IMO in the current shooting meta you really need a 3-man immortis guard unit if you're going to take Arkhan, he's just too fragile and easy to snipe down otherwise. The unit is kinda junk in any other list, but with Arkhan, it's actually worth it I think, because it keeps him alive for another full turn of shooting; without them, he's usually dead by the end of T2 at the very latest, and he's only worthwhile if you can keep him alive and healing stuff double that long.

The depravity summoning mechanics seem to be really weird and may be throwing points off substantially for things like Hellstriders. Precisely because they are fast, hit like wet noodles, are relatively durable, and were very low points for a unit...that ties together to make them very good at generating 2 points of depravity a turn for a bargain basement cost. The only thing I can think of is that some testing showed that spamming them generated too much depravity. But they couldn't make them better and cost more, because that would tread on the toes of their new (and hideously expensive) version. So they ended up in this weird halfway house where they now do basically nothing for their points except generate depravity. More broadly, I am not at all sure that this depravity mechanic is going to be any less problematic than the old one, just in different ways. I wish they'd get off this summoning kick, it causes problems in almost every book it crops up in.

It's bizarre the seekers and hellstriders went up. Again, why would you ever take them compared to the new mounted stuff? The cynic in me says it's a case of "makes these bad because they're literally less than half as expensive as our new mounted dudes, can't have people using them instead."

It's ridiculous the mounted archers have 4 wounds. Double a seeker or hellstrider? More than a deathrider or chaos knight? Just downright bizarre. The sort of thing you'd say was a typo on first glance...but not even GW could be that incompetent, so somebody somewhere thought it made sense. I can't really see why you'd ever take the non-mounted ones. 180 points for 20 wounds on a 5+, 14" movement, decent melee, and 16 4/4-1/1 shots that do mortals on a 6 to wound...vs 160 points for 11 wounds on a 6", 6" movement, terrible melee, and 21 4/4/-1/1 shots with +1 to wound as long as the guy without the bow stays alive.