yukishiro1

The very fact that the Wraithknight thing is what everyone cites kinda says it all though, doesn't it? If this happened all the time we'd have lots of Wraithknight stories, not just the one. Making that seem very much like the outlier, not the normal. I mean maybe I'm wrong and maybe the corporate bosses at GW are evil geniuses pouring over spreadsheets and saying "we have 5000 left over beasts of nurgle! make them really powerful ASAP! But only in 40k, not in AOS, because <reasons>!" But I really think that gives them far too much credit.

I really don't think GW makes deliberately bad factions or units, not least because that would imply they pay enough attention and put in enough effort to do so. The truth is much more prosaic: at the corporate level, they just don't care very much. Balanced rules are not a priority. GW is a plastic company; the rules are just there to stimulate sales, and to do that, they only need to be less than totally terrible, they don't need to actually be very good, and they definitely don't need to be balanced. They just need to be there. Most people who buy GW plastic don't even play the games more than once in a blue moon. Let that sink in, because it has profound implications for the way GW structures its business. The game is just an excuse to collect; it needs to be there to provide the excuse, the same way that someone goes to the store "to buy some milk" when the real reason is to buy cigs, alcohol and junk food, but that's all it needs to be. Ironically, I think the fact that the rules get as much attention as they do is probably down to the rank-and-file gamers left in the company who actually do care about this stuff, and I expect it's a constant struggle for them against the higher-ups who are really only interested in how much plastic they can sell.

I'd say at a minimum: 4 Heroes 3 Battleline choices 3 non-battleline multi-model unit choices 2 large single entity unit choices, 1 of which can overlap in the hero category, as long as it isn't just the other one with a hero stuck on top (i.e. hero on griffon and steam tank counts, but magmadroth and magamadroth with hero on top does not). But the key is for that to feel complete, every single one needs to feel distinct and different from every other, while also feeling useful. So that's 11 if you count the overlapping large choice, I guess reinforcing what I said about about how it is possible, but difficult. 15-20 is probably more realistic.

I voted 11-15, but thinking about it again, I'd probably pick 15-20. I think 11-15 *can* work fine, but for it to work, they need to be really well designed, without any fat or redundancy at all. 15-20 is probably more realistic to create a balanced army, and you need many more if GW insists on doing its current awful favorite thing of breaking up factions into sub-factions that don't integrate with one another at all (i.e. Gitz). If there are distinct sub-factions (Gitz are an example of this, whereas Namarti vs Akhelians in IDK for example are not, because they still mostly interact with one another even if there are little keyword-based exclusions), each needs a minimum of 10 well-designed, well-balanced scrolls to not feel half-baked. There also needs to be some balance in how the scrolls are doled out. Fyreslayers for example do not feel like a real, complete army - I don't know off the top of my head how many scrolls they have, but most of them are essentially repeats of very similar heroes. They only have like what, 3-4 actual units? And some of those feel similar to one another too.

You can also take Idoneth as allies for Lumineth, but not vice versa. The whole thing just seems like a bit of a confused mess.

They only got the ability in Morathi a month or two ago, and were flat-out terrible before that book reworked their datasheet, which is why you didn't see them. It is potentially an extremely powerful ability, but it is also very finnicky to set up, and it is important to realize it only works on your turn, so they can pile in again as normal on their own turn. So you can't lock anything down indefinitely - though if you get a double turn, you can lock it down for both of your turns if you hit both times. I guess it'd let you shield your pistoliers from getting attacked back by more than one model if the unit only has 1" range weapons, until your opponent's turn when they'll just kill them. Though I guess there's a potentially pretty brutal combo there with the double turn, if you can shoot, charge and shoot, melee, avoid taking many hits back, then shoot/magic off the rest of the unit on the double turn, then charge something ELSE, and maybe even avoid dying to that too because you've also netted that one...

High Tide is going nowhere, Morathi was the place to make rules changes if they were going to. Morsarr might get another 10 or 20 points added, other than that it's hard to see anything changing. Thralls and especially Reavers could maybe lose another 10 points too, but I doubt it'll happen.

IDK was more than just bad scrolls. The changes are actually really smartly done in ways that allow units to synergize, rather than just improving them. The Leviadon is the best example of this. They didn't just make it bigger and badder, they changed its buff from junk (cover in a faction that already gets it T1 automatically) to something - and this is the really clever bit - that benefits almost everything in the army (+1 save) but also benefits some cross-sub-faction units more than others (+1 to hit for Namarti, Leviadon is Akhelian). Thralls have always been extremely efficiently pointed offense on paper, but in game they struggle because they're so squishy that its hard to get value out of them before they die. But if you just repointed them and gave them more defense, or nerfed their offense and buffed their defense, they end up just being foot eels, both losing their flavor and their distinction in the army. The Leviadon changes, coupled with the base faction rules, very cleverly give you a way to take Thralls that doesn't involve reworking them to just be foot eels. The Leviadon protects them on the way in, and even gives them an additional offensive output buff that puts them far above the output of eels point for point. Suddenly you have an interesting choice to make. Eels still are the best target for the high tide command point buff (except if you're fighting 4+ wound models), but Thralls are far more points efficient offense generally if you're taking a turtle. You can go through the changes and point out similar things re: the other units. They didn't just make scrolls better, they distinguished them from one another and gave you synergistic ways to combine different scrolls instead of just spamming the one mathematically best unit.

What I'd primarily like to see is more viability for lists that take a wide variety of units. I like seeing lists that have a mix of heros, infantry, cavalry, monsters, etc. I gave my list as a sample of that. To do that, you have to both improve bad scrolls and open up buff interactions. Gitz could be fixed easily by relaxing the keyword soup and letting at least some things from each sub-faction interact with one another. Unfortunately, GW went exactly the wrong direction on Gitz, instead giving them a bunch of WD allegiances that double down on splitting the book up into sub-factions even more than the base book does. This is an example of precisely what not to do. To give a concrete example of the right direction, the loonshrine should just let you respawn any sub-faction's battleline units, you shouldn't have to pick which sub-faction it applies to and lock yourself out of it applying to the others. There's no reason particular balance reason for it, it just serves to push you into specialized armies for the sake of it. You could also consider explicit cross-sub-faction synergies - not just "this buff from the gobbo hero works on trolls also" but "goblins get a bravery buff from nearby trolls and monsters" or "mangler squigs can eat a nearby model in the hero phase to get a buff depending on the type - a gobbo heals a wound, a spider rider makes 6s to hit do MWs instead of normal damage, another squig adds 2 to their run and charge rolls, a troll gives them a 5+ shrug for a turn." These are just random unbalanced ideas off the top of my head - the point isn't that they are balanced, it's just some examples of possible interactions you could have that would promote more varied lists.

The double turn probably worked ok before there were armies that could delete half the opposing army or more over the T1 to T2 double turn because they have so much glass cannon ranged dominance. Personally, I would try removing the double turn on T1 to T2 only. I think that would mitigate a lot of the issues with it, by making sure both players get two full turns before someone has the chance to get two turns in a row.

I saw something a while ago from a reliable source that most purchases of GW products are made by people who don't even play the games on anything but an extremely irregular basis (and this was from before the pandemic, obviously). The rules are very much a sideshow for GW. The core business is selling people plastic. The rules just need to be playable enough to give people an excuse to buy the plastic, they don't need to be and GW doesn't aim for making them actually great.

The Harlequins Troupe box is probably the best kit GW has ever made in terms of balancing dynamism and customization. And it even has the bonus of being one of the only kits where having everybody jumping off rocks isn't deeply silly.

GW has changed philosophy over the years when it comes to model design. Originally everything was monopose because that's what metal allows. Early plastic kits were also mostly monopose. Then they figured out they could do modular kits, and that was standard for a long time. More recently - since about 2015 or so - they have been moving back to monopose, because it allows for more dynamic posing (insert joke about model jumping off rock here), and because it allows for easy pushfit and conversion from pushfit. I think monopose can work, but it has to be really good. Namarti Thralls are an example in my mind of monopose done right. The gain from the more dynamic poses is worth the cost in customization. Most aren't, though. Stuff like Lumineth, there is no reason for them to be so restrictive, given how bland the posing is.

I assume that's an Eidolon of the Storm on top? I think this list proves my point for me. There are zero zappy eels in that list. Not a single unit. Pre-Morathi: Volty + soulscryer +zappy eels is the best list, hands down. Nothing else is really playable without gimping yourself. Maybe you take 3-6 defensive eels, but that's it. Maybe Aetherings for support, but that's not even an IDK unit. Post-Morathi: Turtles, sharks, defensive eels, and Eidolon of the Storm are all highly competitive in addition to the above three. Eidolon of the Sea, Akhelian King and Thralls are playable competitively (Thralls admittedly only with a turtle), albeit probably not the absolute strongest picks. You'd only take a Tidecaster if you want to reverse the tides. Reavers and Soulrenders are marginal and not really competitive. Lotann is still terrible. So IDK went from a book where the competitive lists had at least 50% of their points tied up in a single scroll to a faction where 7 out 14 units are properly competitively, with another 3 that are usable competitively, and another hero usable in a niche build. There's only three units in the book - two hero, one non-hero - that you'd really struggle to use in a competitive list. Going from 3/14 to 11/14 is a massive difference in the options for building diverse lists. But maybe most critically, these units aren't subject to the same restrictive buff-stacking that most AoS tomes are built around, so you can actually see all of them in the same list, and you can mix and match with a fair degree of freedom. There are now at least 10 IDK warscrolls that are competitively viable, and they're all usable on their own merits, not only because of buff interactions, except Thralls which do require a Leviadon to work. My competitive IDK list is now: Volty Soulscryer Eidolon 2x Thralls 2x Defensive Eels 1 unit of 2 Allopexes 1 Turtle 2 units of 3 aetherwings That's surely a diverse and balanced list by anyone's reckoning. If every battletome got a rework like IDK in Morathi that made more than 2/3s of their scrolls usable competitively and allowed you to take diverse lists like the one above (whether or not it's very slightly worse than a spammier list), you wouldn't see me complaining, and I don't think you'd see other people complaining either.

Well but that's the question, isn't it: why should the game push you into restrictive lists? What is gained by rewarding people for taking less diverse armies? This would only make sense if having a diverse army was an advantage. But in AOS, it by and large is a disadvantage due to the restrictive buff stacking model most factions operate on. So why do you need to be rewarded for doing something that is already stronger to begin with? Shouldn't it be precisely the opposite? Why reward the strong with more strength? That's not very good game design. It seems to me that the original idea with battalions was to give themed forces special abilities to help distinguish them on the battlefield. Which is fine. But the problem is that the system doesn't actually do that. Instead, the main use of battalions is the secondary perks of CP, artefacts and drop count. People don't look for a battalion to make a themed army around, they look for the battalion that they can squeeze the most units they want to take anyway into to lower drop count and take advantage of the other side benefits. So in effect, all it ends up doing is rewarding people even more for spamming the best units. And it's hard to believe that's what GW set out to do with the battalion system.

That's a very weird take. The fact that 27 eels + volty was the only competitive IDK list was not the consequence of some fundamental philosophical point of principle, it was just bad faction design. We know this to be true, because GW just released something that remedies the issues by addressing the internal balance of the codex so that a greater variety of builds are competitively viable. You are arguing that it isn't possible to do something that GW just did. That's not a very convincing argument. More broadly, you keep arguing against this straw man that anybody is saying there'll ever be a point where all lists are equally viable. That's not what people are asking for. They're asking for changes to the game to make the gap between the gimmicky "spam all this unit" lists and the more well-rounded "take a bunch of different stuff" lists smaller, such that you can realistically take such a list without feeling like you're throwing away the chance at winning in a competitive setting. In other words, what they did in Morathi for IDK. If they can do it for IDK - the worst spam list offender in the entire game - they can do it for other factions too. It's really weird to have staked out a position premised on the idea that it is impossible to do what GW has just done.

That's not how GW works, though. They make the minis first, then come up with rules for them afterward. The rule are just an excuse to sell the miniatures. They have no incentive to release fewer miniatures in order to make sure the rules for them are better.

That's the bit I just don't think is true. There would absolutely not be the same resistance to IDK if the most powerful list was a balanced list that took 1-2 of most units in the book. You would not hear people say "oh god, not that balanced IDK list again with a bunch of different unit types! that's so boring to play against! why can't we have 27 eels + volty instead?" Of course there will be stronger and weaker lists. Nobody's arguing otherwise. But when the strongest list are gimmick lists that take a whole bunch of one unit over and over again, that is a separate, distinct problem from simply "this list is too strong." You don't seem to feel that's a problem personally, and that's fine - you're entitled to your opinion. But for a lot of us, it absolutely would not be the same if the lists that were powerful were balanced lists that take a wide variety of units from the battletome.

I think what animates a lot of people is they don't like facing a list of 27 eels + volturnos, to take an obvious example. If someone really *wants* to bring that list fine...but the game shouldn't make it the best IDK list you can bring. Even if someone should be allowed by the rules of the game to take that kind of list (a debatable proposition), it should absolutely not be the optimal choice for winning the game. When it is, there's a big design problem. Now generalize that out: people don't want gimmick lists to be the strongest competitively. They want a game system where the strongest lists are balanced lists that take a reasonably wide variety of different units that perform different rules. That's really all it boils down to. By and large, AOS is not that game right now. Part of this is because of the stat homogenization in AOS that removed toughness and allowed wound carry-over and thus compressed unit roles; part of it is from the low number of units available to many AOS armies; lots of it is from the typically overly restrictive buff interactions in many AOS battletoms that sub-divide the books into mini-factions that don't work well with one another. One ray of hope is that what Morathi did to IDK is exactly what GW needs to do to all the battle tomes. IDK went from 27 eels + volty to a much more complete and well-rounded faction. It's still an incomplete faction and it's still out of date in a lot of its design parameters, but Morathi successfully addresses the internal balance and makes more diverse lists at least somewhat more competitively viable compared to eel spam. That's what I imagine most people would like to see happen for all factions.

Battalions need a fundamental rework. They shouldn't give CP, they shouldn't give extra artefacts, and they shouldn't reduce drops - or rather, having lower drops shouldn't impact whether you go first or not, except maybe to let you break ties or something like that. You should take a battalion because of the ability it gives, whereas right now in a lot of cases the ability is more of an afterthought compared to the incidental benefits. Obviously this would mean drastically reducing the point costs of most battalions, which is just fine. Then just let people buy an extra artefact and CP directly, if they want them. A lot of the fundamental problems with list-building in AOS come from battalions and they way they funnel you into restrictive lists if you want to be competitive. The remainder of the problems come from overly restrictive buff interactions - Gitz being the prime example of this. It's basically four mini-armies none of which have much if any synergy with the others. That's terrible book design. Well, then there's units that are just bad, of course. But that's always going to be a problem to some degree.

It comes from two things: (1) many lists having a tiny number of units to begin with, and (2) those units being funneled down even further by the battalion system. GW managed to get battalions precisely wrong - instead of rewarding you for taking a variety of units, they encourage you to double down on an army made mostly out of only a few unit types. Even the factions with more unit options often artificially funnel themselves down - see Gitz, or even CoS, where certain units only interact with other units that are basically "sub-factions," giving you little reason to bring a more diverse, balanced force.

Yep, it's a lot easier to experiment on TTS when your experiment isn't costing you hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours.

The only thing KO realy needs is: (1) can't use fly high with hero-phase moves, and (2) can't use WLV with spell-in-a-bottle. Without those two abilities, and particularly the wombo combo created by the interaction, the faction goes from oppressive to fine.

I agree AoS has a big lethality problem, but the trouble with toning down damage is that in a game where the winner is determined by how many objectives you can control each turn, without extreme lethality, games then just become about who can force one more model (or counts-as one more model) onto an objective than the other side. GW has kind-of backed themselves into a corner here with the way scoring works. It needs to change to something more dynamic in order for lethality to be able to come down significantly.

The problem with shooting and magic is fundamentally the same, that it gets to interact with an opponent who can't interact back (except to try to unbind the spells), so the advantage of the double turn is exacerbated. It's no coincidence the best lists at the moment combine shooting and magic and ruthlessly exploit how powerful both those things are when you get the T1-T2 double turn. Yes, you can just raise the points on magic and shooting until shooting lists can't win essentially every game they get a double turn on...but that means they'll lose almost any game they don't get the double turn on. The problem is how the double turn mechanic interacts with ranged damage. There's no good way to balance it without addressing the actual core issue: that the advantage of a double turn with a ranged army is so huge. Double turn works with combat-based armies because the opponent gets to interact in your turn too. It just falls apart totally when the person getting double turned against can't do anything for two turns in a row.