yukishiro1

Hey, another reason to Just Shoot the Heroes - now you'll not only remove your opponent's buff synergies, but you can actually make his own model attack himself! OTOH, if this makes it a bad choice that people don't take, that's a lot better than it being a must-include that everyone has to take (and shell out some ridiculous price tag for the box that contains it). So I'd rather it be junk than overpowered, if those are the choices. The thing that concerns me most about this is the reference to grand strategies including them. That has alarm bells all over it. Though who knows, maybe there'll still be a couple super easy obvious ones that everyone will take, so again it will have no real impact.

I think when you start blaming the customers for GW doing a bad job that's getting into silly territory. It isn't the responsibility of "the community" to hold GW's hand and make sure its feelings aren't hurt or that it doesn't get triggered and throw its toys out of the pram. GW's a company worth billions with a cutthroat focus on their bottom line and extracting as much money as is humanly possible from its customers. It doesn't need to be treated like a sensitive child to make sure it keeps up its motivation, and it isn't going to be motivated by people saying nice things about it. It isn't doing quarterly updates because it's been so inspired by what great people there are in its community and by some altruistic desire to "give back," it's doing them because a judgement was made that there is more money to be made by giving the customers what they want in terms of more frequent rules updates. Giving them a participation trophy and telling them how great it is that they're trying is counterproductive if what we really want is for them to do a good job in the first place; if you do that the message that goes through is "people like this! more of the same!" not "we need to do better next time." Criticism should be constructive, to be sure, but when we start talking about how we can't or shouldn't criticize GW because it'll upset them and then we can't have nice things that feels like we're talking about a relationship with a socially dysfunctional family member, and I really don't think there are any benefits to be had from that. This is sort-of off topic so I don't want to belabor this any further, except to say that if I really felt like the community didn't deserve any better than what GW gives them, that would probably make me question why I was in the hobby anyway. The wonderful community is what makes this game worth playing. They deserve the very best game money can buy (especially considering how much money is required to buy it these days!).

I guess I just don't understand this point. They literally did just that in the prior update. And not a single person I can remember was complaining that the problem with that update was that it changed points - what people complained about is that it didn't go far enough in changing points. So why would they think that people would be against changing that printed material again 3 months later when they already did it once and the problem people had wasn't that it had been changed, it was that it hadn't changed enough? And what printed material are you even talking about anyway here? The prior GHB was like 9 months ago, not 3 months ago.

No, I don't think so. If they were going up in points anyway they'd just do it now. That wouldn't invalidate anything in the new release, as long as the increases are less than or equal to the points values in the new release. There's no reason not to increase points now in that case, at least for the most problematic units. The concern isn't about invalidating existing printed material - they had no problem doing that in the last balance patch where they dropped a bunch of points. The concern is about invalidating future printed material that they haven't charged people for yet. There certainly would be no reason to go to all this trouble of coming up with a new balance lever that is going to complicate the game and have other unintended consequences if there was the option of just taking a few of the most problematic units and nerfing them in the way you were going to nerf them anyway in a few months. I think it's the more troubling possibility - that the new GHB *doesn't* touch the points values of many of these problematic units because GW didn't think they were a problem at the time they sent the book to the printer. So if they increased the points now, they'd have egg all over their faces when the GHB releases and the points go back down to their prior values. I suspect this is a way to retroactively CYA and act like they were planning this all along, and use that as justification for why the points on at least some of these units aren't changing in the new GHB - "they already have the bonus VPs factored in so we don't need to increase points!"

There are also things going on in that part of the world right now that may be complicating things.

Yeah it's a big mess.

They have to send things to the printers more than 3 months in advance because they print everything in China. It's just the way it works. Historically they have sent stuff to the printers closer to 6 months before. Who knows, with the pandemic, the times may even be getting longer, not shorter. It wouldn't surprise me if they sent the 2022 GHB to the printers in January. I'm not defending it, it's a truly terrible way to update rules that will by its very nature always be out of date by the time it's released. But it's what GW does.

I honestly think it's because the points for the next GHB are already sent to the printers and can't be changed, and it would be embarrassing to do a day-1 FAQ on something you're charging a lot of money for. Which is a terrible reason, but I can totally believe it's something GW would do.

Well...that, or they could have just changed points and redone warscrolls, the way they did last time. Which was underwhelming too, don't get me wrong, because they did a very lazy job with the points changes. But it clearly refutes the idea that their only option was to do something that didn't involve tweaking warscrolls or points, since they did both of those things last edition of the same document.

The rules for the new endless spell they want everyone to buy are in the book, it's pictured next to it. Gotta hope they've resisted the temptation to make it really good to try to get people to buy the box.

That's not a problem from GW's point of view, it's a feature. It's how war-com articles work. The object isn't to educate, it's to stir people up. It's the modern social media philosophy - that the point is to generate "engagement." They will look at this thread and say "jimmies rustled, mission accomplished."

They're probably bodyguards, not damage dealers. That's not really a damage-dealing profile. Ignoring LOS shooting is a dangerous thing in theory but putting it on a 12" range makes it much less dangerous, and it's much less dangerous in AOS anyway because terrain is so unlikely to block LOS anyway. And the profile itself is so anemic that you'd need vast hordes of them to do any real damage with it.

I don't see how it really accomplishes that. Either it nerfs the best units hard enough that people take the next-best unit instead, or it doesn't, and they keep taking the best unit. And nobody is going to stop taking something like Morathi because she gives up an extra VP. It just isn't gonna happen. VP are such a non-granular measure that if they somehow managed to get it just right so that (say]) fulminators are now exactly balanced with concussors, that'd just be complete dumb luck that it happens to line up that way. But in 99% of situations the nerf will either go too far or not far enough, and therefore not so much promote build diversity as just shuffle the pack a bit on what the ideal spam build is. If they had really cared about list diversity they'd have introduced a progressive points handicap for spam. I outlined one way to do it in another thread, but the basic idea is just that each additional unit beyond the cap costs more. I.e. say the first unit of dragons costs you 340, then the next costs you 360, then 380, etc. This promotes actual unit diversity by making it progressively less attractive to pick the same unit over and over rather than taking something different.

Obviously a Chaos Dwarf who got leg-extending surgery.

It's basically just a massive incentive to take Kragnos. Who they are clearly pushing as a solution to bad destruction armies given the buff he got in the last of these too. And it also makes a bunch of money for GW selling a nice pricey kit...so it's a win/win from that point of view. Not so hot for people who actually want to play those armies properly, not Kragnos + some junk. But I don't think GW cares much about that. SoB I dunno, the cynic in me says they decided that everybody who was going to buy gargants because they were so powerful for so long has by now, so it's time to nerf them. But the realist in me says I don't think GW really even operates with that level of organizationally joined-up thinking. I think the better answer is just to take them at face value on what they said in the post - all these things are just derived from a very simple operation they did on the data to get the warscrolls that give you the biggest win % bonus. If that value was above X they put it on the list. Very quick, no brain work required. And then nobody realized or cared that you can't do that with SoB because they only have 4 scrolls period, so of course the two good scrolls are going to have massively higher win % than the two bad scrolls.

I don't disagree with any of that re: what GW will ultimately do once a new BoC book comes out and they have the chance to change their rules to be more like other AOS factions. I just don't see how that means you can say that BoC are "undercosted" currently but also that they'd be bad if you "corrected" their points to the "proper" cost. That just doesn't make sense. When we say a unit is undercosted we're saying it's too cheap for its performance. It doesn't make sense to say that they'd be bad at the "proper" cost. The proper cost is the cost where they would be neither overcosted nor undercosted, i.e. neither too good nor bad. That's what the proper cost is. I guess we just disagree on the meaning of the words we use. P.S. BoC also has a lot more nuance to it than people give it credit for. Gavespawn and to a lesser extent Darkwalkers have a ton of jank built into them, and the Gavespawn rule is one of the most powerful in the game because there are no restrictions on how you can plop down the spawn. The stuff you can do with that rule is downright incredible, and the only thing keeping it from being S tier as an ability is that you have to roll that 2+ and you're going to sometimes fail and lose the game because of it. The dragon ogor d6" move in the hero phase is another thing that is super janky and lets you do all sorts of stuff you couldn't otherwise, though it suffers even more than Gavespawn from the randomness. They're not LRL in terms of a bajillion layered special faction rules, but then nobody is. The total package they now have from the allegiance + the suballegiance + the stuff in BR is actually pretty compelling as a package, the problem was just underpowered scrolls that didn't do enough damage or stick around long enough. And the herdstone fixes that.

Oh I'm sure they'll go up in the 3.0 BoC book. That's certainly been the pattern with every other book and I would expect it would hold true for them too - units will get stronger and points will go up. But I don't understand the statement that BoC are 20% undercosted made together with the statement that they'd be bad if restored to their "correct" point values.

I don't like it one bit, but I don't think it's honestly all that huge a deal. It's dumb, but it's not game-ruining or anything. Well, unless you play gargants. Then it is game-ruining I guess. Not many people will have sympathy for them after what they've been like, but it still sucks to have your army cut off at the knees, at least against other top-tier armies. They'll still stomp the junk armies, but I doubt that's much consolation.

But what does that even mean? If they would be bad if you increased their points, how would that points increase be "proper?" Isn't the "proper" points value the value needed to make something, well, not bad?

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here. BoC are good because their warscrolls have gone from terrible-to-decent value for points to decent-to-good value for points thanks to the patch that increased their effectiveness? Um...yes? How does that refute the point that you can patch factions to be better? As for the idea that they'll get points increases in the GHB...I mean, it's GW, anything's possible, including very stupid things. But that would be pretty silly even by GW's normal standards. Why would they take away what makes BoC a decent faction without adding something to compensate? I would expect BoC to maintain their current status until there is a tome that can change them up to be more like other AOS factions. That would be the logical thing to do. If your point is that "efficient brute strength without a lot of special rules" isn't great faction design, sure, that's fair. But I don't see how that refutes the idea that you can patch a faction into relevance. What you really seem to be saying here is that patching a faction into relevance doesn't generally result in top-tier design. Which is probably true, and I doubt anyone would disagree with that. It's better to get a full rework than a patch. But doesn't seem to be really here nor there to the point being made that you can patch a faction to be functional, even if it doesn't result in the prettiest results. They definitely could have patched Khorne into similar relevance to BoC. GSG I agree is more difficult due to the way the book is structured, but I don't think that'd be impossible either, it'd just take a bit more thought on what you need to do.

Especially when they're all available free online for you to read page by page totally legally via videos put up by people who have the books literally sent to them by GW for that very purpose. It may well be that GW prices them at the premium level they do precisely because they know nobody price-conscious is buying them anyway. So why not extract the maximum you can from the people who will buy them no matter what? They'll buy them no matter what. Meanwhile everyone else just watches the youtube video and hopefully (for GW) gets excited enough to buy some models even though they aren't buying the book. In other words, the purpose of the tomes are just to be marketing copy to sell models, but if you can also get a handful of people to pay 35 quid for your marketing copy, why not take their money while you're at it?

Without wanting to get political, I suspect the Ukrainian military would prefer to be on an even keel with Russia than to get bonus points. AOS is played with 2000 vs 2000 points (or whatever point total you choose). You don't set out to play an inferior force against your opponent's superior force; the whole premise is that you pit equal forces against one another. The reason that forces are unequal is because GW is bad at balancing the game, not because it is supposed to be that way. I suspect almost everyone would prefer their 2000 points to be equal to the opponent's 2000 points than to get bonus victory points for their army being inferior. In a balanced game, if you wanted to play the underdog you could always just play 1750 points against their 2000. This is all within GW's power to fix. That's why this feels bad. It feels like GW admitting it is incapable of balancing its game so it's just going to give people handicaps instead.

This is very true. It's kind of like back when LRL were all over the place and people were like "stop complaining about how unfun it is to play against sentinel spam, you can still win" which was really missing the point. The issue wasn't that sentinel spam was impossible to beat, it's that it wasn't fun to play against. What this system does it it just gives you sympathy points for having a bad army and bad units when you're playing against someone with a strong army and strong units. But your army is still bad, and theirs is still good. They still stomp you and you still feel inferior throughout the game. You just score more points than they do. I don't think what people with bad armies wanted was for their armies to still be just as bad but to win because GW said they get extra points.

edit: Oops didn't realize this was in this thread, and that we're not supposed to discuss that topic here any more.

Community comp always loses to GW's own attempts. It only ever works when the company itself isn't filling the void at all. Like in early AOS before AOS had point values, community comp caught on because there was no alternative. As soon as GW started giving out points values, it completely fell apart. And that's not because GW's point values were better. It's just because they're official. The community could come up with a much better handicap system than the one GW just came out with. It wouldn't matter. You'd never get enough buy-in for it, because there's an official alternative and that's always what people will gravitate towards. It's just the reality of the situation. Right now GW is showing that it wants to be the final arbiter of its own game (see these releases, them taking over the ITC, etc) - it's just not doing a great job at it. Community comp never works in those situations historically. It only works when the company is ceding that space to others.