Bosskelot
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Posts posted by Bosskelot
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57 minutes ago, novakai said:
for a Rant, I think comparatively to what 40K have gotten in recent preview show, the AoS reveal have been disappointing and lacking.
like getting full-range releases for Eldar, CSM, Votann, Imperial Guard, and Worldeaters compare to a lot of small hero releases with only Sylvaneath, Nighthaunt, and Sons having anything worthwhile feel inequities and it is hard to not feel the limited resources where lopsidedly put into one system.
tomes are nice and all but I do feel the majority of people in the hobby don't play or don't play enough to find the game engaging enough in the end. it also feels like the community is too driven up by rules and book releases when it doesn't feel like it is the most important side of the hobby
Don't forget Orks and Sisters in that too.
As for reveals I like that there's finally some good replacements for my ancient wolf riders. Those new ones are going straight onto squares for my oldhammer/KoW/T9A greenskin army.
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8 hours ago, Enoby said:
If I were to hazard a guess why, and to relay my own experiences, it's because AoS currently seems to be a competitively geared game without the mechanics needed to feel satisfying. I've played AoS, 40k, and Malifaux. Out of those, Malifaux is by far the most tactically demanding but it suits it as it's a skirmish game very focussed around scoring points over killing things. 40k, when I played it, was very lethal and there were a lot of hard counters, but you felt more in control as you have lots of options when building lists - though balance was rubbish, it had a strong illusion of choice. In AoS, I've found the game to retain the high lethality but with fewer options so you feel less in control, even if the balance is actually much better than 40k.
For example, I had a game of Slaanesh vs Ironjawz. Despite my best efforts screening, by turn 2 the Ironjawz had wiped out a good 3/4 of my army. We played again, the Ironjawz player failed the charge, and I counter charged leaving them with only about 1/3 of their army left. Technically a 50% win rate, but it didn't feel satisfying to play in either case. It felt quite similar in a tournament I was in; I came second with a S2D Archaon list, but most games were just slaughterfests as soon as bases touched. Definitely a part of playing Archaon lists, but it seemed to also be the case with Squigs vs Ossiarchs on another table.
To cut it short, the recent AoS games I've had and watched seemed to be so lethal you hardly had the chance to appreciate the models on the table. There wasn't much back and forth in a unit, but rather watching things dissapear once charged (unless they save stacked, which usually happened on models with high damage output), which can be tactical but I wouldn't say enjoyable for most. I doubt 40k is much different in this regard, but I think all of the options and better cover rules give people more of a sense of control.
40k on paper is highly lethal, but there are several things the game does to offset this. Not only are there plenty of absolute bricks in terms of survivability, but the terrain rules help to ensure not every weapon can be brought to bear on every enemy unit whenever a player wants. In fact in a lot of 40k games turns 1 and 2 are filled with skirmishing and often very few casualties as both armies jockey into position in order to have their big turns on 3 onwards. Trading units efficiently and sensibly is a core part of competitive 40k and getting consistent scoring off of that; not of doing a giant alpha strike and winning the game immediately. There are armies that lean more towards that style of play, and bad match-ups where one faction might be more vulnerable to an alpha strike from a certain other faction, but they're either rarer or they're sort of skew lists focused around gimmicks and so end up being seen less.
Generally the mission design deprioritizes killing too as lists usually have a significant portion of their points dedicated to objective holders and action-do'ers, who themselves might often not be the main sources of damage in an army. Even scary psykers might just be in a list to be doing psychic secondaries and scoring points, not to be doing mass amounts of mortal wounds. Grand strategies and battle tactics do lean towards the 40k style of mission design conceptually, but in reality lists are still just the same as they've ever been in AOS; spam the most efficient damage-dealers and kill your opponent. Those efficient damage-dealers can be your battleline too so you truly can just take nothing but them and be totally fine. This also leads into another divergence in the two systems with damage allocation and wound rolls where, again, AOS deprioritizes variety in unit/weapon types as damage overspill and flat wound rolls encourage finding the most mathematically universal damage dealers.
A good example of what I mean is looking at pre-nerf pre-tome Sentinels, whom the Lumineth player could just spam, alongside Big T, and basically table people while not really doing a whole lot. Imperial Guard in 40k are actually very similar in a way; their shooting even pre-codex is frightening after being buffed lots in dataslates.... but being a very static gunline army in 40k is not a good way to play it. Guard are still in the mid-30's despite their terrifying shooting because that terrifying shooting does not directly lead into winning games.
I do sometimes wonder if a combination of generally high points costs and no real restrictions on unit spam incentivise AOS to play like this. I'm sure if rule of 3 was removed back out of 40k we'd go back to the bad old days of early 8th again and the game would immediately get a lot more miserable. And 40k is able to have back and forth early game trading/skirmishing battles because most armies have access to cheap throwaway units.
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A lot of what I'm hearing in this thread is that AOS really does need its own Tempest of War.
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Honestly most of your reasons could apply to lots of different game systems, GW especially, so if other GW games seem to be doing fine in your local area maybe the reasons are more systemic and down to AOS specifically and also the local AOS scene.
Games are basically kept alive by their communities and it sounds like you've got a pretty bad one for AOS. Trying to find regular AOS games in my local scene is like trying to find hens teeth; a lot of the locals have just decided to do a single monthly meet up where they all just.... play each other like they always do, and often with a very competitive bent. It's exceptionally hard for newer players to break into that group or find games on the reg. This is in stark contrast to games like 40K, LOTR, Saga, Gaslands, Blood Bowl and others which have regular organised weekly meet ups and gaming nights, and where 40k especially has people always looking for a game on most days, not just the club organised ones. Guess which systems are thriving down here right now.
So yeah, a bad local scene and very AOS specific game issues are probably why your scene is struggling.
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Highly tempted by that Sylvaneth box.
The Skaven one too for Oldhammer/T9A/KoW.
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Bretts and Tomb Kings being the starter armies just sounds like a total meme.
There were definitely unfair reasons placed on them to be the most unpopular armies in the game back in the day, but even if GW runs itself a lot more sensibly now it just seems like a suicidal idea to have those two factions be the face of this new game system.
The only way I see it is if GW truly wants to distance TOW and AOS from each other to a pretty radical degree.
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1 hour ago, acr0ssth3p0nd said:
As someone who is "aggressively casual," I would take AoS a thousand times over the state of 40K, where dataslate rules like Armor of Contempt provide balance on a numerical scale but completely undermine the gameplay identity of certain factions. My Necrons, a faction known for having good AP even on their basic weapons, has completely lost that edge, and in fact functionally have less effective AP on their basic weapons than Marines when fighting them.
40K is a prime example on how not to use iterative updates to achieve balance in a game with distinct factions. Horus Heresy has exploded in popularity near me, and I've been able to turn some pretty hard AoS-naysayers into hearing me out when I describe how each 3.0 faction has a a decent winrate disparity while also feeling like that faction in play.
I mean that's more a problem with the Necron codex; they haven't been a faction known for good AP on basic weapons since like the days of 5th-7th, 8th onwards they've just been completely pathetic in that respect.
Where GW fell short in the design of the Necron codex is making them a melee army (because they actually get great ap and damage profiles on their melee weapons) but then still trying to present them as a shooting army in marketing. I will agree with you that AOC is a bad "fix" for a perceived problem, but ever since AOC was introduced I've actually tabled Marine armies, which is not something I was ever doing with Necron armies previously. Turns out buffing the anti-Marine combat units does wonders for flipping the match-up on its head from where it was in early 9th.
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23 hours ago, novakai said:
Also I think people blow the complexity of 40K (and Kill team to an extent ) way overboard, yes stratagems and the rule is a learning curve but it is by no means a detriment to the system especially if you play the game after a while. You can say AoS is better game system oberall but you can argue that 40K complexity makes it more flashier and flavorful where AoS keeps is simple but also dull at times.
People will put up with, and actively prefer, a certain amount of complexity if it brings with it increased variety and freedom with how to build armies.
40k just has more of that currently so it's much easier for people to have their imaginations captured by a concept.
Also Tempest of War is a god send for more casual players who don't want to or can't keep up with new mission packs. For the people whose local scenes are seeing a haemorrhaging of AOS players; is everyone just using the new GHB packs with all their new specific battalions and the new balance updates that added bolted-on additional scoring methods for very specific units and factions?
Locally we have more 40k players than ever despite the edition behind 2 and a half years in and an oversaturation of new mission packs and updates. But that's probably because there are easy and accessible ways for non-competitive players to enjoy the game through those different mission packs and y'know, despite what you may have heard, in like 95% of cases armies are exceptionally well balanced towards each other with "autolosses" only happening in competitive environments with optimized lists. I still hear and see horror stories of some Sigmar armies just being incapable of winning vs certain others, even in a non-competitive environment.
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Again, it doesn't help that a lot of the tomes have been very low effort affairs; many of them have very little in the way of meaningful changes and you're being asked to spend £32.50 on what amounts to a tiny range of changes and in some cases doesn't solve some long running legacy issues from previous books.
It's just a good way to suck the hype and enthusiasm out of releases.
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What's the general consensus of Bladelords now? Worth maybe taking in a unit of 10 even?
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38 minutes ago, Talas said:
Rob from TheHonestWargamer just mentioned some rumors about the next GHB: heroes below 9 wounds would be untargetable near other units. He said the source was Twitter, does anyone know more about it?
Hopefully.
AOS's shooting rules have been consistently bad throughout its entire lifespan so far and having a more 40k Look Out Sir rule would at least be a marginal improvement for them.
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40 minutes ago, Gitzdee said:
To this day i still dont understand why they removed the regular orcs and gitmob kits when they did.
Its still a part thats missing in the orruks tome imho.
Especially since they've tried to reintroduce "common" Orcs back into them with the Kruleboyz... who just don't fit in with the rest of the army at all because they visually look like a completely different species entirely. 🤦♂️
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Gitz really are massively overdue for a new book and it's also not like they're hurting from old models or a small range. It's weird that they haven't already been released with their mandatory new plastic hero on foot already.
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Getting MW's on 5+ isn't and never was the actual issue with Sentinels and you focusing on that shows you probably never had much experience playing vs the army.
It was that they could shoot stuff out of LOS and re-roll all their hits with Lambent Light to explicitly fish for mortals. You cannot do either of these things anymore.
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3 hours ago, OkayestDM said:
I know that a lot of production has been getting pulled out of China over the last few years, so it's possible that they've had to be selective in where they focus range expansions until they bring the new facilities fully online.
I think there's also the fact that GW is making a concerted effort to bring all of the factions into better balance overall, which is easier to do with smaller ranges. Once a faction is in a good place, it's a lot easier to introduce and balance new units than it is to try to manage both at the same time.
GW are not a rules driven company, they are a model driven one.
The current state of the rules and/or balance has 0 relevance to what they decide to release.-
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As expected, the Lumineth book is mostly minor tweaks to warscrolls and allegiance abilities.
Very hard to get excited about playing this new edition with my army and paying £32.50 on new hardback books when there's barely anything that changes in the rules.
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1 hour ago, Sarges said:
Looks like new kit will be just +1 sprue to the ones from the SC box. They look a bit too similar for it to be a coincidence.
Not necessarily. Remember they use CAD when making models. If you compare the monopose CSM from shadowspear with the multipart kit they have a lot of indivudual identical poses, arms and heads. I guess it's not completely new but this could just be the case of them splitting the monopose designs up and giving options of how to build them.
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19 hours ago, Enoby said:
Seems to be the case here too, and in general AoS discussion hubs things seem to have dried up. It's a shame because I don't think AoS 3 is doing much to deserve what appears to be a growing lack of intetest, but rather I think it's just the fact the hype fell off. Between 40k taking the lion's share of releases, AoS's big future release being leaked, and the books (while better quality than 2e on average) not really sparking much discussion, it seems AoS is losing quite a lot of momentum which is a huge shame. This, of course, could just be observational bias - but on the other hand, they did mention this in their financial report so there's likely some truth to "AoS is losing hype" statement.
Personally, I've not enjoyed competitive AoS in a while as it's often felt very samey - perhaps it's the armies I usually face, but it's kind of turned into sink or swim alpha strikes that don't leave much of a game. I'm not sure if this is what other people have experienced, but in my last few games the damage has been so high that there's hardly been a game at all. I have been enjoying narrative games a lot more, especially when curated to stop people bringing their "narrative" triple cabbage list.
Comp AOS continues to have the same issue it's always had too: samey lists just focused on spamming a very small amount of units.
Like, if I was to compare the unit variety of my competitive Craftworlds list in 40k, to a potential competitive Stormcast list in AOS it's actually embarrassing for the Stormcast.
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15 hours ago, Mutton said:
My heart goes out to DoT players. This book looks totally phoned in. Barely any meaningful changes (ironically), tons of copy/pasted content, and nothing interesting added or issues fixed.
Whether the army is "good" or "bad," I can't say. There's just nothing about it that's exciting.
This feels like a consistent issue across a lot 3.0 Tomes honestly.
On the one hand it doesn't seem like it's leading to any excess craziness in terms of balance, but it's not exactly making a lot of people excited to either play their armies again or start new ones. At least from chatter I've seen around online and locally.
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8 minutes ago, Ragest said:
Rumors for 40k's Battleforces are admech, SM, CSM/Chaos, Militarum and Tyranids
And Craftworlds.
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The CSM codex was also obviously massively delayed, even accounting for covid etc.
They repeatedly stated that the Traitor Guard would be in the CSM dex and then the dex comes out and they're nowhere to be found. That could really only happen if the dex was intended to be out before the KT box. In fact I remember leakers earlier in the year stating that Chaos was going to be before the Aeldari stuff, so clearly at some point GW's overhauling of their ERP system really probably hit a catastrophic speedbump.
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1 hour ago, Chikout said:
Slaves to Darkness have the opposite problem. Much like the Eldar for 40k, the updated models look very nice but feel safe. As the big new thing for the year it's a little disappointing.
Why do they need an insane re-imagining that throws everything out and starts again?
When people want updated sculpts, its because they like the core designs and just want the actual models to be brought properly into the 21st century.
Eldar and Chaos especially have such strong visual designs and aesthetics that have been honed over 30 years that like, what would you even do to "improve" them? That's the sort of thinking that gets grinning muscle skeletons and Alarith Stoneguard. Yeah I guess they have their fans and they're certainly unique, but they aren't going to be entering the pantheon like all the OG Jes Goodwin stuff.
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Dawnbringer Crusades are probably closer than people realise.
They said WE were far off and showed off some CAD renders of axes to make it seem like the project was early days; then 3 weeks later Angron gets fully leaked and then properly announced. Truly got their balls exposed on that one.-
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10 hours ago, CommissarRotke said:
This is it yeah, I've been out of 40k for at least a decade and still end up learning lore completely unintentionally... And that's also part of my point: no one considers this an issue in 40k anymore because of how much fans stepped up to prevent this, but that never seems to be applied to the AOS discussion? That it really comes down to AOS not having the same level of loretube/wiki creators as 40k (and even WHF to a certain extent).
I'll clarify I absolutely don't want to overlook people feeling AOS is less accessible, but rather that the discussion needs to address why AOS seems to be singled out, when AOS lore can also be a (free!) maze if you dig far enough.
Then the question needs to be asked; why is the AOS loretuber/wiki scene so lacking and why are lore discussion hubs so barren?
For a game we are repeatedly told is more popular than WHFB ever was you'd certainly expect more content about its lore or larger communities around it.Just going by reddit, r/aoslore has 8600 members compared to the 175k of r/40klore. But this giant disparity isn't really reflected in the "main" subs where r/ageofsigmar has 180k members and r/warhammer40k has 500k. Still smaller but not by nearly as much.
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The Rumour Thread
in Age of Sigmar Discussions
Posted
Just because a new edition comes in summer, it doesn't mean other systems get left alone.
In fact the usual play recently has been to release a new edition, and then do the actual full model releases for that edition a few months down the line. Part of this could be down to covid and supply chain issues, but, uh, those aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Looking at it historically you had AOS3 last summer, but you also had Sisters and the Beast Snaggas box in the same quarter too. Covid messed 2020 but even then the Lumineth set launched in the same time period as Indomitus. If we go back to AOS2 you had Imperial Knights getting their big release the same month as Soul Wars.