wayniac

So are modern Stormcast lists really still mainly made up of 1.0 stuff? Most of what I've seen basically completely ignore the new stuff (maybe excepting Stormdrake Guard) and seem to be playing like early 1.0?

So out of sheer curiosity as the models look sick, is it viable to run mostly the new stuff and not rely on bringing in old WHFB elves/dwarfs/Empire stuff (maybe excluding regular wizards)? Or is it built around synergy still from the old ranges?

It really feels like the warcry miniatures are done with the quality you'd expect from the market leader. Some of the regular kits still look... it's hard to explain, but a lot of them don't come close to equivalent 3d printed models as far as quality, despite being priced way higher because GW, or in some cases they're just ridiculous design for designs sake like half the lumineth models. The same cannot be said about the warcry stuff.

I hope they take nothing. 40k 10th edition is a complete dumpster fire and IMHO a huge step backwards. AOS is already the superior game. If I actually had to pick something then maybe the Leviathan mission card format which actually seems pretty good

I feel that if they're gonna have playtesters they need to lsiten. 40k already IMHO went south by essentially making ITC the game, since ITC was IMHO a huge mistake.

I haven't yet because I haven't really been able to play for several months due to a myriad of things in real life. My local store is having a league but they're treating it like a tournament which isn't my preference but it means guaranteed games so I will take it however I plan to gauge the other players and see if a few of them would be open to something more than standard games afterwards. I suspect that I would have to do it on the down low because My experience has been if the store isn't running it then people don't want to do anything that's not "officially supported" by the flgs. But the downside of this of course is that then it becomes open to anyone whereas I think a PTG would be better suited by a smaller close-knit group, Even if we basically have to act like we're just going to the store to play a game and nobody really needs to know that or actually doing a campaign because, honestly, it's none of the game stores business. And yes, I never understood the attitude that matched play is somehow balanced at all when it's very clearly not the best reasoning I've seen given is that it's more straightforward in setting up a game and that's the main thing people care about.

In my (albeit inexperienced) opinion, what I like about the new PtG system is that it IS "Matched Play + Extras". In my area at least it's basically if it's not Matched Play, nobody cares or will give you the time of day because it might be unbalanced, so the rule of the day is GHB pitched battles only (even the rulebook ones are considered bad), constantly changing based on what the GHB seasons are whether or not it's tournament games. it might as well be every game is a tournament practice game. I hate it; it's boring, it's stale, and daring to suggest not using the GHB you might as well be saying go back to launch-day rules with funky "My beard is bigger than yours so I get a bonus" and "I'm playing 10 Nagashes" rules with how people will, politely sometimes, tell you to buzz off. Having something that feels similar to matched play but allows for extras is, IMHO, amazing and was the big thing missing previously. It would be much easier in my locale to convince someone to play PtG if A) it still retained what was basically a Matched Play core and had extras, and B) allowed for use against people whether or not they were doing it (although I could see some complaints here about it being "not fair" to get extras for PtG by not playing PtG; I could definitely see a situation where someone has played more non-PtG games but applied PtG rules and ends up with a bonus over someone who hasn't). That definitely was not the cases in the previous systems where people would spend more time complaining about how the games COULD be unbalanced than trying to make it not unbalanced, when it's easier to just say "2k pitched battle on Friday night" and have that be the entirety of the conversation. That said though I wish they'd expand it. It bothers me constantly that GW only focuses on what are essentially tournament rules, and those rules affect the entire game not just tournaments. It would be one thing if people only used the GHB plans for tournaments, but just like it's always been the GHB is considered the game by the vast majority of people, not just something for tournament play; it's like they are still in an AOS 1.0 mindset where it's either GHB rules or it's "put whatever you want" and there is no in between.

Or even if they are, it's in Beta now. Once it goes live there's no reason to expect it will stay free.

If you ask me this is a total backwards move for GW, and they should feel bad. We all knew it was coming, but still the freely available scrolls was a HUGE selling point of AOS. I hope we see a big backlash over this, they deserve it for this sort of ******.

Definitely strange. For now at least logging out and back in fixed it, but... yeah, app is definitely buggy.

Is the core book (e.g. from Dominion) supposed to have a code to unlock it in the app? the new app has like Core Battalions locked and says: but there's no code. Just an oversight (pretty big one IMHO)? I have to say, so far not too thrilled with this app compared to Azyr. Also the fact there's no way to edit the size/etc. of an army list, you have to delete and recreate it.

And yet they have competitive playtesters and at least one designer who is a fairly competent competitive player, so these changes make even less sense if there's someone who actually "gets it"

As par for the course seems like the adjustments are haphazard and random with little or no justification or reasoning, like they were ran through a random number generator. Slaanesh got absolutely decimated and I feel like this is where GW's lack of transparency in design choices is going to be a huge issue, because something like this really warrants something from the designer on just why they felt like it was necessary. Lumineth, which was already super strong to the point of being broken, seems to have come out without much damage while Slaanesh which had issues was gutted for no reason and kicked to the bottom. Makes no sense how or why these changes were done, and with what reasoning behind it.

Which is exactly the problem with balance in AOS. The fact there are a few crazy strong armies skews everything else.

I get what you're saying but I've never found a game as bad as GW games in that regard. Every other game I've played, while there are imbalances, it's never to the point of saying "Don't play that, it's terrible and you'll lose constantly", it's more like "That's not meta right now but here's how you can make the most of it". Only Warhammer it seems to be binary to where there's seemingly nothing to be done to make it even remotely playable, it's pure garbage and you're wasting money/time if you pick to play it. At least that seems to be the way people approach it as I frequently see people dissuade someone from playing a certain army or units by dismissing the entire thing as "bad". A good example of this in my mind is when I played Warmachine. There was a really cool unit (Man-o-War Shocktroopers) that looked awesome but wasn't that great. You constantly had people want to make the most of them, and most everyone agreed they were cool and just not good. Yet you always saw people suggest other units/characters that helped them out, with the understanding it still would not be a super meta list but would not be unplayable garbage. It would be like "If you take X and Y it helps them out" and people still did okay with them as long as they weren't playing against S-tier meta lists. Yet in warhammer I see a lot of "Don't take these units at all, nothing will help them, they are totally unplayable and terrible" as the answer to someone wanting to know about it.

A big problem with that sort of imbalance is that you have people actively telling new players to stay away from those armies or, worse, if they like a particular army immediately pointing them towards the netlist without finding it out what they like or what they want to achieve. The reasoning is they don't want to let the new person invest a lot of money in an army that is weak or can't perform but the problem here is you're telling somebody who may like the aesthetics of Sylvaneth that the game is so bad the army they like is garbage And they will lose just because they picked it. Who would stay in a game like that? I know if that had been my first experience I would have been like what the hell what's wrong with this game and found something else to play that doesn't have that problem. I think another big problem is in warhammer in particular, you rarely if ever see advice on how to make what you want work in the context of the game rather than throwing it all away and picking these completely different units instead. For example when I played other miniature games you never saw the latter And it was almost always the former. If somebody liked particular units that weren't that great at that point in time they were not pointed away from them they were pointed how to make the most out of them. If you cannot do that at all in Warhammer then that speaks volumes to how bad the balance is. The answer to somebody saying I like these units when those units are not super great should never be Don't take those units at all take these completely different units regardless of what you like, but instead synergies and ways to make the most out of those units.

Yeah.. probably the rumored "hobgoblins" which I really want to see what they could be....

Now my main curiosity is about the maybe-Hobgoblins in the maybe-3.0 starter.

I'm a bit disappointed he doesn't have a new faction with him (although...) but he swayed me 100% to destruction now. Not sure of what subfaction yet.

So Kragnos affirms I'm going to jump into Destruction. Wowsers. Now I just need to know what may be in the 3.0 box to decide which Destruction force since I'd rather not do a hodgepodge.

I'm more curious about the destruction army. Hobgoblins seem like a huge stretch that would come completely out of left field, having no mention or any indication of being a thing in the setting and then boom here's an entire subfaction coming out of nowhere.

It's interesting that this is going to be the final broken realms because that would mean several factions are not getting anything before 3.0. They did say it would affect every army but apparently it seems like half the factions are being ignored

Pretty much. Because it's not specifically restricted as being Unique

Unfortunately, that still showed that people didn't want it, like if I've seen anything constantly shown among gamers, especially in Warhammer, it's that the illusion of balance is better than admitting there is none. For example, you will happily see someone play a 2k list that can summon enough to be 3k and claim it's balanced because they are playing a 2k point game. But that same person would scoff and balk at an asymmetrical scenario with 3k vs. 2k (even if it was them with the 3k) literally because the points are different; the fact that in the 2k vs. 2k game it still ends up being 3k vs. 2k doesn't mean anything because it's a "2k game". However I do think a big issue with v1 AOS was you had people bitter over WHFB who would go in on purpose to break the game to "show" it was stupid and childish (and the joke rules didn't help either). like I heard horror stories of people purposely going in with 6 wizards and summoning in a hundred models because the rules let them, or take like a few canons, pick an easy sudden death condition and win the game in 15 minutes. All to "prove" that AOS was a stupid system that nobody should play because it's so easy to break. The sad reality is v1 showed that the modern player for the most part does not want a system they have to police themselves and is incapable of doing it. The fact you still find so many people who will argue vehemently how Matched Play is balanced because it uses points and that means Open/Narrative play can't be balanced speaks volumes. What it really says, to me anyway, is that people want to fall back on the crutch of "it's a legal army" to defend themselves. Think about it: If you had no points, you would have nothing to fall back on if you're called out for being "that guy" who brings 3 keepers or whatever the cheese du jour is. It would be blatantly obvious that you only care about winning, and not if your opponent has fun. But if you're playing a points based game and you can legally take 3 keepers, well you're playing within the rules right? Surely you can't be faulted for building a legal army in the framework provided.. you see where I'm going? It puts all the blame on the rules/army book/designers rather than keeping some blame on the person who looks at the list and says "You know what, nothing stops me from taking all of these super powerful things so I'm gonna do it. I don't care if Bob has fun or not" since they can shrug and say it's a legal army.

Thing is, without restrictions it will be ignored. That's the issue. If you want that to matter, you have to enforce it because trusting people to do it proves time and time again to not happen.