stratigo

I mean I see them adding a unit with a 2+ save and just sigh because I know that comes with a proliferation of mortal wounds again

I think strength verse toughness does allow for more fungibility in interactions between damage and defense. Eh, both games are eminently capable of also creating extremely difficult to kill tarpits too. I mean the answer is GW is bad at balance. Except sometimes its not and they should have the LotR team to write the rules for all the games, if doing so wouldn't make Jay's head inflate so much it pops off and floats away into the clouds :P.

I'd like to see GW reign in buffs and debuffs to make them feel more meaningful for the units that get it. And not, like, hand them out as a subfaction ability cause that's totally the best way to balance it.

the problem with seraphon is that they really are too easy to accidently into a list that will clobber anyone casual. It's just all good. Not all great, but there's only really a few obviously wrong choices in seraphon and a lot stands on its own.

Things like that yeah. I've known a few AoS players to practice by giving away every priority so they can try and manage being double turned too.

I mean, I know for a fact that 40k playtesters were going "Yo, Iron Hands is busted. Yo, GW, you can't release these guys like this. Hey, man, don't" and GW released the iron hands supplement anyways. GW isn't always great for taking feedback for a variety of reasons. a lot of the very best players do in fact do things like this, set up scenarios where they have a stark disadvantage and see how to move from there. Least in 40k, but I can't imagine the best AoS players don't.

And they statistically play... mostly seraphon. WHAT A SHOCK

You're, frankly, not reading your data well. Or are trying to be misleading with it. And in either case it makes it extremely frustrating to see you continue to post things that are simply not true.

that they are all largely playing the best lists and so have controlled for the imbalance in army selection? Also I am skeptical of how WHW measures skill. Skill is sort of ephemeral, it can't be measured except with results. The most skilled players win the most. But they take the best lists the most too. So, skill does matter, but so does lists. How do you say that table skill (As opposed to list building, which is a skill, but one based on recognizing balance issues) is the primary factor over list building? The best players in the world really aren't as effected by balance because they are all highly motivated and have the funds to collect the best army anyways. Though I can tell you a bunch of them get mighty fatigued about bad balance even when they take advantage of it. Not all of them, there are players who cares only about winning and the rest of the game is sort of secondary. I think there's a limit to even this. That a worse player with seraphon can beat a significantly better player with, say, BoC. I think a good junk of even the best players (Like yourself perhaps?) would like better balance to feel challenged in putting together less obvious lists then what we have now. If there are more tools capable of winning, list building and subsequently gameplay is more fun. At least in my opinion. I love approaching a list like a puzzle and thinking it through and then seeing how it falls together on the table (I just know I'm not good enough at list building to put together a tourney winning list without referencing existing ones).

I mean, yes you can. It just takes longer. The game isn't unsolvable. A lot of it is just learning probabilities and some geometry and how to apply that on a table. But the argument you are making, at least as it appears to me, is that player skill is so important that list building and what is and is not OP doesn't matter that much and we should stop worrying about balance because player skill can't be. I argue that list building (which, as ninthmusketeer pointed out, is a skill itself) is the primary importance and player skill only matters in that everyone can easily copy the work of the players that solve the list building phase and thus take the same types of lists against each other, thus balancing the tools that go into building is actually very important for the game. Particularly for those players who aren't looking to chase competition but still want to have a fun and not one sided game with their friends.

Because if on the board skill was more important, then the list variety would have been consistently higher throughout the lifespan of the game than it historically has been. Of course it controls because everyone takes the best lists if they are looking to win, but that tells me lists matter first, player skill second. So everyone controls for the list first. Or, essentially, everyone gets a small loan of a few million from their parents to start their business sort of thing. The best players.... build the best lists first and then everyone else plays it too.

Yes, people spend tons of money of bad products all the time. I warrant most people here are using computers running windows 10 for example. The quality of a product is hardly the only way a product can be pushed for sales. It is just one way. Market dominance is, itself, an extremely strong tool for continued market dominance, just like having rich parents is the strongest indicator that you will most likely be rich as well. Ease of access is another dimension where an inferior product can garner more profit. And just good old marketing can cause a product to be selected over a superior one. I mean, this is all pretty basic. If you are working from the idea that "That which makes the most profit is the best" you start ending in places that justify all sorts of very nasty actions on behalf of corporations. And, of course, game quality is not model quality and GW generally has fairly consistently good quality, and perhaps more importantly, easy to put together models.

This is a very limited, and honestly terrifying way to judge good and bad. A company can do a lot of things to make sure their game remains the dominant one, and much of it doesn't have anything to do with good or bad. They had the third highest number of top finishes in literally the THW link you posted. Which is roughly where they sit fairly consistently. Third is just because I like numbering things, the top five or so factions tend to be a very rough place, I think Seraphons and IDK show up so consistently at the top that they are the best, while LRL also show fairly consistent next to the other three armies (KO, Tzeentch, DoK). Legit I just wanted to know where you were getting your numbers because I couldn't find them, and am disappointed that they get presented with so little context given via twitter. The first question you ask is "Why do you want to collect?" There's pplenty of reasons to. If you are into hobbying, then a unit's power level doesn't matter in the slightest. If you want to have fun gaming, but not necessarily be competitive, then there are some armies and units you should avoid. And if you want to compete, then your choices narrow considerably. It all depends on the consumer and what they are looking to get out of the game.

One of their games literally died and the other took a hammering for years when it was at its absolutely least balance. Balance has some effect on the success of the game.

Yes, which is why the discussion of how lists don't matter compared to player skill is nonsense. A good player will be taking a good list if they are looking to win.

Or player skill just feels like the dominant indicator because we all want to feel like we have more control over events than not. Realistically, the most skilled players take the best lists, so, like, it doesn't matter that much in AoS because there isn't really a difference here. The best list and most skilled player are the same thing nine times out of ten.

What outlandish beliefs? Also, if you don't measure the effects of player skill, why are you so certain it is skill that is the primary factor in who wins a match? Perhaps it isn't, perhaps this conceit is only because it makes you feel like you have more agency than you actually do in a game. This isn't an uncommon sentiment. The best real measure for financial success is how much money your parents had, but people consistently feel that working hard can compensate for that (with the dark converse that the people who don't see success are lazy). Perhaps the real measure of "Skill" is the ability to recognize what is the most busted list and having the means to buy and play it?

Skinks get to teleport. Also any time there is a strong magic army, their damage comes with mortal wounds stacked on mortal wounds. And, here's a secret, there's no real difference between a ranged attack made by casting a spell verse on made by shooting a gun. They are both ranged damage sources. And neither should so easily allow for subversion of all defenses But the issue is high save rerollable is kind of a problem with the game that should ALSO not be a thing. It is not a mistake that the best armies in the game are also armies with a lot of easy and reliable ways to pump mortal wounds, usually at range, though IDK do it in your face. Seraphon? Buffed skinks and Kroak. IDK? Eels LRL? Teclis and sentinels (And like a dozen other ways too cause lul) KO? Teleporting WLV and boat combat DoK? Teleporting snake ladies. Tzeentch? Well... like... it's tzeentch yo.

balance isn't only for competitive play, as has been exhaustively pointed out in this thread. I am tired going over the same points ad nauseam. Again, how many stories of two people just getting into the game to play against each other, but one incidentally bought the OP army while another bought the UP army have you heard? I have heard it a lot. It is bad for the game, and has nothing to do with competition, if a small friend group has one person who just by accident chose seraphon is now creaming all his friends at the game. It's a huge bummer. The only way to take a top table army and not beat the snot out of people not taking a top army is to have competitive level knowledge of your army and theirs so you know how and where to reduce the power level of your army. Balance isn't only for tournaments and I wish people would stop writing posts thinking it is and without the tourney players everything would just be sunshine and daffodils. Who is he? You mean AoSshorts. He's using twitter to update his graphs? *Checks* So he is... wow. So, yeah, iunno, but twitter is NOT a good place to store information. It is incredibly ephemeral and prevents any form of long form information. Like, I wanted to see where he, essentially, showed his work and gave an explanation of his process, but you can't really do that on twitter. If there anywhere else he posts this that includes analysis? I'm really craving some analysis to these graphs. And, like, I know this isn't an exhaustive list of TTS tournaments. It just makes me feel like there's this lack of organization among TOs and commentators/analyts in getting good date collection in a way that 40k has nailed down much better. Wait, this DKHM graph is labeled april 2020? What does that mean? I mean is that a type and they mean april 2021? Or is this all data SINCE april 2020? XD also there's a lot of spanish and I don't read that. There's actually a lot of weirdness going back to the original source of the dataset, so I don't know what to make of this and can't follow the explanations well. I did mean the honest wargamer. Dunno why I keep abbreviating it as THO, I've done it a lot. Is weird. But THW does show tournament wins after the winrates. But this dataset is getting increasingly dated now. There are some newer ones via their streams/youtube with their reoccurring Age of Sigmar stats segment, which come with analysis, but aren't written down (that I can find). Which does frustrate trying to link it for easy consumption. Only if you read it as uncharitable as possible and want to be contrary. But like, have you read this thread? And all the other about balance over the years? I want to assume you have at least read THIS thread. Okay. People are and have regularly posted specific and more general examples of where balance is an issue. So you sliding in and going "I demand you post more examples" feels like bad faith in a way that feels familiar to people trolling politics discussions. It's a way to damage the discourse by continuously demanding people spend time providing and citing sources that have already been provided and cited. And then you can wait a few weeks and do it again. If you had read the thread, or any of the dozen other threads on the topic, you really shouldn't have felt the need to demand more examples, because those examples are already there. This really bothers me because it is really so insidious, and like it doesn't even always register to the person doing it just how insidious and damaging to the discourse doing this really is. I want to be charitable and say you aren't intentionally doing this, but intentional or not, you are hurting the discussion using fallacies, and in a way that has been done repeatedly before. You can't math player skill. Well I guess you could moneyball it, but no one is going to. You can math army lists. But, like, the best players take the mathematically best armies the vast majority of the time because they are the best players and know (often before anyone else does) what the best armies are through theorizing and practice. I know we have been talking the incidental "oops I bought seraphon and my friend sylvaneth" examples. But the darkside of this are the players that google the army that a tourney player used to win and then terrorize his local community with it. And better balance on the top would help to this. But just even a proven competitive list is an extremely useful tool for people just starting to collect in the game because it helps to avoid the bad feels of accidently bringing the knife to a gun fight (to mix metaphors), and a more diverse set of competitive lists is a better pool to draw from to allow for creativity without the bad feeling of playing a bad army.

I'm dead tired of people going "Ah, well I totally went to a tournament with my jank all dryads list and smashed everyone, thus the balance is fine". There's no point in this exchange unless Kade is just being contrary or earnestly thinks their ability to beat teclis that one time means balance is okay, and I have no patience for it. My eyes roll out of my head every time someone does this. It's a pointless exchange. It's based off one person's subjective experiences, ones that might not even be real.

yes, it is indeed technically possible to win a game as beasts against sreaphon. If the seraphon player is deliberately throwing the game, or you are rolling the same odds to win millions in a casino. Sure. Yes, you alone are the great player able to put the rest of the community to shame and beat the best armies and players in the game withany army you choose to take. Do you also regularly win the lottery?

No, many armies have no reasonable expectation, no matter what they do, at holding objectives against another army.

could be maximizing future gains for short term losses. The destruction causes a lot of damage, but a silver tower causes problems as long as it stands.

Don't get me wrong, the rise of fascism has really drained the joy I used to take in the 40k setting and has led me to be increasingly interested in the narrative of AoS that, uh, dodges some of those thorny issues, but I like spectating on competition a lot too, and 40k just has a better apparatus for viewing, analyzing, and discussing its competitive aspects. And rules wise I think 40k is currently in a better place. But then again, AoS is in the end of an edition while 40k is in the start, and balance always goes real bad towards the end of an edition (Then again, Hedonites were a thing). There are things AoS can take from 40k to be a better game. And it is in the terrain rules and mission structure. Making terrain not random, but meaningful would be great for AoS. It would do a bit to reign in shooting, and make movement more interesting. The mission structure, in scoring both primary and chosen secondaries is literally the best GW has ever done for 40k, the missions are better, and don't have dumb win conditions like a few of the AoS ones do. But there's an extra wrinkle to this in that I don't think the GW AoS writers are as interested in competition are the 40k writers are, and are more interested in being neat or quirky. 40k 9th is the most tournament friendly edition of 40k ever made, and its base rules and missions are tight in a way that AoS with its double turns and knifes to the heart just are not. They'll mess it all up in the army balance, but they are building off a solid core that AoS just lacks.

Eh? Big characters are not defining 40k either. Even mortarian, while certainly very strong, is only a part of a list, and you can't win with him alone and whatever else deathguard brings. Deathguard works off the back of its quality terminators right now, and mortarian is a strong supplement, but it is equally valid and strong to avoid him for just more terminators. Now, there IS one winning 40k army combo that's all in on big dudes, and that's demons (which does, these days, include mortarian in it pretty regularly). This is a pretty big outlier, though it is quite strong. But the top two factions in the game don't tend to utilize a big centerpiece, but reliable hard hitting (but, note, not durable) melee infantry. And that's harlequins and Sisters, both use fast melee threats to challenge objectives and can back it up with strong shooting. I can guarantee to you, these armies don't struggle to drag down a mortarian. Though harley lists had to change in the face of death guard. I have my reservations in how 40k is so obviously hardcore power creeping its codexes, but it's not untenable yet (I mean, neither harleys are sisters are new dexes), but the game is just more dynamic and better than AoS is right now, and I hope AoS 3.0 takes the objective system from 40k. If one person in a 6 person group is tailoring to the meta, everyone has to or just accept they are always losing. And, like, this is extremely common in small groups that one player grabbed the OP army and stomps their buddies every time until they don't want to play any more, and it's a bit bad to go to these new players an go "yo, spend 300 dollars on units to be less or more good so you fit your meta better". And my collection grows long as I feel I have a game worth playing, and that does mean having a chance to win. I stopped playing a full year, and ignored that shift to another shop I mentioned, cause my army simply had no legs and I could play other games. I started collecting again cause an event got me passionate and my army had gotten playable.