AoS It's 4 years and still we don't get anything

[Womboski]

In Tournaments we calls these players easy wins

I have yet to leave my local tournament scene. We usually have one person with a serious list and and a bunch of beautifully painted fluffy list. Shout out to my club the Chupacabrahs. Sadly my army is not all painted so I'm the black sheep lol and that is also why I haven't gone to bigger events like LVO.

Edit: sorry I'm derailing this thread.

 

[LizardWizard]

Edit: sorry I'm derailing this thread.

How dare you. We here at lustria strictly adhere to a threads original topic!

 

[Killer Angel]

Edit: sorry I'm derailing this thread.

No, i like your reasoning about the similarities between MtG and AoS, but imo it's not netlisting (which, as said by @LizardWizard , at most is an annoyance… list copy&paste is a boring thing, but the unimaginative players don't know how to fully employ a copied list).
No, the "problem" is the tailored lists / decks.

staying on magic, i'm old and i began with unlimited / revised.
At those times, you were forced to build your own decks, trying to find the cards that, once put together, coud give your deck a theme and some synergies. Fun times, with totally different decks. Each game against an unknown opponent was going to be a true surprise.

Now, with Magic we have themed expansions, with many cards centered around a particular mechanic. With each expansion, after one week from the release, you only need to see the first played card, and you can already guess what cards are in the opponent's deck, with a 90% accuracy.
Boring.
And AoS is suffering from the same trend, mostly tnx to battalions / cities / lodges / whatever.
If you read a battletome as Cities of Sigmar, you know that at the next tournament you will find lists filled with wizards that exploit the bonuses granted by Hallowheart, or lists with steam tanks as battleline.
And I'm using CoS because i know it, but the same can be said for every new battletome. Fyreslayers? Heartguard Berzerkers.

When a game gives you on a silver plate a certain limited number of options that are clearly superior to all the other ones, it basically forces the players to use them. Which kills the variety and a good part of the fun.

Luckily, some of us like to think outside the box so there will always be a fresh build with an interesting idea behind it, but imo the problem is real.

 

[Canas]

It's the combination of netlisting/cookiecutter builds alongside the fact that the developers release stuff designed around a specific themed mechanic & this mechanic is then designed around the current meta of netlisting which creates a feedback loop where you're progressivly forced more and and more into playing the meta unless you happen to find a random build that happens to break the meta. And this is an issue in virtually any (video)game nowadays.

Basicly, first you have the cookiecutter builds enforcing a fairly stable and strict meta. Which spreads relativly far and wide thanks to the internet. Whereas back in the day everyone just did whatever so at most you got a stable local meta. And since everyone just did whatever they wanted whenever you met a new player you wouldn't really know what the hell he would be doing.

Then you got specific mechanics that force you to play a certain way in order to counter them. And since new releases tend to be themed around these mechanics they become very pronounced. This also enforces a stronger meta as you get a few options that are clearly going to superiour.

On top of that since the developers now have acces to much more data, they can design their new stuff to "fit" into the meta (or shake it up) in a way that they want. This allows them to push the meta to develop a certain way.

This creates 3 major issues.
1) You get a very strong established meta, and if you refuse to play according to the established playstyles you usually end up severly handicapping yourself.
2) Whenever something off-meta does succesfully show up it tends to be utterly frustrating to deal with & will win a lot untill people get used to it. Simply because the meta-builds don't really having a response to it initially. This is made doubly worse as off-meta builds tend to rely on abusing a certain mechanic to overwhelm meta builds quickly before their opponents know what's going on and can adapt. Needless to say, they're more common in lower levels of play as weaker players struggle more to adapt.
3) Since off-meta builds work "well" against weaker players, but badly against stronger players (who adapt more or simply spot the flaw in the off-meta build), you can end up in a situation where you basicly have different games for different levels of players. Which can make balance into a nightmare. Resulting in mechanics that are utterly oppressive in lower levels, but basicly irrelevant in higher levels due to the weaker players not knowing how to counter while strong players find countering it trivial, or vice versa due to weaker players not knowing how to use something broken to its full potential while the good players abuse it to high heavens.

In contrast back in the day before the internet.
Cookiecutter builds didn't exist, so everyone did whatever.
Since everyone did whatever you didn't really get much of a meta. So your army would have to be able to deal with anything.
Since your army already had to be able to deal with everything "off-meta" builds (in so far as they existed) weren't as much of an issue as you would usually have a decent response ready. And if you as an individual player didn't have a decent response, the tournament as a whole usually would have, which prevented off-meta builds from dominating tournaments.

 

[Erta Wanderer]

It's the combination of netlisting/cookiecutter builds alongside the fact that the developers release stuff designed around a specific themed mechanic & this mechanic is then designed around the current meta of netlisting which creates a feedback loop where you're progressivly forced more and and more into playing the meta unless you happen to find a random build that happens to break the meta. And this is an issue in virtually any (video)game nowadays.

Basicly, first you have the cookiecutter builds enforcing a fairly stable and strict meta. Which spreads relativly far and wide thanks to the internet. Whereas back in the day everyone just did whatever so at most you got a stable local meta. And since everyone just did whatever they wanted whenever you met a new player you wouldn't really know what the hell he would be doing.

Then you got specific mechanics that force you to play a certain way in order to counter them. And since new releases tend to be themed around these mechanics they become very pronounced. This also enforces a stronger meta as you get a few options that are clearly going to superiour.

On top of that since the developers now have acces to much more data, they can design their new stuff to "fit" into the meta (or shake it up) in a way that they want. This allows them to push the meta to develop a certain way.

This creates 3 major issues.
1) You get a very strong established meta, and if you refuse to play according to the established playstyles you usually end up severly handicapping yourself.
2) Whenever something off-meta does succesfully show up it tends to be utterly frustrating to deal with & will win a lot untill people get used to it. Simply because the meta-builds don't really having a response to it initially. This is made doubly worse as off-meta builds tend to rely on abusing a certain mechanic to overwhelm meta builds quickly before their opponents know what's going on and can adapt. Needless to say, they're more common in lower levels of play as weaker players struggle more to adapt.
3) Since off-meta builds work "well" against weaker players, but badly against stronger players (who adapt more or simply spot the flaw in the off-meta build), you can end up in a situation where you basicly have different games for different levels of players. Which can make balance into a nightmare. Resulting in mechanics that are utterly oppressive in lower levels, but basicly irrelevant in higher levels due to the weaker players not knowing how to counter while strong players find countering it trivial, or vice versa due to weaker players not knowing how to use something broken to its full potential while the good players abuse it to high heavens.

In contrast back in the day before the internet.
Cookiecutter builds didn't exist, so everyone did whatever.
Since everyone did whatever you didn't really get much of a meta. So your army would have to be able to deal with anything.
Since your army already had to be able to deal with everything "off-meta" builds (in so far as they existed) weren't as much of an issue as you would usually have a decent response ready. And if you as an individual player didn't have a decent response, the tournament as a whole usually would have, which prevented off-meta builds from dominating tournaments.

i agree with most of this but i think AoS is naturally resistant to meta lock. their is so much variance between armies and even in armies their is so many choices that it is very rare to find a established list.(they egsist but im getting to that). slanesh has 3-4 common builds but a lot more variants on those builds, shooting is becoming more common but many armies cant. skaven/gitz bring hordes with them, and FEC has biiiig monsters or 120 gouls. even with a well established meta(witch isn't even that solid) you have so many threats that one build can't face them all and so most armies have at least 3.
the problem is when a book is old or even worse when it is done badly without accounting for the rest of the game storm cast only has 2 builds but many play diferent ones and do quite well. but all of their stuff is over priced and they seem powerful in a vakume but when compared to the rest are just fat and expensive.
the same is true of silvaneth the tree lord antent is never taken. why? well he is a 300 point single caster witch isn't tenable when he meets the other wizards in the game
and then you get to stuff that is just old like seraphon stuff that could be great but has fallen behind. we see this with general army attrition we used to be able to field anything and be good then shield changed and we lost our front lines our powerful hitters could still be used but as time went on more and more of them fell out of use mostly since the start of this year. first went bastiladons god against rend but the number of dice kills them when up agenst daughters gits skaven each new releas pushing them farther under. now we are seing the same with razors and rippers they are still good but only once and so many things can shrug of a strike like that and kill back. and so we are left with skinks. we haven't been pigeon hold we just fell behind.
the mane reason that i don't think it's a big problem YET is that most of the books that have come out are all at the same lvl with the exceptions being HoS and the 2 i mentioned above. the only armies that only have 1 way to play them is IDK and the old books like KO even FEK has multiple builds and they only have 4 units. and if seraphon are the lowest head on the totem pole then i think the game is doing well over all
we will always have units that arnt as good as the rest in the book but i run eternal guard in CoS instead of phoenix guard and i do very well better even when some one hasn't seen them before.

 

[Canas]

A fixed meta doesn't necesarly mean you only get 1 way to play a certain army. Generally speaking there will be some variance.

But it'l mean that certain mechanics are required, or just don't work.
For example in the current meta:

• Battleshock mechanics are almost meaningless
• You need to be able to either go first in combat, or shoot things from a distance.
• You need to be able to annihilate big threats instantly, merely chipping away at them won't achieve much.
• Similarly, to survive incoming damage you're going to need either loads of wounds, or superpowerfull saves combined with a FNP
  • As a consequence of these last two; minimum sized line-units (the ones that come in increments of 5-10 models) tend to be fairly underwhelming. Which is one of the reasons SCE performs so badly as they're designed around utilizing elite minimum sized line units, as opposed to behemoths or hordes of fodder.
• Objective-based play requires you to bring a certain amount of bodies, and puts a great focus on mobility (again, SCE kinda suffer here, a lot of their stuff is slow with few options to speed up aside from deepstriking & they don't bring many bodies)
• You need some protection against mortal wounds (again, SCE suffer here...)
• You need some protection against copious numbers of attacks (SCE basicly have the same issue our bastiladon has, decent base-line save, but with enough attacks thrown at them they'l still melt)

These sorta meta rules influence how you play and what is good. And as you can see, there's a lot of aspects in which SCE end up being on the weaker end of the scale as they don't really fit into the meta, despite having fairly powerfull units.

 

[Erta Wanderer]

A fixed meta doesn't necesarly mean you only get 1 way to play a certain army. Generally speaking there will be some variance.

But it'l mean that certain mechanics are required, or just don't work.
For example in the current meta:

• Battleshock mechanics are almost meaningless

• agread

• You need to be able to either go first in combat, or shoot things from a distance.

  or be a counter punch army it's how i beat orks with CoS. or a debuff army like gitz so a lot of options hear. but ya the activation wars need to die

• You need to be able to annihilate big threats instantly, merely chipping away at them won't achieve much.

  um kind of? it depends on what it is horde units are a lot worse in low numbers and you want to keep death units alive. so that they can't come back. a lot of behemoths become usles at low wound counts. the exeptions to the above are the things people think are broken.

• Similarly, to survive incoming damage you're going to need either loads of wounds, or superpowerfull saves combined with a FNP
  

  • As a consequence of these last two; minimum sized line-units (the ones that come in increments of 5-10 models) tend to be fairly underwhelming. Which is one of the reasons SCE performs so badly as they're designed around utilizing elite minimum sized line units, as opposed to behemoths or hordes of fodder.

  [*]Objective-based play requires you to bring a certain amount of bodies, and puts a great focus on mobility (again, SCE kinda suffer here, a lot of their stuff is slow with few options to speed up aside from deepstriking & they don't bring many bodies)

  so wait are you mad that the game has objectives? im not shur how to fix this one.

• You need some protection against mortal wounds (again, SCE suffer here...)

  or just a lot of wounds in your army as you have sead else where mortals from spells are meh and the one thing in the game that does a stooped amount of them is decried by all as the most broken monster in the game.

• You need some protection against copious numbers of attacks (SCE basicly have the same issue our bastiladon has, decent base-line save, but with enough attacks thrown at them they'l still melt)

These sorta meta rules influence how you play and what is good. And as you can see, there's a lot of aspects in which SCE end up being on the weaker end of the scale as they don't really fit into the meta, despite having fairly powerfull units.

so how would you fix the game so that theas rules didn't egsist? what you have stated above covers almost every unit i can think of out side of the 4-5 armies that are doing badly. you seem to have a problem with unit's being powerfull.
you could lower over all damage but then nothing would die so then you would drop resilience and you are right back to where you started

 

[Canas]

O these rules are not necesarly (all) bad. Sorry for being unclear. The point was just that they exist, and have an impact on the game and enforce certain playstyles. And this needs to be taken into account when making new rules. Introducing more "meta-rules" like this also means that existing armies (or units) can suddenly fall out of favour simply because they cannot do what they should do. Any game will naturally evolve some sort of locked meta eventually around rules like this, but the existance of the internet, cookiecutter builds & consequently designers taking the meta into account when creating new stuff has caused meta's to be far stricter & far more pronounced than it used to be.

For example holding objectives being based around body counts means a low-model-count army like the ogers need a rule like "Might makes right" to ensure that they can actually function. If they didn't have that rule the entire faction would basicly be dead on arrival.

Similar things can be said about the other "meta-rules" and it's for example why SCE tend to do relativly badly despite having individually strong units. Their design simply doesn't fit in very well with the meta.

 

[LizardWizard]

There is very little in the way of a fixed meta at the top of the ITC ranks. It is fixed players. Most of the top 5 guys change armies fairly often between events. They do this to adjust to the shifting meta, or to gain advantage against it. Sometimes they finish their MT, GT, and RTTs with an army and then want to go for a second army trophy. Either way the top armies change, but generally the top ranked players do not. This to me is indicative that skill matters more than army. There are also different sets of skills that get those players to the top. Some are fantastic at building the most optimized list possible. One of the players in the top 10 itc ranks that I know is awful at writing list, but he can see a list and know what it is meant to do and play it near flawlessly. Other players are just really good at understanding the battleplans and are capable of planning many turns in advance.

The point being, meta is stale in the middle. The top and bottom don't care about meta nearly as much, which is not to say that none of the three groups are incognizant of the meta's existence.

 

[Canas]

meh the middle is going to be something like 90% of the playerbase. The extremes are nearly always fairly irrelevant when it comes to things like this, though they often are given a disproportionate voice due to being relativly visible.

As for the skill vs army, I don't think this is a very good example of that. The main reason they can switch so freely is because it's a living game with constant changes. Not necesarly because all armies are (more or less) equally viable and the meta constantly shifts around. If the game would be allowed to quiet down and the releases (and balance changes) stop you'd probably very quickly see them stick to a particular meta. What would be more interesting though is the extend to which their playstyles change in between tournaments. If one tournament is dominated by hordes, the next by behemoths, and the next by 10 man squads. Or if one tournament they focus on the objective and the next on tabling opponents, then you got quite a volatile meta. If however one tournament is dominated by slaanesh-y hordes, the next by khornish hordes and the third by hordes of grots the meta is considerably more stale.

Also, it helps that these players are of course good enough to wipe the floor with us mere mortals. This does mean they'l take much greater advantage of even minor shifts in the meta. So even something as minor as a single unit going up 5 points in cost can mean an army falls out of favour in the absolute top. Whereas in the middle it's barely a noticeable change.

 

[LizardWizard]

meh the middle is going to be something like 90% of the playerbase. The extremes are nearly always fairly irrelevant when it comes to things like this, though they often are given a disproportionate voice due to being relativly visible.

It is very hard to gauge any meaningful numbers other than tournament attendance. There is no count of the number of garage gamers. And there isn't anything to aggregate the number of people who show up to play at the LGS or GW stores when they aren't hosting tracked events.

As for the skill vs army, I don't think this is a very good example of that. The main reason they can switch so freely is because it's a living game with constant changes. Not necesarly because all armies are (more or less) equally viable and the meta constantly shifts around. If the game would be allowed to quiet down and the releases (and balance changes) stop you'd probably very quickly see them stick to a particular meta

That is the skill though. It is based on understanding what has changed, how it changed, and how that will change everything else. Even still, there are players like Gwen in the Australian scene who played Everchosen for two years in their tournaments and got respectable results. So army does matter less than the player. And some of the top ranked itc players I know switch armies because they are bored of the one they have been winning with and not for any meta reasons. Yet they still maintain their win rates.

What would be more interesting though is the extend to which their playstyles change in between tournaments. If one tournament is dominated by hordes, the next by behemoths, and the next by 10 man squads. Or if one tournament they focus on the objective and the next on tabling opponents, then you got quite a volatile meta.

I mean this definitely happens. One week someone will run Gristlegore with 4 Terrogheist. The next they will run Legion of Grief and bravery bomb an army to death with mortal wounds.

Play style is a tactics thing not a meta or list thing for the most part. Killing units always matters, you get more points in ITC if you kill more. Winning Majors matters the most. Hidden Agendas also matter. So in a proper sized event with 50 players where you can have more than one person go 5-0 you have to be able to win objectives, kill points, tabling, and Hidden Agendas.

Hordes are always gonna be a viable strategy, but there are also plenty of Shootcast Eternals armies and Skyre armies that aren't horde-centric. Even within the same army there are major variances in unit size. One person might like 10x units of Chainrasp to jump over enemy units and nab objectives. Someone else might use 40x units of Chainraps and buff them up as much as possible to form both the hammer and anvil of their forces. Same goes for Slaanesh. Some players focus on Deamonette hordes. Others focus on their summoning apparatus or bring a ton of Exalted Chariots. The meta for events is always changing and there are many many viable armies and even multiple variable compositions within those armies.

Additionally this continues to happen even between new Battletomes, Erratas, and FAQs.

 

[Womboski]

Deepkin has at least 3 top tournament list. Conventional eel spam with volturnos, fliptide eel spam, and akhelian corps MSU eel spam w/ volturnos. Also there is room for variance in every one of those list. The last list is the first tournament deepkin player to bring light the power of a bunch of small eel units instead of 2-3 giant blobs. Also deepkin players are starting to use namarti corps and look at reavers again.

This has probably a lot to do with what LizardWizard said. Top deepkin players getting board playing the established IDK list. It's not like they are the first players to have these list ideas or to even try them, but sometimes it takes tournament results for people to go "oh yeah I guess that works too".

Since I've been sticking to my local tournaments and games against friends I try to avoid what is the obvious strongest list. Honestly for seraphon I wasn't sure when I started collecting, but deepkin has it's pretty clear 'pick me!' unit in the form of morrsarr eels

 

[Brandfas Machine]

I am very interested in seeing where GW goes with Seraphon, as I suspect they are not overly happy with the faction as it is right now. I would not be surprised by a lot of pruning, altohugh the Ogors book show they do not worry about keeping resin models, but the ogor ones do hold up a bit better than some seraphon models.

At this point, I think it'd be a bit of a disservice if we received no new models. All our battleline models are around 15 years old; our mighty, savage saurus warriors look like skinny doofuses.

Ultimately, we will not know until a couple months before they release it; GW is notoriously closed lipped about plans. I felt the same kind of anxiety with my Free Peoples' army; It's kind of like having a sick old dog, and as the weeks go by, you have no idea if dad is going to take him to the vet or put him out of his misery (except in the case of the Free Peoples, GW managed to do both).

 

[Kilvakar]

I personally think it would be nice to be able to actually go head-to-head in a fight with our armies. I like the sound of being mobile and able to summon and teleport, but just because we have those abilities doesn't mean all our stuff should be easily destroyed and/or not do much damage. I don't think the Saurus look terrible, especially when painted well, but I do agree that it would be nice for them to get an update.

It would also be pretty cool to get some of the units that have been described but have no models as of yet, like the Coatl, Arcanodon, Kroxigor ancient, or maybe even the Thunder Lizard. It would be nice to have some updated models as well. The Skink Prophet, Cameleon Stalker, and Skink Chief all could use some newer models. And while they're at it, making Kroxigors look like they do in TW:W2 and giving them a little buff would be great

 

[Erta Wanderer]

I personally think it would be nice to be able to actually go head-to-head in a fight with our armies. I like the sound of being mobile and able to summon and teleport, but just because we have those abilities doesn't mean all our stuff should be easily destroyed and/or not do much damage. I don't think the Saurus look terrible, especially when painted well, but I do agree that it would be nice for them to get an update.

It would also be pretty cool to get some of the units that have been described but have no models as of yet, like the Coatl, Arcanodon, Kroxigor ancient, or maybe even the Thunder Lizard. It would be nice to have some updated models as well. The Skink Prophet, Cameleon Stalker, and Skink Chief all could use some newer models. And while they're at it, making Kroxigors look like they do in TW:W2 and giving them a little buff would be great

you sir have wonderful ideas