AoS Warhammer Weekly NPE Discussion

[Kilvakar]

What? I get that they can snipe our heroes but they really arnt that bad to face off against in magic since ya know our slanns and kroak are you know. Potent?

I could be wrong, but I think Carnikang was asking which armies would be giving everyone trouble in general. We certainly have the tools to deal with Teclis, but most don't.

Archer spam is going to be annoying for everyone, though.

 

[Dread Saurian]

I could be wrong, but I think Carnikang was asking which armies would be giving everyone trouble in general. We certainly have the tools to deal with Teclis, but most don't.

Archer spam is going to be annoying for everyone, though.

FACTS FUCK ARCHERS

 

[Putzfrau]

I think a lot of NPE comes down to something being non-interactive. Gristlegore double attacking before you could swing, slaanesh essentially always fighting first, anything that does a ton of mortals or damage from range.

People don't like just taking their models off and its hard to blame them.

Do we have the exact wording of the Battalion ability? Does it specify one unit, or a unit, Instead of moving, etc.

It seems very good for being annoying, even if they cannot move after teleporting. They will be all over the board, and just a general projection of force while the rest of the Army does stuff.

The battalion says "in the movement phase, instead of making a normal move with a unit from this battalion you can say it will navigate the shadowpaths." Which basically means you can pick it up and teleport it.

And khailebrons teleport is at the end of the movement phase so you've already moved. It also prevents you from moving in the next movement phase so if you teleport with it you can't even move in the double.

FACTS FUCK ARCHERS

Agreed.

 

[Carnikang]

People don't like just taking their models off and its hard to blame them.

One could also say that it can be an NPE when models DONT get removed from the table. Durability being too high or damage being too low/slow to keep up with regeneration or replacement.
I think part of it is that damage has gone up to try and prevent that problem, with durability not changing for a lot of units. DoK come to mind as being one of the more durable before the new book and the rerollable FNP/DPR nerf by GW. Now they're even more blendy, but have about the same durability. I wonder if the pendulum will swing the other way and the next few armies will be exceptionally defensive by comparison.

This was just a tangent. Not really a response to your post. Just prompted thought.

The battalion says "in the movement phase, instead of making a normal move with a unit from this battalion you can say it will navigate the shadowpaths." Which basically means you can pick it up and teleport it.

And khailebrons teleport is at the end of the movement phase so you've already moved. It also prevents you from moving in the next movement phase so if you teleport with it you can't even move in the double.

Ah, so they can definitely move most of the battalion around together then at least. Will have to practice closing off gaps and being cagey with skink screens again... like good ol' pre-book.
I wonder if either of the local DoK players will play it, or if they're going straight for Morathi and co.

 

[Dread Saurian]

Agreed.

I say it subtly by teleporting myself 9 inches from em. #thuglyfe

 

[Carnikang]

I say it subtly by teleporting myself 9 inches from em. #thuglyfe

I did that to a poor CoS player in my first battle back from self-imposed exile. Dread had held off a charge of 6 Kurnothi with scythes, saw an opening in the backline, and dropped on top of a Sorceress and a limping chariot.

 

[Dread Saurian]

I did that to a poor CoS player in my first battle back from self-imposed exile. Dread had held off a charge of 6 Kurnothi with scythes, saw an opening in the backline, and dropped on top of a Sorceress and a limping chariot.

Oof. I love that about starborne the most tbh. It's the perfect way of saying "no you have to deal with this first before you get to do weird fun stuff."

 

[Canas]

Honestly there's only 2 reasons we're so disliked. The first:

• Shooting in AoS is inherently problematic because there's no downside or mechanical counterplay. And we use a lot of shooting. We can nerf skinks all day long, but as long as shooting itself doesn't change we'l just have this discussion again when the next tome comes out and we get a fresh round of buffs in that update...

​

As for the second issue:

• Our overreliance on synergies to turn weak base-stats into credible threats. This results in us experiencing very sudden power drops. If you kill our support, we rapidly lose combat power. While if you kill our actual combat units we barely lose any combat power unless you kill all of them as our support can just move on to buff someone else. Now I usually complain about it from our perspective, because it can feel very lame to see your entire army fall apart cuz 1-2 key-buffs got killed. But similarly it's frustrating as hell for an opponent who wiped out multiple units but is still losing combats to whatever unit we're buffing now, and thus feels like he doesn't really achieve anything despite killing 40+ models.

Anyway, in short if you want us to be less frustrating, and most importantly stay less frustrating, you'l have to actually adres those two issues.

And yeah, you could of course just nerf our point costs. And it'l probably make those complaining shut up. But it won't solve any of the underlying issues, is liable to just drop us from top-tier to quite far down, and we'll just be having this discussion again after the next updates buffs our point costs again....

As an honourable mention, kroak is also disliked, but imho that has more to do with all magic doing mortal wounds and less with Kroak himself genuinly being problematic. Reliable spammable AoE mortal wounds is simply always going to be amazing as long as the numbers are decent. And since Kroak has basicly nothing else going on nerfing him isn't really an option, at best you'l simply make Kroak irrelevant, at worst you'l make us take slightly less skinks when we use him. Either way the problem isn't fixed...

If you want to fix kroak you'l need to do one of the following

1. Change the mortal wounds to regular damage (or some other damage scheme). So it isn't just universally good against every opponent
2. Give him a different set of spells
3. Completly rewrite the warscroll.

 

[LordBaconBane]

Shooting in AoS is inherently problematic because there's no downside or mechanical counterplay. And we use a lot of shooting. We can nerf skinks all day long, but as long as shooting itself doesn't change we'l just have this discussion again when the next tome comes out and we get a fresh round of buffs in that update...

This is something I've been saying. There are two downsides to shooting and it's not enough to curb the huge advantage it gives. Currently, the only disadvantages are:

• -1 to hit when targeting heroes with 3+ models nearby
• If in melee, can only shoot an enemy within 3"

It's just not enough penalty and makes it too easy for shooting to really outpace melee. As you mentioned, point costs won't fix the underlying problem. This is a mechanical problem in the game of AoS itself, which is why I proposed the following:

• Split warscrolls so we can point cost certain loadouts different
  • This also encourages unit diversity, which is in my opinion one of the pillars that should hold this game up.
• Make it so units cannot shoot into melee like in Total War Warhammer 2 style (unless that unit has a special rule that allows them to, which then the 3" rule applies).
• EDIT: S/T similar to LotR. You can pump out a bunch of shots in LotR but they don't really do much. Not a fan of this one, but I always like to bring it up.
• Remove double turns. Yeah, this is controversial, but it removes the possibility of shooting twice in a row and magic twice in a row.

Our overreliance on synergies to turn weak base-stats into credible threats. This results in us experiencing very sudden power drops. If you kill our support, we rapidly lose combat power. While if you kill our actual combat units we barely lose any combat power unless you kill all of them as our support can just move on to buff someone else. Now I usually complain about it from our perspective, because it can feel very lame to see your entire army fall apart cuz 1-2 key-buffs got killed. But similarly it's frustrating as hell for an opponent who wiped out multiple units but is still losing combats to whatever unit we're buffing now, and thus feels like he doesn't really achieve anything despite killing 40+ models.

This is a problem specific in the Seraphon design and I totally get it. Our warscrolls stack a lot of buffs, it's a bit crazy. I think you can double the Stegadon horn attacks and they all come from different spots? It's crazy. I don't have much input on this, but I can see why people view this as an issue.

As for Kroak, not sure. Genuinely not sure.

 

[Putzfrau]

I think teleports are a much larger issue than shooting, personally. Shooting wasn't a problem for significant portions of AoS lifespan, so i struggle to say it's "inherently problematic." If it was inherently problematic, you would have always seen shooting rising above the rest and that really hasn't been the case.

I do think the relative easy access to teleports when combined with shooting does make it a problem, and its something you see with all the most egregious examples. Tzeentch, KO, Seraphon, and DoK all do this, while Cities functionally does it with bridge.

Also, this site does a pretty good job of showing how are base units are actually pretty damn efficient, even without buffs so hopefully this sheds a little light on the fact that our units aren't totally useless if you don't buff them.

http://ageofsigmulator.com/metabreakers/listbot_unit_tables/seraphon.png

It's obviously not perfect, but its running off pretty much raw stats. How it determines its data is here:
http://ageofsigmulator.com/metabreakers/listbot_explained.html

 

[Carnikang]

I think teleports are a much larger issue than shooting, personally. Shooting wasn't a problem for significant portions of AoS lifespan, so i struggle to say it's "inherently problematic." If it was inherently problematic, you would have always seen shooting rising above the rest and that really hasn't been the case.

I do think the relative easy access to teleports when combined with shooting does make it a problem, and its something you see with all the most egregious examples. Tzeentch, KO, Seraphon, and DoK all do this, while Cities functionally does it with bridge.

If one remembers correctly, this has been an issue/thing since early 1st edition AoS with Clan Skryre Stormfiends. While its not the exact same, deepstriking/teleporting is as close as to be comparable. Stormfiends operated unbuffed about as effectively as fully buffed 40 man skink unit. And that was only the shooting fiends. Melee were able to be dealt with and screened out.

Shooting that is good has always outshined melee. There just was not as much of it before as there was previously. Now there are a lot of mass shooting that can be buffed to be okay, and some decent high-powered shots in armies with good tools.
Perhaps limiting shooting after a teleport, or giving a penalty to units that teleport, would make it less oppressive. But then again, you may have to apply that to deepstriking as well, effectively making the tools and units less valuable to use... i

 

[LordBaconBane]

I think teleports are a much larger issue than shooting, personally. Shooting wasn't a problem for significant portions of AoS lifespan, so i struggle to say it's "inherently problematic." If it was inherently problematic, you would have always seen shooting rising above the rest and that really hasn't been the case.

I do think the relative easy access to teleports when combined with shooting does make it a problem, and its something you see with all the most egregious examples. Tzeentch, KO, Seraphon, and DoK all do this, while Cities functionally does it with bridge.

Also, this site does a pretty good job of showing how are base units are actually pretty damn efficient, even without buffs so hopefully this sheds a little light on the fact that our units aren't totally useless if you don't buff them.

http://ageofsigmulator.com/metabreakers/listbot_unit_tables/seraphon.png

It's obviously not perfect, but its running off pretty much raw stats. How it determines its data is here:
http://ageofsigmulator.com/metabreakers/listbot_explained.html

Putz and I chatted a bit about this. I find this pretty cool but I do caution anyone looking their tables to take things with a grain of salt for a few reasons.

1. Abilities are counted based off how many there are, not based off the context of the ability.
   1. For example, the Trog has five abilities which weights heavier then the two of the Starpriest, but the Starpriest is probably the more popular option (if I had to guess)
2. Bravery is weighted greater then save. With the amount of ways to prevent battleshock whether through abilities, spending a CP, or some team abilities, I'm a bit concerned that it's weighted higher.
3. Number of weapons seems to be an odd inclusion, considering that should roll into average damage?
4. Has shooting is being treated like a bool, where we should at least take into account the range of said shooting. (There is a reason why boltspitters are more popular than javs, ya know)
5. Are upgrades taken into account?

I don't think this is necessarily bad, but again, I wouldn't take a look at this and say, "these units here are amazing/bad, look at this chart!". Again, grain of salt and try to understand the context behind the unit in question.

 

[Dread Saurian]

Putz and I chatted a bit about this. I find this pretty cool but I do caution anyone looking their tables to take things with a grain of salt for a few reasons.

1. Abilities are counted based off how many there are, not based off the context of the ability.
   1. For example, the Trog has five abilities which weights heavier then the two of the Starpriest, but the Starpriest is probably the more popular option (if I had to guess)
2. Bravery is weighted greater then save. With the amount of ways to prevent battleshock whether through abilities, spending a CP, or some team abilities, I'm a bit concerned that it's weighted higher.
3. Number of weapons seems to be an odd inclusion, considering that should roll into average damage?
4. Has shooting is being treated like a bool, where we should at least take into account the range of said shooting. (There is a reason why boltspitters are more popular than javs, ya know)
5. Are upgrades taken into account?

I don't think this is necessarily bad, but again, I wouldn't take a look at this and say, "these units here are amazing/bad, look at this chart!". Again, grain of salt and try to understand the context behind the unit in question.

For seraphon who are literally swimming in an ocean of cp Bravery means little to nothing otherwise I have no real gripe with what you're saying

 

[Kilvakar]

To add to the shooting vs. melee vs. teleport discussion, I personally think that teleporting is much more powerful than shooting overall. Case in point, people say that Starborne is competitive and Coalesced is not almost entirely due to the teleporting. (Yes, I know that summoning is also better than the absolutely terrible terrain rules, but it's always been the teleporting that people rely on to win games) Whenever an army has an option to teleport, it's almost always considered the top strategy unless the army has something just that much better (stormcast deepstriking, great green hand of Gork, Idoneth Soulscryer, DoK teleport battalion, Tzeentch, etc.). It's the same for movement in general. People tend to take subfactions that give you more speed over other choices (Gorefist for Orks and Goretide for Khorne are good examples). Fangs of Sotek is considered our best constellation because it has all of the above. Teleporting, shooting, extra movement, and a CP for a chance at even more movement when you get charged.

Before all the newest round of new battletomes, armies with a lot of shooting weren't always also fast on top of it. Melee armies were either really fast so you couldn't shoot them apart before they got to you (Ironjawz, DoK, Slaanesh, IDK), or they were just so tanky that it you couldn't kill them before they got to you even with a couple rounds of shooting (Nurgle, Bonereapers).

The way I see it is that so many armies have good shooting combined with speed and maneuverability that it's making armies without that combination look much weaker in comparison. One of the biggest reasons shooting ends up being better than melee most of the time is the fact that you get two phases of damage per turn instead of one.

For example, turn 1 you go first. Your shooting unit gets to shoot, charge, and fight that turn. Your opponent gets to hit back with what I'm assuming is a melee unit for this example. Then, unless they throw other units into the combat or retreat, they get to fight you in melee on their turn, and you also get to hit back. On turn 2, assuming both units are still alive and no double-turn, you get to shoot and fight again, and they get to fight back if they haven't been wiped out by now. That's five phases of damage for you, and only three for them. But realistically it's probably only two phases of damage for them because you probably wiped their unit after your second round of shooting and melee.

So yes, I would like to see less reliance on teleporting and shooting, but that's just the way GW wants their games to be played right now, with the focus on objective points instead of actually fighting your opponent. So how would I tone it down? I guess I would say that not being able to shoot while in combat would be a huge nerf to shooting and would make it so that you actually had to keep your melee units forward instead of always running your ranged units up first. If that was deemed to harsh, and it very well might be, then adding a penalty to hit for shooting after movement and/or when in combat would also make sense. That way tagging a ranged unit in combat would actually hamper it's effectiveness rather than just bring all the focus fire down on the unit that attacked them. Or you could make shields more effective against shooting and have shields add an additional +1 to saves vs. ranged attacks.

 

[Erta Wanderer]

To add to the shooting vs. melee vs. teleport discussion, I personally think that teleporting is much more powerful than shooting overall. Case in point, people say that Starborne is competitive and Coalesced is not almost entirely due to the teleporting. (Yes, I know that summoning is also better than the absolutely terrible terrain rules, but it's always been the teleporting that people rely on to win games) Whenever an army has an option to teleport, it's almost always considered the top strategy unless the army has something just that much better (stormcast deepstriking, great green hand of Gork, Idoneth Soulscryer, DoK teleport battalion, Tzeentch, etc.). It's the same for movement in general. People tend to take subfactions that give you more speed over other choices (Gorefist for Orks and Goretide for Khorne are good examples). Fangs of Sotek is considered our best constellation because it has all of the above. Teleporting, shooting, extra movement, and a CP for a chance at even more movement when you get charged.

Before all the newest round of new battletomes, armies with a lot of shooting weren't always also fast on top of it. Melee armies were either really fast so you couldn't shoot them apart before they got to you (Ironjawz, DoK, Slaanesh, IDK), or they were just so tanky that it you couldn't kill them before they got to you even with a couple rounds of shooting (Nurgle, Bonereapers).

The way I see it is that so many armies have good shooting combined with speed and maneuverability that it's making armies without that combination look much weaker in comparison. One of the biggest reasons shooting ends up being better than melee most of the time is the fact that you get two phases of damage per turn instead of one.

For example, turn 1 you go first. Your shooting unit gets to shoot, charge, and fight that turn. Your opponent gets to hit back with what I'm assuming is a melee unit for this example. Then, unless they throw other units into the combat or retreat, they get to fight you in melee on their turn, and you also get to hit back. On turn 2, assuming both units are still alive and no double-turn, you get to shoot and fight again, and they get to fight back if they haven't been wiped out by now. That's five phases of damage for you, and only three for them. But realistically it's probably only two phases of damage for them because you probably wiped their unit after your second round of shooting and melee.

So yes, I would like to see less reliance on teleporting and shooting, but that's just the way GW wants their games to be played right now, with the focus on objective points instead of actually fighting your opponent. So how would I tone it down? I guess I would say that not being able to shoot while in combat would be a huge nerf to shooting and would make it so that you actually had to keep your melee units forward instead of always running your ranged units up first. If that was deemed to harsh, and it very well might be, then adding a penalty to hit for shooting after movement and/or when in combat would also make sense. That way tagging a ranged unit in combat would actually hamper it's effectiveness rather than just bring all the focus fire down on the unit that attacked them. Or you could make shields more effective against shooting and have shields add an additional +1 to saves vs. ranged attacks.

Bringing in heavy weapons sounds like a solid choice. It does a lot to even the field in 40k (the worst cases have rules to ignore it hello intercessors) and we already have the bones of it in cities.

 

[Canas]

It's obviously not perfect, but its running off pretty much raw stats. How it determines its data is here:
http://ageofsigmulator.com/metabreakers/listbot_explained.html

Valiant try, but o god is this based on some bad data representation. @LordBaconBane has already pointed out several of the issues, but it's not limited to that. I mean, cool model and all. But the results are fairly meaningless if you represent your data that badly.

Also @LordBaconBane the reason bravery is valued quite highly is probably because heroes have above-average bravery. So higher bravery corresponds to being a hero and heroes tend to be more expensive. Hence bravery becomes a valuable predictor. There's several other attributes in their top ten that have a good correlation with being a hero as well and are probably in there because of the same reason.

Bringing in heavy weapons sounds like a solid choice. It does a lot to even the field in 40k (the worst cases have rules to ignore it hello intercessors) and we already have the bones of it in cities.

A heavy weapons-type rule could be a brilliant way to limit the dominance of shooting. Though teleports should probably count as moving, given that the most problematic examples in AoS tend to involve teleporting a shoot-y unit around the place.

Before all the newest round of new battletomes, armies with a lot of shooting weren't always also fast on top of it. Melee armies were either really fast so you couldn't shoot them apart before they got to you (Ironjawz, DoK, Slaanesh, IDK), or they were just so tanky that it you couldn't kill them before they got to you even with a couple rounds of shooting (Nurgle, Bonereapers).

The way I see it is that so many armies have good shooting combined with speed and maneuverability that it's making armies without that combination look much weaker in comparison. One of the biggest reasons shooting ends up being better than melee most of the time is the fact that you get two phases of damage per turn instead of one.

The reason shooting originally wasn't as problematic is twofold:

1) Most of the original armies just didn't have anywhere near as good shooting, so melee armies didn't just get shot of the table before reaching their opponents
2) Most of the original armies that did have decent shooting had it on relativly slow units, so you didn't have teleporting salamanders and what not.

If they had maintained those two limitations it would've been (mostly) fine. But then super shooty armies, even relativly static ones, like tzeentch or shootcast can't exist, and shooty speedy armies like KO are even more problematic. If you want armies like those to exist you'l need to implement other limitations on shooting.

Though even originally there already were problematic ones, like the stormfiends that were mentioned earlier. But at least it was somewhat limited back than.

 

[xoid]

I don't really have any data to back this up, but I feel another issue with shooting is that over the last few years there has been a significant increase in the number of units with mid and long range shooting.

Anybody know if this is the case, or if I just have some strange misunderstanding? If it has increased that also helps make shooting more powerful.

 

[Erta Wanderer]

I don't really have any data to back this up, but I feel another issue with shooting is that over the last few years there has been a significant increase in the number of units with mid and long range shooting.

Anybody know if this is the case, or if I just have some strange misunderstanding? If it has increased that also helps make shooting more powerful.

most shooting has decreased (see KO and cities) but with a few exceptions being the LRL archers and the BR catapult

 

[Putzfrau]

Valiant try, but o god is this based on some bad data representation. @LordBaconBane has already pointed out several of the issues, but it's not limited to that. I mean, cool model and all. But the results are fairly meaningless if you represent your data that badly.

Also @LordBaconBane the reason bravery is valued quite highly is probably because heroes have above-average bravery. So higher bravery corresponds to being a hero and heroes tend to be more expensive. Hence bravery becomes a valuable predictor. There's several other attributes in their top ten that have a good correlation with being a hero as well and are probably in there because of the same reason.

Feel like that's being unnecessarily harsh to the work put in to this. Is it the end all be all? Of course not, there's admitted problems especially when comparing abilities with hard to quantify effects.

But when comparing raw stats efficiency its good enough and proves the point that seraphon units are still relatively efficiently priced without buffs. You're not going to be using this to have a really nitty gritty, in depth comparison between two very similar warscrolls, but when you're talking at the most general, 30,000 feet level that we are I feel like its a useful tool.

It at the very least gives some tangibility to those arguments so we aren't just sitting around using hyperbolic descriptions of seraphons "weak base stats" based on nothing but how we feel about the warscrolls.

 

[Canas]

Feel like that's being unnecessarily harsh to the work put in to this.

I mean, regardless of how hard he worked on it the endresult is fairly meaningless cuz the data he put in is bad. And garbage in means garbage out when it comes to ML. The amount of effort put in isn't going to change that. And you know, if he'd ever come to me for advise I'd give it,

Is it the end all be all? Of course not, there's admitted problems especially when comparing abilities with hard to quantify effects.

But when comparing raw stats efficiency its good enough and proves the point that seraphon units are still relatively efficiently priced without buffs

No, it proves that when you have bad data (or a bad data representation, in this case a mix of both really) you get weird results. Like an eternity warden being more efficient than saurus guard despite being objectivly worse in literally every aspect that's meaningfull.

Also, even if this tool was accurate, a unit being point efficient doesn't really mean much... An efficient bad unit is still bad... And similarly an inefficient good unit can still be more than good enough to win, especially as it won't need to fight the entire opposing army at once, which limits how important the inefficiencies are anyway.