Hmmmm now that you mention it, @Canas It really seems as if the Orruk player has no choice whether you have to charge or not. But I do think that it doesn't allow charging after running, but that you can prevent it from happening if you ran. Otherwise melee armies would have a field day against Orruks. You would run toward them and get rewarded by being able to charge as well...
To be honest this is the only potential "drawback" I can see in the ability. Everyone always charges you so you get to slaughter them, including weak backline units. But that also includes that bloodthirster that just ran halfway across the battlefield. If running blocks the rule then it has no disadvantage to the orruk player whatsoever to balance out the immense power the ability provides. That and the phrasing just seems to support what I'm saying.
I'll have to play a few games to prove it but I don't think the backline charging will be so bad. To charge you have to get into 0.5" from the target. I tend to think that good spacing of front line units or chaff will block enough space that the backline charges will fail often enough. Especially if you don't play on a board without terrain.
It might not happen a lot. But when it does happen it's devastating. And more importantly. It will always force you to play around it.The fact that your opponent has to awkwardly play around it is probably powerfull enough on its own. Or at the very least just really annoying if you're on the recieving end.
I will try to explain what i dont like in this new orruks' special rules. The 12" bubble of charge is strong and annoying, but you can work around it. It will be difficult and will cost mental energies but you can do it. Except that this will severely impact the game without even an effort from the orruks player. No "passive" ability should be that strong, dictating the movement of another army in its own turn. The "negate ethereal and wounds saves" is strong, but in the end don't affect us and it will enter play only rarely… but when it does, it's basically game changing. So, it's worthless or too much strong. both are abilities that suffer from a BAD and lazy design. Plus, they both mess with some basic mechanics of the game… a trend i'm noticing more and more in AoS, since when GW introduced tricks that changed totally the sequence of the fight phase. Every time GW introduces such "cool" rules for an army, that completely ignore abilities of other armies of the same core rules, they just unbalance a system that is already in a bad equilibrium.
It’s doesn’t explicitly say that they have to charge that particular unit so there is that. But yeah, this should at least only work if it’s a unit that has been damaged by the arrows.
Thank you! This perfectly encapsulates my main concerns. Not so much the ability itself (although I still think its way too strong) but that we're starting a see a trend of abilities that fully break already previously established mechanics. While it would create some bloat, I'd actually prefer to see new mechanics being created when a book comes out that don't break what's already been established. Blood Tide & Nurgle's disease track thingy come to mind. Just to mirror what you said again "No passive ability should be that strong" I hope it sees some kinda FAQ soon.
To be honest what concerns me most about these mechanics is not that they ignore or overrule other abilities. That in itself is fine. What concerns me is that these new abilities than apply to the entire new army. Having 1 or 2 specialised unit that break the mold is fine. They can be balanced with trade-offs and you can counter them by adapting your strategy. Having the entire army break the mold is problematic. Counterplay becomes impossible since you can no longer do clever things like prioritize specific targets, or get them stuck on a screen. Balance becomes iffy as all of them break the mold, so any drawback needs to apply to the entire army which means that if this drawback is significant the army has a huge glaring weakness that's going to be far too easy to abuse. Whereas if the drawback isn't significant that's just problematic in and of itself... So yeah, it's very weird to me that all these new abilities are applied to the entire army. And not just put on 1 or 2 key-units. At least if it was just on key-units I could see it work and be quite interestin (provided you put in a caveat that you can't just build an entire army out of that one unit)
To be fair: we don't know the full rules yet. Maybe those abilities have some restrictions (like only being able to take certain units or so.
Let’s hope so, because if they come in unmodified it would be hugely detrimental to AoS and the current meta
My musing on it so far 1. Skinks can still use 'Wary Fighter' to withdraw from combat, this is an ability used in the combat phase and not a retreat move 2. At The Double Command Ability, says it can be used to re-roll a charge roll so there is nothing to stop you spending a Command Point to try and fail an already successful charge, not ideal but it could prove useful to prevent losing a squishy character. 3.LoSaT will be be different because it counts as our move therefor we can't run to negate the having to charge so we may need to be more careful with placement there
Every new book shakes up the meta, that's intended. Those new abilities are the new core game mechanics for an army that previously was boring to play and weak. I see them as a huge improvement. Over the top? Maybe! But so were many others on release. Remember Morathi, 2.0 Kroak, unstoppable eels, Kharadron Clown Cars, 1.0 Kunnin Rukk, that thing Tzeentch could do, and so on? Happens all the time. If it is bad for the game it will get fixed in a few weeks. That's the strength of AoS. If this was still WHFB you would have to endure this for a whole edition or longer.
O yeah, the game will probably survive ( Rejoice @NIGHTBRINGER ). Plus, worst case there's always house-rules
Yes, these are good points. but i still don't like the concept behind some of these new abilities: 1) on a general level (the trend of all the recent releases), IMO to mess too much with the core rules is never a good idea, 2) anyway (speaking of "Strength of Purpose") i deeply dislike any ability that can be worthless or game-changing, depending on what army you face.
I absolutely agree that the "anti Nighthaunt" ability is bad. It specifically counters one army. Some of our own abilities (those vs Chaos Daemons) are as bad and should change. Lists should not fail because your enemy plays the wrong grand alliance or army. Countering play styles (anti-melee, anti-magic, anti-cavalty, anti-shooting etc.) is OK, but this is too broad. As for messing with the core rules.... I am torn. Example: Carnosaurs can run and charge as soon as they ate a model. That's messing with the core rules. Bonesplitterz boar dudes can retreat and charge. Same thing. Some weapons make neither hit nor wound rolls for some arbitrary reason. Some warscrolls allow things like moving in the hero phase or attacking in the charge phase. Some allow skipping battleshocks. Kroak can cast the same spell more than once. All of those circumvent or even "break" the core rules and that's exactly what makes them interesting. However, and that's where I agree, those things should always come at some cost. They have to have either downsides or cost resources, or require skill. I think the main thing that might make those abilities bad is that you just take them and they work without needing skills or having any downsides.
All the examples you've given that mess with the core rules tend to be limited to 1 unit though. And that unit pays for it accordingly, either with certain drawbacks or just by being expensive. None of those are army-wide. Also, having the downside be "it requires skill" leads to massive balance issues as it quickly means the entire thing is useless in low level play, or horrificly powerfull at high level play. Skill-requirements shouldn't ever be used as a (major) balancing factor as you're inevitably going to run into that one guy who's just really good and can abuse it to high heavens. Idem with the counter relying on the target being skilled enough to avoid it.