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

A faction (or unit, or whatever) designed around the notion that you need to play exceptionally well (for your skill level..) to be competive tends to create balance issues though. If you tune it so that a "weak" player can compete in his own league then it rapidly becomes overbearing in higher leagues. If you tune it so that a good player can compete in his own league it becomes useless, in lower leagues.

Don't get me wrong, it can work if for example you play somehting like the halfling team in bloodbowl. A team purposely designed to basicly suck. It can become its own challenge to achieve something with that team. However, if that team/unit/whatever is supposed to be competitive it should never be on the condition that the player using it is better than his opponent. After all if the player is better than his opponent he should win, not just be "competitive".

And as an aside; the condition "in order to be competitive with this army you need to be better than your opponent" is just a really stupid condition. I mean, of course being the better player helps with being competitive, and a good player can work wonders with a terrible army. That's what makes him a good player...

In fairness, that terradon list heavily relied on gaming the meta by specificly being played in an enviroment where he knew the regular counters would be absent. Which makes his life a whole lot easier.

More in general though, the issue with these examples is that the only players who are going to pull that off are the exceptional players.Things like performances in tournaments, especially the high level tournaments, are overall fairly meaningless as far as balance and health of an army is concerned. The fact that someone managed to figure out how to use terradons effectivly says more about the skill of that individual player, and his ability to game the tournament-meta, than it does about the overal state of the faction.

Makes me curious though if GW has any data on what's played in lower level tournaments, like say in local GW stores. It would be interesting to see if we end up seeing similar performances there as we do at the high level tournaments.

 

edit: i've adjusted a lot of what i said because it was coming across unnecessarily antagonistic IMO.

I dont think an army that requires you to be better than your opponent is a bad thing. I think an army like slaanesh or pre nerf FEC is way, WAY worse for the balance of the game.

Should seraphon have some of their power shifted from their allegiance abilities to their warscrolls? Yes, they probably should. But my argument was never that seraphon are 100% fine, it was that they are better than people think right now. And they are. They are an above average army that is capable of doing well with multiple lists.

That's a good thing. A new book will come, but for the time being embrace the fact that this army rewards your skill, it rewards being tactical, and it rewards understanding the intricacies of the game. If you're a competitive player you can play this army competitively and do well.

Granted, you could probably do better if you played slaanesh or skaven or whatever, but that's a matter of degrees.

 

yes if all was equal the best player would always win but at the moment bad players can beat us due to a poor army.

agreed

no its that i dont want to be the best player i can posably be to beat a bad player

but it doesn't i play against 2 players of simuler skill to me who both play orks i can beat them if im lucky but most of the time they run 28" the first turn and just sit on the objectives and i can't shift them nothing i have can kill 60 ard boys no matter how well i play.

 

The issue lies in needing to be better than the average player in your league just to be competitive.
Simply put, if you need to play perfectly while your opponent can afford to make a couple of mistakes and he will still win that is an issue.

Yes.

As this very easily creates issues where it becomes massivly overpowered at higher levels of play, where people can consistently play well. Or increadibly useless at lower levels where people consistently make mistakes. Depending on who you use as the yardstick to balance around.

Though most importantly, it can lead to some very very bad balancing decisions introducing some overpowered nonsense justified by "yeah, but it's difficult to use" or "yeah, but it's easy to negate". Which is the thing that I fear most when someone starts arguing in favour of armies (or units or whatever) like this

 

Also, this is an issue that you get when 1 ability is used as a massive crutch and your entire balance becomes dictated by it.

 

Argh you caught all my sass before i edited it out of my post :0

I think your last point is fair. You shouldn't need to be amazing just to compete at any level.

I agree our army is overly reliant on certain mechanics (namly summoning, teleporting, and skinks).

I think it's okay to have an army that is difficultish to use, but yeah, i can agree with a lot of the points being made. I think "i dont want to be the best player to beat a bad player" is a very, very fair criticism.

I've always been a little bit of a lizardmen apologist, so maybe that's my bad

 

all is well. do you need me to edit it?

 

i also like the hard to master army it has made me one of the best players in my club. but thats not what are army is. it's not hard to play it's just finiky to play against it used to be you had to be very caushes against seraphon because we could drop in to any opening and stick or we could escape from any bad fight. but the scales have tiped so far away from us that you can play carelessly and then just live thrue it or kill us in 1 activation.

 

Not at all, i appreciate the offer tho!

 

That, and it requires using a very small subset of our units in a specific way. Meanwhile the Saurus arm of our army may as well not be there.

 

Is AoS this unbalanced?

 

Honestly, outside of slaanesh not really. Theres probably 8-10 armies that realistically have a chance of podiuming.

Some have an easier time than others and there are only a few that really suffer.

At mid-low table play there are some armies that are just drastically easier to play and have obviously powerful things about them.

Edit: i massively agree with the post above

 

Part of the problem, for me, is an issue that is unavoidable in this day in age. The issue of 'netdecking'. A term from Magic the gathering or Hearthstone that means looking up online the best card build and tactics. This can be applied to just about any competitive game, but for me it killed Magic and also is a good example.

People find the "best" build and through crowd sourcing refine that build into a cheese build. Then the next thing you know people claim it's the only viable build. Going to my example of Magic the Gathering. When I first started playing we built decks out of what random cards we had collected and traded with friends and classmates. Once forums became more of a normal thing and computers readily available to the masses Netdecks were everywhere and it becomes hard to play with your fun random deck. Hearthstone is way worse with this imo so rare do you see a fresh or new build.

 

I guess I misspoke. I don't have a probelm with it. I love list building and looking at others ideas and sharing in discussion. In fact theorycrafting is my favorite part of the hobby.

However I do believe it fools some people into only believing in the cookie cutter builds. Meta worshipers.