Hey all, I wanted to post a video to prompt a bit of Discussion. Mostly because I don't know if any of you may have participated in the survey, and what thoughts you may have on how we as a faction contribute to NPE. It is a three hour long video though. So proceed at your own pace. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZhv8C0qi4s Spoiler Apparently we are one of the Worst factions to play against in terms of Negative Play Experiences by a wide margin in the poll. Namely because of our magical dominance and shooting from what I've gathered? It doesn't seem to me that that really fits as a whole, considering the runner up armies to Seraphon, and where we land on a lot of the charts that Vince pulled out. But why are we the target, and why are other armies not as 'hated' for the play experience? Thoughts?
i would be carful about any poll vince puts out he has spent the last year poisoning that well with his audience. beyond that we are the new flavor of the month, in the same way that every one complained about OBR when it came out now it is our turn. i just hope that GW doesn't break us when they try and fail to fix it
Because magic, shooting, teleporting, and summoning are all generally non interactive experiences for your opponent, and we excel at all of those things. It's that simple.
Yet we do not excel at all of those things as others do. Do you believe that our tools are as oppressive as they're represented?
I had to stop watching his content because it got so insufferable. Even when hes on other Channels like AoSCoach he always talks about how he feels we have a broken book and are ruining the game.
I think the argument at this point needs to be why we don't excel, not why we do. The common consensus is that seraphon are the best (or a strong contender for) army in the game. I think if you're going to argue against that, the ball is in your court in terms of bringing evidence to the table. The only list that even comes close to having similar strength across those categories is changehost and its not like people are clamoring to play against changehost either. People even hate playing against KO and they have no magic or summoning. Being really strong in all 4 of those categories means people hate playing against you. Always has been. Always will be. Even watching the video, what are the three highest NPE armies... Seraphon, tzeentch, and KO. What do all those armies have in common? So to put it mildly, yes i think we are that oppressive. I've played Fangs extensively against really, really strong players and its an obnoxious list with answers to everything that can easily win a lot of games in the first turn. It's strong into almost every meta list, to the point that people are literally designing janky tzeentch archaon lists to go up against it. My advice to anyone still questioning the power of seraphon would be to simply play more games with it. It's the strongest list i've ever played, in any GW game and i've played 40k and fantasy/aos for a very, very long time. The rest of the book doesn't suffer from quite the same oppressiveness, but is still very strong.
As someone with 6 different armies at this point, I just chalk it up to normal power creep. The game has evolved and many of my armies have not caught up to the new technologies. Its like people are using old WW2 planes and complaining about the missiles and jet engines we have. Once everyone gets upgraded to the same level it wont feel so bad. We experienced this ourselves in our old AoS 1 book where we had 2+ armor saves and ignored rend 1, only for everyone to come out with mortal wound spam armies in AoS 2.
Do a lot of armies need to be brought up to that "AoS 2" level of power? Absolutely. Are seraphon still overly oppressive even with that context? Absolutely. They need a few minor points adjustments even with normal power creep being taken into consideration.
I agree, some of the things that fangs of sotek in particular allows is crazy. the command ability alone pretty much removes the only way a combat army can play against you. The opponent can run across the board to fight your shooting units but before they get to hit, they get peppered with shots and then half of the time you've run away. The strongest Fangs builds only start to feel pressure, in my experience, when you face an army that is even more heavily focused in either magic or shooting
@Putzfrau you make a lot of good points, and me not having been too active in a long while, I didnt have the full picture. So, furthering the discussion, what kind of points modifications do you think we should have? I've seen a lot of talk about Kroak going up, but if that's just one aspect of the issue, what else needs to be brought into line to make us less oppressive?
I think we would be in agreement that it's pretty much only Fangs of Sotek that are so oppressive to play against? I don't hear anyone complaining about going up against Dracothion's Tail or any Coalesced list. Personally, I think it's more the FoS sub-faction abilities that are "bad" to play against, and that nothing in our army needs nerfs to the actual unit. Yes, that includes Kroak. Think about it. By increasing the point cost of key units like Skinks, Kroak, etc., you are nerfing the entire army. OBR was definitely complained about a lot, but it was really only Petrifex Elite that was breaking the game. It's the same with Seraphon and Fangs. It's also only Fangs that excels in shooting, magic and movement. Other constellations excel in one or maybe two of those things, and while they're still good they're much less annoying to play against. As for the magic part of it, from both my personal experience and what I've heard a lot of other people saying, we don't dominate magically with our own spells, we're more anti-magic in that we can shut down enemy spells board-wide. While it may feel bad to have your casting repeatedly unbound, that can technically happen in any game with any army. Our only truly magic damage-based build is the full Kroaknado build, and that costs more than most of the god wizards like Nagash and Teclis and thus it *should* be powerful. If you're going to focus the majority of your army points on buffing a single model, it should do what you need it to do. Outside of a Kroaknado, we're certainly not going to be crushing the opponent with our lore spells. If, and I do stress if, it's really necessary to nerf us because we're ruining the game, they'd better do the same to Tzeentch Changehost and the KO boat spam list. Plus, given the power creep that's been pretty obvious in the newer books I have a feeling that Lumineth, Slaanesh and possibly even Daughters of Khaine are probably going to be catching up pretty quickly in the annoying army race. I really feel like just changing the FoS command ability so that you either shoot *or* retreat from combat would go a long way. If the extra movement in turn one was also still considered super oppressive to opponents, you could change it to an extra 1" of movement all the time. They could also more drastically nerf the Starborne constellation abilities if they would just make summoning actually useable again. (Edit: I myself posted a thread after seeing Warhammer Weekly make a video about how much he hated Seraphon and how OP they were. How much power and influence does this guy have? It seems that he's pretty well-known and popular, but does he have any actual influence over at GW or even among the community as a whole? He seems to have it out for Seraphon in particular. In the video I saw, he specifically said he didn't want to see them at the top, he wanted them brought down to a middle-tier army.)
Vince is a very popular Painter, and I believe a competitively minded player. I know he's been doing the Warhammer Weekly vids for quite a long time. A for influence, he's a name that's recognized by a lot of the Youtube AoS crowd, and they're often in his chat, people like AoScoach and a few others. He seems fairly reasonable in the comments, though I don't understand the dislike of Seraphon. Honestly, I dont think that would be that bad of a change.
Id be very surprised if thats all they did to fangs. Im fully expecting a 20-30 price increase on 10 man skinks, a 100 pt price increase to kroak, FoS to lose the shooting on parting shot, or to raise the cost to be 2 cp, or 40 man skinks to lose horde bonus, and bound endless spells to go up 20 pts. I really feel like they are going to make the current fos lists unplayable and force seraphon players to have less tools by raising the overal point cost of our lists 200-300 pts. I dont think they should do this, but GW overreacts and I fear they will with us as well.
Skinks should have a max unit size of 20 (or lose the extra attack horde bonus) and go up 10 points per 10. Skink priests should be 90 points. Kroak should be 380, but he'll probably be over 400 because honestly he shouldn't be allied into other armies. Maybe give him a special rule. We'd still be very competitive with the above changes. I don't disagree, the FoS command ability is bad for the game. But people aren't complaining about Draco's Tail or thunder lizard simply because they aren't seeing it as often. IMO Draco's Tail is arguably stronger in a better players hand and a bastiladon focused thunder lizard list is nearly as strong. Fangs is just so, so forgiving it's easy to play and do well with which leads to it being popular and it being the focus of everyone's complaints. Certain Koatl's lists are also extremely competitive but are much less forgiving than starborne lists. Summoning and teleporting is insanely good.
They also said our shooting was as strong as KO in that episode, so I'd take everything they say with a grain of salt...
Skinks alone are fine, 10 guys on a 5+ save, 5s and 5s attack profile. On paper they are rubbish. Its the buff stacking and power multipliers that cause the bad play end of things. I think kroak should go up a bit but mainly i think things like priest and starpriest would be fair for a ~20 point increase. Fangs subfaction ability is the most offensive thing in the book i would say, should just be reworked but they probably wont. It alone makes a unit of skinks or chameleons worth vast amounts more in game
I still dont really get why they split Skink Priests and Starpriests into two units, seems the buff stacking is a lot of the problem. But regardless of that, does it feel to anyone else like the Starpriest venom buff should be a command ability? Similarly costed wizards often have 1 Passive, 1 unique spell, and a command ability, not a free buff like this. If the MW spam buff cost a CP that would cut down a lot of the buff stacking right there. What I would do if I could: Skink Priests 70-> 80pts Skink Starpriest's Venom buff is a command ability Kroak 320->360 Fangs command ability is "or" not both A small nerf to skinks: either blowpipes are 12" (nerf and makes the weapons more comparable), or max unit size is 30 A few other tweaks to under-preforming stuff that isn't relevant here What I expect them to do: Kroak is 410 points All Bound endless spells are +20 points (so 10 more than now) Skink priests, starpriests, and skinks all increase by 10 or even 20 points The problem with this is Fangs will still be the best list and just as frustrating to play against, just slightly less effective, and all the other lists will take hits from the point increases
One thing that concerns me a little is that GW may well make some of these Seraphon changes (points and/or rules) in the midst of other books getting buffed. I just don’t want lizards to get “over corrected” and we are suddenly back to not being relevant. we’re already not that relevant in the lore.
You mean not relevant at all, lol! So far AoS is the story of the Stormcast and Elves vs Undead and Chaos. Everyone else is basically just there.