AoS Nova Open 2019: Wrap Up

Hey guys, wrote an article about my experience at NOVA this year. Hope you enjoy!

https://daviseford.com/blog/2019/09/02/nova-open-2019.html

 

You are so right about the 'Activation Wars'. I play Slaanesh myself and the Locus of Diversion does feel downright cruel sometimes. It's reached the point where I have to deliberately refrain from including my Keeper of Secrets in my lists so that I don't feel like I'm cheating.

It is amusing to me that accusatory fingers are often pointed at Seraphon's allegiance abilities: I've lost count of the times my friends have despaired over table-wide unbinding and teleportation. Yet this is no less impressive than rules like the Locus, and the Hedonites actually have decent units to back it up.

Thanks for the post - sounds like a good time! Makes me resent living on the other side of the planet, as Narrative tournaments of that size sound like a blast.

 

You shouldn’t feel like you are cheating. Local players who are planning to go to tournaments need to experience this. If a player can’t deal with three keepers and the ability to resummon 1500pts in a turn, they probably shouldn’t be taking that list.

That said all hail Kharadron overlords. Our new saviors and kings. Hopefully they come out of the woodworks to beat up on Slaanesh

 

@Jason839 I totally get that from a competitive standpoint, but at the end of the day I play mostly for fun. If we're prepping for tournament play then it's no holds barred. But when I see my friend's fluffy Troggoth army get solo-dismantled by my Pretenders-host Keeper of Secrets, and finish the game with twice as many models as I started, it's not really fun for anybody.

Funnily enough, my buddies Kharadrons completely rinsed me the one time I played them with Slaanesh. I think their across-the-board point drops were really helpful for them: it's kind of insane how many gunships he managed to field. Put all four of my heroes to sleep in turn one!

 

Meh, stuff like that shouldn't really be game-legal to begin with. Summoning 1500 pts worth of stuff a turn when games revolve around 2000 pts armies is just silly no matter how you look at it. Unfortunatly that's one of the biggest issues competitive games probably face, on the one hand players, especially competitive players, like figuring out edgecases like this and pulling of ridiculous and cool stuff. On the other hand it leads to a rather stupid balancing and a massive arms-race if you give them too much freedom and don't reign in the worst excesses...

Out of curiousity, are there any tournaments with ban-lists or using a tier-system like they do in the pokemon games? We have meeting engagements now, which added in a few limitations. But those limitations are too general, not stopping plenty of excesses, while also breaking plenty of acceptable combo's as both are equally limited.

 

I agree with @Canas in the fact that slaanesh summoning is way to good. They don’t have to dedicate much to it but make huge returns from it. Really needs a change sometime soon...

 

I'm hoping they get toned down as well. That being said aren't 2 Bastiladons in TQ a decent answer? 3 Dmg is no joke. Range is only 20inches but on average, if you're next to a AB, you are killing a Keeper a turn. If you can get some decent skink screens off you might be able to compete.

 

It’s been my experience that you can’t just kill 1 keeper in a turn, you need to be able to kill all the keepers. There are usually 2 or 3 and then chariots as well. They will get their depravity and resummon If you got one or two at a time. All heroes must die in a single turn.

 

The fact that they can summon heroes back super easily, just doesnt feel right. They really do need some kind of nerf to make them more balanced, or a points increase at the very least

 

Not only that, but they summon 12 of a hero, then use the new hero to daisy chain another hero and so on until all their points are spent. It lets them put it on objectives 36 inches away super easy to steal games if you aren’t careful.

 

Let me know when you find an army that can kill all the Keepers and heroes in one turn #MakeKroakGreatAgain

 

Haha I’m pretty sure that’s why people are hoping KO makes a resurgence. There is a guy in my local meta who does really well with Slaanesh. If I beat him with Seraphon I’ll let you know. So far no dice. I’ve only managed to kill 3 heroes. 2 with shooting and 1 in combat with the Doppelganger carno. Then he got a bunch of depravity from his heroes being killed, resummoned some and steamrolled me.

 

It is rather puzzling that they nerfed Kroak into the ground due to the perceived brokenness of the Kroaknado, only to introduce a whole new array of armies that pull off far greater injustices than Kroak was ever capable of.

 

oh the times they are a changing it just makes me look forward to when we get new rules lets see how cool they make him.

 

powercreep ftw.

The nerfs to wizards in general have been weird. We got the rule of one, Kroak, endless spells not benefiting from range bonusses immeadiatly after them specificly being sold on "you can throw them through the mirrors for more range". For some reason wizards constantly seem to be nerfed into the ground whenever they get something halfway interesting, despite it usually only having one or two cases that are genuinly broken, if there are any at all. It's quite weird.

 

Just because new stuff is busted (and i don't necessarily think it is) doesn't mean Kroak wasn't. The amount of AoE MW damage he could do, and the fact that your opponent could literally do nothing about it, was stupid.

 

He might have been too powerfull, but a lot of new stuff (and even current stuff) was at least as broken (see aforementioned summoning of 1500 points per turn in a 2000 point game....). And more importantly, they could've actually balanced him instead of nerfing him into the ground. GW has this weird thing where whenever a wizard in AoS is involved in something that even vaguely starts to resemble broken it gets nerfed into the ground, while it's fine to do more or less the exact same thing or even worse as long as it isn't done with a wizard. With the exception of Nagash & Morathi, for some reason those two are allowed their super powerfull magic shenanigans.

 

it'a a good way to sell models and by good i mean really scummy

 

Wizards don't really seem to follow that usual pattern of being powerfull for the hype only to be nerfed once enough models have been sold though. Especially as they have the nasty tendency of nerfing all wizards at once, not just the ones from the shiny new faction with the broken spells. It's a bit odd. The rule of one is probably the best example of this. Spamming spells was possible for ages. It randomly gets nerfed cuz you shouldn't stack/spam stuff, but they ignore every other type of ability that works similarly and proceed to introduce stacking command abilities in the next?same?, can't remember, GHB. The only one who seems relativly immune to the various nerfs is Nagash. I'd almost say someone at GW just hates wizards that aren't Nagash. It's rather peculiar.

And yeah, they do it with other stuff to, to build hype and whatnot. But no other class of unit seems to be as suspectible to this. And I don't think any other class of unit has seen the entire class being nerfed on account of one or two outliers (e.g. Morathi ruining range modifiers on endless spells for the other wizards). At most the nerfs tend to target the new shiny stuff usually. And leave older factions alone.