its really not that big a deal. you can do much of the same, you just have to have everything in staggered lines. little triangles. slighly smaller footprint, so screening is harder, but your units are deeper and coherency cant be sniped as easily. i uploaded a pic that kinda shows it. we used to do the first. now we have to do the bottom.
It's extremely punitive to certain units and again, solves zero problems. If you can still functionally spread out you just need little speed bumps, why have it to begin with? Why the massive punishment to cav units over 5 and larger sized infantry units? It's a ridiculous change IMO, but hopefully when we get the bigger picture its not as bad as it seems atm. edit to reference your linked example: I'm fully aware of the ways to get around it. I'm not saying its impossible to work around, i'm saying it doesn't solve a problem.
Without knowing all the rules for AoS 3, cant say why they went this route yet. however it usually is a change made to improve melee combat. much harder to wrap units and stay in coherency, and much harder to get everyone in range of attacks. Adds more skill requirement to melee combat, rewarding players who are good at preplanning and positioning. pile ins actually matter again, and players can and will screw themselves in combat by moving without thinking. some may see that as a bad thing, and others will like it.
See, i think the exact opposite. it's so restrictive it makes melee combat less skill based because it becomes harder to do interesting things with pile ins and the like. You can't reach a single guy out to just be within 3 of another unit and tag them in combat, you can't minimize the amount of models in range of certain units while having more in range of others. You'll have your little blob of guys that'll stay a little blob of guys until it gets removed. And the interesting things you can do just comes down to weird ways you can deploy to cheat the rule, and if we are doing that then i'll always go back to why is it even there to begin with? Hopefully there is more depth in AoS 3.0 that's yet to be revealed, but at face value it's a rule i vehemently believe has 0 place in AoS without some other pretty massive changes to how the game functions (melee ranges, no consolidation, etc).
That's the same one 40K changed to right? Or at least I'd swear I've seen it posted before. Just wish breaking cohesion due to models dying didn't result in models being immeadiatly being removed. There's other possible punishments that aren't as extreme, like being forced to spend a turn reforming ranks, or suffering a malus to combat effectiveness while your ranks are broken that should be effective enough. Also the cut-off point should probably have been at 6, not five. Units that come in sets of 3 are left in an awkward situation like this, especially the ones that don't work well in a MSU.
We need to stop looking at every change as how it hurts us and look at it as how it helps the game. We are S-tier, we are oppressive, we are making the game unhealthy. Honestly the "nerfs" they are hitting us with will only drop us to low S-tier/high A-tier Right now no one is taking endless spells other than us because they have a chance to misfire. Bound endless spells are fun and I am happy everyone is getting a chance to use something similar. But you need to remember we are magic in the game. We have kroak who can dispell board wide. We have bind endless spell and drain magic. No endless spell is going to stay around long enough to really put the hurt on us. We are still just going to do it better than every other army. Also our bound endless spells are going to hit twice as often. I honestly think that this might be the boost that some spells like emerald life swarm need to be viable.
I really don't think it's that extreme. We are a top-tier army, but we are not making the game unhealthy. And not all of the "Seraphon are oppressive" data, but the quite a bit of it, is based on TTS tournaments hosted by prominent Youtubers right after the new battletome came out. A large percentage of players were playing Seraphon, so of course a large percentage of them would place high. Don't forget that we still placed below KO in many of the big events, but no one is really whining about KO that much because even though they're incredibly strong they aren't as popular. And that's not even mentioning the utterly anti-fun ruleset that is the Lumineth battletome. But yes, 3e does appear to be attempting to balance a lot of these problems, so I'm optimistic about the edition on the whole. I said as soon as his new rules came out that the Kroak changes are good overall, but the completely random roll as to whether he dies or not is not a good idea, imo. I would much rather they just increased his wound count and kept his ward save. But I'm still going to use him and as long as you don't charge him into battle I think he's still going to be very fun to play overall. I do agree with you on the endless spell speculation. We have no reason to believe that we're going to lose bound spells. If anything, our bound spells are probably going to be even better unless GW issues a specific FAQ to nerf them once 3e comes out. The new coherency rules, however, just sound terrible. You have to try and keep your units in a double-row or a blob or you'll basically end up losing the majority of your unit once they lose a couple models. I do agree with what a lot of people are saying that it sounds like they'll need to seriously re-vamp the way melee combat works in 3e or this is just a massive nerf to all melee in general. One thing I really hope isn't the case, but it sounds like it might be, is that I don't want AoS to move to be even more of a skirmish game with smaller and smaller armies and units. I like having the option for lots of unit variety and being able to have hordes or large units of more elite troops. I will be disappointed if they try to push for more MSU and single units doing little fights here and there.
I was not a fan of this rule when it was implemented in 40k, and I am doubly not a fan of it in AoS. I run Tyranids in 40k, and it just compacted my units. I could not reach as far, and even on a smaller board that was noticable and frustrating. In a game with huge hordes of troops, this is possibly a change I would label as bad unless it comes with a buff ala Shining Company. Bad because it seems to be counter to how the game plays. It works in 40k, to an extent, since there aren't huge hordes everywhere. Edit: Where is that from? Was it recently posted? Edit2: Nvm, in the Stormcast Post. Unfortunate.
The thing I've always found weird is that in their own battle reports in white dwarf and such GW nearly never uses hordes. They usually stick to MSU x2 as a max. Maybe that plays a role here.
Do we even have confirmation that modifiers will be capped at +/- 1? I see a lot of chatter about it but haven't seen the actual rule anywhere.
no it's a rumor that some people are treating as fact. i generally just keep it in mind but it isn"t set in stone yet if it does happen it will be rather painful for a lot of people but we will have to wait and see
And unfortunately it’s a very easy fix to avoid AoS Lizardmen making the game unhealthy - make Saurus more viable so that they become meta over Skink spam, but for some inexplicable reason GW won’t do it. Pity because until they do I’m not going to use my Lizardman army in AoS, because I’m never going to sink to the low tactic of repeatedly summoning endless hordes of crap skirmish troops so they fill up the board.
With the way the seem to be trying to make AoS 3e as close to 40k 9e as possible, I think it's very, very likely that the modifier cap rumor is true. What is more unclear is whether it's just going to apply to hit/wound modifiers, saves as well, or everything. Just watched Caleb Hasting's video on the new coherency rules, and this is just a straight up middle finger to melee infantry in the game, which seems to go along with what I'm seeing as AoS wanting to push shooting and mobility as the main playstyle. Except for super-elite, 3-model units, you're only able to get around half your troops into combat even if you're running an MSU of 5 or 10 models. This is *really* going to slow down melee combat and movement in general, but it also in a roundabout way seems to fit with their idea of wanting big, centerpiece models to be better. If you run say a Maw-Krusha into a 40-man horde, only maybe 10-15 of those models are going to be able to actually attack. So the horde will be lucky to get 1 or 2 wounds on the big guy, who will then proceed to wipe out around a third to half the unit. This applies to basically all monsters and big models, as wrapping them with groups of enemies becomes difficult to impossible depending on the terrain and size of the unit they're fighting. I guess this does cement spears or other weapons with 2" range as the superior option 90% of the time... All of this of course comes with a BIG asterisk saying that a complete re-work of combat in the game might mean that this new rule makes perfect sense within the new framework. So really, we just have to wait a few more weeks and see what happens. From what we're seeing of the new rules, I really think GW wants melee-centric infantry in general to go away. They want MSU of cavalry and blocks of archers/other ranged units bouncing around the board while gods and monsters hunt those small units one at a time, not melee hordes charging into each other. Smaller board sizes and rules encouraging smaller unit sizes, along with rumors of point hikes on everything to decrease army size in general all point to them wanting AoS to move to a much smaller scale.
well it's not just him about 3 dozen or so heroes got the same treatment as GW got very lazy with a few of the books and just threw +1 to hit an every hero
A lot more rule previews have been shown: *Note, looks like the idea of re-rolling is being lessened or removed, as CAs that used to give re-rolls now just give +1
You can still fly over the units around him just can't fly over him or land within 3" so it's not a hard counter. Right now the mass dispell is the only good example of a hard counter to endless spells. I agree it is a counter to endless spells but a hard counter is a bit much. I think it's good to see and bet you are right some if not all get something like this. They already do with the new hero abilties. New cogs looks cool and other endless spell changes will be interesting. Kroak with 4 cast and knowing all the Slann lore having extra spells will be nice. They are not bad spells at all being restricted to knowing 1 at a time was the downside. The new command abilities replacing existing+1 to hit command abilties on warscrolls might leave them room to change the warscrolls impacted. Which would be a lot...