AoS Are Ossiarchs any good? (Practice not theory)

you have no idea i have 180 of the little buglers 240 if i sub in handlers my full skink list runs 220 of them,
you could always drop 40 of them and run it with a fang of sotek

 

And now I need another 80 skinks

 

never enough

 

This discussion is why I started building an Ogor army lol. When our army comes down to "fill the board with skinks and annoy your opponent because there's no other viable way to win", it's frustrating.

 

Here here. There's no joy for your opponent in that game. My seraphon are taking a break from anything but friendly pickups until saurus warriors are more viable again.

 

that's a def lose lose situation. I started BCR and Fyreslayers… and then I got told Fyreslayers are OP...

 

They aren’t. They forfeit half the tournament scenarios by default because of the nature of their army. Enjoy them as much as you want guilt free. People just want to be able to charge models, roll dice, and kill things and when you have an army that says we won’t die, find a different way to play, it makes people uncomfortable.

 

im sorry.. I fail to see how an Army that "forfeits half the tournament scenarios" is a top tier army. and the consensus is they are top tier.

 

they are slow and most lists run 1 or 2 giant blocks of troops. So in the scenarios where they have to be in many places at once they struggle. That’s what I mean as about half of the missions have moving objectives and multiple objectives. They are tough as nails and amazing at everything else in the game. It’s part of why they are always top 3 or 4 but don’t win tournaments.

 

they are 7th in the current rankings what he is talking about is the 8 objective maps that fyrslayers struggle with don't worry fyrslayers are at the top of A teir just not OP

 

i agree with everything except that they don't win. they have the 4th most 1st place wins in the last 6 months they do just fine at tournaments

 

just bring a Rune Smiter and bam! 9" of move is all that's necessary. seems odd that this would be an issue for bringing large units

 

They are definitly OP. But people keep thinking being OP means you'l win everything (or at least most things), which it doesn't. People are far too obsessed with winrates when determining if something is OP/UP/balanced, often giving broken stuff a pass so long as it still results in "normal" winrates...

 

in that case how would you define op or broken? if it's just a very potent rule or unit then our army would count.

 

Something's OP when the "counter" boils down to "just minimise the damage it causes and don't bother trying to defeat it". Or worse were the counter essentially just means to "just win" cuz the counter is something like "dodge every single attack", though fortunatly that last one I haven't really seen in warhammer yet. Similarly, when your opponent screwing up matters more than you playing well the mechanic/rule/unit is probably OP. And lastly there's of course mechanics where your opponent gets to do something big, and you can't interact with it in any signifacnt way, for example the ossiarch catapults oneshotting an important hero turn 1 from halfway across the table.

In the case of fyreslayers they're OP as there's no viable way to defeat the unit unless your opponent screws up and allows you to snipe the supporting heroes. Which leaves only the option of stalling them with fodder.

 

so no heavy armor dispite the fact that they are the best counter to the doom hammers got it. the other option is to just chaf up witch as you say bellow is a bad thing

so like our teleports or summoning i general? or for that matter all alegence abilities with speshal note of the big wagh, the tides of death, wildwoods, nagash casting and so on. are all of those broken? they don't alow for counter play and give massive benefits.

but that is the counter to powerful units thats half the point of chaff tarpiting has been a thing for ages

 

Heavy armour is of course allowed, however it shouldn't be outright unkillable by "normal" troops.

Imho the bigger issue is the eternal armsrace. The game needs ridiculously unkilleable nonsense to deal with the ridiculous damage output of certain units. But this leaves only the option of trowing an OP offensive unit at an OP defensive unit. While "normal" units become relativly useless.

Our teleporting is kept in check by limited number of uses. Also, there's the range limitations allowing the enemy some semblance of influence. Also we don't have anything to follow up the teleport with. We lack ranged firepower, so teleporting away and bombardign the enemy from a safe distance doesn't work. We don't have healing, so we can't teleport away, heal, go back in and use this to cycle troops and minimize losses. And we don't have any reliable charges after teleporting so we can't use them to quickly close the distance and immeadiatly be in the enemy's face. All of which significantly limits the "big" plays you can make with it. So in that sense I find it reasonable.

The only truly OP use of our teleport would be the sudden objective grab. As you can't reasonably expect your opponent to constantly have all objectives covered. Though with limited number of uses it's not too bad an offender. It also helps that a lot of objectives give you bonuspoints for holding it for extended amounts of time, reducing the value of sudden grabs. But yes, it's one that can very easily turn into something increadibly OP.

Depends on who's summoning. Khorne, Nurgle & Tzeentch seem to be reasonable as they don't generate too many points & there's clear ways of countering the point generation. Seraphon are more questionable as our point generation is far less easy to influence but with our bad statline we mostly just summon fodder anyway which keeps it in check. Plus our summoners are killeable. In our case the mechanic is mostly just boring, but not necesarly OP. Slaanesh however seems like a summoning on the OP side, they can summon big stuff, generate points quickly. And most importantly, attempting to kill their summoners allows them to summon more stuff, so unless you wipe them out in one fell swoop they're liable to resummon a big chunk of their losses immeadiatly.

Most allegiance abilities are fine as they aren't too "big". And yes, "big" is subjective. It also helps that the entire faction is (or should be) balanced around having these abilities. Having appropriatly weak base-stats/abilities to make sure they don't get OP when the allegiance abilities kick in.

So what's important to note is that OP is at least partially subjective as it's often also dependent on how things are percieved. An uncounterable non-interactive ability is fine as long as it's small enough.

Nagash is OP by sheer virtue of being such a massive outlier and no other wizard being able to even touch him. As a consequence if magic is balanced around "normal" wizards he'l be OP. If it's balanced around him normal wizards will be fairly underwhelming. So regardless compared to other wizards he's OP, even if magic itself is relativly weak keeping him "balanced" in the context of the entire game.

The issue is that it's basically the only viable tactic against them. Whereas you should want to have several options. Normally I'd expect the following to be viable against a doomstar:

- Keep it busy with chaff, and ignore it
- Overwhelm them with a mass of lesser troops.
- Wittle them down, taking a few wounds off each turn
- Shoot it from a distance.
- Keep it busy, and take out the support with a flanking attack or from range, then kill it
- Send in your own big scary stuff

Out of these the only 2 options truly that work are either to ignore it or to send in your own scary stuff. Taking out the support only really works if either your opponent screws up and puts it in a vulnerable position, or if you have overwhelming ranged firepower and can just shoot it despite things like look-out-sir, which only a few factions truly can. The other options either take too long or cost far too much to be viable strategies.

 

ok then at what point does that chang do phoenix guard count? they are farly unbreakable by anything that dosent have rend 2 how about our bastiladons every one i have ever feilden it against have canlled it a broken mess and most troops can't toch it if the skink is around or temple guard all of the abouve is almost imune to like 60% of the game thats why people take them.

i agree with this compleatly it's why our good units are falling out of the meta and is just a sympton of GW being bad at rules righting

and there hyper anvil is limited by it's very high cost almost a 1000 points to do it right the fact that they are slow as dirt and cant relly fight in more then 2 places so most people fined it reasonable dispite it being a hard counter to the big players in the league.

but we have that that is what our chameleons do a unit that we can summon 3 of turne 1 and then there is the battle plan that gives you more points if you take a objective from a oponent so that counteracts the long turme one in fact it's good on the long turm one as well as that one you burn objectivs for points.

so a powerful ability or unit can be mitigated by safishent down sides like the ones stated above

we are in agreement here but i think it's only a down side due to the fact that slaneesh has no
weaknesses

well then tell that to orks the big weagh buffs alredy powerful units the tide of death takes a already powerfull and mobile unit and just makes it worse skaven takes the big units and makes it a very powerful strength undoing any week units and OBR takes good units and breaks them so i think the statement still stands

right which is why when we are talking in objective turms we use win rates mixed with tournament placing and a bit of deductive reasoning as it's the best(although not nearly perfect) way to codify power in any meta. i know you don't like it as you focus an whats fun to play against(which is fair and a good way to look at things) but when we are trying to judge results it's the best thing we currently have.

this has always been the best against doomstars

i haven't done the math but i think you can do this if your name is DoK Skaven OBR or cities so a maybe

fair this is the one thing you can't do to FS

yup we can't do this becouse we suck but a lot of armies can.

and that works depending on what you meen by scary stuff a simelerly hyper anvil will stop hearth guard dead like phoenix guard and they just stand there looking menacingly at each other

well cities can do it with iron drakes and the hurricaneium the and scaven can do it with jesuaries and lighting gun. the problem is more that there are so few ranged armies we use to be one but we are old and tierd same with KO and tzeench i think it's just all the counters to fyrslayers havent been updated yet and i think that STD will hard counter them they have a lot of you can't move abilities that will suck for FS as they reliy on 1 or 2 verry powerfull units to be any good.

TL DR there is solid cointerplay to FS we just don't have it so it's back to skink spam like always

 

Temple guard are in a bad place as they combine 1 wound with a potential 2+ re-rollable rend-protected save. Which is either far too resilient, or squishy as hell depending on how easy the acces to mortal wounds is.

Phoenix guard have a similar issue, as temple guard, though a bit less OP against regular wounds, while far less vulnerable against mortal wounds which makes them far more annoying as now you have no clear counter anymore. At least guard have a clear weakness. In general, I'd say a defensive unit that has only 1 wound and relies on a good (ward) save is always going to be problematic in AoS.

The bastiladon I'd actually consider fairly balanced. It's sturdy, but not impossible to kill as it doesn't have a very large amount of wounds nor does it have acces to a save after save. And it can't take artifacts. If it were a hero and you'd stick for example a gryph feather on it it'd quickly become problematic. Simply throwing a large volume of attacks at him will do the trick, and you're not even going to need 100's of hits to succeed at it either.

There's 1 issue with that drawback though; mobility doesn't always matter. Yeah it's a great drawback when he's on the other side of the table. But if he's already sitting on top of the objective then it doesn't matter that he's slow.
And this imho is one of the biggest flaws designers tend to make. Something is made OP in one department, with a significant drawback in another, unrelated, aspect to balance it out. But since the advantages and disadvantages are unrelated you end up in situations where the drawback simply doesn't matter. And yes, usually that drawback will be enough to keep the thing in check with respect to win-rates. But that doesn't make it any less OP.

Also, it further aggrevates the arms race. Yeah it's slow, but sometimes you have no choice you're going to need to kill them. So stuff needs to be able to kill them. So a counter unit is designed that can kill them but this counter is so powerfull that "normal" anvils get completly annihilated, so we need even hyper-der anvils and the cycle continues...

yes, as I said, that one can be OP in certain situations/matchups, but as far as I've seen so far in most it isn't too terrible (yet).

Also, chameleons are a seperate thing entirely, even if they have their own teleport

Provided the downsides are actually relevant. Which is often not the case.

Hence the caveat most allegiance abilities are fine. OBR especially seems to be rather ridiculous.

Except winrates are fairly meaningless as there's too many factors contributing to them so reducing "balanced" to this simple number is pointless. My favorite example of this League of legends, where you play using champions. Champions often have different winrates depending on which level of play you're looking at. Certain champions are super OP, but easy to shut down, so they are oppresive as hell in low level play, while completly irrelevant at higher levels. Others are too complicated, but mastery pays off, so at low level they don't achieve anything while at the top they consistently win. So regardless of which level of play you're going to take as the benchmark, your balance will be wonky at the other levels... and that's just looking at 1 factor that influences winrates...

Which I consider bad, to an extent at least.

When I said "lesser" troops I did mean relativly unsupported mediocre troops. So let's say throwing 40 unsupported saurus knights at em Not throwing 100 fully buffed up clanrats at em.

Imho, that's problematic in itself. An army should not only be counterable by specific other armies. Don't get me wrong, obviously being a fast shooty army will give you certain advantages over a slow choppy army. But you shouldn't need to be a fast shooty army to actually be able to fight the slow choppy army. Other compositions should still be able to succeed.

 

hmmm i don't agree with this but i now understand where your coming from

exept it really really does movement is so important in this game it's not even funny the best unit in the intire game would have 6/6/0/1 no save and a 36" move just becouse being where you need to be is that important it's the only reason our army does so well and the mane reason why gotrek never sees play it doesn't matter how powerfull you are if you can't get that power where it needs to be. and this is a multi objective game and FS can only feild 2 avils it's why they lose 6 and 8 objective games so often
And this imho is one of the biggest flaws designers tend to make. Something is made OP in one department, with a significant drawback in another, unrelated, aspect to balance it out. But since the advantages and disadvantages are unrelated you end up in situations where the drawback simply doesn't matter. And yes, usually that drawback will be enough to keep the thing in check with respect to win-rates. But that doesn't make it any less OP.[/QUOTE]then should everything just be meh at everything? having a unit/army be strong in one aria and week in another is how you get verience otherwise everything is just a big shade of brown no one stands out. if it's only how far you go with something then as you seed thats subjective. but how is somthing saposed to do a job if it isn't better then other units at it >and if it's just better full stop why would you use anything else?

well no even with counters good play can deni them thats what screens are for or just good positioning you let the glass cannons be usless and then you kill them.

are they? if this armies weaknesses didn't matter we would have a slanesh on our hands where they just never lose but no there is solid counter play here

but i can expand this to almost every army with verry few exeptions so no it's not MOST aleagence abilities are the most potent things we have and they tend to play with the strengthens of the army

but it's not the armies that every one thinks are broken are by far the highest in the rankings and the ones that are bad are all verry low the stats match the general knowlege more bellow

but our armies don't follow that trend gitz and ogars are the closest but thats what the deductive reasoning is for any one who knows the game knows that ogars will never be top teir(and the win rates show this) but if your brand new to the game they will reck you. but slanesh is always good no matter what you do same with the rest of the top you realy can't skrew any of the top 7 armies up at anything above beginner lvl and even the best seraphon players have a lot of troble going 5 and 0 in a big turny.

why? is it bad the anvils are week to rend or monsters to weight of dice everything has counter play why is this any different?

what? why should unbuffed light infantry have a good chance against buffed heavy elates? that makes no sense.

but again amies have personality KO is onabashidly a shooting army so of corse they will die in melee same with tau in 40K if you wan't a good army. and no you don't have to be a sooty army here nore is there only one counter. i layed out 3-4 counters to FS be faster be durable enough to take it on the chin have masses of bodies magic like std or hit verry hard most armies in the game can do one of the abouve or a mix of them. just not us we are behind the curve (and the win rates show this) so we can't compeat. are you really surprised?