What do you know, GW acted! https://www.dropbox.com/s/y9vvb7nlhx4pwgr/Age of Sigmar Errata and Scenarios.pdf?dl=0
Wait.. Okay THIS is defiantely a big step in the right direction and quite honestly baffleing. Okay so GW goes ahead and makes a super dumped down game and then AFTER the release and AFTER veterans and store manages cried out because of lack of balance (oh yeah veterans they don't care about to begin with..) they decided to go ahead and do the direct opposite of dumped down? "no more than 35% of your army may be flyers" okay so that's.. So now we're supposed to sit with a calculater because GW derped up. Why not just do that to begin with? It's just so conflicting because super casual and sitting with a calculator is not exactly on the same path. But let me get this right.. Did they honestly just release a 4 page errate to a 4 page ruleset? Am I mis-reading something here? That's.. Hilarious Now.. Let's move on to a more .. interesting magic phase!
I for one understands PERFECTLY why they kept this out of a starter set! beginners would get seizures from decrypting it!
So GW wrote an unofficial errata and posted it to dropbox/google drive rather than on their own website? Seems fishy.
If they actually bothered in the first place it might've been hard for the newcomers to begin with. **EDIT** Maybe it's because it's new, but the old system was so much easier. Now you basically have to follow a checklist to make sure you didn't break some odd boundary. With that said I'm still not quite seeing the balance here - I mean won't the previous horde armies be at an disadvantage here? Isn't that exactly the issue by going with wounds and not points? If I bring 10 wounds of saurus warriors will they not just obliterate 10 wounds worth of skaven clan rats? **SECOND EDIT** Can someone explain this to me? When a unit exceeds 10 models, receive 2 models for each that is purchased with wounds. i.e. a unit that begins at Five, 1-wound models, would cost 10 wounds total for a unit of 10, but only 15 wounds for a unit of 20. Does it actually say that once you're past 10 wounds in a unit the additional wounds to that unit are now counted as half wounds? So you could bring 20 models and it would count for 15? Is that what they're trying to say? xD
I'm .. okay I shouldn't be disappointed in the scenarios, but I kinda am. They're just the same thing repeated. WIth that said I'm officially willing to try it out. It's likely not balanced yet but if GW can pull out an errata this quick maybe there's some hope for us yet? One thing I didn't read is that this is "unofficial for competitive play". I'm kind happy about that because at least GW acknowledges that there's is such a thing and it also gives tournament holders something to work it. It's not perfect, but from here on it can me modified to suit the game as it progresses and balance issues arrises.
Was this leaked? Why is it in a Dropbox? Why not the GW website? It lacks a lot of the formatting that AoS rules had. ... completely unofficial... for competitive play? Contradiction? Confused. I'm at a moral crossroad right now... xD Not sure whether to go with this or what. Yeah, I don't trust this at all. o.0 I'll wait for an official word and keep doing what I'm doing, I guess. I like this one: "When assigning wounds, Unit Command models are always treated as not being the closest model until they are the only models remaining. Instead, after wounds are done, Command Models are immediately pushed back to be within 1” of the closest surviving models in the unit or 3” directly away from the attacking unit if they are the only models left alive." There is nothing saying that you cannot take an entire unit of command, right? o.0 So... completely useless ruling here?
The way that combat is resolved... I just can't. -_- Goodbye, formations! Unless, of course, you stack command... which, even in this ruling, there is nothing saying that you can't. I dunno. This just seems bogus to me. :/ Good thing it's unofficial. At least the scenarios are kinda-alright-I-guess. I'm not following a word of this crap.
Some of the stuff does not look bad, though until this is posted directly on the GW website, I am not certain it actually are from them. Yes, that is how I read it, after the first 10 wounds, the cost for a wound would be half.
Had a night of sleep and checked up on it (fell over it in the late hours) The rumour says its something a GW store in Canada made, as the recognized obvious problems for their community. Its made for their opening event. So SOME part of GW acted at least. I dont care if its official or not, whats in that document makes perfect sense to me. Regarding "ALL CAN BE COMMAND GROUP" lets just be rational and say "...lets just not". Its something to build from and I am VERY happy that SOME part of their business took the responsibility to clean up. As for scenarios remember that rumour says "HUNDREDS" of scenarios, so this is just a start. It doesn't fix the skaven slave/saurus problem but its a start. If the community adopts this I would not be surprised if GW actually adopts it. It would give me hope for the game. EDIT: actually, I can see why a skavenslave is not a bad choice for their wounds. They can shoot and may give mortal wounds when they flee, so for a sacrifical "get in the way" block they are quite good. -Move skavenslaves in the way of elite combat unit..lets say mournefangs - shoot - expect to get charged - Get charged - if attacker chooses to strike first, the skaven still inflict wounds through this Cornered Rats: Roll a dice each time a Skavenslave flees, before it is removed from the battlefield. On a roll of a 6 the nearest unit within 6" (friend or foe) suffers 1 mortal wound as the terrified Skavenslave bites and claws manically to get away. Remove the Skavenslave if you rolled 5 or less, or after it has inflicted a mortal wound in its escape. - if some of them survives, make a retreat move and hold them up for another turn. If used as a speedbumb and attrition tool to witter down a dangerous unit while the skaven artillery shoots, a skavenslave will work better than a Saurus warrior. its about the perspective. Units are more than combat prowess.
For me it made AoS playable and if it's not completely made up and bogus it gave me hope. At any rate this is a start and I'm hope it'll spread so more people play with it. They issue with creating your own balance rules is that you'll have to explain it to new people and they may or may not agree. It'll just be everybody creating their own thing. With this we might have a good platform to start from. Now, how one creates a balance between good units and bad units is a different matter and is where s point system could be superior.
Imo, all it misses is a paragraph that says something like. If a unit in an army has a "Summon spell" or an ability that sets up a new unit, its owner must create a "reserve list" before the game starts, using the following criteria: - The reserve list may contain a Max. 1/4 of the armies counted wounds (including units not deployed) - May not contain a named character that is already in the army - May not contain a HERO so that more than the allowed 0-2 exists across the army and the reserve list - May not contain a unit with Fly if it would make the amount of flyers in the army more than 35% of the army's total wounds. - Units with models above 10 does not receive the "2 for 1" benefit when purchasing with wounds. - HERO MONSTER units counts double its wound cost If a player decides not to deploy a unit from his army list at the start of the game, this unit may be held in reserve and summoned during the game as though it was in the reserve list (this does not count towards the max. 1/3 of the army).
Even before reading comments, my spidey-senses were tingling about this not being GW's release. It is, however, a reasonably thought out way to deal with some of the gaping holes in the AoS system. If I am playing in the next little while, I think I will use these rules as a guide and see how things go.
How about just saying that summoning is s command ability that can only be used once. Personally I find the whole "SUMMON EVWRTHING!!" dumb. The slann appear to have other things to do so nerfing the summoning wouldn't be the worst thing.. Would it?
In my opinion, practically everything within that errata short of the scenarios, the brief summoning ruling and some of the army-building guidelines is no good. Disallowing shooting during combat is, to me, one of the worst things that it does. It's as though whoever wrote this simply forgot to playtest Wood Elves. Sure, it makes no sense to shoot into combat... but are shooting units that powerful right now? I can tell you: they aren't. Across the board, they are nowhere near the capability of dedicated melee units, even when they go all-out. For most shooting units, we're talking about less than one wound per turn per model, before saves. Many lack Rend. Monsters suffer still from being lone targets, and their shooting in my experience, is only very powerful when fielded en masse (Sunfire Throwers being an exception that should probably get nerfed). By the time melee makes it to their territory, they're useless due to these provisions. In that manner, they will get maybe two turns of effectiveness in the entire game, where melee units will be seeing 4+ turns (as they do now). Did shooting units need to get powered down? Waywatchers, some of the best shooters in 8th, aren't even anywhere near as strong as they used to be. Crossbowmen might be the best infantry shooting, and even they are not game-breaking. Artillery still carries some weight but, again, shooting is there to support combined arms tactics. And for the most part, artillery crew (wimpy and sparse) can be targeted. Actually, that's the other thing: By eliminating a player's ability to choose which models take wounds during combat, formations have just become incredibly weak. For all of the complaining over, "AoS is just about charging to the middle of the board with superstrong stuff and killing everything! No tactics!," formations were one of only a few ways to limit the power of meatgrinder units, and would also force your opponent think twice about charging with everything. Being able to pull models off of the back of formations made it so that you *can* tarpit those insanely powerful units by pacing the number of their models that get into combat. In that way, inferior units *can* beat superior ones if you execute good plans. I don't see how that ruling adds a LICK of balance to this game. It makes powerful melee units even more powerful, even to the level of point-and-click. There is no longer any drawback for charging with them as soon as possible. Peeling units from the front of combats (closest-to-closest) will only lead to superior units getting the surround every single time (looking at you, Temple Guard), with no extra thought on the part of their owning player. It makes the game extremely min-maxy. While deciding which units should fight first was a very, very important part of combat for sure, this ruling makes it the *only* part of combat: The enemy moves in, punches a hole in your formation, you fall out of 1" coherency, you need to retain that 1" coherency per rules, your units move into a single-file line to re-establish it. What do you do in return? Punch a hole in their line, they fall out of 1" coherency, they move back in to retain it, and their movements are forced into a single-file line. Boy is that exciting. Wow, such deep play. Thank you, guy from GW. That is going to happen in every single combat, because it has to by these rules. The game loses so much with that ruling alone. Being completely unable to target characters unless they're the closest model to the shooting unit, the Command Ability limitations & the Look Out Sir rulings are perhaps the most misguided of all of these. Since release, I recognized that characters had changed, and their roles had changed. Characters are extremely vulnerable now, but offer dynamic support options. With that in mind, I think these command abilities (and maybe some are an exception) should be powerful. To limit Command Abilities, disallow the targeting of characters, to add a Look Out Sir which buffs characters is the most damning of all of his: these rulings are simply relics from 8th edition, aside from the bizarre combat resolution that they've implemented. You know the counter to the Slann/Chakax combo in the normal rules? You cripple or kill Chakax outright, or you separate him from the Slann. Good luck reliably doing that when your shots need to get past a Look Out Sir... if you can even target him, which no sensible player will allow because they'll have put one model from the unit between him and his attackers. Plus, you can't shoot into the combat that he inevitably makes it to, and the combat is one that will see him surrounded by TG killing everything that gets close because, herka-derpa, you're forced to peel models off the front of combat with these rules and you can't even make a formation to slow down their pile-in. This looks like Herohammer but, really, it takes the spirit of the game out to such an extent that it should be called Zerohammer. I'm sorry, but this FAQ is absurd. I'll wait for something official. For all of the bogus flak that this game has caught for just being "a pile-in with a lot of dice rolls," that's exactly what this FAQ makes it. There were so many ways to implement avoidance in the standard rules. The game's been out for one week, and people are already mutilating it. Ugh. I guess now I know how the die-hard 8thers feel.
Summoned the old fashioned way? Like by carrier pidgeon or dispatch rider? (Summoned unit marches onto the playing field from an edge.) This is a useful exercise: trailing the mess back to source. Which store? if that is known / attributed. i.e: Who is Julian Hunt? (This name pops up in the dropbox page...)
Summoned via the appropiate spell/ability. Like "I dont want to deploy this unit of saurus, but I would like to summon it later with the *Summon saurus* spell" Regarding backtrailing: I honestly have no clue, passed on what I found because I liked it and hoped you guys would too.