AoS Fixing Serephon

again heroes are far to powerful to be invinsable like this no one can kill a 30 man unit of hearthguard when they are buffed even Gotrek takes 2-3 turns so you need to kill the rune master. what happens if you can't shoot him because he ether can't be targeted or he has a -3 to be hit. you can't break thru the berserkers as stated above you have to shoot him or play much better then your opponent everything in the game needs counter play sniping is just one of them.

 

That'd still leaves spells and the issues in melee, but yeah, it'd at least limit the ease with which you can do it. Personally in the current state I'd simply give them a little squad so they can have some ablative wounds as that'd at least stop an enemy from oneshotting them easily, increasing the oppertunity cost and making other targets more attractive. It'd also give a decent excuse for giving them a few more attacks, making them halfway capable of defending themselves. While it'd also leave the fluff of them being minor heroes, only slightly more capable than their underlings. Not superpowered god's of war.

Blocking the majority is obviously trivial, I mean if you have units of 10+ models it's already difficult to get the entire unit in range unless it has 2" attacks, so yeah blocking the majority is trivial.... But also entirely irrelevant if 1 or 2 models counterattacking can already be a significant threat. A skink priest struggles to duel a single liberator in melee combat, only doing an average 0.66 damage and suffering 0.44 damage in return per round of melee combat (not taking into account any potential support). It's completly plausible for that single liberator to take out half of the skink's wounds before he's finished off. And it isn't even impossible for the liberator to actually win. Unlikely, but not impossible (if I'd have to make a guess the skink probably wins 8 or 9 out of 10 times, but he will occasionally lose). That is an utterly terrible trade-off to defeat a single basic battleline model. And that's just a super basic model. Take something slightly fancier like a liberator with a great weapon, or a horde unit with 2" weapons and even protecting the priest like this becomes quite risky.

As for having some oppertunity to mitigate the damage. Sure, you get to stop or avoid some of it. But the moment a minor hero like this gets into range for either melee or ranged attacks/abilities to hit it it's trivial to knock of a significant chunk of its wounds. And again, the only vaguely reliable way to keep them safe is by staying the hell away from combat (or enemy archers, wizards, etc.) which rather conflicts with them trying to actually support. And apart from the fact that staying at maximum range is boring (wohoo, look at my mighty hero, cowering on the other side of the battlefield...), it also doesn't really work as it makes you suspectible to deepstrikes and the like, plus there's no guarantee that your max range actually keeps you out of range for his archers and whatnot...

As for my games, I largely play fairly friendly games, not massivly competitive ones, so we tend to avoid large buffed up cheesy doomstars or super scary behemoths in favor of more fun and manageable stuff to minimize the amount of frustration. This does also mean that support heroes can draw more attention as there's less oppertunity cost to trying to take out at the support, instead of trying to wittle down that huge blob of witch aelves running down the battlefield. There's simply less that needs to be taken care of immeadiatly cuz if you don't take care of it now they'l murder half your stuff and you won't be able to take care of it after that, and consequently we have a bit more freedom to pick your own priorities. Whereas judging from yours and @Erta Wanderer 's remarks you seem to be playing in a more competitive enviroment with far more doomstars and other nonsense drawing fire away from the minor heroes as most of those cheesy doomstars & behemoths are terrifying regardless of how well supported they are or not.

A unit of judicators takes on average 33-34 attacks using their skybolt bows to kill another 5 man unit of judicators, not taking into account special weapons, support, or even their captain guy.
A unit of judicators takes on average 14 attacks to take out a skink priest with look-out-sir in the same setup. Without look-out-sir it takes them 10 attacks.
A unit of judicators takes on average about 33-34 attacks to take out 10 saurus warriors.
A unit of judicators takes on average about 28 attacks to take out 10 skinks with shields
Why is a skink priest so much easier to kill than basic battleline and even cannonfodder? Even with the additional protection of look-out-sir he still dies in less than half the attacks needed for the judicators & warriors and about half the attacks needed for freaking skinks. None of those are even particularly sturdy battleline. Without the additional protection he barely takes a third of the damage any of the others need.

Also, I actually think the sunblood is more or less fine defensivly, or at least in a vastly better spot than the skink priest. He isn't a support hero, he's a combat hero and actually has fairly decent stats. If you're interested it takes something like 42 attacks for the judicators to take him out when he has look-out-sir. Any buffs he needs defensivly are purely to deal with powercreep, not because he's inherently designed to fall over to a stiff breeze like the skink priest is. It's his offensive where I'd like to see some buffs (the exploding dice give him a nice potential, but he's completly reliant on those 6's so a mediocre round can see him doing very little)

That is not a support issue though, that's an issue with hearthguard being stupidly powerfull baseline. Hell, the things that make a hearthguard powerfull are all on their own warscroll. The "support" doesn't even need to do anything besides exist, it doesn't even need any abilities or rules of its own, for the hearthguard to become problematic. So that's really not an argument against improving support. It's an argument in favor of lowering the baseline power of these kind of units.

 

No player who knows what they're doing wants to get into melee with that unit anyway, so they may as well shoot them if they pose the biggest and most immediate threat. Also, if you're looking for a counterplay for this, there are more than a few units in 40k for example whose special rules allow them to target heroes who would otherwise be benefiting from Look Out Sir.

If it works well enough for the Underworlds plug-ins like Spiteclaw's Swarm, then I see no issue with that idea.

 

yes because having to take 3-4 specialized units to prevent terrorgysts carnasaurs and maw crushers from hitting your front line unopposed is going to do wonders for army flexibility.

 

You're forgetting that heroes with the MONSTER keyword do not benefit from Look Out Sir at all.

 

fine we will use less extreme samples like necromancers, guardian of soules any death general, nagash. all skaven heroes with a speshal shout out to the plague furnace and the doom bell, our skinks rerolling everything is dumb,tzaangor shaman, hag queens, hag queens on cauldrons, Archregents, ghoul kings, akhelian kings, tidecasters, warchanters, cogsmiths,blood priests and many many more.

 

but would benefit from your above mentioned ideas as they have the hero tag and all heroes affect temple guard

 

If you want to rules lawyer the damn thing, then we can definitely have temple guard only confer this benefit to non-monster heroes and that the benefit doesn't stack on top of Look Out Sir.

I never once said that this was a complete idea that's been tested.

 

fine that was a bit techy of me sorry.
but the list abouve shows all the other problem childen with this idea you would make skaven, and slanesh even more unkillable and a lot of other heroes that summon hundreds of points and are now unkillable our slann would be the most hated model in the entire game because now you just can't stop our summoning.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I can tell, you're trying to extrapolate an idea specifically for guard-type units to any and all multi-model units. Beyond that, I don't know if you're thinking that I'm presenting one idea when I gave two, let alone which one I'm emphasizing for the purposes of this discussion.

To clarify, I'm focusing on working within the limitations of AoS's current game mechanics, and thus I'm solely referring to the capped to-hit penalty in this context.

Theoretically, yes, it would make it more difficult for anyone to go after heroes in any army. The problem I have with that logic however is that it neglects to address army-specific special rules that make units with such an ability redundant, if not useless. Skaven are a prime example of this, as their heroes already have rules specific to them that give them greater odds of survival than most in their weight category. Compare and contrast this with the early installment weirdness that Seraphon have been putting up with since 1st Edition AoS, where the only two units in the faction that don't rely on other units or artifacts for that kind of increased survivability are the bastilodon and skink skirmishers to a lesser degree, and the only unit in the faction that directly aids in the survivability of another unit is a hero that outside of a specific warscroll battalion really only benefits... one other hero.

 

ah i might have misunderstood you do you meen only guard and similer units cancel out shooting?

 

To a degree, yes. The kind of limitation I'm thinking of for the ability of such a dedicated guard unit is that the ability reduces the roll to hit a nearby friendly hero until the penalty either caps out -3 or reduces the roll to a 6+, whichever comes first.

By dedicated guard unit, I'm referring to a defensive unit that specifically has special rules as part of its warscroll that are dedicated to either making it harder to pick off a nearby hero (as per this idea) or taking hits from attacks directed at said hero.

 

6+ would be less almost all shooting is 4+ to hit. and i can't think of any outher units in the game that have a protect hero abilitys so it would only be guard that have this very very broken ability. this would be the equivalent of a artifact LoS and starlight stacked

 

Most of the examples you're giving are not support heroes, something like Nagash or a plague furnace is an army's centerpiece, not a supporting unit. There's some examples in there, like cogsmiths & necromancers. But the vast majority of exampels you're giving aren't support. They have (some) ability to support other units, but they can easily be turned into the mainshow.

Also, as for stuff like skaven that already have a mechanic in place to deal specificly with this issue, obviously those wouldn't need the exact same change or that mechanic needs to be changed as well.

No, not all heroes need attendants/bodyguards. It's only the minor ones that should have them.

But it doesn't have a useable combat statline and that's the whole point. It struggles to defeat a mere 2! liberators. 40 points of basic battleline are enough to force him to retreat. That isn't useable, that's pathetic. He only starts to become relevant when both armies have been all but destroyed... I don't want him to be good, I want him to be capable enough that he wouldn't have to run from a decimated basic battleline unit....

I'm not saying a skink priest should be going around charging terrorgheists, nor should it be overeager to fight some basic battleline. But it should at least not be completly screwed if it has no other choice but to fight that basic battleline unit...

Yes heroes need to be targetable, and need to die when concerted effort is made to do so. But they shouldn't fall over to a stiff breeze and be utterly incapable of defending themselves.

Again, I'm not saying they need to be immortal, but 4 wounds and a 5+ save just isn't enough to survive anything. And averaging less than 1 succesfull damage without even looking at save values isn't enough to threaten even a mortally wounded opponent. Give minor heroes enough survivability that they don't have to fear being instantly killed by virtually anything, give them good enough attacks that they can do more than scratch the paint on the armour of basic battleline. That's literally all I want.

 

no almost everything i mentioned is ether support or somthing you have to drop immediately. necromancers have dance mecab gardian of souls brings back crazy amounts of models, death generals bring back intire units, nagash is best taken out at range and this makes it imposible, skinks are suport, tzaansagor shaman adds attacks and modles, hag queens let you reroll wounds and shrugs,the fleash eater heroes bring in back up units, the akelian kin (or maby voltros not surten witch)gives eels a lot more attacks, tide casters drop hit rolls and let you skrew with the tides of death, warchanters give +1 to hit and it stacks and blood priests give a lot of attacks. so not all of them are strictlysupport heroes all of them give nasty buffs you wan't to mitigate.

 

Valid. Alternatively, something akin to the Storm-shield ability that Stormcast Protectors have would make sense for temple guard:

 

i realy like this idea not overpowering but does a good job of representing guard ability.