AoS General's handbook feedback

Ghmm,. I dont think we need a nerf on any units. I agree we have some very good units, like razordon. But as a whole army is you often have 1-2 good units. It should be in balance with the rest off the army. And units should be costed taking the whole army in mind and not just the unit itself.

And on a side note. Razordons are good, but not very great. Their range is short. Meaning they are in charge range of the opponent. Their amount of attacks isnt reliable. I’d take 7 over 2d6 any day (or 2 over d3 for that mather). They dont really perform as assasin, pumping out 9 wound rolls. Which got nerfed by LoS. And also by making teleporting more unreliable. They only really shine defensively with screens in front of them. And that for 40 i think is fine.

For points decrease just Krox down to 140. And chameleon skinks to 100.
And maybe skink handlers to 30. But at 40 they perform as a sort of tax on the thunderquake.

Not the best units. And not very good, even after a point drop. Just more playable.
The skink starseer also is way overcosted. But I think thats more a Command ability problem. The old warscroll was way better.

 

Thunderquake +80
Engine of the Gods +40
Kroak -50
Kroxigors -20
Chameleon Skinks -20
Saurus Warriors 80/300
Starseer -80
Saurus Guard -10
Skink Handlers -20

 

Units should only be costed (if that is a word) according to the... amount of damage they are able to do ...before they are destroyed.

No other consideration.

 

I can't agree with that at all.

AoS is primarily a game of scoring objectives. You don't score objective by punching other units to death.

How much a unit can move, where it can move, what it does to boost other units, how survivable they are and if they are able to debuff over units, has to be taken into account when costing them.

Otherwise units that do very little damage, but can buff or debuff (like most basic wizards) should cost virtually nothing.

 

Not sure if pendrake is sarcastic or not. Skinks are the ultimate example.

 

Those seem fairly aggressive. EotG at 260 wouldn't be awful, but no one would (or should) take tquake at 200.

 

Thunderquake is an absurdly powerful battalion, it should definitely cost much more than 120 points.

 

Forgive my ignorance, but does the General's Handbook just adjust point costs or does it also make rule changes? For example, do the FAQ rule changes show up in the GH first?

 

They have done warscroll changes in the past, but it is almost entirely just point changes.
Unlike 40k, AOS rarely sees rule changes outside of new books.

 

Thanks for the info @PJetski . I guess this might be a moot point then, but I would like to see clarified rules for the Astrolith Bearer. Do we plant the Astrolith or not? Do we plant for one ability and not the other (which is how I assume it works now)?

 

Oh? I didn't realize that. Thanks @Aginor

 

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Meh, he has a point. Putting too much value on mobility & supporting abilities has a tendency of making stuff vastly overpriced.

The issue is that supporting units will never achieve much on their own, so you can never view their pointcosts in a vacuum. A supporting wizard like a starpriest is borderline useless without a target for its venom, which means you're going to be spending at least an additional 100 points to actually start making use of your starpriest and that's the bare minimum.

There's also the fact that a supporting unit will never be able to do stuff on its own and there are thus much more avenues for outplaying him. A starpriest can't win a fight on his own, so he needs a bodyguard to protect him, which means an additional unit is locked up staying in its vicinity. It's a squishy support hero so it has to be carefull not to walk into the firingling of artillery or it'l be deleted, if he gets seperated from his prefered target to buff he losses nearly all his impact on the field etc.

All in all this means that supporting units should nearly Always be very cheap as they just fall apart far too quickly when starting to become higher priced.

As for skinks, the main reason they're currently so overwhelming is cuz we can spam em with summons, the basic tactic around them literally just being to burry your opponent under useless fodder so he never actually gets to do anything as he has to chew through unit upon unit of skinks. The only reason this works is cuz we can summon a new unit each turn to stand in the way yet again. However, the skinks themselfs aren't the problem for your opponent here. Summoning is. Thus increasing the cost of skinks would not be the way to go.

Imho, our summoning mechanic is going to be a disaster to balance going forward as there's little to no (counter)play involved and thus not all that much to tweak to try and balance things out. Our opponent can only counter by killing the slann, and we have nothing to play around with to improve our summoning in a clever way either. Unlike say tzeentch where casting and unbinding spells now become even more important than usual and allow both the opponent and the tzeentch player wiggle room to try and gamble for more/less points in exchange for more/less spells fired at them/their opponent.

 

On the comment of counterplay. I played vs a summoning tzeentch list yesterday (pinks, gaunt, loc). And the game really swung back and forth. What we both realised is that summoning is powerfull, especially with loads of models near objectives. But the plays that switched the game in favor of the player, was the positioning. Really using that 9” away from enemy models, as screening off summoning to good positions. Area deniel was a much bigger threat that de dmg they could provide.

In another game vs Ironjawz my slann got in trouble having some ardboys in his face. Beeing unable to summon within 12, but outside 9” of enemy. Needing to teleport away, which now is more risky. And not having a good postition on the board to summon the units too. I guess in that way flyers much more worth now to get in their and denie some summoning.

 

I meant counterplay specificly regarding our generation of points. Positional play is a decent counter to limit the immeadiate effectiveness of what's summoned, but does nothing against the summoning itself. It doesn't matter much if what we summon are a couple inches further this or that way, as long as they can still be summoned somewhere vaguely usefull they'l probably serve their purpose.

The only situation in which this effectivly locks down summoning is when you're on top of the slann, in which case the seraphon player is in trouble regardless as that indicates he's screwed up rather much. Or if you can manage to box him in in a corner far away from anything relevant, but again, if you're driven so far back you can't even summon near something relevant you've probably already lost anyway as you've been completly and utterly outmanouvered…

 

Old blood??? Just bring along knight azzyee, better bang for your buck as all order units get the buff

 

You mean Knight-Azyros? Had to look him up. 100pts and better buff then Oldblood. Annoying really..