Starblood Stalkers look like a steal now. The Oldblood not having the command ability doesn't matter. He is just a cheap beatstick for the MSU grind. (And you probably don't want other Saurus models anyways).
The oldblood in there still has one of the worst weapon options with no rend, though the highest volume of hits. So meh, unless this turns out to now be the optimal weapon it's not that much of an improvement.
At least the added skinks are slightly more usefull now that 99% of all units are going to be MSU anyway. And even then they're still fairly terrible.
Just a random question to anyone who feels like giving their honest theory, especially if you have any knowledge or experience with the industry. But what are people's real opinions on why they made such massive changes to AoS 3?
Nerfing hordes makes some semblance of sense. As hordes inherently bring a couple of issues with them. Their large footprint, combined with the free-form formations & the fact that you get to choose which models die gives them an immense amount of physical control of an area. And their large numbers means they're super efficient to buff; which has been a big source of the powercreep. As everything else needed to compete with this.
So there I can at least see where GW could be coming from from a game-mechanic point of view. Regardless of if I agree with it or not, at least I can think of some logical explenation.
Admittadly, this is about the only change that make sense in that respect. Throwing a rule of one on command abilities, removing the old battalions, introducing generic battalions with horrible rewards etc. those seem to just be change for the sake of change...
Makes sense. That seems to be the current trend in most "geek" hobbies nowadays. The "dumb it down so that the younger kids will get into it" mentality never made sense to me. Kids got into Warhammer Fantasy and 40k 10 years ago with the more complicated rules they had back then, so why do we need everything simplified even further to try and entice new people today? It's the same problem I have with D&D 5e and other RPGs. "
They're not dumbing it down for the kids. The geek kids who naturally gravitate to these hobbies will come anyway.
They're dumbing it down to reach the general population. People who would normally never bother playing games like this, cuz they're not actually interested. But who end up playing cuz their friends are playing and it's currently the cool hip thing to play and they don't want to be left out. And who will move on to the next thing whenever this loses popularity.
It's especially noticeable with videogames like LoL, who constantly release random crap that has nothing to do with the actual game and make it lose any internal consistency. Both in terms of game balance, where there's constant powercreep as every update needs to be shinier than the last, as in terms of lore which is just a giant incoherent mess at this point.
But these players won't care, they just want to play dress-up and make their champion look like an anime highschool kid or a basketballer, or like they wield a giant lollypop for a weapon or some such nonsense and then just spend an hour with friends fooling around. The game is just a vehicle for the social interaction, but not important in itself.
