AoS Realms

Right I have completely misunderstood the new rules then. I thought your artefact was replaced with the artefact from whatever realm was chosen. So it is basically the same as Malign Sorcery, just different artefacts then.

 

yep no one would ever take it if your artifact was ramdom that would suck

 

It doesn't always work though. It's not that difficult to create a situation where either you bring your broken stuff, and get roflstomped. Or you bring a "fun" army, but then get roflstomped in turn. It's especially noticeable when your opponent still has a small collection, and in general in smaller games where 1 powerfull unit can easily dictate the flow of the game.

As an example, my girlfriend's SCE collection is fairly small, and contains a lot of shooting. Consequently saurus warrior-based lists are impossible to use because they'l simply get shot to bits long before reaching her. In contrast, the old shadowstrikehost would annihilate her simply because they can drop on top of her. Finding a list that can go against her SCE that doesn't result in tabling her, or being tabled 2-3 turns in is ridiculously difficult.

I was referring more to tournaments, or a group that can't/won't play with "fun" lists. It works, to an extend, when everyone agrees to play a fun list instead of just bringing oppresive nonsense, but the moment 1 player doesn't play along the entire plan falls apart.

 

Sure, not always, but in most cases. If players have small collection, the problem will be resolved, when they get a larger one. As long as both sides understand what they are doing, there shouldn't be any problems. Yes, it happens that you or your opponent underestimated army's strength, but it is still solvable.

Then there's no problem with being oppressive in the first place. Just bring your Kroak and 18 salamanders. As long as all players enjoy powergaming, that is okay. If not all of them enjoy it, it is different matter, but it doesn't concern my initial point.

I can speak only for my own group, but we simply don't have such problems at all. If we are told not to bring strong lists, we don't. Surely, we had bad situations because of misunderstanding, but those were exceptions. If it happens that someone keep bringing broken stuff to fun events, we would just stop playing with them. But, fortunately, we didn't have such situation yet, not even close.

In short, my initial point was that in most cases, if you feel oppressive, just tone down your list, you don't need GW's permission to do it.

P.S.: I am afraid, we are getting completely off-topic at this point. I would be happy to continue discussion in another thread, if anyone wish, but let's leave Realms thread to discuss realms.

 

This is semi related to Realms as I have been looking at the Realm of Shyish quite a lot. Im wondering about the rules of Nullification though - The terrain feature says once an endless spell model is set up or finishes a move within 1", it is automatically dispelled.

What if I decide to cast the Stormcast Everblaze Comet 1" within a terrain piece with Nullification? The spell deals damage after setting up the model. As I read it none of them really suggest their effects happen immediately, but rather once setting up the model. In any other part of the game where 2 things happen at the same time, whoevers turn is taking place decides in which order stuff happens. So as I see it, I can cast my Everblaze Comet within 1" of the Nullification terrain piece, burn everything within 10", then automatically dispell it so it is ready to be recast next turn without having to waste a cast dispelling it in the start of my next hero phase.

Anyone got some arguement as to why this wouldnt be the case?

 

Seems against the spirit of the rule.So I'd say it shouldn't be allowed.

However, RAW it would be I guess.

O sure you don't need GW's permission, I just wish GW balanced the game such that it wasn't so ridiculously easy to run into the issue to begin with

 

can anyone tell me, how does kroak get a +3 to unbind?

 

+1 from Celestial Equilibrium from another Slann, +1 from Asterism and +1 from warscroll.

 

+1 from being Kroak
+1 from The Sage's staff
+1 from another slann casting Celestial Equilibrium

for a total of +3

true, but I do think GW has the tendency of making it very easy to exploit at least in AoS and 40K, if not outright encourage players to exploit rules at time, especially if you look at some of the example lists they show when announcing a new battletome or other major release. There's also generally not many limits to what you can do (aside from the point limit).
It always makes me really curious what the core design philosophies are regarding what the limits are within which the game should operate. What kind of unit/combo/playstyle/etc. should not be allowed regardless of how expensive & difficult it is made because it just ends up breaking the core of the game.

 

Ironically white dwarf battlereports are usually super casual with armies just randomly thrown together with barely a thought for synergy and thus lacking the usual powerfull combo's. It makes it very hard to understand what exactly the rules & philosophies are that the writers have to work with when designing new stuff.

 

Isn't that a good thing? Rewarding players for smart combinations of rules to create something greater than the whole. I dunno, sure some things get overlooked or taken too far but i dont really see how that's bad.

 

I wonder how often some of the “power house” lists we see are happy accidents and not “intended” by Gw.

 

It's not inherently bad, the only issue is that even those combo's need their limits. And that's were GW seems to be lacking. They encourage combo's, no matter how much they break the current mold of the game. There doesn't seem to be any point at which they go "mm, maybe this particular combo resulting in X is too much".

Admittadly, this might be partially due to how it's presented, we're not going to see every idea they reject internally. But there's very little that indicates a specific limit for any mechanic. So far compared to the when AoS first came around nearly every limit has been broken repeatedly, more damage, sturdier defenses, more summoning, faster movement, more casting bonusses, etc. With only a handfull of these mechanics being reigned in at some point.

 

I mean AoS is rebalanced several times a year, is there something more specific you're looking for?

I guess i'm just not sure exactly what you're getting it. Sure combos are occasionally too powerful, but things rarely dominate the meta for any kind of extended length. Skaven and FeC were quickly brought down, Slaanesh was totally gutted, revived, shot again, and then finally burned to nothingness with the newest ghb. OBR have largely been brought back in by a meta of shooting and mortal wounds.

Maybe their "this is too much" line in the sand is simply farther out then yours. Maybe they simply don't always do the best job of balancing a game with hundreds of units, dozens of armies, and a mountain of rules to go along with it.

Regardless, does it matter? Top level tournament players enjoy the chase and the power gaming aspect of it so they are happy. Casual players can simply not use the most broken shit imaginable, and narrative players can pick and choose whats appropriate based on their narrative.

More, more, more isn't inherently a problem. When AoS came out books didn't even have allegiance abilities. Would that be your preference? If not, what would be? Honestly curious.

 

Yeah, but how often does that happen? A tiny handful of times? And shouldn't they be doing exactly what you said? They noticed a problem, they fixed it. The realistic alternative is they never fix it or they never even try to create rules that can push the boundaries of the game.

Are we really saying that's a bad thing? I'd rather shoot for the stars and occasionally crash land and need to rebuild the rocket then be satisfied riding horses for the rest of my life.

I don't know how you create dynamic, exciting rules, without also being like "maybe lets pull this back a little bit" every now and then.

 

It is, cuz infinite growth simply doesn't work, eventually you run into problems

Things like allegiance abilities, or entirely new mechanics like endless spells, mount traits etc. Are not inherently bad. And you need to introduce some new stuff every so often to keep it fresh if you want a living game.

However, what I miss is hard limits on what any combo is ever allowed to achieve and which may never be crossed, no matter the powercreep. As an example, when AoS started the SCE with their 4+, re-rolling 1's or better on their basic liberators had above average defenses. Now we got OBR with their re-rolling 2+/3+ saves, ressurecting models & a ward save and the SCE are made out of wet tissue paper by comparison. That's some absurd powercreep, even if the point cost is "appropriate", and frankly somewhere along the way someone should've pointed out that maybe things might be getting a bit out of hand.

Another example is spellcasting, where we've gone from casting bonusses being fairly rare, to regularly seeing +3's and now we even have a model with flat out guaranteed casts. How is a basic wizard supposed to compete with that?

Of course I'm not actually expecting GW to outright tell us what these limits are. But with 20+ factions these limits should be fairly well established and we should not be blindsided by a new release suddenly breaking the rules, again. At least not on a regular basis. Breaking core-rules like this should only really happen during big game-wide updates, like going to a new edition. Not when a new faction is released and its randomly 10 times better at mechanic X than all previous factions.

Also, for clarity. A new faction (or unit) breaking these rules does not necesarly result in the new faction becoming dominant. There may be sufficient disadvantages still holding it back from that. However, it does mean that now to keep up, other factions that focus on the mechanic this faction just broke need to be updated to be competitive in this specific aspect. And eventually you end up with silly things, like a regular wizard being useless because all the good wizards run around with +2/+3 casting/unbinding bonusses, which means that your magic is completly shut down for some armies in certain match-ups. Which is just rather weird and kind of lame.

I'm not expecting perfection, or even for them to put the limit where I'd put it. But as is right now, I barely feel like there is a limit, and at times some of the unbalanced stuff is just so obvious it makes me wonder how they'd miss it.

I don't want to have to throw out half the game because it consists of broken stuff. So yeah it does.
And of course currently it's not that extreme. But if you don't put in limits and just let the powercreep grow and grow you'l eventually reach a point where you might as well just rewrite the game from scratch yourself if you decide to not use the broken stuffs. So yeah, it does matter for the more casual & narrative gamer.

Also, obviously it has an effect on the direction the game goes in. If GW decides that the game would be healthier with say, more anti-horde mechanics cuz all the power-gamers are abusing hordes at tournaments this'll change things for the more casual players as well.

I think it happens a bit too often, and at least as important, it frequently seems to be rather obvious that a certain rule is going to be problematic, or the it becomes problematic within weeks. It's not like it takes months for someone to figure out some hidden combo GW overlooked.

The principle is of course fine, design something crazy, test it and dial back if needed. But then your tests do need to catch the flaws before it's released on the general public. And even then, that crazy design should still fall within the basic limits of your game, and that's easy enough to test as those limits should be fairly straightforward (e.g. no better save + re-rolls + ward save combo than failing 1/X times shouldn't exactly be difficult to check).

Also, obviously the fact that they actually fix some of their mistakes is great. They do seem relativly willing to dial back the worst of it at least. Though there do some to be some that go untouched. Admittadly some of those would require proper reworks of relativly new tomes, so it is a decent chunk of work, so you can forgive them for that, to a point.

 

Honestly, the way you've described your idea of "hard limits" makes it seem like you want the game to stagnate regardless of what your first paragraph says. A basic caster intentionally isn't supposed to compete with a +3 caster. That is literally by design. Why else give it +3? If the toughest unit of the game has a 4+ rerolling 1's, than where do you go form there? You've created this tiny sliver of space "tough" units can now play in. It's a ridiculous way to balance the game. There's nothing inherently wrong with mortek having a 3+ rerollable save. Just like there's nothing inherently wrong with giving a unit +3 to cast. This just needs to be taken in context with the rest of the army and what it can do.

The only realistic conclusion of your argument is there is a hard cap on everything and that makes for a boring, stagnant game where too many units and armies feel functionally the same. It becomes way to easy to rule yourself into a corner and you can't make a unit thats tougher, but more expensive because of some arbitrary hard limit. No thank you. I dont know if you are familiar with WHFB, but it was completely and totally stagnant, which is a huge part of the reason it lost players in droves.

And sorry, but no. It doesn't matter for the more casual gamer unless you are just blatantly disregarding the most important aspect of tabletop gaming -- the social contract between you and the other player. There is no fundamental reason why someone should be destroying casual games with a list tuned for competitive play. Zero.

If that is happening its a problem with your player group, not GW.