AoS Theorycrafting Balance Changes

This is an odd idea. But what if gw made it so people cannot pick the same unit for their battleline?like you can only have up to one full block of skinks with boltspitters after that cannot have another one.

 

In general caps would be a good idea. It'd significantly reduce the presence of spammy lists.

The only issue that might pop up is that some armies just don't really function without being spammy, and not every unit that's spammed is equally problematic. Which makes broad rules aimed at stopping this difficult.

E.g. 5 fodder units of skinks is a lot less annoying to deal with than 5 units of those new SCE dragons.

Maybe we need a rule that just limits the amount of points you can spend on one unit. That might work a bit more generally without running into weird edge-cases all that often.

 

Also a number of armies don't have enough battleline units available then.

 

also it would depend on GW being good at balancing things in the first place. they can't get points right what makes you think they can juggle even more?

 

Meh, it seems like one of the changes where even if they implement it badly it'l still be better than what we currently have.
But yeah definitly won't be perfect.

 

There should just be less "batteline if.." models.

There's no spam problem for models that you can't make battleline.

I'll always be in favor of more targeted decisions than blanket caps.

 

Wasn't a meme. Sam is a great player and the list used a carnosaur and saurus knights. It also uses a prime and other stuff, but far from a meme. Sam didn't build the list thinking it was a joke.

 

That might also require a higher battleline count requirement though, being forced to bring 3 MSU battleline cuz something like the dragons aren't battleline anymore is only going to cost you like 1 dragon in the case of the latest SCE nonsense.

Which is still a very spammy list.

 

It costs you 2 dragons, or 3-4 fulminators which is fantastic. I dont think there's an inherent problem with spam. I think theres a problem when you can avoid any and all list making decisions by taking the best unit in the codex in every single slot... and in my opinion that's generally a more specific problem than just "spam." Battleline/troop/core has always existed to provide an actual "core" of basic troops to a list and i think maintaining that is an important balancing element.

It also helps things like bow snakes or sentinels by limiting their reinforcements to just 1.

 

Not ragging on the guy as a player at all - as I said, he must be very good to have gone 5-0 at all. My point is that (at least at the time of this tournament) other Seraphon players were leaning into Salamanders and Bastiladons for a reason, and then along comes this guy with an off-meta KC list with just 4 Saurus units to clean the tables.

Just took a second look at his build, and I'm sure he built the lists very deliberately to make sure he had the tools he needed to win. But myself as a Basti / Skink purist just looks at this list wondering what the hell the secret sauce was. Even without any Bastis, Thunder Lizard looks like it would be a better pick for this list for Prime Warbeast, the extra wounds on monsters, and double-tapping the EotG. In my experience that outweighs the benefit of a +1 to hit on a bunch of units which frankly won't be that killy anyway in the Age of Savestacking due to lack of rend.

Didn't mean to come across as though I'm talking down on the player - I'm genuinely in awe.

 

Sam rolling up with saurus like

 

2 still isn't exactly a massive difference when the list that someone linked in another topic a while back had 10 dragons. The new list will still be 90% dragons.

Don't get me wrong it might be enough to kick it down a notch. It might make it so the list no longer dominates tournaments. And the whole "battleline if" definitly shouldn't be as widespread as it currently is, but it doesn't actually prevent spamming. There will still be the occasional player showing up with 8 dragons and ruin the fun for others cuz they now have to deal with that annoying nonsense, even if it is no longer meta. Which still isn't great.

Also, spam is inherently problematic, to an extend at least, once you spam powerfull units.
The main issue at the core of this is that a spam list forces the opponent to spam the appropriate counter(s) in return. This is fine if it's a relativly weak unit being spammed for which your opponent has many viable counters. But in the case of powerfull units the amount of viable counters are limited. Resulting in the opponent now also being forced to spam that particular counter.

Which isn't exactly great.

A great example of this was an article on the website a while back, where some guy explained his eel-spam list. And it pretty much boiled down to "the first unit or two of eels will probably be killed without achieving much, but then you still got X units of eels left and that should be more than enough to remove the main threats your opponent has. At which point you basicly have free reign, cuz you still have X eels while your opponent is screwed cuz you've now destroyed all of his potential counters if you did things right." Essentially this list relied on the fact that no opponent is going to bring enough counters against the eels to take it down before you killed all of his options.

Which isn't exactly fun for the opponent (very fun for that guy to figure out this tactic though )

 

Never took it that way, apologies if it came off like i did. Meme lists to me are just lists that are played for a laugh and this wasn't that.

To try and answer a couple of your questions, saurus knights actually hit really hard and like any seraphon list, its just threat overload. Carno, prime, blocks of knights, engine... its a lot of damage being delt in a lot of phases, and there's a good chunk of it that's just mortal wounds. Players often aren't taking prime warbeast even in thunder lizard (arcane might is the go to for the reroll on the slann) and not needing to spend a command ability to get +1 hit and then having a ton of access to it (+1 when charging, koatls CA, AoA) can be a huge help in getting reliable output. Part of the reason mawkrushas are so good is because they get triple the benefit from CA's, and the Koatls ability works in a similarish fashion.

Ultimately, i think players lean into salamanders/bastis/skinks because it's obvious and easier to get maximum output out of. A list like this plays really well into a lot of whats good in the meta right now, and a player like Sam is talented enough to maximize that benefit.

Like a lot of tournament play, matchups and battleplans will play a huge role, but it speaks to the player AND the list design that he was able to beat out a thunder lizard list in round 4 and a warclans list in round 5 to take the win at Everwinter.

Basically, I think our community looks at seraphon with a far to narrow lens. The book is disgustingly deep, amazingly efficient, and incredibly flexible. It gives us so many options to combat the meta, or even play some stuff you like and still perform admirably with it.

That may have been the first time koatls went 5-0 but it also has several 4-1 finishes. The "secret sauce" is it still leverages all the things that make seraphon good. A slann to control the magic phase, ranged mortals to threaten heroes (rse, comets, prime, engine), monsters to score battle tactics, good battleline and plentiful screens.

2 dragons is literally a 20% reduction from 10 dragons. That's not insignificant.

Spam is only a problem when you're able to spam a unit that's superior to all others in every slot, as you mentioned. But that's a problem with the unit, not with spam. It's actually why you're seeing the best players bring dragon lists that aren't just spamming dragons... because a vast majority of the time "spam" lists actually aren't the best. Just the easiest and most obvious to build.

That unit is still too strong whether you spam it or not. Preventing spam doesnt solve the problem of that unit still being too strong.

I've actually played against morton, great player. Eel spam was always a problem with eels and not spam. The unit was too strong, so it was spammed. It also falls into the "battleline if..." problem

If eels weren't battleline or weren't head and shoulders the best unit in the book, they wouldn't have been spammed.

Neither of those solutions require caps on spam. Because the problem was never spam. It was eels, and then the rest of the book being trash. You actually saw this problem being solved when they buffed turtles and sharks.

You can see a better example of this actually in seraphon. Salamanders are the best unit in the book, but you are rarely spamming them at the cost of everything... because other units actually have a role to play, especially outside of dracs tail. Even sally spam in dracs tail was a relatively uncommon build, and almost always included a bastiladon or allied help.

 

I definitely agree with this! Especially with the Idoneth example. The reason they basically just all spam eels is not because their other units are bad, it's because their eels are just better than everything else. The reason they're better than everything else in the army is not necessarily because their stats are overpowered, but because they fulfill every role in the army better than the other units they have.

True. We actually do have quite a few good units in our army, and particularly units that fulfill different roles better than they do. Now, we still have units that are just bad at their role and I totally agree with the people who want those units to be better. But I definitely agree with you that the problem is with the units that get spammed being too good (or other options being too bad), not that you are able to bring a lot of them.

 

The thing that bothers me the most is that, to me, endless spells aren't potent enough and our mastery of magic is not that flashy. I'm not gonna say we are not strong casters, after all in a game yesterday I had +5 CV with nearby Cogs on Kroak, doing his 3x Deliverance, Comet Cal, and Unforging. Living in constant fear of rolling double ones really sucks though. I might be salty about this since I bought all the spells at the tail end of 2.0, a week before they were all changed.

Oh, and I miss pumping all our CP into a single unit of 40 warriors that then absolutely tear things up, or Firelance Knights flying, moving and charging with huge bonuses. 2.0 sure was the dream in terms of how I played the Scaly Bois. Potency isn't that much what I am after, but the fantasy of really fast charging Knights with plenty of attacks and mortals removing Alarielle feels good to me. Also 40 Warriors standing their ground after 20 of them dying to a big Monster only to bring it down in retaliation. Good times, good times...

 

It is not the damage I am afraid of, for Kroak I mean. It prevents further casting, so if I invest Cogs into giving him 5 spells, and he rolls on the first spell the mighty snake eyes, I am bummed out for missing out on many a d3's of damage. In normal lists with just a Slann, it is trivial to reroll indeed with either a general trait, or the Grubs, neither of which work on our Mummified Frog Overlord.

 

Quite so, yeah. The thing is, Kroak cannot have a general trait, nor an artifact, so no source of rerolling. He is at the mercy of the dice, and the cost of miscast is not the mortals since he will not die 97% of the time from it, but the wasted remainder of the spells per turn. As far as I know, there is no way to avoid that on a named model for us, or am I missing something?

And an argument to be made for Endless Spells, Purple Sun is probably the best one for us in terms of damage since it cannot go wild on us, but that is still 70 points. Also, for the opponent, it is better to actually not attempt to cast a spell and have it unbound by a +4 Kroak, it is much easier to dispell an ES we casted and beat a flat number without us rolling against it. The opponent then successfully used his hero phase resource to remove 30-70 points we have spent from the table. Even worse if they have a priest since those dispell without any actual cost to the number of prayers they can do afterwards.

All in all, just a personal gripe with those two systems at the moment. Kroak not having protection from insta death is also kind of a sad thing.

 

uhmm about this, if the priest try to dispell a endless, he can't try to cast a prayer afterwards. They have the same limitations than a wizard