ah I must admit i often miss points other people make. i do most of my forum watching on breaks at work lol. i agree with you though. TTS should not be used to balance the game.
No worries! I think TTS is a great outlet for playing the game, but unless you can guarantee the results, yeah, I wouldn't use it for balance.
Just my 2 cents: 1) This is something i'm personally fine with. Saurus are melee battleline and I don't think maintaining the integrity of such a niche choice should come at the expense of balancing the unit. 2) As long as it doesn't come with increasing the cost of skinks and all their buffing heroes, it should be fine. Obviously GW could be too heavy handed, but thats always the case. You could essentially say this about any nerf in the game. In my opinion, it's a simple easy change that instantly makes seraphon a more manageable army while specifically targeting the most egregious unit in the most problematic allegiance. 3) I think these changes are specific to making skinks more balanced, not fixing shooting entirely. Regardless, If less units were good at shooting, it wouldn't be nearly as problematic. Basically, shooting is problematic BECAUSE units are too good at it, not the other way around. Shooting wasn't a problem until they released 4 books with really powerful shooting units. This problem can be addressed through the typical channels -- nerfing and addressing the most problematic units. I'd start with skinks and work my way down. I'll also say, I dont think anyone should be taking this data as any kind of gospel. It certainly has its problems (as you outlined), but I'm looking at it as just reaffirming what everyone who plays the game a lot already knows. Shooting is too good right now because all the best armies use units that are too good at shooting. Seraphon, KO, LRL, and Tzeentch are irritating to play against, but can easily be cut down to size with obvious changes. Even with all that said, the meta is still pretty healthy and I think certain things are starting to get lost in the shuffle. The competitive middle (all the armies that aren't trash or op) is FAAAAAT. Very fat. There are like 3 outlier armies on the good end, and 2 or 3 on the bad end. Basically everything else is at least 3-2 competitive (4-1 if you get lucky) with probably 10 armies capable of going 5-0 with a little luck. IMO the game is fundamentally in a good spot (which is why i'm not 100% on board with the "how do we fix shooting" conversation), they just should have made a small handful of nerfs to a small handful of problematic units. Skinks and Kroak are probably first and second on the list.
Playing devil's advocate myself, do you really need any of that to weed out casual armies? You yourself stated exactly what armies you think (and I totally agree) are more or less at the top of the pack. Are "real" tournaments going to make that more or less obvious to you? Does paying 50 dollars mean the dude who's trying to have fun with a Trogg list is any more or less relevant to the conversation? TTS tournaments are extremely representative of the type of army spread I see at regular tournaments. IMO all the data is there, it's just a matter of GW recognizing or not. Clearly they don't want to (and i don't necessarily blame them) but I think this idea that when "real" tournaments start things are suddenly going to be drastically different is not necessarily reflective of what i'm seeing at these TTS tournaments and how it compared to the regular tournaments i went to pre quarantine.
Furthering discussion with this video. It is a stats overview of a few TTS AoS tournaments, namely those run by the Honest Wargamer crew from the looks of it. While the data isn't too surprising, it does show that the representation of some armies is vastly different, and possibly skewed by people trying new armies. A point they do consider and touch on during the show. Curious to see further breakdowns of the data like they said would be done. I do think this furthers the point about TTS not being a super reliable gauge of how things will breakdown after we are able to gather more easily.
I don't believe it will be drastically different, but we will have a better set of data and overall a more even spread of player representation. Also, GW took how long to even start taking balance input from regular events? I don't think TTS is going to be considered when they can just hunker down and wait for 100+ in person events every few months, and the tech-illiterate to start playing again in events to provide their own set of feedback.
I feel like it can only help make the real data we get better. A lot of people are playing armies on TTS that they cannot play in real life. A lot of TTS armies are meme armies, spamming expensive units because they dont have to shell out the money to buy all the models and spend the dozens of hours to paint them. This is affecting results. I also feel like the entry fees do a lot in keeping certain people from playing in ultra competitive tournaments where they will lose badly and not have a great time. Of course the man who loves his trogs and wants to spend 50 dollars to lose and have fun will still be there. But there wont be as many of that guy as there might be otherwise. These people are awesome people and a lot of fun to play against, but are unfortunately easy wins and can help armies propel to top tables and again mess with results.
Totally respect your opinion, but none of this is reflective of my own experiences. My experience with TTS has been a vast, vast majority of people are taking "real" armies. The only "meme" army i've played against was 300 skinks or 15 cockatrices and the latter was actually an army the dude was making. If anything, the lack of "hobby lag" means more people can easily pick up the competitive stuff, so you're just seeing more people get exposed to and experience against the nastiest stuff a lot faster. My experience with real tournaments has been 90% of them are clearly there for casual play with casual lists. If anything I find TTS tournaments to have a higher concentration of difficult armies/lists just because the people i'm regularly playing with on TTS are regular, serious tournament goers in the first place. I'd be interested to know what TTS events you're doing that have given you this impression. They aren't run by the honest wargamer folks, but some are. Seraphon with the highest representation and the highest winrate. Feels like that just continues to reinforce the point. I'd suggest listening to Owen's points, he's spot on when he talks about seraphon.
EDIT: I want to make it clear, I'm approaching shooting from a, "according to Vince's data 50% of all npe's are from shooting" perspective. I didn't really outline that from the start of this big speal but it provides context into how I'm thinking about it. I disagree with this. It's not good design. You don't kill one side of your warscroll to nerf another. Whether or not Saurus can melee is irrelevant to the fact that skinks can melee too. Would you kill plague monks and simply say, "eh, let them take clan rats"? This is why I advocated earlier for splitting the warscroll. Have melee skinks on one scroll and shooty skinks on another. You can then play with point costs separate to achieve the best balance. You still get the balance of skinks are cheaper/weaker melee, Saurus are tougher tarpitters, Krox are your big bad hitter boiz. Maybe it's not your intent but what I'm getting from this is "we need weaker shooters to show that shooting isn't powerful". Shooting was a ticking timb bomb, or a landmine if you will. Now as shooting armies came to be do we see the problems with shooting. Simply nerfing units doesn't necessarily fix the underlying problems. Shooting is a one way street. It's not very interactive for you or your opponent and has the potential to be too punishing. For example. Poor positioning isn't punished as much as it should be in shooting. Yes, you'll have to suffer from 3" range, but being able to shoot and melee which has the potential to be really powerful Double turns, double shooting. We risk unit diversity by combining too many options on one warscroll, leading to 'obvious choices'. For example, melee skinks are not as good as shooty skinks, this is a mathematical fact, so based off the points we pay for, we pick ranged skinks pretty much everytime. Some of my suggestions: This is why I suggested earlier not being able shoot into melee unless you have a special rule. It punishes poor shooting positioning and rewards faster units for catching shooting units. (Gives cav more of a reason to be used) Splitting warscrolls when necessary so you can balance shooting units separate. This means we could have melee skinks (throwing numbers here) be costed at 60 pointed and ranged skinks at 80. This way we can encourage unit diversity while simultaneously nerfing shooty skinks. EDIT: Remove double turn EDIT: We remove the potential for double shooting (and inadvertently double magic) EDIT: Move and shoot penality. You move? -1 to hit. Special rule may prevent this. To be clear, this doesn't mean that all shooting units are balanced and in no way we don't need to touch warscrolls. We very well may need to tone done the number of attacks or average damage from shooting units across the board. I currently believe that if you are going to tackle it though, hitting individual warscrolls introduces too much risk and we need to look at the mechanical factors behind the game before we start dissecting faction warscrolls.
Fair enough dude, agree to disagree. I don't think clan rats and plague monks fill the same role, where as saururs and melee skinks do. I'm not opposed to splitting the warscrolls, but GW doesn't do that so it's not something I necessarily entertain or suggest when talking through hypotheticals like this. Not to gloss over a lot of your point, but yeah if we had weaker shooters shooting wouldn't be as powerful. That's kind of the way the game works and you can easily look to aos pre tzeentch/ko to see the evidence of that. For me personally, i'd rather nerf shooting units than warp the game around the fact that powerful shooting units may or may not exist. That's just my personal opinion on balance. I'm generally not a fan of changing core rules outside of the most egregious of circumstances. AoS without a double turn stops being the AoS i love, etc. edit: basically i'd rather change the IMO 2 or 3 problematic warscrolls than change the way the entire game functions. You nerf skinks, you nerf sentinels and you go from there. Maybe even blood stalkers, depends how they shake out with the new book.
I am not either, honestly. I think AoS has very strong core rules (for example, I don't want a S/T table). Despite that, I still view the npe's from shooting as a systemic problem, which is where my points come from.
Not disagreeing with Owen, and the points are valid. Also, wasn't aware they werent running the Hammer times. Could have sworn they were. I don't play TTS much because of it not feeling like the game at all to me, so I don't keep up with who and what events are run. I just like the data. I'm hoping they do go through it more, just to see how it all pans out. As for the Winrate and Representation, yeah, it's not surprising, but 55 Seraphon players being more than some other factions combined is also something to look at. BoC only had 7 players, and one of the highest win rates out of a book panned by the majority of the community, which doesn't perform as well in many events. KO also are not heavily represented here, where as I personally have 3 KO players locally in a meta of maybe 20-30 people. Solid representation there in my local meta, but not on TTs where people aren't picking them up. It really is people trying lots of different lists and doing quirky things, or being super competitive. I do wonder how many games were close and how many were blow outs. That's also a really interesting way to guage performance of an army against others.
Owen is running hammertime, but they aren't running the Butcher's Tribe tournament they refer to at the end. Seraphon having the highest representation should generally mean their win rate is most accurate (more data -> less outliers, etc). Those tournaments are generally pretty reflective of regular tournaments. Meaning, there's a fair mix of people doing a little of everything. Some are having fun, some are trying quirky things, and some are smashing face. Regardless, data in this game is always super variable and theres so many things to take into consideration... but when the conclusion is consistently the same or similar (seraphon are too strong), I think we have to maybe assume that, despite the flaws in any given data gathering or analysis, maybe seraphon are just way too strong.
Totally fair. I think i just come at it from a slightly different angle, with the issue being a few overly strong units that give the impression of a systemic issue. With that said, I still think shooting as it exists is bad for AoS. They should fix the problem one way or another (nerfing the units or changing the core rules).
Fair enough, but more data and larger consistent events is will be a boon to collecting it. With the two new books (though Slaanesh being nerfed a bit to be in the middle of the pack) it'll be interesting to see how things evolve.
Absolutely, it'll be exciting to see. Personally, I think slaanesh is going to be a depravity focused army which is why you're seeing such expensive units, but as you said only time will tell. I'd also just like to say, i'm sorry if i come across as a bit (or a lot) of a TTS apologist here. I'm not trying to be argumentative about what should and shouldnt count as "AoS data", I just don't think it's necessarily fair to speculate about the why's and how's of TTS players when theres tons of people playing in those tournaments that can give first hand accounts of exactly what the vibe is like, what the lists are like, etc. For example, i'm literally playing in the Butcher's Tribe tournament in the youtube video you linked (seraphonies team). I can give first hand accounts of exactly how that experience feels compared to my own personal experience at regular tournaments. I've played in Hammertime tournaments (altho not many, 10am GMT start time is rough) but have also experienced countless others. Some international, some american based, some super competitive, some less so, some with 6 games, some (most) with 3. If anyone is curious about those experiences, i'm more than willing (and happy to) relate how those experiences went from my own opinion. It'll obviously be just that, my opinion, but it feels better than speculating. And i know there are others on this forum with just as much (if not more) TTS experience that can probably chime in and share their experiences/opinions.
I don't think it's anything to worry about, and glad to see that your contributions are part of the data. On that note, did your opponents ever have feedback on the experience between your army and theirs? I don't know how you communicated (chat or via a discord voice room), but was there ever a time when there was an after battle exchange of what went down?
We always use voice chat on discord and I would say 9 times out of 10 i chat with my opponent for a while. Specific to the team tournament, that one was a little weird just because you have some control over the matchups so we were trying to force seraphon (me) into bad matchups. I played IDK, Khorne BT spam, and OBR winning all 3 so far. All tremendous opponents. IDK I ended up winning on Turn 5 so we chatted a bit about what he could have done differently and what I could have done differently. It was battle for the pass and teleport was a huge, huge part of the win. He was definitely a little frustrated (understandably) about the way I could continue to summon screens and constantly pressure his back objectives with teleporting and massive movement. There was obviously more to the game, but that was mostly the conversation. Also, I got pretty lucky with some huge late game charges (after getting some supremely bad luck with kroaks mortals earlier) so its always fun to talk about what ifs. Khorne was over bottom of turn 1. I killed all 3 of his bloodthirsters, including skarbrand on my first shooting phase, with kroak having done a total of 27 mortals in the hero phase. We basically talked about how khorne into seraphon on forcing the hand was never going to go well for him, and we had intentionally chosen the matchup for exactly this reason. He totally got it and basically agreed. OBR went largely the same. I took top and alpha'd all his heroes and a harvester, while keeping myself in position to retreat/shoot from his inevitable charge. He called it after my turn, didn't feel like without heroes he could stay in the game, and i didn't disagree. We had a very similar conversation, his army was built to fight melee armies so we matched him up against me knowing seraphon would crush it. There was a lot of "yeah, great game, so hard to know what to do against seraphon." and it's hard to disagree with that. I did a regular format 3-game tournament this past weekend with my varanguard and managed to take the win. Beat Khorne and 2 KO lists. Was my first outing with varanguard and a lot of peoples first time playing them so most of the conversation afterwards was just us talking through the "what i should have done was..." and "I knew they did X but didn't realize..." stuff like that. I'm not kidding when i say i've never had a bad game on TTS. Everyone is super cool, super polite, always down to chat and shoot the shit a little bit afterwards. I mean, it feels extremely similar to a normal tournament environment if i'm being totally honest.
That's great to hear. Personally had a friendly game at a mates house into OBR and just couldn't lock down the Catapults or remove the hordes of troops. Then again, I was playing a friendly FoS list. I'm really glad that TTs is there, especially for folks who are good to use it. It keeps the community on life support, if not pushing it into healthy during this time. Did you ever have a Seraphon mirror or talk to anyone who might have? I've seen a very fun Battlereport by @Caleb ex nihilo where it was FoS vs TL that was enjoyable to watch.
I have played the mirror a couple times, and managed to squeak out a win each time. Played against Thunder Lizard both times, once with Koatl's Claw and once with Fangs. Thunder Lizard is less bullshit and IMO actually not great into the mirror. Kind of obliterated it both times, the -1 damage from coalesced really hurts bastis and i was able to make a lucky long charge into his skinks when i was using my knights. Not retreat or overwatch meant they went poof and pretty much killed the only threat I was truly scared of. With fangs you just deploy out of range and pick it apart. Played against a triple basti list, deployed out of range and gave him first turn. He moved up, shot a few skinks off, then i moved up and killed like 60 skinks and put myself into position to clear off the bastis. I didn't get the double, but the bastis just couldn't do enough damage (he killed like half of a skink unit or something) and i just unloaded on them the second turn. edit: i'll add that Kroak v Kroak is basically just a crapshoot. its all just dice rolls so should average out to be pretty even but it inevitably swings one way or the other lol. You really just don't want to let Kroak get tempest off on your skink squads before they do something. Most of the time kroak is a little buried so its easy to outrange, but its something that is a little more dependent on specific deployments and battleplans.