NPE is certainly a bigger issue in "casual games", so Seraphon is likely to cause a bigger upset at this stage than at the "hyper competitive level", but does that make the complains less valid? I dont think the game should be balanced around the "hyper competitive level", at the end of the day this is the minority of games that are being played anyways. I also dont see why the competitive meta should consist of only 5-7 armies - The amount of "viable" armies could be much stronger if the top offenders were brought in line. This wouldnt ruin the competitive scene at all. It would make it more diverse. I also dont think playing at the "hyper competitive level" has to equate to fighting against super obnoxious rules. I might misunderstand your point all together though. Im not saying this is the best take on "fixing" Seraphon - Honestly only touching Skinks is the tip of the iceberg - But it was stated prior to my post that halving the max unit size of Skinks would do nothing at all, which isnt true hence my comment. Shooting in itself is not an issue at all. The issue started to appear (IMO) when shooting became a stand-alone option for a number of armies, not something that was complementary to the primary army. I used to look for ranged units in some of my combat armies so I had an answer to buffing heroes that would sit behind screens. These days you build entire armies purely to shoot the opponent off the table, simply because they are that effective and often better than melee options. A shooting army isnt a bad concept, but there are shooting armies out there who have no apparent drawbacks. Shooting armies should be super squishy and once you catch them, they are in deep trouble. In the case of Skinks, they can hit you harder (if equippd "right") once you *catch* them.
I'm saying that halving skink unit size is taking a mallet to a problem that needs a scalpel. You'll certainly kill melee skinks and it's not a guarantee you'll fix ranged skinks. It's just not a good way to approach design imo You're outlining the major problem with shooting armies right here. 1. Shooters can often be better then their melee variants due to only one penalty when shooting in melee 2. No real drawbacks to making a shooting army. On top of that, according to Vince'a data, shooting is he biggest cause of npe. This is the part I trust most of his data. If you want to tackle the above problem, simply smacking individual warscrolls can help but doesn't fix the underlying issues that shooting has. If you want shooting armies to have drawbacks, that's a systemic problem not a warscroll problem. So instead of arbitrarily halving units or other nerfs, give penalities that apply to all shooters, for example, not being able to shoot into melee would be a massive change to AoS. If you dont want to make a change that big, split the skink warscroll so you can buff melee skinks and nerf ranged skinks separate. This encourages unit diversity in the game without being a heavy handed mallet to a single warscroll
Again putting on the competitive hat here. If you want a game to be taken seriously, and to have a high level of competition, you balance from the ultra-competitive side of the game. These are the players who tend to play the most games. Who tend to travel to multiple events. Who study the books and look to exploit rules and interactions. They are the ones who spend thousands of dollars on models to bring optimized lists. They are the ones who will give you the best data on what each army is actually capable of. Every game I can think of with a serious competitive scene balances the game this way. Its different for every playgroup, but my group of competitive friends doesn't really mind going against the other powerful armies. We dont view them as obnoxious rules but as challenges to overcome, We play strategies that are not meta in practice games and look for weaknesses to exploit to overcome the tough opponents. That was kind of my point. If you take the competitive prospective, these armies arent problems if you prepare to face them with another army of equal level, Does that mean only 7 armies should be played at a competitive event, yes it does. Go to a MTG tournament and you will see the same 10 decks over and over again, alongside some rogue decks built to counter those 10. Thats how metas work at competitive tournaments. These armies are identified as the best and the competitive players play those armies to give themselves the best chance at victory. If you dont play one of those armies you are severely handicapping yourself, Now to your point, should they nerf armies to balance the game, no. nerfing all competitive armies so the armies that are not competitive becomes competitive is the wrong way to go about balancing a game. New books are usually pushed rules wise to promote sales. What will happen is all future armies that are published will skyrocket to op status. This in turn will force more nerfs to promote game balance and you will have a very toxic cycle where new stiff is constantly nerfed to bring the power level down. This is what kills games as it ruins the fun and feeling of meaningful investment for the players. What they need to do instead is make everyone else better. Raise armies up with new books and better rules. If everyone is strong, its an even playing ground. It worked in warmachine and hordes well till PP messed the game up by expanding too much. It will work well here too. It will reward loyal players for sticking to their armies, and will diversify the competitive scene while preventing an endless cycle of nerfs. If it was me personally though, I would wipe the slate clean. Write 20 something new codexs for AoS 3 and make sure they were all balance to each other. Nuke the game and start over. Heres AoS 3, heres your new books. Everyone is equal. enjoy,
Which wouldn't be a problem if shooters were pointed correctly Because GW released a handful of shooting units that are too good. Because they released shooting units that were too good. And people get destroyed by shooting units that were too good. There are only underlying problems if they don't point shooting correctly. So by extension, pointing the warscrolls correctly would actually fix the underlying problem. It's not arbitrarily halving a units warscroll. Its actually a pretty unique fix to a problematic unit that specifically targets its issues without letting those issues spill over into other units in the book. The problem is skinks take buffs too well. a 10 man, unbuffed skink unit isn't a problem, and doesnt necessarily deserve to cost 70 or 80 points. Skink Starpriests are already 120 points. Increasing their points by 10 or 20 hurts saurus armies just as bad. The only realistic issue is it hurting melee skinks which is... not that big of a deal. Also, if you're so big on splitting the warscroll than halving the unit size shouldn't matter right? They'd be separate warscrolls in this nonexistant hypothetical future. Regardless, no solution is perfect. Anything you do to them, something else is going to suffer. Which, IMO, is why this is the best course of action. Decreasing a skinks max unit size directly effects how they take buffs, which is the biggest problem of the unit. I also said you could simply remove the extra attack at 15+ but i imagine you wouldn't like that either. I'd argue all shooters don't need penalties (at least not yet) because all shooters aren't a problem. Changing how the shooting system works would mean just as many warscroll rewrites, simply because theres a ton of shooting units in the game right now that aren't skinks or blood stalkers or sentinels. In fact, most of them fall into that camp. I'm fine with them changing the core rules, but thats just realistically not happening before AOS 3. It's not like skinks won't be changed between now and then, so I think we can realistically talk about a skink change as well as whatever shooting change should happen.
So there are no systemic problems with shooting at all? It's all points and nothing else? Can you say with 100% confidence that the way GW has shooting structured has no issues beyond points? Strong disagree there. As mentioned before sums it up well. You build shooting armies because shooting has advantages over melee. There is only one penalty for getting caught and you can still trash opponents in melee because you're shooting them in the face and doing melee. Ontop of that, you said yourself that it took only a handful of shooting troops to cause this. If a handful of shooting units can cause 50% of npe, then it's likely not a problem with the shooting units. Could you just make weaker shooting units? Sure, but you run the risk of killing shooting unit armies and reducing army diversity. You should be able to run shooting armies while providing meaningful and fun games for all players involved. I disagree that hurting melee skinks isn't a big deal. Imo, every time you make a decision that says, "eh, screw that loadout", it's not a good decision. You're impacting unit diversity and likely making overswings on your balance. Melee skinks could be fast & cheap tarpit units, opposite of the tankier and fightier Saurus warriors, but instead we're too busy balancing a completely different loadout that functions like a different unit. It doesn't make any sense why you would look at ranged skinks and say, "we can lump these in with melee skinks". There is a really good reason why in TWWH2 CA priced skink loadouts different and it has to do with balance. Ranged skinks taking buffs well isn't a huge issue to me. Yeah, they're good, but this is why I'm advocating for splitting the warscroll and costing them higher. You'll be taking less skinks, but still able to bring fat 40 stacks. You can still get your buffs off but at the end of the day, you'll have less skinks without running the risks for killing loadouts or running the risk of kill skinks. I just find halving units to be such an overswing. I'll keep saying it, but you're taking a mallet to a problem and could very easily overswing.
Shooting has advantages over melee, certainly. Melee also SHOULD have advantages over shooting. It stops being true when units stopped being released where that is true. It wasn't too long ago that no one cared about shooting because... there were no strong shooting units. The core rules didn't fundamentally change, the warscrolls did. Thats why I think its the problem. If it was a core rules problem, shooting would have always been an issue and it just hasn't been. You should be absolutely be able to run shooting armies. I never once said you shouldn't. It's why i advocated for addressing the most obvious, most underpointed shooting units and seeing how that has an affect on peoples play experiences, before throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As mentioned, no solution is perfect. Melee skinks have arguably never really been a thing in AoS or Fantasy so yeah, in terms of collateral damage they are the ones i'm most comfortable with. I dont think its an overswing at all. Skinks need that big of a nerf. The only other realistic solution is jacking the prices up which mentioned before has other issues. It's also interesting you're so hesitant to "overnerf" skinks, but don't seem as concerned with potentially overnerfing the currently underpowered shooting units when you change the corer rules. I think that's ultimately my concern. It felt like the game was in a good spot pre op shooting warscrolls, so it seems like we should be able to go back to that point just by changing the op shooting warscrolls. Could definitely be a scenario where the cats already out of the bag tho and you can't go back.
For me the issue is that the range and general statlines are too good and the points will be about the same as their combat counterparts. Sentinels have problematic issues but at least they have half the number of attacks as their melee counterparts (wardens) But generally they are all too cheap with range which is a bit absurd
Do you really think skinks need to have their effectiveness cut in half? I know that your opinion has generally been that our new book is amazing and that we're far too powerful, but I really think that's a bit too much. I agree that sounds like taking a hammer to something that could be fixed with a scalpel. Would you rather see Seraphon remain a top-tier army, but with some adjustments to make us a bit less annoying to play against? Or do you agree with Vince that we need heavy nerfs and deserve to knocked down to a lower mid-tier army? I know we're doing really well right now, and that Skinks aren't the only thing in our army that is good. But realistically, skink spam and Lord kroak are the two reasons that we're on top right now. Dinosaurs and Saurus may be fun, but they're certainly not winning most tournaments and if we halved the power of Kroak and Skinks then we'd be in a pretty bad spot again, and no one wants that, except the people who are salty about loosing to Skink spam lists. (Side note, I've started hearing Seraphon referred to as cheese lizards on TTS discord, and they're not talking about Coalesced or Saurus lists...) I guess my point is that I don't necessarily think that we deserve to have our best units halved in strength, although I do think some minor nerfs would be fair. I also think some minor changes to shooting rules would be nice. -1 to hit after moving or not shooting in melee would be fine. The FoS CA should be either overwatch or retreat. I think that would solve a lot of the major issues that people have with Seraphon now, and not wreck the entire Army as an overreaction.
Genuinely, with no hyperbole, yes. I do think that you could literally halve their offensive effectiveness and we would still be arguably too strong. Totally hear you, but i'm just not a fan of this argument, especially your last statement. It implies heavy handed nerfs would always leave us a "lower mid-tier army" which is just not true. Tzeentch received numerous, drastic changes after the book came out and they are still A tier. Seraphon could receive numerous, drastic changes to their best units and still be A tier. Skink spam and lord kroak are part of the reason we are on top right now, but not the entire reason. Seraphon have won more tournaments than the entire desctruction and death factions COMBINED. Seraphon is plowing through TTS and its not even being piloted by the best players, using the best builds. And its still sitting at over a 60% win rate! Imagine if it was only the top players, only bringing the best lists (like you saw with DoK and Slaanesh). I want to make it 100% clear what my point is. We will not, without any doubt in my mind, be in a "bad spot" with drastic changes to skinks and kroak. That is simply not a realistic expectation given the depth and strength of this book. There are lists that right now are S tier builds that could lose literally 300 points worth of models and still be an S tier army. Seraphon can beat most armies in the game using 1500 points and thats not an exaggeration. There are coalesced and starborne builds right now that literally don't rely on skink hordes and kroak that are still A tier builds. I personally believe that we could easily take a hit like that and probably still be the best army in the game, so i'd politely disagree on us not "deserving to have our best units halve din strength." It needs something to be brought back in line, and I think other solutions have the problems i mentioned. Reducing the unit size of skink units helps without rewriting tons of warscrolls because it affects the biggest problem - how well they take buffs - and it does that without hurting other parts of the book that rely on cheap 10 man skink units to screen or those same skink heroes to buff units that aren't nearly as oppressive. Like always, i'd say that anyone not necessarily seeing that same power should try to get more games in against more armies. It becomes more and more present the more armies you play against and the more you realize the sheer breadth of tools available to this type of seraphon list. Or i can give you my personal anecdotal experience that has led me to these conclusions, if you are curious.
I totally understand where you're coming from, and after getting in quite a few games with it I agree that our army currently is awesome and powerful. I just don't think it's quite as insanely strong as you do, but maybe that comes down to you being a better player than me. I appreciate your honesty on your opinions, though. And I also appreciate you giving your reasoning for those opinions without belittling people who aren't in agreement. I generally don't go online and do games with random people on TTS. I just haven't worked up the courage to do so, having had quite a few bad experiences with trying to start online RPG groups before. All of my TTS games have been with friends or people they've introduced me to. I've only had the chance to play against Idoneth, Orruks, Khorne, Skaven, and Seraphon mirror matches. So I haven't been able to play against other top armies like KO and Tzeentch, but neither have I played against weaker armies like BoC and Sylvaneth. I also have played Coalesced lists pretty much every time, except for one game as Dracothion's Tail and one as Fangs of Sotek. I guess the biggest issue I have with halving the Skink unit size is that they would now lose their extra attack after taking 6 wounds, which pretty much any unit can do to a unit with a 6+ save like Skinks have. So if they get shot once or tagged in melee they instantly lose half their damage on top of already being limited to half of what they were before. Our monsters bracket, so if they take usually more than 2-3 wounds they go down very slightly in effectiveness. But a key battleline unit getting it's damage halved after taking 6 wounds really doesn't sound like a unit I'd want to take anymore. I would much rather them lose the extra attack from a horde bonus, because at least then you could take 40 and if you lose 6 you still have 34 shots, instead of taking 20, losing 6 and now being stuck with 14 shots that have terrible hit and wound stats. Also, most infantry that's limited to a unit of 20 is much more elite than Skinks. Not to mention that if the point cost also went up (not what's been discussed in the last several posts, but it's been brought up a lot before), then their role as a cheap sacrifice screen would be diminished as well, making it harder to run lists like Thunder Lizards and anything else that wants to have something protected from charges in turn 1. So all in all, I very respectfully disagree with you on the harshness of the nerf that you would theoretically give to Skinks. I do agree with you in principal though that playing against shooty, Skink-spam lists that can teleport and also potentially overwatch and retreat is probably not a fun time for our opponents. As a Coalesced "main" if we use video game terms, I don't look forward at all to having to face armies like Lumineth, KO and Tzeentch that can do similar things. One thing you said is that FoS isn't the top-winning Seraphon list. I'd be very curious to know which one currently is? Also, if you're up for a bit of theory-crafting, what do you think would be the way to play Seraphon if you did everything you wanted to nerf Skinks? Would the weakened Skink spam still be the best way to play Seraphon? Or do you think people would start playing other lists and would those lists do as well as the Skink spam does currently? One thing I appreciate from you is your bottomless optimism in regards to our army. A lot of people just say "X is good, everything else is bad." So what do you think a less "OP" but still top-tier Seraphon army would look like?
Totally fair! I agree with your reasoning on losing the horde bonus over halving the unit size, and definitely agree that my view on seraphon may be a little on the extreme end. I'll reply more specifically to some of your theorycraft questions when I have more time to sit down and give them the thought they deserve. I'll edit my responses into this post! I will say I think realistically GW just does its usual blanket increase of a few things and the best list will still be starborne but with one 40 instead of 2 or a few less extra toys (salamanders, chamos, terradons, whatever flavor is your favorite.) Dracos tail might get more popular. I think in the best players hands it's probably the better build already. It does 90% of the things fangs does, while having way more control over deployment and what threats start on the board. edit: So I think this question can be answered in a few ways. Ideally you'd want all "ways" of playing seraphon to be equal, so in that sense fangs should be totally viable just more in line with the rest of the book. How you do that I think is definitely up for interpretation. Personally, I think the biggest problem in the seraphon book is our relative cheapness across the board. It's simply too easy to get all your magic heroes, all your buffing heroes, tons of battleline that can be buffed up to a dangerous state, and all the toys. Armies that rely on buffed, powerful battleline generally pay a hefty price for that, and usually it comes in the form of "less toys." For example, Firelance Koatl's Claw lists fit into this style. After your Slann for CP gen, and various buffing heroes there isn't a ton of points left in the army for 700 points of salamanders or chamo skinks. You can sacrifice some buffing heroes for more toys, but its hard to get everything. Seraphon skink focused lists don't generally suffer from this same problem. I think the best course of action is to make Skink focused armies have less power in their skink units and need to rely more on the "toys" part of their build to do the serious damage. By lessening the damage of skink units, you also inherently make the FoS CA a lot less irritating to play against. That's why i'm a big proponent of halving the unit size or removing the horde +1 attack bonus. I just think Skinks are capable of doing way too much damage for the role they play, given the context of what else is going to be in the list. For an example list, I think the "Look" could be very similar to what you're seeing now (a couple big blocks of skinks, your regular assortment of heroes, whatever flavor of extra damage dealing toys you like) just less of the damage dealing power would be in the skink blocks. I think the weakened skink focused builds would probably still be the best way to play seraphon without drastically changing the book. The SKINK keyword buffs are simply too good and too numerous for skink based lists to not naturally rise to the top. I think instead of 80 in 2 big blocks you might see half that in multiple smaller units and more toys. Maybe you'll get to fit in the salamander squads and the single unit of terradons or chamos, etc. You were seeing this a little bit when the book first droped and you saw a lot of people bringing kroaknado, 4-6 units of 10 skinks and filling the rest with sallies. After the Sally point nerf, I think the vibe is similar, you just have more flexibility around taking things that aren't sallies. I think people will definitely start playing other lists because the book has so much depth you're already seeing a lot of that right now! It has tons of options inside and people are generally making pretty good use of them. In terms of the second part of that question, i imagine no, those lists would not do as well as skink spam currently does but IMO that is a good thing. You don't want armies to be in that power range, and hopefully if changes were made to seraphon changes would also be made to the handful of other armies that dance around in that S tier. Thank you! As mentioned above, I think the perfect goal would be to have a situation where if people want to play skink spam (skinks have always been pretty popular) you totally can. It's just less oppressive than it is now. I think Pietari's Koatl's Claw list from the Butcher's Buffet TTS tournament is a great example of very strong seraphon army that I think "feels" more fair. It's got a few screens, a powerful melee battleline threat, some fast ranged, a powerful magic hero and a powerful combat hero. Obviously it's still using Kroak, but you could easily swap Kroak & co out for a slann, an incantor, and an everblaze comet and still have a great list. https://tabletop.to/butchers-buffet/list/pietari-jukarainen Eric Hoerger's tournament winning Thunder Lizard list is also a great example. Both of these lists have more balance in strength, where the list has great pieces but also needs a smart general to get the most out of it. It doesnt just throw buffed up skink squads that hold objectives well, do damage, and then also retreat from combat, out in front of the enemy and go "okay i win." https://twitter.com/AoS_Shorts/status/1305243439974375424/photo/2 These are both current, 5-6 game tournament winning lists against strong players. I think these types of list are healthier for the game and still easily a high A tier build. My hope for the future of seraphon builds would be these types of balanced approaches, where you're seeing the different pieces of the book working in conjunction to create a winning strategy. There are melee threats that can push enemies off objectives, ranged options to target heroes, screens to protect your important stuff and tougher blocks to sit on home objectives. It doesnt just rely on one unit to basically do all of those things at all times and also better than most other units in the game.
Why is so much of this discussion focused around halving the unit size or not? If there is so much debate on whether 20 or 40 is more fair, wouldn't 30 be the best option? That still captures the horde of skinks feel while cutting 20 shots off the unit, reducing buff efficacy, and saving the horde bonus from being done after 6 wounds. If a further nerf is needed (and it likely is) there are still further options without needed to cut the max unit size to 20. Increase the horde bonus to 20+ Reduce the boltspitter range to 12"(brings in line with javelin too) Change the horde bonus to +1 to hit (+50%) or rerolls to hit (+67%) instead of double fire (+100%) I'd personally be okay with any one of these as a nerf in conjunction with 30 man maximum
What? did you read the posts I was replying to? The debate that has been going on is whether it would be better to nerf skinks by changing their max size to 20, or removing the horde bonus attacks entirely. How on earth is any of the nerfs I suggested making them "old skinks but worse", or even worse than the two discussed by Kilvakar or Putzfrau? Is it possible you misread my comment? Im not suggesting ALL of those nerfs, Im saying reduce the max size to 30 and apply one of the 3 bullets in addition. So either: Max size 30 and horde bonus is 20+ Max size 30 and boltspitters are 12" Max size 30 and change the +1A bonus to re-roll all misses two of those dont even effect 10 man units at all
oh thats easy you see i was focusing on the third option. old skinks only had one shot and got +1 to hit at range when they got 20 models they also got + 1 at 30 models buuuut you want them maxed out at 30 so that wouldn't work. so yeah a direct parallel but they don't have wary fighter inherently any more and with only the 1 horde bonus over all worse. the other 2 options are less punishing but the range one only marginally so. nope didn't missread it would only take one of the 2 fairly punishing nurffs to reduce skinks back to our old book they don't have to base 10 man skinks are already worse then old 10 man skinks. also i don't know why you changed your third option " Change the horde bonus to +1 to hit (+50%) or rerolls to hit (+67%) instead of double fire (+100%)"
well kinda old skinks had access to some crazy buffs as well had farther range on weapons and where only 10 points more hardly breaking the bank.( also they where originally the same price soooooo) they could also be summoned in frankly Ludacris numbers and had access to 2 teleports instead of 1. so yeah it's not a apples to apples comparison but as far as the warscroll goes it totally is and that was my point. making the third change would make a worse version of our old skinks a version that would benefit much worse then new one to our new buffs and wouldn't have the endless horde or dancing abilities that made old skinks work.
I just cut the worse version of the 3rd option for sake of the comparison since you were saying it would be so much worse. Re-rolling misses above 15 models is still worse than straight up twice the shots, but it is absolutely a solid benefit The range was the same? like exactly. And nothing close to "Free mortals" level of buffs. Akhan, Nagash, and Idoneth Sharks and Turtles all say high
uuum all of those only changed when a new book came out the OBR main rule book and broken realms morathy respectively. the only time GW has changed a warscroll out side of a book release was plague monks and they where a order of magnitude worse then any other warscroll GW has ever made. not necessarily power wise (but yes that to) but just how annoying it was to play them