jesse
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Post by jesse on Jan 16, 2015 14:59:40 GMT -5
Hey,
I've been playing down in the states for a while, and am back in kingston looking for some competitive games. I play a daemons army and can't help but notice that your tourney rules target psyker heavy armies (certain eldar lists, daemons) pretty specifically, without addressing a lot of the concerns in other lists.
The charge cap specifically is something that I haven't seen in my tournament experience, or in major tournament rules (BAO, LVO, Adepticon, NOVA and a multitude of smaller ones). While I can understand some frustration playing against someone with 15 charge (which is pretty standard playing normal units without even using cheese), a lot of the players I have discussed it with liken a cap to limiting the number of shots in an infantry guard army, or capping eldar movement range, especially given the complete absence of a shooting phase for most daemons.
I can understand wanting to limit invis, but in reality it just adds a strategic element to targeting these units, as you have to use targetless powers (novas, beams, etc) or target a nearby unit to hit them. Limiting 2++ rerollable saves is somewhat understandable as well, but 7th doesn't favour a single death star in any real capacity with the changes to scoring so even that is debatable.
My concern then is that if these major tourneys with the top players involved in A. making the rules and B. playing dont result in a charge cap, invis nerf or rerollable save ban, why is it being used in local tournaments? As I mentioned, its not like these are being abused heavily by all armies and you can just tone them down. The rules still allow for serpent spam, bringing eight riptides in a bound list, etc. Having such targeted rules is very discouraging to see in a tournament setting.
I'm interested in hearing your points of view. If you think something like a heavy summoning list is too powerful (despite their absence from tournament finals), why not limit summoning instead of the thematic and mechanical bread and butter of a daemon army: psychic powers.
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jesse
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Posts: 41
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Post by jesse on Jan 16, 2015 15:04:48 GMT -5
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Post by Jack Shrapnel on Jan 16, 2015 15:50:58 GMT -5
Simple answer - I asked what people locally wanted (over the course of a few different times refining each time and double checking to make sure) and this is what they said to do Longer answer: I guess I should clarify something. I'm a daemon player as well and use both psychic and non-psychic heavy lists and don't ever run summoning factory (finds it bogs down the game too much), so in any tourney rules I certainly do not try to target daemons for example. The cap was a discussion locally which we looked actually to fantasy rules and what they did, as people were indeed finding certain matchups (20 warp charge when you have nothing for example) particularly unfun. We adopted 12 cap straight from Fantasy, where as you know, magic can play a huge part in battles, even with this cap. This is also not intended as a nerf to summoning, it's an attempt to create a situation where someone isn't decimated in the psychic phase just for playing an army with no psykers. Summoning still works just fine with 12 dice, it just limits how much it can happen. invisibility was talked about alot, and as many of us follow several blogs for the big tournies, there have been various limits proposed to the power all along since it was introduced. Granted not everyone agrees on the solution or even if one is required. So when we discussed this power at length we came to the simple solution in the player pack - so invisibility is still an incredibly good power, however it is not overbalanced when compared to other psychic powers. The 2++ rerollable issue was discussed across many tournaments, not just our little local meta, and this is something I followed quite closely. The 2+/4+ rule was taken directly from one of the major tournies, although for the moment I forget which one proposed it initally, might have been LVO but I can't be certain. I can't recall any situations where someone has said they've had a positive experience playing against a 2+ rerollable deathstar, however I've heard pretty much universal negative experiences with it. Invis, the 2+ rerollable and unlimited warp charge each on their own in isolation may not be a deal breaker for some people. Unfortunately these three things combine to really make deathstars devestatingly unfun. Why do we have limits that big tournies do not? Because locally we focus our tournies on a little different way of playing. Our biggest tourny is about themed tables and missions, and the experience of having fun together. All the prizes outside of any trophies, are ALL draw prizes. You can get crushed every game and still win the biggest prize on the table. (if all goes well this year, a thunderhawk!) There are very few netlists, and it's not the same three army builds taking the top five spots of every tourney. So you might find some of our methods curb some of the power builds, and really that is intentional. It's aim is just to make a fun tourney for the majority of attendees.
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Post by voodoo on Jan 16, 2015 16:00:00 GMT -5
I didn’t respond before Shannon because I knew he’d be more eloquent and have all the answers. Limiting psychic dice is a good thing for a lot of armies including the Thousand Sons list I’m bringing to the club championship which has D6+9 warp charges/turn until I begin losing psykers. Does it suck to give up free dice on a 4+? Yeah. However it is nice knowing my psychic phase will remain pretty well unchanged in effectiveness until a large portion of my army is dead.
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Post by Jack Shrapnel on Jan 16, 2015 16:31:27 GMT -5
...oh and I should add that some of the other notable netlists out there you've mentioned haven't been targetted mainly because I think no one runs them around here. I'm sure if they became problematic, people would be advocating to have them limited. We also don't comp number of detachments or require every list has a CAD either, so there's actually some expanded options compared to some notable big tournies that are only allowing two sources in list building. Hell, I've even allowed unbound (by prior permission) so long as it was fluff based rather than "lets see how many wave serpents I can fit at 2k! As you're looking for competitive gaming, I will say that there are a number of people in the club that can bring some hard lists to play against if that's what you're looking for, and it's pretty easy to arrange such a game. Also coming up in march we have a tag team event that is anything goes, so you can have as many warp charge, superheavies, invisibility, detachments, 2+ rerollables as you'd like on that one ...oh and Voodoo's mistaken, I don't have nearly all the answers, just ask my wife
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jesse
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Post by jesse on Jan 16, 2015 16:45:46 GMT -5
EDIT: I like your philosophy, allowing everyone to bring stuff that they find cool and interesting is wicked fun. I am just concerned that it is insanely hard to balance "cool and interesting" and serpent spam (or, "how many riptides is TOO many") in a competitive environment, as the rules as they stand do not do this (according to my experience anyways). If you think that everyone in the community is good enough to bring an army of equal "power level" so that the games are strategy based rather than who brought what, that sounds like a fun time.
I've left the rest of my comment below anyways, but I'll probably be by to get some more games in with the club before entering.
If you're running a tournament (read: competitive, prizes and an entry fee) with no unit restrictions beyond a universal no SHs, and then no units totaling more than 9 warp charge, there is no way that isn't just ruining certain armies (not netlists, entire gods/playstyles). It should be telling that even daemon armies playing WITH invis, rerollables AND unlimited dice still lose to vanilla marines with their own brands of cheese (smashf***er, flyer spam, barrage abuse, etc).
I'd love to play competitve, strategic games OR fun beer/pretzel games but the two don't mix when one side gets cheese and the other doesn't. If someone brings seven OS wave serpents and an imperial knight, they can play, but a thematic tzeentch list can't.
Granted, if its the way that the club runs and if it works for you, fair enough.
I wrote up what my issue with the cap is further in terms of mechanics, but its relevance to a few armies only should be enough to see its a little weird.
Fair enough on invis and 2+ rerollable, I can work around those.
Warp charge still concerns me however. As for psychic phase, as I mentioned it almost completely replaces shooting phase for daemons outside of a couple unused units like flamers, soul grinders, etc. It is particularly unfun to have no shooting phase OR psychic phase against an army that has several units throwing 75 flashlights at me. And there is no one but grey knights, eldar and daemons who can afford the dice for invis (5 required) or 2+ rerollables (5 required), especially not with a cap.
Mathhammer ahead:
In summary, you get 18 s5 24" bs3 shots against two thousand points of max cheese, 72" ignores cover barrage sniping shooting from the opponent. Alternatively, you could use those points for powers which help you get the other 1500 points of your army across the board to assault. Currently those powers are: invis, things which increase your save and things which unreliably disrupt the opponent's ability to shoot based on further dice rolls (hallucinate, dominate, etc.). None of these are reliable with nerfs.
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Post by Jack Shrapnel on Jan 16, 2015 17:59:17 GMT -5
Those are some excellent points, and as a daemon player myself, I can see where tzeentch daemons would certainly be handicapped by that limit. I'm certainly open to discussion on the point as far as our local tournies go, and hopefully we can get a few differing perspectives either way so that we can make whatever decisions are fair for everyone. I can say that locally we try to bring more take all comers lists style than the extreme ones. There are tough lists however that do play, including imperial knights, necrons, eldar and tau that are pretty hard, and the recent tyranid formations have raised their power level as well. It's not so much that we bring "soft" lists, it's just that normally there isn't alot of the standard "net lists" out there, although once or twice they have cropped up. I attribute part of the reason is that we are a small club, everyone knows everyone and we try to walk that balance between a solid competition and some of the craziness seen elsewhere. Can I say with authority that absolutely no one will ever bring a serpent spam list? well no, that's not realistic and really I can't tell someone to not play models they bought and painted because it isn't my brand of fun We have a few eldar players around for sure, but you're much more likely to see three serpents in a list rather than 6-8! but we're certainly open to any recommendations on how we can make things even better for everyone!
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jesse
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Posts: 41
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Post by jesse on Jan 16, 2015 19:47:59 GMT -5
For sure, I'd never want to play in a game where the other person started off with no chance to win simply because of the two armies on the table, whether it be overpowered psychic powers or some spammable unit. At that point, where's the fun? I'd love to hear some more opinions on warp charge capping if anyone else is reading. What are people's concerns with it compared to the aforementioned guard list bringing three hundred guardsmen on foot? Time constraints? Interactions of psychic powers giving too many buffs? Summoning? Getting powers denied if you only brought one psyker? I've spent a lot of time determining how to take advantage of my army's specialization so I'm more than happy to go over exactly what works and why these aren't any different than other armies' strong points. Bonus reading, a piece on frontline (probably the current top tactics/news/tourney info sites) on charge caps missing the point, from shortly after seventh coming out: www.frontlinegaming.org/2014/06/24/the-new-psychic-phase-missing-the-forest-for-the-trees/
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Post by Silent one on Jan 17, 2015 11:09:24 GMT -5
I am on my phone so I won't go into details here. But i play tyranids and csm both can be Psyker heavy. So far i have not had a problem with the cap. It threw me at first and i thought it would hinder me alot. But so far the good u see from it out wieghs the bad. Specialy with alot if oeiple having no psykers in thier armies. Even with 12 dice sometimes my powers can be overwhelming.
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jesse
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Posts: 41
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Post by jesse on Jan 17, 2015 11:56:59 GMT -5
So the issues there:
CSM don't get that many warp charge without using the overcosted (and therefore never seen in high competitive play) thousand sons. You get 4 warp charge for ahriman, 3 for a sorc or DP and that's it, 7 warp charge. To get more you need to literally blow points making your army worse (thousand sons or scrolls of magnus) solely to get more dice rather than the passive increases that daemons and GKs get from many units. Playing an army like that is FUN but not equal to even a fun army with random units in an eldar list.
Tyranids can hit the charge cap more easily, but they really only need to hit a few catalysts to max out their psychic utility, then they can use their guns, psyker-less summoning, guarded hive tyrants, mawloc/lictor shenanigans etc with max effectiveness.
As for "overwhelming", as I linked they point out that you need about triple the dice to have a fifty percent chance of denying a single power. Think about the most powerful psychic presence in the galaxy, failing to prevent someone from reheating their soup. Soup man then gets up and uses all of the guns that he has, that psyker can't take cause he's supposed to use mind bullets.
As I mentioned before, fun armies are a blast but "championship for prizes" isn't the time to be pulling punches, compared to, say, a scenario with the invasion of prospero by the nids or something where thematic armies make sense.
(For the record, I'm not talking about buying some flavor of the month army, just optimizing whatever list you want to run without taking stuff that is categorically bad. Netlisting doesn't even work for many armies any more as you can see by the huge variance in winning armies at tourneys)
This is all from a theoretical/pro level meta standpoint, so it could play very differently in store. I'll be in today for a game or two anyways.
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Post by raceygaming on Jan 17, 2015 12:59:25 GMT -5
I know as a Tau player I might not have much opinion on this topic but from a practical stand point of our local tournament play I think part of the alteration to the psychic phase is to increase speed of play for 2 hour based games.
The local club championship already has some pretty complex scenarios for set up and play. As a player with no physic phase I can tell you that the set up time for a psyker heavy army is VERY noticeable (especially with daemons once you include gifts). In a 2 hour game where the first 10-15 minutes before deployment even start is generating powers and finding the right cards and clearly marking who has what; then deployment time. I've seen a lot of 2 hour games go to turn 3 which limits the amount of tactical play for both players. I think time is always an issue that at tournaments, and that the club championship is 6 games in one weekend does limit the ability to go to 2.5-3 hour games to deal with the issue. While the 12 warp charge limit doesn't directly impact the amount of psykers that you can bring but it tends to be a soft cap because once you easily can get to 12 dice why take more psykers.
This is just a an observation that I've had playing in tournament with no cap on dice and our local cap on dice.
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Post by voodoo on Jan 17, 2015 14:36:37 GMT -5
The only thing you can win in the club championship by winning lots of games is best general or best overall. Prizes are completely random. Rest your head if that's what this is all about.
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Post by Jack Shrapnel on Jan 17, 2015 18:09:37 GMT -5
I actually think Jesse is right, for what it's worth.
warp charge over 12 really only happens for five armies:
Daemons Eldar Grey knights tyranids thousand sons
I can't really see any other army pulling off more than 12 dice in a psychic phase.
so let's look at what is the problematic thing for each:
Daemons - summoning factory just slows down the game to a crawl and makes your tournament game only get to turn three max, so this is annoying as hell. Is it broken? well not really... in the tests I've done against malefic daemonology and using malefic, it is again annoying, but you're getting for the most part pretty basic units, which are delayed in affecting the game by another turn (given they deep strike and none other than horrors have any ranged ability). Possession is cool but it kills the psyker, and again the naked greater daemon must deep strike and stand there for a turn. Summoning factory hasn't actually won a major tournament that I know of since 7th came out. Cursed earth is solid, but really you can get that on a warpstorm result already so I don't consider a short range buff broken. Probably because how the hell would you even finish a game? the only other power they have access to which can be crazy is invisibility, but lots of armies can get that and a 12 dice cap certainly doesn't prevent someone from using this power every turn (ie: I'm only going to get off 2-3 powers max, so I might as well ensure the best one!). Summoning daemons = problem for tournies (time), other daemons - not really.
Tyranids: okay, it's possible to make a triple flyrant, tervigon and 3 single zoan list (10 warp charge before dice roll) but you've just invested 1000 points into the psychic phase and you can only take powers of the hive mind. really wouldn't matter how many dice you generate, you're basically casting catalyst and perhaps pyroxysm with the occasional warp blast if there's a land raider across the table (as it's the only thing in your army that can hurt the damn thing!) No, nids aren't a problem with getting over 12 dice.
thousand sons: Sure they can get alot of dice, yes. There are a lot of drawbacks to running a full on thousand sons lists though, especially with the points you're paying for each unit. Sure they have invuls, psychic powers and AP3 bolters. But they die like extremely expensive marines. You can still have a solid, tough army, but you really do rely on those psychic powers to keep you competitive, and I hardly think it puts them over the top. No, Tsons aren't a problem with getting over 12 dice.
grey knights: sigh. Okay the first of the armies which I feel could prevent an actual problem with uncapped dice. Given they can easily generate 20+ dice they can cast pretty much whatever they want. They have access to divination, so if they're willing to risk a perils, there's pretty much a guarentee that they're going to get invisibility somewhere. They could certainly present a case for an overwhelming psychic phase. However, what are they casting? Outside of the models with divination, they primarily are casting: hammerhand, force, banishment and cleansing flame. This can be rough for a daemon player, but for the rest of the armies banishment is useless, force is occasionally good. Hammerhand is a give to cast, and cleansing flame occasionally (if you have purifiers mainly). So I'm on the fence on this one actually. I can see it seeming broken, but not actually affecting the game as much as what they were probably doing with 12 dice already.
eldar: yeah, we know. They're already the best army in the game (cough wave serpents). A seer-star. That's what we're all afraid of. this is the problem which leads to the cap.
so maybe we just need to worry about the things that ARE a problem rather than a universal cap?
thoughts?
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Post by nekekami on Jan 17, 2015 18:42:03 GMT -5
Well, being as it's already been said more than once about how our local club operates in regard to prizes, winning, and the outlook in general we have on the hobby as a club, I'll avoid that again.
I do however feel that the houserules we've put into place weren't done in response to any direct list that any one person (or more) plays at said club. Instead, we've made what little, few changes we have, just so that people don't directly TRY to abuse those few, distinctly over-powered aspects of the game.
And yes, while there are arguments about why such things aren't needed from a top-level, competitive standpoint - I'll point out that out little local club isn't one of those ultra competitive organizations. We are, in fact, a small (relatively speaking, from an active perspective), local gaming club.
Frankly, anyone who rolls into town and starts talking about how this or that organization, tournament, or otherwise does things, can blow. We're not asking you to like it. We're not even saying that you have to follow said houserules, though if you're playing at Nexus on a club day, you should probably clarify that beforehand. We told people that we were making these decisions based on the potential for abuse, while encouraging people to look for fun - and competitive - options elsewhere in their respective Codices, instead of spamming abusive entries.
I'll continue to advocate having fun with the hobby, as I have for many years. I've watched the super-competitive mindset take hold at times, pushing the win-at-all-costs attitude, and I don't like it. We've seen people (okay, person) also go on at lengths about how the top prizes should be for top points - which I'm fairly certain the overwhelming majority spoke out against, which to me, means that others don't either.
The internet is bad enough at convincing people about what, and how to play the hobby as it is. I don't really care to see more of this ultra-competitive bullshit being pushed around our club. Sure, there's a time and a place for it, but in my opinion, those times and places are specifically at those events.
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jesse
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Posts: 41
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Post by jesse on Jan 17, 2015 19:01:37 GMT -5
nek and voodoo, I'm absolutely not trying to demand prizes or impose rules here, I'm proposing solutions which make the game fun and competitive (ie. how well you do corresponds to skill level) for armies that do use psykers as well as those that don't. I apologize if I come off as too aggressive or anything (no way to tell online after all); I talked to a few guys in the club today actually and they seemed receptive to discussing it at least.
I'm absolutely not into abusing power units for an edge. A typical tournament list of mine includes a variety of melee-only cavalry charging while supported by some heavy hitting psykers that have no offensive capability otherwise. Taking three units of nurgle bikers and spamming invis? sure, cheap.
racey: absolutely, and I'm guilty of taking way too long in a psychic phase before. Playing 2 turns sucks, and is definitely not fun. I think a solution here though is a time cap per turn or per phase, not a dice cap. After all, a blob guard or tau shooting phase, or green tide movement phase can take a long time as well, and a time cap would fairly restrict all aspects rather than just psyker armies.
shannon: Only a couple HQs in GKs can even take invis from telepathy (in the club's nerfed form as well), and the other powers are basically givens that theyll get off anyways. I'd propose a number of things before a dice cap, like a time cap, a blanket "no seerstar, beaststar or screamerstar lists" and/or a "max one/two summons a turn" rule.
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