The US champion from last years Masters runs a Phoenix guard star with five characters. He would have won this year as well if the TK player didn't cheat. I would hardly call him a moderate player if he can beat the best in the nation.
High elves cannot function well outside of the death star builds aside from running a star dragon and even then they will still have something if a helm bus.
Nor would I call George O'Connel (General of Chaos) moderate. He invented the super herd in sixth edition, won major events with Beasts and is currently running a WoC star.
Aside from that, Najo, I like your post.
Wait ...what? I hope you have some evidence to back up the accusation of cheating. Care to explain?
Also, in reference to the suggestion for MR increasing the casting value, by how much would you increase it? I believe MR should make it harder to hurt a unit with magic, but simply adding +1-3 to the casting value basically just consumes another die from the casting pool. Sure it will make the 24+ casting value spells almost impossible, but they already were pretty much 6 dice monkey and pray spells.
Increasing Arnzipal's Black Horror from a 15 to an 18 doesn't impact the difficulty, it just reduces the other things you can do that round. You are still losing that unit, or a good chunk of it.
Things I feel strongly about:
- Fixing Fear/ITP/Terror. The huge prevalence of ITP makes fear a virtually useless ability. And Terror is the laughing stock of what it once was. The scaling Fear - Terror relationship I think is fine, but either fear needs to be a next to no cost ability, or there need to be more armies and units susceptible to it. Aside from maybe Orcs and Goblins, Armies are either immune to fear thanks to high leadership, or through ITP. And the argument could be made that the one of the best core choices for O&G is Savage Orcs which are ITP.
- Cannons. Cannons offer no counter play. If you have a cannon, you roll some dice and your opponent picks up models. He has no option get away from it. His best hope is that there is a huge building on the board to block line of sight. But with the size of bases (for monsters in particular) these days, that is nearly impossible. Honestly if GW were really concerned about balancing things out in their game like this, they could take a few pointers from video game developers. If you read through their patch notes, especially for the larger games like MMOs and LoL, etc. you will see that oppressive mechanics get phased out, because they remove the enjoyment of the game. Oppressive mechanics in a game are mechanics that offer no counter play. They often make the game feel like a single player game because it doesn't matter what your opponent does, you just do your thing and achieve what you wanted.
It is fine that there are things that hard counter monsters. Monsters are tough and can really run away with a game if you don't have anything to deal with them. But a game full of hard counters makes for a game with little variety and becomes stale. Adding scatter to the cannon, while it might make it more palatable if it hits (since the chances are reduced) but do not change the lack of counterplay. Putting in a mechanic that allows the opponent to do something to try and mitigate the effect of a cannon would go a long way towards improving on the aspect of play that cannons bring to the game. Examples of counter play include things like Hard cover (ok, if you want to shoot at my expensive but vulnerable unit, its going to be harder to hit me. Or you can choose to shoot my intervening unit and shoot less expensive things), tests to shoot (similar to the coven throne), the dispel mechanics in magic ( I know I have so many dice so I can choose to dispel the spell I want to ensure you don't cast) etc. Heck even a save (armor, ward, whatever) can be a form of counter play, because at least you feel like you have a chance to do something to stop your opponent.
- Test or die. I understand the test or die mechanics were put in to encourage people away from death stars, but they sort of failed to do that. Instead we have this mechanic that again largely lacks counter play. Sure magic spells (the largest source of test or die mechanics) can be dispelled, but not with irresistible force. I am fine with mechanics that threaten large units. There should be a mechanic to make that not the OP way to go. There should a counter to someone's deathstar. But again it should not be I roll some dice, you pick up models. Maybe changing test or die spells to things like a large volume of high strength (5-7 range, not 10) hits, reducing armor, but allowing for a mechanic that gives the defender a chance to mitigate the loss, or perhaps some other way where through movement, or army selection, or whatever so that he can reduce the risk to his units. Maybe a mechanic where the unit takes a 2 str x hits per model in the unit where X = 10 - average strength of the unit. So a str 3 unit would be hit with 2 str 6 hits per model, or something similar. (Just spitballing here, please don't crucify the message based on a half assed example of an alternative).
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I am not sold on changing the 'double rout' mechanic as you call it. I think advanced tactics to hold a frenzied or death start unit in place are good. With the random movement of a flee, it will not always work so it's tricky to get off. However using a similar tactic with skirmishers who become unchargable (because they have to form up base to base when a charge is declared at them, which might cause their profile to move out of LOS for the charging unit) has to go. Maybe the double flee mechanics should go, but I certainly don't think they are necessarily over the top.
Overall I mostly agree with you Najo, excellent post.
