10th edition tournament results - it doesn't look good

[TrawlingCleaner]

17 minutes ago, Captain Idaho said:

@Xenith I would contend that self limiting and correction is not desirable in extremes, which is what we have right now. Taking aside the fact anti-eldar weapons were traditionally massed Autocannons or defences against massed Mortal Wounds and firepower, the issues are you can't counter Fate Dice and the Detachment rule combo. At all. They just get them.

 

The example of Angron charging an Avatar was given by someone in another thread, with the Avatar just Fate dicing the saves in a crucial clutch moment then curb stomping the rest of the army.

 

Added to that, even if you could anti-eldar, that skews your list for other factions so something else becomes dominant disproportionately.

 

Extremes don't balance themselves with time is what I'm saying.

 

Not having a counterplay to Fate Dice isn't totally accurate, I'd argue. If my Guardians with or without Farseers are dead, outside of an Enhancement I'm not producing any more. The Enhancement gives you Fate Dice if the Characters unit kills an enemy unit which is nice but there's not many characters or units that are likely to kill many units (Maybe Windrider blobs with an Autarch?). It's potentially easily said than done that's for sure but there is counterplay.

Oaths of Moment doesn't have a huge amount of counterplay either, you pick a unit or two that you don't even have to be able to see and they're your target. There's fairly few things in the game that can make itself untargettable on the fly or move after being shot but there's still some counterplay with strats to make it harder to hit or wound etc.

 

There's no way to stop someone using the Fate Dice once they have them but there's ways of stopping their production and manipulation. If you can't kill Guardians, you might have bigger problems than just fighting Eldar

[Doctor Perils]

OK, with data it does seem to confirm Aeldari are overpowered - I think starting out with an errata disallowing Fate Dice causing Critical Hits and Critical Wounds would be necessary, though perhaps not sufficient: at least that's how I'll be playing them until we get any official response

[Xenith]

54 minutes ago, Cactus said:

Isn't Bugeater the event that banned eldar after their preview article was published? Hard to win when you can't play!

 

That's the joy of cherrypicking statistics to prove whatever you like 

 

By banning Eldar, they removed any chance to prove their point, and actually did the opposite, by reducing the % of tourneys Eldar have won.

[Captain Idaho]

What statistics have people cherry picked about Eldar, Desolation squads and Knights etc then? If there's some tournaments results out there which contradict the trends let's see 'em.

 

Not that I agree anything should be banned at this stage, or ever really. The game is the game.

 

Regarding Oath of Moment mentioned by some... I think the proposed change I mentioned earlier (wounds not hit rerolls and rerolled dice not critical scoring helps bring Marines into line. Alongside some points changes.

Edited June 26, 2023 by Captain Idaho

[Squark]

I don't think the interaction between the ANTI-X ability and DEVASTATING WOUNDS needs changing- It's very clearly intended based on how frequently the two keywords coexist. It's essentially a way to further tailor a weapon's performance against a specific target. Is there any case where the interaction is actually causing problems, or is it just getting tarred with the same brush as the result of fate dice?

 

As for fate dice themselves... They're definately problematic, but I'd like to see both of the proposed solutions playtested (1/unit/phase or can't crit). I prefer the former personally since it means you can't completely shape the outcome of one point of the game. It also doesn't hit miracle dice (since they already have the restriction), although there aren't a ton of critical effects in the sisters aresenal that I found in a quick search so either change wouldn't hurt them much.

[TheMawr]

1 hour ago, Captain Idaho said:

The example of Angron charging an Avatar was given by someone in another thread, with the Avatar just Fate dicing the saves in a crucial clutch moment then curb stomping the rest of the army.

 

To be fair I found that one lacking information, and the information we got was odd.. he used 7(!) faith dice to survive angron, and afterwards was drained trough his fate dice.. but angron can return, those 7 fate dice do not return so quickly.

Ofcourse the Avatar player could have had a farseer  with a bunch of guardians playing fate dice regeneration... wich would have probably been a better target to throw angron at in the first place.

 

Sorry but from the little info that one had, it sounded like a combination of extremely good luck with fate dice rolls, extremely bad luck khorne dice rolls and choosing the wrong targets. Nothing sounded necessarily broken in that specific example and with the specific info given.  (I dont mean this assertive or calling them out or something, its just that you cant jump to a conclusion without more information there.)

 

also informative perhaps is instances were eldar did loose (always friendly matches though, tournament players will always have at least one but mostly more of ; WK, Support or fireprism.. the 3 that definitely need a major fix)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldar/comments/14j3g99/got_wrecked_in_a_friendly_match_against_thousand/

 

As I said before there are obviously problems, however, they are way more nuanced, and there are people jumping in with stories like the Avatar vs Angron one constantly that boil down to "I lost, so the point is proven" wich do not help the situation at all, more information would.

 

 

[Captain Idaho]

I believe Thousand Sons are one of the problematic armies so it's no surprise there if he deliberately handicapped his list with weaker choices.

 

But yeah, anecdotal accounts are ok but the raw data is what is needed.

Edited June 26, 2023 by Captain Idaho

[Karhedron]

16 minutes ago, Captain Idaho said:

What statistics have people cherry picked about Eldar, Desolation squads and Knights etc then? If there's some tournaments results out there which contradict the trends let's see 'em.

 

I don't think Xenith is accusing the TOs of cherrypicking but Bugeater. I would say it is not cherry-picking but we do have a very small sample size of data to work with at the moment.

 

For my part, I had a hunch the Eldar, Marines and Knights seemed strong but I think we need a lot more results under competitive conditions to determine how strong and what the best fixes would be.

[tzeentch9]

Having seen some other tournament results for tenth, elder did okay, but hardly dominated them. Knights seem to have had a good time though

[jaxom]

The internet and growth of the community makes it very easy to share data, propose fixes, and disseminate those fix ideas. The problem is any recommendations require buy-in and testing. The easiest form of buy-in is for GW to do it because it’s “their game,” but the turn around on it can be lengthy.

 

GW has gotten more hands on, what with their tournament data-trawling and quarterly balance sheets so I don’t know if there’s room for 3rd party, faster fixes.

[Scribe]

Now, I'm not going to say Eldar are not busted, but I'm always really uhhh cautious, in accepting 40K tournament results as meaningful.

 

There's a lot of variance, and really a TINY amount of iteration.

 

This isnt MTG with online games numbering in the 10's of thousands. Its a handful in comparison.

[phandaal]

Eyyy Votann at 30% RTT win rate. But sitting pretty with a 45% GT win rate. Great success!

[Blurf]

3 hours ago, Focslain said:

Making it so things like fate dice, miracle dice and anti-X count as modified succusses would go a long way to stalling dev wounding. That would have fixed the DW strat issue just fine. Lethal hits doesn't proc dev wounds, neither should any wounding mod rule.

 

Towering should just confer true line of sight. If I can see you I can shot you and vis-versa. Granted this is how I'm playing it personally in friendly games.

 

Not sure on how to mod indirect other then indirect weapons shouldn't have ignore cover.

That's using a cannon to swat a fly.

 

Sisters of battle have THREE sources of Devastating wounds in the entire army, two of which are expensive combat characters and one of which is a completely useless support character.

 

Nerfing Miracle Dice for the sins of Fate Dice is asinine. Especially when Sisters are already terrible this edition. Just nerf Fate Dice. If Eldar started with 6 dice and couldn't use more than 1 per unit per phase, that would go A LONG way to fixing the problem without screwing sisters even further into the dumpster.

[Blurf]

1 hour ago, Squark said:

I don't think the interaction between the ANTI-X ability and DEVASTATING WOUNDS needs changing- It's very clearly intended based on how frequently the two keywords coexist. It's essentially a way to further tailor a weapon's performance against a specific target. Is there any case where the interaction is actually causing problems, or is it just getting tarred with the same brush as the result of fate dice?

 

As for fate dice themselves... They're definately problematic, but I'd like to see both of the proposed solutions playtested (1/unit/phase or can't crit). I prefer the former personally since it means you can't completely shape the outcome of one point of the game. It also doesn't hit miracle dice (since they already have the restriction), although there aren't a ton of critical effects in the sisters aresenal that I found in a quick search so either change wouldn't hurt them much.

Can we talk about how purely unfair it is? Not in terms of a generalist 'balance' perspective, but from a mechanic to mechanic, 1 to 1 comparison?

 

Fate Dice are so much better than miracle dice that you can tell there was not a single person of overlap between the two indexes in the writers room. Just allowing you to START with 12-15 Dice is already an insane improvement on miracle dice. Letting you pay 1 dice to reroll the remaining 11-14 is truly above board.

 

There's an argument that Sisters generate a lot more dice over the course of the game (which is true) but by the sheer nature of the mechanic, that doesn't balance things out. A dice available from the start of the game is far more valuable than even a dice generated over the course of the first turn (for what should be obvious reasons). I'm not sure there's a number of dice Sisters could generate that could possibly match Eldar's first 15 in terms of gameplay impact. 60? 80? I don't know if it'd even out even then.

 

And then just...getting the Triumphs aura ability army wide for free. Truly terrible.

 

Ignore that Eldar have High Damage devastating wounds and sisters don't and a bunch of other advantage they have and just look at the two abilities. This is like if Space Marines got Oath of Moment: Reroll all Hits and Wounds against 1 unit,  and Chaos Space Marines got Oath of Small Period of Time: Pick one enemy unit, friendly models attacking that unit Reroll 1s to hit in the fight phase, provided they made a charge move this turn.

[Squark]

Minor digression, albeit related to the topic- Where is the [TOWERING] keyword defined? I can't find it anywhere in the core rules, so I'm not 100% what it does now. It certainly isn't defined in the sections on visibility or abilities, which are the most sensible places for it to be.

[Brother Casman]

I believe Towering only interacts with Ruins and Woods terrain features? They can see and be seen through ruins and woods normally.

[spessmarine]

The very important stat at the top

 

Quote

They also got 86% wr without the mirrors.

 

Yikes

 

8 hours ago, TrawlingCleaner said:

Indirect Fire currently means that you're -1 to hit and the unit gets cover if you can't see the enemy model. That's fine as is but why do most Indirect Fire units have [Heavy] and have rules that ignore cover? Desolators are a good example of problematic units that have both (I'll get onto these guys), to me it's very counter intuitive. There's no point not to use Indirect (competitively speaking) as you can effectively kill units without any downsides, you can't see me but I can shoot you at full efficency. My honest hottake is that Indirect should make the firer BS6+ unless that model has LoS to the target or a spotting unit (specific keyword), games like Bolt Action have the right of Indirect.

 

I found that funny.

We nerfed Indirect! Oh by the way, some of them get weapon abilities to ignore the downsides of Indirect!

 

Not as funny though as the edition classic, announcing a reduction in re-rolls before seguing into Oath of Moment. All time classic.

[Sea Creature]

Seeing there was only one SM army in the top five it’s hard to say OoM is overpowered.

[Interrogator Stobz]

4 hours ago, Blurf said:

That's using a cannon to swat a fly.

 

Sisters of battle have THREE sources of Devastating wounds in the entire army, two of which are expensive combat characters and one of which is a completely useless support character.

 

Nerfing Miracle Dice for the sins of Fate Dice is asinine. Especially when Sisters are already terrible this edition. Just nerf Fate Dice. If Eldar started with 6 dice and couldn't use more than 1 per unit per phase, that would go A LONG way to fixing the problem without screwing sisters even further into the dumpster.

Melta should have anti vehicle and Dev Wounds, melta got far too nerfed this edition. 

[MARK0SIAN]

The most annoying thing about this whole balance issue is that it is the personification of the “How many times do we need to teach you this lesson, old man!” Meme. 
 

Prior to to tenth there were at least two instances where GW had to rein in non-natural rolls triggering special abilities because it was too strong. The most significant being the introduction of the actual rule that said modified dice scores merely counted as a hit/wound without any specific value because people were triggering extra hits or other benefits on rolls of 5 or even 4. Then they had to preemptively nerf LoV before they were even released because they realised too late how overpowered it would be for their extra damage etc to kick in on 4s instead of 6s.

 

They know that non-natural rolls triggering special abilities is bad, yet here we are again.

[Squark]

5 minutes ago, Interrogator Stobz said:

Melta should have anti vehicle and Dev Wounds, melta got far too nerfed this edition. 

Gw got complaints about it being anti-everything, so now melta is anti terminator, I guess >.<

 

I think the problem came when they gave marines a second wound and suddenly multi-damage weapons became much more valuable.

[spessmarine]

17 minutes ago, Squark said:

Gw got complaints about it being anti-everything, so now melta is anti terminator, I guess >.<

 

I think the problem came when they gave marines a second wound and suddenly multi-damage weapons became much more valuable.

 

Made all the more confusing since they introduced a system, anti-X, to allow adjusting things to counter specific things rather than good into anything.

[Scribe]

Just now, spessmarine said:

 

Made all the more confusing since they introduced a system, anti-X, to allow adjusting things to counter specific things rather than good into anything.

 

Everyone already has melta, cant sell it again. Time to release new weapons/profiles, which people have to buy new kits for.

[ZeroWolf]

36 minutes ago, MARK0SIAN said:

The most annoying thing about this whole balance issue is that it is the personification of the “How many times do we need to teach you this lesson, old man!” Meme. 
 

Prior to to tenth there were at least two instances where GW had to rein in non-natural rolls triggering special abilities because it was too strong. The most significant being the introduction of the actual rule that said modified dice scores merely counted as a hit/wound without any specific value because people were triggering extra hits or other benefits on rolls of 5 or even 4. Then they had to preemptively nerf LoV before they were even released because they realised too late how overpowered it would be for their extra damage etc to kick in on 4s instead of 6s.

 

They know that non-natural rolls triggering special abilities is bad, yet here we are again.

Chiming in, I'm going to bet that based on time lines, the index rules were already locked in when the backlash to the LoV happened meaning it was probably too late to try and fix things and keep on schedule.

[sonsoftaurus]

I haven’t gone in depth on Eldar, but I was surprised that with three standard game sizes they didn’t scale Fate dice, like 4/8/12 depending on size of the game.