Opinions are like starter set Kruleboyz: everyone’s already got way too many, but they keep getting repackaged and pushed out anyway. Once per quarter, every dickhead on the internet howls that their favourite units are fine but everybody else’s need nerfing, and your faithful Plastic Craic writing team (or at least the ones who haven’t been frantically fapping over FEC) are here today to add to the cacophony.

Peter Atkinson

One Points Increase

How do you defuse the bomb that was underperforming Idoneth?  Do you take precise and careful action, using the utmost clarity of thought and action?  Or do you ram your fat fingers in there and start grabbing fistfuls of random wires and yanking them out?

If GW starred in The Hurt Locker, it would have been a very short movie.  Not content with a tidal wave of green in the points update, GW yanked another leaver at the same time just to see what would happen.  And what would happen is Shark Spam.

The real jolt came from the FAQ itself (popping 6s in shooting), but a lot of those units (Tidecaster, Leviadon and to some extent Kings and Namarti) are staples of competitive IDK lists.  And just look at those lists:

https://woehammer.com/category/companies/games-workshop/age-of-sigmar/order/idoneth-deepkin/fuethan/

Sharks, Sharks, Sharks, Sharks, Sharks; they really are an aggressive assault on your eyeballs.  The FAQ was a big part of the issue – I’ve got a problem in principle with anti-shooting gunlines – but that’s not getting rolled back at this point.  So we’re left with the blunt instrument of points hikes, and I suggest we wield it mightily.

The verdict: Sharks (Bloodthirsty Shivers) to 180 points each (i.e. 540 for 3).  And if you’re dropping points on other units elsewhere in Idoneth, then these Sharks can go up even further, so people don’t just bank the savings and keep spamming these bloody things.

One Points Decrease

How early is too early to say you fucked up?  The Big Pig is out of the money, and not by a little bit.  Forget about the novelty Army of Renown which is beyond salvaging, the core warscroll for the hero version should be a staple of Orruk armies – people were frothing at the mouth to run this thing, and you never bloody see it.

The 180 point Gougers are fine (indeed they’re a borderline bargain) but Biggus Piggus himself needs a good tickle.  The Momentum mechanic was a great idea, abysmally executed: it’s way too hard to build up, to the extent that the barely-achievable upside should not really be priced in at all.  You have to point it on the assumption that it’s running on its base stats the whole time, because it’s vanishingly rare that you’ll get the upside. It has to have cost them sales. 

Anyway.  Biggle Piggle is slower than a Maw Krusha, he hits softer than a Maw Krusha, he’s easier to kill than a Maw Krusha and he does less to support your army than a Maw Krusha.  A mere 70 points discount from that centrepiece Monster (which itself is hardly settling the meta alight) is slim pickings. 

The verdict: It won’t happen, but….Biggity Piggity down to 300 points.  If an 80 point drop sounds aggressive, that’s only because you’re being swayed by the astronomical start point. Gougers can stay at 180 and I really don’t care about the one in between.

One Rules Change

It was the Bullgors that did it.  They do charge mortals?  OK. 

On a 2+?  Whatever. 

Two up rerolling ones?  Get fucked!

That rule is an absolute insult to everyone involved.  At that point, why are you even making us waste time rolling the dice?  And then picking out the fails?  And then rolling them again?  Do you really have that much contempt for our time?

Let me make it abundantly clear, because the penny doesn’t seem to have dropped yet:

Any time something happens on 2+ rerolling ones, you’ve stuffed it up.

And I do mean any time.  Always and everywhere.  If it happens on 2+ rerolling ones, it’s a broken interaction that needs fixing today.  If it’s supposed to have that level of certainty, make it just happen – there’s already plenty of stuff in the game that just happens, the Warchanter damage buff being one example. And if it’s meant to have a small amount of peril, make it happen on a 2+ with no rerolls. 2+ rerolling ones just makes no sense.

There are edge cases where rerolls can add value: specifically, when it’s a single roll (not a pool of dice to pick through) and there’s an element of jeopardy involved.  So with Master of Magic for example, you’ll often end up with “pushing your luck” dilemmas where you’ve just about managed to cast a spell, and you have to decide whether or not to stick with what you’ve got, or push for higher to blast it through an unbind. That’s cool.

I’d argue that the ideal rerolls in Age of Sigmar exist only in tightly ringfenced conditions:

• The reroll must relate to a tiny dice pool
• It must reroll the full set of dice (not picking out specific results to fish for the outcome you want)
• It must never get to the point of rerolling a 2+ (or equivalent)
• Examples of well-functioning rerolls: Master of Magic, Forward to Victory (reroll charges)

If it doesn’t fit those criteria, dish out plusses instead. This was the clear direction for most of 3rd Edition, but they’re slowly creeping back into the game more broadly. I really hope we don’t get back to what we had in earlier editions, which was a freakin’ reroll jamberoo with rerolling individual dice plastered right throughout the game. 

But Muh FEC Chomp

This isn’t me trying to pre-nerf FEC. The point is, there’s always a better solution. For example in the case of FEC, instead of rerolling to fish for 6s, how about the spell lets them pop off on a 5+ instead of a 6+?

The maths is very similar: hitting a 6+ with a reroll is a 31% chance, whereas hitting a natural 5+ is a 33% chance. So you’re actually very marginally better off with the plus than the reroll, and that’s fine.

Indeed, you could replace any reroll with a static bonus: for example you could make Forward to Victory (reroll a charge) into add +2″ to a charge. I do think that would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater somewhat, because let’s be honest, it’s piss funny when your opponent rerolls a failed short charge into an even worse fail. It would be a shame to lose that.

The Verdict: Take every reroll that doesn’t meet the principles above, and throw them on a fucking bonfire.

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Sean Benson

One Points Increase:

Now you may be looking at the game feeling like everything is starting to settle in fine and dandy, but I have to say every time I come back around to it, I can’t help but feel this pressure coming in the cosmic dinosaurs. We see the value of a Lord of Celestial Resonance Slann week in and week out. I want to see the frogs go up more to get the Slanns up to 300 and potentially Kroak into the 450 range. I think we should be in a place where the choice is really whether to go a Slann or Kroak, but not automatically both. The faction on the Starborne side is becoming such a well-oiled machine, and having to make no tough choices at the all-you-can-eat buffet means they’re always eating to their fill.

The Verdict: Slaan Starmaster to 300, Kroak to 450

One Points Decrease:

There’s a lot of pet warscrolls that I think we could all grab from to say “Hey that would really change the fabric of the game,” but I think one is especially timely right now and would benefit one of the Dawnbringer armies. Let’s see Kurnoth Hunters go down in points across the board. Of all the things we’d like to see do well in the Sylvaneth faction, definitely having Belthanos and his big boy brigade would be excellent. Let’s pull them down at least enough that if you wanted to go all in, you get another 3 in a list. Sylvaneth list writing is so tight and they live in a place that hinges so heavily on the skill of the pilot to get them over the line in games, so giving something that is a bit less tricksy and is more on numerical durability would open the faction up more to a new set of fun, exciting lists.

The Verdict: Kurnoth Hunters to 180 Swords / 200 Bows / 220 Scythes

One Rules Change:

Experimentation is pretty cool, I mean we all get a time in our lives to do something a little bit off the beaten path and perhaps dig deep into our souls to re-emerge anew. I’m entirely sure that now that we’ve had Merciless Blizzard for nearly 6 months, we can call it a day on this experiment and bring it down to a less wanky upside. The highs are over, let’s call it a CV 9 spell with damage value = 4d3. More consistent and less spiky. Excellent. Sign it off, let’s go.

The Verdict: Merciless Blizzard | Casting Value 9 | Damage 4d3

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