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That's pretty poo poo, wow. Did you guys see the new Frog solo for Grymkin that was being worked on? It looks loving rad
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Jan 4, 2019 03:04
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It'd be better if he was a minion also, but "Baron Tonguelick, Lord of Warts" is a great name. I guess I need to get the last cool frog solo, Chief Mire, once he's not in a collector box.
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Jan 4, 2019 18:38
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effort post incoming I've been playing since Escalation back in Mk1. My interest has come in cycles, but in 2014 I moved to an area with no wargaming meta at all and I never really recovered from that; I tried to play a bit in 2015, but in 2016/18 I was mostly Malifaux and in 2017 I was living on an island where nobody had even heard of tabletop wargames. So obviously I've missed some stuff. Like, most of Mk3. And also apparently the death of the local scene in the Boston area. I play Convergence and Skorne, since I sold my Protectorate stuff at a grotesque discount, but I'm sort of interested in getting back into it. I've heard some pretty dire things about the health of the game. Theme forces are mandatory, apparently. Faction balance all over the place, tons of models never get used. Pagani's gone, DC's been gone for a while, Lyle, Shick... Jason Soles is somehow still there despite a history of, well, everything he's done to the game. But I don't want to psych myself out too hard. I do want to come back, some of my best gaming memories are WM/H. I miss the game. I tried playing the card game, didn't like it; I kickstarted the video game and regretted it. There's no substitute for the real deal. Don't sugarcoat it: is Warmachine on life support? Is it getting better or worse? Do we get the impression that they know what's wrong and how to fix it, and what's working and how to keep it going? I have pretty limited time to play games these days, especially ones with travel time. Is this something I should be investing my time in? And does anyone still play in Boston?
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Jan 5, 2019 01:40
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You're hearing stuff from 2017 mostly. Faction and theme force balance is pretty good for most factions now, save Legion. The game went through a very rough patch early in Mk3, but its recovering very nicely, and new models and mini factions are still coming our regularly. The game is fine. Theme forces are mostly mandatory but now that they've had a chance to get balanced they actually add a lot to the game, especially given just how many choices there are now.
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Jan 5, 2019 01:44
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The best answer I can give you is that the game is probably in the best shape as its been in a long time rule and balance wise. However there's a general apathy amongst the older players and a lack of new blood. Can't seem to get new players as much as we try.
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Jan 5, 2019 01:55
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And if we are being honest, the end of mk2 was a cluster gently caress. You basically had to play themes back then too, with a couple exceptions, and it was awful. Mk3 launch wad pretty awful for a variety of reasons, and it turns out DC wasn't as great a designer as everyone liked to believe, anyway. Mk3 sees a lot of factions and a lot of different lists placing well in a variety of events. It's not perfect but I feel very confident in saying it's a stronger game today than maybe at any point in the games history. E: and the LCQ at WMW had it's highest participation ever this year from what I remember. The game is definitely more regional than it used to be though. S.J. fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Jan 5, 2019 |
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Jan 5, 2019 01:56
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A lot of that is that GW is back in peoples' good graces so a bunch of people returned to warhams.
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Jan 5, 2019 01:57
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I think the game ran face first into a couple realitites of the medium. First, change is hard and it often takes time to win people over. Mk3 is quite good now but it definitely strained the relationship between players and PP at times. It takes a while for those people to drift back. Second, tabletop gaming is expensive and most people can't really play multiple games. Many people will simply play the game their friends/community is playing. So when Games Workshop is weak, other games can flourish. But when GW is strong, it's going to suck a lot of air out the room, and GW seems to be strong right now. Finally, Warmachine always faced a bit of an innate paradox. It's the "competitive" wargame, but variance is still hugely influential on who wins and who loses. Whether it's list selection, the opponents you face, dice, etc. I suspect that the heavy amount of uncontrollable variance in the game can drive really competitive players away over time. It's hard for people to take the L at a big tournament when they feel that their loss was simply out of their hands. Especially when it happens several times in a row. That feeds back into the balance issues at the start of Mk3 as well. I think all of those factors combined into a bit of a perfect storm of poor timing for PP. The first and third issues drove veterans away while the middle one prevented new players from coming in. If PP is able to keep the game in a good state, people will drift back in, but it'll probably take some time. I doubt the game/company is in serious trouble, although that could change if economic conditions worsen dramatically, but that's the kind of stuff that's not really worth speculating about.
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Jan 5, 2019 02:15
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One thing that I was talking about earlier today with a friend of mine who used to play (this conversation is why I made the post above) is basically: there's always been a tension at the heart of WM/H that has strained gameplay and caused challenges. On the one hand, everything about the game's fantasy and lore (and obviously the intention of the designers) is to go "tall," playing very heavy with warjacks/beasts with infantry support. But everything about the game's rules has encouraged you to go wide with infantry, from powerful buff spells working better on units to the whole "additional die of damage on charge attacks" mechanic favoring units with 10 mediocre attacks instead of warjacks with 2 powerful ones. Has that ever been meaningfully addressed? We've tossed around suggestions in our old group like "infantry get +2 or S+P on the charge." I know they added a ton of WJ/WB points in Mk3 relative to Mk2, but while people will take them if they're free, that seems like a bandaid solution. On the plus side, it's good to hear Rasheth is good now, because I played a shitload of him in Mk2 when he was kind of the butt of a lot of jokes (and, frankly, Skorne was in pretty rough shape last I checked, though I hear that's different now too). And yeah, it really seems old gee dubs is firing on all cylinders now. That's actually kind of heartening. If they can pull out of the 2013-2015 death dive they were in, anyone can.
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Jan 5, 2019 03:29
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Infantry spam is mostly a thing of the past. Free jack/beast points are substantially greater now and jacks are now much more efficient cause of new focus rules.
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Jan 5, 2019 03:55
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In my experience the lists being presented have huge variety. It generally does fall in to jack/beast spam or infantry spam but there have been a resurgence in mixed arms lists. I’ve been pretty active with our provincial meta recently and have seen no real dominate Must Play one and there isn’t One List to rule them all any more. Certainly there can be strong lists (Gaspy 3 with all the Slayers or Anamag and Primal Terrors) however the game lets you have options to deal with them. I believe that outside of a few quirks, the game is doing just fine. Once Jeff settles in to Pagani’s skin everything should quiet down on the DOOOM front.
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Jan 5, 2019 04:55
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fool_of_sound posted:Infantry spam is mostly a thing of the past. Free jack/beast points are substantially greater now and jacks are now much more efficient cause of new focus rules. Infantry spam is alive and well in a variety of lists, but 'jack heavy lists or mixed lists are well suited to play into it with a variety of casters. It will never be quite as bad as before because of how large your battlegroup is required to be in comparison to the past, but Cryx can and will still drown you in bodies. But then, so can Trenchers, Winter Guard, Convergence, Grymkin, Knights Exemplar, and Skorne even has a pretty gross Swordsman spam they can run now. Infantry lists also run the gamut from hard skew to being very 'mid-range', to borrow an MTG term. S.J. fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Jan 5, 2019 |
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Jan 5, 2019 08:00
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It's might just be my area meta then, because the only infantry spam you see here is with fairly heavy infantry, which doesn't feel nearly like the infantry machine days of mk2.
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Jan 5, 2019 17:20
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Did the IKRPG content released in No Quarter get collected in a book? I'm trying to track down some of the stuff put out across several issues.
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Jan 5, 2019 20:31
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Jonas Albrecht posted:Did the IKRPG content released in No Quarter get collected in a book? I'm trying to track down some of the stuff put out across several issues. Only the adventure path, I think. Lemme know what you're looking for though, I might have it.
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Jan 5, 2019 20:53
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S.J. posted:Only the adventure path, I think. Lemme know what you're looking for though, I might have it. NQ 48 (I promised my girlfriend there were robopriests) and 49 for the Rhulic stuff.
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Jan 5, 2019 20:58
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S.J. posted:Infantry spam is alive and well in a variety of lists, but 'jack heavy lists or mixed lists are well suited to play into it with a variety of casters. It will never be quite as bad as before because of how large your battlegroup is required to be in comparison to the past, but Cryx can and will still drown you in bodies. But then, so can Trenchers, Winter Guard, Convergence, Grymkin, Knights Exemplar, and Skorne even has a pretty gross Swordsman spam they can run now. Infantry lists also run the gamut from hard skew to being very 'mid-range', to borrow an MTG term. I'm still convinced Terminus with 70+ Infantry is a good list that most pairs will struggle with, just gotta test it a bit more.
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Jan 5, 2019 22:59
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susan posted:I'm still convinced Terminus with 70+ Infantry is a good list that most pairs will struggle with, just gotta test it a bit more. I've seen this and it seems aggravating, so I'm inclined to agree.
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Jan 5, 2019 23:59
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I always liked skew lists. The best time I had in Mk2 was pSevvy, double Judicator, choir, vassals. Also I think I had another jack in there, an arc mode maybe?
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Jan 6, 2019 00:02
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My local meta has died, a lot of us have sold off armies but kept one to play odd games / in the future. I think it comes down to the following: 1. Back when we started playing warmachine was cheaper to play than 40k. Now though warmachine is more expensive than 40k so people are playing that or guild ball. 2. The constant CID has irritated some players as they fell the game is constantly changing.
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Jan 6, 2019 00:05
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DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:I always liked skew lists. The best time I had in Mk2 was pSevvy, double Judicator, choir, vassals. Also I think I had another jack in there, an arc mode maybe? Turns out that's way loving stronger now than it was back then. Even more stupid if you swap pSevvy for High Reclaimer, and add in Sevvy 0.
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Jan 6, 2019 00:17
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gilljoy posted:My local meta has died, a lot of us have sold off armies but kept one to play odd games / in the future. I play every week and read up on the CID changes when they are happening. In truth, even that is nowhere near enough to keep up. My meta is down to two players and one guy who sometimes shows up but doesn't want to play in Themes, from 6-8 every week. WMH was never a casual game to begin with, but even for regular players who aren't quite hardcore enough, keeping up with the game feels almost like a chore. It's exhausting. I played in a 3-player Team Tournament yesterday. While it was amazing and fun, each time we where handed the lists at least two of the 6 lists we saw where completely alien to us. The game relies heavily on synergies, and they are not always readily apparent when you scan through a list. While I still love the game, I honestly think it's become way too complicated for it's own good. Most of my gaming group has switched over to Guild Ball now. While it's of course a younger system and thus a little unfair to compare, it suffers way less from the overflow of information. You will always have 6 different opponent models on the table, and since there aren't that many models and abilities, after a couple games against a certain player, you will know what his favorites do by heart. It's just as tactical, but way less reliant on memorization.
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Jan 6, 2019 17:56
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I haven’t played in about a year and a half but there’s a journeyman league starting this week so I think I’m going to use it to ease myself back in. The only problem is that I only have the mk3 starter for Skorne so I’ll have to play ol’ wavy arms for the first 3 weeks. The other faction I own is Khador - is Kozlov any better?
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Jan 6, 2019 18:29
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Xekaar really isn't that bad in a journeyman league. In fact you might even think he's really good in the under 35 point games. Your problem with Xekaar comes in when there are a bunch of threats on the board that can all shoot him dead.
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Jan 6, 2019 20:02
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Xekaar is much better with the new Immortal Vessel. He's still pretty awful defensively but he's at least able to not instantly get assassinated any time he tries to do stuff now.
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Jan 6, 2019 20:09
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fool_of_sound posted:Xekaar is much better with the new Immortal Vessel. He's still pretty awful defensively but he's at least able to not instantly get assassinated any time he tries to do stuff now. Yeah this definitely changes him into a playable 'lock. He's got a lot of good stuff on his cards with no way to reliably get them out until now.
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Jan 6, 2019 20:24
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Luebbi posted:I play every week and read up on the CID changes when they are happening. In truth, even that is nowhere near enough to keep up. My meta is down to two players and one guy who sometimes shows up but doesn't want to play in Themes, from 6-8 every week. WMH was never a casual game to begin with, but even for regular players who aren't quite hardcore enough, keeping up with the game feels almost like a chore. It's exhausting. A warmachine-like video game would rule because of this. Digital is the perfect medium where those problems would be strenghts.
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Jan 6, 2019 22:49
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You sure would think so, but alas
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Jan 7, 2019 00:02
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I bought Warmachine Tactics, got stuck on a bug in the second tutorial mission that wouldn't let me continue, and haven't played since.
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Jan 7, 2019 00:31
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Luebbi posted:I play every week and read up on the CID changes when they are happening. In truth, even that is nowhere near enough to keep up. My meta is down to two players and one guy who sometimes shows up but doesn't want to play in Themes, from 6-8 every week. WMH was never a casual game to begin with, but even for regular players who aren't quite hardcore enough, keeping up with the game feels almost like a chore. It's exhausting. I've been hesitant to pipe up in here since I shat on the game pretty heavily when I was burning out on it shortly after Mk3 hit, however I've kept up on the game through this thread over the past 2 years or so. What I can say for my area's meta is that it died completely shortly after CID started and armies were changing monthly. I think this has been one of two major turn-offs for people I know who used to play. For context: East-side Portland, Oregon & suburbs area - 2015-2016 up until L&L where Mk3 rules dropped a friend of mine who became a PG and I began hosting WMH nights at a LGS. At the peak around March 2016 we ran a journeyman league that was supposed to take up right up to L&L that had 37 people sign up, 32 of which completed the league play. We had lots of casual-fun types and probably 5-6 that were interested in and gearing up for tournament-style play. We all understood that Mk3 was going to change things up and right around the time our group had started to adjust to that CID kicked off. Most people played with cards and tokens at the time and almost immediately everyone was forced over to the app-whose-name-I-cant-remember for $90 in buying the updates for the $18 card pack you just bought, oh and you can't use cards anymore unless you want to print them yourself and paste them to stock MTG lands or whatever (  and looks terrible).The tournament-interested players quit immediately. They spent months learning other factions and characters and in the course of a couple of weeks the forced-Themes changes along with monthly changes to entire factions meant that they couldn't keep up. Themes becoming requirements meant that in order to stay competitive, you had to have multiple squads of similar units for your S-tier theme that was only going to be valid for a few months until the next CID or Bold-Text Rule change that was key to the theme's power. The casual players started falling off shortly after as the flavor-of-the-CID-month initial changes that were usually toned down later on became netlist curbstomping parties for whomever's month it was for CID. By early 2017 if someone posted in the GroupMe chat looking for a game, it was usually followed a couple of days later by the person dropping the chat because no one responded or was interested. Nowadays whenever I look at the multiple battlefoam bags and boxes in my closet full of hundreds of WMH models and think I should maybe do something with them, my choices are either to play two sides of a table by myself, or sell them at 20% of retail and lose my shirt on the value. The Guerilla Miniatures Gaming guy had a Top5 list of games in need of new edition updates in 2019, and his #1 was WMH. His opinion was that it needed to be allowed to grow from a skirmish game into the mass combat game that it's slowly been morphing into, and I'm not entirely in disagreement with him. I think it should retain rules of skirmish size games, but for the size of factions and the breadth of unit options (plus colossals), it needs to go up in size and support 6x4 board play and a 40k 8th edition-style streamlining of the rules. For sure though, I prefer GW's annual Chapter Approved with a bi-annual FAQ release schedule for adjustments over monthly changes that skew entire factions and reset the meta entirely. (Also I loving hate the lovely-as-of-2016 v.2 of their app and the excessive microtransaction-style monitization model.) tl;dr - I think CID/Themes and the forced move to the app to be able to play the game did a lot to turn people off.
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Jan 7, 2019 00:48
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Gamers are the worst. When it's not "Fix my faction now", it's "Don't fix theirs I don't want to relearn things!".
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Jan 7, 2019 00:57
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Iceclaw posted:Gamers are the worst. When it's not "Fix my faction now", it's "Don't fix theirs I don't want to relearn things!". I'm pretty sure that reductive pedantry rates higher. I haven't seen people quitting 40k in droves with their bi-annual FAQs and annual points adjustments system. I suspect that may have something to do with the healthier playerbase and it's specifically why I pointed it out in the post, but maybe  are too hard for you.
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Jan 7, 2019 01:12
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Iceclaw posted:Gamers are the worst. When it's not "Fix my faction now", it's "Don't fix theirs I don't want to relearn things!". I just... most of the CID changes are for new things coming out. You don't have to pay attention to them at all. You can just look at all the new stuff and the rules changes for free once they drop. It's literally no different than a new/updated book coming out in any other miniature game, which if we want to make a 40k reference, is about every other month for AoS/40k. There are ~6-8 important dynamic updates that actually happen in WMH every year. koreban posted:[. . .] monthly changes that skew entire factions and reset the meta entirely. (Also I loving hate the lovely-as-of-2016 v.2 of their app and the excessive microtransaction-style monitization model.) Pretty much this entire statement is incorrect, but I can certainly understand not liking things after Mk3 dropped.
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Jan 7, 2019 01:17
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koreban posted:The Guerilla Miniatures Gaming guy had a Top5 list of games in need of new edition updates in 2019, and his #1 was WMH. His opinion was that it needed to be allowed to grow from a skirmish game into the mass combat game that it's slowly been morphing into, and I'm not entirely in disagreement with him. I think it should retain rules of skirmish size games, but for the size of factions and the breadth of unit options (plus colossals), it needs to go up in size and support 6x4 board play and a 40k 8th edition-style streamlining of the rules. I'm not sure that this is anything that me or my friends want, but I'll roll it around in my head for a while. Thanks for the youtube channel though, it looks pretty good.
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Jan 7, 2019 02:48
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S.J. posted:Pretty much this entire statement is incorrect, but I can certainly understand not liking things after Mk3 dropped. I dated it precisely in the case that two years+ had altered that truth or improved on the shittyness. I don’t claim to know what CID is doing right now, but the early iterations absolutely changed entire factions, and the new themes that introduced upwards of 15 points of free solos for meeting theme requirements did make sweeping meta changes on the regular. Again, as of the last 2016/early 2017 time that I last played.
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Jan 7, 2019 05:20
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Thing is the game is awful at larger sizes. Watching 100 point games in mk2 looked worse than the previous editions of 40k. In mk3 everyone wanted to go right to giant infantry wars from the get go with no undetstanding of the system or the changes. Personal experience but I watched a ton of people just try to copy paste mk2 lists into mk3 then get mad an quit. Mk3 had a crap launch period but the constant adjustment keep it from locking down to one or two lists reigning over everything. There is actual vareity, that is a good thing. Remember mad dog spam? They adjusted that quick. Going to grand army style of what 70 models on the board, individually activating every unit, solo, an trying to manage a 5 focus caster on how many jacks to fit that? Or managing all that fury? I'm not saying its wrong to find that kind of style fun but its not, to me just saying, what the game is built on. Maybe if they go mk4 an go that style but its a whole different game at that point. Games wax an wane, 40k is big now but people like vareity. Its the McDonalds of gaming, it has prescence but it isn't the only game in town, your community may vary. I like wmh as a quick an focused option. A game of 40k is slowly rolling into a 2+ hour sit down with index, codex, faq bloat but that is the nature of the beast. If I want a fast game its not 40k. If the wmh scene is dead in your area branch out or try to revitalise it. My lgs has a journeyman starting just to try something new, it happens. If you have more models than you know what to do with offer demos, get people interested.
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Jan 7, 2019 05:41
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koreban posted:I dated it precisely in the case that two years+ had altered that truth or improved on the shittyness. Sorry, that's what I meant about the Mk3 drop. After that initial drop of themes bringing games back up to what people were more familiar with in Mk2 (size wise), everything smoothed way out.
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Jan 7, 2019 05:53
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koreban posted:whole lotta uh hey, I'm also a portlander and the wm/h scene, while smaller than it was back in the mk2 heyday, does have a pretty consistent group now with at least 2 regular nights in town one on each side of the river. We also have at least 1 regular tournament a month and that draws the Tacoma / Seattle crowd for larger events So if you're looking to actually use those toys come on down. Also we use discord now
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Jan 7, 2019 06:40
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I dunno, I think koreban's group is probably fairly exemplary of what happened with a lot of small metas. The transition from Mk2 to Mk3 was definitely a low point, I think that's fair to say. It was a super tumultuous rollout and the balance of the game oscillated wildly during that period. Whether via choice or necessity, PP put themselves in a position where the game was very imbalanced for a significant period of time. And not in a small way that encouraged variety, but where factions that had themes simply had more points and better rules than factions that didn't. I think they underestimated how fast they would be able roll out themes and hiccups like the Skorne and Cryx major reworks were obviously not things they originally planned for. If you were paying attention and willing to give PP the benefit of the doubt, you could see the light at the end of the tunnel. But for whatever reason (and this is all completely anecdotal of course), tabletop gamers seem to be pretty pessimistic on balance. I think a lot of folks were primed to go all Chicken Little at the first sign of trouble. The extreme negativity of the internet echo-chambers that people used (particularly the Facebook groups) didn't help matters. From what I've seen, with a small meta there's generally a couple guys that are really invested and they pull the rest along. If those guys checked out during the Mk3 transition, that's pretty much the end of that meta, at least in the short term. I think it basically came down to a question of whether or not your meta had a core that believed in what PP was doing or not. Of course people are different and I'm sure plenty of people had different experiences, but I think broadly that's a fairly reasonable explanation for what happened to a lot of the smaller metas. The bright side is that the game is good now. And a good game will draw in more players. Especially since there are a lot of people out there with models on the shelf. It's easy to buy back in when things look good. Unless the situation at PP is far more dire than we have any indication of, I'm sure the game will be fine. AttackBacon fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Jan 7, 2019 |
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Jan 7, 2019 06:45
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And I can't speak for anyone else, but in my area we had a few individuals who were dead fixed on being huge pieces of poo poo and intentionally trying to get the game to die in the area, including going out of their way to lie to local players about whether or not people were playing, where they were playing, and even lying to Carl at Warmachine Weekend about there being no one in the area that would be interested in organizing a WMW qualifier. And these guys regularly talked to a lot of players/organizers all over the country.
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Jan 7, 2019 06:47
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