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Shot in the Rear...NPE? Whack with a Cuddle bat?


Iron Heel

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Godlyness and Hateful Darkblack are both correct - the best way to show that this combo is/is not overpowered is to post battle reports with a detailed explanation as to why the players felt the way they did.

 

I haven't played with or against this combo yet, but as a general rule, I try to give combos the benefit of the doubt and assume they aren't overpowered until there's a very large amount of evidence to the contrary.  I'm not calling anyone in this thread out , but people in general tend to have emotional attachments to their favorite characters, so a knee jerk reaction to something crushing your favorite models tends to be "OP!"  Given the outcry against Guild Austringers and Rotten Belles (and the lack of errata), my impression is that Wyrd doesn't errata models lightly.  To the people suggesting this combo is overpowered, post battle reports and present logical conclusions as to why this combo is too powerful.

 

That said, my gut reaction from reading the relevant cards is that there are many other similarly powerful combos in the game.  For example, my friend CougDyver has some new Rail Golem - Hoffman combo that puts the Golem in the enemy deployment zone with elevated stats attacking models on turn 1.  I played a recent game with Tara where I dropped a Fast Killjoy and a Fast Desolation Engine into the middle of Perdita's crew on turn 1.  I think it's a slippery slope to start errata'ing powerful combos unless they completely warp the meta.

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Tara combo you see a mile away. So not mitigating some of that damage is player error. Reactivating rail golem was an issue but you don't hear about it anymore. Belles are s running joke in my games. (Oh liked your dual total is at 20 ok I be walking. ) Austringers can peck a few things and people hate it. But o enjoy all of it since I can only become s better player by playing against people who thought of a combo or used something I have never thought of.

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I don't think anyone here except Justin (if he's watching) 

 

Always. :)

 

Very, very frequently there are actions/abilities/combos/etc in the game which seem ridiculously overpowered on paper, when everything is assumed to go perfectly, but just don't hold up in play once you face the reality of terrain, positioning, luck of the draw, and an opponent trying to stop you. 

 

I think this is *another* one of those situations. The beta was great, but it trained people to look for fixes in the rules rather than ways to adjust their game plan. Now that the models are printed, we need a different mindset.

 

All that said, should this prove to be a problem, I have no issue with errata (and have proved so in the past). But the level of theory and premature suggested fixes to a problem that is itself not yet established would only hinder that process (assuming it's necessary).

 

At the moment, I am no more likely to errata this model than any other one in the game (same for the upgrade).

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Thats what I find most fun. Seing how many combo's are what some people consider OP to then realise every faction has 2/3 OP combo's. My new feeling/reaction to all of these potent threats is 'stick an ice wall infront of it'. I believe Ulix has some strong combo's that when played right will result in autowins vs some crews. Against other crews this may not feel like such a threat. Pandora using incite/Lucius with red tape trigger/raspy dropping an ice wall in the way/Marcus casting law of the meat etc. Thats the beauty of the game, everything can be a major threat, or useless at exactly the same time.

 

I can definately see some nice tricks with corn husks, the clobbering stick etc, but its not like it hasn't ben done before (Vik's with the malifaux child, Colette with any durable beatstick, dreamer teddy summoning build, belles) all of which are filth in one meta, but weak in others.

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 Thing is, I agree if it's on paper, but these things have been accomplished in game (consistently). People have come in and wrote their games up, explaining how it happened. So its not theory.

 

 And the only part I care about is bringing this to the attention of Wyrd, so they can internally check into it and test it themselves. That done, there's not much more to add. :)

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THANK YOU JUSTIN!!!

 

sevorin- do you think that people who have had no negative experiences with a master will go to rage on the forums about their experiences with them?

 

I fully expect that when somebody has a game go against them in some way they didn't expect, they will hop on here with endless complaints and send emails to wyrd, etc.

 

It is theory that the ability or upgrade is overpowered, the reasoning behind the postings is not always rational, mostly it seems emotional, and basing big rules changes on a very small number of people's negative emotions about a hand full of games (IE. not consistently) wouldn't be a great idea IMHO. 

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THANK YOU JUSTIN!!!

 

sevorin- do you think that people who have had no negative experiences with a master will go to rage on the forums about their experiences with them?

 

I fully expect that when somebody has a game go against them in some way they didn't expect, they will hop on here with endless complaints and send emails to wyrd, etc.

 

It is theory that the ability or upgrade is overpowered, the reasoning behind the postings is not always rational, mostly it seems emotional, and basing big rules changes on a very small number of people's negative emotions about a hand full of games (IE. not consistently) wouldn't be a great idea IMHO.

Yeah.......I'm pretty sure no one on here said anything remotely similar to that. No one came on here screaming.....experiences were posted......and I'm pretty sure everyone is saying.....this needs to be looked at a little more closely to see if there's a problem.

 

I certainly agree that posts can be emotional......in response to and/or in defense of abilities and such.....but I'm not seeing much of that in this particular thread.

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I agree, this thread seems to be calm and rational for the most part, which I greatly appreciate. :)

Your comment saved it from me getting stingy <_<

 

I still hope I can get a match going with the local Ulix player with all the toys, it's becoming too damn hard to get that match going... I do know I'll use Ten Thunders since with ressers, my gremlin drop is Nicodem mostly and I've already seen how bad Hanged cramp up Ulix's style, so even if it ended up being considered too much, I do know it has a hard counter to it in hanged shenanigans.

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What sort of lists and Masters are particularly vulnerable to this, and under what circumstances?

I don't want to come across as dismissing anyone's experiences, but I feel as though all the crews I've run lately would be able to counter it fairly easily after seeing it in action.

Corn Husks seems vastly more powerful than Shot in the Rear to me, and even that just requires removing a single model from the table.

I'll go read the battle reports. Hope to get some games in against it myself at some point.

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I would think any zerg master, IE summoners with a lot of low def, low wound models would be most vulnerable to this, but as was said earlier... I think every master has the ability to counter this if they have enough model selection possibilities.  

 

As to corn husks... I dunno what tables other people are playing on but generally we get a lot of cover in our games, lanes can be open, but drawing a LOS to a piglet behind a building isn't always so easy. It seems like other people are saying every pig is going to be able to use this ability all the time, sure isn't the case in our games.

 

Further, if you got a stack of piglets behind a scheme bunker and your using them to let Ulix summon... where's the huge advantage? I mean if a pig moves once and drops a scheme 3-4 inc away, that means he can move back or close to his original position behind the bunker... ok... or Ulix, or Old Major can use one AP to bring them all together behind the bunker. so what... they might be slightly more exposed for an action or two? I just don't see how this is so extremely overpowered, beginning of this thread people sure made it sound like this single ability was killing all the fun... 

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  • 4 months later...

I'm going to threadomance this a bit, which I hope is ok, rather than start a separate Ulix thread on the same topic. I had my first experience against Ulix tonight, and it very much fit into the negative play experiences people were describing earlier in the thread. 

 

My crew was:

Lynch: Wanna See a Trick, Woke Up With a Hand, Rising Sun

Hungering Darkness: Addict

Doppelganger: Useless Duplications

2x Illuminated

Beckoner

2x Silurid

 

His crew was (more or less)

Ulix: Husbandry, Hunting Bow, Liquid Bravery

Penelope

Gracie: Saddler

Old Major: Corn Husks

Lenny

Slop Hauler

some other things I am no doubt forgetting

 

Schemes and Strats: Reconnoitre, Cursed Object, Protect Territory, Breakthrough, Plant Evidence (I took Breakthrough and Plant Evidence)

 

1. Corn Husks. This was on Old Major, on a board where the vast majority of the terrain was Ht 2. If we were playing the ability correctly it meant essentially every pig on the board could remove one of my scheme markers simply by stopping within 1" of it - including charging the model that just placed it. Even with two Silurids it quickly became apparent that my odds of getting 6 scheme markers on the table were essentially zero. Even keeping 1 or 2 was going to be a stretch. 

 

2. Hunting Bow and... Slop 'em up?. My opponent and I honestly started to lose track of how many AP his crew generated out of activation. On turn 2 he summoned a war pig, which took a free attack along with 2 to 3 other pigs via slop em up. That attack turned into a free charge on a different model, killing it. In the next turn via Hunting Bow 2 AP from Ulix turned into _8_, count them _8_ attacks from the War Pig and Old Major. The War Pig charged and killed a Beckoner, then charged and failed to kill an Illuminated. Not to fear, Ulix then shot Old Major who finished off the Illuminated and then charged Lynch. He failed to kill Lynch, but now Old Major and the War Pig were both in the midst of my crew, had killed two critical models and engaged my master, and had not actually activated.

 

This ability for a single AP from a master to balloon into 4 or even more AP from 9 and 10 ss models seems very much out of line in comparison to comparable abilities that I am familiar with. Obey strictly limits the number of attacks that can be made. Obey-like abilities from Dreamer, Collodi, and Lucius (the masters I am familiar with) also cannot multiply to anything close to the same degree as far as I am aware.

 

My opponent also agreed that something was terribly wrong with the way that ability played out, and to a lesser extent Corn Husks. I'm fairly certain we could have played that game with those crews a dozen times and I would have come no closer to making it competitive - between the big pigs erasing my crew and the small pigs erasing my markers the game was more or less lost from the get go. 

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If we were playing the ability correctly it meant essentially every pig on the board could remove one of my scheme markers simply by stopping within 1" of it - including charging the model that just placed it. Even with two Silurids it quickly became apparent that my odds of getting 6 scheme markers on the table were essentially zero. Even keeping 1 or 2 was going to be a stretch.

Do enemy scheme markers count as enemy "models" for the sake of Interact actions? If the Piglet charged your model, they're engaged. Therefore they're actually preventing themselves from removing markers if they don't count. Also, in this game your silurids could have leaped out of engagement, placed a marker and walked back in to keep the enemy pinned.

If I'm correct, I think it would have been a vastly different game for you.

It also sounds like terrain was a major problem if there wasn't terrain to block Corn Husks LoS and things were able to be so easily charged.

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No, Corn Husks allows them to just discard an enemy scheme marker within 1" to heal 1 wound. It's not an interact action. So yeah they can do that while engaged. 

 

Also Bodiless, I think you had a good point in posting in this thread again and sounds like a pretty brutal game. 

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OTOH Ulix has seen use on the British tournament track and hasn't (to my knowledge) dominated there.

I also do think that one game isn't enough to say one way or another. I at least tend to lose when going against a Master I haven't played before. This is doubly true if the Master has a very distinct playstyle (so Brewmaster is worse in this regard than Lady J) and Ulix certainly does.

Not discounting your experience or opinion, just noting that it isn't (yet) conclusive.

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No, Corn Husks allows them to just discard an enemy scheme marker within 1" to heal 1 wound. It's not an interact action. So yeah they can do that while engaged. 

 

Also Bodiless, I think you had a good point in posting in this thread again and sounds like a pretty brutal game.

Thanks for the correction, zFiend. I don't have my cards to hand but I was thinking of the (0) interact action that piglets are allowed via Corn Husks. I understand the issue a bit better.

All the same, I very much agree with Math, here. The problem is, you'll get people logging in to describe negative experiences but rarely to say they had a fair game. Most masters I've played against could seem OP the first time you play them.

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This is the second time my opponent has used that crew, to essentially the same result. Both games were non-competitive to the point where he won't be playing Ulix outside of tournaments again. I agree, it is a small sample and nothing too definite can be drawn from it. However, since it was very much in line with other experiences I'd read here about Ulix I thought I would add it to the pile. 

 

 

A note about the setup. We had a lot of terrain on the board, and it is terrain that was even designed in consultation with Wyrd (it was used at last year's NOVA tournament). So there was plenty and cover and coverage, just not a lot that would block LOS to a Ht 3 model. Having an ability like Corn Husks on a big model like that with no range limitation seems like an extremely powerful ability. The fact that removing scheme markers is not an interact, even a (0) interact means there is almost nothing you can do to stop it from going off. Likewise Major's "pigs are not valid charge targets for other pigs" kept all of his various free charges pointed in the right direction. And because my opponent is a skilled player he was careful to not let me drag Old Major in and murder him before there was essentially nothing left of my crew.

 

On Shot in the Rear, I think the ability is fine in concept but it needs to have some kind of limitation set on it. As I said in my other post, it is the only Obey-like ability I can think of that can generate an arbitrarily large number of attacks. It is pretty close to having 3 pigs activate in a row, with the minor assumption that you wanted them to charge something, with the possibility of each of those activations in turn generating additional activations. In our game last night, if we hadn't already reached the point of calling the game, Ulix could have shot the War Pig _again_ to force a second round of charges, because Old Major killed the Illuminated it was engaged with and thus it was now allowed to charge again.

 

3 AP from Ulix then would have resulted in at least 10 attacks from two heavy hitters, possibly as high as 12. Again, that is so far out of line from what similar abilities do that I think it warrants a second look.

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. So there was plenty and cover and coverage, just not a lot that would block LOS to a Ht 3 model. Having an ability like Corn Husks on a big model like that with no range limitation seems like an extremely powerful ability. 

 

 

So maybe gets some terrain that will block LOS to Ht 3?

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