Buhallin

I haven't run the actual numbers, but I think the Hanged have about half of the "lasts the entire game" effects in Malifaux. Whispers From Beyond is absolutely brutal against anything that heals, but don't forget Horrifying either. A on Wp duels for the rest of the game is pretty crippling. I even managed to make it work against Pandora once, which was beyond priceless Not easy, but awesome. They're definitely support, but can deal a surprising amount of damage against the right targets. I like to pair them with a Grave Spirit, which makes them INCREDIBLY tough. I pretty much auto-include them with Seamus and Kirai, and will frequently run one with McMourning as well.

I've managed to Alpha masters on a few occasions, but it's not a terribly reliable option. The Raptor helped it along a lot - assuming you can get the opposing master turned into a beast first, it frees Marcus up to Stare Down, and they're in trouble. But generally, it's not really any harder than accomplishing any other master v. master action - but the payoff (at least until/unless they fix the self-sacrifice thing again) is huge.

They did, but I'm not sure it was necessary. Privateer made no such change when they began allowing (or clarified that it was always allowed, depending on your point of view) premeasuring within your control area. I think the reason they added it in with 40K/WHFB has to do with other aspects of the system - specifically, generally low movement speeds and the advantage to being the one who gets the charge off. While I don't think a game would bog down due to people measuring things all the time, I can easily see two forces squaring off against each other, with both intentionally staying out of charge range and refusing to move closer and be the one who eats the charge. The random charge range would fix that, especially since some units can potentially triple or even quadruple their charge range with lucky dice. IMHO, that's a problem that's specific to those systems rather than something that's generally a problem with premeasuring. I haven't seen that issue develop in Warmachine, and the fact that a Focus is actually stronger than a Charge should keep it from ever being an issue in Malifaux.

Have you actually seen this happen, though? When Privateer first allowed measuring in a warcaster's control area, there were similar dire predictions. But none of them actually came to pass. The game is doing well, and hasn't become dragged down by excessive measurement at all. Have there actually been any concrete complaints about premeasuring resulting in this sort of thing? Don't get me wrong, I'm sure everybody can point to That One Guy who did it, but that's not the same thing as THINKING That One Guy would do it if he were given a chance, or that it would bog down the game in general.

Same as with any other bit of premeasure, I think - it would become more about the positioning and movement influence and less about guessing the range. The Dreamer would make sure he had a Nightmare within 3", and the opponent would eliminate or move those Nightmares to open it up. In this particular case, I'm not even sure it would change anything at all. You cannot select illegal targets at all - it's not a "do it and lose it" like out of range is. If you tried to target the Dreamer, you'd measure to see if the Nightmare was in range, and if it was the action would simply be backed up.

I have issues with my eyes. Since I was young, my brain only used one eye. This means I have little to know stereo vision, which has two major impacts in my life: I can't see 3D movies, and I have no depth perception. IMHO it comes down a lot to what you view your (the player's) role in the game as. In general, I view myself as guiding competent actors on a battlefield, making decisions while they execute those decisions. Rangefinding is not a decision-making skill, and the ability to accurately determine range should not be up to me any more than my ability to accurately aim a gun determines my model's chance to hit or my ability to be irresistibly sexy should determine my Belle's ability to Lure someone (because let's face it, if it did, my opponents wouldn't stand a chance ) It gets even sillier when you're in science fiction settings. Every marine who operates in space would have a dozen different methods to determine range to a target built into their armor, but I have to guess whether or not it's in range for his gun to hit? Makes no sense. On the practical side, I think the concerns about how much it'll slow down the game are mostly overblown hyperventilating from people who just don't want to see it change. In my own experience, and my own play, players will waste far more time agonizing over an uncertain range check than they would measuring multiple possible ranges.

I really don't think people are vehemently opposed to changing H2W or the Red Joker, for the most part. But there are side issues with it that are rather strongly disagreed with. The Seamus tactica that dgraz mentions is a good example. To hear some tell it, Seamus isn't worth playing, and honestly the entire Rezzer faction isn't worth playing, in large part due to H2W. I disagree with that pretty strongly, and for all the "Just stay out of the conversation if you don't like it" I'm not going to sit around and let people create what I feel is a misinformed view of the game. That is where I think the defenders' vehemence comes from. It's less an issue of thinking H2W would be broken if it were changed than it is disagreeing with the implications of what it means if H2W needs to be changed. And the "Oh god, can we PLEASE talk about something else?" fatigue certainly plays a part too. Nobody is saying you CAN'T talk about it yet again, but plenty of us WISH you wouldn't. And this is where a lot of the rest of the disagreement comes from. I play Rezzers, and rarely Kirai - my standards are either Seamus or McMourning. There's rarely a game that goes by where I don't have H2W2 on the table, and I can't tell you the last time I've had one of them eat a Red Joker, much less one caused by H2W. When facing H2W2 (like Teddy), I've never found delving to be all that useful - if I'm going to be hitting a target 4-5 times to try and find the Joker, then that's probably going to kill it anyway. And that comes back, yet again, to the question of variance. Because it's not "How often does a model with H2W get killed by a Red Joker?" it's "How often does Hard to Wound cause a model to die when it wouldn't have otherwise?" Is the Joker the first card pulled, or the last? Was it on the first attack, or the fifth? These things make a difference, and I don't think anyone has made an actually solid case for the question of variance. And at that point, we're talking what people like or dislike about the game. I'd be willing to bet that if we started looking, we could find plenty of rules that 20% of the playerbase dislikes. ---------- Post added at 02:14 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:07 PM ---------- Would you argue that miscasts aren't a balancing mechanism for Warhammer's magic system because you can go the entire game without a miscast? Any time there is random variation in a game system, there's a chance it won't show up in a game. By your logic, it's not possible to have a balancing mechanism which depends on cards, whether it's an activation target, a trigger's suit, anything. The level of balancing provided, like any risk, is based on probability and impact. A low probability/high impact event is a decent counter, whether it occurs in every game or not. Yes, it's a low enough probability to not occur every game. But the impact is suitably high - if it weren't, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Still.

I'm not sure people think it would be too powerful. I think for the most part people just accept that it's part of Hard to Wound, and that it's a pretty rare event. As I tried to point out earlier, unless you're cataloging which card comes up with the Red Joker, you don't actually know if Hard to Wound makes a difference or not. "He flipped the Red Joker against Seamus" doesn't actually tell us anything. As for the comparison to Armor, it's going to vary a lot. With a 2/3/4, sure, Armor's probably better. But there are plenty of cases where there damage spread is more than 2, and you'll often find that on heavy hitters. Secondary effects are also a lot easier to get against Armor. Rasputina would much rather see Armor than Hard to Wound, and I can't tell you how many times I've resorted to shooting my own Golem in the back when facing Rezzers. And, finally, I think Armor +2 is the exception. Ice Golem, Peacekeeper, etc - you see it on very hard targets. Armor +1 is more standard on models that you'll see Hard to Wound 1 on, and H2W1 can typically beat that level of damage reduction.

There's a very big difference between a new player making a comment about the Red Joker and the usual suspects taking yet another pass at the exact same topic of dislike they've brought up time and again, and promising to keep doing so time and again. But I guess that's the price we pay for ensuring new users don't risk exposure to the search function.

Honestly... why not? "I don't like the way a Red Joker acts on a damage flip" has been done to death. There are no new points to it, from any side. There weren't any new points the last time it came up, or the last time it took over a Seamus tactica, or the time before that, or the one before that. Every response from anyone in Wyrd has been as authoritative and unequivocal as can be - they understand exactly what people don't like about it, but they think it adds to the game. A large majority of players seem fine with it as it is, so there's not much public pressure on them to change it. "Can we please shut up about it now?" is the way a lot of people feel. I'm all for tilting at windmills - I've been known to take a pass or two at them myself - but getting tired of people tilting at windmills is not some massive unforgivable deployment of rudeness. At this point, we should start regular arguments about converting Malifaux to dice instead of cards - it's probably about as popular, and about as likely. Declaring "as intended" on H2W isn't out of place because it's rude or I took some meta-level offense to the conversation. It's out of place because it's as provably false as anything going on in this debate. Dustcrusher acknowledges this (which is very cool of him) and we can move on.

"Mistake" is a highly relative term to begin with, but it's also not what we're talking about (at least not what I was talking about in the post you quoted). The question is not whether they made a mistake in Hard to Wound. The question is whether it matches their intent. Does Wyrd INTEND for the Red Joker to work the way it does, up to and including how it interacts with H2W? I think the responses from the top hats have shown unanimously that it's working exactly the way they intend for it to work. You can disagree with the way they've chosen for it to work, or think it makes a worse game, etc - that's fine. But the standard gamer deployment of "intent" as "The devs actually agree with me even though it's not exactly what the rule says" doesn't really have a place in the discussion here.

Given the input from a number of top hats, is there truly still some lingering question as to the actual intent here? How many times and in how many ways do they have to say it? If you don't like the way it works, fine - that's up to every player. But I think they've made the "intent" pretty clear, and this ongoing charade that Wyrd has somehow failed to grasp that they screwed up implementing H2W and they still just haven't realized it... well, I think that ship has sailed. And got caught in a hurricane. And blown into the heart of the Bermuda Triangle. And if that place is nasty in our world, what's it like in Malifaux?

Even assuming there's no perceptual bias going on here (which I'm sorry, but there has to be), this is a flawed analysis. If you're worried about H2W, the question isn't how many times a model with H2W eats the Red Joker. Of course if you play with mostly H2W models, that's what's usually going to get hit by the Joker. The question is how often H2W made the difference in the Joker showing up. You say most flips end with a - I agree with Guy in Suit that even flips are way more common than you portray, but we'll go with it. So that means most flips you're going to be flipping two cards. Adding Hard to Wound 1 increases it by 1 card. Which card the Joker shows up on is very important. First card flipped, it was going to hit you no matter what. Second card, you were going to catch it because of the you usually see. If and only if it was the last card flipped did H2W actually make a difference. I never, EVER see anyone presenting these numbers in their anecdotes. And unless you've got them, and take careful notes, you don't really have an accurate feel for how H2W is actually affecting you. This is also why I question your "can't count the times vs. 2-3 in the 18 months". By the structure you've laid out, a H2W1 model is 50% more likely to see a Joker flip (3 cards vs. 2), and H2W2 is twice as likely (4 vs 2). That's not just luck, that's not a statistical outlier, it's so unlikely as to be effectively impossible. I don't think dgraz expects anyone to change their mind. At the risk of putting words in his mouth, I think he feels that this issue draws an inordinate amount of discussion given the number of people who actually think it's a problem. Put another way, the vocal minority is VERY vocal, and given that Wyrd seems universally content with the way it works, there's not much point in killing that many electrons discussing it every other week.

He can convert as many as he wants. You can compare the wording to something like Obey (Zoraida, Perdita) which limits the use to once per activation. You are correct about the counters - if a model carrying a counter is killed, the counter drops at that spot. That's the only way I can think of for a body part counter to end up on the table.

Armor doesn't have the drawback that Hard to Wound does because Hard to Wound is a much, MUCH more powerful ability. Removing an opponent's ability to cheat damage in most circumstances is absolutely huge. Everyone hates seeing the Red Joker flip on an extra H2W, fine... how often do you actually see that, compared to someone cheating for it on an even damage flip? Have you ever watched Rasputina trying to get her blasts off against a H2W-heavy crew? Armor just doesn't do that. Even just on the damage numbers, Armor vs. H2W is mostly a wash. I don't think it's a stretch to say that a from H2W consistently reduces the damage by at least one step, right? That's going to match Armor +1 in all cases, and frequently Armor +2. There are a few cases where you can get more than that, but they're typically very specialized crews. It's hard to compare those without knowing exactly how they're factored into a model's cost. Spirit is a solid defensive ability, but it's not in the same league as H2W either. Spirits universally have fewer wounds, so the end result is a tough but not invincible model, and that's before you get to the relatively large number of things that can bypass it.

I think there's a general need to address soem cheesiness in self-sacrificing, but it's a hard thing to catch. For instance, your bonus points for Breakthrough would suffer from the same problem. I think Wyrd knows this is an issue - they fixed it with the Stiched, and I expect they're paying attention to the more general issue. I don't really think this is necessary. For one, you haven't touched on what I think most people believe are the actual problem children, the faction/master schemes. I think the multi-staged VPs are interesting, but I don't see them actually doing anything to fix the balance. To the extent that they do, it's all in changes that could apply to the current schemes without the VP number changes you're suggesting. I can get behind the idea of updating schemes to take out the cheesy methods to finish them, but I don't see any actual NEED for the rest of it. ---------- Post added at 05:48 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:42 PM ---------- It's not always just about the VPs. Announcing Frame for Murder means your opponent has to make a hard choice on if/how to kill a model. Call it on a fast striker and stick it in the opposing master's face, and things get hairy for them. There's a very strategic choice going on there. Same thing on the flip side - announcing Kill Protege or Grudge on an opponent's model forces them to make a choice on how they play that model. Secrecy will vary, but that's why it's a choice. It may not make a difference for Bodyguard, but it makes a big difference for Grudge or Stake a Claim, or Hold Out - a secret Hold Out is almost certainly a free VP. I actually think the cases where secrecy has a minimal impact are the minority. Many people point to Kidnap as one of the big problem schemes, primarily because of it being a full 2VP while still being secret.

No. This was floating around for a while, but the current ruling is that the winner flips. Rules Marshal reference here.

I dunno, I like the "sticky" image myself. There's just one more corpse when the pile lands, is all :Decay_Puppet:

Yeah, I know - said so last page Conversation's gotten a bit unspecific, and the fact that you counters are "sticky" once a model picks them up throws a lot of people off. Was just offering that up

When I run demos, the crews I use are Rasputina and Seamus. And I'm actually considering changing them. Why? Because Seamus and his girls screw with Rasputina's damage output like you wouldn't believe. With H2W all over the board, it's very hard for Raspy to get any blasts - much less good blasts - to go off when she can basically never cheat damage.

Not entirely sure what this is aimed at, the conversation has gotten kinda fuzzy But this doesn't say it can use counters carried by other models, so the counter must be either carried by Rasputina, or just on the table within 6".

Unfortunately, this doesn't work. Models cannot drop or transfer counters they have unless something says they can (Snowstorm doesn't have any such ability), nor can they use counters carried by a different model unless specifically allowed (the Acolyte cannot). Rules Manual section on Counters, last paragraph. I concur that it's mainly a forward-looking characteristic they added to help Rasputina's avatar. Without any Graverobbers in the crew, corpses don't drop. With him in the crew, anyone you kill before she manifests will still be lying around waiting for her to, uhm... yeah, let's not go into what they're waiting for her do. Suffice to say, they'll be there, whereas a crew without any Graverobbers wouldn't have anything, uhm, waiting.

I see two problems here. The first is that you're trying to treat the card flips as independent events, rather than a draw without replacement problem. While the reshuffle may produce a theoretically infinite pool, in practice it is not. Many turns work they way through with no reshuffling at all, and at the very least there is a finite number of cards which will be drawn from the deck in a turn. Using the 10 card 8/2 example, I might ask "What are the chances there are no good cards left in the deck after two draws compared to four draws?" These are different values, although I haven't bothered to actually run the numbers. That's the impact on future performance. And it matters, because you're focusing entirely on the card distribution when there's more to it than that. The mechanic means that not every card will be productive when it comes up. If you run a deck with straight flip, every card gets "used". If you run them in pairs with a each time, most of the "good" cards are overwhelmed and won't be used. The overall effectiveness of the deck goes down. This is the effect I was trying to explain earlier, and it took me a bit to square it with your point on the distribution. You're right about the overall distribution, but for that overall distribution to matter you have to put an unrealistic framework on the problem.

I'm not entirely convinced that there's not a potential impact of eating critical cards if the pool of "good" cards is small enough (for example, many spells need 10+ of a certain suit, seeing them lost during a dig can have a big impact), especially since the card pool may be theoretically infinite but cannot be reset by the player. In these cases, the probability of occurrence may be the same as any other card, but the impact would be notably higher. This is effectively the reverse of the Red Joker. I do, however, see your point on the general distribution and concede it without the need of inflicting proofs on anyone here. My stats may be rusty, but my dislike of proofs isn't

I would think it should. Most buildings should be Ht 3 interiors, though. My general read on Ht is that they're about 3 feet per. So barring a particularly low ceiling, your standard should be 8-9 feet, or Ht 3. At the very least, if you're going to have buildings like that which restrict crew entry I'd make really sure that they were clearly laid out for both players before crew selection.