Azahul

10 minutes ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

Well, you're on a positive flip unless there's a minus, so on average the opponent is cheating first.

But depends if you want to play those averages (or just kill support models).

I found killing the healer as my number one priority felt good so I could attrition better. Though it turns out stoic nod was enough to undo me anyway xD

That just sounds like you didn't do a good enough job killing the healer!

1 hour ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

I personally really like poking things with his main gun.

"Would you like to cheat a 13 or risk getting hit for 6?"

EDIT: Not to mention most support models you can kill pretty consistently from 19 inches away. I killed an enemy pearl in 2 shots and then ran away xD

It's just so expensive if they do call your bluff... the very opposite of what I was just describing where Parker2 can do his job with virtually zero need for cards.

Still, I'm sure I'll get around to actually using that part of his kit some day...

One nice aspect of Parker2 I am finding is that is pretty card efficient. Parker can get by just fine on his own activation making three Broken Man Lasso attacks. If he leads with a Stare Down, which at Stat 7 will often win the duel and with its fairly small impact will rarely provoke a defensive cheat, you don't even need to win the Lasso Duels to be generating value out of them, and their odds of winning go up once the first one lands and Staggers the target.

Then, in turn, the highest damage attack in the crew targets Mv, so Benny can capitalise on the Staggered to win that duel quite easily (typically Stat 6 vs Mv 3) and maybe mine an extra scheme marker in the process if you have/flip a tome on his melee attack.

Mad Dog will use a few cards and if you try to actually use Parker's gun you have to be prepared to drop a few severes, but there is something to be said for how much work the crew can do without really trying to win duels.

I'm still experimenting with the last model or two to hire into the crew. Played a game with Sue last night where he didn't really contribute directly too much, which is about par for the course with Sue in my experience, but in this case it is on me for sending him down a flank as a schemer rather than direct combat. It did leave me wondering if I'd get more mileage out of a Convict Gunslinger. I doubt I'd feed markers to the Gunslinger often but they do give more mobility to the crew in a pinch.

In terms of pure support I also still need to test how I feel about a Scavenger or a Smuggler, so there's a bit of experimenting still to do.

16 minutes ago, Zebo said:

The real solution: fix Drop It so the one controlling the placement of the marker is the attacker. 

Certainly, but that impacts so many other models I think it's the least likely fix. Even changing the core rulebook so that a single 30mm base cannot block LOS between two other 30mm bases seems more likely.

As an aside I did recently have a game where Parker and Pearl were able to sit themselves atop a Height 2 hill and survey the countryside and boy it actually made it feel like the crew's core mechanic worked! 😆 Benny was getting Perditions in his own activation without having to kill rats, Mad Dog got a Perdition at one point without having to kill a model... just glorious.

Gosh I hope they fix that LOS issue at some point... whether it be by removing the aura element from Perdition to strip the LOS requirement or even by an FAQ so that LOS between two equal sized bases can no longer be blocked by a third base of the same size. I think this is the first game I've played with base to base LOS that pretends tangent lines don't exist, and it does my head in the way they apparently start existing again when you have a model standing exactly on top of a marker.

1 hour ago, Morgan Vening said:

How are you getting multiple Perditions off?

I get the concept, Staredown (and successful Drop It's), but given the opponent gets to drop the Scheme Marker, why are they not dropping it out of LOS of Parker2?  He's only a Ht2 30mm base, so that means unless the shooting model doesn't have LOS to the position directly opposite Parker, it can be dropped there. Are you putting him in an elevated position? 

I get that it works with Lasso (once per turn), but you're specifically talking about outside his activation, and I'm struggling to figure out how.

Aye, as Maniacal says the idea of that four model "core" I mentioned in the original post (Mad Dog, Benny, Pearl, Hodgepodge Emissary) was that they all fairly reliably make scheme markers in ways other than Drop It triggers, meaning I can count on multiple Perditions every turn. The idea behind the list was to cram as many such models in as I could find in order to actually make Parker2 function, and I've been pleasantly surprised by the result.

3 hours ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

My take on the discord:

After playing Parker 2, I can definitely see the huge potential of the crew and see how it can be comfortably 'playable.'

Huge amount of power.

But I think the crew is probably a bit too disruptible for the MB meta and probably isn't going to make too huge a competitive splash except when people aren't prepared for it.

 

That said... Can't wait to see Azahul play it. I'm sure he will really get value out of the crew!

To be fair that is about my own take on the crew (in that I remain unsure if it has legs competitively). But even just achieving "playable" status is a big leap given my original take was "dead on arrival"

5 hours ago, LexLock said:

Are you really taking him over parker1 just for Perdition? Parker 1 has sooo much stuff and more wounds and higher wp. Are you playing DMW as a challenge to yourself and finding that he can do something or is he actually a viable pick over the OG parker?

 

Also, who wants to bet that the wyrd designers don't play Drop It! as written when they playtest it lmao.

Perdition does quite a lot. A 2" pulse will normally tag at least two models, and the damage from pulse can't be resisted, so once you're hitting ~3 Perditions a turn Parker2 is out-damaging Parker1 without using any of his own AP.

Meanwhile he's able to a play more of control game, the Lasso can really shut down enemy beaters quite well, something Parker1 normally does by face tanking them and mining them for Soulstones. That same Lasso lets you force enemy models together, both guaranteeing more Perdition damage and setting up amazing Mad Dog turns where he just melts half the opposing crew in an activation. And then you get to have actual synergy with Benny, who is a great model that I always love to see on the table, so it's nice seeing him have actual play in Bandit.

Overall I think I like Parker2 more than 1, but I went off Parker1 a bit around the time they changed Wanted Criminal and removed his ability to play a full resource generation game. Parker2 has some very clear strengths with his ability to move models (friendly and enemy) and deal passive chip damage. Parker1 is tankier thanks to the ability to generate soulstones, though having +2 health vs Parker2 having Hard to Kill is kind of a wash in my view. Parker2's Abandon Hope does much the same job as Draw Their Attention, while allowing you to get scheme markers down in places you have no models.

And yes, based on Perdition, Stare Down, and Trigger Finger on the Bandido (another seemingly non-functional ability), I'm guessing that playtests haven't picked up on the fact that these markers can be placed such that the model with the aura can't draw LOS to them unless it's their own activation.

Whoo, it's a busy schedule for us in the coming months, but the end of days of proxying is within sight!

Yeah, that was my own initial take, but by that metric you would be better off playing Leveticus (who isn't even limited to hunting Minions). It only takes a handful of successful Perditions each turn on the other hand to do more damage than the gun ever would.

To clarify, if I'm trying to make six damage happen the simplest way is to cheat to hit twice with Mad Dog. Better stat and Min 3 damage. Has a blast too. So my Severes usually get spent on that activation. Or if I am set up for it Benny hits for 5+ only needing a single severe. Better in both cases than Parker needing two severes and often a Soulstone to force his to happen, so the cards are rarely there for Parker's activation and when I get it it's purely because my deck wanted it to happen.

1 hour ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

Very exciting to hear about how Parker is coming together.

How often do you find yourself shooting stuff for 6, or at least threatening the shoot for six?

Maybe once a game? It doesn't come up often, and when it does it's often a fluke. I don't always have the cards to make it work, there have been games where it only happened because the cards just made it happen.

Benny hits for six at least as often

Ok, so when the rules of Parker Dead Man Walking were revealed I was pretty down on him. Stat 5 on his main attack, a meagre 2/3/6 damage track, the one trigger that makes the attack occasionally formidable not being built in, Chaos in the Badlands just feeling like a really low impact action, Stare Down being a step below even that, and worst of all his coolest front of card ability, Perdition, seemingly being non-functional on arrival. It read like it was designed to work with the Drop It trigger, but because the opponent controls the placement of the Drop It marker they could usually just block Line of Sight to Parker and avoid the Perdition aura that way. All around, pretty annoying.

I got to thinking a while back though that the way to play him might be to toss any hope of making Drop It work out the window and instead hire models who make scheme markers in other ways, and finally had the time this week to sit down and hammer out a few games to really put my theories to the test. The core models for Parker2 in my view are the following:

Mad Dog (obviously, also usually gets a kill and with Fistful of Scrip he will proc a Perdition pulse most turns)

The Hodgepodge Emissary (makes a cheap and easy marker as a bonus action, provides some healing)

Pearl Musgrove (again, a bonus action to drop a marker, and the amount of healing she can put out as markers drop and are removed is genuinely impressive)

Benny Wolcomb

That last one deserves a little more attention I think. Benny in Bandit has a poor reputation, but he really, really does work in Parker2. Without Parker1 hoovering up scheme markers and with only Mad Dog and Benny himself as Life of Crime models you actually end up with a considerable number of scheme markers scattered around the table. That lets Benny do some awesome rat summons, and he isn't just doing them in his own deployment zone. Some games I forego Turn 1 backline summons just to get Benny up the table faster, and he will sit there in the middle of the opposing crew summoning rats on top of enemy models and just tearing them off the table with 5+ damage Swarm Them actions. Those same summons can throw out a good bit of healing thanks to Pearl, and with the Emissary around too Benny can actually play a role as a bit of a tank and that just gets more rats on the table. Finally, if the opponent tries to deal with these rats, Loyal to the Very End gives you Perdition pulses in the opponent's activation.

The last handful of stones (I think there's about 15 leftover) aren't something I am particularly settled on. I've been hiring double Prospectors for want of anything better to do, the starting cache of 3 can be rebuilt pretty fast if they're picking up Pearl's enemy scheme marker every now and again and the Appraise actions can do a lot between Pearl's and Parker's auras.

Obviously such a static build doesn't make Parker enormously flexible, you only have a little bit to play with, but in pools with a few scheme markers Parker is both good at scoring and good at denying. The Corrupted Leylines strategy works very well for him too, but I'm finding he isn't all that bad in any pool. His crew is a little susceptible to being spiked down, but against anything that can't rip them off the table in a single activation the unrelenting pace of healing in the crew actually makes them surprisingly durable for a crew where Hard to Kill is really the only reliable defensive rule.

Overall the amount of damage the crew puts out when you're hitting a Perdition pulse almost every activation is actually quite formidable, far outstripping my initial reading of Parker's card. 

I still don't necessarily think Parker's card is well designed, Perdition feels like it shouldn't be an aura or something so that it could at least synergise with all the unused Bandit minions and that would at least make Stare Down feel like it kind of does something. But I was wrong in writing him off so completely, he has a great deal more legs than I gave him credit for and I am having a lot of fun finding out what he can do.

On 2/21/2022 at 4:30 AM, admiralvorkraft said:

Winged Plagues are still super squishy, but now they're pretty reliably getting three+ blight out by the time they go.

I presume the three is one for a Blight Spreads after running up to an enemy model late in the turn, one for Disease for that enemy model activating, and then one for Demise?

Ok, a quick catch-up on the last two games of the series.

Game five was Tara1 vs Seamus1 on Break the Line. I misplayed my turn one a bit, after getting no crows in hand initially I decided I would rather hold my stones for damage prevention rather than spend one on Aionus to get pass tokens from Eventuality. A big mistake, since it meant Tara had to put herself forward before Seamus activated and that meant she got jumped towards the end of Turn One. Luck didn't help, my best card in hand Turn 2 was lower than my opponent's so I lost initiative, and a severe damage flip on negatives meant Seamus killed Tara in melee before she activated on Turn 2. I killed his Dead Rider in return (setting up that kill was why Tara was so exposed to begin with), but after that things deteriorated pretty badly and I started losing models like flies. We called the game after I managed to score Catch and Release with a hired Wretch, only to Black Joker the initiative flip and thus lose any chance of getting the end point of the scheme. I think we ended up calculating that game as a 7-3 loss.

Game six was a second Turf War game with both Claim Jump and Research Mission. I decided to give Schill another shot as a result and ran the same build as my previous game. This time I learned my lessons from the previous game, and rather than blithely dive my opponent's death bubble and make a bunch of Hazardous Terrain for him to push me into I hung back, killed Colette's doves and decoys every chance I got, and only dove in once I could start peeling the bubble apart systematically. Hannah killed Cassandra from full health through a Soulstone with a full 9 damage punch, and I managed to pick things apart from there while using my surplus of healing to keep my models from ever dying. It ended in a 7-4 win for Schill, losing no models and only failing on the fourth strat point.

To be honest beyond just reinforcing my view that Tara is a fantastic Master with a great Keyword, the other thing I've taken from this event is that Schill2 is a bit better than I originally gave him credit for. I actually think he may work better with Yannic than Schill1, if only because the Yannic-Engineers bubble produces so many Severe cards that you can run out of moderates for Schill's TNs whereas Schill2 just wants to punch and a Severe never feels bad there. Not as good at scheming of course, but still he has more to recommend him than I originally gave credit.

Worth noting is that nothing on the Kaltgeist's card defines what an Ice Pillar is. If I'm playing Nekima and hire a Kaltgeist OOK, there will be no rule on any of my cards or in the rulebook saying what traits the Kaltgeist should have. If it were meant to be Blocking, how am I supposed to know that?

It is indeed a game norm that markers of the same name normally have the same traits, but there are exceptions (such as the Sparks example above). I think the others have done a fine job outlining the rationale for why Kaltgeists deviate as well.

Hm. Winged Plague changes probably aren't enough for me to put them on the table. They really needed at least one defensive rule.

Barbaros change seems like a slight improvement. I already liked Barbaros and used him in some builds. This is fine.

Drachen Trooper changes are good.

Not as many changes as I was hoping for, and still no reason to pay stones for Outcast upgrades, but I don't disagree with the changes that were made. Whelmed isn't a bad way of summing it up.

52 minutes ago, RisingPhoenix said:

There is of course disagreement over how models are used.  But I would also say that my characterization of a large segment of posters on this forum is accurate.   I have in fact been directly told numerical buffs are literally bad for the game (because they invalidate cards of all the silly reasons) and that it's better for a model to not be viable than to do a bunch of small buffs on its card.   Every conversation on buffs has at least one person say some variant of "it's okay if a model isn't viable" and usually quite a few bandwagons that dance around but end up saying something similar (usually by hypothesizing some instance where the terrible model is useful - while knowing full well they'd never bring it). 

Your need to personally come after me in response is quite telling.

Don't worry, my "need" is driven entirely by a desire to see you tone down your rhetoric. I don't like seeing people get banned and locked out of discussions on subjects they're clearly passionate about. Unfortunately attacking the character of other people on the same forum is usually a fast way to end up there.

Anyway, I seem to be making the situation worse, so don't worry I'll stop trying to diffuse things.

6 minutes ago, RisingPhoenix said:

This is very likely true for the most part.  The fact is a lot of bad models are just kind of independently bad, and no master change is going to fix them.  It shouldn't.  Bad models need to be fixed by buffing bad models directly. 

The thing I've discovered is that for whatever reason fans of this game are HEAVILY resistant to buffing, especially numerical buffing.  This is nigh-unbelievable for me.  Most people in most communities consider buffing to be an excellent way to bring more things into viability - instead of hammering at the nail that sticks up, evaluate whether the nail that sticks up is at a healthy height, and if it is, establish a good level to bring things to.  If a model has a cool effect but is kind of meh, maybe a better damage track or some extra health or armor or a little more movement would improve it.  Reward diversity.

I think it's a large part because there's a lot of people on these forums like having advantages over other players.  They like knowing what the good models are, and they like noob-stomping.  It gives their ego a big boost to be good at malifaux, and one of the ways to consistently have a population of scrubs to beat is that if it's hard to acquire a good crew.  You see this same phenomena with collectable card games where people enjoy having ultra rare cards that are stronger than everyone else's cards, so they can constantly beat on the scrubs.  If every model is viable, it's easier for new players to field decent crews with only a few boxes, and then all of a sudden their dominance is less assured than it is when they face a Rasputina player fielding 2 December Acolytes because "they came in the core box and I can't afford to buy another box right now".

Mark Rosewater in his design of MTG called this system mastery and talked about how there was a large group of magic players who really got big ego gains out of  acquiring it.  It's a cheap ego boost because it doesn't actually involve the hard part of learning the game and outplaying the opponent, you just have to learn the scrub stuff. 

Honestly mate, most of the opposition I've seen you face (though I can't claim to have read every conversation you've been in on the subject) has been over what models need buffing, not whether buffing is a good idea generally. It would probably be better to assume other players have developed appreciation for a different set of models to you given the diverse nature of the game rather than assigning malicious attributes to them for their disagreement.

Am I weird in that I think OG Euripides still looks solid? He was always a Master that seemed to draw a handful of true believers who could really make him work, whereas new Euripides looks rather easier to get good results from.

There is absolutely no way for Wyrd to collect accurate enough data on the level of League of Legends, let alone with their small team respond promptly with updates to the game, and tournament results represent tiny sample sizes with little in built weighting. Most players I know aren't exactly diligent about recording final results in the app, they just talk out Turn 5 and call it a day, so app data isn't going to be all that reliable. League of Legends is such an order of magnitude greater than Wyrd in terms of player base, resources at their disposal, and is purely digital so the vagaries of the fleshy meatspace don't need to infringe on the data so much. And, frankly, while I've never played it I do know that despite all those advantages it still doesn't seem to be highly regarded as a good game.

I'm not saying Wyrd should give up on making improvements, but within the context of tabletop games what they have achieved is remarkable. 

3 minutes ago, ooshawn said:

I don't know statistically. I can only speak from neverborn's point of view. From my Side nothing like that really happened. Kirai2 is broken though, and nobody is really hiring gaki, just summoning them, because it's overwhelmingly easy to do so. same with pistoleros. neverborn didn't really get anything like that, except maybe pandora2 summoning, but even that's kind of eh. They took a really lackluster approach of just making bad models summonable in a few cases from what I could tell

Being summonable is a blunt force solution, but at least they see play. Not every model has to be worthwhile both as a summon and a hire. So long as there is at least a reason to own a model, I am both happy and deeply impressed. Very few games come even close to having that on every model in their stable.

At most I think there are 2-3 low cost models in each faction that never see table time after Malifaux Burns. Hopefully they see some attention in the next errata, and then we can put this particular bugbear to bed and start complaining about all the high cost models people never hire...

8 minutes ago, ooshawn said:

It's all good if you abandon ship and join the dreamer2 train, but if you are still trying to make molemen work, it's like your still in the same spot as when m3e came out. That's incredibly lazy in my book

Aren't Molemen more the exception than the rule? Pistoleros and Gaki weren't exactly hitting the table much before Malifaux Burns, now they are. Quite a lot of old models have new life with the new Masters.

33 minutes ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

I think at this point most small models are playable, but it is relatively rare to see lists with lots of small models which feels like it should be a part of the meta. And I don't think tinkering individual models will get there.

Thus suggestions for next edition!

I mean, I disagree that tinkering with individual models wouldn't get us there. If you made everything Cost 5 or less in the game Cost 1 then you'd probably see every crew run number heavy.

That obviously isn't the solution, but it does indicate that somewhere on the balance spectrum is a tipping point where spamming models becomes viable, regardless of institutional disadvantage. Cost is hardly the only lever that could be pulled either. A Cost 4 model with Stat 7 Min 3 attacks would be spammed a fair bit I imagine.

This isn't the first game I've played where particular model types or even whole list archetypes were considered unviable because of the core rules of the game. Those games that tried to address or fix those problems rarely did so with core rule shifts, most did it with buffs to the specific models that were the problem. And in many cases they not only found that there was absolutely a point at which those disadvantaged model types became viable, but that it was even possible to make them busted good by pushing the envelope a touch too far. I would hope to avoid that particular problem, but with so few low cost models left genuinely in need of help Wyrd could afford to focus their attention quite a bit.

1 hour ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

From what I hear, pass tokens, charge, and focus all contributed to this decline.

That is undoubtedly true, but changing those features isn't the easiest way to get cheap models to see play. If Winged Plagues were Cost 1 or 2, I would probably hire them. Same goes for all the unplayed Cost 4 models. It's a blunt force solution but it would work, and honestly have fewer broader implications than massive reworks to the core rules.

It is worth noting though that this is a solution increasingly in want of a problem though. Malifaux Burns did a serious number on the quantity of low cost models not seeing play. Is there even a faction with more than three Cost 4 or less models that just do not see table time? Yeah, the Malifaux Burns solution of making most of them summons was about as blunt force as my "make them Cost 2" idea, but it did seriously diminish how many such models we have to worry about.