admiralvorkraft

It's not uncommon - both Obliteration henchmen are sometimes-takes. Though admittedly Aionus is a synergy tech-pick rather than a counter-tech pick. I'd also argue that Bring it! Is relevant in pretty much every game.

Gods I hope they all go dmh. Levi has well outstayed his welcome as a central character imo. Let this be his big destiny moment and write him out.

I see what you're going for. Can the minions be Academic though?

If I'm soloing a master/keyword then I'm looking at three things; mobility, tempo, and resource generation. If you're playing titles then Ironsides would be my pick, if not then probably Collette or Kaeris? Sandeep is probably an option, my eyes just glaze over reading his cards...

There really isn't a hard answer to Fuhatsu. You just have to manage him. Limit what he has clean shots on, throw stunned/slow on him, engage him so he only gets two shots, etc. And he's got bully stats, so he's a good target for your random extra attacks - charge him with a corpse candle or whatever.

I'd love a story along the lines of "All the Governor-General's Men." An investigative thriller centered on the newsroom of the Tattler and exploring the balance between genuine truth seeking and the sort of yellow journalism Nellie relies on to keep the presses running. And wyrd, if you're listening, I can get you a pitch outline of you're interested 😛

Tara answers armor by burying the problem model and yeeting it into irrelevance 😛

Her shockwave is also surprisingly potent.

It's fair. I prefer to budget my stones for damage prevention and only spend them for OMH when I absolutely have to. But you're right that I can work that differently.

I need to stress test him more as an independent operator. He does some interesting things but he's hungry for masks in a crew that's already hungry for masks.

I don't think that I was doing that? I didn't mean to. As I said above, the Viks are super fun in this edition because they can play a variety of ways, and their best approach might be that skirmishing edge play. You're absolutely right that this conversation was marginally ot to begin with and is now absolutely outside of the remit of the thread and I'm going to stop responding in it. Again, I'm sorry that I came across as talking down the keyword, that wasn't my intention.

Combat minions can exist. If you drop weak damages to more appropriate levels you improve the relative average damage of the mercs (and, importantly, other combat oriented cheap models). More importantly the current game balance is heavily tilted towards a minimal amount of highly efficient AP. If you want to resolve the problem of low ss models you need to shift one step towards weight-of-ap. Not enough to privilege that approach, just enough to make it viable. Tweaking one model no one has cared about for two editions doesn't shift that dial at all but lowering weak damage across the board limits the amount of damage you can guarantee without cheating the damage flip and leans more into trying to flip through your deck to hit those damage spikes. It's weird to me that you're focused on one model when the issues you're bringing up are game-wide. As for combat generally my only wish is for scheme oriented crews to be competitively balanced against tank and agro crews. There's nothing wrong with combat being an aspect of the game but it shouldn't be THE deciding aspect in matchups of similar skill. And I only got into that because I was asked to clarify a flippant comment.

Oh, I know what the Viks are. They're pretty fun in third, though I'm not thrilled about their title. In 2e it was impossible to get a good game with them, win or lose it was just an eye roller, but w/e. What I was saying before I, admittedly, went off topic was that rather than looking at making this one 4ss model do 6ss worth of damage maybe we should look at the structural reasons why such a skin percentage of 4ss models see play. Dropping weak damages across the board, and/or increasing the ability to exert pressure through scoring are both more productive ways to look at improving the relevance of low ss models/so called low value AP. I'm certain that we won't see anything like my proposed changes in this edition. But desperate mercs aren't getting a redesign either.

In a game with a whole lot of strengths it's all relative, right?

I mean that it's not why I play the game? It's fine, and when there are points in the balance it comes alive. But I'm here to chase points. That's what's fun for me. The default pattern of, "Early on snipe the weak models so they can't score the fun schemes, then collapse into a slugfest in the middle so we can ekk out a one point difference on claim Jump," I do not love. There's too much combo-wombo MtG style thinking and not enough tactics-of-maneuver spatial reasoning for me personally to get excited about fighting for the sake of fighting. In 2e it was probably a little too easy for certain crews to simply decline engagement and force the draw or win on schemes. In 3e it's too easy, imo, to force an engagement at will.

The strat and scheme issue is more complicated than that. One issue is that the interact schemes are extremely inefficient ap-wise - it takes a dozen AP to get both points of spread them out and only about two AP to deny it. On the other hand research mission and claim Jump exist and they cost basically 0ap - so long as you want to be playing aggressively anyway. Then there's the way schemes are scored. The eog point requires you to have a contested board presence going into turn five. If you've taken a scheme oriented crew against a murder crew chances are you can't get those last points unless your schemers are also pretty beefy - mech rider, first mate, Lady J. Lastly the most reliable way to gain control of the last activation is killing unactivated models, so your elite killers who can't be easily one-activationed have like three systemic advantages over other styles of play. My preferred fix would be to bring back more of the 2e scoring dynamic (schemes are worth up to 3 each, scored in-game) to privilege aggressive evening and hi starting AP. The way more heavy handed approach would be to lower weak damage almost universally to make fighting more in line with scheming as far as AP investment to payoff. Big caveat, I love the game as is, I'm not trying to bellyache because my preferred approach is a structurally uphill battle.

I'd much rather drop weak damage on models with weak 3 to 2 and 2 to 1. Combat is not the game's strong suit and almost every model is overtuned for it. That's my preference for making low ss models viable as a rule. I understand that it's almost certainly not a popular one.

Considering how many players only hire a handful of models anyway I don't think it's a uniquely low cost model problem.

So then position to mitigate the alpha. Or take z2 and you automatically stop it.

Honestly I'll be taking 33 just to take the teeth out of alpha strikes. Like, okay you set up your bomb, now it's buried and distracted. It's going to be slow in a minute once Aionus gets a charge in, hope you had a backup plan. Because again, I want to play a five turn game, not one that's over halfway through turn two because Nekima ate my crew OR I got a lucky couple damage flips and deleted her before her second activation.

Considering that alphas make for a terrible Malifaux experience for all concerned, I am worried about how the meta shakes out. I don't have much sympathy for a Nekima player being on the receiving end of this garbage for once though...

Auguste has play - I think - but the key is getting him a stack of distracted before you expose him to threats. I think he might be your t1 ball carrier/turf marker tagger/etc. Toss a mask or two at him and he can be at distracted 3 by the top of turn 2 which isn't bad... In theory. He probably also has more play into keywords like Qi and Gong, Performer, and Journalist 😛

The rule of thumb in 2e was that damage was nice but movement won games. I think that's less true in 3e but being able to pick your battles is still super helpful. I hate the all-in approach Daw1 favors and 2 plays the skirmishing/isolation game better so I'll probably always run him. Good to have different styles I guess.

I think it's pretty well established that human clothes are way too pretty for Lucius to cut ties.

Yeah, I wish my 2e Lucius were better painted, but hey we all start somewhere. That checking-the-pocket-watch stance is perfection.