Gnomezilla

No—fourteen hours after this post is when everyone accepted now will join in. (17:00 EDT)

I am beyond excited to play Zipp. My meta is not. He better still have pianos!!! As far as Leveticus’ crew goes, wounds becoming a joint resource for all the crew to share and optimize appeals strongly to the necro in me (in other games, if there is a hit point-to-mana conversion I will abuse it down to a sliver of life, just to keep the spells flying). However, that still means playing him, instead of something inherently awesome, like Zipp.

Dampening Field. My favorite debuff.

Ask our local competitive player about ‘nerd rage Hoffman’ as the Guild beatstick with survivability. He has enjoyed the place effect of Improved Harness far too much.

Somehow I don’t think we’re getting a GG19. If M3E appears mid-year, maybe not even a formal GG20 until we all figure out what’s what for models (masters?) as well as strategies and schemes.

? I can see you’ve got a point here but no idea how you got there, and I want to know. I thought that turn-by-turn schemes were there for counterplay and that counterplaying both strategy and schemes was the goal. You are saying it makes the hidden game something less? (Maybe I’m not getting it because there isn’t much of a hidden game in my meta. If Take One for the Team pops up, he’ll give up the 2VP for it. If Show of Force, he’ll certainly take it even in Ours. Etc.)

Nice find on the synergy with the Tooth! I’m struggling against a list with pounce attacks, right now, and she would be a good counter to that.

She’s a puppet henchman...which means she can carry certain puppet buffing upgrades. Into a Dreamer crew. How fond are you of using Stitched Together?

I swear I’m going to start numbering you all in the future... Opinion: there are masters I am now less interested in because of token mechanic reading like it’s a condition accumulation and that is already driving me nuts on Nellie (but less so on Ramos). Friendly tokens: Hoffman, Shenlong, Asami Enemy tokens: Nellie, Dreamer, Hamelin Pass tokens: Perdita, Youko Hamasaki Opinion: while I am comfortable with attaching upgrades mid-game, there’s going to be a lot more of that next edition and it will catch people by surprise. Friendly upgrades: Kirai (?), Yan Lo, Marcus, Von Schill, McCabe, Ophelia Enemy upgrades: Jack Daw

In the game just before wave five, my supposedly tanky stompybots were also being killed just as easily because armor ignoring/non reducible/defense trigger bypassing had become just so common...and that didn’t make sense. It should say something that an entire upgrade was released saying ‘whoops, let’s give you back that resilience we assumed your crew always had’, the killing got toned way down just as you fear—and we still barely see that master. (But that’s a step up from never seeing him.) Viks can still output heinous damage on multiple targets if I cluster my stompybots, but they can no longer one-shot-kill multiple 10ss+ models per activation to the point the game is lost after one such activation. It’s a lot closer to a balanced game.

Ask your nearest born Lucius player what a joy it can be to maneuver the other player into spending his AP to score your VP.

Guess it’s finally time to reap a benefit of playing a very theme-bound master—whatever I buy in the stompybot line now will certainly still be a stompybot later. (...sorry, even with Marlena in my possession I’m a Hoffman player first.) For the first time, for me, sculpt is going to be equally weighed against stats when it comes time to buy. So the domador which I like very much has moved ahead of the Jury which 1. doesn’t thrill me as much visually 2. will probably go with Lady Justice later. And I’m absolutely going to snap up some effigies from a Collodi player offloading them. They’re so cute!

And I MISSED this?!??!?! *mightiest and most forceful of feminine ‘harrumphs’* *which, unfortunately, also means it pitched upward several notes if not a full octave, spoiling the effect with a childish affect*

Pff, fluff. The fluff also says Hoffman should’ve been machine puppeting enemy constructs all over the map, and I haven’t seen that yet in two editions. Hint. Hint.

If you have Queeg hired to start with (supporting melee with Promises) and standing next to the investigator: have Queeg push 3”, cast his aura of interact on a 0, drop a scheme marker (within 4” of the investigator who pushes he-who-activates-late 3”, then walk. The next two to activate, deployed on either side of the duo, walk, interact (investigator freaks out and pushes activate-late and activating-next-after-the-investigator forward). Investigator activates, picks up Queeg’s marker and a card, walks, schemes (pushes next-guy again), walks. Next-guy and last-to-activate start 6” up the board but still within Queeg’s & investigator’s reaches to scheme on a 0 (investigator pushes in response to board state, now, not fixed) and use their AP as they need to. There’s now a field of scheme markers behind you if you need to threaten certain schemes or power up attacks. Queeg has lost 2” of move but otherwise your crew had no trade-off for advancing a total of 15” before it activated (I can’t quite get the last guy to stay in the investigator’s range for that last push to the centerline). If you have a supply wagon it’s probably crossed the centerline by now. Corner deployment is no longer a problem. If you brought Lucius, so long as the investigator lives nobody can be trapped in combat if they don’t want to be. I like these guys and their ceaseless disruption of the board.