FrostyPox

I would basically use him like a scalpel to target the meanest stuff my opponent had, melee them to death, and then use sanguine evocations to get back to safety. Between him, Alyce and Slurpy I was usually able to effectively contest pretty much anything effectively. When I needed to I used Sanguine Evocations for mobility, too.

without the summoning, without the mobility of Sanguine Evocations, and with the steep nerf to Levi's and Alyce's melee ability, I'm basically left with nothing of my old playstyle. It's a totally different crew, and not the crew I signed up to play, and not a crew I'm interested in playing. It doesn't do the damage it used to do, and it doesn't have the survivability it used to have. The new Levi crew is straight-up weaker than it used to be, and I keep hearing that it's meant to operate around attrition and survivability, when it is sorely lacking in both departments. The entire crew was built around the cycle of death and rebirth (things die and leave scrap markers, new things are summoned from the scrap markers, aboms turn into slurpy who turns back into aboms who turn back into scrap markers when they die who turn into new abominations, levi dies and comes back and dies and comes back and dies and comes back) and that is completely gone in the new edition. He isn't the master I bought, and I'll be damned if I'm going to be forced to buy an entirely new crew just to play the game I've been playing for 3+ years.

How do people who think the new Levi is good play him? Please be detailed and specific because I literally cannot see how he's supposed to be good now.

I do tend to play aggressively, because that's how the crew played in 2nd edition. It seems like many of the changes made to crews in 3rd were for the sake of change, and that's nearly always a terrible design decision. Regardless, I don't see how holding the center is possible; there is an abundance of hard to wound in the faction, and a decent sprinkling of wound transfer abilities, but none of it is really enough to actually last long enough in attrition. 

I've often seen people wailing and gnashing their teeth over Unmade and Entropy, but I don't get it. More than enough crews have out-of-activation movement and the like to make Entropy almost a non-factor, and Unmade, while good, isn't like some hard stop. My opponents always find it worth to risk taking a damage point when they can reliably deal 3+ damage in retaliation, which is nearly all the time. There's a lot of wound transfer abilities, but that's explicitly not attrition; 4 wounds transferred off of one model and on to another is still 4 wounds inflicted.

The other, and I'd say biggest issue, is that Levi doesn't do anything other than hit stuff, and he doesn't hit as hard as, say Misaki. All the other masters I've played against, and most of the others I've read do cool things with tokens, markers, conditions, movement, etc; Levi hits things. That's it. He hits a thing and shoots a thing and maybe looks at cards so he can hit things better. It's dull as dirt.

He is without question the most boring master in all of Outcasts, and is certainly one of the weakest by a truly egregious margin; indeed, compared to masters from other factions I've played against (Misaki, Kaeris, Von Schill, Titania, and a few others), he is both extremely weak and extremely uninteresting. Alyce is more of a Master than he is, I feel.

Changing the entire crew's play style would be tolerable (not a good thing, but tolerable) if he was still an effective master, but he's not. I also will always, always assert that changing something's existing play style is terrible design, since it's pulling the rug out from under players. I have looked at him backward, forward, upside down, and inside out, and I still do not see how Leveticus is even remotely good, how anyone can think he's good, or how Wyrd could've sat back and said "Yep, this is great, ship it".

I've played quite a few games with Levi. From what I've seen, he's one of the weakest, most boring crews in the game right now. I've tried everything and no matter what happens I end up with two models left by the end of Turn 3. Usually Levi and Alyce.

There's more than enough out-of-activation movements to nullify the damage aura. The crew has okay damage, but no survivability (odd for  a crew they're trying to push as an attrition crew), no recursion, and very little mobility. They don't seem to have A Thing like most other crews do (IE, Misaki's super-scalpel assassination hit and run, Kaeris' kick-ass mobile firestorms, etc). The healing isn't really strong enough. I keep hearing "it's supposed to be an attrition crew" but that sure isn't reflected in the actual gameplay.

It's bad enough that I'm not even remotely interested in playing Malifaux anymore. Sure, I have other crews, but I find the existence of a crew that's so weak kind of hard to swallow and is indicative of bad game design, and also Levi used to be my favorite. I played last Thursday, so unless I missed something, I'm really not seeing much improvement with the updates. It feels like Levi was designed in a vacuum and whoever made him had no idea how the other crews were being designed.

EDIT: I just saw there has, in fact, been an update since then. Levi himself is still boring and bad, but I'll give it a try with the updates to the other models. I'm not optimistic, but I'm more than willing to have my mind changed.

7 minutes ago, Nukemouse said:

Marlena Webster and the new "Scavengers" can both help levi heal to fuel his abilities without having to eat abominations. The Hodgepodges (which levi has always had a bit of a thing for in fluff) can also help heal his already rather heal focused crew. Perhaps including some of those could help address some of these issues? As for speed, remember Levi can still hire Necropunks for scheming.

I'll give them a try next time and see how things go. Hopefully they'll help out. Thanks for the advice.

I played one game with Leveticus this past Thursday and honestly, I had no fun. I've been playing miniatures games for like 20 years and can count the number of times I just stopped playing because I felt completely helpless against my opponent on one hand, and this was one of them. For the record, I'm not like a super-serious competitive player, and the only other crews I've played are Tara and Haemlin, and my understanding of factions other than Outcasts is pretty limited.

I'm not great at this kind of technical description, so please bear with me. What drew me to playing Leveticus was his lore, and one of the things I love about Malifaux is that all the crews, thematically, seem to click.  It's pretty obvious what they're intended to do, and they generally do it well. In his current incarnation, Levy does not at all feel like "the Steampunk Necromancer" toying with life and death and rebirth. He doesn't seem to interact with his crew in any meaningful way. You could replace the abominations and other keyword stuff with anything and it wouldn't make Levy feel any different. This is a bad thing, IMO. Levy himself is relatively unimpressive.

The whole crew, and Levy. seem to be based around attrition now, which is fine, except they do not have the durability to be an attrition crew. I like the idea of Levy "eating" models to heal himself or other models, but unless you take like 10 aboms at the start, he doesn't have the resources to do it. Restricting his summoning so much has totally changed his flavor, too. I don't know, if he could summon aboms just to eat them and heal I think that would make a world of difference in both his viability and his theme. This should go without saying, but for the sake of clarity and understanding, it obviously shout require an action and have a relatively high TN.

I played against Kaeris and frankly I felt completely helpless against her. I took the same kind of list I usually take (Levy, Alyce, Slurpy and a few Aboms and Ashy-D) and there was nothing I could really do. I didn't have the speed to do much in terms of schemes and strats, and I couldn't afford to take the damage to boost my damage output. Like I said, I felt like I was supposed to be playing an attrition game, without the ability to take hits. The Entropy special rule is neat but it seems like enough models have out-of-activation movements to get around it, and frankly, my opponent agreed that taking one damage to inflict significant damage to my dudes was well worth it. I called the game mid-turn 3 because I had already lost all my aboms, the Engine was at like 3 wounds left, Ashy-D was about to bite it, and I was already down one waif.

I don't know. I hope I've made myself clear enough. I really don't want to sound like I'm whining; I'm not saying Levy should be able to throw down 8+ nearly risk free and teleport around the board like he used to (all though I enjoyed that play style immensely), I just think right now he doesn't do enough with his crew, and there needs to be a bit more durability than there currently is (and I think bringing his summoning potential back will fix many of the problems I have with him). But man; he used to be my favorite master, and what they've done to him has sucked all the fun out of playing him to the point where, without some changes, I'd probably never play him again.

Less important, I don't like that I now have one extra waif who I can't use in the game; I'm really not a fan of invalidating models. (Even less important, it ruins the Powerpuff Girl paint scheme I have for the waifs, too! :P)

Hello!

I'm a relatively new player in Rochester, NY. Started playing last November and played three or four games before travelling out of the country for four months. I'm back now and I really want to get into this game. So far I like it more than any other minis game I've played (which is quite a few). Hoping to get into this game more.

This may not be the best forum for this, but I figure I'll ask anyway, in case any other Rochestarians see this: Where are all the Rochester players? I played with the Henchman at Millennium, but they don't have a Malifaux day it seems, and I asked at Just Games and they said they have a Malifaux day on Thursdays, but I heard that only like two people show up for it. I know there used to be a pretty large Malifaux community around here, so I'm wondering where it is and/or what happened to it. I really want to invest more time (and money!) in this game, but I'm worried that there's not really enough momentum for it right now.