DonQOT

9 hours ago, Modernpenguin said:

When you say fun, I think both of the mechanical aspect, but also how their lore/theme fits into the way they play on the tabletop. 
 

That is what I mean by fun. I like interesting mechanics and especially when they evoke the thematics of master and crew.

It sounds like Yan Lo is relatively similar to how he played previously, though I need to get a handle on his new nuances. McCabe being a powerhouse in faction seems funny to me, as I recall him being more of a versatile support engine with his upgrade tossing.

I'll miss the kamaitachi as it was for all the upgrade shenanigans TT used to be able to get up to, but at least my old masters haven't changed too much...except for Mccabe's lose of Guild (WHICH I AM STILL NOT SALTY ABOUT, STOP ASKING).

There has been a lot of vinegar made of the Explorers and their supposed place in the meta, and I acknowledge and agree with those concerns in large part.

As something of a palette cleanser from the negativity, however, let's take a moment to appreciate what we may about the faction.

I am still shameless in my affections for the faction. I probably would not be coming back to the game without their introduction,  after all. I've always had a weakness for those pulpy adventurer types as well as have been wanting to see more of Malifaux beyond the titular city, so they were always going to be up my way thematically.

They were also the only faction whose roster had my interest through and through. I like all of the Malifaux factions to one degree or another, but Explorers was the only one where I have a sincere desire to play all of the Masters on offer.

Right now I have only played much with Jedza and a bit of McCabe (he was my primary in the elder days of 2e), but am planning on digging into EVS, Syndicate, and Ivan soon. All of them I expect will see daylight on my table, digitally for now, but someday in beautiful poorly painted plastic. May can't get here fast enough.

So what are some of your favorite aspects of the faction? Do you like their models? Do you like their faction themes of movement/terrain nonsense? Their lore? Has Mikhail's brooding continence and man-bun awoken feelings in you that you didn't know you had?

Flatter the faction and maybe they will deign to allow you a privisional membership, or at least show mercy on your next encounter.

Oh I am totally with you there Plaag, I'm more of a fluffy player that picks the models I buy based on how much I like the look and feel of them  and their lore and mechanical themes more than because they are any good (i.e. I got Jedza for those reasons). I really like ES for their character and would play them even if they weren't top tier. Hell, I really like Cadmus' characterization and feel, the fact that they are on top of the pile is a turnoff.

I don't think that ES was intentionally over tuned. My thesis was just to suggest that the factors I listed in my post were why they could have ended up overpowered without the intention to do so. Indeed, I think you hit the nail with the mtg comparison. A game like Malifaux only remains commercially successful if people want to actually play it, which these imbalances actively discourage. Plus, I'm sure they would like to sell all those other factions' models too.

My hope is that Wyrd anticipated this possible overstep and will release some errata shortly to dial things back.

That said, as someone who does love the character of the faction, I remain reticent to see some of the more drastic changes some have mentioned, as I think they could spoil the actually fun parts of the faction.

I've spoken my mind elsewhere so I won't reiterate any more here. Just that I favor a pruning back approach to rebalancing as opposed to what I see as a more slash and burn strategy suggested by the saltier decriers...to use a mangled metaphor.

It's nice to hear that both of these masters are still fun, as they were my core in 2e. I'm still getting my act together rebuilding my crews after all my Guild models became completely worthless with McCabe leaving the faction (BUT I AM NOT SALTY ABOUT THIS AT ALL.) and my friend who shared a good portion of his Resser models with me for Lo moved halfway across the country, so I don't have a working crew for either yet. 

Glad to see that they are still having some success and are still fun to play. Guess I better brush up on my TT models. 

I am curious to know what other, better Jedza crews are now thinking about crewlists.

I am enjoying the zoning potential of their terrain marker shenanigans a lot, and the fun tricks with movement that hurl my grandma mummy around where they thought she and her bubble crew couldn't reach, blink best boy around, and just generally make a nuisance of myself during my opponent's activations, so I've gone in on the minions pretty hard and always take my multi-great godson, Mikhail, but the rest of my ss has been pretty flexible.

I'm mostly just faffing about, though, trying out all the different keywork crew combinations. See if I manage to come up with something clever by the room full of monkeys method.

I'd like to hear ya'll think are now the essentials for when you run the Seekers. Vdubs seems pretty popular, and Emissary, natch. Any other favorites? Upgraded effigy seems like it could potentially be worthwhile here (or at least fun), make you have to work a bit to get your stabby statue and much more doable in this crew than many others.

It does seem like a lot of the complaint about Cadmus is not just that she is strong, but that she doesnt interact well with the other player. A lot of Cadmus abilities are none negotiable once they go off (i.e. I touched you, discard a card or I stick you with a parasite token you can never remove).

I kinda like that as part of Cadmus whole creeping doom schtick, but it probably doesn't feel great to have zero options to interact at that stage.

What about a change to her parasite tokens, maybe make them into a negative upgrade instead that gives either the affected model or friendly models the ability to discard the upgrade for an action. Still painful to get stuck with, but not game ending. Sometimes you let it stay because your actions are too precious to waste, but then your masters qbd heavy hitters can be safeguarded by keeping chaff around to pick the lice out of their hair.

Maybe not the only change to be made,for sure, but at least mitigating the NPE that this threads about.

So these are just some general observations when it comes to overpowered/tuned compaints in general, but more specifically inspired by the discussions around ES so I think they belong here.

Almost any time there is a new faction, character, et cetera, in a game there are arguments of them being overpowered. Like most true, but boring answers, these arguments are often both correct and incorrect at the same time.

Often people perceive new mechanics as overpowered (unless they were release significantly underpowered for some reason) as a simple function of the fluency bias. As has been observed, many of the voices cautioning against overselling the strength of ES do so with the presumption that the player base simply hasn't become familiarized enough with the new faction to have fluency when facing them, so when tried and true methods of tackling a certain archetype that they see in one of the new masters doesn't work, there is a strong gut feeling that the new master is unfair. This accounts for some of the cries of overpowered, though certainly not all.

One of the reasons that ES is over tuned simply cannot be helped from a business and design perspective. If you are a game company introducing a new sellable product, you are disinclined to make the new product worse than your previous lines. It would be pretty disastrous to invest in design and production work for a venture and then have none of your customers buy it because you simply did not make your shiny new element appealing enough. In the worst cases you get the kind of pay to win power creep that kills your game. But even in the best cases you have scenarios where new game elements are almost always released at least a little over tuned, but hopefully can be dialed back shortly after introduction. I think there is more of the latter with ES. Most of their tools aren't fundamentally better than other factions, but when you look at their incremental characteristics they often eclipse their competitors. Damage tracks that are just a little more punchy. Trigger abilities that enable their control elements to work just a little too easy.

Finally there is the problem of designer experience. Simply put, the designers of 3e Malifaux have had more experience with their own systems, so when they are designing new models, they know their old ground well. They know what combinations work and which don't work, so they have better synergistic design overall. This exacerbates there previous inclination towards over tuning. What is more, since the new faction has fewer models overall, they want those models to all be useful and cover all their bases, which leads, I think, to the higher average power to ES models as well as the seemingly common complaint that their tech models simply have too many tools.

There is more I could say, but that sure is a big wall of text, so I'll stop. Probably nothing much new there for my fellow armchair scholars, but hopefully there is something salient in the morass of my mind.

Oh, and none of what I said applies to Jedza, btw, she is perfect as is and needs no change. Also I am totally objective in all of my perceptions.

On 2/24/2021 at 10:15 AM, dannydb said:

I think it's a keyword your going to have to understand how it works in order to disable it, as you can lose so many actions too mikhail and his 2in range and caught in the ring 

 

In addition with emmy shockwaves and pulses with duels arnt way to go so movement shenanigans and going for schemes which that bubbles are less effective are jedza weakness 

Agree with this 100%. Jedza was the new master I've spent the most time learning and playing. I lost all my games until I finally grokked how they work. Then my performance has varied more by how well my opponent understood the crew.

I think overall it will settle into a strong but midrange crew with lots of intricacies to keep things interesting and clever but pinned around one mechanic to encourage good counterplay. Which is great from where I am standing as Jedza is one of my absolute favorites now and think she's taken her place as my new primary (sorry McCabe, you broke my heart losing your Guild status).

1 hour ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

Good thought!

Certainly Archivist at ten stones would discourage OOK play which would be nice.

One issue is that whatever the changes are, they need to be play tested. And I imagine playtesting resources have been redeployed to all the other broken (but possibly not as broken as Cadmus) stuff.

Oh yes. I meant to include the discouraging effect a price hike would have on ook use of Cadmus in my first post.

Seems like Archivist ends up on a lot of other keywords' lists and that just seems wrong from a design perspective. I feel like OOK should really only be encouraged for tech choices and some really clever niche builds. When most players have an OOK model in their standard list, something must have gone wrong. But Archivist if just too good not to take at his price point.

I'd hate to see Cadmus be changed in too many other ways. As I intimated, they have a really cool gimmick that has a strong marriage of theme and mechanic and I worry a lot of the prospective changes would really take away from that. Hence, rather than taking their toys away from them, just make it more difficult for them to have them all at once.

But I'll stop harping on about it now.

Could a fix for some of the issues be a simple cost increase? I note that filling up on all of Cadmus super desirable henchman and enforcers plus an expensive versatile like Mr. N or the Emissary still leaves you will a third of your soulstones left to play with.

All of this in keyword single models also only cost 8 which is on the low end for the almost certainly overtuned faction. Bumping them up to 9 (or maybe 10 with something extra yummy like Archivist) seems like it would go a long way towards slowing down the oppression engine that is this crew. 

I think this might be a good way to get a quick and dirty nerf out the door without messing with the fun themes and mechanics of this crew.

Just an observation from a relative newcomer who knows the next side of nothing.