An Adepticon Tournament Report - 1st

[EnternalVoid]

I did not reply at first as I wanted to see what was said and was doing some other stuff *had a painting project go wrong enough it needed a simple green bath and brush down*.  But the progression of the thread when I came back was enough to make me decided to throw my two cents in.  So To Be Completely Honest I am not hugely concern by this combo, at least yet.  This is one Tournament, a big one yes, but one Tournament.  We need to see more data.  More important, Wyrd needs to see more data.  Looking at previous incidents with Wyrd they are not generally the sort to jump on something till they feel it is warranted.  Which to me is a Very Wise Thing.  In the past it seems they get their data, examine it themselves, and then go from there.  Kudos to Icyman's win.  Props to his concerns and bringing them forward. 

But at the same time, this is not something new.  The Rat Engine was debated back during the Beta.  So was the Killjoy bomb.  This was debated after the beta.  This is being debated now.  The biggest change from then till now is two things; first Icyman's account and win as possible data and the second is that we have a new Tournament packet using different schemes and Strategies that might be altering how it works in the framework of the game.  Previous data with the Rat Engine and Killjoy bomb were all with the base strategies and schemes, NOT the new ones.  Now I will say I was not at Adepticon this year so I did not get to see this nor the state of the tables, my group got burned out on Malifaux for playing it for years and is spending some time away from it.  But I know that I have seen a Rat Engine with Killjoy at Adepticon back when wave 2 first was official, and I remember that it lost.  I have also seen the tactic lose other times.  Might well be that Icyman's a better player than the others who tried it and had more time to refine it.  Might be how it interacts with the Gaining Ground changes.  I Don't want to take away from his win as he earned it.  But one Tournament is not enough Data, more so when it is taking place 2 years afterwards and we know people were aware of the components of this tactic and it has been used before.

We are not a pitchfork and torch mob in a witch hunt *Normally*, we are gamers who deal with crazy combos, weird and odd rules interactions, and the reality that when things hit the table it does not always work like the same as it would in our heads.  So if you are seriously concern about the Rat Engine combined with Killjoy, take it to your gaming group, play around with it, see what you can do and how it works for you, and let your group brainstorm it all.  Sure some might say "I play for Fun" or "I don't play things I don't fine fun", that is your/their call.  But be willing to give data to Wyrd about the issue before any sort of call to arms to change it all.  Approach it like you would if it was a Beta work and put in the work to build the data to supply to Wyrd so they can take it and compare it to their own.  You will be far more helpful to them that way then just a series of posts about what people thing on a thread if you can back it up as much as possible.  Heck if you are really concerned by this start a thread on the battle report forum called RatJoy or something where people can put their battle reports against it and with it so you can build a strong set of data for reference. 

[katadder]

well we did have a viks rat bomb appear on top table at a tourney yesterday, killed alot of stuff but the Lynch player still managed to pull off a win and take the tourney.

[Math Mathonwy]

11 hours ago, EnternalVoid said:

But be willing to give data to Wyrd about the issue before any sort of call to arms to change it all.  Approach it like you would if it was a Beta work and put in the work to build the data to supply to Wyrd so they can take it and compare it to their own.

Tournament prep games and five rounds in a tournament is quite a bit of testing for a given interaction as far as open beta went (at least for the publically posted data).

[thebarbalag]

It's troubling to see something crash an event like this. However. I would put a little money down that most of the players who lost to it did not see it coming, or hadn't given it all that much thought. The US meta, inasmuch as there is one, is pretty spread out and the best players rarely face each other but for a few big events annually, like this one. This can often result in a skew at events, as some surprising combo can blindside even great players. I'm heartened to see that the same combo, also in the hands of a good player, didn't fair as well in another event. The data is very limited at the moment. If NOVA and Gencon or other big events on the other side of the pond show similar problems, then it may be time to consider cuddling, but I'm not for basing such decisions on such a small sample size.

[zeeblee]

To note: in this report Icemyn faced the same trick (or variation) in 3/5 of his rounds (specifically rounds 3, 4, and 5). While we need more complete roster data to know just how many of the top tables were running ratctivation, it's also unlikely one person would accidentally get stuck facing the only other people to utilize it.

[Bodiless]

He also did take a 10-0 victory over a UK Outcast player at Adepticon, so it isn't as though there is some secret to beating this that only UK players know. 

[Icemyn]

Just to reiterate, as it seems to get lost in the conversation:

I do not think RatJoy is inherently problematic. It may or may not even be the best Killjoy delivery system. 

The issue is very simply the activation control that Ratctivation gives to the outcasts in the early turns at no cost. 
You can as illustrated get 8-9 activations for 8ss. 
You do not need to take all of those in turn one as people are suggesting. 
You can very easily get ~5+ extra activations on both turns 1 and 2, maybe even turn 3. 
If your opponent decides to hide in his deployment zone and "turtle up" you can just wait til turn two and advance your objectives, while you do the same thing on turn 2. 
You can not win a game from your deployment zone. 

Assuming Ratx2 Wretch.
Turn 1: Rat, Rat, Wretch(throw 2 rats), rat(decide not to make a rat king), rat.  8ss(5 activations) 
Keep in mind that 3rd rat where you make the decision does not have to activate in that spot you have other models like waifs or whatever else.
Turn 2: Rat, Rat, Rat, Rat, Wretch(throw 1-2 more rats), Rat makes king, Rat King break, rat, catcher w/ reactivate, rat. (10 activations)

Or if the opponent keeps hiding in their deployment zone snowball activations while they cower. 
The simple fact is the player with ratctivation never has to make a move first which gives them all the advantages. 

Ignore Killjoy please, focus on the issue. 

[Breng77]

i also think we need to separate the ideas of unbeatable and NPE.  You may well be able to beat the rat activation trick.  However, if doing so is a boring game every time IMO it is a problem.

[consolas]

On 4/5/2016 at 2:04 AM, Omenbringer said:

Appreciate the write ups.

Sad to see that Hamelin's rats are still causing problems, hope this gets addressed faster than last time.

Rats gave problems before?

[consolas]

On 4/6/2016 at 3:02 AM, Icemyn said:

2) Are not fun 

Maybe to some people winning at all costs is the concept of fun and thus this might be an issue and probably more frequent in future tournaments.

 

[Omenbringer]

8 hours ago, consolas said:

Rats gave problems before?

Yes 1st edition Hamelin's crew was an absolute mess. A NPE in several ways, one of which was the rats.

[Khoregard]

On 4/5/2016 at 11:57 PM, trikk said:

I think the easiest solution would probably be make rats unhireable and make obedient wretch rat summoning trigger once per turn.

I`ve had so many Wretches throw low crows against Lasarus its not even funny. This model has one of the most reliable summonings and costs 4SS while being a significant minion that is immune to distract/cursed object.

 

NPE all the way.

The wretch isn't a "Nihilist" so unless she hasn't activated yet she wouldn't be immune to distract/cursed object

[Bengt]

2 hours ago, Khoregard said:

The wretch isn't a "Nihilist" so unless she hasn't activated yet she wouldn't be immune to distract/cursed object

Well she is a "Nihilist" (which is a Characteristic), I think you mean that she doesn't have the "Nihilism" Ability that deals with conditions.  

[Adran]

18 hours ago, Khoregard said:

The wretch isn't a "Nihilist" so unless she hasn't activated yet she wouldn't be immune to distract/cursed object

Whilst she doesn't have Nihilism she will just sacrifice herself to generate rats, and remove the condition that way. 

[Fog]

On April 11, 2016 at 3:30 PM, Icemyn said:

Assuming Ratx2 Wretch.
Turn 1: Rat, Rat, Wretch(throw 2 rats), rat(decide not to make a rat king), rat.  8ss(5 activations) 

You cannot choose to *not* make a rat King.  Tangled gives no room for choice.  Rat activates, if there are three more rats then they voltron into a king.  Activating things in the wrong order will force you to combine early, cost you activations and potentially hurt your second turn activation pool.

 

That changes the activation order required (rat, wretch, summoned rat, hired rat, summoned rat) which isn't too big a deal for the first turn control but it makes controlling for second turn something you need to plan ahead to accomplish.  It complicates matters and requires thought and effort to play.

 

i definitely agree that the engine may be too strong outside of Hamelin, but I don't want people playing this wrong all across the country for the next few weeks.  If I have to stare this down across the table I want them playing it right.

[Icemyn]

2 minutes ago, Fog said:

You cannot choose to *not* make a rat King.  Tangled gives no room for choice.  Rat activates, if there are three more rats then they voltron into a king.  Activating things in the wrong order will force you to combine early, cost you activations and potentially hurt your second turn activation pool.

 

You misunderstood me. When I say choose not to make a Rat King I mean don't walk the 4th rat close enough to trigger tangled. 

So you have 3 rats in tangle range one outside. At the point I note is where you have to decide if you want to make a rat king or not. 
If you do walk outside rat in, if not keep outside rat away. 

Hopefully that makes more sense. 

[Fog]

3 minutes ago, Icemyn said:

You misunderstood me. When I say choose not to make a Rat King I mean don't walk the 4th rat close enough to trigger tangled. 

So you have 3 rats in tangle range one outside. At the point I note is where you have to decide if you want to make a rat king or not. 
If you do walk outside rat in, if not keep outside rat away. 

Hopefully that makes more sense. 

It's perfectly clear now.  I'm expecting four outcast players at our local tournament Saturday and I wasn't looking forward to having that fight four times. 

[orkdork]

Pardon the egregious threadnomancy.

Has anyone seen a top-tier voices Pandora player vs. Ratjoy? Typically, my Pandora list doesn't care overmuch about activation control due to voices/incite, and the crew on the whole eats Killjoy for breakfast. I would expect the Levi list to be less of an issue compared to the Viks list.

The Pandora list is very much an all-comers list as well.

Not that this is any sort of solution, mind you. I just really wonder if I could take this list down myself, but I don't have an experienced Ratjoy player to try against.

[Paddywhack]

On 4/8/2016 at 10:47 AM, LunarSol said:

It's essentially the same problem that forced FFG to significantly alter the rules of Imperial Assault AND still take the cuddle bat to the models involved.  Activation control is just incredibly powerful in alternating activation systems.

Yup. The old AT43 game from Rackham (my first alternating activation game) had a mechanic to kind of help. If you had fewer units than your opponent you could Pass your Activation once per Turn. This helped avoid one side totally steam rolling the other with activations, but that game never took off (and some would say was the downfall of Rackham) so it never got to play out long term to see how much it helped. 

[Dark Aletheia]

We could come at this from another direction: fluff and theme. 

As an avid Hamlin player, I always thought it strange (and distasteful) that rats were hire-able by other masters. Rats/disease are Hamlin's thing and it seems weird, from a fluff perspective, that someone like the Viks could "hire" them. That doesn't make sense to my cinematic mind and pulls me out of the game when I see rats in a non-Hamlin list.

So, yeah, I agree that the problem could be fixed by limiting Rats and the Obedient wretch to Hamlin only, but I'd argue that it should happen, not because of game balance (which is important), but because it reinforces the story/fluff side of the game.

[Dark Aletheia]

1 hour ago, Paddywhack said:

Yup. The old AT43 game from Rackham (my first alternating activation game) had a mechanic to kind of help. If you had fewer units than your opponent you could Pass your Activation once per Turn. This helped avoid one side totally steam rolling the other with activations, but that game never took off (and some would say was the downfall of Rackham) so it never got to play out long term to see how much it helped. 

BTW, the Relic Knights 1.5 rules just dropped the other day and it addresses the same thing. Like Malifaux, RK has an alternating activation system and the new rules require you to add a "filler" card (non unit, can be used to heal and other things), if the number of models you have drops below a certain number (your "dashboard.") So, yeah, another system with alternating activation that address the issue once it was found some problems associated with it.

[Fetid Strumpet]

I don't think you can take that line as a valid argument. I mean if you logically go down that road you enter all kinds of problems of theme, especially in outcasts. Why would you be able to bring abominations with Von Schill and so on. Why would Nicodem be able to summon Belles as that is a Seamus creation, and in Wyrd released fluff Nicodem berets the belles at the Dead Man's Ball and if their manner of practicing necromancy is so different? If Hannah dislikes her sister as much as the fluff indicates why would you be able to hire them in the same crew? There are numerous examples of things just not making thematic or fluff sense in the rules, so I'm not certain that argument really works as anything other than a personal opinion, which is fair. It's just not I think a very strong argument to actually have something changed.

Relic Knights has it's own problems and the system comparison I don't think is comparable to Malifaux. Relic knights has no turn structure, it's basically 1 everlasting turn, with no limit on how many times you can activate the same model. The issue appeared that it was actually better in many cases to actually ignore hiring a Cadre as much as possible and just hire your knight and Cypher, and then as many boosts (non models) as possible, because if you only had the knight it could activate every chance you got to do something. It would be like saying in Malifaux that if your master was your only model, every time it was your turn to activate you could activate your master, even if it had already gone. That also lead to the issue of the fact that the cost difference between knights became heightened, because a more expensive knight, not only was better on a point for point basis, but it also made it easier to hire less models, because you don't actually need them, and in fact because your opponent could get points for killing them, were actually detrimental to hiring them.

While I agree that the out activation is an issue to the game as a whole I don't think it's as simple a fix as giving passes, because I suspect that not only would that make tracking things more difficult, but it would force the game in the other direction. Weak or numerous models would become vastly less useful than they are now, and we'd shift back to a big problem that existed in 1.5 where outside of a few circumstances it was detrimental to hire the lower cost models, and elite models were vastly better. That's a situation I don't ever want to go to because aside from a few instances I think they mostly got the balance right between taking swarms vs taking elite models.

For my money I think, over all, what they did with the Clockwork traps is mostly how low cost models should be handled, in that they might have an effect on the game, but you can't activate them. It's similar to one of the suggestions I'd have for dialing Levi back. I think since he's not paying anything for the waifs they shouldn't get to activate normally. They should potentially be given a rule that says they can't activate, and  a rule that says Levi can spend his AP during his turn to make them take a 1AP action. I think that might tone him down enough because it would get rid of the free activations he gets, and it would do much to limit his mobility, since he'd have to spend something's AP (His, a Belle, a Doxy, or some other model) to move them around to get them in positions outside his deployment zone. I'm not certain how that would apply to rats but I do feel there shouldn't be models lower in cost than 3 hirable that can activate in the game.

As someone mentioned in another thread we had all kinds of problems with Mindless Zombies and Seishin during the Open Beta. If you could hire them and priced them fairly for what they actually did then the compounded synergy between models that wanted corpse counters, and the activation they gave just made them bonkers, if you costed them for not what was on their card, but for the synergy and activation, then they became not actually worth hiring. I think they did exactly the right thing by not making them hirable.

[Dark Aletheia]

8 minutes ago, Fetid Strumpet said:

I don't think you can take that line as a valid argument. I mean if you logically go down that road you enter all kinds of problems of theme, especially in outcasts. Why would you be able to bring abominations with Von Schill and so on. Why would Nicodem be able to summon Belles as that is a Seamus creation, and in Wyrd released fluff Nicodem berets the belles at the Dead Man's Ball and if their manner of practicing necromancy is so different? If Hannah dislikes her sister as much as the fluff indicates why would you be able to hire them in the same crew? There are numerous examples of things just not making thematic or fluff sense in the rules, so I'm not certain that argument really works as anything other than a personal opinion, which is fair. It's just not I think a very strong argument to actually have something changed.

 

OK, so I'm glad that you read my post as adding a aesthetic evaluation of the situation rather than a game balance one. However, I don't think that's necessarily not a "valid argument"; if we threw out aesthetics, we could easily (and much more cheaply) play the game with bottle tops or chits. For the record, I'm not saying I think anything needs to be changed, just suggesting that there are more than game balance issues that we might throw in the mix.

I do think that Wyrd does use some rules to enforce theme. Off the top of my head, for example, Lazarus' "hate the maker" rule. Given his fluff, it would make no sense for Lazarus to be in a Guild crew, as his rebellion is from the Guild is intrinsic to his story, though I can't think of a game balance reason that he couldn't run with Guild.  What I am saying is I think rats are closer to the Lazarus rule than to your examples, meaning more central to Hamlin's identity than other masters.

Again, I'm not saying what I'm offering is a "strong argument" or that I'm advocating a change. I'm just offering a fluff/thematic consideration. I just think it's weird and more jarring seeing rats in a non-Hamlin crew.

[Dark Aletheia]

25 minutes ago, Fetid Strumpet said:

Relic Knights has it's own problems and the system comparison I don't think is comparable to Malifaux. Relic knights has no turn structure, it's basically 1 everlasting turn, with no limit on how many times you can activate the same model. The issue appeared that it was actually better in many cases to actually ignore hiring a Cadre as much as possible and just hire your knight and Cypher, and then as many boosts (non models) as possible, because if you only had the knight it could activate every chance you got to do something. It would be like saying in Malifaux that if your master was your only model, every time it was your turn to activate you could activate your master, even if it had already gone. That also lead to the issue of the fact that the cost difference between knights became heightened, because a more expensive knight, not only was better on a point for point basis, but it also made it easier to hire less models, because you don't actually need them, and in fact because your opponent could get points for killing them, were actually detrimental to hiring them.

I'm not saying there's much comparison between Malifaux and RK. The previous poster mentioned AT-43 and I thought it useful to observe another game with alternating activations that added a substantial change.  Batman Mini game uses passes, Infinity uses ARO's, etc., both are systems meant to check activation control getting out of control.

I'm also not at all suggesting that Malifaux use a "pass" system. I'd hate that, actually, as activation control is an important strategic layer to the game.

[SinJ]

 

18 hours ago, Fetid Strumpet said:

I don't think you can take that line as a valid argument. I mean if you logically go down that road you enter all kinds of problems of theme, especially in outcasts. Why would you be able to bring abominations with Von Schill and so on. Why would Nicodem be able to summon Belles as that is a Seamus creation, and in Wyrd released fluff Nicodem berets the belles at the Dead Man's Ball and if their manner of practicing necromancy is so different? If Hannah dislikes her sister as much as the fluff indicates why would you be able to hire them in the same crew? There are numerous examples of things just not making thematic or fluff sense in the rules, so I'm not certain that argument really works as anything other than a personal opinion, which is fair. It's just not I think a very strong argument to actually have something changed.

I think Wyrd hasn't placed hiring or summoning restrictions so far due to a smaller model pool. I'm not trying to advocate for an entirely fluffy game but does it make sense that you can hire those things you mentioned in other crews? Especially with the advent of now wave three and four incoming I think that there are plenty of models where restriction could make sense, especially in regards to summoning.

18 hours ago, Fetid Strumpet said:

As someone mentioned in another thread we had all kinds of problems with Mindless Zombies and Seishin during the Open Beta. If you could hire them and priced them fairly for what they actually did then the compounded synergy between models that wanted corpse counters, and the activation they gave just made them bonkers, if you costed them for not what was on their card, but for the synergy and activation, then they became not actually worth hiring. I think they did exactly the right thing by not making them hirable.

I think that making Malifaux Rats unhirable would be a solid solution as well as making the Obedient Wretch only hirable to models with the Nihilist characteristic *for Henchman hardcore Nix. As a Hamelin player this feels like it retains his rat game while not crossing into the ridiculous territory allowed with the Rat Engine plus Leveticus and Belles or the Viks.

However most people think excessive activation control is overall the problem. The solution needs to originate from an overall change or option not just spot treating one at a time.