Balance/Power Creep in Malifaux

[Math Mathonwy]

3 hours ago, katadder said:

yes killing is a big way of controlling the board but not everything has df6 either.

certainly from an arcanist POV I can quite happily say my arachnid swarms (gotta love built in multiple attacks), rail golem ( to attacks) and cojo have all killed plenty it all comes down to when you use them, usually when opponents have used their good cards.

Also cojo and arachnid swarms can remove enemy markers to deny them VPs

Do you hire Arachnid Swarms often? I never see anyone hire them (outside of Adran, naturally). They have built-in synergy with half the Masters of the Faction yet they aren't hired. Now, granted, their design is such that if they had a high Ml stat they would be absolutely horrible but the point remains.

3 hours ago, katadder said:

some of the others I cannot comment on, but things like Candy its not that hard to keep alive, no harder than any other model unless an opponent concentrates on it. there isnt a model in the game cant be killed in 1 round/activation if you really want it to go down

_{(just for comedic effect - I know what you mean and agree)}

[BFOmega]

8 minutes ago, Math Mathonwy said:

Do you hire Arachnid Swarms often? I never see anyone hire them (outside of Adran, naturally). They have built-in synergy with half the Masters of the Faction yet they aren't hired. Now, granted, their design is such that if they had a high Ml stat they would be absolutely horrible but the point remains.

I could see hiring one against something like Colette, for the Scheme marker removal, though I'll admit it's iffy. With Ramos he'd at least get a + to atk flips from Under Pressure, and he has the built in +dmg flips above 4 wds. Mobile toolkit could give another to either of them too.

Also, try one in Hoffman. ML7 with the Overwhelm trigger... gross.

[daniello_s]

28 minutes ago, Math Mathonwy said:

Do you hire Arachnid Swarms often? I never see anyone hire them (outside of Adran, naturally). They have built-in synergy with half the Masters of the Faction yet they aren't hired. Now, granted, their design is such that if they had a high Ml stat they would be absolutely horrible but the point remains.

_{(just for comedic effect - I know what you mean and agree)}

You have made my day with this, Math. 

Well done 

[katadder]

No I dont hire arachnid swarms, just summon spiders for them, but they are still not poor models because of having an Ml5. 

I do like them but most my other crews tend to be fixed (and with arcanist generally play to theme) so squeezing in an 8SS beater instead of a 10SS one is difficult. They have still had some good kills for me and swung games

[Fetid Strumpet]

Not trying to be argumentative,just mentioning a point brought up in Justin's post. Just mentioning that I would disagree with Justin's assertion that if you have armor lower DF doesn't matter as much. In my experience Lower Df is ALWAYS bad. It might not be as bad from a strictly 'the enemy is trying to kill my model and it's taking them more ap to do it' sort of way, but low defense means you are going to get hit. There are a number of things in the game that are brought into play be being successfully hit or damaged. Conditions abound that are placed on you in such a case, and in my experience and perception many of the models that have low defense burn a ton of abilities that could do other things simply to counteract as much as possible the downsides of having a low stat. Prime example, Perdita vs Seamus (and no I'm not arguing either should be changed or that either is over or underpowered) I've seen a number of threads where the advice for beating Perdita is to basically ignore her because it is too hard to kill her because her DF is so high. Seamus is a difficult to kill master, and the advice is often the same, but Seamus is only hard to kill because he has 4 abilities (and models brought into to crew to take advantage of one of them) that are all essentially trying to do via abilities what +3 defense does for Perdita, who gets abilities on top of this. Which isn't even a fair comparison because while it might be hard to kill Seamus it is absurdly easy to get any particular condition you want on him that is resisted by Defense. 

Again for clarity, this wasn't a complaint or call for change, just an observation that even if other abilities mitigate it, it is rarely ever a good thing to have low def, no matter how many abilities you have to offset it, so I think at least that part of the statistical look if fair.

[Gnomezilla]

That picture could only have been better if you pulled the version with hearts-doodles from the "one master you hate to face" thread.

2 hours ago, lusciousmccabe said:

One thing that can be said for new releases is that models seem increasingly designed for how M2E actually works, rather than being semi-random re-skins of v1.5 profiles. So I think there may have been a sort of 'utility creep' in terms of how models work in the game, with the well designed models (which isn't all of them) in the later waves having a balance of abilities and actions that work towards various objectives, while early designs tend to have one specialisation which may or may not do anything to help you win the game.

Also, kind of off topic but I really love how GG16 addresses things like how woefully inadequate marker removal is in a lot of crews, so they can sort of retroactively tweak things to be relevant by changing the objectives rather than the models.

While I like the entire post, this put words to the worry I had, and puts the worry to rest. Very insightful. Thank you.

[katadder]

9 minutes ago, Fetid Strumpet said:

Not trying to be argumentative,just mentioning a point brought up in Justin's post. Just mentioning that I would disagree with Justin's assertion that if you have armor lower DF doesn't matter as much. In my experience Lower Df is ALWAYS bad. It might not be as bad from a strictly 'the enemy is trying to kill my model and it's taking them more ap to do it' sort of way, but low defense means you are going to get hit. There are a number of things in the game that are brought into play be being successfully hit or damaged. Conditions abound that are placed on you in such a case, and in my experience and perception many of the models that have low defense burn a ton of abilities that could do other things simply to counteract as much as possible the downsides of having a low stat. Prime example, Perdita vs Seamus (and no I'm not arguing either should be changed or that either is over or underpowered) I've seen a number of threads where the advice for beating Perdita is to basically ignore her because it is too hard to kill her because her DF is so high. Seamus is a difficult to kill master, and the advice is often the same, but Seamus is only hard to kill because he has 4 abilities (and models brought into to crew to take advantage of one of them) that are all essentially trying to do via abilities what +3 defense does for Perdita, who gets abilities on top of this. Which isn't even a fair comparison because while it might be hard to kill Seamus it is absurdly easy to get any particular condition you want on him that is resisted by Defense. 

Again for clarity, this wasn't a complaint or call for change, just an observation that even if other abilities mitigate it, it is rarely ever a good thing to have low def, no matter how many abilities you have to offset it, so I think at least that part of the statistical look if fair.

Whilst I am not asking for higher defence on anyone I do agree to some respects. I love to see Seamus or someone with low df when I bring raspy, just means I am going to paralyse them easier to serve up to my wendigo to eat.
and on the other side having low df doesnt help when so many things can ignore armour (or other defensive ability you wish to insert). df4 or less generally means you will always get hit

[LunarSol]

13 minutes ago, Fetid Strumpet said:

Seamus is a difficult to kill master, and the advice is often the same, but Seamus is only hard to kill because he has 4 abilities (and models brought into to crew to take advantage of one of them) that are all essentially trying to do via abilities what +3 defense does for Perdita, who gets abilities on top of this.

People consider Perdita hard to kill when she has +5 Df over Seamus for what its worth.  At just +3 I'm not sure if its quite enough off curve to be as reliable as Seamus's tricks when you factor in cheating.

That said, the other big advantage of high defense is the reduced damage.  One of the issues models that try to make up for abysmal defenses with armor suffer is the tendency to get hit with a lot more moderates and have damage cheated on them.

[Justin]

I think anyone would agree that (assuming the same Wounds, let's say 5) a model with Df 5 and no defensive abilities is significantly easier to kill than a model with Df 4, Armor 8, Hard to Kill, and Regeneration 4.

At some point, defensive abilities do make up for/out class sheer Df totals. We can argue about where that line is. The point being: looking at stats alone does not tell you whether or not the models are better.

[Omenbringer]

15 hours ago, Kadeton said:

Are there any combinations that you find particularly egregious? Most of the non-thematic combinations I see are just any old Master with the 'generically strong / high value' models like Austringers and December Acolytes, but it sounds like you're thinking more of strong non-thematic synergies. I've also found most thematic crews work perfectly well in competitive environments.

I would offer the addition of the so called "Ratjoy" models to any list outside of Hamelin.

3 hours ago, solkan said:

I just want to go on record as not having a position on whether there is or is not power creep in the game.  My objection is that the copy/pasted version of OmenBringer's post doesn't demonstrate whether or not there is power creep in the game.

For instance, Lucius is Df 6 with 6+ action values, and there's this four page thread on the forum lamenting how underpowered he is.

Lucius may not be necessarily under powered on his own (I am of the opinion that he isn't that bad) however his Guardsmen are (and not talking about Austringers who are still above the power curve despite numerous complaints about them last edition, Rotten Belle's as well). Why are they thought of as so bad? It has an awful lot to do with their acting values of predominately 4's.

As for the depth of analysis perhaps if I find the time in the next few days I will do a more thorough SS cost analysis, or perhaps others can add to the effort. The post was intended as a quick synopsis, throw stones at it if you want but I would be surprised if it doesn't show as true.

3 hours ago, D_acolyte said:

Now with that being said, if you are concerned about power creep then try to sign up for play testing and break the game so you can then say this is to powerful Arron. It is important that we players are as much trying to help move the game in a way we want as possible.

I fully believe Wyrd is working to balance the game and here is why:

The zero point upgrades, rightly or wrongly, is Wyrd trying to increase the viability of models that may not be seen as viable.

By changing the tournament schemes Wyrd is trying to affect the meta and give time to models that may be underpowered or changed how we the players choose to power our force.

They have shown that they are willing to weaken models as they did with the metal gamin and despite the response to it I hope they are still willing to.

Dont assume that many of the more vocal posters in this thread haven't play tested for Wyrd before. Many of us have and some still do. In my experiences the play testing process wasn't super effective. Often times when valid overly potent interactions were discovered during play testing it was met with shall we say a very aggressive and vocal  opposition that drowned out the signal. More than a few of these wormed there way to publication despite being discovered during play testing. Perhaps it has changed...

The 0 point upgrades and power reduction of the Metal Gamins are interesting examples. Wyrd didn't just change them on their own, threads such as these prodded them to look at the models more acutely. I will offer that they are a bit quicker than last edition to change things.

A discussion about Strategies and Schemes would take its own thread and would likely result in the same posters digging in as they have before.

1 hour ago, Justin said:

Indeed, this is a good post.

I'm not really going to jump into the fray, but I want to steer the discussion a little. Far too often I see a premise thrown out and that premise is accepted automatically, then everyone just jumps to how to fix/prevent the problem (because that's sort of the fun part).

But let's question this premise.

I don't think a straight stat comparison between the books is an accurate representation of power creep. For one, it ignores point cost. Shifting Loyalties had relatively few lower costed models, so their stats would be higher on average. Also, stats need to be looked at against their accompanying abilities (if a model has Armor, for example, a lower Df doesn't mean as much).

I agree that it is a good discussion to have. I also agree that often the accusation of Over or Under Powered is thrown around too frequently.

What I dont agree with, is that compensating for lower Df through abilities such as Armor is a great method. The model is still going to get hit and the margin of success is also going to be higher. Higher Margins of Success translates to higher damage potentials (even with damage abilities considered) and unless the Black Joker shows up still means 1 Wd inflicted versus the always 0 Wd's of a successful Defense Resist.

I agree that SS cost is important in the discussion. An example I would offer is the M2e Ice Golem versus the Shifting Loyalties Arcane Emissary. Both 10 SS, both Enforcers. The Ice Golem has a Df of 2 versus the Emissaries Df of 6. They differ in Armor value by 1. Attack values are similar but the Emissary has a much longer threat range (by quite a bit), a 1 AP charge compared to Melee Expert, and a much wider array of Triggers (to include inflicting Slow on the Target). Damage is a notable difference but only considering the Ice Golem's Smash action, the others are close trading lower Weak and Moderate damage for 1 point at Severe. With higher Df values becoming more prevalent stronger Weak and Moderate damage is more valuable than Severe. As mentioned Smash is devastating when it connects however it requires the entirety of the Ice Golem's AP and also has a very short range of 2". If the two models were to attack each other the Arcane Emissary is at a 4+ flip on his attack actions while the Ice Golem is at an even flip with the Emissary. Hands down the Arcane Emissary replaces the Ice Golem completely in a Rasputina crew.

_______________________________________________________

The last thing I would offer is that the outliers from M2e (Guild Austringers, Rotten Belles, etc) are not what forms the statistical average. Rotten Belles and Guild Austringers are significantly above the average in their acting values for minions even similarly costed models.

[Justin]

Were competitive Rasputina lists running Ice Golems regularly before Shifting Loyalties came around? If they weren't, it's not a case of the Emissary replacing it, but a case of the Ice Golem being under powered and not seeing the table before Shifting Loyalties was ever printed.

Also, is this actually a trend, or a single instance? Some models will always be better/worse (or at least perceived that way). To show that power creep is a problem with Shifting Loyalties as a whole, I think you need to show that this is a trend, and not just a single happenstance.

More food for thought. Anyway, I'll leave you guys to it. Enjoy the discussion.

[Omenbringer]

42 minutes ago, LunarSol said:

People consider Perdita hard to kill when she has +5 Df over Seamus for what its worth.  At just +3 I'm not sure if its quite enough off curve to be as reliable as Seamus's tricks when you factor in cheating.

That said, the other big advantage of high defense is the reduced damage.  One of the issues models that try to make up for abysmal defenses with armor suffer is the tendency to get hit with a lot more moderates and have damage cheated on them.

Really? Df +3 is a huge amount. This means a Red Joker on the attack fails against a 12+ on Df. Considering cheating the defender is far more likely to have a 12+ in hand than a Red Joker.

21 minutes ago, Justin said:

I think anyone would agree that (assuming the same Wounds, let's say 5) a model with Df 5 and no defensive abilities is significantly easier to kill than a model with Df 4, Armor 8, Hard to Kill, and Regeneration 4.

At some point, defensive abilities do make up for/out class sheer Df totals. We can argue about where that line is. The point being: looking at stats alone does not tell you whether or not the models are better.

And what model has all that Justin? If a hypothetical model had that then perhaps Df 4 wouldn't be a huge liability.

[LunarSol]

34 minutes ago, Omenbringer said:

The last thing I would offer is that the outliers from M2e (Guild Austringers, Rotten Belles, etc) are not what forms the statistical average. Rotten Belles and Guild Austringers are significantly above the average in their acting values for minions even similarly costed models.

And yet when the outliers form a large enough pool to create a diverse and varied game environment.... they do.  Average is not the goal; variety is.  A game with 60% top tier models and 40% bottom tier models has no models that are in the statistical average, but is vastly more competitively varied than one with 5% top tier models, 80% mid-tier models and 15% bottom tier models.

The Ice Golem was not replaced by the Arcane Emissary.  It was replaced by about a dozen other models long before the Arcane Emissary came along.  Those are the models the Arcane Emissary is competing with.  Trying to tether it to the Ice Golem just creates an Arcane Emissary that isn't in contention with a dozen other models and leaves the options exactly the same.  Making the Emissary competitive with those models means there's a dozen+1 choices in Raspy's crew.

Trying to balance to the lowest common denominator is exactly why Guild has a lot of bad minions.  Tons of things were cut back to keep from being better than Guild Guard, but it does nothing to improve the variety in Guild.  It's just left Guild with a lot of options that lose badly to Terror Tots and the like.

[LunarSol]

5 minutes ago, Omenbringer said:

Really? Df +3 is a huge amount. This means a Red Joker on the attack fails against a 12+ on Df. Considering cheating the defender is far more likely to have a 12+ in hand than a Red Joker.

And what model has all that Justin? If a hypothetical model had that then perhaps Df 4 wouldn't be a huge liability.

It's not a huge amount because Seamus's Df is below the average attack, not equal to it.  Perdita is generally only Df+1 to 2 without Francisco.  Likewise, Seamus gets hit fairly often due to his low Df, but its not nearly as bad as it would be if it was Df-3.  FWIW, Df 4 still avoids about a third of Ml/Sh/Ca 6 attacks before cheating.  

[Myyrä]

37 minutes ago, Omenbringer said:

As for the depth of analysis perhaps if I find the time in the next few days I will do a more thorough SS cost analysis, or perhaps others can add to the effort. The post was intended as a quick synopsis, throw stones at it if you want but I would be surprised if it doesn't show as true.

I have some program code somewhere that can be used to calculate the expected amount of AP models need to spend to kill other models (or something else with some modification). I guess I could dig it up and do some calculations.

[Redbeard]

29 minutes ago, Omenbringer said:

And what model has all that Justin? If a hypothetical model had that then perhaps Df 4 wouldn't be a huge liability.

Really? It was pretty obvious that he was creating an extreme example to show that defense abilities other than defense do matter. Thus why he said "we can argue about where that line is."

Having a model in Shifting Loyalties that's better than a model in the core book is not power creep, it's imbalance. There are imbalances in Malifaux, no one denies that. The question is whether the imbalances are always on the trend of creating more power with each subsequent release. In my experience, people aren't taking Crossroads models more than core models, and there wasn't a rush to proxy Shifting Loyalties models because they are so good.

Unless maybe you're having a Crossroads Seven epidemic where you live? Because that would be pretty awesome.

[Fetid Strumpet]

Quote

I think anyone would agree that (assuming the same Wounds, let's say 5) a model with Df 5 and no defensive abilities is significantly easier to kill than a model with Df 4, Armor 8, Hard to Kill, and Regeneration 4.

 

I wouldn't. For one thing you haven't specified wounds, which could play a big part.

But you inadvertently support my point with that statement. You point out in your statement, and many others are fixated on, the Killing aspect. While I'm 100% onboard with the concept that the best form of control is killing a model, and if you have to expend the same amount of resources to perma paralyze a model as opposed to killing them its better to kill them. But my point is that in the game as currently constructed, there are numerous ways to effectively deal with a model that doesn't involve killing them. In my Seamus example the reason I look on models with higher Df as superior in some ways is they have less to deal with in the form of conditions. Many conditions can effectively combat your ability to do anything at all (paralyze or one of the conditions applied by a nurse), Kill you by getting round those defensive abilities (Impossible/hard to wound don't do anything against massive stacks of dmg coming from the burning condition, or models which ignore your armor), or the models opposing you can get access to abilities that just flat out negate yours, (how good is your Df4 model with Armor 8 and hard to kill against a model that ignores them?).

As someone said above, how good is your low def model with the high armor, hard to kill, and regen going to be when Raspy, or Molly, or anyone else with a paralyze effect targeting Df just keeps you perma paralyzed for most or all of the game?

Also let's not forget that there are multiple models in the game, and commonly used choices because of this, that get ways to get around Hard to Wound, Hard to Kill, Terror, Armor and so on. Yet there is only one model with a specific upgrade that on the reverse side says when I have this ability, you can't ignore it (The Carrion Emissary with Kirai's upgrade in a Kirai crew prevents ca attacks from just ignoring incorporeal within an aura), frankly I'd like to see more abilities that prevent you from just ignoring defensive abilities be prevalent in the game. Conversely, in general there isn't anything in the game that lets you just ignore high a high defensive stat. The closest being models which in an aura give negatives to the defensive stats, and all of those to one degree or another have issues (for good reasons). It's one of the reasons that the some models in this edition got a much needed boost in survivability simply from the inclusion of Impossible to Wound. While the Never can cheat portion of the ability is nice the key thing that helps them survive is that the ability isn't called Hard to Wound and thus there aren't a plethora of ways to just ignore it with your big beaters. Let's not forget how much of a joke Teddy was to kill last edition because hard to wound 2 not only let an opponent fish for a red joker, but like this edition there were commonly taken models that ignored the Hard to Wound ability completely.

To again clarify, I agree that to prevent the game from just being stale it's good there is variety. I agree that models with high defenses shouldn't necessarily be given even more abilities to make them difficult to remove. But I do argue that it is almost NEVER a good thing to have low defense regardless of how many abilities you are given to offset that fact.

[LunarSol]

 

15 minutes ago, Fetid Strumpet said:

 

I wouldn't. For one thing you haven't specified wounds, which could play a big part.

Actually he did, its even in the part you quoted.  

[Redbeard]

42 minutes ago, Fetid Strumpet said:

But I do argue that it is almost NEVER a good thing to have low defense regardless of how many abilities you are given to offset that fact.

You can't qualify an absolute. 'Almost never is not a thing' -- 'rarely' is a thing. I know that might seem like a silly distinction, but you capitalized 'never' to make a point, when what you're really saying is "it is rarely a good thing."

No one is arguing that 4 > 5. What they are saying is that 4 + less quantifiable variables can, in some circumstances, be > 5. And, because you qualified never by saying 'almost', you actually agree.

[Stryder]

Try looking at it another way...

 

What's harder to kill - a December Acolyte or an Illuminated?

 

Now ask yourself...Why?

[santaclaws01]

1 minute ago, Stryder said:

Try looking at it another way...

 

What's harder to kill - a December Acolyte or an Illuminated?

 

Now ask yourself...Why?

A better comparison would be a model with Df 6 to an Illuminated. Acolytes don't have any extra defensive or healing abilities.

[Stryder]

So...you're saying defensive abilities do make a difference?

[santaclaws01]

12 minutes ago, Stryder said:

So...you're saying defensive abilities do make a difference?

I'm saying that to try and make the point that they make enough of a difference of a 1 point change in Df you need to not compare it to another model of the same Df. Also, don't try and act like that was a got'cha with me, I haven't said anything either way about that.

[Stryder]

They have one less wound, too. But compare it to a Guardian if you feel you must. Same applies.

[SpiralngCadavr]

3 hours ago, Fetid Strumpet said:

there are numerous ways to effectively deal with a model that doesn't involve killing them.

+1

a low defensive stat on a high priority model paints a bullseye on it for any ability that very effectively counters that. And high stats are where you get those guaranteed successes with a decent to good hand, rather than just better or worse reliability. Being able to force a tie or win is often all you need, with flat damage, nasty conditions, strong triggers, etc.