To Flurry With a Peacekeeper?

[Bazlord_Prime]

The Peacekeeper is the first model I've used that's had Flurry, and that's just been within the confines of our current Shifting Loyalties campaign.

I've used her (why not, right?) Flurry ability 4 times now, in 2 games, and just through sheer bad luck, absolutely whiffed 11 of those 12 attacks. Either I would flip the Black Joker, or my opponent would flip the Red Joker. Or, I just didn't have a high enough card to cheat over my opponent's unnaturally high flip. 

So my question is this: do you experienced Flurryistas reckon it's worth using this ability, or do you find Focusing for one attack to be a better prospect? 

I can't get around bad luck with Jokers, of course, but am I being too cagey about cheating in high cards to win the duel? (Edit: Actually, I don't think I ever really had cards high enough in hand...).

The other aspect is that Flurry is 3 attacks against 1 target, and with the kind of damage the Peacekeeper can do, it doesn't make much sense for her to be just engaging weaker, low Df targets, looking to one-shot them, right?

[Myyrä]

Get for the attacks from Promises or Hoffman Emissary.

[4thstringer]

What are you saving your high cards for if not min damage 4 attacks?  

[hydranixx]

If you focus you could still just as easily lose the flip if the opponent flips a high or cheats high to avoid the attack or even just to equal your total (and deny you the straight damage flip anyway), and then you've spent both AP.

If you Flurry you have to lose 3 duels to do nothing. That's a lot of duels to lose, and despite your apparent bad luck, you should be winning at least some of them. I know jokers can suck, but if the worst case occurs and your peacekeeper draw black jokers out of your deck and red jokers out of theirs every activation, well that's still only 1-2 of your 3 attacks accounted for, and now both decks are devoid of the jokers you don't want to see. 

Also if you do Flurry (especially if you're getting +s from somewhere) you're seeing more cards overall so you have more chances of randomly hitting a ram. 

[Antipodean]

Flurry is amazing. You might one shot something, but when you need something dead 3 attacks is the ticket.  Might miss, opponent might cheat, hard to wound/kill etc. etc. can be worked around when you hit something 3 times with this model. No such things as overkill in some cases.

Sounds like you have just had a bad run of luck.

[HydroMog]

flurry is a great option, barring bad luck, you should be doing good-great dmg to a model. by itself you can usually kill a model with the 3 attacks. if you find yourself having trouble hitting with flurry then make sure you have some sort of buff to hit such as from hoffman emissary. 

[Ludvig]

The beauty of flurry is that even if you black the first attack and they red the second attack you still have the third to cheat in that 13 of rams and do min damage 5 or 6. Focusing make jokers hurt you even more so I wouldn't do that. 

It is usually a great way to make he enemy go "oh shit, I'm dead anyway so I'll just not cheat against this and save my hand" or if their model is a t full wounds but couls potentially die they might feel obligated to cheat like crazy to beat you.

A flurry under the effects of promises is just sick and most opponents will resign their model to death. The peacekeeper should not hunt low ss models (at least not with flurries). It s buildfor brawling with other super hard beaters.

[Bazlord_Prime]

On 14/09/2017 at 10:04 AM, Myyrä said:

Get for the attacks from Promises or Hoffman Emissary.

Thanks for that post, @Myyrä - I didn't even know about "Promises" (I've never played/played against McCabe)! That should work quite well in the campaign, since I was already considering Queeg, leading to Lucius as my Master.

Actually, Promises will be super-ugly within the Campaign, since all Skills, Equipment and Injuries are considered upgrades...

[Bazlord_Prime]

On 14/09/2017 at 10:23 AM, 4thstringer said:

What are you saving your high cards for if not min damage 4 attacks?  

Ahhh... You've got to HAVE high cards in order to save them, my friend! 

As it's the campaign, and my Campaign Rating has been pretty high, my last two games I've only taken 1 Soulstone. Total (ran last game with zero). 

It's actually worked really well for me, somehow - but it meant I never stoned for higher cards, and just had to lump it with whatever Fate provided 

[Bazlord_Prime]

On 14/09/2017 at 11:16 AM, hydranixx said:

If you focus you could still just as easily lose the flip if the opponent flips a high or cheats high to avoid the attack or even just to equal your total (and deny you the straight damage flip anyway), and then you've spent both AP.

If you Flurry you have to lose 3 duels to do nothing. That's a lot of duels to lose, and despite your apparent bad luck, 

Of course, you're right - I was really just venting my ire at the compressed amount of bad luck I've been having with it.

On reflection though, my choice of targets may not have been optimal. One was a Lone Marshal, who was able to just push away during his Activation ("Trick Shooting"), and the second was a Nurse, with Df 6. As @Ludvig said, targeting an equivalent brawler is probably more helpful, as there's plenty of those that have Df 4, making the Attack flips that much easier despite what your hand looks like.

[PanzerHarris]

I speak from bitter experience of having way too much similar card luck. My decks are renowned for going 'oh no you don't!' to me at crucial moments.

For that reason I will always Flurry given half a chance. Hoffman or McCabe will make Lord Stompy Bits (that's what I named mine!) Nimble for that reason. If I can make him Fast, then I'm very happy to harpoon my target first, drag it in and THEN Flurry.

Don't underestimate the psychological effects of knowing you get 3 strikes with something that hits as hard as the Peacekeeper. I frequently have opponents refuse to throw in severe cards on the first couple of hits on the basis that there's many more to come, so moderates may well be enough.

And don't forget the immutable laws of attacking a low Wound model with Flurry. Yes, you could kill it in one shot. And if you Flurry it will die first shot. If you don't Flurry, it'll survive the two normal attacks and you'll feel really rather stupid...

[doubledragon]

On 9/15/2017 at 11:44 AM, PanzerHarris said:

And don't forget the immutable laws of attacking a low Wound model with Flurry. Yes, you could kill it in one shot. And if you Flurry it will die first shot. If you don't Flurry, it'll survive the two normal attacks and you'll feel really rather stupid...

Exactly right.

[Adran]

On 13/09/2017 at 10:34 PM, Bazlord_Prime said:

The Peacekeeper is the first model I've used that's had Flurry, and that's just been within the confines of our current Shifting Loyalties campaign.

I've used her (why not, right?) Flurry ability 4 times now, in 2 games, and just through sheer bad luck, absolutely whiffed 11 of those 12 attacks. Either I would flip the Black Joker, or my opponent would flip the Red Joker. Or, I just didn't have a high enough card to cheat over my opponent's unnaturally high flip. 

So my question is this: do you experienced Flurryistas reckon it's worth using this ability, or do you find Focusing for one attack to be a better prospect? 

I can't get around bad luck with Jokers, of course, but am I being too cagey about cheating in high cards to win the duel? (Edit: Actually, I don't think I ever really had cards high enough in hand...).

The other aspect is that Flurry is 3 attacks against 1 target, and with the kind of damage the Peacekeeper can do, it doesn't make much sense for her to be just engaging weaker, low Df targets, looking to one-shot them, right?

On the plus side if you hadn't flurried you'd have missed 7 out of 8 attacks and still had those 4 other failed duels to get through at somepoint during the turns. 

Focusing is probably not the right choice over flurry, because you are flipping 2 cards vs flipping 3 cards.So you would have done even worse as you'd have only made 4 attacks in the time you made 12, and used fewer bad cards from your deck. 

[Myyrä]

15 hours ago, Adran said:

On the plus side if you hadn't flurried you'd have missed 7 out of 8 attacks and still had those 4 other failed duels to get through at somepoint during the turns. 

Focusing is probably not the right choice over flurry, because you are flipping 2 cards vs flipping 3 cards.So you would have done even worse as you'd have only made 4 attacks in the time you made 12, and used fewer bad cards from your deck. 

Focusing is almost never the right answer. If you don't know when it is, it's safer to just not use it at all (and target being in cover isn't automatically a right answer).

[Gnomezilla]

8 hours ago, Myyrä said:

Focusing is almost never the right answer. If you don't know when it is, it's safer to just not use it at all (and target being in cover isn't automatically a right answer).

...? 

Not with a peacekeeper, no. But I was still operating on the principle that 'eliminating a negative flip was one of the most important things you could do in Malifaux' and too often, I have to spend an AP to assure that on a particular damage flip* (again, not the peacekeeper's). Assuming that I want to on the damage and that I haven't brought a beloved toolkit, of course.

 

*The last few weeks I have been trying the new GG2018 strategy which encourages fishing for severe damage, though, and this has boosted the importance of damage flips, when a severe from a terrible damage track is worth more VP than a weak hit from a heavy hitter.

[Myyrä]

Eliminating negatives is usually bad business unless you really want to cheat.

[Ludvig]

13 hours ago, Myyrä said:

Focusing is almost never the right answer. If you don't know when it is, it's safer to just not use it at all (and target being in cover isn't automatically a right answer).

Don't suppose you'd care to elaborate in another thread? I'm not sure there's a good focus guide handy so a general discussion would be welcome.

I usually focus if I want to cheat in the red joker for damage or need a moderate to guarantee a kill which a single weak would not. I agree that focusing means you're prepared to cheat high on the duel.

I used to focus austringers often...

[4thstringer]

4 hours ago, Myyrä said:

Eliminating negatives is usually bad business unless you really want to cheat.

Are you talking about on the damage, or always?  If an attack is on negatives, I've pretty much assumed it is going to fail when I make it.  That doesn't mean it's not worth making, but its a great way to watch a severe from my deck do nothing for me. 

[Bazlord_Prime]

Sounds like some of us would benefit from the mathematics being broken down on this one. I'm not the man to do that, sadly...

I'd say though, that if I had a regular model that'd been Swilled (or similar), and so was on  to my Attacks, but i felt I had to attack, I'd be more tempted to make 1*Focused flip where I knew I could cheat, than 2*negative flips, where I'd suspect I'd flip a face card plus a low something, and have no choice which to take.

I'd also expect that the Focused route at least bears the possibility of inducing the opponent to cheat, which the 2* case is unlikely to do.

Then again, maybe in that situation it's just better to try and do 2AP worth of non-flip actions if possible, like moving & putting down Schemes...

[Ludvig]

5 hours ago, 4thstringer said:

Are you talking about on the damage, or always?  If an attack is on negatives, I've pretty much assumed it is going to fail when I make it.  That doesn't mean it's not worth making, but its a great way to watch a severe from my deck do nothing for me. 

No idea on the math here but I've taken potshots into cover and hit people. There's a healthy chance they'll flip below you and need to cheat so if your hand is crap or none of you has a hand left I could see how shooting twice would be nice. I'm sure deck counting helps this decision but I have never bothered to do that.

[Ludvig]

If you know you have one joker but not the other left in the deck, two shots into cover can also be made to draw that one out.

[Myyrä]

7 hours ago, 4thstringer said:

Are you talking about on the damage, or always?  If an attack is on negatives, I've pretty much assumed it is going to fail when I make it.  That doesn't mean it's not worth making, but its a great way to watch a severe from my deck do nothing for me. 

More or less always. It isn't awfully difficult to verify this with some napkin mathematics.

Let us assume a model with attack stat 5 and 1/2/3 damage track and a defending model with Df 5 and no defensive abilities. The ratio of weak to moderate damage is 1:2 which is pretty big. Let the defending model be hiding in soft cover (which is the most favourable situation for focus).

If we go ahead and attack with focus we have roughly 1/2 chance of hitting the target and we'll most likely be on a straight flip for damage. If we assume no jokers, the expected value of damage becomes 1/2*1,84 = 0.92

If we just go ahead and shoot without focusing we have roughly 1/3 change of hitting the target, because there is 1/3 chance that the opponent's flipped card is the lowest one when we flip 3 cards. The damage flip is weak on probability 1-(8/13)^2=0.62 and we'll just assume it's moderate otherwise. That would bring the expected damage to 2*1/3*1.38 = 0.92. The assumptions we made, actually favor the focus case, so the expected damage is higher when not using focus.

Just shooting twice is at least as good in this case when you just look at the expected value and our assumptions definitely favored focusing. If the attacker's damage track were 1/3/4, it might make sense to focus against soft cover, but definitely not hard. It's not difficult to see how the situation changes when the damage track becomes 2/4/6 (it's identical to the example above except the expected values just double), and when you increase the weak damage from there or decrease the moderate or severe you just end up favoring attacking twice even more.

You can also easily estimate how armor, incorporeal or hard to wound affect the situation. Hard to wound reduces the chances of the higher damages, so it favors not focusing. Armor and incorporeal are bit more tricky, and you need to look at what they do to the weak:moderate ratio. If they increase it, they favor not focusing, and if they decrease it, they favor focusing more, but usually not enough.

Changing the attack and defense stats make the mathematics more complicated, but surprisingly they don't affect the ratios of expected damage with and without focus that much.

So basically, it all comes down to cheating. When should you focus so that you can cheat? I have a heuristic decision rule that I like to use: if cheating in a moderate card won't give you at least two more damage or prevent two damage to your model, don't cheat. It has served me quite well as a rule of thumb, and there is some reasoning behind it, but I won't go too much into detail here. In our example case above, there is no way to get 2 more damage by cheating in a moderate card regardless of whether one focuses or not, so let's assume the damage track is 2/4/6. As we remember, the expected values of focusing and not focusing were more or less equal in this case, so I could consider focusing and cheating all the weak damages up, but I would be giving up some damage (because the assumptions we made favored focus) and only get that 2 extra damage for my moderate card, so it's somewhat questionable if it is worth it. 2/4/6 is also a McTavish level damage track that most models simply do not have access to, making focusing is an even worse idea.

All in all, you should only focus if there is extremely much value to be gained from cheating the damage flip, be it because of blasts, the enemy model dying or big numerical difference between weak and moderate or severe. Oh, and if you suspect you might have better use for cards later that turn, you might want to save them instead of constructing a situation where you can cheat them in for shitty gains.

[Myyrä]

Oh, and BTW, the conclusion you should draw from the above post is not that you should attack with . The conclusion that you should draw is that attacking models when you have a is a terrible idea and using focus makes the situation even worse.

[Ludvig]

20 minutes ago, Myyrä said:

Oh, and BTW, the conclusion you should draw from the above post is not that you should attack with . The conclusion that you should draw is that attacking models when you have a is a terrible idea and using focus makes the situation even worse.

I think the more meaningful situation to compare is that you're deep into shit creek and need to kill a model that you can only attack with negatives on your last activation for the turn. Do you focus once or hit at negatives twice. You could also be attacking specific models like Yin or Francisco/Cassandra with their aura up.

Saying "don't put yourself in a position where you need to focus" isn't helpful to the actual choice of focusing or attacking at negatives.  I agree that it's sound advice for playing the game but it's a different sort of tactical question.

[Myyrä]

4 minutes ago, Ludvig said:

I think the more meaningful situation to compare is that you're deep into shit creek and need to kill a model that you can only attack with negatives on your last activation for the turn. Do you focus once or hit at negatives twice. You could also be attacking specific models like Yin or Francisco/Cassandra with their aura up.

Saying "don't put yourself in a position where you need to focus" isn't helpful to the actual choice of focusing or attacking at negatives, that's a different sort of tactical question.

I wouldn't say it isn't completely unhelpful. It's useful to know how useless attacking things hiding in cover is. That way you might realize that you should just shoot at the lower value target out in the open. Obviously shooting at something in cover is still better than doing nothing, but often there is also the alternative of dropping a scheme marker or taking defensive stance or something.

Knowing how difficult killing targets in cover is also helps you remember to position your models so that you can get those cover bonuses or position your shooters so that the opponent won't have cover.