Bleeding Disease too strong?

[Nikshe]

1 minute ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

I don't know about that particular matchup, but that is definitely one of my biggest complaints about Malifaux. It can be hard to attract players when they might accidentally pick crews where one person is hard-ish countered by the other, and there's a significant gap right from the get-go. Not everyone has the luxury of having a large collection to pick from.

Well, then these players shouldn't go to tournaments, where Malifaux is a competitive game, with thoughts about victory but should play in clubs or hobby-centers instead and discuss their bands before gaming. They should eventually buy new boxes without crying "I bought one crew and now can't win every matchup!".

"Malifaux" is business. Wyrd has very gentle way to motivate players to buy new boxes. And it is kind of cheap. If you can't handle saving 50 $ every month... well, there are elder players who want to sell disliked bands, there are auctions and sales.

[Maniacal_cackle]

1 hour ago, Nikshe said:

Well, then these players shouldn't go to tournaments, where Malifaux is a competitive game, with thoughts about victory but should play in clubs or hobby-centers instead and discuss their bands before gaming. They should eventually buy new boxes without crying "I bought one crew and now can't win every matchup!".

"Malifaux" is business. Wyrd has very gentle way to motivate players to buy new boxes. And it is kind of cheap. If you can't handle saving 50 $ every month... well, there are elder players who want to sell disliked bands, there are auctions and sales.

It isn't for tournaments that I'm talking about, I'm talking about casual play.

We've got a club of a few hundred people, but they have tons of options for what games to play. Why would someone stick around with Malifaux (and spend the $50 a month) if your first experience with the game is you buy a crew box and just get stomped by what feels like horribly unbalanced matchups (for example Molly vs. Zipp)? There's plenty of other nice games out there.

I spend loads of money on the game and have no trouble keeping up. But retaining more casual players is definitely a struggle for our local community.

[Nikshe]

One more time: in casual gaming people can DISCUSS their bands. Something like "Hey, I'm a new one and only have Zipp, so can you be gentle to me and pick something not an ultimate-contra? - Sure, let's do the Crossroads then".

In your community somebody can be friendly and actually teach new ones about different Masters. May be give them a try of their own bands - just to show how other Master can play, different style. If no one can be that friendly (even Henchman) ... well, it's not a Malifaux problem. It's your community problem indeed.

[RisingPhoenix]

14 hours ago, clockworkspide said:

Only up to a point, though.  If McCabe is by far my favorite master, someone should not be able to auto-win just be plopping the plagued piper on the table.  Forcing me to come at things differently is good, but rendering my preferred master utterly irrelevant before the game even starts is another.

And fortunately there is counterplay!  Don't get lured in.  McCabe is Mv 7, Hamlin is Mv 5.  Hamlin can't exactly walk, walk, charge to make McCabe die, he has to at most do one walk and then lure, because he needs the entire bubble of his crew surrounding McCabe to stack blight that fast and eradicate him.  And he really wants to melee on top of that for the injured.  

In this case, Hamlin was able to Lure, Lure, melee, meaning McCabe was within 12" and line of sight of Hamlin at the end of his move.  That positioning didn't happen during list building.

There's far, far worse pieces of Rock-Paper-Scissors in Malifaux.  M2E was an all-stars game, you took the best models, so there didn't tend to be counters.  With M3E if you don't recognize you're in a counter matchup and pick pieces accordingly, you're going to lose the game in crew construction.  In this case, Lucas could easily have taken fast versatile models (Dawn Serpent, Shadow Emissary, etc.) and focused on winning the strat and schemes.  His netgun is still fantastic (blast off a rat into everything, it'll really irritate Hamlin), he's still ridiculously fast, he still hands out those upgrades.   And Hamlin isn't great at killing 10 wound models (stack 5 blight, double bleeding).  It's that killing a 20 wound model is only slightly harder than killing a 10 wound model (stack 7 blight, triple bleeding).  Do you know how few 20 wound models there are in Malifaux?  Even the entire rest of McCabe's crew is fine.  

 

On the larger counterplay discussion, don't be a dick to casual players.   Don't play things like Lady Justice into Tara, Jack Daw into the Viks, etc.  Warn people when they're walking into a "Negative Play Experience".  In fact, lets expand that.  Tell opponents what your models and your crew does.  Tell them "Hamlin can stack blight quickly and has a lure, so he likes to lure big models in and destroy them."  I bet if the Hamlin player had said that, then McCabe wouldn't have positioned himself in such a way to die (or if he did, well, that's on the player 100%).  Be positive!  Tell them "Hamlin isn't good at ranged, if you can avoid the blight then he can only lure you, but once you're blighted you'll die."  Tell them how Nix and Benny work.  And McCabe, tell your opponents about those fucking upgrades and the damn fast and the damn netgun.  

[Maniacal_cackle]

9 hours ago, Nikshe said:

One more time: in casual gaming people can DISCUSS their bands. Something like "Hey, I'm a new one and only have Zipp, so can you be gentle to me and pick something not an ultimate-contra? - Sure, let's do the Crossroads then".

In your community somebody can be friendly and actually teach new ones about different Masters. May be give them a try of their own bands - just to show how other Master can play, different style. If no one can be that friendly (even Henchman) ... well, it's not a Malifaux problem. It's your community problem indeed.

We tend to start in batches of a bunch of new players at once, and they play each other rather than the experienced players.

So most of the players don't have the option of swapping crews.

As for lending crews, most people prefer to play with their own crew rather than borrow another one. Which ties back to the original complaint (matchups being so lopsided).

So discussing the crews beforehand doesn't really solve that.

[RisingPhoenix]

18 hours ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

We tend to start in batches of a bunch of new players at once, and they play each other rather than the experienced players.

So most of the players don't have the option of swapping crews.

As for lending crews, most people prefer to play with their own crew rather than borrow another one. Which ties back to the original complaint (matchups being so lopsided).

So discussing the crews beforehand doesn't really solve that.

New players also don't understand all of the counterplay options.  Necropunks are amazing models - but if you decide to take their extreme speed and go engage enemy models with them, their value plummets.  As tough as they are, a beater will chew through them fairly quickly.  New players will make rookie mistakes, like not focusing before attacking, making things like Serene Countenance actually really good.  They won't hand manage properly, and there's crews where that could be an absolute disaster.  There's other crews where that's not a big deal. 

As an example, imagine a new player picks up Zipp's crew.  It's an okay box.  But it contains a ton of stones that don't do anything much in combat.  The fact the First Mate got nerfed is going to be very confusing, because he's their only beater (they do just have the crew box).  So they go up against Rasputina's Blessed of December crew box, run up and do some things, and then get utterly deleted from existence. There's an ice golem in there.  Do you know what in Zipp's crew deals with an ice golem?  Well actually everything, they're slow as frozen molasses, but if you decide to go fight the Armor 2 model, you're gonna have a bad day.  

So to be blunt, counterpicks are not the problem.  A new player doesn't know enough about the game to even know if they're in a counter matchup.   They're going to send the First Mate to go fight an Ice Golem and think it's the worse model when it loses.  The only thing that would solve that would be to make the game more generic.  

Note: There's also some fundamental imbalances of playing a 5 round game with 30 soulstones.  Scoring is a limited resource and hands are limited resource.  The result is pretty much that models like Lady Justice get a LOT of cards to work with.  I shudder at the horror that Leveticus' crew box will bring to that sort of format, because Leveticus and Alyce getting the benefit of 3 Scavenger card cycles for better cards and 3 Weird devices is going to promote good play of funneling everything into a few models anyway, and those two beaters are Leveticus and Rusty Alyce.  There's crew boxes that might literally lose half their models by round 2 just from getting within 12" of a Fast Alyce that started her activation with 2 Focus.  

[SoulGambit]

Bleeding Disease requires a huge investment, is intensely telegraphed, and has predictable vectors. Compare: Seamus, who will personally deal about as much damage from his 4/6/8 Damage Gun than Hamelin + Nix + OW will from bleeding disease and can do this in a highly unpredictable way against any target. Kirai can do similar through Ikiryo and her summons.

A good McCabe counters Hamelin, not the other way around. Stick the mirror on McCabe for Life Leech, as well as the Hard to Kill Upgrade. Be careful with positioning. You use McCabe + one other beater to pressure the bubble while the rest of the crew mops up. Samurai are a good choice.