Opinion: crews shouldn't consistently be able to summon 10+ stones in a turn.

[Harlekin]

10 minutes ago, thewrathchilde said:

I don't want any more models or crews setting on the shelf along side Yasunori

To be fair, nobody keeps you from bringing Yasunori. As you said, there are tons of models and options and they all want to see the table even when they might not always be the general UBER model.

As a primary Rezzers player I really was hit hard by the Archie nerf but I absolutely welcome it as he was just boring because he was in almost every pre-nerf Rezzer list I've seen. He is still very good within keyword but only rarely seen OOK. What I get from the other factions the situation is quite similar there. 

 

As I side note, there is one summoning list I really like to play: 
McMourning, Sebastian, Asura (plus random stuff, i.e. Gravedigger).
Turn1: Asura spends 2-3 cards and 2 stones for 4 Mindless Zombies (8 Stones), Sebastian converts the Gravediggers Corpse token to a Canine Remains (3 Stones), And if I really want (to get the lolz) McM converts 2 Zombies and the freshly generated Corpse Token (Gravedigger) into a Flesh Construct (7 Stones).

Summoning for 18 Stones in turn 1 (can usually easily repeat it in turn 3, maybe 2) and I never ever heard any single complain about it  (Mainly because my opponents tend to win versus this list and usually are quite happy to see a totally different McMourning).

The problem is not so much the summoning of 10+Stones but the abuse of non-Leader Kirai in this special case, imho. 
 

[Harlekin]

7 minutes ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

limiting the scope of summoning a bit.

I'd make it "limiting the scope of certain summonings". 

Never heard any complaints about Forgotten Marshal or Sebastians summons (among others). We seem to talk about a very special case here. And afaik Kirai herself isn't this big a problem without being second Master. 

[ooshawn]

I agree, that the game is already balanced(nerfed) enough, painfully so in some cases. Make cheap models worth something, and then summoning will have less value because you don't have to have an elite crew every game. give me a reason to take 2-3 terror tots or 2-33 changlings.

[Maniacal_cackle]

5 minutes ago, Harlekin said:

To be fair, nobody keeps you from bringing Yasunori. As you said, there are tons of models and options and they all want to see the table even when they might not always be the general UBER model.

As a primary Rezzers player I really was hit hard by the Archie nerf but I absolutely welcome it as he was just boring because he was in almost every pre-nerf Rezzer list I've seen. He is still very good within keyword but only rarely seen OOK. What I get from the other factions the situation is quite similar there. 

 

As I side note, there is one summoning list I really like to play: 
McMourning, Sebastian, Asura (plus random stuff, i.e. Gravedigger).
Turn1: Asura spends 2-3 cards and 2 stones for 4 Mindless Zombies (8 Stones), Sebastian converts the Gravediggers Corpse token to a Canine Remains (3 Stones), And if I really want (to get the lolz) McM converts 2 Zombies and the freshly generated Corpse Token (Gravedigger) into a Flesh Construct (7 Stones).

Summoning for 18 Stones in turn 1 (can usually easily repeat it in turn 3, maybe 2) and I never ever heard any single complain about it  (Mainly because my opponents tend to win versus this list and usually are quite happy to see a totally different McMourning).

The problem is not so much the summoning of 10+Stones but the abuse of non-Leader Kirai in this special case, imho. 
 

Is that really consistent, though? I'm counting at least 5 target numbers 😜 (Also, can't count the mindless zombies and flesh constructs twice, so the Flesh Construct is only a 3 stone gain).

I guess I should say efficiently as well. Crews that can just stack tons of models to get the summons going seem fine-ish, but most of what I listed is with 2-3 models.

Reva + McMourning + Toshiro can consistently summon 12 stones a turn, but I would agree it doesn't necessarily seem like an issue because your entire crew is dedicated to generating those resources (since you need 4 corpses a turn, plus a severe, plus a way to remove distracted).

[Maniacal_cackle]

For Dreamer/Zoraida for example, it takes one master action and one henchman action to summon, plus two cards (9+s), but that's backed up by draw 6 if you need it.

That's pretty efficient!

[Maniacal_cackle]

5 minutes ago, ooshawn said:

I agree, that the game is already balanced(nerfed) enough, painfully so in some cases. Make cheap models worth something, and then summoning will have less value because you don't have to have an elite crew every game. give me a reason to take 2-3 terror tots or 2-33 changlings.

Please tell me the 33 is not a typo. I want to see that crew in action xD

[ooshawn]

that's my patented 33 changling crew I was gonna run in the tournament after I got enough practice with nekima

[thewrathchilde]

21 minutes ago, Harlekin said:

To be fair, nobody keeps you from bringing Yasunori. As you said, there are tons of models and options and they all want to see the table even when they might not always be the general UBER model.
 

Yasunori's rules keep me from bringing him.......pre-nerf I didn't play Yansunori in every Thunders list, I probably used him in about 30-40% of my lists. 

I don't always have to use/play/bring the UBER models, most of the time I bounce around master/keyword from game to game and enjoy playing a a wide variety of crews but I still can't bring myself to play something that is that much of a poor return on the investment. I would find myself taking Sybelle OOK in Ressers right now before I would find value in Yasunori in current form. 

[ooshawn]

i think they should just go harder into keywords, make the ook bonus 2 stones, take a stone off the cheapest non summonable minions. really force some uniqueness into each crew. the riders are all too good, and I think we saw enough of just copy/paste lists in second edition. It'd be nice to actually have some variety and crews not function the same, with the same scheme runners etc etc

[thewrathchilde]

2 minutes ago, ooshawn said:

i think they should just go harder into keywords, make the ook bonus 2 stones, take a stone off the cheapest non summonable minions. really force some uniqueness into each crew. the riders are all too good, and

that would be kind of interesting as a broader crew building change- I would probably suggest scaling it so the first OOK model was +1, the second was +2, etc or just limit it to only allowing a certain number of OOK models per crew including versatile models.....maybe something like every 15 SS of crew selection enables you to take 1 OOK or versatile model so that in a standard 50 SS game you could potentially have 3 which could be a combination of OOK or versatile. This in conjunction with scaling costs on them would make the decisions harder. The only down side is there are currently some keywords that really need the OOK and versatile help and until they flush out some of the keywords a little more (which could result in too much bloat as well) they are going to need the help from the versatile and OOK selections. 

2 minutes ago, ooshawn said:

I think we saw enough of just copy/paste lists in second edition. It'd be nice to actually have some variety and crews not function the same, with the same scheme runners etc etc

I do like the variety but although I only played the last year and a half or two years of M2E felt like a lot of the copy/pasta was the result of echo chamber and group think not purely playability or not....

[ooshawn]

naw, by the end of 2nd the game was math problem that had been solved and people took the best models , at least in big tournaments or large large gatherings . unfortunetly some people have no chill : /

[farmoar]

2 hours ago, thewrathchilde said:

that would be kind of interesting as a broader crew building change- I would probably suggest scaling it so the first OOK model was +1, the second was +2, etc or just limit it to only allowing a certain number of OOK models per crew including versatile models.....maybe something like every 15 SS of crew selection enables you to take 1 OOK or versatile model so that in a standard 50 SS game you could potentially have 3 which could be a combination of OOK or versatile. This in conjunction with scaling costs on them would make the decisions harder. The only down side is there are currently some keywords that really need the OOK and versatile help and until they flush out some of the keywords a little more (which could result in too much bloat as well) they are going to need the help from the versatile and OOK selections. 

I do like the variety but although I only played the last year and a half or two years of M2E felt like a lot of the copy/pasta was the result of echo chamber and group think not purely playability or not....

Thank you for bringing up the echo chamber. ive been saying it for a while, but was laughed at for it

[Adran]

9 hours ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

On top of that, even if we had perfect data for all the tournaments played, the data is way too biased. For example in the local scene for my city, the best player will win every tournament regardless of what they're playing.

This is something that I think is a very important point. Not all crews are the same power level all the time, but unless you are very close in level to your opponent its rare that I think the crew is the deciding factor, the player and even the luck generally make more difference to the result from what I have seen. (there is also a scissors/paper/stone effect that can also increase the power of the crew you are facing, but only if you've picked the wrong crew into it)

I'm not sure I fully agree with the original premise. Summoning is an ability that I think has always looked worse when you face it than it really is. Its certainly a strong concept. But it is easy to get mislead by it, people talking about summoning 10 stones worth of models each turn is true in once sense, but not true in another. For instance in the second turn you are summoning 4/5 of the effectiveness of a hired model, since it only has that much of its actions/time on the board.

It also can greatly be effected by the game type being played. Summoners are generally good in attrition and action intensive games. But they aren't so good if your opponent gets points for killing your models, because what you are then doing is just providing them with more easy stuff to kill. 

Almost the biggest problem is the consistency of it. draw a severe and you know you can get a good model summoned. Give that severe to a beater master and they might do more damage with it, but it depends on more circumstances ( Doing more damage probably means its either triggered an extra attack or its on a model that is able to do area damage in some way and can hit multiple models with it)

 

 

 

 

 

[Maniacal_cackle]

4 minutes ago, Adran said:

This is something that I think is a very important point. Not all crews are the same power level all the time, but unless you are very close in level to your opponent its rare that I think the crew is the deciding factor, the player and even the luck generally make more difference to the result from what I have seen. (there is also a scissors/paper/stone effect that can also increase the power of the crew you are facing, but only if you've picked the wrong crew into it)

I'm not sure I fully agree with the original premise. Summoning is an ability that I think has always looked worse when you face it than it really is. Its certainly a strong concept. But it is easy to get mislead by it, people talking about summoning 10 stones worth of models each turn is true in once sense, but not true in another. For instance in the second turn you are summoning 4/5 of the effectiveness of a hired model, since it only has that much of its actions/time on the board.

It also can greatly be effected by the game type being played. Summoners are generally good in attrition and action intensive games. But they aren't so good if your opponent gets points for killing your models, because what you are then doing is just providing them with more easy stuff to kill. 

Almost the biggest problem is the consistency of it. draw a severe and you know you can get a good model summoned. Give that severe to a beater master and they might do more damage with it, but it depends on more circumstances ( Doing more damage probably means its either triggered an extra attack or its on a model that is able to do area damage in some way and can hit multiple models with it)

I agree with you consistency is key, and the 'problems' are the crews that can do it consistently.

I don't know if I agree with your argument about summoning being weaker in later turns so it works out.

Yes, that is true, but the problem with the 10+ stone crews is exactly that they can do it all early game. Summoning 20-30 stones turns one and 2 and doing no more summoning is viable with a mega summon crew. Whereas a crew summoning 6-8 stones a turn is looking at getting that value way later in the game where it won't have an impact.

Spreading the impact of summoning over the course of a game is exactly what makes it so balanced despite appearing powerful. When you can get that power all front loaded in turn one (and possibly a bit of turn two), that balance aspect of summoning goes out the window.

[Maniacal_cackle]

Oh, also, worth noting that often your turn one for models is moving up the board, and for example Kirai summoning stuff can put it 16" up the board turn one (because of Rider).

So in some cases, summons actually get more AP than hires when you include how far up the board they can start.

Again, for regular summoner crews I think this effect quickly drops off and isn't too noticeable. But it can get pretty bonkers with the front loading strategy I detail above.

[thewrathchilde]

1 hour ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

Yes, that is true, but the problem with the 10+ stone crews is exactly that they can do it all early game. Summoning 20-30 stones turns one and 2 and doing no more summoning is viable with a mega summon crew. 

Who is summoning 20-30 stones turns one and two?

 

That just doesn’t seem remotely realistic in any normal game I have seen or played that a player is summoning 40-60 stones worth of models in the first two turns....

 

 

[Adran]

1 hour ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

Oh, also, worth noting that often your turn one for models is moving up the board, and for example Kirai summoning stuff can put it 16" up the board turn one (because of Rider).

So in some cases, summons actually get more AP than hires when you include how far up the board they can start.

This is true, but its hiding the cost of extra actions already spent to let you do it. If I walk Kirai and then summon 6" forward the model is "more effective" than if I had hired it in my deployment zone, except you are missing 2 master actions and the summon card to get there. 

20 minutes ago, thewrathchilde said:

Who is summoning 20-30 stones turns one and two?

 

That just doesn’t seem remotely realistic in any normal game I have seen or played that a player is summoning 40-60 stones worth of models in the first two turns....

 

 

I think he means people are summoning 10-15 stones in turn 1 and then again in turn 2, ending up with 20-30 extra stones worth summoned over 2 turns

[Harlekin]

24 minutes ago, thewrathchilde said:

Who is summoning 20-30 stones turns one and two?

 

That just doesn’t seem remotely realistic in any normal game I have seen or played that a player is summoning 40-60 stones worth of models in the first two turns....

 

 

For numbers only, I can rather easily do it with my Rotten Meatball McM Crew: 

Turn1: Asura spends 2-3 cards and 2 stones for 4 Mindless Zombies (8 Stones), Sebastian converts the Gravediggers Corpse token to a Canine Remains (3 Stones), And if I really want (to get the lolz) McM converts Gravediggers' Corpse Tokens (Gravediggers) into a Flesh Construct (7 Stones) => 18 Stones summonend
Turn 2: 2 Gravediggers drop another 2 Corpses. 1 Corpse + 2 remaining Mindless Zombie become another Flesh Construct (+3 Stones). Sebastian converts another Corpse into Canine Remain (3 Stones). Asura summons 4 Mindless Zombies (8 Stones) => 14 Stones summonend

=> 32 Stones summonend in T1+T2 

If I add Toshiro I might even be able to add another +2 net Stones per turn. 

Not that it does me much good. But I can do it 😁

[Maniacal_cackle]

Yes, I meant total, not per turn.

Although Harlekin provides a good example of why it isn't always a bad thing.

I do think it'd be nice if summoning was more keyword focused (Sybelle should summon Belles on distracted targets for example).

7 hours ago, Adran said:

This is true, but its hiding the cost of extra actions already spent to let you do it. If I walk Kirai and then summon 6" forward the model is "more effective" than if I had hired it in my deployment zone, except you are missing 2 master actions and the summon card to get there. 

Well, most masters spend turn one doing at least one action anyway.

The cards certainly matter, but they matter less turn one (except against specific crews). Which was one of my original worries. It requires such niche things to beat them (more so than most other crews or regular summon crews).

Although note all this is opinion/personal preference. I don't think there is an ironclad 'these clearly need a nerf' yet. Looking forward to the double masters vassal series!

[Regelridderen]

I’ve alway wondered why enforcer/henchman summoners aren’t limited in their summoning - beyond ordinairy model availability - whereas masters are limited to 5.

[Maniacal_cackle]

3 minutes ago, Regelridderen said:

I’ve alway wondered why enforcer/henchman summoners aren’t limited in their summoning - beyond ordinairy model availability - whereas masters are limited to 5.

Well, typically enforcers and henchman are limited to one specific model with plentiful 3, so the limit kicks in naturally. But yes, it is a bit weird! Not to mention the lack of a summoning upgrade overall.

That's my biggest gripe with enforcer/henchman summoning - the lack of upgrades! It isn't even a balance concern, just a consistency one xD

Although Forgotten Marshal does hand out upgrades for whatever reason?

[Harlekin]

IIRC most Henchmen/Enforcer summons come with circumstances which have to be met (like killing a model with a trigger) and the models summoned usually arrive with Slow while the summons with Upgrades don't require this setup. 

Compare McM's summons with Kirai summons for example. Kirai just does it like this while McM needs this exact situation.

I don't see any lack of consistency but quite obvious game design decision based on balancing. 

[Maniacal_cackle]

3 minutes ago, Harlekin said:

I don't see any lack of consistency but quite obvious game design decision based on balancing. 

The consistency issue is some things reference models with summon upgrades (like the exorcism trigger), but you can't use it against most henchman/enforcer summons xD

[thewrathchilde]

12 hours ago, Harlekin said:

For numbers only, I can rather easily do it with my Rotten Meatball McM Crew: 

Turn1: Asura spends 2-3 cards and 2 stones for 4 Mindless Zombies (8 Stones), Sebastian converts the Gravediggers Corpse token to a Canine Remains (3 Stones), And if I really want (to get the lolz) McM converts Gravediggers' Corpse Tokens (Gravediggers) into a Flesh Construct (7 Stones) => 18 Stones summonend
Turn 2: 2 Gravediggers drop another 2 Corpses. 1 Corpse + 2 remaining Mindless Zombie become another Flesh Construct (+3 Stones). Sebastian converts another Corpse into Canine Remain (3 Stones). Asura summons 4 Mindless Zombies (8 Stones) => 14 Stones summonend

=> 32 Stones summonend in T1+T2 

If I add Toshiro I might even be able to add another +2 net Stones per turn. 

Not that it does me much good. But I can do it 😁

and that is the point.....it might be possible to do it (summon 30+) though I am not sure the math above works as you count the stone cost of the zombies, the Canine Remains, and the Flesh Construct through when once you convert 3 x mindless zombies into the Flesh Construct you aren't getting a net gain of 8 for the Zombies + 7 for the Construct because you are then sacrificing the 6 x stones for the zombies into the Flesh Construct. At the end of all the actions you ended up with a gain of 12 SS worth of models (2 Mindless Zombie + 1 Canine Remains +1 Flesh Construct - 2 SS) and then on the second turn 14 stones worth as you mentioned for a total of 26 total. I might have missed something in the math but that's my count...

in either case whether it is 26 or 32 you are also spending 28 SS + cards in design + 4 SS for Asura to use (and maybe more if Sebastian is having to Stone for the Crow) so a minimum investment of 32 stones and 66% of your hand every turn to really not gain anything of value except for the Flesh Constructs and using up a significant amount of the limited number of actions  a crew has to not gain any benefit in the game for scoring, limiting your opponent, etc. This is also discounts what your opponent is accomplishing during the same period with the resources they have which they are most likely using much more effectively.

 

I think you know this and agree based on your "Not that it does me much good. But I can do it." line above and this is completely different from what Maniacal_cacke was implying which was that the summoning was too powerful and leading to such an advantage over the other player that is was unbalanced....this is one of those engines that does a whole lot of stuff but isn't really accomplishing anything.

[thewrathchilde]

I really didn't/don't want to turn this into an argument over semantics......like I said on the previous page I just want to caution against overreactions that lead Wyrd to have  perception there is a problem where there isn't and make changes as a result. 

With very few exceptions I just don't think the game has had enough play time to really determine what is or is not a problem. I was even against the changes to Shenlong's upgrades or pretty much any of the other changes so far as I just don't think they were needed- people just hadn't had or taken the time to develop the play counters.