Hoffman issues

[Kiryn]

Played against Hoffman a couple of times, in guild but it doesn't matter overly either way, and I just can't see what neverborn have that get through all that armour 2 and / or out attrition them.

Note that I do have dreamer but don't overly like playing him.

I think probably the most luck I've had is with titania but I just wondered if anyone had any special sauce for the stompy bots?

Considering a Marcus poison list next time too.

[Regelridderen]

Ping damage, such as poison or Misery or shockwaves is great against armor. Lucius can call upon Agent 46 to Analyze Weakness, Severe6 damage puts a nice dent in armour Mature Nephilim bring that along with Execute triggers. And those constructs suffer from low Wp, so Terrifying and Wp attacks work wonders. 

[Math Mathonwy]

Zoraida can also be used to avoid direct engagement and just control the game while scoring if the strat and schemes support such a playstyle.

[Adran]

I'm going to start back at basics -

Step 1 The game isn't won by killing. If you don't need to kill a model then you are potentially wasting resources when you do so. Look at the problems the game creates for you in its combinations of what you need to do to score, what your opponent is doing to stop it and how you can stop your opponent scoring. Killing can be an awser to soem of the problems, but its not the only answer. 

But assuming that you've decided that you do need to do some killing

Step 2 Armour is no good against 1 damage hits. It oinly reduces to a minimum of 1, so every time you only deal 1 damage you have stopped the armour doing anything.  Lots of 1 damage hits will kill armoured models as quickly if not quicker as unarmoured models (most armoured models are on the lower average of wounds per soulstone).

Step 3 Armour is less good against big hits. If you have Armour +2 and 8 wounds, that would take 8 hits at 3 damage, but only 4 hits at 4 damage, and 2 hits at 6 damage to kill. The easiest way to get the bigger hits is to use models with a high severe and use Focus to let you cheat that hit. You will need to save resources top do this, btu over all its probably less resources than you would need to hit multiple times to have done the same amount of damage. 

Step 4 Damaged models are just as good as undamaged models at everything they do. There is very little point putting every model in their crew down to 1 wound and leaving them there, it will have minimal impact on what the crew can achieve. Once you start trying to kill something, you are generally best keeping at it until it is dead. 

 

You can look for some of these things in hiring. Black blood is a reasonable source of ping damage, and Nephlim can have quite High severe damage so they are certainly worth looking at as a way to kill armoured models. Poison, Burning and Hazardous can all do ping damage. Misery can do ping damage. Doppleganager is able to have a minimum 3 stat 7 ignoring attack if you set it up right. Hinamatsu has an armour ignoring trigger, or the ability to attack 6 times in a turn (8 if you can get her fast). Dreamer and Chompy both can Ignore Armour. 

There isn't 1 special answer, but I believe all crews can bring in answers that will help. 

[Corwin]

My only game vs Hoffman so far I was playing Marcus and brought Angel Eyes, Hinamatsu, and the Beast Within. That with a good amount of stones i could eat through high armor low wound models fairly easy.

[Kiryn]

Cheers guys, all things I've tried to be honest and it's mostly in a turf war pool with other kill schemes that it's a problem. 

I think I will try a poison Marcus build next time as they have the ability to play around the Hoffman crew and also cause some issue if they get in to a fight. Also with the right upgrades on the right models they can go towards meeting the attrition.

[Maladroit]

As Adran said, focus on scoring, but also be aware that the armour two is only part of the problem. Hoff has one of the best heals in the game and does a decent job of condition removal too. If you think about an armour 2 model you've spent resources hitting for a severe 5 damage - probably focus, cheating to win the duel and probably a severe cheat on the damage - Hoffman just heals a construct for 3 on a relented duel and you're back to square one. (It is so good I've had at least three opponents ask to look at his card to confirm). But to do this he needs to be close to his crew and he can't heal himself. So a big part of killing Hoff models is to get them to spread out away from the bubble and then pick them off, anything near Hoffman is incredibly resilient. 

Edited October 16, 2021 by Maladroit
Stoopid autocorrect

[Kiryn]

3 hours ago, Maladroit said:

As Adran said, focus on scoring, but also be aware that the armour two is only part of the problem. Hoff has one of the best heals in the game and does a decent job of condition removal too. If you think about an armour 2 model you've spent resources hitting for a severe 5 damage - probably focus, cheating to win the duel and probably a severe cheat on the damage - Hoffman just heals a construct for 3 on a relented duel and you're back to square one. (It is so good I've had at least three opponents ask to look at his card to confirm). But to do this he needs to be close to his crew and he can't heal himself. So a big part of killing Hoff models is to get them to spread out away from the bubble and then pick them off, anything near Hoffman is incredibly resilient. 

And that's without a heal from the two med bots either, with one of them being 3 stones but def 6 and armour 1 because why not. In the game I played recently Howard was on 2 wounds and then back to 9 by the top of the next turn. Very oppressive. 

I think I'll look towards Marcus or get dreamer out again if I think I'm going to see Hoffman. Can either play round them with Marcus or gum him up with summons with dreamer. A well placed insidious scatter could do a good job in starting to break the ball apart.