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Errata 2022 - Outcast


50 SS Enforcer

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14 hours ago, Azahul said:

If I were to add anything to Aionus I think it would be a defensive rule. Any defensive rule. I personally find his support functions in Obliteration invaluable for 10 stones (at least in Tara1, Tara2 doesn't need him so much), but it is pretty wild that he's a 10 stone model with neither damage nor anything to keep him alive beyond good stats. But it wouldn't need to be much, and with the option to Bury Aionus whenever he's in danger I haven't really run into a situation where he dies before scoring some points. 

I 100% agree with this. As is, Aionus is often hiding somewhere in the back cause if he peeks out he gets blastered pronto. This means that half of his really cool abilities don't see use (Time is a Flat circle is the big one, but even Buffering or A Stitch in Time are impacted when facing heavy ranged crews). I'd love for him to have Hard to Wound or Demise Eternal (and drop to 8wounds) or something.

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I'm usually pretty good at keeping Aionus safe but yeah, you aren't wrong that I basically never use his auras.

 

That said buffing Aionus isn't anywhere near my top ten most wanted fixes in the faction... Stuff like moving Bounty Hunter off of the "Minion only" clause for Soldier for Hire, making Winged Plagues playable, giving Protection Money to Parker1, making Convict Gunslingers Cost 7, changing Drop It so that the Bandit player places the marker, etc.

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Oh sure, it's not making my top 10 either, especially since Tara 2 is more than playable as is (funny how none of my lists with her include him though). 

It would be nice to tweak him at some point.  Defensive tech would be good, but I think he needs more punch in some way.  People say he's a 10 stone tax to play Tara, but... is he?  He's made out of tissue paper, his offense is horrible, if your opponent wants him off the table they can remove him.  Tara 1 gets activation control anyway, and if she truly needs a 10 stone tax to be good she's just not good - Tara 2 has no such issue, believe me.  Thirty-Three is pretty core to her kit but no one is calling him a tax.

Winged Plague... I dunno.  Make them spawn a rat on death or make them cost 3 would both help.  I'd probably pick cost 3.  At that cost you could try to do Breakthrough or something with them, although you're still probably just better off bringing a bigger more survivable model. 

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29 minutes ago, RisingPhoenix said:

Oh sure, it's not making my top 10 either, especially since Tara 2 is more than playable as is (funny how none of my lists with her include him though). 

It would be nice to tweak him at some point.  Defensive tech would be good, but I think he needs more punch in some way.  People say he's a 10 stone tax to play Tara, but... is he?  He's made out of tissue paper, his offense is horrible, if your opponent wants him off the table they can remove him.  Tara 1 gets activation control anyway, and if she truly needs a 10 stone tax to be good she's just not good - Tara 2 has no such issue, believe me.  Thirty-Three is pretty core to her kit but no one is calling him a tax.

Winged Plague... I dunno.  Make them spawn a rat on death or make them cost 3 would both help.  I'd probably pick cost 3.  At that cost you could try to do Breakthrough or something with them, although you're still probably just better off bringing a bigger more survivable model. 

You're calling him a 10 stone tax like he isn't generating 10 stones of value without being a tank/beater. My experienceis that Aionus is quite easy to keep safe, and that as long as he is alive he makes scoring a lot easier. That's not a tax, that's paying 10 stones to win games.

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1 hour ago, Azahul said:

You're calling him a 10 stone tax like he isn't generating 10 stones of value without being a tank/beater. My experienceis that Aionus is quite easy to keep safe, and that as long as he is alive he makes scoring a lot easier. That's not a tax, that's paying 10 stones to win games.

Well if he's winning you games, more power.  My experience has been that it's just 10 stones worth of power gone from an already fairly fragile crew if he spends all game hiding in deployment behind terrain.  With summons now being near-useless for scoring, I think it's fairly easy to just kill everything that would score and let Aionus/Scion/Talos hang out wondering what they're doing with their lives. 

Granted you need some experience playing against the crew to realize that's the right move.

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Tara is almost always going to be the most mobile crew on the table. My own experience says that your opponent usually only gets to kill the models you're ok letting them kill, and Aionus by no means spends the game in the deployment zone. He'll usually head down one flank when I play, and Tara herself generally takes another. Your opponent may recognise that the best strategy would be to kill one of these 10+ health soulstone users, but whether they are able to do so after running half the table length only to see the target vanish and reappear on the opposite table edge is another.

 

Seeing as most buried models in Tara unbury base to base with enemy models, I've always considered Tara's summons useless for scoring anyway. Their job for me has been to tie down enemy models and keep them from doing anything more than play whackamole, and maybe even burn out the opponent's hand with a bunch of Glimpse the Void checks if I get lucky on my attack flips. 

 

But it's all sort of immaterial. Tara is the best performing Keyword in Outcasts competitively apparently, so we probably won't be seeing buffs there.

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Okay, I went and found these vaunted stats for Tara's "best performance" and she was played in two games.  Two. 

That is 100% irrelevant.  Like it literally does not matter what the outcome of those two games were, that data is completely irrelevant.  If you try to use it for anything for any purpose you are wrong.  The only thing the data says is people don't play Tara much. 

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8 minutes ago, RisingPhoenix said:

Okay, I went and found these vaunted stats for Tara's "best performance" and she was played in two games.  Two. 

That is 100% irrelevant.  Like it literally does not matter what the outcome of those two games were, that data is completely irrelevant.  If you try to use it for anything for any purpose you are wrong.  The only thing the data says is people don't play Tara much. 

You have it set to a single event.  If you change it to all, the number jumps to 37 with a 51% win rate, putting her at the 14th best performing master spot for the 2020-2021 World Series.

EDIT: Although of course you have to take winrates with grains of salt (a lot of the games are not at the top table level), but if you also look at the performance of someone like Axelst using Tara, you see a ton of power there.

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14 minutes ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

You have it set to a single event.  If you change it to all, the number jumps to 37 with a 51% win rate, putting her at the 14th best performing master spot for the 2020-2021 World Series.

EDIT: Although of course you have to take winrates with grains of salt (a lot of the games are not at the top table level), but if you also look at the performance of someone like Axelst using Tara, you see a ton of power there.

If a 51% win rate is our best performing master, then there's kind of a fucking deeper problem with this faction. 

Just looking at the data though, that's incorrect.  Hamlin went 9-4-4, Leveticus went 9-7-3, etc.  Standout awful was Parker at 3-8-1 where a low play rate combined with a low win rate indicates strongly the consensus is he's bad and the consensus is probably right. 

Still nothing says that Tara can't get buffed.  There's masters sitting at truly disgusting win rates like Nexus (30-13-3), Ophelia (31-12-5) or Misaki (35-18-5) who are clearly out of line, Tara at 19-17-1 looks nothing like that. 

Data wise I'd say there's a clear indicator that playing Nexus correlates very strongly with winning (especially since as a brand new master we'd expect playskill and win rate to rise as people get more experience - and it's already super high), but Outcasts have nothing that would prevent us from being buffed for any master. 

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18 minutes ago, RisingPhoenix said:

Just looking at the data though, that's incorrect.  Hamlin went 9-4-4, Leveticus went 9-7-3, etc.  Standout awful was Parker at 3-8-1 where a low play rate combined with a low win rate indicates strongly the consensus is he's bad and the consensus is probably right. 

Oh, I did miss Hamelin somehow, good point. Leveticus is still sub 50% though.

19 minutes ago, RisingPhoenix said:

If a 51% win rate is our best performing master, then there's kind of a fucking deeper problem with this faction. 

I mean... 51% winrate is extremely solid. And of course winrate isn't everything. Tara is an extremely skill-intensive master, so I suspect her numbers get nerfed a bit by people losing with her from not playing her to her full potential.

I certainly can't play her to her full potential (I can't memorize the discard pile).

20 minutes ago, RisingPhoenix said:

but Outcasts have nothing that would prevent us from being buffed for any master. 

Well, a handful of crews get buffed in any given errata, so she'd be an odd choice.

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Ties don't get counted in win rate, been that way since they built the pyramids.  Neither a win nor a loss equals no counting in win rate. 

Quote

I mean... 51% winrate is extremely solid. And of course winrate isn't everything. Tara is an extremely skill-intensive master, so I suspect her numbers get nerfed a bit by people losing with her from not playing her to her full potential.

Winrate isn't everything, but I'd say it's enough to be convinced that she's nothing special.  We can say that she's high complexity, but we could also say that means that she's more attractive to better players and therefore her win rate is artificially inflated because better players tend to play... better. 

Overall I think the data says what it needs to - Tara (and the Outcasts faction in general) is nothing special.  Perhaps the most important thing is that nothing (outside of Hamlin who has a low play rate) has a good win rate, and that therefore good players haven't found any go-to masters to maximize the faction.  That would make us similar to Guild in power level, which I feel is generally correct.  Which makes nerfs to Leveticus stupidly inexplicable, but ah well. 

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11 minutes ago, Morgan Vening said:

It'd be strange if ties didn't count.

Ten games, 1 win, 9 ties should have a win rate of what, 55%?

If you don't count ties, that'd mean a 100% win rate? Sounds wrong.

To be honest, I follow several different sports, and all those would give that a win rate of 10%. Looking at the recent reports about Virat Kohli as Indian Cricket Captain and Rafael Benitez as Everton Football Manager, they calculate win rate as wins/total games (at least on the BBC reports I read). This maybe because both are talking about sports that have a high number of ties, but that's exactly how I expected people to calculate win rates

(And most tournament scoring I know uses the gaining grounds 3 TP for a win 1 TP for a draw, so it should probably have a winning percentage of 40%, based on scoring 12 TP of a possible 30). 

As I read, it appears the the NFL used to disregard ties in calculating its winning percentage, but that practise ended in 1972. I hadn't heard of it before this discussion, but I don't follow American sports that heavily, which is where this seems more prevalent as a scoring method compared to the points awarded for results that Rugby, Football (association), Cricket, team Golf, Hockey, Ice Hockey, Sailing, Formula 1 racing seem to use. 

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9 hours ago, Math Mathonwy said:

You really love stating stuff in absolutes, don't you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winning_percentage

There's right and there's wrong, and any time your win percentage doesn't sum to 100% it's wrong.  Ties can either count as half a win/half a loss or be ignored, but they cannot be counted as a loss or everything is chaos. 

Now gently steering this nonsense back to Errata 2022...

(seriously, people, start your own fucking thread.  It's simple!  It's easy!  It's free!)

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9 minutes ago, RisingPhoenix said:

There's right and there's wrong, and any time your win percentage doesn't sum to 100% it's wrong.

It does sum up to 100%. Win / all game play.

Win rate is NOT the mirror of lost rate tough.

As other expose, I think it's a methodological mistake to discard the draw when calculating the win rate.

However the best metric is the points rate. 

Game points score / absolute points.

This one is at 52% for Tara. This is good but not incredibly dominant. In my eye, it means she's in the right spot.

 

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4 hours ago, RisingPhoenix said:

(seriously, people, start your own fucking thread.  It's simple!  It's easy!  It's free!)

You were the one who started the conversation, so I assume that was a joke? But it didn't come across that way.

13 hours ago, RisingPhoenix said:

Ties don't get counted in win rate, been that way since they built the pyramids.  Neither a win nor a loss equals no counting in win rate. 

 

4 hours ago, SEV said:

However the best metric is the points rate. 

Tournament data also masks all sorts of issues (like player skill unless it is a many round tournament), so I think you have to combine data like that with experience. Or regressions, but I don't think we have access to that sort of thing xD

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I was just speaking about a simple metric to replace win rate. 

If you want to factor in player skills it's an other story. 

One (relatively) simple way to do it is to use the round where the points were score (later round weight more than early round) and the num er of player in the tournament. 

Beside that you need a performance metric for the player themselves. As usual I'm biased toward Elo...

But yeah, now we're far away from the thread subject.

My opinion : Tara is fine. Parker need a little something. Your upgrades S***. 

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23 minutes ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

You were the one who started the conversation, so I assume that was a joke? But it didn't come across that way.

 

Tournament data also masks all sorts of issues (like player skill unless it is a many round tournament), so I think you have to combine data like that with experience. Or regressions, but I don't think we have access to that sort of thing xD

It's usually best to combine it with some level of experience and judgement.  For instance if you glance at the Tara lists, and all the lists that won eschewed Aionus while all the ones that brought him lost (for example) then you probably learned something.  If all 8 parker losses came from one player, and that player also lost all their other games, maybe that player just blows.  And certainly the sample size is small.

What I'd say (and I did not bring up win rate) is there's nothing wrong with buffing a bad model even in a pretty decent Keyword.  A bad model is bad.  Hamlin might be a pretty strong keyword, but that doesn't make Winged Plague a good model. 

I will say the data supports the nerf to Levi was pretty horrible, especially given that a lot of his mediocre performance came pre-GG2 so what the hell.  I know Wyrd doesn't typically revert nerfs, and I'm still fine with the Scavenger adjustment (it's really more that than a nerf and I understand they were coming in a lot OOK).  I don't think it supports an awful lot else in any direction.  I think people are going to look at the data, and use it to draw the conclusion they were correct, and keep on keeping on. 

 

I think Aionus is in a pretty bad spot, where he has little to contribute defensively or offensively and his auras virtually never get used.  If the two pass tokens are so broken they are eclipsing all that maybe the solution is to adjust the pass tokens down to one and fix the rest of the model so he can do more than sit in a corner and flip crows all day - which is interactive to literally no one and an incredibly boring playstyle. 

There's something to be said for making the game more fun.  I don't have fun taking a 10 stone do nothing model, and I don't have fun sticking it in a corner and generating pass tokens with it.  Nor did I have fun taking my entire turn after my opponent, that part of M2E was so bad it got the entire edition nixed.  If making the model more interesting also means we fix that... yay?

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Overall my impression of Outcasts competitively is that they are the epitome of 'fine'.

I've seen every Outcast master perform well competitively, but they don't really dominate (although I'm sure some Arcanist players/the Russian meta would claim Leveticus is stronger than ever). The faction doesn't have anything like a Bokor that is clearly overtuned or anything like Wong that is clearly undertuned.

So I wouldn't be surprised if the errata misses them almost completely. I imagine Explorer's Society will receive the most attention of course, and keywords like original December are too far below the curve.

That said, I'd love to see parker get some attention as I think his power level could go up quite a bit while remaining balanced. I also like the idea of buffing Winged Plagues, but again that is a really powerful keyword.

Although I would love to see the rat-pass-token trick FAQed and then Winged Plagues buffed...

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I've never been convinced that's a real issue.  Yes, you can drain their pass tokens and get activation control with essentially 2 rats per pseudo-pass token, but you're literally having the rats do nothing, and if you want to make use of it the rats have to live.  Most people see 8 rats and they want to kill them.

It's one of those combos that sounds good on paper but then in game you always have things to do with the rats or they're dying or something like that.  I've used it with just two rats a few times, but that's really not that high impact.  It's one of those very technical quirks that feels like it's an exploit, but doesn't actually matter.

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22 minutes ago, OctaBit said:

What's the rat trick?

You...

  • Use 'just like a rat', opponent uses a pass token.
  • Your activation.
  • Use 'just like a rat', opponent uses a pass token.
  • You can't take an activation due to the chain rules, so opponent must activate.

Net result: You use two rats, your opponent uses two pass tokens and an activation. You slowly gain activation control.

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