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| Game balance is a myth. |
You know, not a lot of things bother me in WHFB and 40K, but some things are just unacceptable.
Most players consider the Ogre Kingdom's Iron Blaster to be overpowered already. Here, you have the Skull Cannon for 135 points [talking about WHFB here]. It's a Daemon of Khorne, has T5 with 3+/5++, moves 7", fires a flaming, magic cannon, has the combat stats that makes even combat units weep, has S6 Impact hits that regains wounds.
We have a problem here folks, 3 problems in fact:
- The designers there have no idea what game balance is, both internally and externally. At this point, we're assuming they're just doing random shit, and any sense of game balance is just pure luck.
- The playtesters they hire don't know what they're doing, or how to playtest, or recognize potentially abusive, undercosted, or overcosted units. Either way, I don't know what's going on in this department. Anyone with half a brain would immediately recognize the problem with a unit like this. It's really that obvious.
- Lastly, and possibly the worst thing of all: GW is just trying to sell models that aren't selling well, or they know aren't going to sell well, with purposely abusive rules. The thought of them making poor rules just to models is horrifying. You know what, it might not even be the designer's call at this point. If your boss comes up to you and says "make this model sell or gtfo", what would you do?
What do you guys think? How does something like the Skull Cannon make it past the design studio?
8 comments:
The idea that GW playtests is a joke in itself. Remember they make the miniatures and then build rules around them. The game balance is irrelevant, as GW does not support tournaments.
They try to sell miniatures, by any means possible. Be it the fact that they increased units sizes in WFB, or implemented snapfire to force people to increase the size of attacking units by buying more minis, or introduced flyer models.
should this model be banned? I think YES
R36" BS5 Large Blast that ignores cover? Hitting with 61% change? Granting assault grenades for ALL who attack the target? Hmm. I want 3 of them and a Khorne army :) I wouldn't cry OP more then Nob Biikerz, Paladins, Draigowing, anything like this was thought OP. Yes, the unit is strong, but it's still an AV12 vehicle, open-topped, and can be killed. Works nice, but I wouldn't say it soooo OP.
I'm talking about the WHFB version..
Funny thing is the 40k version can't shoot when it deepstrikes as it counts as moving at cruising speed, can therefore only snapfire and you can't snapfire blasts.
As for Fantasy, better make sure you have a good WARDsave!
Wouldn't be even nearly such a kick in the nuts if the model wasn't ugly as all hell (no pun intended), but I think this is hands down the worst looking one from either system. Such a shame when the old jugger-pulled chariots looked so cool, and the new slannesh and tzeentch ones look pretty great. Truth is there's always gonna be some people who buy the overpowered b.s. regardless of the models, but these'll be the same people who have 100 flamers and screamers sitting on a shelf now, so more fool them.
Azatoth beat me to it but to reiterate, GW still considers itself a MIniature company first and a Game company second. In order to get balanced rulesets published they need to at least treat both aspects evenly if not completely invert that paradigm. I don't think we'll see that happen. It really is a shame, the Daemon book is the only one that stands out in 8th edition as being out of step from the rest of the books in internal and external power levels.
I don't think that GW intended for the skull cannon to be this overpowered otherwise the Slaneesh chariots would be powerful and they are quite the opposite (and still horrible models). Where exactly they went wrong, playtesting or design, I do not know.
I think it should be taken out into the car park and jumped on. Then the steel mould should be melted down and the designer taken out and shot.
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