hat the top Who? Yeah, like you want to know what the problems of the game are look at the top four Yep so, uh and then the uh the fact that uh So let's talk about magical dominance because there's another and if we move over to number two Yeah to rank two then magical dominance becomes real interesting magical dominance beats Both of the it it's the highest number two Right, right, right Uh, so again in within its chart Right, almost basically almost 40 of the people who selected it Said that it was the second worst thing and so magical dominance, uh Was the by far most popular number two choice So a lot of people again, it was number two overall in the survey It was number two very hard with a with a bullet here Right. Yep Uh, so I found this I found that to be really interesting again because we've been going down this road so strongly recently It tells me Stop Stop it Yep. Yeah, what we're doing is a problem. I love how we like as soon as Uh teclastrop nine months ago That's when the spellbomb got coin, right? Right. Yes, that's correct And I remember immediately we were like this is bad this trajectory if this continues is going to be bad for the game Guess what data bears it out. Yeah It's interesting because activation wars though. It was the most popular choice by raw total count Right. Yep. It's much more distributed amongst the top three as to how people found it Right, right whereas shooting just everybody it just front loaded all on number one Like people freaking hate it right now And I wonder if that's not a function of the fact that as we mentioned the activation wars has been kind of you know Falling into the background Right and and and shooting is at the forefront. You look at those top armies. Yeah Yeah, Seraphon singe Yep, uh Just exploiting shot one after the other doc doc Use flash snake shooting. Yeah snake shooting spamming snake shooting docs up at the top right now too Yeah, yep Yeah, yeah, no, you're absolutely right. It's funny. It's I so This this gets into the anchor bias Right, Tom. It's so funny because I said I said doc and you're like, what do you mean doc? It just didn't click in my brain for a minute Right, but you're absolutely right Um, it's it's this sequestered thing that is by the way, lrl also Oh, yeah lrl. Yep. Yep. Um You know, it's it sequestered into A few armies can do it really really well Right with either high-rent shooting high-rent mortal wound shooting or sorry long-range high-rent shooting or long-range mortal wound shooting Right when those things all start getting together Then It gets really bad really fast and I think when you look at those top armies, they're all doing some combination of that crap right If everybody in the army had an eight inch shot And that was it if that was the extent of the range it'd be like, okay. Yeah, whoever who cares Right. Yeah, I I can just see that monkey that muppet meme or whatever where they're like looking at the camera side-eye. Yeah Yeah, exactly Yes, I don't know what I'm talking about. Yeah um so Well, yeah, so, uh You know lrl is not statistically atop. I'd argue But it gives a horrible experience and that's the point Yeah, I mean the evidence we have is that they're they from tts is that they're a pretty top ranking army Um that they're in the top five or six armies. So I mean again Right and most of those are like 60 yarders Well, it varies a lot. Sometimes you got 30. Sometimes you got sometimes you got skew lists, but sure I mean again, I you know, I was on rob show last week and we did the songs section And so it's you know, what are you selling? What are you buying? Right in light of the recent goings on in the world? And I said If i'm a buyer i'm a buyer for lrl You're talking about an army that's already a tier easily A tier it's getting a new book and it's getting a new book and adding like 13 units 12 units something like that You know, whatever to that with new synergies new nonsense like I I do not know how that army doesn't just immediately explode into s tier So we'll see Anyways, it's getting a point rebalancing I guess Uh, no, don't feel bad for playing them. Never feel bad for playing an army. It's not You should never feel bad for playing an army says the slumesh player Which I willingly shelved, right? But that was and I didn't like because it was unfun for me to play with my friends That's that's a choice that I made you should not feel bad for playing an army That army should be better balanced and taken and be brought into line So you don't have to feel bad for it people love love the army you love play the armies you want to play, right? Okay, it's not on you Okay All right Assistant ref says lrl point rebalancing sentinels down 20 points. There you go. They them and croak both down 20. Okay So, uh Let's look at the bottom of this chart. So this is this is the other half of this chart, right? Um High amounts of dice rolling damage debuffs high melee damage Bravery and high rend they look like you just look at the counts here Right very very low points. This is where the data drops like a rock this whole set of Things is where they just stopped showing up as anybody picking them as number one Right, we're literally just talking about a handful of people in almost every case And you know, we already talked about this, right? Like is this does this mean it's safe to explore this more and push it into the meta and new design Or does it mean that as we do that? They would push way up, right? Like imagine if aos 3.0 as you've talked about tom gets rid of the become immune to battle shock Right, right Does something like let's just imagine that's gone Okay, do bravery debuffs then all of a sudden matter I mean for some armies but then uh and then chaos like peace Is that a bunch of passive bubbles? Yeah, sure. I mean like that's it if they do that then Does that create Does that create the shooting situation right of the haves and the have-nots? Because some armies are just like yeah, battle shock hot her her. I don't need that commandability. I haven't used that in years You know one reverse scaven, whatever, right? Yeah, sure Whereas a lot of we don't know what had things going to do in the new new book, but sure sure. Yep uh so, you know the um The the point is is that like that three factor thought of like It's It's voted low because it's just okay and you can explore it more It's voted low because the frequency of it is so rare right now people can't properly evaluate it, right? So you got a frequency bias or You people voted so low because other game mechanics are mitigating the negativity and It makes it really difficult to know what you can rightfully explore here Yeah What I'll say is that if I were to take a guess As to what wouldn't be bad if you bumped up rend damage Right and damage debuffs I think it'd be fine. I think that space is you can explore with probably little blowback I mean I don't like I don't know like that hits me as mpe like high supreme damage stuff is not things I enjoy I mean I like playing with my toys Yeah, sure. Well, that's why you also have units five units removed at the top of one That you know that like that's that's fair You'd have to be careful because if combined with big movement Then you get the turn when alpha strike game goes into overdrive. Yeah, sure And then you push that up through the root It's it shows one of the challenges of this right in that you need to give people special abilities But when you pull on a and b because of c you might also blow one of those out so right Yeah, that's fair. That's fair In line with what you're saying tom, there was quite a lot of verbatims of not a huge number, but a decent number of people talking about Having a negative play experience from like oryx Having having oryx come into them at the top of one and just you know blowing them off the table And they're like and they it was a real feel bad for them My my son discovered that when he played stormcast and pushed everything the middle of the table and I went are you done? And then introduced him to his other army. He plays and what they actually do in melee. Yeah Uh, see mucky. No, I didn't include summoning as an npe It would have been a good one to include like summoning and model refill is something I should have put in there Yeah, but there's just not there's not enough of it right now to really Like crank to 11. I mean, I don't know. That's my personal Would we be just double dipping on slanash on the activation wars? You know, I don't know But it'd be interesting Yeah npe army ranking. So the next question in the survey was rank all of the armies in order of npe right so you had every army in the list Which armies contain the most npe? The less npe. Okay Yep Corgiol did it did I try to control somehow for respondents with an axe to grind? I tried to I in the question Phrasing I was very specific and repetitive In every question as to exactly what I was testing for So, I mean, that's all I can do. I can phrase the question as clearly as possible to say Did this exact situation happen? Is this exact situation? Please, you know, what what of this exact situation? Do you consider npe? right, so and I You're not you can't really grind an axe against a specific army, but you can against a mechanic That can be evocative of an army It's hard to control for that stuff really like people whatever's in people's minds. I can't You hope it comes out in the wash, right through statistical significance. That's the best I can say Okay, anyways back to this uh npe army ranking Holy crap Love this one tom. You remember the chart earlier where we showed the number of armies played Right. Yeah Now see the inverse of that chart right Right It's so fascinating It's it's like, hmm the armies that rank the highest On npe and by the way, this is sorted again same way as the last chart where you can read column one is how it's sorted Right, so people who voted it as number one Yeah percentages run horizontal okay and It's the freaking almost perfect inverse of the last chart as you'll see in a minute because I did a little nice Yeah, that's all your picture um Like people don't like being hated Yeah, and by the by tom can we just gander at that seraphon dominance? I know I know they almost double The army under them On raw npe count of people who said they're the worst army Yep Yep Something like a quarter of all respondents to this question ranked seraphon the worst army What's One in four. What's the worst army seraphon? Yeah, that's insane Like that is such a jump Over its nearest competitor right because zeech and ko more or less neck and neck right statistically and significantly different Yeah, they both dropped. They both shoot people off the table. Congratulations. Right. Here's fun But seraphon seraphon take all the shooting of zeech Are all of ko and combine it with all the magic of zeech Yep, and they get bodies to boot Yeah, so this one's great. The only the only outlier fire station like hey, I'm late to this party. What's going on over here? Just over here not dying. Do you can you spot the outlier at the top of the chart tom? From our previous table or no cities Cities is quite highly ranked if you remember it was highly played. It's one of the most popular armies Yeah, and yet here. It's still quite highly ranked, right? Yeah, people quite don't like it And I was thinking about why this is I've got a theory. I'd love to run it by you. Okay, yeah Because cities Is the ultimate npe dabbler Okay Yeah, they've got a little bit of multiple fighting and like hammerhall They've got a decent amount of shooting but not like overwhelming caradrian overlords, although they can bring in some ko stuff Right into tempest eye They can run a decent amount of high armor for like round one or in some builds with like tempest eye They can do some amount of alpha striking with some of their units Maybe in like living city or something right like it can be so many different things. It just kind of dips its toe Into enough little npe pies that that all simmers up Yep Yep That's my theory again Who the heck no yeah, I mean I think that it's I think that it didn't show up in a lot of the other like things Because of the just simply the diversity the diversity of units the diversity of builds diversity that it's just not It's not standout, but those that are standout like the hollow heart shoot you off the table Yeah, hollow heart spelldom for for the magic for spell domination people when people think of cities That's what they're thinking of Yeah, it was interesting Once again, by the way, scaven dead in the middle the breakpoint of the table like literally 13 and then 7 They're the breakpoint, right? And then again your popular armies The only army to get zero votes for top npe Nighthawk Yeah, baby. You want to be everybody's friend roll up with nighthawk and everybody's like cool Cool. We can be friends now Very popular army everybody loves them aesthetically pleasing. Nobody thinks they're the worst army This is the winner. They were the truly the only army to get zero votes for the vote for number one I didn't have this data when I chose it But do you think it was an accident that I went from playing doc at the height of their power to nighthawk No, I think it like subconsciously you knew you had to atone I did I did I'm not gonna lie. I was like, you know what? I'm doing nighthawk. This is gonna be the nighthawk year Yep Yeah I think oryx end up being low, you know, somebody said it's a surprise that interesting or oryx are so low despite that turn one Alp strike potential I think ultimately that's mine to punch up right because ultimately there's still an army that wants to go have a punch up Yeah, exactly, right They're not shooting you from a distance.  Yeah, I love though. Yeah, as somebody points out in the chat.  Yeah hard pass that are returning Yes, yeah Uh, so, yeah, the in both this ranking in the army's blade scaven's the tipping point, which is it's always interesting to me So, yeah, uh, I love the inverse correlation here and in fact Tom, let's take a look of the visualization of that inverse correlation So I actually put these two charts together Yep, and then line mapped them, right? Yep, and Look at that correspondence. It's it's great. It tells the story so cleanly Okay Yep The light blue arrows are when you know the army like the farther down you go This is the count of number one npe on the right and the army's played largest to smallest on the left So just in case you're not getting what we're saying about a direct inverse correlation That despite what you see at tournaments people hate npe laden meta busting armies I don't know how else I can prove it beyond this Right fire slayers High on the npe low on being played Storm cast returnals high on being played low on npe right You can see how the top of the chart is all blue lines that match the bottom Right and or the bottom of the chart of armies played is orange lines that have to reach up into getting a higher count of npe The interesting exceptions were like I said just as we saw in earlier like visa chaos suns Which I probably account to like not a lot of sun's armies out in existence I think you know and and also it being kind of a boring army, frankly Kudos by the way to the shout outs to the flesh eater courts the beast of chaos and the sons of bahamut Who just accept your lot in life? Sure sure Uh, certainly they have an experience smash bat. Absolutely. Yes. Can smash bat smash that Yes, he can Yeah, so it was just a really like I wanted to do this visualization and perhaps that orange line on or that blue That orange line on flesh eater courts should be at the deep blue. I suppose Um, that's that's probably a bit of a mistake there Um, but at any rate like this so clearly visualized everything for me when I when I made this line chart up I was like, oh, yeah, there you go Right Yep So, yeah, I mean again just to repeat this thing I've said 10 times because I really wanted to sink in The best thing gw can do to help their overall sales out of line their financial bottom line is Seem to sell better When they're balanced, yep people will like one make great models That's probably still very important right because again we saw we see night haunt dominating over and over again in these things Because people the models blew people away, right? Yep That's one two is pitch for the middle with the rules Yep, right Yeah, that like ultimately Uh ogres was a success Yeah, sure. Yep, you know like ogres ogres had a lot of like hate, right? um when it dropped but The reality is is that it was you know, it was liked well enough Yep, they're doing better than they're than the like bone reapers that came out at the same time Right, right Uh assistant ref asks did you do anything on how many uh, How many example seraphon chose themselves as the worst npe offenders would be interesting to see how self-aware people are I did not that would have been a great chart. I didn't even think of that, but that's a that's a great idea assistant ref I'm sorry. I didn't think of that one One of the biggest challenges with this when I put these together is and the reason this one took so long Is because it was like a really complicated data set But like I have to sort of sit down and think about what are the interesting things to find And just start digging in the data and making pivot tables and and you know making and digging and cross tabs and not all of them bear fruit Right, so it's for them. We're like, okay. Yeah boring, right exactly like oh that didn't tell me anything interesting So so by the way folks, we're not done yet. No Tuck in There's there's a third section to there is yet another section. That's right Okay, so negative play experience verbatim Uh, this is where we're going to get into some commentary. I picked a small selection of comments. There were like 800 comments on this and I did read them all And he did buy But I did like 10 because come on now Okay Uh All right, so and and I thought it would be interesting because obviously I don't know who the heck these people are You know anyway, so I thought it'd be interesting to list the armies they played so Uh Here we go, tom right up your alley the ko list with the turn one spell in a bottle warplighting vortex wombo combo This is an example of bad game interactions. It should have been spotted before released. It's not that you can't beat it It's that it's a bad experience to play against 25 plus eels and idk lists are a marginal here It's not that the mechanics are abusive per se like the ko vortex, but it's not a fun army to fight against Yes, I play idk. It doesn't mean I don't agree that the list is boring to play and to play against and again I net deep kin only player. It's the only army that this responded plays So there's self-awareness here, right? Yep What this one what I drew from this one is There are these I picked these verbatim because I thought they were representative of sort of larger samples of what people said, right In concerns or yeah in concerns and this one to me what stands out Is that there are sometimes just these singular toxic elements That need a rata like immediately because they're so poisonous That they can just completely Ruin people's day one effect Right and this is the warp lightning vortex wombo combo as he calls it. This is total eclipse Right Like there's been a list of these. Um, this would have been vanguard wing at its height Yep vanguard wing change house at its height. Yep, sure That are just like so toxic so bad so dumb That if they one they shouldn't get to release and two if they do they need to be fixed like immediately Because every day they're out there still being played. They're just poisoning people's perception of the game I want to point out that we called out the ko warp lightning in a bottle The week that the book dropped. Yeah, sure because it was so obvious, right? Yep I mean, I think you had that. I think you were the one that mentioned it to me first I had I had gotten my hands on a copy of it And it was literally in so me and gary were bouncing it back and forth like within like Within minutes Of having the book in hand I remember us coming up and going this is it like we had seen almost nothing else in the book And we went this is the most broken thing Yeah, because I think I mentioned like throwing a purple sun in it or the dark fire demon rift and yeah And I was like why? Yeah, why why let's make them not move and kill half their army because on the numbers You know like I don't I don't need to rail on this but on the numbers if you do the math No other endless fell will do as much no other hundred points Will ever do as much damage as that warp lightning vortex in one in in one double tech. It's not even close Yeah, exactly Yep. Yep All right, so verbatim number two Against beast collaborators part of the ogre maw tribes the multi wound Damage resistant mortal wound dealing on the charge and high damage output during combat Just makes for an unstoppable force in my experience. I'm sure it's not the same for all But nothing I've thrown up against a list with multiple large beasts has managed to make a significant dent So what's interesting here is this this person plays a lot of armies storm cast silvaneth Disciples slanesh nergal slaves knight haunt and war clans A lot of armies there, which I respect right and It's funny because out of that list I'm like well with disciples or you should be able to burn that down or you know with nergal You should be able to withstand that or whatever But again, the reason I wanted to talk about this one tom and I'm interested for your thoughts here for sure is one One of the things that I noticed is that every army got called out basically There are very few exceptions if you look in the verbatims. There are people who hate basically every army Yeah right Uh with the exception being knight haunt, right, of course Uh, I literally do not remember a single verbatim that mentioned knight. Of course, of course, of course I'm not saying there's there's not one those knight haunt players are awesome Yeah, I'm just saying I do not remember one there might be one in the whole list I'm sure there's not but like Armies that we don't can traditionally consider being npe can oftentimes give some players trouble Right, right like when you have two blocks of 12 bowls um That for some armies, that's not like that. You can't win against that right Yeah, yeah, and so it's the the the relevant part to me here is just how list dependent Some of this might be right because this player if you just looked at the armies and I said, you know, okay player a is playing maw tribes and player b can pick from disciples slanesh nergal s2d or or war clans Right, they can pick out they can play any of those armies What's the win rate look like and you'd be like well It's got to be the second one, right? I mean just Well, no that stormcast eternal like looking at like I don't know how they don't just bounce off The stormcast army with all of that no rend ogres Sure Well, again, he's talking about the he's not talking about the ogre build. He's talking about the monster truck build So, okay. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah Which has a lot more friend, right? It's it is a big problem for stormcast Yep in the mortals charge. Yeah, exactly. Yep in the mortals on the charge So it was just like it's telling because we speak of these things as monoliths Yeah And they're really not right um because There are different lists different levels of experience different skill ceilings and floors on the armies themselves right Yep, and It makes it a real challenge Um roomy new player here beast claw feels really ridiculous to play against. What does slanesh do against them? Sure. I can help you out So beast claw is actually one of your depending on the exact list if it's like a heavy beast claw list Um, it's a pretty great matchup for slanesh because they need to come into melee You can match them speed for speed The trick is you need to be like pushing your greater demons and pushing them to go last You can beat them down.    Hope that helps man The key is you've got to play a very careful game with slinash because you're always on a razor's edge All right as a gloom spike gets boss of jorke, which I love I think they switched that intentional which I think is awesome Boss of jorke. I want to call it that from now on the boss of jorke Uh, I ran several matches versus crydron overlords already Rough go right where we've tried multiple scenario deployment setups their ability to impact anything on the table from the Start regardless of what I do or how I scream means they can rid me of my central synergy pieces without losing much on the backswing Another nps grants playing as a city's army with huge phoenix guard flames by our phoenix on a two plus four up Charge your army alpha bunker you or alpha block you in right and then that's it tom As somebody who likes both of the broken armies on the broken sides of these combinations Yep of this particular player Yep You know by the way, this is a city's a sigmar fire slayers idk lrl dot and obviously a gloom spike player Right This just sounds terrible to me right like this is this is the worst You I think about that that maw's of jorke matchup against crydron overlords, and I'm just like oh god What a terrible matchup for them Right that is hard rock against soft scissors Yeah, and there's just not a lot of options Like I'm glad as it like you know, yes your glooms fight player. I'm glad you have other armies. Sure um because I mean just glooms fight in general are just in a bad spot and so like I Uh, I feel for you is what I'm gonna say Yeah, and there's not and there's not a and there's not a good solution there Yeah, to me what this one showed is How sometimes no matter what there's always the chance for npe because of just really bad matchups Right like strengths and weaknesses. Yeah strengths and weaknesses like the ko are so perfectly set to exploit exactly what the maw's of jorker doing And even if we brought the the squigs up some Yeah And toned ko down some It would still be A bad matchup right just because of the very fundamentals of what's going on right right? I mean the Yeah, yeah, you're gonna have a bunch of mobility variable squigs chasing after dwarves that can pick up and read a player return. Yeah Yep Sounds rough Like that's that's a rough go folks and they're gonna hit and just bounce off those boats that can re-roll their shaves And yes coach, I know it's actually the jaws of morc We're calling it maw's of jorke because that's what the player said and it's their army So it's maw's of jorke now jaws of morc is dead long live maw's of jorke I want to see all tournament reports report this army has maw's of jorke from now on Check's out checks out All right I am all about the maw's of jorke life. That's right Okay, I played against I played against a friend's std archion plus marauder list and he crushed me into a living Archion is already insane, but together with those broken raughters. I just couldn't do Yeah, I haven't played again since then because it discouraged me really bad I put this in because this is one of those ones that broke my heart And not only that and this is it only gloom spike gets player. Yeah. Yeah Yeah See I see stuff like this and it hurts my soul Like I want this person to play the game I want this person to have fun playing the game This is garbo Yeah, this should this should not happen Yeah Okay And That like that's why this one's in here Like I put this one in here because Like because these challenges are just Like so obvious like we wrote up marauders And and we just did we really think that was okay? Like the s2d book is really So fantastic. It's one of the better books they've written Yep It is a bright shiny Extremely well polished diamond that has this huge inclusion running through the center of it occlusion Occlusion I remember It has a big chip in it Right Yeah, f's in chat. That's right Because if you again as he said archaeons a big problem, but that's not what pushed him over the edge, right? It's the broken marauders Which makes sense. He was prepared to face tank archaeon Right because he didn't throw like 60 gets in and he'll he'll he can hold up archaeon with some negatives to hit and like That's a game because archaeons just one model. He'd have the body advantage But when he's got these multiple packs of 40 marauders coming in Blowing his units off the board Yeah, making 11 inch charges like it's a joke Yeah Yeah, it's this is it's ridiculous So if you happen to be watching this person who answered this question is this and I don't know who you are right, obviously I hope you come back man And and just get your friends to play other armies or I hope you find a new army to play with Or I hope they fix gets or you find something to to relight your passion because this really sucks And I don't like it And in a perfect world Um We wouldn't have armies that do this that this kind of stuff would get caught in in design in development and weed it out right Because that's a part like that's that's what we want. We don't want people to have to suffer through this. Yep. Exactly Uh Okay So, uh, you know when I complain about the waters, but you know what at the same time Uh, thanks for participating in the quiz. Yeah, I mean you're not you're you're not playing Assuming you're hearing this but thank you for still being part of the community. I agree. Absolutely. Thank you for staying in the community and uh the The yeah, I mean If you hear me bang on about stuff like croak and marauders and whatever right and sometimes people will push back in the comments And be like you talk about it too much or whatever. This is why I bang on about it Yeah, yep. Yep Okay, anyways moving on uh for me anytime my opponent's army prevents me from normally participating in the game It results in a negative play experience I don't mind when an army is powerful But when it prevents my army from doing its thing I no longer feel like I'm participating in the game armies that can debuff you or abilities like bellicor's dark master ability Which can shut down an entire unit or model for around our prime examples I'm torn because these are legit tactics, but at the same time they're not enjoyable to play against Slaves the darkness player It should be just labeled self-awareness player self-awareness player. Yes Yeah, I I included this one because I really felt like I understood this person You know like Because this is something I feel very strongly. This is like what this person is espousing is what I often feel Yeah, as a timmy I want to do my armies thing Right. Yep.  Whatever. I got to do my thing You know, that's cool Yep So I just I I felt a A kindred spirit in this in this one, right? Tom, what's your thing? Is it just winning spike, um No, no for me like for me Like I if I'm going to be honest like it's not winning Because vanguard wing is uninteresting Right like when that was at the height. I didn't just roll out with the storm cast that I had on my shelf Yeah, um change host it weren't my thing and so for me Like I have to have something that's that like There has to be often some degree of ingenuity or like I I can't take the flavor of the month list that everybody's taking So if I play ko in this meta my ko list, I can assure you will not look like anybody else's Yep Yep, so I want to win and I want to do well, but I just I can't Um, I I think that there is more blue ocean for us to play sure. Yep, totally fair All right, luminous in general is a really bad experience I don't disagree with that the weaker build aka the weaker build Aka hammers destroy melee armies and cost no points for their battle line The other side is just pure jank for all their spells hard to list because it's almost all of them Passing battle shock off to your units not allowing you to use command abilities and never forget the archers There are other armies for certain things like fire slayers and fight first ability 60 bliking's numer at the croak spell in a bottle And a few other things. I think those armies with some point changes could be fixed, but lumenath is over the top This is what this is the point I was making right this by the way, look at what this person plays beasts ogres blades Oof oof right all three of those armies are like I have a thing I do a thing I don't have a lot of tricks. I'm a straightforward army That's how I play and they you know like on the other side of the coin is literally this army that's got like 50,000 things They're doing every round You know you saw ben saba's spell list with lumenath Yeah, I did Like 12 spells he's got specific orders and he's got he's assigned you know each The way that they're all taken on each thing and it's this this then you move here Then you do this then this spelled and this spelled and this spelled and this spelled and this spell and it's like yep And also then I'll burn some gold and I'll burn it again over here and you know Yep How does it's it's this case of the one I loved about this one when I looked at the what this person played It's why I included this one because I was like boy if there was ever an example of the haves versus the have-nots Right Yep It's Like that army has such a high skill ceiling. It's insane like against a great general That army is extremely hard to beat And I do not want to know what it looks like plus 12 units As I said earlier It's uninteresting to me. Yeah, I get it As we know Good.  It would just be a bad time for everyone, tom You should have that weapon Say what you should not have that weapon That's fair. You need to be playing night hot. That's the correct army for you Well, I have some on the case and more need to get painted. So there you go Uh, I loved this one because I think that uh, our friend shoe from rerolling ones would agree with this answer Consistency is key. Why are some oras holy within 12 and others with an 18? Why can some of you fight twice immediately? Well, there's have to work for the next activation Why do most armies have to play to their strengths? Well, some are above average in every single phase sce Blades of corn and slaves to darkness player Yeah I I'm tempted to read these in the term of like in the in the java watch the Civil war documentary like the 12 part Civil war documentary Sure. Yeah, I love that documentary But anyways, I'm tempted to read it like that Consistency is key Why are some oras holy within 12 like it's a letter back home, you know from the front? Yeah Uh at any rate, uh the This is one of those things that I know drives people absolutely crazy Just these little minutias and by the way the way to read this isn't the person saying why isn't everything distributed equally Okay, they're not talking about power differentials They're talking about Literally rules differentials where things work in different ways for seemingly no reason Yep. Yeah, right So like you can fight Twice, but this army's fight twice Is triggers immediately they don't have to wait for the normal activation Right Whereas this army's fight twice Is you know You go I go like with the unit right and then you go normally and then I get to then like I have something I can spend Like slenesh is a good example of this, right? I have a command point. I can spend to make a unit activate again Right, but I can't do it immediately. I can't just like fight fight Like flash eaters can right It's just the worst or or to even drive this home Let's look at the difference between the keeper of secrets command ability Like say you've got a slenesh keeper of secrets Obviously, she's slenesh, but uh keeper of secrets and a slenesh chaos lord in the same army Yeah, okay The chaos lord activates his ability at the start of the hero phase But it triggers later, right? He still you still have to go in order Yes, right So you have to like guess that that whatever you're picking to fight twice is going to survive Right, whereas the uh Whereas the um The keeper can just wait see if she survives and then if she does then burn her command point to do it Right Yep, it's just like these little like differences You know, it's just so funny because I like as you know, I've been playing a lot of magic Sure, and like it just makes me laugh that like So much of this game could just be key worded So, yeah, I want to talk about keywords for a minute because the temptation here is to run to keywords Right, but I'm just saying like so many of these abilities could have templates Yes, that's the difference. So if if I were going to do like I use I use keywords flippantly But the reality is is that templates are what I'm what I'm What I'm honing in on which are like standardized ability sets So if you know how an ability for the right, you know for the ring of rails And if you know how the ability works in one instance, it works in all the instances. Yeah So to me There's there's sort of this is very much a double-edged sword.  Yeah, because universal special rules lead to bad design pretty fast I don't want to do I could do a whole show on this, but I'll try to defend Walked in railroad design decisions. Correct And hiding them under keywords is even worse because then I don't want to look at my scroll And see Ability a ability be ability see and I have no idea what those things mean I have to go read a different part of a book To understand what those things do So like when magic prints, they're commons and I think on commons they they list out all the rules Right, they don't just say like first right. They don't say first strike They say first strike parentheses. It does damage before it does this thing, right So I hate universal specials and key wording in general Because one it leads to railroad game design because once you create this repository of just like this is a thing You start stapling them in wherever you can now. That's already gonna happen.  This guy has eight freaking keywords and no rules printed on this card And so we're back to playing Eight edition warhammer, right if I've got 90 universal special rules. I don't have universal special rules Okay, right I mean the way you cut that you split that baby is that you write the whole rule on the war scrolls But you standardize them. So somebody says Okay, what's your ability to do? Oh, it's just pie. It's the it's a k-man point pile and activation ability. Oh, okay Yes, it's the way they've done smartly like you you do you keep the text whole the best example They've done with this is sixes or double taps Yeah, right. Yeah, it's a common rule It doesn't need key worded. We don't need a universal special ruled It just gets spelled out. It can be given different flavor every time it happens, right But the text is always the same And the part of the other problem is that can paper over when you use that universal special thing it can paper over Underlying issues which are like broken phase activations. Like I mentioned the castle or thing Right. I am activating it. I need to remember. I have to activate it at the start of the hero phase And then I have to forget about it for some amount of time Right and then really remember.  So I really hate like it can paper over sometimes these the real problems which are often inconsistencies in order of activation where you have to remember I need to activate thing here and then Now 20 minutes from now. I'm going to need to remember. I did that thing because it's going to have another effect Right So at any rate, yeah Okay, uh Don't mind armies having their random janky trick But some armies have them in spades e.g. Summoning by itself is fine But having summoning plus spell dom plus buff is still don't is insufferable Made me bringing back my 40 chain rasps by times two field balance fec l o n player This speaks right to the thing we talked about earlier, right where it's not right One of these things is usually tolerable when they start grouping together You know, you know, and this is a great example, right? You've got the summoning You've got a spell dom in the house. You've got buffed bestilladons. So super buffing plus long range shooting right, you know Pile on on pile on on pile on where the summation It's where it's greater than this one of its parts, right? That's when we dive deep into the nbe waters Uh, anything else you want to say about that one? No, I think that that's dead on. Yeah. Yeah Uh stacking these things is bad Yeah, yeah, exactly. Stop stacking them. Like stop putting them together When you do one understand that it can't get a second one of these things or it's going to go bad and definitely make sure it never gets a third right right, right Uh And then this next one's kind of this a long same line sometimes combination of things I don't consider npe can become npe if they're combined in a bad way or put on a unit That's too powerful earth guard berserkers a good example I don't think ward saves fighting first or fighting twice are necessarily npe But when combined on a powerful unit compounds and reduces interactivity Exactly. So not only is it the combination, but it's what the frame you put that combination onto, right? Again take I've said this a hundred times, but it's worth saying again imagine if everything in gristle gore Only applied to the ghoul courtier Right the four wound ghoul hero Where you can like fight on death and fight twice on death and all of that nonsense, right? Would anybody care? Probably not. No No, I mean you might get like a mini smash bat, but sure sure like In it on his best day.  I did eight damage Right. Yeah, and you know that don't feel good. Yeah, exactly But when it's on a dude who can roll up and do like 60 damage Like whoa who shot across the board 20 inches or something before he charged, right? Oh So it's not just the stacking it's stacking on a power piece and the problem is The power pieces are often the ones that seem to have the most justification to stack on because they're the big special guys They need all the big special rules right Right. So you've got to like you've got to understand that natural bias we have And push against that So let me get this straight. We're here four years later after I submitted that Development that that letter of critique to gw Saying stacking is bad the summary of this big like three page letter In responding to the tomb kings problem was in how they dealt with tomb kings was stacking is bad And what we're finding is Still bad Yeah Don't do it bad design Like now this it's not stacking bonuses. This is stacking abilities. Sure It's same the principle is the same But the principle is the same. Yeah, yes Spread it out. Yeah And the last one here is it's great that armies have strengths and weaknesses Not all armies should have the same mechanics The problem arises when one army special thing is like hitting someone with a wet napkin While you're trying to fight the opponent's army whose thing is wielding a metal bat Which is on fire and plays heavy death metal rifts from doom every time they hit you with it I just love the way this person phrase this So good What I read there that genuinely made me laugh I can picture like the flaming metal doom bat And yeah, this this speaks right to the the inequity Right and again Stormcast Eternals player holding the army they play Right. Yep So there we go tom That's it That's all We did it We made it through Oof Yeah, uh Yeah, like So where are we at? Summary. So here's our wrap up. Um, you kudos to you, uh, 320 some folks who who survived this long um You know I The game's not in a bad spot No Again, we focused very much on the negative here, but It's like I don't want people to overemphasize this whenever we do a show and explore the negative elements of the game It's easy to then get wrapped up in the ennui and that's not what we're saying. It's not like the game If the game was terrible, I literally wouldn't have spent freaking 30 hours putting together that data right like this this What we were trying to highlight with these data sets Right or this data set and these these points is that um, there are some instances in the game That need to be dealt with there are some uh corner case Things that are just very bad experiences that we need to design a way from right Um, and that's okay, uh, we can correct those easily sometimes you can fix things with points sometimes worst roles just need to change Sometimes abilities just need to change. Yep Yep By the way, just as a quick note on the end This is why I think community driven comp or community points is like the wrongest of roads One it as I mentioned on rob show it takes all the pressure off of gw to actually improve the game Which isn't how we should fix things and two most things in this game that still have problems aren't fixed by points Right like in the survey when we did the balance survey Two to one people said the change that they think needs to be made are war scroll changes And I don't think community comp is going to start rewriting war scrolls Nope. Nope. So it's it's lipstick on a pig right Uh, yeah, I mean the summary to me is they need to think a lot about how they're when they when they write these abilities They need to think a lot about one how it reduces interactivity to How like within the army the stacking and how it's going to pile on Right and three we probably need to come to jesus about Uh shooting in general and what its role is in the game Right for ko they just got their second book Well plus 30 points to all units there you go problem solved fixed it No, I mean it's it's bigger than just ko obviously, right, right. Yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely um I actually think ko are in a pretty good spot and of course I say that because i'm a ko player You're you're you're on that end like shooting six percent. I don't see a problem I don't see a problem uh No, I get it. I do um I think that they uh I think that they have some really interesting options and I would like them to explore that stuff more with the with like I think the the late great hope for ko is in their thunders I really do believe that Yeah, it's a shame when they redesigned the book they didn't push a little more into the melee space, right into having like The the thunders act more like stormtroopers or something and and you know kind of you know, you know, you know You know what the easy solution was for thunders Um when they activate in combat they can shoot instead Sure, like make them a more melee focused unit in some way or another right where it's close up They want to be in the biz and the reason why I say that like when they activate in combat they can shoot instead The advantage in that like they can't shoot if they charge right Because you can't shoot if you charge that's part of the rules.  Yeah Yeah, I don't know. I uh Anyways, like we're not talking about uh thunders here. Yes Uh, I get it So all in all there you go. That's the results of the survey. Like I said, I'll try to put uh Put all of the survey data we've done over the three surveys up into someplace Maybe I can like draw a box or something might be the best way to do it. I don't know I'll take or something And uh and get all that out there for all of you who've watched. Thank you so much for staying here I never said the whole of course the whole time again. I forgot to say hit like But hit like now if you haven't already I really appreciate it We really appreciate it. It helps a lot of people find the video It helps build momentum and traction and all those youtube terms. So I really appreciate it And uh subscribe if you haven't already. Thank you all so much for watching I hope this was fun and interesting Uh, the power point three hours. This was a long one Just to end on a happy note somebody said it would be cool to balances with a positive play experiences show I think that's a great idea because there's a lot of really good Positive play experiences that we could highlight as well of what makes the game really fun I think that would be a great uh a great show to do. So I will certainly add that to our plans But as always, thank you so much for watching. We really appreciate it and as always We'll see you next wednesday