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Old April 14th, 2021, 01:11 PM
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Re: Soldiers of Valhalla - nominations and discussion

Quote:
Originally Posted by dok View Post
I have said many times that I think the Death Knights of Valkrill are the worst design the original design team ever created. Allow me to explain why (setting aside their undersized sculpts, which are not relevant to this discussion). I apologize for this being a bit rambling, but it's a tricky thing to explain.

I have no problem with weird cross-faction synergies, in principle. It's part of the fun of Heroscape. Ne-Gok-Sa and Me-Burq-Sa were designed to bond with Romans from the start. But that's the point - they were designed that way. They were always meant to be warlords who get warlord bonding. They (and Mittens) got thematic bonding squads later, but that didn't change how they were meant to play.

What makes the Death Knight bonding so bad is that it's a bizarre grab bag of bonding heroes. Dumutef Guard bonding with Death Knights is weird and athematic and changes how they play. Ditto for Air Elementals - just weird. Taelord was arguably the point of the design but it feels like a weird band-aid and not super thematic either. (It felt good to give them one thematic option that is meant to work with them in VC with the Skull Demon.)

I've often said that if the Death Knights didn't exist and were proposed in the SoV, I would reject them as "too custom-y". Nothing in classic really matches the Death Knights in terms of the extent to which it recasts old heroes by slapping some strange cross-faction synergy to something new. It's something I'd like to avoid in our designs. Just because classic created Death Knights (or Isamu/rats/whatever-you-hate) doesn't mean we should.

While the VC customs have certainly expanded the synergy webs of existing figures considerably, we have generally either worked with figures that already had comparable synergies or stuck to pretty thematic pairings. Our most ambitious expansion is probably adding bonding to Jotun with the Dreadguls, but I personally think it feels very thematic, like the wildlings in Game of Thrones allying with giants.

We also added bonding for large constructs, Deathwalkers, monks, Ninjas, etc, but in obviously reasonable, tight synergy webs. Some of these (and other similar new synergy webs) were controversial, and some of them I didn't like personally, but they all showed significant restraint in what they lasso'ed in to their web.

There's also a couple cases where in order to hit the thematic option, we include something weirder, like Crypt Guardians bonding with Chainfighters or Zombie Hulks bonding with Ravagers. I'll admit I've personally grown quite fond of the former combo. Sometimes I'm willing to excuse these things because hey, cross-faction weirdness is part of the game. But it's not like those designs sought out the weird synergy - they just didn't twist the language of the power around to avoid it.

Long story short - there's no super simple rule around how much weird synergy is too much weird synergy, but I really don't want to recreate the Death Knights.

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I think it's pretty obvious where I am going with this, but when I look at the Wulfling hunters, it screams Death Knight bonding to me. Find a left box stat, and bond with it. SYNERGY!

I appreciate that the "unengaged" constraint is meant to keep it from being busted with Himmel, but in practice what it probably means is that it only really works well the ranged figures. Dund has always been crippled by the "before moving" timing of crippling gaze, and this would definitely remain true here.

I don't hate Arktos bonding (he already has bonding, after all, and he's probably more thematic than most of the others), but Van Nessing bonding here is pretty strange, and the others on the list just get weirder.

Honestly Arktos is probably the only one that makes competitive sense (in large part due to the hunter attack boost), and much of the time it will default to the latter version of the power, which is just shoehorning a 4-figure squad out of two sculpts. I can appreciate wanting that, but it feels a bit forced.

In short, I think the bonding needs to be something tighter and more thematic than just "hunters", and the default to a 4-figure squad feels like something being done on a custom because you couldn't find more sculpts.

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Unrelated to all of the above is the matter of the second power. I appreciate that it was simplified from something that I thought made little sense thematically and would probably get played incorrectly. That said, the new version is frankly pretty problematic. Making a common squad immune to ranged attacks until engaged can create some flat-out stalemate situations fairly easily, and could feel borderline unfair in others. And if priced appropriately for their power in those matchups, they will end up getting rolled by melee.

I'd appreciate a much less absolute power. This would also be more thematic, in my opinion - they're hunters, not astral beings, after all. Stealthy X and Concealment X are both good models to follow that make plenty of sense.
I'd definitely be interested in talking to you in a chat setting sometime because I can plainly explain every concern you've laid out using direct answers and plain logic for all of the thematics.

As for the competitive and gameplay aspect, I have a lot of data that I could share with you that addresses the concerns of no hitzones. More importantly, itd be great to play a game with you and show you that they arent a threat or a meta breaker to anything except the 4th mass.
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