So L9, ChrisGrenard, and I were playing tonight and were being pitted against a lot of new players what with all the sales and presents.
We ran into an Ork player who built 9 squads of shootas (9 x 5 per squad = 45 Orks in the group), and ran them around in one giant blob.
Around that same time, Chris got himself a Distort Cannon, which has an ability called singularity which sucks everything into a black hole in an area.
the crazy thing i noticed about this is that, despite such huge casualties, the game was barely even half over at that point so obviously they came back and made a game of it at least.
well....the massive enemy casualties sent the Tyrranids into a blood rage which broke the mind control hold the Eldar had over them. This led to the Tyrranids attacking their former masters the Space Marines and resulted in much loss of human Tanks and Tactical Marines.
depending on my strategy fix, i might rejoin again once expansion comes out. Been playing mostly single RPGs lately, this could be good change of pace. When is expansion will be out?
Gamestop lists it as March, 30th. That's a Tuesday, the normal day that games ship to stores, so it's probably accurate. So, about 4 months away now.
The developers have already said there's going to be a lot of balance changes in Chaos Rising, stuff they didn't have the time or budget to do with normal balance patches, especially so since now there's a new unit, and likely a new commander, for each army. Sadly, it's looking like we're stuck with the current balance scheme until then.
I thought it'd be a commander unit too. The good news is, when he uses his ability, it sounds like he's a monster in melee, meaning SM now have a competant melee unit
So, looks like no current armies are getting new commanders. Just the 3 new Chaos commanders for multiplayer.
Tyranids might get extra changes though since they have a new codex out and GW might mandate extra changes to promote them. We can be pretty sure that their new unit is some kind of genestealer unit though, especially since part of the expansion takes place on a space hulk, the traditional home of the genestealer.
Eldar get the Wraithguard, similar to the wraithlord, but is a heavy infantry unit that's also anti-heavy and anti-vehicle (from the tabletop stats).
Which leaves the Ork's new unit as the big unknown. I can't think of anything that Orks really need. They are surprisingly complete of their codex, and stikkbommas are an extra unit from a previous codex.
It actually common speculation that Nids are getting two new units but losing one they have now (normal lictor). This is backed up by the very brief appearance of two new nid units in one of the videos that were posted.
So how many people are still playing this mutiplayer? I'd love to get in on some 3 vs 3 action with my fellow OOers. It'll take me a few matches to get back up to scratch, but I shouldn't be too terrible while I get back into it...
If you are flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit - Mitch Hedberg
I'm in the same boat, kinda. Campaign is a blast, especially coop, and last stand is fun (though limited). I just found ranked multiplayer games overly stressful after a while and friendly (non-ranked) games never really caught on with any of the folks I played with.
The problem is we always seem to have an odd number of people. That's mainly why Turtle, Chris and I mostly play together. The other problem being that since the three of us have more or less played since launch we can't fairly compete against newcomers. That said we're always open to people who want to learn or need suggestions.
If there was enough interest in a friendly 3v3 I'm sure we could mix up the teams enough to balance things out a bit as long as people go into it with a sense of humor.
Lordnine wrote:The problem is we always seem to have an odd number of people. That's mainly why Turtle, Chris and I mostly play together. The other problem being that since the three of us have more or less played since launch we can't fairly compete against newcomers. That said we're always open to people who want to learn or need suggestions.
If there was enough interest in a friendly 3v3 I'm sure we could mix up the teams enough to balance things out a bit as long as people go into it with a sense of humor.
Yeah, we're actually like second tier competitive at this point, so outright matches against us might not be the best ideas. That said, I am very, very willing to train people up to the point of being pretty darn good at the game.
Lordnine wrote:The problem is we always seem to have an odd number of people. That's mainly why Turtle, Chris and I mostly play together. The other problem being that since the three of us have more or less played since launch we can't fairly compete against newcomers. That said we're always open to people who want to learn or need suggestions.
If there was enough interest in a friendly 3v3 I'm sure we could mix up the teams enough to balance things out a bit as long as people go into it with a sense of humor.
Yeah, we're actually like second tier competitive at this point, so outright matches against us might not be the best ideas. That said, I am very, very willing to train people up to the point of being pretty darn good at the game.
Well, my thinking also was that the three of you don't live together right? I mean possibly if, say, Chris wasn't around someone else could be the 3rd to play against some random strangers...
If you are flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit - Mitch Hedberg
Weirdboy is in!
I'm amused by how faithful it seems, he CAN actually hurt friendly units!
Upgrades:
Bigga Brains – Increase the Weirdboy’s health and grants the Over Dere! ability which allows the Weirdboy to fling nearby Orks through the air without causing them any damage. It’s not quite as graceful as teleportation, but it can get the job done.
Warphead – Increase the Weirdboy’s energy and grants the Foot of Gork ability. The mighty foot of the Ork god Gork is summoned to stomp on enemies, stunning and damaging them.
Warpath – Delays the Weirdboy’s death explosion and grants the Warpath ability. When toggled on, Warpath increases the movement speed of nearby Orks and reduces the damage they take.
Balance? Wutz dat?
GORKSTOMP!
*everyone knows balance is totally unorky*
not likely anyone cares strongly at this point, but they announced the addition of two more heroes to Last Stand (one of which is the hive tyrant, currently on view over at the community site).
holy shit, free for all? Seeing as this stands a good chance of making friendly games a realistic possibility again, this may have just broken my "wait 6 months until issues are fixed" attitude toward this one.
Free for all would definitely help with situations where we've got people wanting to join in, but not enough to fill out two teams. It can also level things out since if you run into an experienced player, you can back off and let him start fighting someone else.
The weirdboy looks devastating to clustered fragile units, he's definitely the Tier 2 Ork artillery. Don't worry too much though, most of that video is of single player, and in single player, enemy units tend to be extremely fragile.
I'm still wondering what other balance changes they've made that aren't so clear cut as a new unit. The big issues for this current version is not really the 1-2 devastating units, instead it's in the cost effectiveness for certain units. Guardian spam and the like are very cost effective in the early game.
Seeing replays over the last few months, scouts seem ridiculously cost-effective in the early game. One of the best players I've ever seen (Pega) starts every one of his 1v1 matches with three scout squads and almost always takes significant map control with those alone. They're fast, they do significant damage, they're strong antimelee with the shotgun, they're cheap to build and reinforce... etc. I watch him honestly not knowing what I would do to combat it. How do scouts seem to you now?
Scouts drop faster than any other unit in the game. To use them the way Pega/NoisyElmo uses them requires a level of micro and situational awareness that is equal to, well, Koreans playing high level Starcraft.
You can lose a scout squad in 2 seconds if you mismicro them in any way. Their best weapon upgrade requires you to get close to use, same for grenades. If your opponent has decent shooting he'll drop them pretty quickly.
They do move fast, and can hit hard in the right circumstances, but the vast majority of us, even pro-level players will not be able to use them like he does.
He also makes extremely good use of the force commander when he's using the 3 scout start.
Great Unclean One takes a crazy amount of damage. The Avatar can't take that kind of punishment and he's not a caster. I wonder if he will be getting a buff as well. Also, did I see a Demon Prince? It looked too small but not sure what else it could have been.
The avatar will likely be fine tuned. But also realize that in the tabletop game, nurgle units tend to be high health units. It doesn't look to take any more damage than an avatar can take either.
One thing I did spot was the predator tank upgrade to twin linked las cannons in multiplayer, saw that one before but feared it was just a SP upgrade. But dreadnoughts getting a twin linked las cannon is new, you can see one armed with it. I'd definitely use that upgrade for a tougher AV option.
Well it took fire from two preds, some infantry and a drednaught for about a minute and made them retreat. If you think the avatar can do that you need to play Eldar more.
Also, it's been shown that the GUO has an ability that can almost one shot a tac squad as well as a plague ability that does constant AOE and can move. Which makes him a pretty powerful caster. Aside from being slow I'm not seeing much of a weakness there.
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