Deathmaster is one of my favorite characters in the trilogy and a lord I constantly try to make work in multiplayer with embarassingly low degrees of success. The first time I saw Yuan Bo's Execute ability, I thought it would be the perfect thematic ability for literally one of the best assassins in the game. I told myself that CA wouldn't do it because the ability was a defintive and unique part of Yuan Bo's character...but now wait a damn minute, it looks like one of the new Ogre heroes has gained the ability as well. 

Why not also give it, or a similar type ability, to the meanest and greasiest murderer in the entire Under Empire? He needs some help as he feels very underwhelming in multiplayer due to his low mass and being melee only, which means it is very easy for his targets to simply run away from him even with his net (it never seems to last its full duration and every game a unit will simply move out/get bumped out of the root and continue running). A ranged assassination coup de grace would solve his problem of actually securing the kill on his quarry. 

There is precedent of newer abilities being given to older units like Glorious Charge going to the Royal Altdorf Gryphites. Deathmaster could keep Whirl of Weeping Blades (which he needs to escape from blobs), but Cloak of Shadows has been badly powercrept out of relevance and was never that good to begin with. Anyone else think it would be cool to replace it with an Execute type ability?

I don't like the execute ability, or abilities that let you click on a unit and cause damage because it's cheap and there is no counter.

Snikch has a few things that hold him back. Low health means he's always going to be prime targes to things like spirit leech, rancid visitations, and execute. And Like all skaven characters, he has low knockdown resist, so even when you do get him on a target, he often falls over and spends a lot of his time getting up.

I'd like to see these things fixed by either, giving him more health or some sort of spell resist and increasing his knockdown resist.

And he was actually nerfed not long after his dlc. His scaling damage used to be more impactful but was reduced. Now you don't really see much impact from it so they could restore it back to what it used to be.

That is true, the Execute abilities are cheap. Point, click, dead and nothing you can do about it. Maybe we shouldn't have more of that in the game. Execute just felt like a good thematic sort of ability for him because he should be an apex level duelist/Lord killer, but he feels increasingly overmatched as the DLCs roll on. I also remember early Snikch - the scaling damage was actually something you had to respect, and functioned like a less lazy version of Execute. 

I just wish Deathmaster felt more dangerous - he's supposed to be this badass assassin, but spends the whole game on his butt or hiding because, as you mentioned, he is incredibly easy to Lord snipe when out of stealth. I like the idea of him getting spell resist...overcast Rancid Visitations is brutal. 

Also, his snare is busted. It does not last its full duration and even if it did, 7 seconds is too short. Marcus Wolfheart's Hunter's Snare is 11s, and Prey of Anath Raema is 16s. I know that each of those has a limited number of casts, but Net of Amyntok is 20s. 7s is way too short for him to close the gap and do any meaningful damage, especially against flying Lords. as I mentioned, units frequently leave the sigil and run away before its duration is complete. 

Thanks for replying. I like your suggestions. Hopefully someone at CA agrees. I would also love it if down the line someone at CA looked at his Cloak of Shadows...unless I'm missing something, it feels very meh for 200 gold. 

Execute would be thematic I agree, but as an honourable rat, I can't accept it on my beloved Deathmaster. 

His snare is a very game 2 balanced item. If he were introduced now it would have a damage component and last 20 seconds like Karanak's. It does have the aoe explosion damage but it's difficult to pull off. Not that I want it to do any damage to SEs. Call me old fashioned but I like my melee assassin characters to do their damage in melee.

If we're lucky, when Skaven get their Thanquol dlc, they'll do a pass on all the other lords and give them a bit of love. Throt still needs some juice and at some point during the games lifespan, Queek will be viable in mp.

Yeah I know none of this will change for a while, and I like where Skaven are right now for MP in general. I agree about Throt - I was glad when he got the price reduction, but he still feels underwhelming. Also his Packmaster buddy is just awful. I think the culprit is that his leadership is just too low, and the "Running with the Pack" heal is weak (if you watch in slow motion, it flickers on and off between attack animations for very little output). 

I agree with you about his snare and I don't want it to damage its target, I just wish it lasted longer, or applied a debuff like Trophy Heads to soften up the target. I always thought it was odd that he didn't get an ability like that. I imagine it is very hard to balance a game over this many years, and other than the Thunderbarge and Landship CA has been doing a good job lately in my opinion. But one DLC at a time...I was watching preview videos of the new Heroes and Lords and just thought about how it would be great to send Deathmaster against these bruising Khorne/Ogre lords, but with his current kit I think my favorite infamous Lord killer would be smashed into a rat colored stain in the ground. 

It's going to be interesting to compare Throt to the new Arbaal LL for Khorne as they are both 95 speed on their mounts. If, as I suspect, Throt looks like a joke compared to Arbaal, we will be able to point to this and ask for some buffs. Leadership and his AL bonus on his brood horror.

Speaking to your nerf of Scaling damage, I just played a multiplayer game where my Deathmaster isolated and killed the other player's Drycha. His Scaling Dmg never did more than 500 dmg to her even as her HP dropped. I know it's an isolated sample, but it's still pretty pathetic. Compared with some of the dmg output in WH3 (pushing 1K), this feels pretty lame and certainly underwhelming compared with the Execute ability point-and-click nuking someone who is at 20% HP. Depending on the character, that can be a hell of a lot more than 500 dmg. 

Also wow, been playing for years and didn't realize Throat lost AL on his mount. And just realized he only has 60 leadership even when mounted...I guess there is a reason I never bring him. The generic Warlord is better on a Brood Horror and is cheaper too. 

Funny you say Drycha because that's one of the few match ups I like him in. WE players like Drycha against skaven cause she's difficult to snipe with range and because of the summon. 

I just ran a test against the AI against Tamurkhan on foot, to see if the scaling damage would show up more on a lord with a bigger hp pool. The most snikch hit him for was 612 damage when Tammy was below about 20% health. That's actually not bad considering his max weapon strength is 460. There would have been some RNG involved due to Tamurkhan's armour so he could have potentially hit him harder as well. It's still not the most impactful ability though. Considering how squishy he is, it would be nice if snikch was more dangerous early on in the fight.

Regarding Throt: They just gave him a -400 gold decrease, so can you imagine how bad he was before? The warlord on the brood horror feels more effective since you can buff his leadership more and he's cheaper. I actually think Throt is better as a foot lord where you can bring his abilities to support something like a hellpit.

Just in case CA are reading this thread. Here is an example of the knockdown issue;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfSK9t0_E3c

Snikch gets knocked over four or five times in a row. This happens to a lot of foot characters but especially to Skaven ones. And imo it is a bigger problem for Snikch since he is designed as a hit and run assassin. He can't fulfil the second part of that role if he is constantly having to pick himself up off the floor.

Thanks for running that test - to me, 612 dmg is good but not amazing. For an extreme example, say Yuan Bo used Execute on an Exalted Great Unclean One - that would be instant 2700 dmg. Skarbrand with buffs popped goes over 1K dmg. Hell, Exalted Flamers do 1.1K dmg at range. I'm not advocating that Deathmaster hit that hard, he is a much less expensive rat and not a greater demon or dragon, but the power creep in the current game shows how 600 dmg does not feel that dangerous anymore, and being dangerous should be his whole thing as he brings literally nothing to the table except Lord sniping. 

Also that video you linked to - HOLY HELL. How does Deathmaster lose that fight?? I initially felt stupid for even starting this post, but now I'm glad I did. That is exactly what I'm talking about. Most feared assassin in the game gets dumpstered by a cartoon character. 

As for the B Plot of this discussion, Throt, I have never tried bringing him as a foot lord...what matchups do you try this in? I always found literally all of his abilities underwhelming in terms of keeping the Moulder monsters in a fight (ditto for Packmaster as I explained above). They just don't feel like good enough support lords to make a monster build work,  plus all the regen (which I generally love) means you can't bring them into a matchup like Khorne with all that fire damage. But I'm always looking to learn new tips from other Skaven players so if I'm missing something here let me know.

Knockdown is a pretty big impediment to melee foot characters but it's very easy to fix. There's a stat for knockdown resist and for dwarfs, sigvald, and some other characters it's at 80%. Compare their combat performance and it's apparent it provides a major offensive benefit for limit defensive losses you don't care about on you melee characters.

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dpaolino#7689 wrote:

Thanks for running that test - to me, 612 dmg is good but not amazing. For an extreme example, say Yuan Bo used Execute on an Exalted Great Unclean One - that would be instant 2700 dmg. Skarbrand with buffs popped goes over 1K dmg. Hell, Exalted Flamers do 1.1K dmg at range. I'm not advocating that Deathmaster hit that hard, he is a much less expensive rat and not a greater demon or dragon, but the power creep in the current game shows how 600 dmg does not feel that dangerous anymore, and being dangerous should be his whole thing as he brings literally nothing to the table except Lord sniping. 

Also that video you linked to - HOLY HELL. How does Deathmaster lose that fight?? I initially felt stupid for even starting this post, but now I'm glad I did. That is exactly what I'm talking about. Most feared assassin in the game gets dumpstered by a cartoon character. 

As for the B Plot of this discussion, Throt, I have never tried bringing him as a foot lord...what matchups do you try this in? I always found literally all of his abilities underwhelming in terms of keeping the Moulder monsters in a fight (ditto for Packmaster as I explained above). They just don't feel like good enough support lords to make a monster build work,  plus all the regen (which I generally love) means you can't bring them into a matchup like Khorne with all that fire damage. But I'm always looking to learn new tips from other Skaven players so if I'm missing something here let me know.

It's difficult to say where the right balance would be because it's not an activatable ability with a cooldown. You don't have to do anything to pull it off. It's something he always has enabled and benefits from. So you don't want it to be too strong. Like if a mid tier melee character like an Ogre Tyrant is missing 10% of his health, he shouldn't be getting hit for 700 damage on every swing. But as Spellbound said, too weak and it's irrelevant at the start of the battle and only noticeable when you're already in a good position. 

The other thing I need to consider more is vigour loss. I always knew about the effects, but now that you can actually see it on the unit cards, it really brings home how much of a disadvantage melee lords are at compared to caster lords, who can get their value back easily with magic. I was thinking about something like Perfect Vigour for Snikch, who doesn't have the craziest stats to begin with, and you can kind of convince yourself that it makes sense thematically since he's this highly trained weapon.

I was trying Throt out against Slaanesh, since Slaanesh are the masters of gooning your lord right now. The idea is that he is much harder to snipe on foot and he can help buff and heal your hellpit, and give BvL to your chaff to try and drag down their seekers and fiends. He's probably not the best choice but I think he is viable there.

I actually really like the Hellpit against Khorne. The fire damage is a worry but in my experience Khorne players love to go wide against Skaven, with very few tools to take down a big SEM like the Thing-Thing. They will bring a mino GW but they don't have flaming attacks and valkia doesn't have the dps or the health to go toe-to-toe with it. Maybe it will be different with Arbaal being the new hotness. 

Remove all knockdown for living models, restrict it to killed models. Immediately solves any issue it has while preserving the "spectacle".

I feel like the knockdown comments could be its own thread...I always hated it when single entities are fighting because if you're the one knocking the enemy away it does almost zero dmg (which makes no sense), but if you're the recipient you can't fight back. So it frustrates both sides, and as well know, frustration is great for gameplay. Plus when units charge someone and go flying off them like a ping pong ball, I cringe. I understand it if my unit was the one being charged, but when its the one doing the charging and still goes flying like the enemy is made of Flubber it defies all the laws of Newtonian physics. 

I had thought about how Scaling Dmg isn't an activatable, but by the time its relevant it's only impactful for a fraction of the unit's combat rolls. So it's still niche and he essentially specializes at finishing off already injured enemy leaders. Which is fine, its just why I initially wanted him to be better at executing. Its funny...I was going to say that giving him a ranged Execute would be OP but then I realized that that's literally how the existing Execute ability works. I feel like I've come full circle and I'm back to my original position that he should get one - dude has a huge ninja star on his belt, just say that he throws that and you have the lore justification, plus you bypass all his knockdown jank and inability to hit lords kiting him or flying above him Spirit Leeching him. Like, if you're going to keep Execute in the game, then Deathmaster should get it. I also like your perfect vigor suggestion. 

I'll try Throt vs Slaanesh, I really like bring Hellpit in that machtup. I don't bring it vs Khorne bc, as you said, Minos with GW scare the hell out of me, but I'll give it a try. 

Yeah I don't really see a reason why foot characters shouldn't have 80% knockdown resist. It's really aggravating that high elf caster heroes are virtually unkillable on foot compared to chaos dwarf ones even though latter pay double for supposedly better defensive stats. The constant knockdowns also make it virtually impossible for Karanak to kill foot casters, he is better off just hanging close to without actually attacking for the silence.