Spread Range For Abilities Doesn't Work Well

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15 days ago
Feb 3, 2025, 2:37:10 AM


   Is it just me, or is this mechanic for abilities kind of clunky thanks to the ridiculously small 30 meter spread radius and the way it mechanically works (A unit's banner needs to be within that 30 meter spread range to be "infected", not merely an entity from said unit)?

It seems to work devastatingly well against clumped up characters and SEMs, but even against infantry blobs, let alone spaced infantry formations, I've never seen it reach its max of 5 units. It's particularly bad against units that tend to be quite spaced out by nature of their role on the battlefield, like cav, chariots, fliers, or wardog units (making it pointless that Nurgle's Curse of The Slug army ability, complete garbage anyways, has a Spread Range at all, because it too often only ever affects one unit).

Don't get me started on how even more pointless it is that Curse of The Ancient Witch and its twin, Blessing of the Ancient Witch, from the still new-ish Lore of The Hag, have Spread Range.

Curse of The Ancient Witch would be good against units like Sword and Shield Chosen, but (due to Spread Range being so tiny, and the AI tending to space out their infantry) in practice the only practical (meaning efficient usage of WoM) use of it is in dealing with a heavily armored character with a strong shield, like Belegar.

Blessing of The Ancient Witch is somehow worse however. It's a buff spell for your missile units, with a Spread Range as well, but because you CANNOT clump missile infantry together if you want them to fire, though it can affect up to 5 units as is standard for any ability with Spread Range, you're lucky if you get TWO of your units buffed with it.

Your thoughts?

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15 days ago
Feb 3, 2025, 11:40:30 PM

If I understand you rightly, the spread range is honouring the table top.


So you could either have models of a unit impacted, or the majority of the unit has to be covered by X to be impacted.


Whether that is right or wrong for how the game should work I do not know, but that does sound like it is trying to honour general table top rules.


But yeah, that then does not work with blobs for all manner of things and then completely disregards the table top logic, so still not right.


Maybe things like that should just have a "model impacted" cap, which would definately honour warhammer tabletop.

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14 days ago
Feb 4, 2025, 2:38:18 AM

steam_16337071113996#2223 wrote:

If I understand you rightly, the spread range is honouring the table top.


So you could either have models of a unit impacted, or the majority of the unit has to be covered by X to be impacted.


Whether that is right or wrong for how the game should work I do not know, but that does sound like it is trying to honour general table top rules.


But yeah, that then does not work with blobs for all manner of things and then completely disregards the table top logic, so still not right.


Maybe things like that should just have a "model impacted" cap, which would definately honour warhammer tabletop.

No, the bit about the banner has nothing to do with TT.

The importance of the banner is that mechanically, as far as attack orders, spell targeting, and relevant in this case, ability targeting, are concerned, a unit's banner IS the unit.

Another good example of that is that with direct damage spells, it doesn't matter if an entity of a multi-entity unit is in range of your spell's cast range, because direct damage spells are cast on the unit's banner, if the unit's banner is out of the spell's cast range, you can't cast that spell that must be cast on an enemy unit.

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14 days ago
Feb 4, 2025, 2:56:03 AM

ThatLegoDude#3033 wrote:

steam_16337071113996#2223 wrote:

If I understand you rightly, the spread range is honouring the table top.


So you could either have models of a unit impacted, or the majority of the unit has to be covered by X to be impacted.


Whether that is right or wrong for how the game should work I do not know, but that does sound like it is trying to honour general table top rules.


But yeah, that then does not work with blobs for all manner of things and then completely disregards the table top logic, so still not right.


Maybe things like that should just have a "model impacted" cap, which would definately honour warhammer tabletop.

No, the bit about the banner has nothing to do with TT.

The importance of the banner is that mechanically, as far as attack orders, spell targeting, and relevant in this case, ability targeting, are concerned, a unit's banner IS the unit.

Another good example of that is that with direct damage spells, it doesn't matter if an entity of a multi-entity unit is in range of your spell's cast range, because direct damage spells are cast on the unit's banner, if the unit's banner is out of the spell's cast range, you can't cast that spell that must be cast on an enemy unit.

ah, I see what you mean now, I did misread it!


Yeah that doesn't make sense, should be model based, but banner in range is an odd way to do it from the TT perspective. But at the same time, you can shoot and cast abilities/spells at things you can't see, like behind a wall in siege, which is equally as odd.



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13 days ago
Feb 5, 2025, 4:03:00 AM

ThatLegoDude#3033 wrote:


   Is it just me, or is this mechanic for abilities kind of clunky thanks to the ridiculously small 30 meter spread radius and the way it mechanically works (A unit's banner needs to be within that 30 meter spread range to be "infected", not merely an entity from said unit)?

It seems to work devastatingly well against clumped up characters and SEMs, but even against infantry blobs, let alone spaced infantry formations, I've never seen it reach its max of 5 units. It's particularly bad against units that tend to be quite spaced out by nature of their role on the battlefield, like cav, chariots, fliers, or wardog units (making it pointless that Nurgle's Curse of The Slug army ability, complete garbage anyways, has a Spread Range at all, because it too often only ever affects one unit).

Don't get me started on how even more pointless it is that Curse of The Ancient Witch and its twin, Blessing of the Ancient Witch, from the still new-ish Lore of The Hag, have Spread Range.

Curse of The Ancient Witch would be good against units like Sword and Shield Chosen, but (due to Spread Range being so tiny, and the AI tending to space out their infantry) in practice the only practical (meaning efficient usage of WoM) use of it is in dealing with a heavily armored character with a strong shield, like Belegar.

Blessing of The Ancient Witch is somehow worse however. It's a buff spell for your missile units, with a Spread Range as well, but because you CANNOT clump missile infantry together if you want them to fire, though it can affect up to 5 units as is standard for any ability with Spread Range, you're lucky if you get TWO of your units buffed with it.

Your thoughts?

Spells should have been based on the range of the spell and the maximum number of units that can be TARGETED. If a spell has a range of 150 all units within the wizard's range should be able to be SELECTED by the wizard to have the spell casted upon them. Obviously vortex, breath, and wind spells wouldn't be implemented that way. 

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7 days ago
Feb 11, 2025, 4:20:21 PM

Kind of late but with ultra 30 is just a bit tight. 40 hits a better balance of consistently spreading but not being guarenteed to spread.

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