Balancing Vampire Counts

crimsonsun#1168

Arclyte said:

Gaze of Nagash has the potential to 1 shot heros on Large if all missiles hit

Everyone is up in arms over Spirit Leach (which is too strong I agree), but if RNG is on your side Gaze outdamages it easily

Hmm not from what I've seen, what unit size do you play on?

Hogarhhughes

Arclyte said:

Gaze of Nagash has the potential to 1 shot heros on Large if all missiles hit

Everyone is up in arms over Spirit Leach (which is too strong I agree), but if RNG is on your side Gaze outdamages it easily

Right? Gaze of Nagash is especially capable if your caster is in the air, and is much better at killing than fireball. I've gotten lucky and killed both a lord and a hero behind him with a single overcast, on medium unit scale.

Not that I want it to be nerfed, I'm glad that spirit leech is receiving all the negative attention. Really I enjoy the lore of vampires much more than the lore of death, a group heal and aimed vortex spell are incredibly powerful.

Kayosiv#7489

I haven't had much success with Gaze of Nagash, but will test it more with some of this in mind.

Arclyte

I have a replay when I was testing it. It was 1v1, Mannfred on zombie dragon VS Karl Franz on Deathclaw

Overcasted Gaze of Nagash on Large unit settings one shotted Karl

KiriONE

Well I can't speak for multiplayer but as far as a VH/Legendary campaign is concerned I just see a lot of issues with the mid/late game armies of VCs.

But the mid/late game is so weak. Skeleton Units (oh, why are graveguard not skeletons again? becuase they are skeletons wearing armor?) become obsolete almost instantly. The whole upper tier of units can almost completely be ignored. If it wasn't for the fact vampire and library chains generate income, I bet most players would ignore them.

I think most of the issues VC are seeing come from the fact their two key selling points, Magic & Fear, aren't implemented correctly/fully. We all know about the magic scaling, but then the Fear mechanics suffer from the same issue it does on the tabletop (full disclosure I'm a 40K player). That is, most units have ways to ignore fear or have high enough thresholds for fear tests, and even when they do fail (a low probability) the consequences are rather forgettable.

Ethereal units just feel straight up bugged, along with Raise Dead mechanics. I am putting my Legendary playthrough back in the coffin until things get sorted out becuase I feel like I'm playing a beta as far as combat mechanics are concerned.

I love the concept of where the faction is supposed to go, but it's just not there yet.

Not to mention that their economy is kinda rubbish. Why on earth is there an increase in army upkeep with each army. What is the point of this on top of already expensive, but average units.

Asamu#6386

Navinor said:

Well i think too, the zombies should get a slight buff.

If you have to choose between sekeletons and zombies you will always recruit skeletons when you have to.

Normally i would not even take the normal skeletons in the end, but zombies are like peasants in another total war game.

You would NEVER recruit this kind of units.

They should have more durability, because they are a "meat wall".

In MP, people always take the Zombies over skeletons because of how cheap they are. Half the price with more HP makes them better, despite the drop in combat stats. Occasionally they take Skeleton spearmen as well for the anti-large damage. The skeletons won't be killing anything either, so you might as well go for the extra cheap wall of meat to bog down the enemy units while the Crypt Horrors do all the damage.

On that note: Crypt horrors are too good and should probably cost 100-200 more or have their AP damage reduced.

Kayosiv#7489

Yeah I made the point that skeletons are pointless because zombies are just more durable for half the price, despite the terrible speed. Spearman have a point because of the anti-large bonus, but regular skeletons suffer from lack of clear role.

Crypt horrors on the tabletop have always been extremely good value wise, but not very potent offesnively against, get this, targets with high armor. That's what the vampires and great weapon grave guard are for. With crypt horrors being good at getting through armor, being durable, and being cheap, I"m not sure what you're NOT supposed to use them for, as they seem well suited to fight literally everything. I'd like to see them cemented as tanky and poison dealing monstrous infantry while the vargheists have their role be the super damage dealers that can't take a hit back very well.

Tennisgolfboll#5877

AggonyDuck said:

Cairn Wraiths excel as an anti-ap and anti-shock unit, particularly against heavily armoured ap/shock units. Thanks to their physical resistance, they are one of the few units that can tank units with great weapons. So for example I wouldn't recommend using them against Longbeards as they have low ap damage, low charge, good attack and defense and immunity to Terror. On the other hand I could recommend them against Hammerers or Longbeards with Great Weapons when facing the Dwarves. They are also considerably faster than regular infantry, so they have the liberty to choose engagements and pull back if they end up in a bad engagement. Think of them more as semi-cavalry that's better in sustained melee than charges and you have a better idea of how to use them.

You are right and they are cluless.

They just dont get the basics to be honest

MartialDoctor

Kayosiv said:

Spirit Leach: This spell is entirely too effective. Killing lords in 2-4 casts, it is just plain unfair. In the tabletop, the effectiveness of this spell was based on the leadership rating of an opponent. Make this the case in Total War Warhammer. It should do minimal damage to high leadership opponents but should be devestating to those with low or routing leadership. That way, timing and casting it with skill and using it in combination terror and other spells like doom & darkness will be important. As it, it is a no brainer fire and forget spell that is too powerful and very boring.

I'm glad this has been brought up. I had a player in MP use this against me the other day. He was able to just about kill Grimgor without even touching him. Constantly hit me with Leach until he was almost dead and then Grimgor simply retreated...

This is one thing that definitely needs balancing; I also like your suggestion for it.

KiriONE

tennisgolfboll said:

You are right and they are cluless.

They just dont get the basics to be honest

Well there's two aspects of Cairn Wraiths that you can base this discussion on: There's Multiplayer, which is just their raw stats, and then there's their Campaign. I think OP's discussion, and most others in this thread are looking at this from the campaign point of view. For what they cost to get to, recruit, and upkeep AND research to improve, I think you can do the exact same thing with Graveguard and Crypt Horrors.

While the applications against anti-army or infantry in general is plausible and they do well. I don't know if they fully justify the investment just yet.

Diplomatt

crypt horrors are OP as ****

Kayosiv#7489

crimsonsun said:

Arclyte said:

Gaze of Nagash has the potential to 1 shot heros on Large if all missiles hit

Everyone is up in arms over Spirit Leach (which is too strong I agree), but if RNG is on your side Gaze outdamages it easily

Hmm not from what I've seen, what unit size do you play on?

So I've been doing a fair number of multiplayer games as well as testing and I have found the following.

Spirit leach does around 800-1100 damage.

Gaze of Nagash does between 0 and 800 when used. It does between 0 and nearly 2000 if over-casted depending on if all missiles hit.

Spirit leach has a much lower top end, but it can't miss. It is generally the stronger spell because RNG can't make it do nothing. However, full strength magic missiles are insanely strong.

The problem is that gaze of nagash is the worst magic missile in the game. It is from what I can find, identical to the magic missiles in the little WAAAGH, light, fire, lore etc, but costs 8 mana instead of 5 or 6 for no real gain.

I had a game where a light wizard 3 shot my vampire lord with his magic missile. I had a game where I literally 2 shot an Azhag on the Slaughterer on Skull Muncha (almost 4000 health) with two overcasted gaze of Nagash spells.

All the direct damage spells (and accuse) seem to be doing too much damage, with the exception of transmutation from the lore of metal. It only does 500-600 damage and for it's high mana cost is underwhelming.

Doriel

Kayosiv said:

crimsonsun said:

Arclyte said:

Gaze of Nagash has the potential to 1 shot heros on Large if all missiles hit

Everyone is up in arms over Spirit Leach (which is too strong I agree), but if RNG is on your side Gaze outdamages it easily

Hmm not from what I've seen, what unit size do you play on?

All the direct damage spells (and accuse) seem to be doing too much damage, with the exception of transmutation from the lore of metal. It only does 500-600 damage and for it's high mana cost is underwhelming.

Final Tansmutation deal about 1500 damage when overcast with a range of 200m. It cost a lot of WoM but 200 m range is huge for a spell like that.

Kayosiv#7489

I hadn't tried overcasting it. Good to know.

HornyKhornsHorns#2880

crypt horrors are too strong for 800 gold i agree, they need small price increase, 100-200 gold,.

Flurry

manfred and other vamp lords are too strong and vc units are too weak.

Kayosiv#7489

antipeople said:

crypt horrors are too strong for 800 gold i agree, they need small price increase, 100-200 gold,.

I would much prefer if they stayed similarly priced but lost armor piercing. They are not armor piercing in the tabletop, the role is already covered by grave guard with great weapons and cairn wraiths, and that armor piercing belongs on varghulfs.

Flurry said:

manfred and other vamp lords are too strong and vc units are too weak.

That is exactly how the faction is meant to work.

#940261

I've tried using black coach and it was worthless not only from price prospective, but also as unit taking up a slot in your army. Instead of jumping to conclusions, I created a thread "Tips on using black coach". No useful tips followed and many forum users stated, that black coach was indeed useless. Someone adviced me to write my feedback in this topic. So here I am. Please, do something about black coach.

Einarial

Flurry said:

manfred and other vamp lords are too strong and vc units are too weak.

Kayosiv said:

That is exactly how the faction is meant to work.

Pretty much this.

Carl_Bar

Wrote this for another forum but here's my thoughts on late game VC units:

Ethereal Units: I'll talk about the two units individually in a moment but i wanted to take a stab at this property first as it has some very important effects when combined with both units lack of armour. Simply but ethereal reduces all physical damage to 25% of normal, this includes AP damage and Bonus vs X types. The latter of which i'm pretty sure bypasses armour as well. Thus the fact that Etheral units reduce all this is really cool as it cuts down the damage of your typical AP unit a LOT and anti-X units with AP even more. The ultimate example is Grave Guard, (or similar like greatswords), vs Crypt Wraiths, against most other infantry units they deal in the mid 30 damage per swing range, against ethereal infantry units, (so crypt wraiths), it's reduced to to 11.5 which may or may not round one way or the other. As a result they're naturally strong against armour piercing units and much less at a disadvantage vs "good vs X" type units. The downside is that units without armour piercing get the full amount of damage past their non-existent armour. Normally such units unless fighting one of the few very low armour units only get around a fifth of their damage past armour. Thus etheral units let in a quarter of the units total damage. Which means compared to standard armour piercing units they actually perform worse vs non-armour piercing units. This is all exacerbated by the fact that they have very low health for units of their type, half or less. So unless they're fighting units against which they have a significant advantage over Grave Guard with Great weapons they're pretty much allways going to perform worse.

Crypt Wraiths: Remember all my comments above. Yeah they apply in full. And thats the issue. They actually worked out about even with Grave Guard with Great Weapons in a Vs fight. But that is not a good thing, they may be slightly cheaper and not anti-infantry but Grave guard or similar units are basically what they're supposed to be strongest against, so having them come out that much weaker really hammers home the point that they pretty cost inefficient. Sure they've got Terror, (though i've yet to ever see that do a dammed thing), and they're faster, (not insignificant), but thats about their only benefit for cost.

Hexawraiths: Oddly these have been doing quite well. From looking at their raw data entries on their weapons i'm pretty confident this is down to their fire damage. Some testing shows that the ignition amount on a weapon is effectively further bonus damage that ignores armour, so effectively they have a swing of 42 damage a time since they have 10 ignition, which is really heavy duty so they have really, really, nasty damage output. They've even come closer when i got curious to beating demigryphs than anything else i've tried in a similar cost region. They're not necessarily the best heavy cav in the game but they're quite strong. They're probably, (it's very hard to judge tbh, they're right up there expense wise, but theres only one other AP cav in the game and they're agreed to be very OP atm so there's no good reference points), worth their price overall. Which makes them freaking unique amongst high end undead units at the moment. My biggest complaint is that they and crypt wraiths cover too much of the same ground.

Black Coach: Cost for Cost these are absolutely terrible. Despite having armour piercing attacks that Black Knights lack these do far, far, far, far worse than black knights in combat. Having nosied over the the weapon stats and had a play with the other chariots it all comes back to the point that it is just a single model, so in addition to being easier to lap around and thus get flank and rear attack morale penalties on it, it's damage output per attack isn't actually very high overall by comparison even that it has the best numbers. It's true that it dosen;t suffer falloff from casualties of course but it still means that whilst other chariots still have most of their health left they do quite a bit better damage output. It's also not especially healthy and the leadership is just downright diabolically bad. Whilst poor leadership is kind of an Undead thing, even by that measure it's bad. Which means it starts crumbling early and often which just makes all that armour and other benefits kinda irellevent. It's sole real claim to fame is it's clickies, but these are so long cooldown wise and so short in duration that it's very arguable if they make much difference at all.

Big Gribbles, (Giant's, Varghjulf's, Terrorgheist;s, Giant Spider, e.t.c.): I want to have a quick discussion on the functioning of big gribbles before i move onto discussing the Varghulf and Terrorgheist. All of them once you realise that they split their listed damage value between all the targets they hit deal far lower "DPS", (if that makes sense), than typical units because the damage per swing isn't very exceptional and neither is the swing rate and they actual swing at fewer models than a typical unit will. On the flip side they mostly don't have enough space to come under attack from as many models as a typical infantry unit and for the non-undead big gribbles have the best total HP and often other defensive stats of the entire army. Add that to the disruption effect of their multi-hit attacks and the big gribbles have an interesting situation where they generally take longer to do a given amount of damage, but they also take longer to receive a given amount of damage so it evens out. And since their combat ability does not degrade with damage taken and they usually have the highest total hit points so they can keep fighting way longer than the rest. The only other really common point is that the very small size, (relatively speaking ofc), for units to attack with means that in combination with their love of wandering into the thick of it they quickly and often end up surrounded and thus suffering the attacked in flank and rear leadership penalty, their tendency towards more protracted fights also tends to leave them suffering from the tired and exhausted penalties before the fight ios very old.

Obviously most of the big gribbles have varying degrees of exceptions to all of the above, thats how they're unique with their own strengths and weaknesses, but it provides a sort of ready comparison point for analysis.

Varghulf: All of the prior points about big gribbles in general apply to the Varghulf. It's not actually despite it's listed damage the lowest damage output of all of the, that honour goes to the Terrorgheist as the Varghulf has quite a rapid attack rate. But it's still a lot weaker than all the other big gribbles. And that means that in addition to the -14 penalty for being attacked in the rear and the -6 for being attacked in the flank it's often also got the -6 penalty for being in melee, (which seems to refer to being "in a melee your considered to be losing" in reality). Add that to the -8 for being exhausted and it's allready at -34 leadership when it only has 45 base. Damage is complicaited but the penalty for it becomes large enough to add upto a total of zero at quite low total lost health and with the lowest health of all the big gribbles it doesn't take a lot of damage before it starts crumbling which in the end will still outstrip its other damage intake which means it's suddenly taking damage a lot faster than normal. Needless to say that ends very, very badly for it's effectiveness. Breaking the hundred kill mark without losing it is very rare. Given how easily so much other stuff, much of it not AP has little trouble breaking said mark whilst being much cheaper it's hard to argue it's cost efficient, and with such a big deficit in health and damage output to the other gribbles i'm not sure a simple leadership buff alone would fix things. It may be the cheapest big gribble, but thats like saying reiksguard are cheaper than demigryphs. True but not by that much. Nor do i think it would be a good idea to just buff it's leadership alone. We don't want it treading the same ground as hexawraiths and crypt wraiths.

Terrorgheist: As noted it's odly got lower damage output over time than the varghulf, but not by much and it has better health. It's also got lower leadership but what i observed in testing was that it was more often considered to be winning the fight than the varghulf so it not only didn't get a -6 penalty, it got a +6 bonus, (typically, some file digging indicates it can be 4, 6 or 8), which is a more than the 8 point change in the leadership which is larger than the drop in base leadership between the two. So overall in the real world it's leadership holds up a bit better than the Varghulf's. I suspect the poison is the source of it, it makes it take quite a bit less damage which means it also suffers from the damage leadership drop more slowly. It all adds up to it starting to crumble slower leading to it getting to do more damage which makes it more effective of the two overall. But simple testing made it painfully clear that it's not even remotely in the same league as any of the other big gribbles in it's cost class. I know it might sound strange given how much flak we've all given it in the campaign. But you have to remember the campaign gives it a lot of ways to boost it's leadership and other stats, often though not allways in ways or to degrees you either can't for other races or especially, not to the same degree. They don't stop it from being fairly weak by the big gribble standards, but they paper over a lot of it.

PSEUDO EDIT: Okay i've gone digging through the morale penalty files. Looks like the -6 for in melee is a penalty for losing more than X% of your unit health in a 60 second time period. Makes sense the Varghulf would suffer from it and the terrorgheist wouldn't most of the time. Only emphasizes more how lower health totals hurt big gribble effectiveness.

For the benefit of someone who was asking how it works, (worked all this out after writing the above btw):

Fear inflicts a -10 morale penalty on anything fighting a fear causer unless it's immune to psychology or causes fear itself. Terror does the same [plus if the unit fighting it drops below 14 morale it will flee for 12 seconds. if it's morale is still above 0 after 12 it will rally and be immune for 60 seconds.


Also Gaze of Nagash is just another missile that explodes on contact, albeit one with homing properties. Think of it as a souped up outrider grenade or ironbreaker satchels or w/e. You get 6 projectiles per cast standard, 12 with overcast, each does 121 AP damage to anything it hits plus another 182 AP in a small radius, (3, stone throwers are 5 for reference). it's the hardest hitting of them all.

Carl_Bar

Ok minor update to the above, it turns out upon detailed testing that bonus damage vs X type does not bypass armour, so in most cases it's 100% worthless.