New animations for giants, and a bit of speed.

Mikhail1938

Absolutely on all forums, discussions and the like, I see the same message: add buffs to giants, nerf missile units, then give them even more buffs! It’s such a feeling that no one notices this problem, except for the speed, which only the lazy didn’t write about, but it’s easy to fix: just raise their speed to the speed of the trolls and the question of speed can be closed. The main problem with giants is their attack animations and how damage is dealt during these animations. Take the same gs's idols that inflict damage throughout their attack animation, and the same with all other monsters that are designed to fight infantry that came out AFTER the giants, they all have good animations and the damage that is behind them it follows, while, it seems, the animations of the giants are intended more for fighting large units than infantry.
Maybe it would be better to ask the CA to make a new animation for the giants and add a little speed to them, rather than begging them to buff them and nerfing the missiles, although it would probably not hurt to nerf their Legolas accuracy a little ... But no, then without artillery, single monsters will be too strong. Also mby a little bonus vs inf will be good too.
So what do you think?

elkapp

On animations i think anyone can agree that they should be reworked: they're clunky at best, and years ahead of stuff like mammoths (which is still WH1 content). The main point is that mammoths (an many more) have "swipe" attack animations that give them the possibility to rotate the model (in the direction of che chosen target) and attack at the same time, while giants must first rotate (which is not great since their rotational speed is low) and only after facing the enemy they will attack. Give them swipe attacks and more than half of the work is done.

Not relevant, but i thought i might add this, a lot of single entities lack in killing power and responsiveness due to this issue of lacking any swipe attack, so one could argue CA should add swipe attacks for a lot of units.

The second issue with giants (which is not so easily solvable) are stats. Now, this is something i don't like treat approximately, so i prefer to tell you that "for what concern raw numbers, giants should get a buff". This buff can be treated as a "simple" speed buff, but one could argue that buffing their speed would make them less unique (in the context of monsters) and might make a point about pushing for other stats (or abilities, those also exist). This doesn't mean that speed isn't the right choice, i just wanted to make a point about considering the full length of all available tools.

Third issue. Biggest oned, which make the above almost irrelevant, CA won't care about fixing them, and even if they make new animations for them they won't care about buffing them. The reason is simply that the developers care, when balancing the game, only about QB gameplay, not Campaign. So when missile units are overperforming on CP, but completely fine on QB, then missile units are completely fine.
If you want more balance within Campaign such that missile units are not as strong i suggest you using mods.

Saitoh

You don't want your giants fighting infantry, you want them killing lords, heroes, and other SEMs. Giants have crap MD like every other monster but also have no armor so they take considerable amounts of damage fighting chaff. Their lack of armor doesn't matter in a duel because everything worth dueling is AP anyway. The fact that they lack BvL is deceptive, their base MA and WS are so high they have more MA and WS against large than Hellpit Abominations anyway, and they keep that against foot lords.

Spellbound55

Giants aren't anti-infantry and their animations reflect this. Rouge Idols are anti-infantry and their animations reflect this. Giants may need some changes (or missile units may need adjustments) but their animations actually let them do their job of dueling SE's quite well. From a cost standpoint they're hard to beat if you just want to put high WS attacks into a single entity.