Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Aeldari Community Rules Update

After the changes in Chapter Approved, it put the Phantom in a more awkward spot.  It felt out of place at 2400 pts and still it can be easily obliterated by a Warhound.  In workshopping and tweaking one thing became readily apparent... the MACRO rule has to change.  For this purpose we've workshopped it to "Macro weapons are heavy weapons that may not fire overwatch.  In addition successful invulnerable saves must be rerolled against Macro Weapons."  This is for all weapons with the MACRO rule and the rule now scales appropriately rather than being absurdly good against Titanic units and useless against non-titanic weapons.

From there it became a matter of fine tuning units, which mostly only took minor changes and point adjustments to keep them in line with other titanic units.  The Phantom, however, still needed a lot of playtesting.   Even after the considerable number of changes I made the Phantom was, we were shocked to find, still bad.  Against an equal points force it was often in its last or next to last tier by the end of the first turn, regardless of which player went first.  It never survived the second turn.  After testing step by step we found the two major issues were 1) it took damage too quickly, and 2) the Macro Weapons didn't do enough damage, even against non-titanic units (why is a Leman Russ able to shrug off a D Bombard?).  Then we found what was really the sweet spot:

 
With the save already at 2+ and the T at 12, I was leaning to giving it a -1 to hit all the time, not just when it charged or assaulted, but at the suggestion of others tried T14, and to my surprise that small tweak seemed to slow things down a bit, keeping the Phantom in the second tier by the end of the first turn.  In addition the tweaked macro weapons (originally tested as "fires twice at the same target") made the primary weapons feel substantially dangerous, even moreso than the other solid weapons. 


Above: My favourite moment from playtesting.

With these changes it sits between the Reaver and Warlord and is pointed accordingly.

For those wanting an updated version the rules they can be found: HERE
Please note: Damage Tiers or on the fluff/image page.