Plasmoid's Narrow Tier Blood Bowl

[donkeyjon]

Games Workshop long ago put the onus of fixing balance issues on the individual leagues and peer pressure. This is the 40K model at this point. Nobody is trying to make the armies balanced. There will be broken combos, and it's the job of tourney/league organizers to keep the experience fun. Hence the reason for sportsmanship scores factored into tourney rankings.

The great thing about Blood Bowl isn't the number of balance problems, but just how amazingly balanced the game is in comparison to other GW products. At least half of the teams are top tier in one TV range or another. Quite frankly, in a game with so many different teams available to play, they've done a fantastic job of keeping it as balanced as it is.

[Viajero]

Originally Posted by danton

Fend on WD makes sense to me, but I would lower the cost by 10K. Lots of Woody coaches ignore Fend even as a late skill, but Enarion has two of the best WDs in the OCC and both are still around mostly due to taking Fend quite early on! WDs do need a nerf out of the box and like people have said, Dodge is only 2 TDs away!

We could spend a good few numbers of pages debating wether Fend or Side Step is more effective with regards to long term survival of WD´s I am afraid.

But that is hardly Plasmoid´s point here. His comments when it comes to nerfing Woodies, are very specific: it is about their early access to Strip Ball. The goal here would not be nerfing Woodies for the sake of it, but to limit their advantage when getting StripBall right away.

Taking Dodge away from WD not only eliminates Strip Ball as a threat early on but it actually nerfs a lot more than explicitely intended. Wether that drastic reduction in effectiveness is balanced or not in the overall Plasmoid´s scheme of narrowing tiers is left for the testers to decide obviously, but imho it is probably going to be quite a BIG nerf, not a "minor" one as suggested by Plasmoid.

If you really want to address only the StripBall issue, and that issue alone, then removing Leap or replacing it with SideStep (or whatever) at start is imho a much wiser move (and tematic reasons be damned) because the step change is not that big so you dont run the risk of overshooting when nerfing woodies and it still leaves you some manoeuvre margin with regards to nerfing. With regards to the specific StripBall issue removing Leap limits the value of StripBall greatly, specially if the ball is properly screened or caged. It obviously does not remove the Strip Ball threat alltogether but its nerfing (by removing/replacing Leap) may be enough to cater for the original Plasmoid concern about it, whithout the need to nerf so drastically by removing Dodge!

Plus, to those who say removing Dodge is not a biggy because the 1st skill is "only" 6 SPP away... rubish, those 6SPP tend to be quick with WD because they have Dodge in the first place! Plus 6 SPP is only the case if you do not get a double or stat increase skill up, otherwise is 16...

I would start with such a nerf first (remove Leap and replace with something else) so to avoid a nerf overshoot, and test to see how it goes.

[Gallows Bait]

I'm also not sure I quite see the premise in early access to strip ball being a problem.

Sure hands is easily accessed early and any team that doesn't either start with it or pick it up early is rather foolish in my view in any case.

Its the first skill I choose on a chaos or nurgle beast and highly recommendable on ghouls and so forth. Most teams starting without it on their throwers would be wise to take it also. Its still my first pick on a high elf thrower, for example.

Leap, now that is harder to counter early on, since you can't start with guard. But against a sure handed ball carrier inside a cage, its effect is massively reduced.

[Perkin Warbeck]

I really agree with Gallows Bait on this one. For ages I played with Woodies at the exclusion of everything else and I didn't feel that strip ball was the key factor in their builds for exactly the reason he says. I'm not the biggest fan of any skills that can be cancelled out by others, and sure hands is this protection. Playing on the TT my friends and opponents would ensure they had sure hands if the league was small, and even in wider more open circumstances I found that ball carriers mostly had sure hands.

After having several teams where I took strip ball, I eventually stopped putting it into builds and felt I had gained more use with other skills. I know it can still be useful, but so too can many other skills we don't see people taking very often, like diving catch for example.

I understand the nerf, and maybe even the need for the nerf, but not necessarily the reasoning that it slows down strip ball.

[sunnyside]

You know, despite trying to nerf POMB (+claw) I'm pretty sure Plasmoid's idea buffs it.

Even presuming he's right about the odds of removing someone from the pitch, I think the percentage reduction is probably worth having your guy up unless it really matters.

But beyond that, the old rules make it so that re-rolling on a KO will frequently backfire on you. The new version makes it much more likely PO will be used to get those CAS results, and without the backfires.