Big news out of WarCom this weekend, which promised among other things that a Balance Update is coming VERY SOON

This is obviously exciting news for the competitive community, who have more or less ‘solved’ the current game with Zarbag’s Gitz PP/CtC. Don’t just take my word for it though; it ends up if you’re willing to go full mask-off WAAC you can literally netdeck despite not playing a match in more than 6 months and still walk away a US Open winner. Here’s to hoping the upcoming balance update fixes a couple of our current issues and we don’t need to rely on unspoken gentleman’s agreements.

That said, the game is in a much more diverse state now than it was before the original rules update. That balance change came shortly on the heels of the World Championships where Gorechosen of Dromm with Reckless Fury were effectively unbeatable for many players. We’ve lived in this newest meta since January 7th, or around 4.5 months.

While you might have opinions about whether the current competitive scene is ‘good’ or if you, like me, think that Countdown is a little too potent or certain warbands/combos are too weak, I wanted to close the book on this meta by looking at the positive things it did bring about. So, grab your report card and red pen, and let’s dive in to a near-meta’s-end review of “Were the Reckless Dromm Nerfs Appropriate?”

What Were the Actual Changes?

Before we can assess if the rules change did something good and intentional, let’s think back to the major changes. I’m going to say subjectively but enthusiastically that all the little FaQ/Errata type clarifying changes in the rules update were positive. Rules updates are generally awesome if they help people understand the intent and play more consistently. So strong work there, even if I disagreed with some of the wording and decisions.

There were obviously several things that were affected overall, but the ones the community at large were asking for were
A) Tone down Gorechosen of Dromm
B) Tone down Reckless Fury, and
C) STEP ON IT

So what did the rules team change in response in the first balance update?

Gorechosen

Made it so the Enrage ‘charge in the powerstep’ ability cost Eight blood tithe – This prevented the turn one double charge with Gorehulk, and made it so the warband could never use Enrage before inspiring. This was perhaps a little overkill, but preferable to the previous state where you could lose your leader before you even got an activation.

When selecting somebody to charge with Enrage you must choose an enemy fighter – this is why costing eight blood tithe might have been a little too steep. The ability is still great, as you can potentially force somebody off of a token, edge hex, specific territory, etc and force a charge counter onto them so you can alter the board state going into an end phase. But it reduced the incredible damage output potential the warband had been known for, and so it remains a good change.

Made it so that Final Frenzy could not bring you above 1 health – Previously, you’ve probably already inspired before a fighter is slain, already used Engrage, so what are you holding on to blood tithe for anymore? Roll em all and if you’re lucky you’ll end up healthier after you died than before you were attacked. Now, you need only a single crit to survive on 1 health, but you also can’t exceed that. It seems like a fair balance to strike, as the fighter will be easier to pick off and you don’t feel the need to invest so much into over-killing.

Made it so Final Frenzy forced the fighter to be slain at the end of the round – This was in my opinion a great change – you get to keep the fighter for objective scoring and can deny them the bounty for a turn or three, but they will be dying. This prevented some of the ‘feels bad’ invalidation of effort; you DID kill the Gorehulk after all – why shouldn’t you get rewarded for that? The Dromm player can delay, but not deny, that result while still getting to use the piece.

Overall, the community’s initial view was ‘dang they really might have gone too far’ – but a few months down the line I think they walked a pretty good distance. Gorechosen are still quite strong as we will see, but they’re not nightmares anymore. Their stats are still incredibly good (to the extent I’m willing to risk trying Realmstone Raiders with them), and the warscroll is different but not ‘bad’ – and arguably is still in the better half of current warbands.

Reckless Fury

Press F(oresaken) to Pay Respects

The following cards were Forsaken in Nemesis – meaning you straight up cannot taken them for competitive events. This caused a huge deal of disappointment for some people who might have preferred wording changes, clarifications, and perhaps restrictions rather than outright banning, but that’s the quick fix the rules team had in mind. Maybe someday we will see these come back as Restricted with or without rules changes.

Get It Done – Take a charge token off of one friendly and put it on another. Huge power to force a charged out scenario and block counterplay, but more importantly let your best piece charge twice.

Bladecatcher – an upgrade that turned off weapon abilities for incoming attacks. Forever! The equipped fighter never has to suffer cleave, grievous, you name it. Incredibly potent, and somehow only 1 glory!

Fury of Aqshy – Slap this Certified Banger of an upgrade on a fighter adjacent to a charged enemy fighter and effectively lock them out for the rest of the round/game. When played effectively by canny players it was incredibly strong, incredibly ‘feels bad’, and outside of a few niche scenarios, had no counterplay.

Utter Ignorance – The biggest of the baddies, the card effectively said ‘if you die, no you didn’t‘. While really good as an effect for a dozen reasons, when coupled with the fact it had no restrictions (such as only applying to low bounty/health fighters, reducing defense, or something), it combo’d remarkably well with the Gorechosen Final Frenzy. In some cases you had to kill Dromm or the Gorehulk 3 times before they finally stayed down.

The update also clarified Vicious Brawl requiring a triangle unless you’re the underdog, which is fine. Makes it a little more difficult to score.

Overall, forsaking multiple cards in RF cut its power level substantially and forced it to pair with decks that had good upgrades, since they now were playing with a power deck that only had 9 and 7 eligible cards. The Objectives are still fine, and the remaining cards work well enough for the right warband and gameplan, though it got knocked down several pegs and is somewhat of a non-starter for many warbands and deck pairings now.

With the history behind us, let’s see if it had the intended effect!

Warband Winrates

Below I’ll show two screengrabs of how often given warbands were winning in the original meta and the most recent meta. These are all taken from the Underworlds Statistics Project which is a lot of fun to play with. It has a reporting bias, as it really only has public tournaments and user submitted casual games, but it’s a big enough data set to draw some broad generalizations which I’ll attempt to do here.

First, let’s peek at win percentages for the first two months of the game, including Worlds

Next, let’s look at win percentages since the Dromm/Fury nerf over the last 4.5 months.

Overall there was a decent shakeup! I could talk for a long time about my hot takes on what rose and what fell, but that’s not the main thrust of this article. My biggest takeaways are: Dromm fell a little bit, counters to Dromm (such as Headsmen) fell too, as did other RF enjoyers such as Farstriders, Mollog, and Jaws.

Meanwhile, stocks were up for the things that suffered more in the face of crash aggro/alpha strike leader nukes. Zarbag, Dread Pageant, Cyreni’s Razors, Ehpilim, and Grymwatch all saw moderate to large boosts with their biggest threats eliminated. Did it go too far? Probably, if you look at the Gitz at least.

Let’s inspect Gorechosen specifically, as they were hit the hardest as the main focus and intent of the rules update.

Pre- and post-nerf, we see a huge change in both size of the meta pie slice, but also a more reasonable win rate. People are playing them substantially less often: they went from the 2nd most played warband to 12th. They also dropped their winrate by ~6% but are still comfortably competitive, winning just a touch over half of their games. Below is the same information in table form.

From a numeric perspective it looks like the Dromm Nerf was just about perfect. The warband is still playable, still competitive, but roughly ‘fair’. They aren’t featured in every tournament and every table, but also haven’t vanished entirely. So whether or not it looked like overkill at the start, I would say they look to have gotten it just about right!

With Dromm out of the way, let’s take a look at how RF as a whole has fared.

Deck Winrates

We will play the same game with the Underworlds Statistics Project data, this time looking at decks and focusing on the effect the balance update/Forsaken bomb had on RF’s meta share and win rate. First, let’s peek at the first two months of nemesis data, and note that overall RF was pretty good, arguably even great when pared with BA and especially CtC.

Next, we can compare that to the most recent 4.5 months, excluding the pre-nerf data. RF/CtC is still pretty potent, but otherwise it’s middling to bad, even. The classic BA/RF is down to only 44% win rate. RF/ES is <39%, and people don’t even bother playing RF/Edge.

It’s hard to draw definitive conclusions about this data save for the obvious fact that RF has fallen down a ways and is no longer the kingmaker of decks. That was the goal, right? With the vacuum created by RF’s fall from grace we see that Countdown is too strong as I have discussed before, and especially so when pared with Pillage & Plunder. I mean, a 57.4% win rate? That’s as bad or worse than the prior boogeyman.

Back on topic. RF now needs to lean on its partners’ power cards more, and so can do just with solid power decks like CtC, PP, and BA, especially if they can get some overlapping goals in the Objective department (or in the case of PP, just lean all the way in). If we assume GW wants everything to sit between a 45-55% win rate, then 3 of the RF pairings meet this standard, none are ‘overpowered’, and 3 are below standard (1 only barely). So they might have erred on the side of ‘too much nerf’, but if they overshot it wasn’t by very much.

Next, let’s check out how well the RF lists have done when it ‘matters most’: competitive events and podium spots.

Podium Placements

This data is from all events in the set. I’m not computer savvy enough to display two sets from pre and post nerf. That said, RF has hit the podium in four different deck combinations, and reasonably often with BA. Some of that is due to the pre-nerf BARF dominance, of course.

If you look just for events past the January 7th rules change, RF appears only 5 times: 3 with BA, 1 with PP and 1 with WnR. RF grabbed 1st place twice, 2nd once, and 3rd twice. Subtracting that from the fill data set we find:

Pre-Nerf: 4 firsts, 3 seconds, and 3 third place finishes.

Post-Nerf: 1 first, 1 second, and 2 third place finishes.

While I don’t have the fancy filtered data, you can see a modest but reasonable drop-off in podium rate, without RF being eliminated entirely. The second data set does represent double the number of events and double the calendar time though, so the roughly halving of medal count is more like a 75% reduction in competitive podium success. RF is still there, and still wins, but not dramatically more than other decks not named PP or CtC.

Again, by those standards, it looks like the rules update got us roughly in the ballpark they were hoping RF to have competitively, with maybe a little too much power suppression.

Anecdotal BS

Before the nerf, it was effectively all anybody could talk about online. Dromm OP, RF is busted, game is unplayable. The team reacted relatively quickly to dial both of those factors back considerably. Their timeliness was pretty great, but how hard they cranked on that nerf bat had some people concerned. Had they gone too far?

In the weeks after the change, I saw very few people running Dromm at all. Reckless Fury still saw some modest play since there were fewer other options and now you could ‘play it with a clean conscience’. Then they both faded into the background as people adapted to the new rules and started to realize that Gitz were overtuned and PP/CtC was effectively free glory. Even in a pre-nerf Gorechosen BARF land, the current Zarbag list might still have won out had the meta had enough time to develop.

In the last couple months, I have seen Gorechosen come out of the woodwork a bit more, BA/RF played again, and even do OK in some larger tournaments. As people get the sense that neither was actually nerfed too hard, they’ve started to take those toys out for a spin once more. The totally scientific vibe I get is that it’s now socially acceptable to play Dromm, RF, or both. It’s even a valid tournament option and has played spoiler to some strong contenders in the last eight weeks or so.

By that measure (again, incredibly accurate and based on evidence), the Dromm/Fury nerf went just about the right distance with roughly the appropriate force. That’s better than I or pretty much anybody expected at the outset! Maybe these GW guys actually know how to workshop some games after all.

Wrap

With all the above in consideration, I would give the last balance update a final grade of B. It definitely could have done better (identifying some of the now glaring issues with Zarbag, CtC, PP and a couple other standouts) or have used a more nuanced touch (avoiding Forsaken and just making the cards more reasonable). It did, however, accomplish the goal more or less and did so in a pretty rapid manner.

What do you think? Gitz/Grymwatch terrorists aside, has the damper on blitz aggro helped the game’s balance? Do you feel differently about the Dromm nerfs or the Forsaking of those four RF cards? Let me know your thoughts by commenting wherever you found this or by emailing SpentGlory@gmail.com and until next time, don’t forget to spend that glory (and blood tithe!)

PS I also welcome all ranting, wishlisting, and predictions about next week’s Balance Update, because it’s provocative, and gets the people going.