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Weren't "noobcrons" a thing when they came out?

I am guilty of the sin of liking nucrons nonetheless, but like for the Tyranids, it is really nice that willingly or not the progression of successive codices actually make some sort of coherent timeline, if you are happy to look at it this way.

 Insectum7 wrote:
Well, there was a simple trade-off, which was the power level of units. Necrons had some very strong abilities and units which, without Phase Out, could have easily been considered OP.

And IMHO that is a poor balancing act, similar to how in 9th we had factions with extremely powerful units but poor objective play or visceversa weak units but strong objective play.

In general people aren't very satisfied with being slaughtered but winning on a technicality or being the slaughterer but losing on a technicality.

And also a pain to balance, we already have points to adress power levels.

 Tyran wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
Well, there was a simple trade-off, which was the power level of units. Necrons had some very strong abilities and units which, without Phase Out, could have easily been considered OP.

And IMHO that is a poor balancing act, similar to how in 9th we had factions with extremely powerful units but poor objective play or visceversa weak units but strong objective play.

In general people aren't very satisfied with being slaughtered but winning on a technicality or being the slaughterer but losing on a technicality.

And also a pain to balance, we already have points to adress power levels.

^Hard disagree. I'd rather have more diversity in army play. OldCrons required specific ways to fight them effectively, and I far prefer that over less-risky design choices with more sameness in gameplay.

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:
Weren't "noobcrons" a thing when they came out?

I am guilty of the sin of liking nucrons nonetheless, but like for the Tyranids, it is really nice that willingly or not the progression of successive codices actually make some sort of coherent timeline, if you are happy to look at it this way.

Not sure what noobcrons was, unless you're talking about massed Warrior armies.

Progression in the story/setting is one thing. . . but for me the frustration with Nucrons isn't "progression", but outright change. Many staple Necron units are shadows of their former selves in terms of individual capability, and the loss of Pariahs and the lore change to C'tan isn't progression, just outright change.

Using the old 4chan terminology their for what it worth but I believed they hinted at necrons being very strong in their 3rd edition iteration.

I don't think you're wrong either because the revamp of the faction was so thorough that there is indeed change, but I'm one who never actually discard any older lore and I'm happy to head canon or see it with a sense of progression, step by step discovery. Especially with the very imperium centered narration.

Certainly a trope of mine in that regard, but just as with the nids, a trope that is fed by how the faction's development went.

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:
Using the old 4chan terminology their for what it worth but I believed they hinted at necrons being very strong in their 3rd edition iteration.

Ah, sure. Well there was definitely some initial shock to the Crons when they arrived in full force. They regenerated and teleported around, their basic infantry could knock out vehicles with lucky hits, and they had a number of weapons that could ignore Invulnerable Saves. Very dangerous army with some fancy abilities. But they had those critical weaknesses like low Initiative, not regenerating after being Sweeping Advanced, and Phase Out. It was an army that was really brutal if you didn't know how to grapple with it, but totally manageable once you knew how to fight it. I think some people really never figured it out, some players are pretty inflexible.

I don't think you're wrong either because the revamp of the faction was so thorough that there is indeed change, but I'm one who never actually discard any older lore and I'm happy to head canon or see it with a sense of progression, step by step discovery. Especially with the very imperium centered narration.

Certainly a trope of mine in that regard, but just as with the nids, a trope that is fed by how the faction's development went.

While I could get along somewhat with ignoring lore, the issue is the corresponding changes to gameplay. Warriors, Immortals and Flayed Ones are shadows of their former selves. Pariahs are gone. Destroyers are sluggish. The current army appears to encourage characters attatched to squads rather than the faceless hordes. It's just not the army I fell in love with.

Understand what you mean, gameplay wise they have become more "mainstream". I must say, I rather agree

While 3rd (and by extension 4th) ed crowns could be managed if you knew how to play into them, their army itself was still overpowered in terms of power. Warriors were marines +1 and at a lower cost, lords and pariahs were combat monsters, plus they had rending and psuedo FNP army wide. So while there were tactics that worked better into them such as focus fire and trying to bully their low initiative in melee, they were balanced around the fact that they had to bring a sufficient amount of warriors to soak casualties and not be auto-wiped. And while warriors were contenders for the best troops in the game and inherently undercosted, they still weren’t cheap.

It’s honestly a style of balancing that I miss; where every army wasn’t just a copy paste of others with a slight tweaking.

 morganfreeman wrote:


It’s honestly a style of balancing that I miss; where every army wasn’t just a copy paste of others with a slight tweaking.

That's the kind of design I'd rather have got, even the asymetry means some factions will feel more or less full.

On that i always quote CoH2 as an example. I used to play it a lot, and I loved how each faction gave you equal chances of winning the game while playing in absolutly different manners. And not with only one way to play each mind you. Then the british army was introduced and they started toning down the game and making every faction sysmetrical to force the british in.

That was the end of the fun for me as every army felt and played the same so I finally dropped.

This was also partly a result of the game's focus being more towards competitive play though.

Anyway, I can't unsee DoW necrons lying on the floor now help me

 morganfreeman wrote:
While 3rd (and by extension 4th) ed crowns could be managed if you knew how to play into them, their army itself was still overpowered in terms of power. Warriors were marines +1 and at a lower cost, lords and pariahs were combat monsters, plus they had rending and psuedo FNP army wide.

Erm...

A Warrior was 20% more expensive than a 3rd ed. Tactical Marine

Pariahs were meme tier garbage.

Lords were tough, but 3 WS4 I4 attacks weren't making them combat monsters even with a Warscythe (and you were looking at 190-200 points for a 'good' Lord build.

Their 'rending' didn't ignore armour like actual rending. Being able to wound Wraithlords with Warriors was so situational as to be basically useless, and taking out vehicles was an exercise in fishing for sixes (also note that being able to glance vehicles with gauss weapons acted to balance out the stunning lack of dedicated anti-tank weaponry in the list).

Yeah Pariahs were an awesome concept and a cool design, but just cost way too much to be competetive. They didn't count as Necrons for your body count, you couldn't teleport them, they didn't self repair. But they could cut Terminators in half and that just sorta freaked people out.

Gauss was funny, because if you didn't play Crons you thought it was the most OP thing ever, but if you did play Crons you really felt the lack of dedicated AT weaponry. I wound up always bringing two squads of Heavy Destroyers to do real AT/AP2 work.

Something interesting to note on the time it takes for Necrons to phase out after getting destroyed, the original 2nd ed rules had a middle ground between phasing out and getting back up where they just lay dormant until the next repair attempt in the following turn. That wasn't good game play and was replaced with more decisive repair mechanics ever since, but it does show a desire even early on for Necrons that are not beyond repair to stick around for a while, even though the eventual result, that is phase out or getting back up, is the same.

At the same time, the short story in White Dwarf that led up to the first Necron release described phase out as a very quick and automated process when it did happen.

 Insectum7 wrote:
Yeah Pariahs were an awesome concept and a cool design, but just cost way too much to be competetive. They didn't count as Necrons for your body count, you couldn't teleport them, they didn't self repair. But they could cut Terminators in half and that just sorta freaked people out.

You can also add that they paid for anti-psyker rules in an edition that barely had psychic powers.

And they had one attack per model. Even if you charged, you wouldn't do appreciable damage for the high price you paid for the unit.

Pariahs are the shining example for why Phase Out was a terrible rule. You'd be stupid to bring one of the coolest units in the codex because even if you put up with all their inherent problems, you would make it easy on your opponent to just phase out your army before they ever made it into combat. There's a reason why you effectively had silver tide and Destroyer spam as functional armies but rarely saw any other flavor. Phase Out was too crippling to think about fluff, and game math was all that mattered. It also led to such fluffy behavior as a squad of ten Warriors hiding out of sight in the furthest corner of the board for the duration of the game just so you could play the rest of your army in peace. As in, you opted to play with 180 points less than your opponent just to be able to make it to the end of the game. Phase Out going the way of the dodo was about the only good thing to come of the 5th ed codex as it was neither mechanically interesting nor representative of the fluff, if not conceptually then at least in the way it was actually played. For a codex that I otherwise hold in high regard, the rule was a pretty big failure.

^I'm gonna disagree with that again. Pariahs didn't make Phase Out bad, Pariahs just had bad rules. It's not like adjustments couldn't have been made to improve both Pariahs and how they interacted with Phase Out.

And I obviously can't speak for everybody, but I can't even recall ever keeping a squad of Warriors in a corner just to deal with Phase Out. I was too busy using teleportation moves to concentrate forces and outmaneuver opponents. They were too valuable to the fight to hide away.

Late use of the 3rd ed. codex (ie. in 5th edition) often saw Warriors trying to hide in reserve for as long as possible, while Monoliths, the Deciever, and Wraiths played the actual game.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
Late use of the 3rd ed. codex (ie. in 5th edition) often saw Warriors trying to hide in reserve for as long as possible, while Monoliths, the Deciever, and Wraiths played the actual game.

Admittedly, the game in 5th edition was quite different to 3rd when the codex was written. For a start, only troops could score, so the late-arriving warriors had an objective they needed to sit on in many missions. The shift from victory points to kill points also encouraged wiping units more, which didn't help.

I don't think using 5th is a fair yardstick.

 Insectum7 wrote:
^I'm gonna disagree with that again. Pariahs didn't make Phase Out bad, Pariahs just had bad rules. It's not like adjustments couldn't have been made to improve both Pariahs and how they interacted with Phase Out.

And I obviously can't speak for everybody, but I can't even recall ever keeping a squad of Warriors in a corner just to deal with Phase Out. I was too busy using teleportation moves to concentrate forces and outmaneuver opponents. They were too valuable to the fight to hide away.

I saw plenty of it. I don't remember any Necron player but myself who refrained from that kind of nonsense. Which is odd, because outside of tournaments the 3rd and 4th ed games I played and watched had very few issues with gamey situations.

But of course I can only speak for my neck of the woods.

 Haighus wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:
Late use of the 3rd ed. codex (ie. in 5th edition) often saw Warriors trying to hide in reserve for as long as possible, while Monoliths, the Deciever, and Wraiths played the actual game.

Admittedly, the game in 5th edition was quite different to 3rd when the codex was written. For a start, only troops could score, so the late-arriving warriors had an objective they needed to sit on in many missions. The shift from victory points to kill points also encouraged wiping units more, which didn't help.

I don't think using 5th is a fair yardstick.

^ 5th made an adjustment to the Morale rules in CC that really hurt the Crons. In 3rd and 4th Ld modifiers were from outnumbering, but in 5th it was changed to the difference in casualties. So prior to 5th, Necrons were often testing on Ld 10, but in 5th, if they lost 3 models and caused none in return, they were testing on 7, making them far more likely to fail, Fall Back, and get Sweeping Advanced with their Initiative of 2. They couldn't ressurect after that either, which was catastrophic.

5th ed also saw a balloning of high AP weapons, and the switch to TLOS only made it worse.

In 3rd and 4th though? Necrons were fantastic.

 Insectum7 wrote:
^I'm gonna disagree with that again. Pariahs didn't make Phase Out bad, Pariahs just had bad rules. It's not like adjustments couldn't have been made to improve both Pariahs and how they interacted with Phase Out.

And I obviously can't speak for everybody, but I can't even recall ever keeping a squad of Warriors in a corner just to deal with Phase Out. I was too busy using teleportation moves to concentrate forces and outmaneuver opponents. They were too valuable to the fight to hide away.

This.

As the previous poster pointed out? Pariahs just didn’t interact with the rest of the army.

Yes, they were absolutely rock hard, but that came at a points premium. And once deployed? That was your lot. No We’ll Be Back. No Res Orb. No Teleport shenanigans. Just plain old foot slogging.

Sure, they’d competently murder pretty much anything they got their hands on. But with no non-teleportation transport options, and no way to regain lost models? You’d be really lucky if they ever made their points back. Even if your opponent wasn’t great, you were still reliant on them getting to horribly murder a high value unit.

They just came with far too many “If I” conditions to be reliable. Especially when your basic Warrior Squad was T4, 3+ Sv and could be confidentially relied upon to fall over and get back up, not to mention a full squad having a not unreasonable chance of plinking a tank into oblivion in a single round of shooting.

Sadly, Pariahs just didn’t perform.

Where the pariahs deprived of WBB because of the weak weak fleshy bits?

Need to take my 3rd necron Dex out of its shelve again.

Love pariahs though I'm sad they got trashed.

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:
Where the pariahs deprived of WBB because of the weak weak fleshy bits?

Need to take my 3rd necron Dex out of its shelve again.

Love pariahs though I'm sad they got trashed.

Yeah, they were converted human pariahs so didn’t count as Necrons - no WBB and they didn’t count towards Phase Out.