Greetings! Today I wanted to talk about objectives. One of my main focuses will be the topic of so-called "kill surges" and how they fit into the current landscape of competitive deck building. Are they good enough? Do they see enough play?
To preface this - I wanted to make clear what the "kill surge" is. It might be obvious, but for the sake of clarity: a kill surge is a surge objective that can be scored after an attack action that takes enemy fighters out of action. Those surges usually have some additional requirements to fulfill to score them. For example one of the larger subsets of kill surges is the leader-centric one, where the killer or a victim has to be a leader.
Not long ago I’ve witnessed a brief, but interesting, discussion about kill surges and how to evaluate them. The consensus was that they’re too unreliable by nature and because of that, even the best of them are not likely to receive the top score. Personally, I don’t like that state of things, but at the same time, I’m finding it hard to argue against that statement.
I’m a fan of the situation where everything we score in the game has an underlying cost to it. This might be spending an activation, playing power cards, not spending our glory during the action phase of the round, and so on. With kill surges you have that element of having to spend some of your resources - it might be an activation, power card, etc.
The trouble is that you’re spending this resource to get a chance of scoring those surges. You still have to roll the dice and get successes. Then, your opponent gets a chance to disrupt you - roll his defense dice and hope for more successes than you.
Unmodified attack actions most often revolve around a 50-60% success rate. You can improve your odds of success, but that is an additional cost and those options are not granted to be available at any time. With the current direction in the Direchasm, this would require having some glory as most accuracy this season comes as an upgrade.
Getting a kill is a big reward in itself - you get the glory and more importantly remove enemy fighters from the game. Gaining some extra points from a surge sounds great, right? It sure does. But is it reliable? Wouldn’t you prefer to get a surge that allows you to get some easy glory and maybe upgrade your fighter before charging? After all to get glory from kill surge you have to get your fighter in position, spend an activation, add a charge token, ensure you’ve got enough damage to kill, and then get a good roll. That’s quite a substantial effort for something that can simply fail and not let you score your glory.
If we compare kill-surges to other objectives that are being played often we will see one major difference. Those cards that see play are reliable. They can be disrupted sometimes, but in general, your action will always guarantee you working towards the goal instead of giving only a chance for progress towards scoring the card.
So… all in all whole situation is far from optimal if you want to be competitive in a larger tournament and play a bunch of kill-surges while at it. Winning those events typically revolves around having the deck and the strategy that you can reliably execute and hope you’ve gathered enough glory to beat your opponent. Why take a single glory surge that requires you to kill an enemy fighter while also fulfilling some additional requirements when there are other easy options are requiring 0 successes on dice rolls? After all surge objectives are meant to help your glory get going, so you can upgrade your fighters and get kills easier. Instead, we would end up with a lot of objectives that are simply hard to score and usually require more than one attack.
The most used kill surges are Savage Exemplar - thanks to Mollog, Hrothgorn, Kainan, and other very strong leaders; Winged Death thanks to its speed element; and Surge of Aggression which also is not a kill surge per se. Other 13 released with Direchasm universals barely see the play. A few of them can be situationally good (like Martial Mage which happens to be my personal favorite), but the rest is simply not worth the slot in your deck. Is this a healthy situation? In my opinion no. The game has received too many easy-to-score and hard-to-disrupt objectives, that can be scored at a very low (or even no) cost. With do-over mechanics being very punishing and the need for repeatable and reliable results in a competitive scenario kill surges have almost no place in competitive decks. Modern successful aggro builds typically run 0-2 of those in their decks. Most often 0-1. Racking kills is being used as a condition to score end phase glory instead. And most often even there the goal is to minimize the number of kills needed if it can be helped. You don’t want to block your deck because the dice were cold or you’re facing a low model count elite warband.
What is the solution?
There are three options that I can see:
Option #1: make other surge objectives harder to score. Back, when Calculated Risk was considered broken because of how easy it was, we used to play Advancing Strike, Precise Use of Force, Strong Start, Sorcerous Scouring, etc. Those were played because they haven’t had over-the-top requirements and compared pretty well with other available options.
Option #2: make kill surges easier… or more profitable. Cards like Perfect Strike are a great idea. They aren’t easy. But they pay 2 glory at surge speed. Now… that, while maybe not the best card available, is very interesting and worth the effort to score.
Option #3: go away from kill surges and focus on cards that require attacking in a certain way. Cards like Steady Aim, What Armor?, Get Thee Hence, Headshot - they all were surge staples. Some didn’t even require your attack to hit. Similarly Keep Chopping was an amazing objective. Attacks being successful did not matter as long as you’ve managed to make enough of them. This has been replicated in Steady Assault, which is fairly successful in certain warbands.
Personally, I’m mostly in favor of the 3rd option. While I would love to see kill surges thrive... I do like it when my aggressive effort is being rewarded even if I’m not able to get enough kill pressure early. Attacking leads to scoring glory and it also does increase odds that something will get taken out of action. Kill surges feel a bit like an objective you’ll score if you’re up against a horde warband or you’ve already committed a lot of resources and got your glory train going. Leave corpse gathering for end phase cards - things like Cruel Hunters, Bold Deeds, or Clean Kills are excellent and are the right direction to go with kill-based objectives.
Apart from that I would go ahead and limit the amount of self-scoring cards. That move should hopefully help players leave the very conservative approach to the game and start making glory from attacking again. It could also potentially help aggressive warbands have more representation in the top spots of major tournaments. Introducing those more interactive, aggressive, yet quite reliable objectives would benefit the game more. Sometimes it feels bad to drop an interesting deck concept only because it does require everything to go perfectly as planned. That’s the reality we live in - your min-maxed opponent is most likely scoring his objective deck anyway. I feel this is a factor that is limiting the innovation in the game. The need of building a deck that you can score no matter what, because if you don’t you’ll not get enough glory, while the other guy just went through all of it without you being able to stop it.
Should we drop kill surges altogether? No. Even now there’s room for them. And some are very strong. Although it could be argued that those tend to be the cards that can be scored without actually killing someone if needed, like Surge of Aggression.
So… not cutting all of them out… but I would suggest dropping some of them to make room for more interesting cards in the set. My main candidates for the chopping block would be the ‘leader’ cards. Especially ones that require you to kill the leader or stuff like hunger-based ones, because almost no one runs hunger anyway. If we wanted to keep ‘kill the leader’ cards and see them being played, we should award 2 glory for them. Killing leaders is not easy in many cases. So it’s only fair to reward it well.
The bottom line is: unless surge objectives will get noticeably harder to score kill-surges will continue to see little play. They’re simply too costly and offer no guarantees that you’ll score them in round 1 (or at all). To help this situation they should be more reasonable on reliability and difficulty involved. I would focus more on objectives we could get while attacking. Landing an attack can be tricky on its own, but is also free from the burden of having to kill the model. And cards like What Armor?, Get thee hence or No Mercy offer solid proof that this type of card can be very successful and popular. It may not fully help kill surges, but those cards are close enough to them in nature. And that could be enough to get me to be happy.
What are your thoughts guys? How do you feel about kill surges and the difficulty of the currently available surge objectives? Let me know in the comments.
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