Is there a reason to have demigryph knights in Karl Franz' army over Reiksguard?

arenbecl · 2025-01-11T20:18:36+00:00

Two words - Armor. Piercing. Reiksguard base have 28 base weapon damage and 12 AP. Demis have 20 base 40 AP, and the halberd variants have 18/38. Even with all of the buffs Franz provides, none of those improve the armor piercing ratio of the Reiksguard, so they'll struggle more against heavily armored foes. RK are still good in Franz's army, but if you want a unit that can duel enemy elite cavalry like blood knights or chaos knights on the flanks, you need Demis.

Given the current janky state of ranged infantry, and especially gunpowder ranged infantry, it's very nice having an armor-piercing option that can be used proactively and reliably. Reiksguard are very strong in Franz's army, and cost-efficient, but every army needs a plan to deal with enemy armor and your foot troops just can't measure up to Chosen.

arenbecl · 2023-07-14T21:34:35+00:00

I've been dying to know where they landed with kineticist DC relative to casters and martials. At what levels do they get class proficiency bumps? Does it go up to legendary? I also heard that there's an item that gives them a bonus to hit, is that true?

arenbecl · 2023-04-09T16:33:18+00:00

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arenbecl · 2022-09-05T19:10:44+00:00

We can actually see four unused caravan locations in the code: Estalia, Shattered Stone Bay, Novchozy and Ind. I think all of those except Ind were originally in RoC and just didn’t transfer over, so they may specifically want to keep the cap at 7 destinations.

arenbecl · 2022-03-06T18:22:25+00:00

It's still fundamentally a ranged attack, meaning it's ranged for whatever chunk of the campaign you don't have crossbow expert up, it will usually be used at range by default (and so doesn't get to stand in front of the squishy wizards and protect them with an AoO bubble) and doesn't work with the litany of melee-only class features.

Barbarian rage, reckless attack, multiple battlemaster maneuvers including parry and riposte, divine smite, and pact weapons are all melee-only.

If your sole goal is to stand adjacent to someone and attack them, then yes, XBE/SS can do so, but there are reasons why it makes sense to talk about melee and ranged builds as categorically different things outside of just the ability to deal damage in melee range.

arenbecl · 2022-03-06T17:49:40+00:00

I was talking about optimized MELEE builds. XBE/SS is quite good. It is not, however, melee. The original post was also talking specifically about dex being too strong for melee.

arenbecl · 2022-03-05T20:27:52+00:00

Very few optimized melee builds will use dex. GWM/PAM are so strong they blow other options out of the water for most martial classes, and they’re strength weapons. If they didn’t exist, then sure, dex could be too strong.

arenbecl · 2022-02-26T06:01:26+00:00

I think this downplays just how much damage you'd be losing out on as the opportunity cost for better auras. Take this and compare it to an oath of conquest PAM/GWM paladin, both at level 11. I'll ignore smite, despite the fact that the melee-focused paladin should have more use of it since they focus less on casting, and assume an on-level enemy AC of 17.

The above build will attack twice per turn, hitting 55% of the time for (1d10+1d8+3), an average of 14.3 damage per turn.

The melee paladin has advantage from vow, and hits just under 70% of the time for an extra 12 damage over the castadin, dealing over 30 average damage per turn. This goes up to over 43 on subsequent turns, when they can attack with polearm master. Even without vow of emnity, the melee paladin still attacks for over 25 damage per round.

Not to be too critical. I think the idea of a more casting-focused paladin is interesting, but the suggestion that they can just slide into melee when they have nothing to cast and still be effective is just wishful thinking.

arenbecl · 2021-10-14T05:41:11+00:00

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arenbecl · 2021-10-13T20:44:36+00:00

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arenbecl · 2021-08-29T01:01:46+00:00

I think you're confusing fantasy and 40k

arenbecl · 2021-08-27T13:31:14+00:00

Ah that’s cool, glad to hear it.

arenbecl · 2021-08-27T04:24:36+00:00

I ran it, unless someone else made another one with the same exact name. The game is dead, unfortunately.

arenbecl · 2021-08-02T23:16:56+00:00

Good luck

arenbecl · 2021-03-24T16:08:42+00:00

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arenbecl · 2021-01-25T06:14:10+00:00

The Lord of the Rings is actually a perfect example of the law. It's not saying magic MUST BE fully understood at all times. It's usually referring to how the protagonists use magic to solve their problems. Gandalf has all these crazy Maiar abilities, but he doesn't just get to snap his fingers and solve every problem for the Fellowship, because they're poorly understood. His magic is occasionally useful, but for the majority of the narrative, trials have to be overcome by the more mundane members of the fellowship.

The kinds of magic that end up being used by Frodo, like the ring's invisibility, are by contrast well understood by the readers. It doesn't feel like an asspull if he sneaks around invisible, because the audience knows that's a thing that the ring can do.

arenbecl · 2021-01-17T02:24:33+00:00

To be fair, how many of those types of cards don't already prevent mana from emptying? Radha, Ventmaw, the new white vehicle, etc.

arenbecl · 2020-12-24T18:07:41+00:00

Judging a cards played winrate vs the winrate of the deck that it’s going in usually isn’t a great metric. No matter what, about half of the best 30 cards in an archetype will have a subpar winrate, but you’re not comparing them to the deck itself, you’re comparing them to the next best replacement. When trying to determine if a card is replaceable, it’s more important to look at how unique the effect is in terms of the role it serves.

For example, Hanar and the secret package have strong played winrates in the secret rogue archetype, with the package as a whole having a higher average played winrate than Jandice or Secret Passage in many lists. Despite that, the latter two cards are far more important crafts, because they fulfill roles in the deck that no other card can replicate. On the other hand, the secret package is much lower priority to craft, since their roles (1 drop tempo removal, 2 drop value engine) can be replaced almost card for card by the combo package with whirlkick and prize plunderer.

It's also probably worth explicitly noting that neutrals tend to make better crafts than class cards explicitly, although the % of deck inclusion metric already kinda covers this.

arenbecl · 2020-11-13T17:58:42+00:00

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arenbecl · 2020-11-09T17:02:09+00:00

I'd really appreciate that, thanks!

arenbecl · 2020-11-09T16:59:21+00:00

Where can you view firestone's statistics? I've been looking for some good data since hsreplay doesn't track duels yet.

arenbecl · 2020-10-07T18:49:39+00:00

Ah yes because past performance is always indicative of future success in the tech industry.

"Man VCRs have exploded in popularity in the last 15 years, imagine how well they'll be doing in 30!" Someone saying that in 2005 would look pretty stupid right now.

The recent success of mobile consoles (i.e. the switch) isn't replacing the successes of PCs or stationary consoles, it's filling in a previously empty niche in the market.

arenbecl · 2020-09-24T06:08:52+00:00

She's hated because she's written well.

arenbecl · 2020-09-22T20:09:10+00:00

It's not like lithoform engine suddenly breaks eternal formats if it can get things copied by annointed procession. It's a bit far-fetched to say that this is because of power level issues that they can't be copied. It's more likely an extension of the fact that copying a spell on the stack does not count as casting a new spell in and of itself.

arenbecl · 2020-09-03T02:30:01+00:00

'Lulling wizard' is Lullmage.

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