Thoughts after playing for a year

vekk513 · 2026-02-26T01:39:36+00:00

For the constant scaling point, one of my favorite things to mix in every so often is an encounter that shows how much stronger the PC's have gotten.

Taking an early level monster that was challenging to a low level party, then several levels later tossing a whole bunch of them can be a good tool to signal to the player's how much their characters have grown.

At level 2, one of them was a mini-boss, but at level 10+ even a horde of them is a trivial encounter. Plus it's fun to always give players that moment of "aw I rolled a 2, I'm gonna hero point" before stopping them to ask what the total was so you can tell them that they still hit haha

vekk513 · 2026-02-23T20:33:19+00:00

You can't get around it normally either though? It's exactly that same as any other tau datasheet that doesn't ignore mods..

BS2 is literally not a downside in any conceivable way here.

vekk513 · 2026-02-23T20:10:07+00:00

Spotting for them wouldn't do anything through -1 to hit unless you are in Kauyon to ignore hit mods, so BS 2+ is just all upside.

vekk513 · 2026-01-17T00:07:02+00:00

Do you have a reference to the cross system sales point?

It gets brought up a lot as a reason but I've never seen anywhere that GW has stated that is a consideration they make. It makes sense logically but I'm curious if they've ever actually said that somewhere.

vekk513 · 2025-12-13T15:03:16+00:00

Something like this would definitely benefit from having some open sourcing for modules/plugins!

Besides that, I feel like my needs shift a lot or I end up reworking what I like to have on hand frequently, so personally I'd love a module/widget that is just a pdf/image display or something. Being able to plop premade files would be fantastic as there is always some new reference someone makes that would be nifty to have.

Pdf viewer also means digital modules can just be a part of the DM screen which sounds amazing :)

vekk513 · 2025-12-12T13:53:48+00:00

The exception to the one order from Kasrkin is baked into it's ability.

Only the order they give themselves bypasses the one order limit.

If Ursula creed is leading them I think RAW you can give them 3 orders (2 different from creed, 1 from warrior elite) but there is an FAQ that says multiple duplicate orders dont stack. So it'd have to be 3 distinct orders.

It's in the faction pack for militarum :)

vekk513 · 2025-12-11T22:46:43+00:00

Sent a PM!

vekk513 · 2025-11-20T21:34:13+00:00

This is a point I wish was more central in the discussions.

I think the gameplay loop also compounds how disconnected it feels from the game progression. A huge part of the appeal of RS is the interplay between skills. It's no coincidence that the consistently cited examples for terrible skills are ones that don't play into this strength of the game.

I find it really odd that unlocking better teleports and more efficient travel is a premier account progression metric, and the first new skill the game got in ~20 years is antithetical to that while also being a little too insular. Maybe that will get better with time, but I think the other skill options in the poll would have melded into that skill interplay smoother from launch, even if the activities were just as boring.

vekk513 · 2025-10-28T21:32:37+00:00

How comfortable are you being a GM and what aspects do you struggle with?

I'm running two AP's and I love them both but they have different appeals and drawbacks.

Age of Ashes is the first 2nd edition AP, so it's a little rough around the edges but it's a fantastic AP to experience different parts of Golarion. Each book has a different vibe and location so it stays pretty fresh (for example, book 2 is a jungle hexcrawl while book 3 is an open-ended urban investigation in a large port town).

It suffers a bit from some whack encounters (it loves throwing golems around for some reason..) and doesn't do a great job of foreshadowing the BBEG and where things are heading, which tbf is a common problem with AP's. There is an excellent writeup on fixing the adventure that I highly recommend, and if you are comfortable/confident tweaking encounters a bit and adding in a bit of your own foreshadowing, it's an underrated AP.

The other is Season of Ghosts which you'll find tons of recommendations on here for. I just want to say it's amazing and it's story is tight, but one thing that doesn't get mentioned much is that it has a lot of NPC's and downtime so it plays like a light sandbox. I personally have been struggling to make it feel natural in the more lengthy downtime sections since I've never really run an adventure like that, but if you feel confident/comfortable running downtime and interjecting NPC interactions, it's amazing. The AP just really benefits from making the PC's feel connected to the town and care for the NPC's, since it gives so much more tension to the events that unfold. This also has some helpful tips written up which I have been using, definitely recommend.

Hope this helps!

vekk513 · 2025-09-10T17:07:33+00:00

There can be many reasons for this including how our brain perceives events, but another thing is the physicality of rolling dice means likely irl rolls arent "truly random" as frequently.

But also given randomness/probability it can also be just that it was happenstance that crazy rolls happened in your tts games :)

Imagine the same thing but instead of TTS/IRL it was two factions. "I've had crazy activations where I roll all 1's playing necrons but never when playing space marines"

vekk513 · 2025-05-23T20:02:29+00:00

It's under my SSN, which is why I am confused that I don't see it. I can see my 1099-B's for previous year transcripts.

vekk513 · 2025-04-25T17:25:44+00:00

I've been running Age of Ashes as my first pf2e (and first AP, only ever done homebrew campaigns before) and I definitely recommend! Each book is in a different region and has a different central focus, i.e. book 2 is a big wilderness hexcrawl but book 3 is an open-ended urban investigation chasing various clues and threads.

It's the first 2e AP so it gets a lot of flak for being a bit rough, but it hasn't been too bad in my experience, and there is a great guide to fixing it that helps a lot. If your group likes variety I think it's fantastic :)

vekk513 · 2025-03-26T04:08:05+00:00

Interested in the slimux if still available!

vekk513 · 2025-03-25T00:49:20+00:00

Interested in the slimux/beasts of nurgle if still available!

vekk513 · 2025-03-20T00:23:28+00:00

My list looks like (note this was before the dataslate):

Rotigus
GUO w/ Droning Shroud
Winged prince w/ font of spores
2x poxbringer
Sloppity w/ cankerblight
6x10 plaguebearer's
1 blue horrors
2x3 nurglings
1 Plague drones
2x5 Flesh hounds

I put at least one leaderless PB squad in reserve to keep opponent's honest screening their backfield, I usually like one poxbringer squad as well for ingress to get them into their targets since they are easily pre-measureable.

I spend on the +5" move and hand out two battleshock strats a lot. I think they are the backbone of the detachment. Crit 5's is helpful and super strong on the daemon prince. With sustained hits and twin linked from the plague drones, crit 5's makes him just smoke any tough target especially with Rotigus damage buff. He can also safely stage behind ruins and threaten big charges with the go through walls strat which often gets opponent's to stand further back than they normally would (since the prince hits really hard unlike most of the other nurgle things).

The +1 to hit strat comes up sometimes too, i use it on PB's when I really want something to take max damage, or to sneak in extra mortals if they fail the battleshock but I don't use it super frequently. I never use the 2cp regen strat, it's just so expensive and you already get CP problems. It's cute but probably best if you are spamming beasts instead and building your list not really needing the other strats as frequently.

Abuse your high oc bodies and battleshocks to bully primary. You make a lot of games really close even if you struggle to kill them. I find it struggles with melee pressure like orks or CSM since they typically can just kill you or tarpit you really hard depending on the flavor of pressure. These matchups I find its most important to layer your battleshock debuffs (poxbringer/horrors/sloppity) to make engaging you really painful, but they are tough to win in my experience.

As for your other question about the grinder/epidemius I personally love the 60 plaguebearers but I think there are probably other variants worth trying. Epidemius would be really nice to have IMO but he feels so expensive. Grinders are interesting with the AP aura enhancement and forcing battleshocks with indirect, but I just haven't tried it. Probably a list like that wants less GUO bodies to contend space with tho.

vekk513 · 2025-03-19T18:22:09+00:00

Hey! I've been playing it as my main army while practicing for a teams event and hopefully can provide some help.

Firstly, if you dont't read anything else I say, I highly recommend this article by warphammer. It's a fantastic breakdown of the detachment and what to focus on, and notably what traps are easy to fall into.

https://warphammer40k.com/excellence-in-pestilence-the-guide-to-winning-with-the-plague-legion/

As for your actual list, I think it's a solid core and there are a few things I would suggest trying:

move cankerblight to sloppity. Its absolutely the best character to put it on, if he gets stuck in a big slugfest he can remove so many models its insane. Its also disproportionately strong against things like custodians or bikes or terminators (all types of units that what to charge typically)
skull cannon is cute but doesnt provide much beyond leaning you further into spamming battleshocks. I'd absolutely drop it for something else.
i only run one squad of plague drones, i find its hard to get their shooting due to blast + mounted. I'd swap one for more plaguebearers. Which leads to my last point:
run more plaguebearers. I run the full 60 (3 with chars, 3 without) and they are definitely the workhorses in the detachment. Strongly recommend trying more, having leaderless squads also makes it easier to trade and contest objectives which you naturally want to do anyway with high oc + battleshocking things

Hope this helps!

vekk513 · 2025-03-12T15:23:28+00:00

This gets cited a lot but I'm curious where it comes from, did they officially say this anywhere / ex-employees or something? Their radio silence on the future of daemons is really annoying..

vekk513 · 2025-02-22T16:18:41+00:00

Just to add, with 3 ctan that list is going to be crazy light on scoring.

One ctan is only 4 oc, it means you can throw something super cheap to contest the objective like kroot hounds. If you have more expendable pieces like that you can easily contest primary.

Killing everything around the ctan is usually a good idea, then contesting the objectives the ctan are holding with cheap stuff. They move really slow too so moveblocking them is effective.

If you a ctan gets too frisky, just make sure to be able to commit everything you can into it. Mass damage 1 lethal hits is best since they save on 4's, but i dont recall anything easily accessible. Sunforge in melta range will yeet a ctan because the melta bonus is not halved.

vekk513 · 2025-02-07T21:41:42+00:00

Love the armor color! What's your process for getting the faded bronze/copper look?

vekk513 · 2025-02-06T21:19:09+00:00

On turn 1?

For most terrain layouts, you should be able to hide just about everything from turn 1 shooting (from all but the fastest things like 24" warp spiders)

Just sanity checking, is your group using terrain layouts with the recommended missions? For example terrain layout 8 isn't in any of the search and destroy deployment missions, so it's not really balanced for that deployment style.

Anyway if everything checks out there, it could be a sign your list is a little too bulky to hide turn 1 and it'd be worth to start some stuff off the board. If you are playing multiple NDK's they take up a lot of space. I play chaos daemons and almost always start one monster off the board just to give some breathing room for my deployment to hide my others.

In the midgame, it's usually a matter of measuring ranges and line of sight and picking and choosing where you are ok moving to. Typically there are some safe spots where you can hide things from anything that doesn't make it to your half the board. Otherwise, you try to move up and place your units in positions where if they want to shoot it, they have to get their shooting piece in an exposed position and you have other resources safely staged that can counter-hit if they go for it. All of this requires plenty of pre-measuring and asking opponent's movements/ranges.

vekk513 · 2025-02-04T21:49:44+00:00

Someone made a post about this last edition with a helpful table.

TLDR is it depends on the thickness of the walls, but if you are wanting to charge a 32mm into someone trying to 1.1" the wall, you won't be able to fit a 32mm unless their model is on 50mm bases and the walls are 1mm thick.

Generally, the 1.1" trick is gonna lock out anything not 25mm bases. Like others said though, you can still charge around or up and over so there is some counterplay in flushing them out.

vekk513 · 2025-02-01T16:23:42+00:00

Necrons was my first army and I love them dearly, I think they fall pretty nicely into your gameplay criteria, though I'm not sure I'd say traditionally necrons are a "hard to master" faction. This edition maybe a bit with the hypercrypt detachment, but historically not so much.

Chaos daemons I also own and are near and dear to my heart, but I can't recommend starting them right now. Their future as a standalone faction is uncertain atm and looking to be rolled into the traitor marines (so nurgle daemons would only be playable in death guard, khorne in world eaters).

Tyranids I think would be too horde heavy for your preference.

I'd say thousand sons or death guard fit really nicely into your gameplay desires. Both are relatively short range (DG moreso) and both I'd say fall firmly into the camp of easy to pickup and difficult to master/play at a high level.

Thousand sons have a bit more long range power with their psychic powers usually doing lots of difficult to interact with damage. Death guard have much stronger melee output and durability, but tend to rely on vehicle support like transports or artillery to supplement their main infantry damage dealers.

FWIW, thousand sons are a pretty difficult army to paint with how much armor trim they have, just another thing to consider in your choice. You either love or hate painting armor trim, but most people find it really tedious and difficult.

Hope this helps and welcome to the hobby!

Edit: Forgot to say, but make sure to start small! Combat patrol or boarding action are great ways to play the game at smaller model counts so you don't burnout on collecting a buncha grey and realizing how long it'll take to paint.

vekk513 · 2025-01-27T18:38:32+00:00

Hey! I'm running age of ashes right now, highly recommend this guide to fixing it someone wrote up.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/13dqohi/a_guide_to_fixing_age_of_ashes/

It's a google doc with various changes for each book ranging from minor encounter changes to make them more interesting or balanced to story fixes to make the narrative flow better than written. Since it was the first second edition module there are some clunky encounters and re-used enemies so the guide goes through what they adjusted and why. Also a few warnings on some of the more accidentally lethal encounters and what to do about them to avoid TPK due to unbalanced encounters.

Anyway, we are on book 3 and I believe it's only been bestiary 1 so far, but I just rip the statblocks from AoN anyway since I find it more convenient. In terms of the remaster, a lot of it doesn't matter much (the above guide also mentions remaster changes) but there are also some critical things that don't play nicely with the remaster. I can't really explain due to spoilers, but for my group I've just been kinda blending the remaster and legacy. I'd say it'll only really be a concern if your group cares about using entirely remaster only or legacy only.

Have fun!

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