Warhammer Total War: Warhammer 2

[Average Manatee]

Huge Vargheist buff out of nowhere, now an effective AP unit. Vlad too and with reusable ring (though his movement speed still sucks). Pirates nerfed, greenskins nerfed. Some buffs to weaker lords.

Surprisingly sparse on skaven/wood elf changes, I guess the new units are their buffs.

 

[thesheeep]

Pirates nerfed,

That's a bit mystifying, isn't it?
They are kind of one-trick ponies anyway and could always be easily outranged by Elves or just run down with cavalry due to lack of real frontline. In MP, people can just charge through the crabs.
It's hilarious to me that people have been complaining about Coast needing a nerf as they can be so easily rushed down.

Anyway, it's also not fully true that they only got nerfed - some units actually got buffed. Like the Animated Hulks, which nobody ever used - not sure if their new buffs make them better, of course...

• Melee Attack changed from 30 to 32
• Run Speed changed from 3.8 to 4.2
• Charge Speed changed from 6.5 to 6.8

Better, yes, but I still don't see why you would use them. What's their role supposed to be?

The buffs to Depth Guard are actually pretty good. They were always a small bit away from being a good unit.
So they might now be a good unit (?)

Also, what's this (for all Gunnery Mobs):

• Reload Skill changed from 0 to 10

Reload skill? It's not the reload time since that is a separate stat.

 

[Fedora Master]

Nice

 

[Parabalus]

HELMAN GHORST – BROTHERS GHORST CORPSE CART

• Cost changed from 850 to 650

HELMAN GHORST
Faction effects:

• Removed +13 charge bonus for Corpse Cart units
• Added bound spell “Lesser Raise Dead” for corpse cart and mortis engine units.

Lord effect

• Added +15 armour for zombie units (Lord’s army)

ARCHAON THE EVERCHOSEN
Faction effects:

• Removed +10 leadership for chaos warrior units
• Added +3% weapon and missile strength per veterancy rank for all units.

If that's really faction-wide that's insane.

 

[Maculo]

CA messed with Malus' sanity/possession meter again. Sanity no longer causes - 10 melee attack, and possession provides +10 melee attack and +10% ranged damage. Still, the -60% replenishment is a bummer.

I read this in one of the reddit threads, but it is weird that CA did not think to include chaos corruption in Malus' mechanics. Morathi spreads demonic corruption, but not the character possessed by an actual demon.

Also, once you obtain Malus’ item, he takes only 1 damage from each tick from Tzarkan’s drain.

 

[Average Manatee]

I don't get why CA seems so intent on Malus's mechanic being shit. Can't use his signature ability literally 95% of the time. Is there any other lord that is actually substantially nerfed in campaign compared to his skirmish abilities? The one powerful perk he's had, the -50% cost, still removed in favor of useless growth you can hardly afford to use. Also his army bonuses only apply to his army rather than faction-wide, so its even weaker once you've got more armies running around (which is turn 1 if you keep hag graef).

Pirates nerfed,

That's a bit mystifying, isn't it?
They are kind of one-trick ponies anyway and could always be easily outranged by Elves or just run down with cavalry due to lack of real frontline. In MP, people can just charge through the crabs.
It's hilarious to me that people have been complaining about Coast needing a nerf as they can be so easily rushed down.

The thing with pirates is that they don't rout so even if your cavalry charges into shooters the shooters just sit there and tank damage while being able to shoot in melee and other shooters also shoot you. It's probably even worse now with the unit mass changes, probably very hard to charge through hundreds of zombies even if their mass is low individually.

Reload skill? It's not the reload time since that is a separate stat.

It's not shown anywhere but reload skill is what determines reload time.

 

[Raghar]

HELMAN GHORST – BROTHERS GHORST CORPSE CART

• Cost changed from 850 to 650

HELMAN GHORST
Faction effects:

• Removed +13 charge bonus for Corpse Cart units
• Added bound spell “Lesser Raise Dead” for corpse cart and mortis engine units.

Lord effect

• Added +15 armour for zombie units (Lord’s army)

ARCHAON THE EVERCHOSEN
Faction effects:

• Removed +10 leadership for chaos warrior units
• Added +3% weapon and missile strength per veterancy rank for all units.

If that's really faction-wide that's insane.

+15 armor for 5 armor units is damage reduction of about 5 percent.

3 percent damage increase per rank is +27 percent increase at max rank. That's not that great. Also some units should have higher increase than other units. But that would need another unit table, just for Archeon. Which is totally doable, and no problem, but CA wants simple easy + few percent solutions.

Also why did they removed charge bonus from corpse carts. In these few situations where corpse carts actually charged, that removed them even that miniscule advantage against nose picking lazy peasant.

 

[Average Manatee]

Wood Elf Campaign seems a bit brokenly easy. TL;DR:

- Wood Elf main buildings only cost cash to upgrade, not growth. It's economy and defense buildings that cost growth. So be a proper penny pincher early game.
- Upgrade the Oak of Ages ASAP. This unlocks confederation missions.
- Win 5 battles vs. Bret and Greenskins to confederate the two minor elfs around oak of ages. At rank 3 oak of ages you confederate Durthu by beating dwarves 3 times and Orion by razing or sacking 10 cities. Obviously doing this explodes your cash and strength since you'll get level 4 or 5 provinces.


With all this done, you've already cleared out most of the area around the oak of ages and improved its growth rate. At this point I'm like ??? what do? I have 5 out of 7 possible growth from the border region around the oak of ages with +4 from spellsingers buildings and +4 from healing my first tree. Since the main oak is already past 250 I just need to wait around for about 30 or so turns to win I think. The intent seems to be that I'd go heal other forests besides Witchwood (started as the sisters), but I don't see the point. I got an event to take Gaean Vale but I just have to build it up from the bottom and then wait like 40 turns to heal it (30 turns at +3 health per turn and another 10 turns for the ritual to finish). I did confederate Oreon/Laurelorn but still, it's just a bunch of free extra money and I don't see the point of trying to heal unless I wanted to go for a long campaign victory, I can just sit back and wait 30 turns.

Possibly the quickest, simplest campaign. Just wipe out some relatively minor, weak factions around the oak of ages, get free confederations and wait. Could have been way quicker too, I think the best method would be to farm forest health by razing and then waiting around to immediately re-raze whenever someone colonizes.

Also you still can't trade without a land connection from your capital to the trade partner. WTF. Deeproots don't count, my capital isn't even Oak of Ages but Witchwood. I have to blob all the way to either Twisted Glade (and therefore defend against Skaven and Dark Elves for the rest of the game) or Amheim (and do the same with high elves) if I want to trade with the world.

 

[Average Manatee]

Another unlisted update change, and possibly the best ever: You don't have to listen to Tyrion every time you go to start a new campaign, it only plays the lord quote if you actually select them. 10/10 patch of the year.

 

[Beggar]

Another unlisted update change, and possibly the best ever: You don't have to listen to Tyrion every time you go to start a new campaign, it only plays the lord quote if you actually select them. 10/10 patch of the year.

Totally. It sickens me to hear that "I am Tyrion. Heeeir of aenarion". Same as hearing blacksmiths sounds in DS.

 

[Fedora Master]

FIX YOUR DAMN PATCHING PROCESS CA AAHHHHH

e: Oh, the victory conditions for the new lords are really nice! Throt doesn't even have to kill off other factions.

 

[Average Manatee]

Wood Elves finished. Happened sort of as I expected. Trivially easy and very short once you've confederated the main forest.

Spoiler

[

Something like 60 turns before Archaon can spawn. So much for trying out legendary chaos invasion

Spoiler

And as I thought, didn't even have time to purify another forest. Basically just teleported in, killed someone with one region or confederated an already existing forest, then paid my way to a defensive alliance. Not much to do honestly.

The "purification" ritual was pretty anti-climactic. 3 fairly weak rebel armies will spawn but you have 2 turns to ambush them before they can attack you like normal rebel armies. I think all of them autoresolved with <5% casualties on my side. Even the final oak of ages purification was exactly the same. The final battle was also the same as pre-patch. Not much to it.

Overall I'm kind of indifferent to the rework overall. It'd be a lot more interesting if the easy confederation didn't happen and you had more choice on what to do rather than being quickly guided into being super strong and controlling the oak of ages territory. I can see the campaign getting quite repetitive for each race. As far as new units go, the Stag Knights were definitely good but fuck, tier 5? Didn't bother building more aside from what I started with. Just went with glade guard/waywatcher spam since Sisters get bonuses to archers. Might try Drycha and go for a pure melee army once I've done the Skaven campaign.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

overpowered dlc stuff? from ca? who would have guessed?

[surprised kirk]

 

[Average Manatee]

Nothing was overpowered except the free confederation, which is not DLC. I'm not sure why it's so easy and early to get. If anything there were actually a lot of nerfs.

-You can't stack Talons of Kournos from heroes for huge range increases.
-You do get Knowledgeable lords now so you can run around with infinite magic easily (I had like +100 from characters by the end of the game), but then magic is honestly not that useful for wood elves. Penumbral Pendulum was nerfed hard, and it was your main way to delete lines of infantry. Pit of Shades isn't too useful considering if you ever get enemy infantry to blob up your archers will delete the blob in seconds. Life magic is pretty shit unless you run lots of treemen. Beasts magic is just plain always shit in SP. High magic is similarly shit, the +60 reload skill spell only affects one target and is basically just for artillery, something you don't use. Dark Magic is similarly pretty bad, maybe frostbite spamming to delay enemies would have been OK. It's a real shame they can't get light magic for Net of Amyntok.
- Ariel is actually pretty shit. Surprised me. She gets extra magic and magic discounts, which is meaningless due to knowledgeable heroes. She doesn't get any new spells and the ones she does get aren't even the best of your norrmal selection, in fact I'd say her spell selection is worse than most single-type lords. She buffs sisters of the thorns which I don't use (look nice but, cmon, waywatchers, microing cavalry in huge battles sucks). She gets a ton of bonuses to the local province which are useless because 99% of the time you are outside your main tree and the bonuses will do nothing.
- Forge of Daith is fairly useless. Equipment that only affects your lord effectively does nothing once you get 20 vs 20 or more battles. I got a +20% movement bonus item and one that summoned a unit of waystalkers, that's about it.
- Waystalkers did apparently get slightly nerfed on their accuracy.
- The overall amount of money you make from the main forest is nerfed since you don't get buildings with an adjacency bonus. Overall once you conquer all the forests is probably about the same, but you also don't get outpost income nor the +1% damage per outpost bonus. Not that it was really worth it to blob before since it gave you great power relation penalties.
- A lot less free +relations with everyone. You get +10 with everyone from an amber unlock, +20 bretonnian, and +30/25 high elf/dark elf is near the end of the tree.
- Sisters were pretty good as a legendary lord in battle but even more ranged isn't a specific need of wood elves.
- Even when you complete the campaign the final bonus from a fully upgraded oak of ages is kind of shit. +100% ammunition and +10% ward save during forest battles. Wow. 90% of the time if it's a forest battle it's because I'm ambushing and you don't need bonuses for that. The further +15% reload time reduction for all armies from a 2nd amber was pretty good though, makes your waystalkers quite buff (81 missile strength) if you want to go for a long campaign victory. Which really shouldn't take that long, just have to bribe/conquer some people and click end turn another 30 times.

 

[Mazisky]

Creative Assembly announced that due to the criticism they are reworking the Forge fo Daith and they are recreating the cards art for both this and Grom DLC.

 

[underground nymph]

What was the criticism about in particular?

 

[Fedora Master]

Oh god hovering over Drycha on the campaign map results in ENDLESS SCREAMING from her.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

I noticed that Wood Elf economy is pretty shit. Your only money maker are your big trees, and they don't make enough money to even sustain a single stack of late game units, which you need to defend your tree against attackers. You need to stack upkeep reduction as wood elves, and even then that's not going to be enough.
Deep Roots are cool, but the 10 turn cool down is bullshit, because due to your poor economy and supply lines you aren't going to have that many armies. Good luck trying to defend multiple forests with only one stack against threats on all sides, which will happen because no one likes wood elves.

I find the whole office mechanic to be amusing in a bad way
"hey, lets make a mechanic that rewards players for having multiple armies when there's also a mechanic that harshly punishes them for having multiple armies".
Fuck off CA.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Oh god hovering over Drycha on the campaign map results in ENDLESS SCREAMING from her.

I'm playing as Drycha right now actually.
She's kind of fun, especially early game, but I noticed that when you start fighting against well armored units you tend to struggle, and the units that deal good damaged against armored units tend to have high upkeep due to the racial trait and have debuffs on top of it.
You pretty much need to take aspects to make it even, and even then that's not enough.

 

[Mazisky]

What was the criticism about in particular?

The criticism was that the forge is a lazy mechanic and is useless most of the time, expecially compared to the more exciting and more meaningful Throt lab.

The other one was that the card art quality since the Grom DLC looks like placeholder and it doesn't match the higher quality of vanilla card arts.

Both will be addressed.

As a result we discovered that reddit haters are more useful than fanboys for consumers.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Yeah great power is fucking stupid. You can gift people over and over until they like you. Unfortunately getting an alliance with an already big faction costs disgusting amounts of money (like 300k in gift).

It is indeed. Especially when you are trying to negotiate with a faction who's stronger than you
> Be Dreadfleet
> has about 15 settlements
> trying to negotiate with Naggarond
> -40 great power penalty
> has 115 settlements and strength rating of 1 to my 6
> "Oh no, this little midget faction of corpse pirates is a huge threat to my empire."

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

What was the criticism about in particular?

The criticism was that the forge is a lazy mechanic and is useless most of the time, expecially compared to the more exciting and more meaningful Throt lab.

The other one was that the card art quality since the Grom DLC looks like placeholder and it doesn't match the higher quality of vanilla card arts.

Both will be addressed.

As a result we discovered that reddit haters are more useful than fanboys for consumers.

Heh, sounds like the Prophet and the Warlock.
One faction gets a lot of neat bespoke mechanics and the ability to upgrade your faction to a great extent and is overall a lot of fun to play.
The other is the Cult of Sotek.

 

[Fedora Master]

Oh god hovering over Drycha on the campaign map results in ENDLESS SCREAMING from her.

I'm playing as Drycha right now actually.
She's kind of fun, especially early game, but I noticed that when you start fighting against well armored units you tend to struggle, and the units that deal good damaged against armored units tend to have high upkeep due to the racial trait and have debuffs on top of it.
You pretty much need to take aspects to make it even, and even then that's not enough.

Yea, I can't confirm the "WE being easy" thing. Drycha struggles. The VC next door are a pain in the wooden ass.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Oh god hovering over Drycha on the campaign map results in ENDLESS SCREAMING from her.

I'm playing as Drycha right now actually.
She's kind of fun, especially early game, but I noticed that when you start fighting against well armored units you tend to struggle, and the units that deal good damaged against armored units tend to have high upkeep due to the racial trait and have debuffs on top of it.
You pretty much need to take aspects to make it even, and even then that's not enough.

Yea, I can't confirm the "WE being easy" thing. Drycha struggles. The VC next door are a pain in the wooden ass.

Never fought Vampires, but I did fight Empire a bunch and tend to do ok with them as long as they don't spam too many greatswords. Drycha is really good at dunking on armies that have mostly lightly armored ranged infantry and artillery due to her ability to just summon dryads anywhere on the map.
Against dwarfs though? Absolute bastard of a fight. Pretty much every unit you can afford are outclassed by fucking longbeards, and they never bloody break. Even quarrelers can put up a good fight.

 

[Average Manatee]

Did you upgrade your oak (the main oak of ages, not starting settlement) ASAP? It gives very nice global growth bonuses that will accelerate everything else, along with unlocking confederation. As soon as you unlock confederation you can quickly get several mostly-upgraded trees.

Dryads vs. dwarves will definitely be much harder than spamming glade guard vs. skaven and dark elves but you can basically just escape to the oak of ages. If you upgrade your starting tree and give it defenses you should be able to defend it against most things for a while. Grouping them up for pit of shades should work well. Though the easy way out would be to spam starfire shaft glade guard. Also one of the treemen lords can give -5 leadership to all enemy armies and get a temporary -16 leadership aoe ability, that'd be pretty powerful. It also looks like Office that gives you insidious glamour instead of glamour effectively removes the combat penalty for elves.

EDIT: Oh shit, Drycha doesn't actually start with the oak of ages. I guess she's just straight up the hardcore masochist Wood Elf start. Not sure if you're expected to conquer it from the other elves or if you'd get it for free by event after purifying the first tree or something.

Heh, sounds like the Prophet and the Warlock.
One faction gets a lot of neat bespoke mechanics and the ability to upgrade your faction to a great extent and is overall a lot of fun to play.
The other is the Cult of Sotek.

Cult of Sotek IS actually extraordinarily powerful though. Just... Ikit Claw is on a whole other level of easy instant OP shit. Cult of Sotek bonuses are stronger than anything that non-skaven races get IMO.