Looking for good Nurgle resources/advice

[mattgslater]

I think Jimmy's take on Stand Firm is highly colored by his experience. I probably would want some Guard before I started, but spamming Stand Firm can be really powerful, especially in a format without much Claw. Being unable to push anybody anywhere makes it very hard to bash effectively.

[Piousman]

Especially if you are playing bash-vs-bash, since they cannot just push you off them, giving you a chance to hit back.

- Piosuman

[SunDevil]

Unlike Jimmy F. , I have read this entire thread and I cannot find where bash Nurgle is said to be sub-optimal in terms of onfield winning percentage. I said on the podcast and here that slayer Nurgle will probably win more games in certain leagues/contexts.

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Also Carnis, Smeborg has said the purpose of skilling his men up the way he does is to provide fun for him and his opponent and a challenge, not to be the most efficient team so I can understand a lot more of his way of thinking now.

No, Jimmy, I find it to be the highest performing (most effective) style of Nurgle team.

All the best.

For the record I did say that building teams sub optimally is fine is you want a challenge or if you would be ostracized for making a killer team.
I think Nurgle are challenging enough without needing to handicap yourself further.
The title of the thread is Looking for good Nurgle resources/advice, I dont believe taking SF before MB Guard Fend or Claw on any player is good advice if winning is your aim.
Of course if you want to make a fun build then that's fine as I have said before.

Fair enough and thank you for taking the time to pull that quote out. I saw that as well and just thought smeborg was stating his opinion. In his experience, the stymie is the highest performing way to play Nurgle. He didn't say it was "in all circumstances." Again, That's his opinion, not a blanket statement of fact meant to belittle bash Nurgle coaches.

Also, 'good' advice is subjective. Provide all the 'good' bash Nurgle advice you want and I'll thank you for it. I just hope we can avoid saying anyone is doing it wrong (or providing bad advice) simply by stating their opinions about how they personally like to play Nurgle.

[mattgslater]

To be fair, Jimmy's not just asserting his opinion. He has empirical evidence to back it up. It's skewed evidence, but it's not bare assertion. That is, his argument is neither very tactful nor all that strong (at least not as strong as he and Carnis seem to think it is), but he's got an argument and points to support it.

1) In the Blackbox, and to a lesser extent in Ranked, Chaotic slayer teams are the current Big Thing. The Next Big Thing has yet to evolve in Blackbox; in Ranked, elves seem able to compete.

2) Ranked and Blackbox are the only LRB6 environments in FUMBBL, where they play most of their games.

3) The best FUMBBL coaches are among the best anywhere, so one would expect that the optimum would tend to dominate. It's also likely, given that they're FUMBBL fanatics and excellent coaches, that FUMBBL strongly informs their home leagues. (No personal experience; I live thousands of miles away from them.)

It's got problems, of course; the reflexive nature of league environments, including Blackbox and Ranked, provides an "echo chamber" of sorts that can make various strategies more or less competitive in various environments. So they make categorical statements based on their experience, which is certainly relevant to the overall discussion but underestimates the degree to which their experience is non-representative.

[Carnis]

To be fair, Jimmy's not just asserting his opinion. He has empirical evidence to back it up. It's skewed evidence, but it's not bare assertion. That is, his argument is neither very tactful nor all that strong (at least not as strong as he and Carnis seem to think it is), but he's got an argument and points to support it.

1) In the Blackbox, and to a lesser extent in Ranked, Chaotic slayer teams are the current Big Thing. The Next Big Thing has yet to evolve in Blackbox; in Ranked, elves seem able to compete.

The next big thing is ALREADY HERE! IT'S THE FENDBEARDS!

http://fumbbl.com/FUMBBL.php?page=team& ... _id=649245

Anyway there is no real good counter to clawspam, except blodgespam, which actually does great in box, 5th most played race being DEs. Elves do great in ranked, cause in ranked its the easiest race to get games with! But even blodge spam comes with problems when the killerteam adds 2-3 tackle.. All elves still remain the winningest race though, even in fumbbl, cause their TDs are really really hard to stop even up numbers.

I must ask though, what would be a good spot to go for empirical evidence? Or anyway a better spot than Fumbbl's B/R or Cyanide's MM? My suspicion is still that most of the coaches who go MBPOClaw in TT and give it such a bad reputation as a gamelosing strategy are coaches who are playing the game to kill, not to score TDs. In the other end of the spectrum there are coaches who play in leagues where such comboes are not seen at all..

This reminds me a bit of the situation at GW HQ, before the quickpatch rules changes that were added to BB on white dwarf after a powergamer joined GW league and had all dirtyplayers + pro killing everything and everyone he played against. This was when sigurd's injury table was added (1-3 badly hurt, 4-5 SI, 6 killed) over the old 12 before or after modifiers on the injury table = kill, 11 SI, 10 BH.. Most injuries were kills back then, heh.

Sort of like the other side of the argument is saying "this is the best strat to win" the otherside says its not, but does not test it in practice. That's the feeling I get, but maybe I'm wrong.

[mattgslater]

I must ask though, what would be a good spot to go for empirical evidence?

One place to go for every league culture? Ain't got one. Maybe if Ian's stats were more clearly broken down by team and league, we'd be able to get a better impression of the game's various "schools" of thought and their relative places in the Grand Scheme of BB. But you still wouldn't end up with a clear hierarchy of strategies.

In the league I play in, strategy mostly revolves around three coaches, two of whom play Skaven exclusively. There's me, there's these three guys, and then there's everybody else. So we always have whatever I'm playing, two Skaven teams, a team designed to compete with Skaven and whatever I'm playing, three teams designed to compete with that guy's team and with Skaven, and a Necromantic team nobody games around (the current one has a Block/MB guy; he's pretty good, but he doesn't make a bad coach competitive, even if he is getting a lot better at positioning Golems. Weirdly, his 3 Cas all came on rolls where he wouldn't have needed Claw, though he's Clawed his way into plenty of KOs and stuns).

It seems to me that Claw(PO)MB spam is the best heavy strategy when you're seeing a lot of heavy teams, including other Claw(PO)MB spam teams. The obvious solution is to keep your feet, and there are teams that do that well.

My figuring (and this is speculation) is that we're just looking at the Next Big Thing here, and not really a sea-change so much as a new kid in town. I suspect (again, just suspicion) that fundamentals-heavy elves are the antidote for Claw(PO)MB spam in most leagues. Certainly, mass Dodge is a solid way to reduce your injury risk; if it weren't, nobody would give Amazons a second look! If the top coaches in the league run elves, and if I'm right about it, then Claw(PO)MB spam is less valuable and other heavy strategies, such as Smeborg's "stymie" strategy, a "funneling" Undead attack, and MB/SF Orcs, may be more useful. The obvious response to this, taking some Tackle(PO)MB on the killer teams, means less Claw(PO)MB, weakening the team's focus and allowing more room for the marginalized styles to breathe. In short formats, playstyle doesn't really dictate skill selection, because the skill tracks often diverge later in team development.

[Carnis]

I must ask though, what would be a good spot to go for empirical evidence?

The obvious response to this, taking some Tackle(PO)MB on the killer teams, means less Claw(PO)MB, weakening the team's focus and allowing more room for the marginalized styles to breathe.

3 claw is 60k, 3 tackle is 60k, in perpetual this is not an issue at all. Obviously if your season is 10games long you have to choose who you play against.

Even then just going:

Surehands/Block on one pest

Guard/Block on all NWs

MB/Claw/PO/Block on one Pest
MB/Tackle/PO/Block on one Pest

Dirty player on one rotter.
Wrestle on one rotter.

And you cover *all* the bases really in a short term league.

Needs 16 spps on the ballcarrier and 6 on each to get the build going, preferably 16 to get claw or PO.. But even then getting to 31 is *not* hard..

It'll be a hard fought match against elves/amazons probably, at least if you dont have tackle yet.. Nurgle arent a short term team, but for longer term they have the ultimate team really for a basher-style coach.

[mattgslater]

Yeah, but that's not a problem roster. Claw and Tackle compete directly; Claw-en-masse is the broken part, and if (if) Dodge elves prove to be the answer to the strategy, the amount of Claw on such teams will almost certainly decline, even in Blackbox.

[Smeborg]

Sort of like the other side of the argument is saying "this is the best strat to win" the other side says its not, but does not test it in practice. That's the feeling I get, but maybe I'm wrong.

I will try and advance the debate a little. I have always said that Nurgle make a good slayer team. However, I also find that Nurgle get better results as a stymie team.

I am wary about giving opinions that are not based on experience. I played slayer Nurgle in 2 tabletop leagues and 1 tournament before I developed the stymie Nurgle style of play and team development. I found stymie Nurgle to be consistently better (higher win percentage). That is the basis of my opinion.

I accept that things might turn out differently in FUMBBL, were I to test both styles there. But that is unlikely any time soon.

Like Carnis, I wonder if those who advocate forcefully for slayer Nurgle (JimmyFantastic for example) have tried pure stymie Nurgle (no slayer skills) for any extended period of time (or even at all). If they have, what was their experience? If they have not, what is the basis for their comparison?

All the best.

[Wanchor]

I rather think that some kind of happy medium might be the most effective overall rather than full adherence to one camp or another. That being said, I prefer leaning more toward the stymie build, though I'm very happy with my slayer-Pestigor. Gonna sound like I'm tooting my own horn here...lot of that in this thread.

[mattgslater]

That hybrid bit works with Orcs. Side Step is a great skill on a BOB; my SS/Block BOB has ruined two drives in the last two games. MB is great on a Blitzer, if you pair him up with a BOB or a Guard player. Spam MB and Block, get a bunch of Guard and a few toolbox skills, and then start picking up the SF/SS/Fend once you've got the basics together, or as you roll doubles on BOBs and Blitzers.

Seems it would be harder with Nurgle, but should work fine. They've got some of the stymie pieces to start, but have a lot of Block/Wrestle to take... the difference, I guess, is that Nurgle have more specialization and a higher peak, while peak Orcs tend to mostly have three of the same four skills (Block, MB, Guard, SF/SS; Throwers and Linos may have different builds, and Blitzers may have other skills too).

[Wanchor]

An important difference also being that the Pestigors have horns and so rarely need to bring in assist to pick on a straggler or smash out a strongpoint in the opponent's setup, letting the rest of the team maintain its own formations. Moreover, as much as I like to knock the opponent's pieces off the pitch (and who doesn't), I find that the threat of a can opener hovering around also does a fair deal in redirecting the other coach's attention to be able to minimize harm due from the slayer's interference, often to the detriment of the scoring side to the play.

That being said, I never leave this guy out to dry, always tucking him in behind some other pieces to protect him. I almost never even follow up a blitz with him unless I'm very confident that he'll be safe, which usually involves him attacking someone who managed to slip into the cage.

[mattgslater]

I almost never even follow up a blitz with him unless I'm very confident that he'll be safe, which usually involves him attacking someone who managed to slip into the cage.

That reduces the value of PO considerably, no? You can't be afraid of what happens if your opponent sells out to blitz your AV7 guy using MB; play with some guts.

[SunDevil]

When I finish my current season with stymie Nurgle (my second) they will have about 22-23 games played, hopefully more if I do well in the playoffs. I am seriously considering retiring the team at season's end and restarting another Nurgle team to bash. I'd play two seasons, roughly the same number of games, and have a very good idea of which would do better in our local area.

Something to consider made easier by this tremendous thread and also me not really having any other teams jumping out at me to play them next.

[Carnis]

When I finish my current season with stymie Nurgle (my second) they will have about 22-23 games played, hopefully more if I do well in the playoffs. I am seriously considering retiring the team at season's end and restarting another Nurgle team to bash. I'd play two seasons, roughly the same number of games, and have a very good idea of which would do better in our local area.

Something to consider made easier by this tremendous thread and also me not really having any other teams jumping out at me to play them next.

That wont be a big sample size though, but qualitative discussion always has room for opinions ofc. Quoting Koadah stats oncemore:

I like PO. It means that other teams like humans, zons etc can get nasty too.

If I was going to tweak it I would disallow using claw & PO in the action. (for fear of breaking the claw or injuring yourself with it.)
A chance to injure yourself is good too.

Even in the ox Chaos's overall stats are not that impressive.
All games

At 1800+ they are barely above 50%
1800+

They don't start to get going until over 2000 and become dominant past 2200.

2000+

2200+

So higher TV slayer nurgle (average casualties >5per game) fairs ok with 56% wins (draws count as 50% win, loss 0% etc) and 8th overall in the races..

Where does stymie nurgle stand?