FiSH wrote:Your first point was that the snowbally mechanic does not change the tide of a battle. This is incorrect. Inspiration is a big deal and helps win battles that would have been otherwise lost.
Now you are saying that inspiration is snowbally. Duh.
I really do not mean to be offensive, but I have seen a lot of your posts recently, and most of them are very poorly thought out. Please put in more effort and time when making a post.
Forgive my offense, but it is clear to me that you missed the point of my post entirely, as I was not making claims about inspiration, much less was I remotely saying that inspiration doesn't change the tide of battle, only a fool would make a zero-sum claim like that.
To that end I was mostly asking a question, which could be restated here as to "why is inspiration a mechanic in the game at all (when there are balance alternatives that would be more reliable and more fair).
Since you would like me to think it through myself, which I have been frequently discouraged to doing so in the past from prominent members of this community, and since then chosen mostly to ask questions instead of making statements, I could none the less go ahead with your request and walk through the arguments as to why Inspiration is actually a burden to balance and good design instead of a feature.
To start with I'll go over the obvious, Inspiration provides an area damage (and other effects) benefit to your units once a key unit (i.e. dreadnought for the rest of the example) has killed an enemy.
Now, mathematically this means that the benefits of Inspiration will be greater, under circumstances in which killing an enemy is more frequent and more likely. This is the snowball aspect of inspiration. The problem with snowball mechanics of this nature, particularly as involuntary passives, is that they provide greater benefit when it is not needed, and lesser benefit when it is more needed.
This is where you misread: I would not say that Inspiration has no effect, and I would acknowledge situations where Inspiration provides enough benefit for 1 player to win a fight against another, which he would have lost otherwise.
However, I am not disputing any of the above, but instead would say that Inspiration proves to be a burden upon balance, specifically for the reason that all the effort and tuning of units specifically is undermine by passive auras that throw the values of those units around. Active and temporary effects can be praised for their tactical value in changing combat, but passive persistent effects that alter those baser values would undermine the care of tweaking the stats of one unit or another, when those stats are persistently different in practice than in theory.
To that end, I ask why Inspiration is in the game, because it would seem that, to use my example of the Dreadnought earlier, that all players and all races would be better served for a snowball mechanic like Inspiration to be replaced with simply more reliable features for such a unit as the dreadnought itself.
While I use the dreadnought as a reliable example of a unit that on its own has a large impact in combat (because lets face it they're a damn good unit), the fact that the presence of one such unit as the dreadnought suddenly makes all other nearby units much stronger is worrisome for the sake of balance alone.
I pick the dreadnought because its a clear and obvious case, but there are many units that have similar features, I could just as well use the Librarian/ Terminators/ or the Avatar of Khaine as an example.
However, I pick on Inspiration in particular because it is not simply a persistent aura (even though it may as well be) but instead it is an aura whose contribution behaves in a way that snowballs more-so, and relies on snowballing more-so than any other.
In the end My question remains? What is the point of inspiration? It is less beneficial when it is needed more, more beneficial when needed less, and undermines the efforts of tweaking and balancing units that are effected by it beyond simply the aura's carrier.