The GH Preseason: Blood Bowl Season 3 Reveals Roundtable

The classic Games Workshop drip-feeding on information continues, and thus does the Goonhammer Preseason. As of writing, the latest Warcom article with a few details on the upcoming release just dropped, and we’re here to give you our early impressions, predictions, and feelings. There’s some potentially massive changes in this one! Let’s bang through ‘em one by one.

Secure the Ball

HardyRoach: Some clarifications here, as the previous article suggested that this action would end your entire turn. Here it’s been made clearer, the action will just end the player’s activation. We also get the info that it can’t be done by any Big Guy (keyword bolding there), or anyone with the new trait “Unsteady” (which both Saurus and Zombies have, among unconfirmed others).

I like this action less than I did before. While ending the player’s activation is a downside, it’s not really a particularly big deal for the teams that will likely benefit the most. Those teams probably didn’t have the movement to go much further, or the passing skill to do a pass, so who cares. I don’t think this is going to be as disastrous an action to introduce as some seem to think, but unless there’s more restrictions we haven’t seen, I think it might end up getting FAQ’d down the line.

Dan “dittka” Boyd: I suppose I should be happy that Sauruses (Saurii?) can’t secure the ball, but I’m still not happy about this rule. Low AGI teams should have drawbacks, and picking up the ball was always the biggest one. It’s why you’d see Sure Hands on so many mid-low AGI rosters in tournaments. However, it does look like this rule isn’t egregious as I feared, so we’re probably all good.

Marquis of Peaches: Seconding HardyRoach here that I like this much less than the version that we thought it was. An immediate turnover in exchange for a near-guaranteed pickup is an interesting trade-off, though one that a skillful coach could mitigate with good action priority. Now there’s basically no downside to it.

Dan: This makes me like it less! Now I’m upset!

Passing Simplifications

Credit: Warhammer Community

HardyRoach: No more Wildly Inaccurate, no more deflections! Back to just Accurate, Inaccurate, and Fumble. Interceptions are also still a thing. All good. I honestly forgot about Deflections half the time and so did a lot of my opponents, even experienced ones.

Also, it’s implied some other players will be slightly less crap at passing, which does lead me to think that they might bump some of the 3+ Throwers up to 2+, or I hope so anyway. Imperial Noble Blitzers are already at 4+ passing. Maybe they’ll just also be 3+, but with no skills, which is basically back where we started. We’ll see! A lot of the details of this are potentially going to change my opinion.

Dan: Passing has been a complete nothingburger for all of season 2, so I’m glad to see that they’re reverting, here.

Marquis of Peaches: A Pass action was actively ridiculous to play out during this Season, and was the only thing in the game that consistently had me breaking out the rulebook. Even Throw Teammates were simpler most of the time! The way that modifiers interacted with the rolls was counterintuitive, and there being a difference between what happened on a natural 1 vs. a modified 1 was an everlasting source of confusion.

I will say, however, that I think Deflections were a fun source of chaos - breaking up a pass, only for it to bounce around somewhere completely unexpected, was good for laughs in a couple games I played this Season. While needing to confirm a crit in order to successfully intercept added a layer of complication, I think we could have removed Wildly Inaccurate but still kept Deflections.

This is, of course, mostly a moot point because if you’re passing the ball, something has probably gone horribly wrong already.

New Skills and Traits

HardyRoach: Quite a few bits and bobs here. We discussed Steady Footing when we talked about the last Warcom article, and Ghidra and I weren’t fans, feeling like it was pretty feel-bad to add ward saves to Blood Bowl. We’ve also got Punt, which sounds like a safer version of Hail Mary Pass, not sure that’ll get taken very much but I could see uses for it if a player already had it; Taunt, which forces a player to follow up a block on the skillholder – could be rather handy on Big Guys, Str 4 Blocker pieces, and Sidesteppers, making them that bit more sticky; and Bullseye, which makes thrown players not scatter on a superb throw – don’t see this getting taken very much, maybe on a treeman it’d be good for taking out ball carriers, but the requirement that it be a Superb throw makes that less appealing.

There’s also a whole new skill category that a load of cheat-y moves are getting moved into: Devious Skills. Not a bad idea really, moves some of the less useful things like Shadowing and Piledriver out of General (though it does the same for Dirty Player and Sneaky Git, swings and roundabouts, eh). Presumably both General and Devious will need more skills to fill them out – we know that one of the Devious ones is likely to be Eye Gouge.

Dan: Punt sounds like it might be full-on ridiculous if it truly doesn’t cause a turnover. Imagine this: a Dark Elf Runner punts the ball to the back half of the opponent’s side of the pitch, where a cherry-picking Witch Elf is within 8 of the goal line. If the ball can’t be interacted with, ie.: interceptions, it’s just a better version of passing! If the ball doesn’t do a full deviation (with the ball traveling d6 squares in a d8 direction), we’ve just unlocked Passing 2: This Time it’s Good. I hope they’ve done some gatekeeping rolls or something to get a punt off! We’ll see!

Putting the “violence” skills (Sneaky Git, Dirty Player, etc.) in devious is a soft nerf to linemen everywhere and kind of stinks. The other skill changes mentioned seem all right, though.

Marquis of Peaches: As an inveterate Halfling player, Bullseye seems very interesting to me. I agree that it will almost never get picked as a skill, but I have a feeling that we’ll see a Star Player that comes with it pretty soon.

Splitting Passing out in 2020 led to the addition of a glut of skills that were largely, uh… not very useful. Presumably, we’ll need a full 12 Devious skills to fill out the randomization tables, and I have a feeling we’ll see something similar, where we get lesser versions of existing skills (Brawler) or skills that are simply never taken (Cloud Burster).

Punt is horrifying, and I fully expect it to not last past the first FAQ in the state that WarCom has described it. It’s a Hail Mary Pass that doesn’t cause a turnover. It’s hard to understate how broken this would be for agility-based teams unless it has a serious downside.

Between multiple rerolls per turn, Secure the Ball, and now Punt, it seems like there’s been a push in the rules department away from letting Turnovers happen. The risky, push-your-luck style game design is the heart and soul of Blood Bowl, and I hope that it isn’t lost in the modernization of the game.

Confirmed Roster Changes

Blood Bowl Second Edition Skaven by King_Ghidra

HardyRoach: This is likely to be the major transformative change for this edition, and a lot depends on how well balanced the new rosters are. Basically, you will now only need one box to field a full team…kinda. If your positionals are being sold separately, like with Big Guys, Bull Centaurs, Assassins, or Gobbo Secret Weapons, you’ll still need to buy them separately (which is good, given that otherwise Goblin teams would only have Linemen on the team).

We’ll talk a bit about what our feelings are for the rosters not mentioned in detail, but first let’s talk about the ones that are.

Skaven are down to two Gutters, but their Blitzers have Strip Ball and MA 8. This is pretty huge, Gutters are arguably the best positional in the entire game, and losing two of them is going to be a radical thing to adapt to. On the other hand, having Blitzers that start with Strip Ball and higher movement softens the blow, as now they have ready-made ballhawks. Given that my general strategy with Gutters was to make two into carriers and two into hawks, I personally am likely to find this a lateral move, but there are a lot of valid team builds for Skaven, so I’m sure others will disagree.

Dan: This is fully wild. This will hurt Skaven coaches in leagues as it will greatly incentivize targeting GRs for violence, but I think we will see very little impact to Skaven tournament rosters, except that their Blitzers might now be the best defensive piece in the game. I think this is a straight upgrade to what was already an extremely stacked roster.

Marquis of Peaches: Who looked at the Skaven roster and thought “we can’t just nerf them, we’ll have to give them the best Blitzers in the game to make up for it”??

HardyRoach: Dark Elfves are down to two Blitzers, but Runners have the new skill Punt, and Assassins have Hit & Run (which works with Stab). Punt is a big shrug for me, I don’t necessarily think it dovetails very well with the Delf playstyle, it’ll be pretty niche. But they seem to really like given Delf Runners weirdly niche skills, so that tracks. Hit & Run on the Assassins is actually pretty good. Being able to just hop away after a failed stab really negates a lot of the risks of these positionals. I think Delves are going to be hurting from this though, and lose some of their identity as the bashier elves.

Dan: As stated before, I think Punt has the potential to be a truly game-changing skill. But, I will echo Hardy’s lamentation that Dark Elves are losing a big part of their bashy flavor.

HardyRoach: Shambling Undead only get two Ghouls, but they get Regeneration. Zombies get Eye Gouge, which prevents enemy players from providing assists (though we don’t know if it’s a passive skill that’s always in effect, or an active one that requires activation and perhaps a roll, my guess is the latter). This will probably make Undead a little bit more fragile overall, though the Regeneration will help somewhat with that. I’ll be more worried if the injury table is unchanged, because it’s pretty savage right now.

Dan: I cannot remember a time where I’ve played against a Shambling team with more than two Ghouls. I do not think this change is going to have a big impact.

Crab-stuffed Mushrooms (Joey K): I hope the roster slimming will make it easier to take Big Guys at the start. It was always a dilemma with my Khorne team whether to start with one!

Marquis of Peaches: Something else worth noting is that over on the Warhammer Facebook page, we got cards for two Star Players - Griff Oberwald (hold your groans, please) and Grim Ironjaw. Griff got slightly more expensive, up to 300K Gold Pieces, which is still nowhere near his actual value. I suspect we’ll continue to see tournament organizers charging SPP as well as Gold for Star Players, and capping or outright banning Mega-Stars.

Grim Ironjaw also has a Trait we haven’t seen before, Hatred (Big Guy). This seems to be a nod to Blood Bowl’s Warhammer Fantasy roots, where Hatred gave rerolls to hit against the target of their Hatred. Maybe this will be similar to Brawler, allowing him to reroll a Block die against Big Guys. I’m looking forward to seeing where else this pops up!

Most interestingly, each of these Stars has a set of keywords at the bottom of their card. Griff is (Blitzer, Human), while Grim is (Dwarf, Special). While we don’t have any more information about what these actually mean, it does open the door to some interesting speculation. We know that changes have been made to the roster, but we don’t know how they’ll interact with these keywords! Does Griff being a Blitzer mean that, for instance, a Human team that takes him to a tournament has to give up a Blitzer roster slot? With the probable changes (see below!), that means a Human team would only be able to take one rostered Human Blitzer.

Grim being a Special (positional, I assume - but I don’t actually know!) probably means that there’s no roster slot that he fills if you take him as a Star. While this would be a relatively minor change - I would sacrifice most of my positionals to take Griff, frankly - it does have an effect on the calculus of Star Players that coaches bring to tournaments. At the very least, it will be another lever for TOs to pull as they try to balance their rulesets. Watch this space!

Probable Roster Changes

Blood Bowl Human Team by Crab-stuffed Mushrooms

They’ve confirmed that their plan for these changes is to ensure that you only need one box to field all the positionals that the box covers (bar some exceptions, like Ogres), so we also have a good idea of which teams are going to have these roster changes and what those changes will be! We’ll give our thoughts on each.

Elven Union: -2 Catchers

HardyRoach: Whatever skills they’re adding to this team are going to have to be good, because the whole Union gameplay of flooding the opponent’s backfield with Catchers isn’t going to work nearly as well anymore. If one or both of those Catchers get ganked, woof. Hard times. Will probably force Union to play a more Wood Elf-y game, minus the Wardancers.

Dan: Hey, it’s me, the local Elf Union player! This stinks!!! Especially in league play, where you need multiple catchers because they never, ever play two games in a row. In tournaments, I would only occasionally take three catchers, but I’d usually run with two, so it’s not that big of a deal, there. But not having that lever to pull is going to hurt.

Humans: -2 Catchers, -2 Blitzers

HardyRoach: Most human coaches don’t seem to go whole hog on Catchers anyway, so that one doesn’t seem like a big deal. Might even make Catchers a better pick overall if they get a shiny new skill out of it.

Losing the Blitzers is gonna hurt, as it will with all of the teams dropping Block players. Block is just really good, if you hadn’t noticed. I can think of certain skill additions that might make up for it a bit, though.

Dan: I built a human team late last year to build for tournament play early next year. If this change comes through, they’ll probably remain unpainted, as I think this is a pretty bad hit to what is already an ailing team. Sorry, Squashington Bashinals!

Khorne: -2 Khorngors

HardyRoach: Need more information on this honestly. On a surface level, it seems bad. Khorngors are well-worth maxing out of a starting team, or ASAP, due to being the only source of reliable and controllable blitzing. But it depends what skill they get! If they get Block, yeah, alright, I’d consider that an okay trade at least.

Dan: Definitely in the “we need more info” camp over here.

Nurgle: -2 Pestigors

HardyRoach: Christ. Nurgle were already in a rough state, they’re gonna need some juicing after losing two of their only reliable ball carriers.

Dan: Yeah, this one’s bad. Hopefully they get some large compensatory buffs.

Marquis of Peaches: Stop, stop, he’s already dead. When I run tournaments, I tend to split the skill packages into 5 tiers. Snotlings, despite being a Stunty team, end up in Tier 4, while Nurgle ends up in Tier 5. If this goes through, I’ll need to make a special Tier 6 just for Nurgle.

Orcs: -2 Blitzers, -2 Big Uns

BB Gouged Eye Blood Bowl orcs retro

HardyRoach: Seems huge. Honestly, maybe the biggest hit here on an actually strong team (sorry Nurgle). If they just give the Big Uns Brawler or something, this could be extremely bad for the team. I can only imagine Orcs are going to need a few new skills to even this out, not just one extra each for Blitzers and Big Uns.

Dan: If this change goes through, it will, unfortunately gut orc teams. I am skeptical that there are enough compensatory skill buffs in the game to make up for it. I suppose you’ll see a lot more orc rosters with Trolls, but the trade off from two Big ‘Uns to one Troll is a direct downgrade, and don’t forget they’d be losing two Blitzers, too.

Marquis of Peaches: If this happens, we’ll need a new box for this team stat. We know they’re not in the starter set for this edition, but this is genuinely murderous. It would be a shame to see one of the oldest, proudest races of the Fantasy world brought low by a commitment to one-box teams. I know that the community had complaints about having to buy multiple boxes to make a decent roster, but the oldest teams are really suffering from going about it like this.

Wood Elves: -2 Catchers

HardyRoach: I’m not an elf player, so someone correct me if I’m wrong, but this seems alright really? Yes, they’re losing two Dodge players, that’s not great. But I also think it’s something that can be made up for by making an existing positional or two a bit better.

Marquis of Peaches: Wood Elves are hard pressed to afford more than two catchers anyway, at least until very late in a team’s league development. As long as I’ve got two Wardancers, I’m fine with this.

Dan: I think this is in the same realm as the changes to Elven Union. It’ll hurt in league, but be an ultimately negligent change to tournament play.

That’s everything for today, but we’ll be back as soon as the next hype drop falls from the spigot. Keep your eye on the ball, and all that.

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Tags: Blood Bowl | roundtable | GH Preseason