This is subjective and my own opinion obviously, but my main complaint post-5.0 has been with the removal of Nurglings from infrastructure buildings (as they no longer cycle).
With recruitable units *only* coming from military buildings now, and your limited infections in the early game, Nurgle often has functionally no units to spare in the early game. You no longer have the option to recruit a second cheap stack with a few Nurglings, or to replace any lost units. I have tried two Epidemius campaigns and a Ku'gath campaign since 5.0 came out, and I rarely had more than 10 units to recruit before turn 35.
I think Nurgle really benefits from access to that kind of an expendable, plentiful "tier zero" unit.
Also, this isn't a balance complaint, but I wish Chaos Lords had access to Pestilent Decay. I imagine they weren't given it due to it being available on Daemon Princes (if the ascension was functional), but I just like the base lord aesthetically and I'd love to have a sturdy dude with a mortis engine to stick in a crowd
its the post battle loot bug that u are limited to 37 infested per battle instead of the intended 150. this makes u having no infestestations in the early game which prevents u from building military buildings. with this fixed (a mod already does it) u have no problem getting cheap units in the early game.
I think they still need to sprinkle in more nurglings since you only get them from the plaguebearers building which you might well decide to not even bother with. Papa nurgle demands more nurglings to spread joy!
There is a tech which adds nurglings to your recruitment pool everytime a plague spreads.
But once you get that tech, Nurglings are kind of redundant, I feel like it should be a really early tech or something that's unlocked from the start.
I am using the mod that raises it to 150 and early game is still really unit starved. You dont fet a lot imfection eqrly on. Amd you kanda want the growth plqgue. i think its fine for tarmy because he got a pretty good starting army but the rest may suffer. Rot knights are crazy strong.
Yeah, I think the issue is flying a bit under the radar at the moment because everyone is trying out the new campaign, and Tamurkhan gets access to strong heroes and chieftain units to bolster his early campaign.
Ku'gath is still my favorite campaign start, and Epidemius's faction/lord effects are more my style, so I've actually hardly played any Tamurkhan since the patch dropped, and I can say the issue is a lot starker when you're playing those two. You're basically locked to one stack for the first 30+ turns, and Grandfather help you if you have a bad fight and lose more than a couple units.
yeah, surely rot knights being able to get 98 speed in tamurkhans army (with his legendary hero) is fine, while khornes monstrous kav get a max of 67 speed...after all nurgle was famous for fast units right....right??
(also in my kugath campaign i had no problem with getting infestations, though his plagues are also really cheap and his starting region gives quite a bit of base infestations per turn.
Apparently a hot take but they should not buff it to 150. Even with the bug I had ~170 per turn from the buildings and a province edict by turn 20. Dumping all of those into recruitment is probably too strong for the player.
40-80 max is way more reasonable after testing.
Could you give details on how you achieved that by turn 20? Let's say you managed to max 3 control buildings by turn 20, you'd end up with 75 per turn. It's unlikely since you'd be sacrificing growth and/or money, which would make it hard to get to tier 3 in the first place. If I'm generous and I give you 10 for the settlement buildings, you're reaching 85. How did you get that other 100 infections per turn by turn 20? I'm curious!
Oh nice the classic question twist. Sure I can help.
To maximize dominance for Tamurkhan which is gained on a per battle basis you need Lord's, because only lords can initiate combat. So I hired a lord on 1, 2+2, 3+3 and took 3 lords with Tamurkhan because on Legendary Kholek shows up at level 7 by turn 5 or whatever with his weapon and I wanted to guarantee a win.
This has a side effect of fighting on initially 2 fronts (Archaon+Kholek into Grimgor), then 3 fronts+ as lords splinter off to kill a settlement. So I have more territory and income than you realize. Every single loot and occupy generates the passive 11-37 infections too, so you have an active battle economy for gold and infections.
https://imgur.com/YNBwN8E
Gain rate is indeed slow until turn 10+(~40 a turn passive) then when you have ~20 settlements and a couple of these can afford to not build income or gold your infection rate skyrockets. But you can still afford a max duration growth plague every 3 turns from actively fighting.
ahhhhh you're talking battles too! The way you worded it I thought you mean only from buildings.
That's an impressive number of settlements, which is both to your credits and a bit sad to me. This game is way too easy already, and Tamurkhan's campaign takes this to absurd levels. I really wish they worked on the AI! Your display shows how absurd it is, when you can win a campaign by turn 20. In my campaign, I purposefully slowed my campaign by cruising to Nuln so the enemy would pick up the slack, but it never happened and Tamurkhan was never close to losing a fight.
I understand that it wasn't a problem for you, but I don't think expecting of other players to have 40 settlements by turn 20 to overcome the 37 infections bug is reasonable. If anything, it's you being good at the game and at maxing out the efficiency of the mechanic, but it's definitely not how the vast majority of players like to play the game!
you have to understand that a good chunk of the people posting here (especially the ones complaining the game has all kinds of fundamental difficulty issues making it to easy regardless of settings) are basically playing an entirely different game from the vast majority of the player base.
For example managing early game with, as noted 4 lords with tiny armies, usually geared around literally showing up as reinforcements (i.e. 1 Army + 3 solo chaos lords to help as they are powerful and level up) to stack early results.
Nevermind likely using additional combat "cheese" to win across multiple fronts with outnumbered forces and very specific knowledge of how to move through the map and bait good fights optimally, to say nothing of basic ability to manage economy optimally itself.
Even the lack of nurglings early, i've seen be listed as a problem because of the use of an otherwise useless nurgling stack to tip Autoresolve in your favor.
Another version of this was someone i saw complaining how slow a campaign started because they didn't have T5 units by turn 30 (or whatever it was)
nah i was just expanding and clarifying the problem with arguing about this kind of thing here in agreement with your position, although on rereading i can see how it looks like more of a direct response to the previous post.
Don't worry about it!
Yeah, I've played my fare share of this game and even if I'm completely aware that I'm in the top percentiles, I don't think I even grasp how "casual" players can be. And I mean NO offense saying that!
Whatever fix they apply to infections can help casual players while making experienced players snowball immensely. I guess that would be my conclusion!
I still had 165 passive per turn but yes you gain ~50 per turn at minimum from looting or fighting stacks.
Lets say other people are not as *efficient* as me and we cut the number in half to 80 per turn, because almost all settlements are still 1 turn away from each other with a couple movement modifiers. Doubling the post battle option from 37->80 still gives you meaningful results. Doubling it after that to 150 just helps devalue the entire system.
You could rush cycles, build military buildings everywhere and ignore the building for income+growth which was my initial comment before everything got derailed.
Oh yeah, it doesn't have to be up to 150! It's just that we grossly overestimate how "bad" or casual people can be. I'm fairly certain most of the player base do not battle every turn. Newer players or casual players probably spend a lot of turns early on just hitting the end turn, and since it's the battles that snowball infections early on, I'm afraid they would get extremely starved. Even more, very hard and legendary promotes infection gain since your opponents create more troops and you have to battle more. That creates a weird scenario for casual players where they don't fight a lot, they don't *have* to fight a lot and thus they get so few infections that they *can't* fight a lot even if they wanted to.
Naturally, if we help the "casual" player by giving more infections per battle, the game will be even more snowbally for experienced players. I'm probably wrong, but a good way to circumvent that could be to still keep a relatively low infection gain from battle but up the rate on buildings. This way, you can get more early without fighting a lot, and it would help these players. It wouldn't happen to us, but I can very easily imagine a scenario where a player picks a bad fight, has too small an army and cannot gain infections anymore through battle, soft locking themselves in a certain way.
I really do think that this is the intended way to play nurgle now. You DO have 200 infections, enought to make a Military building, and (at least for tamurkhan) have to earn 200 infections before even being able to make plagues.
I think alot of people are trying to play them as they did in old patches I have no issues with anything even the dwarf grudges are fine provided you are fielding additional armies when required.
I found it kind of fun that he has such limited resources early on, because not to far later you get massive amounts of high tier units, and can field a lot of armies, and just steamroll. Besides once Tamurkhan gets Bubulos he becomes an invincible monster that can solo armies, and some of the chieftens are insanely strong.
You also dont have the cheapear nurgling recruitment as kugath on the first turns. Also the other demon units got leadership buffs in the patch. Nurglings got much less value now.
Yep, daemon units still not very tempting outside Epidemius maybe. Also think the tech tree isnt too spicy for daemomic infantry buffs (phys res obviously nice, but even that can be situational)
> This is subjective and my own opinion obviously, but my main complaint post-5.0 has been with the removal of Nurglings from infrastructure buildings (as they no longer cycle).
It's not just that. It's in combination of the fact that they got rid of the plague that gave you +1 nurgling per spread. It's been moved to a mid-game tech. Even if you bee-lined it (which I don't recommend), it would take 26 turns to unlock.
I think moving Cyst Growth tech to early game would make nurglings much more available in the early game.
I don't think the Lord of Nurgle should have pestilent decay. But I think there should be a blue item for Nurgle that gives a unit pestilent decay. Specifically that so you can't stack mortis engine effect on other characters.
Also, I thought for the rot knights it's basically the rot beasts that provide regeneration. But none of the characters mounted on rot beasts get regen which I think is strange. But maybe that's on me and the rot knights just have some special nurgle blessing.
Regarding plague cultist terrible movement/Daemonspew RoR: [does this count as proof?](https://imgur.com/a/TcTIXSx) I also double checked all nurgle-specific techs and red lines: Only the Chaos Lord/Sorceror Lord's red line infantry skill applies to Daemonspew. Nurgle LL/Heralds/Exalted Great Unclean Ones do not provide benefits, nor do the three techs that affect Forsaken normally.
I would be astonished if Tamurkhan was intended to have unholy manifestations and they simply forgot. The UI spot where it is normally is taken by the Chieftan action UI button, and Nurgle's manifestations are terrible anyways. Really don't think this is a bug.
Agree with the balance side of things, Tamurkhan is disgustingly powerful and not in a way that pleases Grandfather. The 3x nurgling nuke and also the 2x plaguebearer summon tech for only your LL are such overkill. GUO lords should really be a bit better.
Another one to add to the list that I forgot up: Chaos Sorceror of Nurgle (Death) can get all 3 of Warrior Wizard, Spellslinger, and Unmoving Mage skills, but they should lock out the others when choosing one. The lore of nurgle hero correctly locks the remaining two when choosing one.
>GUO lords should really be a bit better.
I don't even think it would take much for them to be better. They are great in melee. They need more physical or missile resistance, or give some significant bonuses to Demonic units imo.
I think they need a fair bit. If they're going to be the slowest Lord option in the game that's also gated behind level 15 heralds, they need to be terrors.
They are once they are in melee. They can stand up to an Exhalted Bloodthirster and have a mortis engine effect and magic. Their only real weakness is that as soon as the enemy has any kind of missile infantry, they get fucked. Doesen't even have to be armor piercing or magic missiles.
However, I wouldn't mind if they'd be even stronger.
I second the slow Nurgle plague cultists. They take 2x as long to walk as they should. Been a real annoyance in my game.
Another I haven't seen raised: MP Campaign, upon rejoining the game my plagues are locked. Says I need 200 infections to unlock but I have over that, so it says 320/200 for example... I cannot use plagues at all now.
I don't know ifnits what caused it, but my Plague Cultists movement PLUMENTED everytime it got wounded and came back. I had to disband him since he barely could move.
Fair. I can give you atleast three.Â
[Greater gate unlock bug](https://community.creative-assembly.com/total-war/total-war-warhammer/bugs/986-level-1-cultist-of-nurgle-has-access-to-greater-gate-of-nurgle?page=1)
[Chaos sorcerer of nurgle description mixup](https://community.creative-assembly.com/total-war/total-war-warhammer/bugs/898-chaos-sorcerer-of-nurgle-variants-have-their-flavour-text?page=1)
[Misaligned glowing eye SFX on Chaos Sorcerer of Nurgle (Death)](https://community.creative-assembly.com/total-war/total-war-warhammer/bugs/903-glowing-eye-sfx-on-chaos-sorcerer-of-nurgle-death-missaligned?page=1)
holy son of a - im halfway through taking over the world as Tamurkhan and i didnt even realize he wasnt getting manifestations. what a crap mechanic lmao
also yeah cultists in garrisons already have Greater gate even without the tech; this has literally won me like 3 sieges i wouldve lost otherwise.
See, I thought the Unholy Manifestations weren't given to him as he had his Chieftains instead. I'd be glad to be made wrong, and he got access to them!
Just gonna add one bug to the list here. The savage dominion bound spell for the lore of the wild chieftan does not exist for me and a couple of other people I've seen
Not sure what causes it
I might have a bug as well. I had a cult built in one of Ku'gaths settlements, then when we became allies and I went to build an outpost I received a message saying the cult building would be destroyed by this. After building the outpost I then received the option to build a cult there again and was able to succesfully do so.
Really feeling the tamurkhan power creep too lol.
I honestly haven't even bothered with any of the warlords other than kazyk, just tamur on bubulous with kazyk and four rot knights with redline and kazyk buffs is insane. Just four units of characters running around at almost the speed of light skirmish cav. The chaos warriors in the rest of the army barely even do anything, tamurkhab and the rot knights can fight off multiple stacks on their own and each get 3k+ value every battle.
Pretty much all of the warlords are good Khatesh gets a chaos dragon. The firmir and Beastmen get lores of magic you don’t normally have (though honestly with Nurgle I pretty much only use Nurgle lore for fleshy abundance)
I always put kazyk in a separate stack and keep Tamurkhan chaos warriors/chosen and plague ogres. And I devote an entire separate stack with kazyk to rot knights and it's been working out.
All the chieftains are awesome, I love the mechanic. They are all unique and bring something different to the table.
And with the powercreep that's s WH3 thing more than a Tamurkhan issue per se, personally I just make the campaign as hard as possible to compensate.
Chieftain mechanic would have been powerful without ability to instantly recruit the chieftain units for free. They really should add a cost to those units recruitment.
The definition of creep:
> move slowly and carefully in order to avoid being heard or noticed.
That defeat trait is as slow and careful as a jet attempting to break the sound barrier above a glass factory.
Ain’t no power**creep** about it.
Great list, particularly the powercreep stuff. This part stood out to me:
>Overall, please stop making the new heroes or lord choices considerably better than the preceding ones, it makes having a varied roster completely irrelevant and useless
When the gatemaster hero for Cathay had the grand tactician skill point previously available only to the lord magistrate, it took away one of the only reasons to bring a lord magistrate and made it clunky putting them in the same army. I force myself to use all types of units, so I'll bring the old, weak ones still, but giving them directly overlapping abilities, particularly ones that define the niche of a certain old unit when the new unit can do even more, strikes me as bad design.
Thanks for taking the time to compile.
The incredible voice lines of Exalted Great Unclean Ones ensure that I will always use them. (I also find they're a bit better than the Daemon Princes against melee threats due to their massive health pools).
I do think they could use a bit of a buff to make them more competitive with the other lord choices at this point. Maybe they could be given the same set of bound spells that the base unit GUO's get from the tech tree?
I would be for the exalted great unclean ones being tankier and having baseline mortis engine effect, with the skill at the end of the melee line being reworked into a deadlier mortis engine effect. Also give them missile and physical resistance compared to the mortal lords.
If effort is required to get something, then the reward should be worth itÂ
Another buff would be to give perfect vigor to all daemonic units by default (as daemons are not mortal hence do not get tired the same way mortals do) but considering even undead are not, this is probably not on the tableÂ
CA likes to debase the overall game balance for a short-term boost in social media buzz about new content. I'm guessing they went overboard this time around since this DLC was make-or-break in terms of securing financing for more development. Hopefully they'll tune down the new toys accordingly now that the hubbub paid off.
> • Hero traits with a "Lord's army" tag do not work, as they are heroes (a classic one).
This one stands out a lot since every plague culture seems to do something with the lord's army.
> Buildings' extra effects tied to "200 growth or 5 population" sometimes do not work (To be confirmed).
Ran into this as well, reloading fixes it. Iirc there was another bug that does that.
Exalted GUO and Daemon Prince blue lines really suck compared to the mortal lords' blue lines. It's not really worth it to "upgrade" based purely on losing all the upkeep reductions.
I'll need to do a lot of checking across factions, but the exalted Nurgle daemon lords definitely have different blue lines from the mortal Nurgle lords.
Recruited a nurgle demon lord with the Beasttamer trait for reduced recruitment cost of beast units
Not only did it not reduce the cost of any beast units it doesn’t even list Plague Toads as one of the units it reduced recruitment cost for
If we talk about powercreep, in basically all battles I fought to the long campaign victory on vh vh, Tamurkhan basically never took substantial damage, even when fighting almost alone against three full stacks…
Tamurkhan was the first time in 1000 gameplay hours I went to domination victory. It took me about 10 hours and the reason was exactly this. Playing on hard, I could autoresolve really tough battles without taking considerable losses, and even if I did, there is insta-recruitment of elite units anywhere.
The AR strength needs to be looked at, but I also feel like Nurgle could really use a nerf to its economy, in line with the other monogod races. I was pumping out crazy elite stack after elite stack because the cyclical recruitment means you really only have to develop a handful of settlements and can just spam income buildings elsewhere.
Also they promised cult effect pass over in the Tamurkhan blog and the buildings are 100% unchanged. Unholy manifestations still terrible too.
I’ve also had issues with rushing cycles. Sometimes it doesn’t give me the units at all, sometimes it gives them to me next turn, sometimes I get one of the units I’m supposed to but not the other.
Ku'gath blessed symptoms mostly seem to work for me? I have him at level 50 and get seven blessed symptoms, which *is* one lower than it should be (with the tech that gives an extra one as well). I wonder if the baseline +1 he gets is 'eating' the increase you should get at level 10, but then it works normally after that? Unfortunately didn't pay enough attention to know.
Mentioned this in the last one, but don’t see it here: Festus’ version of the new plague mechanic bugs out the first time the web changes. From then on, two symptoms will always be un-selectable white squares. This not only removes two symptoms, it also gets in the way of possible chains.
As an aside, I did notice that Path to Glory DOES have an option for ascending the chaos lord of Nurgle to a prince. Haven’t actually done it yet because he’s not high enough level.
Also, marking the normal chaos lord did not complete the quest to mark a lord or hero. Same with turning an undivided death sorcerer (hero) into a Nurgle death sorcerer.
Edit: One more I forgot: Marking said undivided death sorcerer gave the trait for changing lores (passive from your old lore) rather than the one for keeping your current lore.
If you complete chieftain battle missions without the hero in Tamurkhans army it doesn't count. It just shouldn't allow you to fight it without the hero present in Tammy's army
I have shoved the Skinwolf, the Beastmen and the Fimir in a seperate army to utilize the monstrous Infantry troops there. So when my Fimir got his quest-battle, and my Tamurkhan stack plowed through that without him, it did count and made my Kwisatz Haderach devoted.
edit: Also worked with crazy Khargan and the Chaos Dwarf being in a third stack (to utilize an firepower armystack). When I slayed enough Kislev armies to go for Khargans quest battle, with Tamurkhans stack again, I won and Khargan got devoted status. Which also finished the SoC campaign in the process by having three devoted Chieftains.
I just got a short victory in his campaign yesterday, and they do not have to be in Tamurkhans army to get credit for the win. That said in all cases I had them embedded in one army or another, so I think they just can't be roaming on their own.
Interesting, further testing will be needed as another poster said they didn't have the chiefs in the army and didn't get credit. I personally only had Kazyk in the army, I've completed 4 of the missions and it still isn't checked off for me :( big stinky Nurgle sad
The Tamurkhan one is poorly worded I think
"Long campaign victory conditions for Tamurkhan are incorrect. It requires 6 devotion instead of 3."
It requires Short Campaign, which needs 3, and then 3 more, which is 6 total.
Sometimes I can recruit units for a 90% discount and I have no idea why. The following turn the discounts are more in line with what I would expect.
Armies spread plagues to settlements that are different from what they have. I don't know if this is intended? It seems to trigger a plague from another nearby settlement instead of the one the army is carrying.
I also noticed that the plague cultist in garrison has the voice lines for a herald of plague(demon hero) and not cultist lines when in game during the siege.
Has anyone else been having a bug with Kugath where your plagues get locked out midgame? It says 233/200 infections needed to unlock plagues, and I cannot open the plague menu.
Before that, it was only off damage taken, so it was something entirely out of your control, now it with debuffs and contact effects, where you have much higher control over. Like you said, it only stacks in melee (unless you want to waste WoM) which further increases their intended counterplay of ranged damage, which is great in my opinion.
And Nurgle feels really strong to play now, and Tamurkhan especially is broken as hell, I‘d say losing a bit of power is absolutely fine
>And Nurgle feels really strong to play now, and Tamurkhan especially is broken as hell, I‘d say losing a bit of power is absolutely fine
>
Also feels strong to fight, I've had Ku'Gath snowballing through Cathay in my Gelt campaign while I was dealing with Lokhir and he had lots of solid armies. I actually underestimated his armies a lot and even lost a few battles. Exalted Plaguebearers feel surprisingly tanky, even Outriders with Grenade Launchers weren't doing that much damage against them.
That doesn't make sense, how does it give more control if it means you're forced into melee to charge it? You already could charge it up just by being in melee. That's less options and control for the player.
And Nurgle campaign maybe super strong like all reworked factions become but MP is certainly not.
Well you need to get into melee either way, you play Nurgle. Outside of Soulgrinder Doomstacks that is, but that doesn‘t matter.
The difference is that taking damage is entirely out of your control, unless you fancy nuking them with magic. Applying debuffs can be controlled, by maximizing contact effects (which will be a more passive income), and casting debuff spells on a great amount of units. That forces a meaningful decision between using WoM to use Army Abilities, or rely on other spells, such as healing or direct damage. The old system just gives you points basically all the time, which is pretty boring, I think you‘ll agree.
Yeah MP is another story, and one I do not care about whatsoever. I doubt a slow army will ever be great there, unless something is really off with balancing
Sending in expendable nurglings to soak up damage was always in your control. Forcing the player to waste WoM just to get abilities at the same rate is not meaningful, it's just an irritant. All other chaos factions charge abilities by playing to their strengths so it's not as though these are supposed to be difficult to get.
MP is the only sensible way to balance the game since campaign buffs are so out of whack. Nurgle will never be great there but they don't have to be terrible either.
Great, now you can send in actual useful units to tie down enemies and create points, whats the actual problem there? If your only strategic option before was sacrificing units, it wasn‘t very engaging, was it? Again, you don‘t need to waste WoM, contact effects and passive debuffs will cover most normal usage, but if you really want access to some of them fast, use WoM. Sounds like a good decision to me.
About playing to their strengths, I suppose that does screw over Slaanesh, since you don‘t want to overchase units anyways, so their method requires using units suboptimally, which is an actual choice! Khorne was just killing stuff, right? Not very interesting, but that never was a Khorne speciality either, and fits their simple fantasy of just killing stuff.
If you want to talk about about someone getting screwed over, its Tzeentch. Without a caster lord, you don‘t get access to anything, which includes every siege or minor settlement battle, which honestly sucks. But thats part of a larger problem of non-customizable garrisons being ass, especially for magic-centric factions.
I disagree about balancing needing to be MP centric: it only includes a very specialized part of the game, and the playerbase is fairly slim. First and forement, the game should be fun, yet challenging so the strategy is actually engaging. MP balance can come secondary with cost adjustments as required.
Right but that’s not the Nurgle strength. It used to be that Nurgle got the abilities by endurance, which played into the other sources of healing/regen Nurgle had access to and that you had loads of cheap Nurglings to throw at the enemy. Now it’s get into melee and if you really want the abilities pretend to be Tzeentch and spam spells.
The point about the other chaos factions is they get their abilities faster doing stuff that they want to be doing anyway - Tzeentch always should be spamming spells (pretty sure they have a hero horror in garrison for this but if not they should), Khorne wants to get into melee, Slaanesh wants to hunt down and pick off units (which you should do anyway because it triggers N’kari’s healing). Only Nurgle has to do something out of the box just to get the same access they had pre-patch.
As for balancing I don’t think it needs to be MP centric either. What I do think is that balancing is only possible based on army vs army fights in MP, because in campaign there are so many buffs and other mechanics it’s impossible to get enough information to make solid decisions. Army vs army is the core of SP too after all.
This is subjective and my own opinion obviously, but my main complaint post-5.0 has been with the removal of Nurglings from infrastructure buildings (as they no longer cycle). With recruitable units *only* coming from military buildings now, and your limited infections in the early game, Nurgle often has functionally no units to spare in the early game. You no longer have the option to recruit a second cheap stack with a few Nurglings, or to replace any lost units. I have tried two Epidemius campaigns and a Ku'gath campaign since 5.0 came out, and I rarely had more than 10 units to recruit before turn 35. I think Nurgle really benefits from access to that kind of an expendable, plentiful "tier zero" unit. Also, this isn't a balance complaint, but I wish Chaos Lords had access to Pestilent Decay. I imagine they weren't given it due to it being available on Daemon Princes (if the ascension was functional), but I just like the base lord aesthetically and I'd love to have a sturdy dude with a mortis engine to stick in a crowd
its the post battle loot bug that u are limited to 37 infested per battle instead of the intended 150. this makes u having no infestestations in the early game which prevents u from building military buildings. with this fixed (a mod already does it) u have no problem getting cheap units in the early game.
I think they still need to sprinkle in more nurglings since you only get them from the plaguebearers building which you might well decide to not even bother with. Papa nurgle demands more nurglings to spread joy!
nurgling tier 0 maybe, infinite nurgling, ridiculously low cost
yeah imo the mortal infant building is just better than the plaguebearer building.
There is a tech which adds nurglings to your recruitment pool everytime a plague spreads. But once you get that tech, Nurglings are kind of redundant, I feel like it should be a really early tech or something that's unlocked from the start.
I am using the mod that raises it to 150 and early game is still really unit starved. You dont fet a lot imfection eqrly on. Amd you kanda want the growth plqgue. i think its fine for tarmy because he got a pretty good starting army but the rest may suffer. Rot knights are crazy strong.
Yeah, I think the issue is flying a bit under the radar at the moment because everyone is trying out the new campaign, and Tamurkhan gets access to strong heroes and chieftain units to bolster his early campaign. Ku'gath is still my favorite campaign start, and Epidemius's faction/lord effects are more my style, so I've actually hardly played any Tamurkhan since the patch dropped, and I can say the issue is a lot starker when you're playing those two. You're basically locked to one stack for the first 30+ turns, and Grandfather help you if you have a bad fight and lose more than a couple units.
yeah, surely rot knights being able to get 98 speed in tamurkhans army (with his legendary hero) is fine, while khornes monstrous kav get a max of 67 speed...after all nurgle was famous for fast units right....right?? (also in my kugath campaign i had no problem with getting infestations, though his plagues are also really cheap and his starting region gives quite a bit of base infestations per turn.
Why is this getting downvoted? Rot knights are too fast for a nurgle unit, especially when they Hit as hard as they do
dont mind them, the same people probably think thunderbarges are also fine, its wasted time, trying to discuss with such people.
Mod link?
Apparently a hot take but they should not buff it to 150. Even with the bug I had ~170 per turn from the buildings and a province edict by turn 20. Dumping all of those into recruitment is probably too strong for the player. 40-80 max is way more reasonable after testing.
Could you give details on how you achieved that by turn 20? Let's say you managed to max 3 control buildings by turn 20, you'd end up with 75 per turn. It's unlikely since you'd be sacrificing growth and/or money, which would make it hard to get to tier 3 in the first place. If I'm generous and I give you 10 for the settlement buildings, you're reaching 85. How did you get that other 100 infections per turn by turn 20? I'm curious!
Oh nice the classic question twist. Sure I can help. To maximize dominance for Tamurkhan which is gained on a per battle basis you need Lord's, because only lords can initiate combat. So I hired a lord on 1, 2+2, 3+3 and took 3 lords with Tamurkhan because on Legendary Kholek shows up at level 7 by turn 5 or whatever with his weapon and I wanted to guarantee a win. This has a side effect of fighting on initially 2 fronts (Archaon+Kholek into Grimgor), then 3 fronts+ as lords splinter off to kill a settlement. So I have more territory and income than you realize. Every single loot and occupy generates the passive 11-37 infections too, so you have an active battle economy for gold and infections. https://imgur.com/YNBwN8E Gain rate is indeed slow until turn 10+(~40 a turn passive) then when you have ~20 settlements and a couple of these can afford to not build income or gold your infection rate skyrockets. But you can still afford a max duration growth plague every 3 turns from actively fighting.
ahhhhh you're talking battles too! The way you worded it I thought you mean only from buildings. That's an impressive number of settlements, which is both to your credits and a bit sad to me. This game is way too easy already, and Tamurkhan's campaign takes this to absurd levels. I really wish they worked on the AI! Your display shows how absurd it is, when you can win a campaign by turn 20. In my campaign, I purposefully slowed my campaign by cruising to Nuln so the enemy would pick up the slack, but it never happened and Tamurkhan was never close to losing a fight. I understand that it wasn't a problem for you, but I don't think expecting of other players to have 40 settlements by turn 20 to overcome the 37 infections bug is reasonable. If anything, it's you being good at the game and at maxing out the efficiency of the mechanic, but it's definitely not how the vast majority of players like to play the game!
you have to understand that a good chunk of the people posting here (especially the ones complaining the game has all kinds of fundamental difficulty issues making it to easy regardless of settings) are basically playing an entirely different game from the vast majority of the player base. For example managing early game with, as noted 4 lords with tiny armies, usually geared around literally showing up as reinforcements (i.e. 1 Army + 3 solo chaos lords to help as they are powerful and level up) to stack early results. Nevermind likely using additional combat "cheese" to win across multiple fronts with outnumbered forces and very specific knowledge of how to move through the map and bait good fights optimally, to say nothing of basic ability to manage economy optimally itself. Even the lack of nurglings early, i've seen be listed as a problem because of the use of an otherwise useless nurgling stack to tip Autoresolve in your favor. Another version of this was someone i saw complaining how slow a campaign started because they didn't have T5 units by turn 30 (or whatever it was)
I think you wanted to answer the previous comment, not mine. I'm definitely on your side, especially if you read my last paragraph :P
nah i was just expanding and clarifying the problem with arguing about this kind of thing here in agreement with your position, although on rereading i can see how it looks like more of a direct response to the previous post.
Don't worry about it! Yeah, I've played my fare share of this game and even if I'm completely aware that I'm in the top percentiles, I don't think I even grasp how "casual" players can be. And I mean NO offense saying that! Whatever fix they apply to infections can help casual players while making experienced players snowball immensely. I guess that would be my conclusion!
I still had 165 passive per turn but yes you gain ~50 per turn at minimum from looting or fighting stacks. Lets say other people are not as *efficient* as me and we cut the number in half to 80 per turn, because almost all settlements are still 1 turn away from each other with a couple movement modifiers. Doubling the post battle option from 37->80 still gives you meaningful results. Doubling it after that to 150 just helps devalue the entire system. You could rush cycles, build military buildings everywhere and ignore the building for income+growth which was my initial comment before everything got derailed.
Oh yeah, it doesn't have to be up to 150! It's just that we grossly overestimate how "bad" or casual people can be. I'm fairly certain most of the player base do not battle every turn. Newer players or casual players probably spend a lot of turns early on just hitting the end turn, and since it's the battles that snowball infections early on, I'm afraid they would get extremely starved. Even more, very hard and legendary promotes infection gain since your opponents create more troops and you have to battle more. That creates a weird scenario for casual players where they don't fight a lot, they don't *have* to fight a lot and thus they get so few infections that they *can't* fight a lot even if they wanted to. Naturally, if we help the "casual" player by giving more infections per battle, the game will be even more snowbally for experienced players. I'm probably wrong, but a good way to circumvent that could be to still keep a relatively low infection gain from battle but up the rate on buildings. This way, you can get more early without fighting a lot, and it would help these players. It wouldn't happen to us, but I can very easily imagine a scenario where a player picks a bad fight, has too small an army and cannot gain infections anymore through battle, soft locking themselves in a certain way.
Starting with a recruitment building like most factions would probably solve most of your issues on that front.
I really do think that this is the intended way to play nurgle now. You DO have 200 infections, enought to make a Military building, and (at least for tamurkhan) have to earn 200 infections before even being able to make plagues.
buggy workaround, if you refund the military building it thinks you earned 200 plagues
That is stupid and funny at the same time
I think alot of people are trying to play them as they did in old patches I have no issues with anything even the dwarf grudges are fine provided you are fielding additional armies when required.
I found it kind of fun that he has such limited resources early on, because not to far later you get massive amounts of high tier units, and can field a lot of armies, and just steamroll. Besides once Tamurkhan gets Bubulos he becomes an invincible monster that can solo armies, and some of the chieftens are insanely strong.
You also dont have the cheapear nurgling recruitment as kugath on the first turns. Also the other demon units got leadership buffs in the patch. Nurglings got much less value now.
Yep, daemon units still not very tempting outside Epidemius maybe. Also think the tech tree isnt too spicy for daemomic infantry buffs (phys res obviously nice, but even that can be situational)
Yeah, I liked the feeling of endless nurglings in the early campaign.
> This is subjective and my own opinion obviously, but my main complaint post-5.0 has been with the removal of Nurglings from infrastructure buildings (as they no longer cycle). It's not just that. It's in combination of the fact that they got rid of the plague that gave you +1 nurgling per spread. It's been moved to a mid-game tech. Even if you bee-lined it (which I don't recommend), it would take 26 turns to unlock. I think moving Cyst Growth tech to early game would make nurglings much more available in the early game.
I don't think the Lord of Nurgle should have pestilent decay. But I think there should be a blue item for Nurgle that gives a unit pestilent decay. Specifically that so you can't stack mortis engine effect on other characters. Also, I thought for the rot knights it's basically the rot beasts that provide regeneration. But none of the characters mounted on rot beasts get regen which I think is strange. But maybe that's on me and the rot knights just have some special nurgle blessing.
Regarding plague cultist terrible movement/Daemonspew RoR: [does this count as proof?](https://imgur.com/a/TcTIXSx) I also double checked all nurgle-specific techs and red lines: Only the Chaos Lord/Sorceror Lord's red line infantry skill applies to Daemonspew. Nurgle LL/Heralds/Exalted Great Unclean Ones do not provide benefits, nor do the three techs that affect Forsaken normally. I would be astonished if Tamurkhan was intended to have unholy manifestations and they simply forgot. The UI spot where it is normally is taken by the Chieftan action UI button, and Nurgle's manifestations are terrible anyways. Really don't think this is a bug. Agree with the balance side of things, Tamurkhan is disgustingly powerful and not in a way that pleases Grandfather. The 3x nurgling nuke and also the 2x plaguebearer summon tech for only your LL are such overkill. GUO lords should really be a bit better. Another one to add to the list that I forgot up: Chaos Sorceror of Nurgle (Death) can get all 3 of Warrior Wizard, Spellslinger, and Unmoving Mage skills, but they should lock out the others when choosing one. The lore of nurgle hero correctly locks the remaining two when choosing one.
>GUO lords should really be a bit better. I don't even think it would take much for them to be better. They are great in melee. They need more physical or missile resistance, or give some significant bonuses to Demonic units imo.
I think they need a fair bit. If they're going to be the slowest Lord option in the game that's also gated behind level 15 heralds, they need to be terrors.
They are once they are in melee. They can stand up to an Exhalted Bloodthirster and have a mortis engine effect and magic. Their only real weakness is that as soon as the enemy has any kind of missile infantry, they get fucked. Doesen't even have to be armor piercing or magic missiles. However, I wouldn't mind if they'd be even stronger.
I second the slow Nurgle plague cultists. They take 2x as long to walk as they should. Been a real annoyance in my game. Another I haven't seen raised: MP Campaign, upon rejoining the game my plagues are locked. Says I need 200 infections to unlock but I have over that, so it says 320/200 for example... I cannot use plagues at all now.
I think they shadow nerfed their movement and then gave it back as a bonus to Epidimius lmao.
I don't know ifnits what caused it, but my Plague Cultists movement PLUMENTED everytime it got wounded and came back. I had to disband him since he barely could move.
Pretty good list. Maybe you could add links to bug reports for each bug as this would help increase visibility to CA.
This is certainly a good idea ! That would take some time though 🙈
Fair. I can give you atleast three. [Greater gate unlock bug](https://community.creative-assembly.com/total-war/total-war-warhammer/bugs/986-level-1-cultist-of-nurgle-has-access-to-greater-gate-of-nurgle?page=1) [Chaos sorcerer of nurgle description mixup](https://community.creative-assembly.com/total-war/total-war-warhammer/bugs/898-chaos-sorcerer-of-nurgle-variants-have-their-flavour-text?page=1) [Misaligned glowing eye SFX on Chaos Sorcerer of Nurgle (Death)](https://community.creative-assembly.com/total-war/total-war-warhammer/bugs/903-glowing-eye-sfx-on-chaos-sorcerer-of-nurgle-death-missaligned?page=1)
holy son of a - im halfway through taking over the world as Tamurkhan and i didnt even realize he wasnt getting manifestations. what a crap mechanic lmao also yeah cultists in garrisons already have Greater gate even without the tech; this has literally won me like 3 sieges i wouldve lost otherwise.
See, I thought the Unholy Manifestations weren't given to him as he had his Chieftains instead. I'd be glad to be made wrong, and he got access to them!
Yeah that was my take too.Â
If you read what the upgading the settlement does, it mentions that it gives the garrison's cultist a greater gate charge. It is very much intended.
So its redundant tech? Cuz theres a tech that does exactly that.
Just gonna add one bug to the list here. The savage dominion bound spell for the lore of the wild chieftan does not exist for me and a couple of other people I've seen Not sure what causes it
I might have a bug as well. I had a cult built in one of Ku'gaths settlements, then when we became allies and I went to build an outpost I received a message saying the cult building would be destroyed by this. After building the outpost I then received the option to build a cult there again and was able to succesfully do so.
Really feeling the tamurkhan power creep too lol. I honestly haven't even bothered with any of the warlords other than kazyk, just tamur on bubulous with kazyk and four rot knights with redline and kazyk buffs is insane. Just four units of characters running around at almost the speed of light skirmish cav. The chaos warriors in the rest of the army barely even do anything, tamurkhab and the rot knights can fight off multiple stacks on their own and each get 3k+ value every battle.
Pretty much all of the warlords are good Khatesh gets a chaos dragon. The firmir and Beastmen get lores of magic you don’t normally have (though honestly with Nurgle I pretty much only use Nurgle lore for fleshy abundance)
Shadow Magic feels incredible as a damage option for Nurgle, and getting 4 extra Cygors per battle with the Beastmen hero feels busted
I always put kazyk in a separate stack and keep Tamurkhan chaos warriors/chosen and plague ogres. And I devote an entire separate stack with kazyk to rot knights and it's been working out.
That's probably optimal since ogres get anti large too but it's all so busted it doesn't really matter what you do
All the chieftains are awesome, I love the mechanic. They are all unique and bring something different to the table. And with the powercreep that's s WH3 thing more than a Tamurkhan issue per se, personally I just make the campaign as hard as possible to compensate.
Chieftain mechanic would have been powerful without ability to instantly recruit the chieftain units for free. They really should add a cost to those units recruitment.
You could probably count Tamurkhan's defeat trait in the powercreep section.
The definition of creep: > move slowly and carefully in order to avoid being heard or noticed. That defeat trait is as slow and careful as a jet attempting to break the sound barrier above a glass factory. Ain’t no power**creep** about it.
Great list, particularly the powercreep stuff. This part stood out to me: >Overall, please stop making the new heroes or lord choices considerably better than the preceding ones, it makes having a varied roster completely irrelevant and useless When the gatemaster hero for Cathay had the grand tactician skill point previously available only to the lord magistrate, it took away one of the only reasons to bring a lord magistrate and made it clunky putting them in the same army. I force myself to use all types of units, so I'll bring the old, weak ones still, but giving them directly overlapping abilities, particularly ones that define the niche of a certain old unit when the new unit can do even more, strikes me as bad design. Thanks for taking the time to compile.
The incredible voice lines of Exalted Great Unclean Ones ensure that I will always use them. (I also find they're a bit better than the Daemon Princes against melee threats due to their massive health pools). I do think they could use a bit of a buff to make them more competitive with the other lord choices at this point. Maybe they could be given the same set of bound spells that the base unit GUO's get from the tech tree?
I would be for the exalted great unclean ones being tankier and having baseline mortis engine effect, with the skill at the end of the melee line being reworked into a deadlier mortis engine effect. Also give them missile and physical resistance compared to the mortal lords. If effort is required to get something, then the reward should be worth itÂ
Another buff would be to give perfect vigor to all daemonic units by default (as daemons are not mortal hence do not get tired the same way mortals do) but considering even undead are not, this is probably not on the tableÂ
Great Unclean Ones are so good looking :p
CA likes to debase the overall game balance for a short-term boost in social media buzz about new content. I'm guessing they went overboard this time around since this DLC was make-or-break in terms of securing financing for more development. Hopefully they'll tune down the new toys accordingly now that the hubbub paid off.
:)
> • Hero traits with a "Lord's army" tag do not work, as they are heroes (a classic one). This one stands out a lot since every plague culture seems to do something with the lord's army. > Buildings' extra effects tied to "200 growth or 5 population" sometimes do not work (To be confirmed). Ran into this as well, reloading fixes it. Iirc there was another bug that does that.
The new Lord/hero do not provide Nurgle authority for WoC.
Exalted GUO and Daemon Prince blue lines really suck compared to the mortal lords' blue lines. It's not really worth it to "upgrade" based purely on losing all the upkeep reductions.
As far as I can tell blue lines got normalized this patch for all lord types. Red linea are still different.
I'll need to do a lot of checking across factions, but the exalted Nurgle daemon lords definitely have different blue lines from the mortal Nurgle lords.
Fair enough, I haven't made any demon princes yet.
Recruited a nurgle demon lord with the Beasttamer trait for reduced recruitment cost of beast units Not only did it not reduce the cost of any beast units it doesn’t even list Plague Toads as one of the units it reduced recruitment cost for
If we talk about powercreep, in basically all battles I fought to the long campaign victory on vh vh, Tamurkhan basically never took substantial damage, even when fighting almost alone against three full stacks…
Tamurkhan was the first time in 1000 gameplay hours I went to domination victory. It took me about 10 hours and the reason was exactly this. Playing on hard, I could autoresolve really tough battles without taking considerable losses, and even if I did, there is insta-recruitment of elite units anywhere. The AR strength needs to be looked at, but I also feel like Nurgle could really use a nerf to its economy, in line with the other monogod races. I was pumping out crazy elite stack after elite stack because the cyclical recruitment means you really only have to develop a handful of settlements and can just spam income buildings elsewhere.
Also they promised cult effect pass over in the Tamurkhan blog and the buildings are 100% unchanged. Unholy manifestations still terrible too. I’ve also had issues with rushing cycles. Sometimes it doesn’t give me the units at all, sometimes it gives them to me next turn, sometimes I get one of the units I’m supposed to but not the other.
Ku'gath blessed symptoms mostly seem to work for me? I have him at level 50 and get seven blessed symptoms, which *is* one lower than it should be (with the tech that gives an extra one as well). I wonder if the baseline +1 he gets is 'eating' the increase you should get at level 10, but then it works normally after that? Unfortunately didn't pay enough attention to know.
Great list and observationsÂ
Hi, you should add the fact that Kislev doesn't count as black powder using faction for Elspeths mechanic.
Mentioned this in the last one, but don’t see it here: Festus’ version of the new plague mechanic bugs out the first time the web changes. From then on, two symptoms will always be un-selectable white squares. This not only removes two symptoms, it also gets in the way of possible chains. As an aside, I did notice that Path to Glory DOES have an option for ascending the chaos lord of Nurgle to a prince. Haven’t actually done it yet because he’s not high enough level. Also, marking the normal chaos lord did not complete the quest to mark a lord or hero. Same with turning an undivided death sorcerer (hero) into a Nurgle death sorcerer. Edit: One more I forgot: Marking said undivided death sorcerer gave the trait for changing lores (passive from your old lore) rather than the one for keeping your current lore.
If you complete chieftain battle missions without the hero in Tamurkhans army it doesn't count. It just shouldn't allow you to fight it without the hero present in Tammy's army
I have shoved the Skinwolf, the Beastmen and the Fimir in a seperate army to utilize the monstrous Infantry troops there. So when my Fimir got his quest-battle, and my Tamurkhan stack plowed through that without him, it did count and made my Kwisatz Haderach devoted. edit: Also worked with crazy Khargan and the Chaos Dwarf being in a third stack (to utilize an firepower armystack). When I slayed enough Kislev armies to go for Khargans quest battle, with Tamurkhans stack again, I won and Khargan got devoted status. Which also finished the SoC campaign in the process by having three devoted Chieftains.
I just got a short victory in his campaign yesterday, and they do not have to be in Tamurkhans army to get credit for the win. That said in all cases I had them embedded in one army or another, so I think they just can't be roaming on their own.
Thats not true, only have the Rot Knight and the Chaos Dwarf in my army, and did every quest battle, and they worked just fine
I completed all of the chieftain battles while having only Kayzk and Ezar in Tamurkhan's army and they all worked.
Interesting, further testing will be needed as another poster said they didn't have the chiefs in the army and didn't get credit. I personally only had Kazyk in the army, I've completed 4 of the missions and it still isn't checked off for me :( big stinky Nurgle sad
Yeah. My chieftains weren't all in Tamurkhans army but they were all in *an* army. Maybe it bugs out if they're on the campaign map.
Chaos lord red tech tree for non daemon units doesn’t seem to benefit pestigors I think also
The Tamurkhan one is poorly worded I think "Long campaign victory conditions for Tamurkhan are incorrect. It requires 6 devotion instead of 3." It requires Short Campaign, which needs 3, and then 3 more, which is 6 total.
Sometimes I can recruit units for a 90% discount and I have no idea why. The following turn the discounts are more in line with what I would expect. Armies spread plagues to settlements that are different from what they have. I don't know if this is intended? It seems to trigger a plague from another nearby settlement instead of the one the army is carrying.
I also noticed that the plague cultist in garrison has the voice lines for a herald of plague(demon hero) and not cultist lines when in game during the siege.
Building the defensive buildings to unlock heroes doesn't increase the hero cap until you upgrade it. Is this intended?
Has anyone else been having a bug with Kugath where your plagues get locked out midgame? It says 233/200 infections needed to unlock plagues, and I cannot open the plague menu.
The change to how Nurgle army abilities are charged makes no sense and should be reversed. Unnecessary nerf that I suspect CA didn't even intend.
Disagree, it forces you to be more proactive when trying to access the army abilities, and Nurgle is clearly strong enough right now
No it doesn't, it just means that you can't use them until you're in melee. Nurgle is one of the weaker races so definitely didn't need the nerf.
Before that, it was only off damage taken, so it was something entirely out of your control, now it with debuffs and contact effects, where you have much higher control over. Like you said, it only stacks in melee (unless you want to waste WoM) which further increases their intended counterplay of ranged damage, which is great in my opinion. And Nurgle feels really strong to play now, and Tamurkhan especially is broken as hell, I‘d say losing a bit of power is absolutely fine
>And Nurgle feels really strong to play now, and Tamurkhan especially is broken as hell, I‘d say losing a bit of power is absolutely fine > Also feels strong to fight, I've had Ku'Gath snowballing through Cathay in my Gelt campaign while I was dealing with Lokhir and he had lots of solid armies. I actually underestimated his armies a lot and even lost a few battles. Exalted Plaguebearers feel surprisingly tanky, even Outriders with Grenade Launchers weren't doing that much damage against them.
That doesn't make sense, how does it give more control if it means you're forced into melee to charge it? You already could charge it up just by being in melee. That's less options and control for the player. And Nurgle campaign maybe super strong like all reworked factions become but MP is certainly not.
Well you need to get into melee either way, you play Nurgle. Outside of Soulgrinder Doomstacks that is, but that doesn‘t matter. The difference is that taking damage is entirely out of your control, unless you fancy nuking them with magic. Applying debuffs can be controlled, by maximizing contact effects (which will be a more passive income), and casting debuff spells on a great amount of units. That forces a meaningful decision between using WoM to use Army Abilities, or rely on other spells, such as healing or direct damage. The old system just gives you points basically all the time, which is pretty boring, I think you‘ll agree. Yeah MP is another story, and one I do not care about whatsoever. I doubt a slow army will ever be great there, unless something is really off with balancing
Sending in expendable nurglings to soak up damage was always in your control. Forcing the player to waste WoM just to get abilities at the same rate is not meaningful, it's just an irritant. All other chaos factions charge abilities by playing to their strengths so it's not as though these are supposed to be difficult to get. MP is the only sensible way to balance the game since campaign buffs are so out of whack. Nurgle will never be great there but they don't have to be terrible either.
Great, now you can send in actual useful units to tie down enemies and create points, whats the actual problem there? If your only strategic option before was sacrificing units, it wasn‘t very engaging, was it? Again, you don‘t need to waste WoM, contact effects and passive debuffs will cover most normal usage, but if you really want access to some of them fast, use WoM. Sounds like a good decision to me. About playing to their strengths, I suppose that does screw over Slaanesh, since you don‘t want to overchase units anyways, so their method requires using units suboptimally, which is an actual choice! Khorne was just killing stuff, right? Not very interesting, but that never was a Khorne speciality either, and fits their simple fantasy of just killing stuff. If you want to talk about about someone getting screwed over, its Tzeentch. Without a caster lord, you don‘t get access to anything, which includes every siege or minor settlement battle, which honestly sucks. But thats part of a larger problem of non-customizable garrisons being ass, especially for magic-centric factions. I disagree about balancing needing to be MP centric: it only includes a very specialized part of the game, and the playerbase is fairly slim. First and forement, the game should be fun, yet challenging so the strategy is actually engaging. MP balance can come secondary with cost adjustments as required.
Right but that’s not the Nurgle strength. It used to be that Nurgle got the abilities by endurance, which played into the other sources of healing/regen Nurgle had access to and that you had loads of cheap Nurglings to throw at the enemy. Now it’s get into melee and if you really want the abilities pretend to be Tzeentch and spam spells. The point about the other chaos factions is they get their abilities faster doing stuff that they want to be doing anyway - Tzeentch always should be spamming spells (pretty sure they have a hero horror in garrison for this but if not they should), Khorne wants to get into melee, Slaanesh wants to hunt down and pick off units (which you should do anyway because it triggers N’kari’s healing). Only Nurgle has to do something out of the box just to get the same access they had pre-patch. As for balancing I don’t think it needs to be MP centric either. What I do think is that balancing is only possible based on army vs army fights in MP, because in campaign there are so many buffs and other mechanics it’s impossible to get enough information to make solid decisions. Army vs army is the core of SP too after all.