What happened to Hamelin?

 Hey folks. I've gone back and forth a bit on whether or not to do this write-up. Largely because it's going to be pretty negative, and I both prefer to focus on things I'm having fun and because I haven't written all that much content for Malifaux 4e so far and this risks making it look like I have a negative view of the whole game. So let it be said that I am really enjoying the new edition, there's been a lot of fun stuff to explore with my Outcasts and I'm enjoying trying out the Keywords I never had a chance to test during the beta.

That said, I have been getting asked a fair bit about my views on Hamelin. For anyone who missed it, I was a big, big proponent of Hamelin in M3E. I always meant to do a deep dive into his crew, but I was often daunted by the sheer depth of play I would need to communicate in order to accurately describe it. He was my favourite Master in the faction by a good margin and I really enjoyed the unusual way in which he approached the game. But luckily... I guess... that is no longer an obstacle, and since folks have been asking me for my Hamelin impressions as a certified Hamelin aficionado, let's get into it.

What are the symptoms of the Plague?

Before we start looking at the way the crew works now, I feel like it might be important to get a sense of Plague's theme. Looking to past editions, Plague has always been a "late game" crew. The defining feature of Hamelin in M2E and M3E was an attack called "Bleeding Disease" that became stronger you were able to stack his exclusive "Blight" condition on the target, giving the crew this sense of a creeping infection that slowly became terminal. He would also want to summon Rats, often through some fairly convoluted methods, and the slowly growing horde would also give him more power in later turns than he started with. I like to think of Plague as a crew whose power could only be understood on the table, attacks and abilities would scale in value depending on the game state rather than their own merits. While you can read the card of a model like Hannah Lovelace and immediately see that she could deal a lot of damage, the ability of Hamelin to do that damage has traditionally been tied to how successful you've been in setting up the field.

Now, playstyles do change when an edition does, but M4E's Plague Keyword still has enough nods to this approach that I think it was the intention that Plague still play in broadly the same way. I don't want to get into the Open Beta too much, but I do think it's worth noting that the crew was closer to this ideal during the beta. It felt like each successive change started to move the crew away from this approach until it was more of a superficial trapping than an actual playstyle, eventually ending in a bunch of post-beta changes that solidified the shift away from that slow, inevitable doom that the Plague Keyword used to capture.

Title Trouble

Like all Masters, Hamelin has two titles in Malifaux 4th Edition. They each have very, very different problems going for them. I'm going to do a quick run through of the problems with Plaguebringer first, since he's the more straightforward one and his problems are easier to understand.

The general idea between the two titles is that Plaguebringer is the "Blight token" title, and Piper is the "Rat" title. There's a bit of a problem right off the rat with that split, which is that Rats are the most effective sources of Blight in the Keyword so Piper is actually better at producing Blight than Plaguebringer. But thanks to his crew card, Plaguebringer makes up for quantity with quality Blight:

At least, I assume that's the idea. In reality, this crew card might be in the running for the worst in the game. There's a clear attempt here via the power bar to capture the idea of Blight getting stronger over time, of keeping that multi-edition theme of Plague as a crew that slowly grows stronger as the game goes on. It's a bit weird that the strongest effect then is a penalty to interacting, less reaching death's door in the late game and more having a bit of a fever that makes it easy to overwork yourself. You also need to be dedicated about using Diseased Embrace every turn in order to get there, and you never know when you start committing to that process if this will actually be a game where your opponent will need to Interact enough times with Blighted models in the late game for it to matter. Frankly, the best thing about the crew card is that Diseased Embrace gives your models a TN-less self heal. Not bad for tankier models in the crew like Nix.

Beyond the crew card not offering much to the Keyword, Hamelin himself is fairly self-sufficient. His front of card gives a Blight token to any enemy that activates within 6", and a couple of defensive rules. His back of card is all offense:

There isn't really anything here that benefits from hiring his own Keyword. Between Diseased Embrace, Source of the Contagion, and his Lure, he's actually pretty comfortably able to produce all the Blight he needs. Bleeding Disease spent the entire beta as an attack that scaled based on the amount of Blight on the field, but it proved too difficult to balance and the developers post-beta turned it into a Damage 3 magic attack. It had unfortunately been stripped of all of its triggers during the beta, meaning that Hamelin now revolves around a Damage 3 attack without triggers or raises, so there's not a lot of variation in how his actions resolve.

Hang onto that thought, it will be important when we get to Piper.

But since Hamelin doesn't need a lot of Blight to hit maximum power anymore, and he produces enough Blight himself for what he wants to do, and because his Crew Card is lacklustre, there's very little encouraging the Hamelin player to invest in their Keyword. Models like Nix (who needs Blight, but again he and Hamelin between them make enough) and the Fumigator who are just independently solid are worth hiring, but I don't feel like investing in models like Rat Catchers or Stolen are worth it unless you want them purely on their own merits. There are no considerations around creating a game state that favours this crew, Hamelin is a pretty straightforward and selfish beatstick who could happily spend every stone on OOK and Versatile models without blinking.

So in the end, you kind of end up with an ok damage dealer playing a superfriends list and basically pretending his crew card doesn't exist.

A Bonus Blight Sidebar

I have neglected to this point to mention what Blight actually does. In a nutshell, its main effect is that Blighted models make Wp duels at negatives when the duel is generated by a Plague model. The Plague Keyword has a lot of Wp attacks, but it is also a brawly Keyword with mostly low Damage attacks to offset the power of the Blight token. Blight goes away in the end phase unless the model with Blight is standing next to another model, which often runs counter to the idea of Plague being a crew that slowly goes stronger. It's not uncommon for every Blight token to just disappear at the end of the turn, unless your opponent has been quite obliging in their positioning. Plague doesn't have many ways to move enemy models, so it can be hard to engineer persistent Blight, and half the time you expend Blight on your stronger attacks like Bleeding Disease or on triggers. This, of course, reduces the value of Plaguebringer's crew card even further.

The Piper's Problems

If Plaguebringer's issues began with a dysfunctional crew card, Piper's do the same. In this case though, the problem is that Piper's crew card goes in the other direction by giving every model an action better than the actions printed on their own card:

The culprit here is "Gnawed to Death". Now, as I mentioned earlier, the Plague crew is a crew of mostly low Damage attacks. In fact, outside of Bleeding Disease, every single attack in the Keyword is Damage 2. Gnawed to Death, however, can do up to Damage 3 if the target is close enough to enough Rats. It also targets Wp, so the opponent resists at a negative if they have Blight, and if you have a lot of Rats the one thing Rats do is give a model Blight just by ending their activation in base to base. So, provided you have enough Rats, Gnawed to Death is guaranteed to be better than any attack on your card.

Don't worry, you're guaranteed to have enough Rats. Hamelin, the Piper, Benny Wolcomb, and two Rat Catchers all produce Rats as once per activation signature actions with low TNs and make an additional Rat for every Raise. That alone should average about six Rats a turn, but Piper also has a Skl 7 magic attack with a Raise Value of 3 that makes a Rat for every Raise, which pretty consistently makes another 2-3. And of course, Gnawed to Death also has a Stone trigger to make two more Rats. My baseline expectation is to summon 10+ Rats every turn with this crew without breaking a sweat, and notably you have a maximum allowance of 8 Rats on the field at once. Making Rat Kings will get rid of some as well, but Rat Kings are also Vermin and add to the Gnawed to Death damage. Long story short, you are basically guaranteed to deal maximum damage with Gnawed to Death, and every non-Peon Plague model in the crew has Gnawed to Death, so you make a lot of Gnawed to Death attacks. 

Gnawed to Death is at this point a flat Damage 3 attack with no triggers or raises, and you do this every activation because you have a lot of cheap models hired and it's just stronger than their native actions and usually more reliable. A Skl 6 attack that the opponent resists on a negative has to be compared against the Skl 5, Damage 2 targeting Df attacks that basically the entire Keyword relies upon outside of this. You'll take Gnawed to Death every time. And it's just boring. At a certain point you realise that you don't really feel like a Rat Catcher, Benny, a Stolen, a Rat King, or Nix have any real difference between them. Even though Gnawed to Death is once per activation, it's usually the defining attack of every activation for every model in your crew. Even Hamelin is pretty likely to do the same. In the worst case scenario, Hamelin might do Gnawed to Death once himself and then start using his obey to demand other models also use Gnawed to Death.

Gnawed to Death remains shockingly consistent as well because the opponent is inevitably resisting on a negative flip. It's not unreasonable to expect 10+ Rat activations every turn. At the end of every activation, an enemy model will gain a Blight. Non-Rat models also hand out Blight, but it usually involves opposed duels so I wouldn't worry about that too much. Rats are better, so you can ignore the other Blight effects, but it's sometimes ok in an emergency. Frankly, there's no amount of token removal in the game that can keep up with the rate at which Piper's crew produces Blight, any form of counterplay is essentially irrelevant. 

The same, honestly, applies to the Rats as well. You just make too many. Even crews with shockwaves or similar AOE effects on their crew cards usually fail to keep the Rat population under control. You certainly wouldn't waste points hiring a single OOK model with an AOE attack and expect it to make any difference to the Rat population on the board. Multiple opponents have just decided on Turn 2 that it's probably better for them to ignore the Rats and just accept that they'll be there, and honestly I usually find that's the correct call. It removes quite a lot of text from the cards of the Plague models if they're no longer physically able to summon Rats, and it lets the opponent focus their actions on just killing the squishier cheap Plague models. There's no sense here that Plague is getting stronger over time, because you heat peak performance pretty much immediately and then just stay there forever.

Even just positioning Rats is almost tediously easy. The range at which Rat Catchers summon Rats is absurdly generous, usually letting them just appear where you want them. Gnawed to Death and Hamelin's A Dance of Tiny Feet attack summon the Rats on top of enemy models. You rarely need to activate a Rat to move it into position, you just need to do so in order to produce the Blight. Which is funny, because both Rat Catchers and Hamelin himself have ways to generate additional Walk actions on Rats. I usually forget about these rules, I can count on one hand across two dozen games the number of times it's been remotely relevant.

This all contributes to the feeling that playing against Piper is a game of playing against a computer. They're going to do Gnawed to Death every activation. There will always be enough Rats in range to do max damage. It will almost certainly hit. Are you playing a crew that can absorb a Damage 3 attack every activation and still score its points? Congratulations, you won the game. If you are playing a crew that cannot, you probably lost. The gameplay doesn't vary and the Keyword doesn't really have the tricks to mix things up. Every activation repeats the same loop, and there is little that the Hamelin player or their opponent can do to break out of it. There is no counterplay, but also a flat 3 damage every activation isn't really insanely powerful either. It's good enough to win some games, lose some others, but it's not really going to ask either player to make any choices.

Where to from here?

At this point, I would generally caution folks away from playing Hamelin. By all means, try him out if you want to see these rules in action. I'd be very interested to hear about folks with different experiences in how this collection of rules comes together for them.

The tragedy is that it didn't need to be this way. The original rules for Hamelin in the 4e beta felt much closer to something interesting than what we got. Far too strong in some areas, too weak in others, the usual beta problems, but we didn't have the problems we have now. Rat generation was far more sensible in Piper, Plaguebringer had scaling damage effects and a lot more reasons to play in Keyword, and it was actually worth considering token removal or hiring models capable of keeping the Rat population under control. Blight affected Df and Wp duels, but every model was Damage 2 and Blight was much harder to produce. There was an attack on the Rat Catchers that could deal up to 4 damage, based on the number of Rats in the area, but it targeted Sp so you had this fun push-and-pull where your weak attacks could usually hit without much investment, while you hoarded your cards for the big attacks that required careful set-up. Rats didn't hand out Blight unresisted either, though they had their own problems in that their activations felt like a complete waste of time. It wasn't perfect, it was very much a beta product, but it was at least interesting.

At this point I really can only hope we see a Plague rework in the first errata or two of the new edition, but I don't have my hopes up. A problem that kept occurring in the beta was that it's really quite hard to build a complex ecosystem, and a lot of changes would require other models to change in turn. I understand why the developers eventually just gave up and made Bleeding Disease a bog standard Damage 3 attack, rather than tying it to the Power Bar of the crew card or something, but it's still sad to see.

Anyway, I promise to do a more positive write-up on Infamous or Bandit or something in the near future. Hope you all are having a great start to M4E!