Little by Little

Granite was intended to serve as a midfield enforcer, tough to take out and disengage from. We still think this is a valid playstyle that gives her a strong identity within the Mason’s Guild, the problem previously was that Granite didn’t perform this job well enough to be selected over other models such as Brick. Additionally, the changes to Granite are quite different to those we’ve shown on both Snakeskin and Salvo. While neither of them had any statistical changes in favour of changes to their abilities, Granite does have a few changes to her stat line.

Firstly, Granite’s MOV stat has increased from 3”/5” to 4”/6”, which doesn’t seem like much, but when you’re quite reliant on multiple small movements to get across the pitch, even a small change like this provides quite a big impact. Similarly, Granite’s melee zone has increased from 1” to 2”. Increasing a model’s melee zone is another change which may not seem like much, but on the pitch it can have a huge impact, particularly for a model like Granite that wants to be involved in a melee as early as possible.

Previously, Granite was reliant upon the Determination character trait which gave her an additional point of DEF while engaged by two or more enemy models. We decided to cut Determination out completely and just give Granite a DEF of 3+. This helps to cut down the complexity of using Granite because players using her have one less thing they need to remember. Additionally, this change simply helps make Granite a more consistently tough model.

Due to Granite’s more consistent defensive stats, we took another look at her health bar and decided to reduce it from 24 to 20 health points. At DEF 3+ and ARM 2 with 20 health points, Granite is not an easy model to take out, particularly because she has a greater capacity for her counter attacks to be effective due to her new 2” melee zone. It is also worth noting that Granite has retained the Sturdy character trait which further adds to her defensibility, since knocking a model down is one of the most common methods of making them easier to take out.

Moving onto Granite’s character plays, there aren’t a lot of changes here. Gut & String’s MOV penalty has been reduced from -4”/-4” to -2”/-2”, since this character play also lowers the target’s DEF by 1. These two effects together are incredibly powerful in that they make an enemy model easier to hit AND make it more difficult for the enemy model to escape further attacks. So reducing the MOV penalty to a more reasonable level is only fair. This change wasn’t made because of Granite specifically, but when you consider that she also has very easy access to knockdown on the second column of her playbook, it’s easy to see why this change makes sense.

Finally, the character play Tar Pit has a new name, Broken Earth. We changed the character play’s name so that we could use it on more models and have the name make sense in more places. Additionally, we increased the size of the rough terrain aura from 3” to 4” to make it a little stronger since it wasn’t often used in Season 3.