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Friday, January 03, 2014

Blood Bowl: Draft Complete

Yesterday had the last pick of the NBFL and it's time to start cheesing up some abilities. I found out how they manage to make this happen. You play a bunch of games against a team full of snotlings and beat them up to earn lots of experience. As you level up you pick whatever skills you want on the drafted guys and at the end of the leveling games they get an admin to go in and edit all of the drafted players and set their skills to the drafted ones instead of what they have. On top of this each of your other players can farm up 6 experience as well (enough for 1 level) and you get whatever you happen to roll.

I'm playing chaos pact which is a team featuring 3 'big guys' who are super strong, hard to skill up, and randomly decide to take actions off. I get a couple of one shot dudes from other rosters (a dark elf so I have an agile dude, a goblin so I have a crazy dude, and a skaven so I have a fast dude) and the rest of the team is guys who can mutate and get strength skills on regular rolls. People often play this race without the big guys and use the easy mutations and strength skills to kill lots of people with the dreaded claw-piling_on-mighty_blow combo. Drafted players couldn't get mutations which meant I wasn't going to be able to draft anyone with the combo anyway and with every team getting infinite cash and some free stars it didn't seem like keeping my team rating low was going to accomplish a whole lot. So I decided my primary goal in the draft was going to be getting hard to earn skills on my big guys to make them more useful with a secondary goal of getting a bunch of my regular guys into a position to be good guard dudes. I like punching over and over and I really want to have a strength and guard advantage.

The first guy I got to draft was in the expansion draft and I took a basic block/guard guy as my troll. Trolls aren't very good at much beyond being a large man in one location and those two skills are pretty much the only two I need on him. Block is a doubles skill on a troll so it was good to pick it up in a draft. As an added bonus he's only 9 SPP away from his next level and if he rolls doubles on that one he can get a mutation. Like tentacles!

Off to the main draft where I got to pick 9th, 34th, and 41st. There were some really, really good guys at the top of the draft (the first overall pick was a +ST, +AG, sure hands, strip ball guy who turned into a dwarf runner) and thankfully no one took the guy I really had my eye on. A big guy with block, guard, tackle, and enough SPP to need only 2 more to level. I turned him into an ogre which is pretty fantastic for me. Block and tackle are both doubles only skills and guard is super important for my team plan. Being so close to level is really good as, again, a double will turn into tentacles or maybe claw. I turned him into an ogre instead of a minotaur because I thought I might draft a juggernaut minotaur and even if I didn't a minotaur with one free skill can just take juggernaut. Minotaur has horns and wild animal so he's a better option to be the blitzing big guy if I need to have one of those so he should hold off and get juggernaut I think.

By the time the 34th pick came around the other big guy with block had been taken and there wasn't much exciting left. No bonus strength, no bonus agility, and no big guy with doubles meant I didn't have any obvious choices left. There was a guy with bonus armour and two with bonus movement if I wanted those. Most of my team gets practically every skill on a regular roll but my linemen actually don't get agility skills so if I wanted to get something like dodge it would be easier to get it here than by drafting it. Ultimately I decided that I didn't really want to put my minotaur on the line of scrimmage, especially if he didn't get lucky and get block, so I need a 3rd tough guy for the line. The guy with bonus armour also happened to have dodge and wrestle so I went with him. I don't really like wrestle on a guy who expects to get guard next level but getting the 9th armour was important for me. My three divisional opponents are dwarves, orcs, and lizardmen and they can't get claw which makes bonus armour a reasonable play. (Also having all three opponents featuring 9 armour dudes means my own claw is going to be VERY tasty.) Added bonus? This guy is only 10 SPP from leveling again to get guard. 10 is pretty far for a guy without mighty blow, claw, or block but maybe he'll get some MVPs or something.

Pick 41 had even slimmer pickings. The minotaur option was still on the table (break tackle, movement, juggernaut) but he was 19 SPP from leveling again and I'm actually not a huge fan of break tackle on a loner. I decided I would probably rather have a shot at doubles with a fallback of guard or juggernaut than have one of my 3 big guys so far away from either block or guard. I ended up taking another lineman instead, this one with block, dodge, and tackle. He's also planning on being a hard to knock down guy with guard. And he's only 5 SPP from leveling! That's one MVP or a handful of skinks. He might also be my go to ball carrier until I really level up the elf. I could see taking extra arms on his level instead of guard for a ball carrier.

I'm pretty happy with the draft and I'm excited to see how this league plays out. It'll be nice to skip over the 'flat broke and unskilled' section of Blood Bowl for a change.

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