And we barely had a year with our new battletome, lol! What are people thinking of the leaks/rumors about 4e so far? And do you think GW will finally be able to balance our army internally this time around? It sounds like they're trying to simplify even more, while still adding more special rules and reactions. Weapon ranges going away and everything having a 3" range sounds a bit lame, it just means that you'll always want to bring the higher damage/rend units instead of having to actually care about which models have more range on their melee attacks. Color-coded abilities for each phase? On the one hand I guess it will help some people remember which abilities they can use when. On the other hand it kind of sounds like they're dumbing down the game even further... Going the 10e route of giving each army an index at the start of the edition is interesting I guess? It means you'll have updated unit stats at the very least and probably some very basic army rules. But it also means that if your army index is crap when it comes out it's likely to remain crap when your battletome comes out. And of course it means our 3e battletome which feels like it just came out is going to be completely invalid in a couple months
Gotta love that drip-feed release model.... Lol no. So long as the starborn v.s. Coalesced divide remains the tome will never be internally balanced. The two subfactions are far too different to share a tome. Honestly; fair change. Most of the time there was an obvious best weapon anyway; so removing the fake choice of "range" can help clean up some warscrolls. It'll also help make it easier to balance as you no longer get issues with MSU with weapon A v.s. a full horde with weapon B and how that interacts with certain buffs and whatnot. It does raise 2 questions though: 1) How is this going to interact with screening? Does our starpriest now have to stand 3" behind his skink escorts to avoid getting a sword to the face? 2) What about long range melee attacks like Kroak's nonsense? I'd assume this is just a quality of life improvement. Easier to remember what command ability is for combat if all the combat abilities are red or whatever. Meh, in principle it's better than the drip-feed of new rules throughout an edition. That drip-feed inevitably causes powercreep and weird design issues, as the new tomes are written with the power of hindsight as well as possibly already keeping the next edition in mind. Plus, that drip-feed means some factions end up useless half the edition because they're waiting for their new tome and are stuck with rules written for an old edition. Assuming they actually release decent rules, releasing all at once is definitly preferable.
Agreed. I've always hated that some armies get their current edition book sooner and others have to wait till the end of the edition. It's not good for anyone, as the ones that get their books early on often get outpaced by later books, but the later books have to suffer through the waiting time then don't get much time to actually play with their new book. I'm hoping they balance the indexes better, but you're still left with only having a partial army ruleset for most of the edition for a lot of people. Assuming they do what they did in 40k, you'll have your unit stats, basic rules, and one "detachment" equivalent. I don't really want to get stuck playing just Dracothion's Tail, for example, for the next two years As much as I know people would dislike losing the summoning and magic focus, I *really* wish GW would ditch the Starborne/Coalesced divide and just make our army one faction like old school Lizardmen. Let there be a spell or something to teleport a unit like a lot of other factions have, and let us get some limited summoning for specific units. All the Daemon factions do this, and they have good base rules and unit stats on top of that. So it's not like it would make Seraphon overpowered to be able to summon a little, have a chance to teleport, and also have units with good baseline stats. That's true some of the time, especially on a lot of Stormcast units and individual characters. But for battleline troops there really were some situations where you'd want spears and some where you'd want clubs/swords etc. Making *everything* 3" range just makes me think they're going to remove most weapon loadouts altogether. So instead of clubs or spears on Saurus, for example, we'll probably just get "Celestite weapons" or something like that and most units will only have one weapon profile. Which isn't terrible, but still a little overly simplistic for me. Most likely they'll go to what they did with 40k where characters have to be attached to units, so they're basically treated like an upgrade for that specific unit rather than doing their own thing. If not, then I'm guessing they'll make some sort of rule where characters are not targetable by models not in base contact with them as long as there are other friendly models in combat with that unit. Most likely long range melee attacks will go away entirely or just become a warscroll ability that says "pick a unit, roll a dice, do d3 mortal wounds." Gargants and the like will probably have a special rule where their "combat range" is extended beyond 3".
Honestly, at this point I don't care if they want to focus on Coalesced or Starborne, I just wish they picked one and stuck to it. Right now we're stuck with two subfactions that have fundamentally opposing playstyles. Its impossible to write a coherent book for something like that. This mostly just boiled down to "are you fielding a horde or a MSU?" Which meant it was still kind of a false choice. Also; it created weird internal balance problems on the warscroll since all load-outs had the same base cost. And similar issues surrounding the cost of units (e.g. 1x40 or 4x40 being vastly different in power at the same cost). So meh, I can't say I'd be terribly upset about losing weapon loadouts, its not like AoS ever did loadouts particularly well anyway. Honestly would love that as it'd solve so many problems that AoS keeps struggling with... I hope not siiiigh Honestly, long range attacks like Kroak's are actually reasonably fun. (or well, Kroak's attack is still stupid, but for other reasons... not cuz of its range )
Some stuff about battalions and units Double reinforcements are gone apparently, so I guess no more proper horde units? Or alternativly; certain units will just have absurdly large MSU Command points are changed to be rare again, so half of our heroes are going to need full rewrites. Again. And regiments now fullfill the function of battalions with respect to low drops. It seems like bonusses and special rules from battalions have now completly dissappeared. Regiments are vaguely themed in the same way battalions were. A bit closer to the original battalions with specific heroes leading specific troops. Units outside of a dedicated regiment will be dropped individuall, increasing your drop count & give a free command point to the opponent if he has fewer auxiliary troops than you do. Overal; fairly non descript and somewhat underwhelming. The only truly interesting thing battalions ever gave was their special rules that could provide interesting bonusses. But it seems that even the last vestiges of those special rules we had in 3th edition with stuff like a free all-out-attack have now dissappeared and the only benefit to fielding battalions is to get a low drop count... Also; this will make lists that spam the same broken unit a bunch of times more common as the punishment for doing this/the reward for fielding a thematic coherent army has become negligible.
A bunch of stuff is getting discontinued. Beasts of chaos and bonesplitterz are just flat out gone. Stormcasts & skaven get cleaned up. Warcry chaos warbands get largely deleted, presumably because of the recent marauder releases. And we lose the eternity warden. Also; weirdly enough the liberators count as "discontinued" so it is a bit unclear which units are properly discontinued and which are simply going to get a new model. It's a bit of a shame, the stormcast lose some of the cooler models. Skaven seem to largely be losing older models taht are finecast or metal, so presumably a lot of these are going to be replaced with a new sculpt. The chaos warbands is a bit of a shame, they were fun and flavourfull. BoC seem to be demoted (or promoted if you ask @NIGHTBRINGER I guess ) to ToW
First look at warscrolls The interesting bits: Universal weapons rules from 40K seem to go into AoS now, with stuff like crits. Liberators have lost their loadout options (dual hammers v.s. shield doesn't matter), but retain their grandhammer option. It is unclear if what the champion model still does. Bravery is replaced by "control" which represents objective control Other than that, the SCE liberator scroll has nothing interesting or really new. Nagash has a powerlevel which diminishes when he gets wounded. They don't actually explain what it is. They explicitly mention his staff only buffs spellcasting during the hero phase ward saves and some other abilities like "fly" have been moved to the keyword bar at the bottom. How this improves readability is a mystery. Nagash is a wizard (9). Presumably that wizard (9) refers to his power level and is how many spells he can cast. His personal spell states it can be cast more than once per turn. Presumably this means that the rule of one continues to ruin the lives of wizards. His spell has both an offensive and defensive use; if that's going to be a trend for spells that would be nice. Hand of dust is no longer a spell, it's now apparently a monstrous rampage. Nagash has lost his spirit claws attack. Outside of his power level Nagash does not have a damage table. Nagash is now only a ossiarch unit? Colour coding & symbols is nice and definitly improves readability. But putting abilities like wardsaves and fly in the freaking keyword bar promptly ruins the overal readability again. The lack of a damage table is worrisome. Having monsters with only a few wounds left continue to hold objectives and do max damage is a bit lame... The fact that they feel the need to explicitly mention that Nagash's staff only buffs his casting during the hero phase is interesting. But again, without any extra information it is difficult to tell if this is meaningfull or not. Does this mean we get spell casts at different moments? Or did they simply type that to increase the word count of the article? Universal weapon rules are fine I guess, depending on what exactly we get. Bit odd to give such a powerfull ability to liberators of all things though given that they're the absolute most basic SCE unit. Especially when considering that this was essentially the special rule some of the more elite SCE units like retributors currently have... The fact that Nagash now has the ossiarch keyword is potentially interesting, though that has little to do with the actual warscroll. They mention ranged attacks are generally going to be reduced in range. Which seems odd since models and movement ranges don't seem to be reduced. O and Nagash is a "warmaster" now while the liberators are just "infantry". Again, without any actual information of how that matters... Other than that, again very little interesting information....
So far I'm definitely not that excited about the preview for 4e. I honestly wasn't super-enthusiastic about the change from 2e to 3e, although 3e did at least attempt to remove some of the extreme balance issues that different armies had in 2e. Skaven are getting the range refresh Lizardmen got last year, and it's well-deserved! Personally hoping GW lets them keep most of their units and just updates them rather than removing most of them. Bonesplitterz and Beasts of Chaos going away completely is really, really dumb and bad. I saw an Honest Wargamer stream where he was basically saying this is most likely due to the competition between The Old World and AoS proper, since apparently revenue from games like ToW and Forgeworld models doesn't go to GW proper and hence the people over at GW hate the idea of selling stuff that is used in both games. Still, it really sucks for people who played Bonesplitterz or Big Waaagh! and especially sucks for BoC players. Didn't they just get a new Vanguard box recently, as well as a new hero model? I know Stormcast had WAY too many models but still, seeing like 1/3 of their range get cut is really sad, especially for really nice models like the Evocators on Dracolines and the Taurolon model. Really feels like GW is just punishing people who didn't already dump their old Stormcast armies to go full Stormdrake and Thunderstrike units when those were released. Feels way too soon for AoS to be getting a "Primaris" situation. I do know that some of the units like liberators are just getting updated (which again, not old models, no real need for a range refresh this soon, lol!) but taking out unique stuff like the Evocators, the ballista, Taurolon, Paladins, Castigators, etc. is already making a lot of people mad. Not really liking the new warscroll preview. Sounds like they're basically taking away a lot of the uniqueness of different units and just giving them all more generic abilities. It looks like Liberators now just do mortal wounds on 6s to hit, which is crazy powerful. But I guess if half the rest of the units in the game also have this or similar abilities it won't be considered OP. But like Canas said, it depends on who gets what special rules. Stormcast already have a LOT of special abilities on their warscrolls where their units just get ward saves, free mortal wounds, free save bonuses, free to hit bonuses, etc. just for being Stormcast. I could definitely see GW giving some armies loads of special weapon abilities while other armies get stuck with none or only the less powerful ones... We can infer that spellcasting and miscasting work pretty much the same. Miscast and you can't cast any more spells that turn. However, if Nagash is getting a +2 to spellcasting rolls, I guess that means Kroak and Slann no longer will get any bonuses, lol! Not a big fan of losing bravery in favor of objective control. We already had rules for how many models each model/unit counts as on objectives, but making it a stat on the warscroll makes me assume that there will be a lot of rules different armies/units get that increase their control stat or decrease the opponent's. I know some people will like it, but I personally prefer battleshock to cause fleeing models, not just "your models don't count as holding the objective this round because my unit used Scary Face." Not sure why they want to lower the range of shooting attacks. They already made melee way more effective by shrinking the board sizes and giving most armies a way to throw something into your lines in turn one. Sounds like they want to make AoS more melee-focused, which is fine, but I'm not sure how they're going to do that without either neutering armies like KO and Lumineth that rely on shooting, or giving them crazy annoying and/or OP abilities that make them able to shoot you to death anyway. Random note: Nagash isn't on Ossiarch-only unit, apparently he's getting a separate warscroll for each Death faction. Not sure if that means he'll have different abilities or if they'll just change the one keyword to match each separate faction, lol! Would like to hear more about "power level" and how that's supposed to degrade with damage. I agree that monsters retaining their full power until they die is going to make them really powerful. Although it sounds like in general they'll be amping up the the power level of most things, if even basic troops are getting mortal wounds on 6s to hit as part of their base warscroll, lol! If a single round of combat with some Liberators can deal 5-6 wounds to your monster, not having it degrade with damage might be a good thing. I'm going to give AoS 4e as much of the benefit of the doubt as possible. But I'm definitely not buying anything until we get the full rules released and see how the army indexes look...
I mean, 4e is claiming to fix things too. They just haven't actually explained how or what. And let's be real, it's not like 3e actually succeeded all that much at fixing the balance issues anyway... It just replaced them with other issues O for fuck's sake that is dumb.... Honestly, I get why bonesplitterz got removed. AoS currently has 4 different kinds of greenskins; and the bonesplitterz have the least going for them. It's of course a shame, but ultimatly understandable. BoC only really makes sense if they start putting BoC stuff in SoD. I think that GW just didn't really know what they wanted with SCE and just kinda fucked up. The different chambers do have way too much overlap, and it's obvious that they do. But they also clearly couldn't make up their mind what exactly an SCE was. The first round of basic SCE were essentially just space marines on dragons The second round had this weird hunter vibe going on, which didn't mix terribly well with their heavy armour. Also their mounts are chickens now. The third round they suddenly were all magic users, their mounts are more dog-like. And now with the fourth round we've gone back to the original idea of armoured knights on dragons, but with a more distinct silhoutte so they're not just space marines in fantasy. Honeslty, GW just seems to be terribly organized when it comes to creating a new faction. Honeslty, I wish they gave actual information. It's been so limited so far. Bravery was horribly flawed though. Certain units simply never cared, because losing enough models to trigger it was rare. And for the units that did care you just saved one command point and kind of ignored it otherwise. As for objective control. Honestly, it could be interesting. But given that Nagash has a flat objective control, and no damage table I fear it'll have some problems... In fairness you could make a good argument that armies that rely a 100% on shooting are rather annoying by default So I can understand wanting to neuter them. But given how big AoS models are, and how far they can move, it does seem weird of a change at face value. Even 18" already feels rather short ranged at times. God I hope that we're missin something. Things already die pretty quickly in AoS. Having basic troops like liberators with mortal wounds spam is going to be annoying.
Command abilities in 4e Couple of things: - O god more rule of one bullshit. - Everything can use command abilities now. No more need for heroes or unit champions or something - Reactions are a thing now. This is neat. Especially if other abilities use this scheme as well. - A command ability can be used to cast in the enemy hero phase; Which is cool. But there better be multiple ways to do this, 1 per turn is increadibly limited. Also, no idea how this interacts with spellcasting limit. Can Nagash cast 9 times in his own turn, then once in an enemy turn for a total of 10? Or can he cast 9 times in total? - The actual new command abilities are decent enough. Free movement, countercharging, a heal. They are fun little tricks to pull. - Only countercharge seems to be 2 points? Why? Also; given the rule of one bullshit the punishment for not using battalions is completly negliceable...
Yeah, the rule of one stuff is annoying. Wish they'd drop it but some factions have super overpowered spells and when combined with wizards that can do lots of casting I could see it getting out of hand *very* quickly if they didn't have it, so it kind of makes sense for casting. For command abilities on the other hand, just an arbitrary restriction for most of them. Everything using command abilities has pros and cons imo. Off the top of my head, it means you have to babysit stuff like Kroxigors less, but also makes me wonder how heroes are going to be supporting units. I guess they might have their own unique "abilities" as they're calling everything now that just buff stuff without CP usage, which would be nice. Hope they don't go the 40k route of having leaders just be attached to units as an upgrade. Reactions are interesting. I know it can be frustrating to have to sit through someone's whole turn without being able to do much, but some of these reactions sound OP as all get-out with what little information we have. Unleash Hell was much more balanced than Covering Fire imo. Now armies with good shooting units will simple spend a CP every enemy shooting phase to get an extra free round of shooting from that unit. Being shot in your own shooting phase every turn is going to be annoying as heck. I guess that's why they were saying they wanted to reduce the shooting range of most things, lol! The casting in your enemy's hero phase thing is cool, but again, going to be really annoying to get powerful spells spammed on you even in your own turn, or defensive spells used that prevent you from doing what you wanted to do even if you went first that turn. Overall, none of these look absolutely terrible, but I'm concerned about how they will be combo'd. Countercharge in particular looks a bit OP, and really discourages the "throw a unit across the board turn 1" strategy that a lot of armies use currently, since it practically guarantees that your attacking unit will get swarmed if your opponent doesn't spread their units out really far. I was thinking Power Through would be OP at first, but on a second read it says at the end of any turn, not any phase. So you won't be using this to charge with something, hop a screen, then kill the target that was being screened originally, unless you get the double-turn, lol! They say that there isn't a single ability in the game that gives you extra CP anymore. Really curious to see how long that lasts with how many abilities centered around that in previous editions, lol! All in all, it looks like they're MASSIVELY ramping up the lethality of the game. Lots of mortal wounds, charging and shooting in your opponent's turn, ping-ponging your units around the battlefield with all these extra movement abilities. Definitely feels like it's meant to appeal to younger players looking for more action-heavy games where you kill a lot of stuff in a short amount of time.
I mean; just don't make such broken spells in that case? Or put restrictions on the super powerfull spells. But the fact that two basic casters, like say two starpriests, need to fight over available spells is just silly. Meh, the 40K route has the major advantage that you can't easily kill minor support heroes. It also opens up some potentially interesting buffs which is always nice. Which solves a number of problems for minor support heroes have. Wouldn't be the worst thing to happen to AoS. Honestly, this is the biggest problem with the new command abilities. It appears like there's going to be 2-3 "good" commands you're just going to be spamming every turn, and the rest you kind of ignore most of the time. Like, every shooting army is going to spam unleash hell, every monster army is going to spam that charge, every caster army is going to spam that spell (assuming there's no hidden downsides to it.) Honestly; good. I despise those kind of idiotic strategies that would be absurd in a real battle, but work in certain games due to the lack of punishment for suicidally aggresive plays Well they did say that factions who relied on that would get significant buffs to make up for that. So you know, we're getting our 4th? 5th? overhaul soon It's less "younger" players, and more "competitive" players. High lethatlity rewards extreme min-maxing and "clever" plays, because that single good move, or minor extra buff you squeezed in, is now extra devestating.
Totally agree. If they didn't make certain spells too OP to be spammed or made it so that only those spells had restrictions it would make a lot more sense. But you're right in that having basic casters have to fight for spell usage is dumb. Especially with warscroll spells. If you bring two Starseers they should both be able to cast their ward removal spell, lol! Personally I'd prefer the older rule of foot heroes next to another unit not being targetable outside of a certain distance. Having foot heroes limited to glorified wargear upgrades that only buff one specific unit would be really annoying personally. I'm also not the biggest fan of the turn one rush tactic, especially when it's only one unit. But I still don't like the countercharge ability since it not only shuts down that type of tactic, it also just adds even more unnecessary annoying stuff to the game. "Oh, you want to attack my big tough unit? Guess what, my other big tough unit is now in combat with you too. Have fun getting hit twice and most likely losing your unit that you were relying on killing or tying up the original target " There's one situation where I can think of it being useful though, and that's in catching stuff like KO boats and any Lumineth-esque units that like to shoot you and run away repeatedly. Despite how much I'm not liking a lot of the generic 4e stuff, I'm actually somewhat hopeful that GW may actually be able to balance our book this time around since it looks like they'll be removing subfactions in favor of the admittedly less interesting "battle formations." So hopefully they'll finally remove the Starborne/Coalesced divide and let us run an actual mixed army and not a "spam the type of unit your subfaction likes" army. Yeah, that makes sense too. Just a bit weird how the general talking point has always been "you win on objectives, not by tabling your opponent." Now it appears they want to make tabling your opponent more of the main focus. Do you think they're trying to shorten games even more? Because with how "fighty" all the reveals feel so far I have a hard time seeing battles lasting more than 2-3 rounds, lol!
The issue with that is that you can still get killed by random AoE, and given that some heroes have only 4-5 wounds that can still be done absurdly quickly. Not to mention "special" rules, like snipers and whatnot screwing with things. Plus, it still means minor foot heroes can't go into melee combat without immeadiatly being annihilated, which makes their whole weapon profile just kind of pointless. Attaching them to a unit fixes both those issues. It also has some benefits with respect to buffs. You can give them a powerfull buff that affects the unit they are attached to, without having to worry about them accidently buffing something scary and unlocking weird syngergies (e.g. you can only attach the support to a MSU, so you can make the buff powerfull without worrying about accidently buffing a horde unit) Meh, countercharging isn't the real issue there. The real issue is that it's too easy to create a massive overwhelming local advantage resulting in a one-sided fight. Meh, I don't think they're trying to make tabling the focus. 2 min-maxed armies matching up will probably work fine(-ish). I'd assume that there's also going to be plenty of powerfull defensive abilities. For example, every faction now has access to healing with that healing command ability. Anyways, they just forget that if you encourage competitive min-maxing style gameplay tabling becomes more common for the "normal" players, as well as other potential weird issues popping up.
And the new skaven model. It has a silly amount of damage on its ranged attack for a minor ranged hero. It has "totally not mortal wounds" on 6's Look out sir comes back Fun fact; everything that isn't a hero can give the benefit. So have your skink priest be guarded by a bastiladon I guess. Anyways, that means minor support heroes are still going to randomly die to abilities/spells/etc. cuz it really isn't terribly much protection. Minor melee heroes are still going to be unable to actually do much melee-ing out of fear of getting squished... Of course the skaven immeadiatly introduces an exception to look out sir, cuz GW refuses to actually give minor support heroes any sort of real survivability.... His musket has a 24" range, so whatever GW said about ranged attacks being shorter ranged is apparently nonsense... And that's it really. Basicly an entire article to declare "look out sir comes back"
Battleplans and GHB and stuff They seem to be playing around with different scoring-schemes for different battleplans and such. Like a 10 point cap on victory points per turn in certain battleplans. On the one hand; I guess it's good to prevent run-away games. On the other hand, once you've fallen behind that limit could be problematic. O, and a partial show of the new "seasonal" rule. Which seems to be poorly phrased and just begging to be interpreted in ways that probably don't correspond to the intention. RAW its a bodyguard rule that can be used without the bodyguard being anywhere near the attacker. Additionally you could easily argue it triggers even if the attacker doesn't target the general they are guarding. He just needs to be in combat. Who wrote this rule?
I think we will be pleasantly surprised about the lethality, but that might just be my optimism. 2 attacks at damage 3 (best cast scenario) is a silly amount of damage? Really? You're better than this @Canas In all seriousness, i'm assuming there will be less range across the board so something like this will be rarer and farther between. But again, that might be the optimism talking.
24" 2/3+/3+/-2/D3, with critical hits on 6's, and with his "more warp energy" rule turning that D3 into a flat 3 most of the time. And on top of that it's a sniper. O, and all of that is without any external buffs. It's just the basic warscroll. That is pretty good offense for a minor support hero. Very simply put; he seems to outgun basicly every other hero that I can find, with the exception of the Fusil Major on Ogor, and the Lumineth fox spirit things. It also makes it one of the few support heroes who are actually worth attacking with. And one of the few who can attack from a safe range with its 24". So yeah, for a minor support hero, it's ranged offensive power is pretty impressive. In comparison, it's melee attack is pretty average, even a bit weak, for a minor support hero. Anyways, mostly it just makes me doubt GW's claims of turning down ranged firepower. This is the first ranged unit they've shown off for the new edition, and it already outguns virtually every existing comparable unit. And it isn't even a super duper fancy unit. Hence, its a bit silly. But who knows, maybe it turns out this is the most powerfull ranged unit in the game and they did actually limit ranged firepower on everything else.
My friend, the last book our starseer had nearly the same ranged profile while also being a wizard. It's not that bad, we have no idea how much it costs and it's "support" ability is... Not very good. At least not without seeing the context. Is it humerous that gw shows us a 24 in range hero after they said that. Yes. But I think you're exaggerating both how good it is and how impactful it'll be. It's six damage in a worse case scenario. 6. The knight judicator exists right now with a much better profile and it's still kinda womp womp. The dogs and mortals is what makes that unit work.
Shorter range, less rend, no crits on sixes, no "more warp power" to turn that D3 into a 3, no sniper rule. Sure, the maximum damage output with perfect roles is the same, but the average performance & the special rules are very much in favour of the skaven here. I'm not saying it's particularly good or impactfull. I'm saying that it has far more offensive power than minor support heroes usually get. Which is made extra ironic by GW's earlier statement that they're toning down ranged attacks. And it also doubles down on @Kilvakar worries about the apparent damage powercreep for the new edition. Very simply put; if a minor warlock already has this; what kind of firepower is an archwarlock going to bring? Let alone a named warlock, or a warlock mounted on a weaponsplatform or something...