AoS 4th Edition is nearly here...

Correct me if I am wrong, please:

I am new to AoS, but the faction packs are they not more like the indizes in W40k?
So everyone has now a "condensed" way to play the army, but the rest will follow when the battletome is published at a later date?

 

It is a bit unclear to which extend it is "condensed", but yeah similar idea at least.

 

On that note, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that we'd be getting 4 battle formations each with our indexes. I was under the impression that we'd just have the Sunclaw Starhost until we eventually got our battletome.

I also noticed that a lot of our old enhancements (such as Sotek's Gaze, Vengeful Defender) ended up as enhancements in Spearhead. I have no intention on playing Spearhead, but I'm wondering if eventually we'll be getting more heroic traits and artifacts upon our battletome release.

Also, anyone notice the most recent Rumour Engine? Looks an awful lot like it could be a dino tail, though I've seen several people say it also looks like a serpent. I suppose DoK could use some more units too...

 

They need something to justify selling the tomes I suppose...

 

Of course, didn’t want to complain in any way.
The way the start of 10th edition in 40K with the Indizes worked out felt great imho.
Also apart from few exceptions the later Codizes were more sidegrades and the index detachment mostly still played a significant role.

with all I here about AoS being the better game with the better ruleset I am highly optimistic for the faction packs and the later battletomes

 

*Indices.

They said everyone would get four formations, just previewing one per article.

Exodites confirmed!

 

Both indices and indexes are acceptable.
Indices follows the original latin, indexes represents the English history to refuse to do latin properly
Also, there seem to be certain professions/fields that have opinions on which one is more correct....
In short, English is a disaster.

 

They do still exist, they have been mentioned as enhancements that some armies will have. We don't get them for some reason. GW really dislikes our dinos, lol!

 

English is, indeed, a disaster, but GW says "Indices" so I'll go with them.

Reading the Skaven Pack and Stormfiends have specific loadouts, maybe because how they come on their instruction booklet. This irritates me even more because I already expressed how I dislike that hand weapons and spears/lances on the rest of the models have the same rules and they didn't took the chance to make them slightly different.

 

Sigh, the whole point of the edition is to streamline things and make them consistent across factions.
And GW can't even get that right...

 

GIVE IT A REST CANAS JEEZ LOUISE.

I played my first few games of tenth the other week after being out of 40k for a while and it was fantastic! The game felt great.

 

Interesting, I haven't been into 40k since....5th edition I think? I used to have 10k points of space marines. From what I've seen of the game now, I can't say I'm particularly wild about pulling random cards to score secondary points. Another reason I like AoS more, I like battle tactics. What's your opinion on the scoring cards?

Also, for those interested, Caleb Hastings posted an enormous comprehensive review of the faction pack here. I really enjoy listening to others' thoughts on the warscrolls and rules as it helps me with forming my own opinions (another reason I frequent Lustria online). I was sold on the free All Out Attack hero trait until Caleb pointed out how much more useful the other two were, for example. Now I'm keen on hearing what Rob from Honest Wargamer has to say...

 

I play aos very competitively so was not looking at 40k as my competitive game. I enjoyed the cards a lot, the game felt great for what i wanted it to be. Because the cards were random i felt like i could just put myself in advantageous general positions and build a list that could handle whatever was thrown my way, instead of building to a specific battle tactic or scoring card progression.

I'm not sure i would enjoy 40k as my main competitive game, but as a compliment to aos i really enjoyed it!

 

The base rules are definitely streamlined, and honestly while I'm fine with 3e's base rules 4e is doing some good stuff with the core rules as well. As I've said in previous posts 4e is doing some things that I actually really like. But GW is *never* consistent with rules across factions, and I don't expect that to start now. I have a feeling that there will be a bit more overall balance this edition due to the way the core rules are set up and the fact that it doesn't appear so far that any faction has a super-abusable way to ignore or exploit the core rules like some have in previous editions.

But GW clearly doesn't really focus on balancing factions against each other. I know that sounds like a really radical thing to say, but I'm not trying to be hyperbolic. I think faction balance is often up to who wrote the battletome, did they like the faction they were writing for, stuff like that. Obviously we're working with partial rules and perhaps some factions will get better rules with their battletomes. But at least releasing indices for each army at the start of the edition is a step in the right direction.

I haven't gotten a chance to read over every other faction's index yet, but at the very least I can say that I find the rules for our faction to be.... ok? Slann looks strong, Aggradons are decent, Saurus are really basic (I feel like they should have a crit effect on their weapons, or that clubs and spears should have anti-infantry and anti-cavalry or monster respectively) but still retain their decent statline. Got a bit weaker in that every model has to be on an objective and also has to be controlling the objective to get the 3+ save. Skinks are basically worthless, Aggradons are pretty good, Ripperdactyls might be playable again, but we continue to lack any sort of "powerhouse" units or heroes. A lot of stuff went way up in points without receiving any real buffs to compensate, which makes me think that GW is trying to shrink army sizes yet again after they cut way back on them in 3e.

Our army feels very squishy with basically everything sitting on a 4+ save. We also lost nearly all mortal wound output which really sucks. And while I get that it's been toned down across the board seeing other factions with basic troops doing crit-mortals is a bit annoying. The things I'm most disappointed about are:

1: Our monsters feel extremely weak. Overall, they are extremely expensive, most are rather squishy and have pretty low damage output. Once again, we have monsters that are statted like they are supposed to be cheap and spammable, but are instead expensive and you can't bring many, if any, in a truly competitive list. Trog looks like it could be a decent support monster and the Oldblood on Carno does a decent amount of damage, but is WAY to costly in points for what it does. I don't know what it is GW has about our dinos that they seem very hesitant to make them actually strong melee combatants that also don't die very easily. They have refused to give us mount traits, gave us some good ones in White Dwarf them immediately removed them. They do it for so many other factions' monsters, I really don't understand why they won't let our dinosaurs be actually powerful and not just support pieces you use to pick off weakened units.

2: We have essentially no ranged attack capability. I know that 4e is trying not to focus heavily on range attacks and reducing range overall, but by hiking up the price on Bastiladons, removing all buffing potential we had for Skinks and still keeping the Salamander so unreliable we are essentially a pure melee army now. I like melee combat but I feel like Seraphon in particular has options for so many types of combat I wish GW would just let us use them all and stop shoehorning us into 1-2 list types in every edition.

3: They're still doing battletome releases. Seriously, having the indices released all at once is great! Why not just write all the battletomes as well? They're so close to finally getting rid of the powercreep and/or army neglect that comes with releasing a few battletomes a year. I have a feeling that seeing as how we got our book so close to the end of 3e it will be the same for 4e. And on top of that, what is the purpose of the battletomes? Will they add more rules/units for each faction? Will they just be rule adjustments like buffing/nerfing things but keeping the same index rules overall? Unfortunately as much as I like the indices all coming out now I feel like it won't be any different from previous editions as the battletome releases buff factions as they come out and then fall behind over time...

TL,DR: I think 4e's core rules are looking pretty solid but our army rules are very lackluster. Not saying we're a bad army or will be terrible competitively, but I'm just not seeing anything that I'm excited to actually use on the table right now.

Obviously this is all just based on my reading of the core rules and our faction pack. If anyone's had better experiences actually using them and has read more of the other faction packs and can compare us to other armies I'd love to hear what your thoughts are!

 

Honestly, given the vast quantity of OC manipulating mechanics, and the high amount of reaction/trap card style mechanics,I think the frustrating combo's are simply a bit less obvious this time. Especially since they're new mechanics.

Though I do agree the streamlining does seem to have smoothed over some of the more rough edges. It's one of the general benefits of streamlining.

In addition to writers picking favorites there's also just issues with how they playtest.
GW never uses properly dedicated playtesters who go and try to break and stresstest the game in a organized manner. Whenever they discuss playtesting in a white dwarf article or something it's always just a bunch of semi-influential players playing a handfull of testgames and providing some general feedback. It's honestly amazing how amateur-ish a lot of GW's processes appear to be at times. And it causes a lot of mistakes.

I guess, count our blessings?
But yeah, it's astonishing that GW keeps getting away with releasing essentially half-finished editions and then drip-feeding updates.

It's the one thing they seem to have managed with the streamlining; most factions look more or less ok as a whole.
Or at least, don't seem significantly worse/better than the others.

If I'd have to make a guess; it's just left-overs from the previous editions. Basicly; blame the summoning tax

Cuz money But yeah, it's absurd.

Honestly; I just wish the game managed to stay stable for a while. Even if that means being stuck with a bunch of stuff I don't like. At least that way I don't have constantly question if it's worth buying a tome/codex or if it's liable to become invalid in a month. Especially when considering starting a 3nd or 4th faction that I'm not going to be playing as much as my 1st preference.

 

Definitely not a fan of all the reaction abilities. I think the hard limit on CP is going to somewhat mitigate spamming them though, especially since people will want AoA most of the time. The OC stuff I'm really not a fan of, lol! Especially since so many units buff/debuff it. Going to be really annoying to keep track of from what I can tell.

Yeah, it seems that they prefer influencers to playtest and write articles about how fun it was rather than see what the armies can actually do. They also clearly don't playtest all the units in an army. I think they always seem to be looking more for feedback on the general rules and looking for "bugs" rather than trying to see "is this army fun but balanced and are the individual units in it good?"

One thing I'm very happy about in 4e is losing the focus on summoning. You'd think that GW would lower point costs on them rather than increase them for that reason, lol! But yeah, I'm just kind of speechless at how GW just absolutely refuses to make our dinosaurs combat monsters on par with what other factions have. We have Carnosaurs, Stegadons and Aggradons that would all be good candidates for mount traits. Other factions that only have one mounted hero get them so why don't we? Also, I will always bring up the fact that Carnosaurs hunted Dragons to extinction in old Lustria, so that's a good indicator of how strong they *should* be. Making them glorified support pieces that are best when picking off wounded opponents is kind of insulting when you have stuff like Zombie Dragons, Thundertusks/Stonehorns, and the actual dragons all being fairly stronger than Carnosaurs for the points. At least Stegadons and Bastiladons are good at what they're meant to do, but not for their point cost.

Yeah, the fact that anything you buy will most likely not be useable in a couple months is one of the scummiest things GW does. It's a big reason I haven't bought anything from them directly except Kroak and the Hunters of Huanchi in a long, long time. I bought the new Seraphon book because I wanted it, but we had just about one year of it actually being useable in-game, which is honestly terrible.

I refuse to just "buy the newest thing" because GW wants to keep milking me for my money. I have all the Seraphon I want/need, barring any future new models, plus Stormcast and Idoneth. Most of my Stormcast army was deleted with their range purge so I refuse to buy more just to be able to play them, despite how much I like some of their newer models. Losing Bonesplitterz and Beasts of Chaos is also a really poor move on GW's part, no matter what the decision process behind it was. As much as I love the game, you have to constantly remind yourself that the company that makes the game's only goal is to get you to give them as much of your money as possible, and they will do everything they can to try to force you to replace your army/start a new army as often as possible

 

Honestly, the most annoying bit about OC is that it probably won't matter all that much in 9 out of 10 scenarios.
But when it does matter, there is a lot of potential for weird sheningans and annoying bookkeeping.
It's a prime candidate for frustrating gameplay moments.

They don't even seem to go for influencers, plus testers are under an NDA anyway so its not like there's a point in using influencers. Anyways, some of the testers definitly are just well known figures, like famous players or something, but based on what they showed in that white dwarf article, some of them just happen to be friends. I think they even mentioned it was on a semi-voluntary basis, or at least, it wasn't a paid job.

It really shouldn't be a surprise that the testers mess up with some frequency when it's organized like this.

Meh, given how often changes come a GHB later than they should, I'm not surprised. I'm guessing someone just forgot to update their point cost formulas or something

I mean, we've spend 2 editions stuck with an army with a split personality thanks to the clashing playstyles of our subfactions.
It took them 3 editions to decide saurus should get vaguely lore-appropriate stats.
We didn't get any actual endless spells,despite having some of the most powerfull wizards in the lore.
In general, our magic has always been kind of uninspired and dissapointing, even if it was reasonably effective.
We've never had prayers, despite the faction prominently featuring several castes of priests.
In the lore of AoS we are either punching bags, or deus ex machina; and are rarely featured for more than a few sentences.
For a long time, the best thing to do with our most powerfull wizards was to not cast spells.
The great plan is somehow even less coherent than it was in WHF.
It's the only faction that hasn't really moved on from their WHF roots.

Seraphon are full of weird little contradictions and inconsistencies, I think GW simply doesn't really know what they want to do with Seraphon; both narrativly and mechanicly.

I'm pretty sure I'd spend more money if I could reliably build a 2nd or 3th army without having to worry about it getting outdated.
Or better yet; a 4th or 5th. There's plenty of models I think look cool; and I would buy a spearhead here, a unit there, and then maybe a tome, if I knew it would eventually get me a functional army. But that's far too slow to keep up with the updates.