AoS The General's Handbook II Wishlist

I'd rather see more incentive for pure one-faction armies to work well. Would make it far easier to make armies play a certain way instead of creating a jack of all trades with no particular weakness cuz you can get a wizard from 1 faction, line infantry from the next, cavalry from a third etc. Making pure-armies moreof a thing would result in much more focussed armies, strengths & weaknesses. Should make balancing easier too since you can give an army Obvious weaknesses to counterbalance massive strengths. This does require the stormforged to not have every single type of unit in the game though (all they lack is a wizard and artillery I think)

 

Yeah. As much as I want an updated Seraphon battletome I'm willing to wait if it means the less loved factions get some attention and updates. A lot of factions really need their lore fleshed out to give them more character along with rule updates to make them effective alone whereas our faction at least has adequate lore. Personally I'm hoping to see some of the really small factions either expanded (ex. collegiate arcanum bolstered by golems, acolytes, and elementals), rolled into another faction (ex. collegiate arcanum is rolled into free people), or consolidated into a single support faction in each alliance that can be freely used with any allied faction (ex. collegiate arcanum, devoted of sigmar, and other factions in Order with only a couple units could be given one battletome that's built to supplement any other Order faction without costing those factions the benefits of their own battletome).

 

For things like the collegiate arcane I'd assume they'd eventually get a tome together with all other humans. Splitting those up would result in a rather massive influx of needed models and tomes and such. And lore-wise it wouldn't make much sense. Admittadly it would be nice if they did get more stuff in general, 4 units in an entire faction is a bit odd..

 

A lot of people comment on how some army books have had multiple love to others that have had 1 or none. I believe GW tried to go in a "generic", "split" and "simplified" direction initially that didn't end up working as intended. They reversed their direction and found that books like the new "Blades of Khorne" are better and now need to go back and fix up existing armies before going forward. Why? Because those armies are already party done, you can get more out for less time.

Seraphon for example already have fluff, warscrolls, battalions. They only need tweaks to rules, points costs and insert the new stuff that Khorne got such as allegiance abilities, magic weapons and items, perhaps even Slann magic.

My wish list would be:
- Some way to deal more mortal wounds. I don't understand how armies can have D3 mortal wounds with no hit rolls. We should be D6 with hit rolls, or change them to require a hit roll. Yes I'm looking at Stormfiends and Warp Fire Throwers.
- Saurus Knights have a 5+ save. They used to be so heavily armoured. Ohh but they will say they have 2 wounds. Not good enough. While I am here. Knight lances are 1". Really? Shortest lances I've ever seen.
- Saves in general. We don't have great armour saves. What happened to our scaly hides? Yay we ignore rend, shouldn't our shields give us +1 save? or re-roll our 5+ saves on most models. It just feels weak and un-lizardmanly.

 

I don't know enough about points cost/balance and whatnot to comment on them specifically - but some things I'd like to see are:

• Rules and items that create a new unit or model as the result of a random event (Engine of the Gods summon results), specific trigger (the undead respawn ring, horrors splitting), or a spell that is NOT a summon (Tzaangor Shaman's Boon of Mutation) do not require reinforcement points to use.
• Horror's ability to Split without using reinforcement points factored in to their overall points cost. Not as many points as Pink+Blue+Brimstone in total, but maybe a 25% discount for splitting.
• Models that have a specific exception that allows them to attempt to cast a spell multiple times (Lord Kroak's Celestial Deliverance) may do so regardless of the Rule of 1 in matched play

 

In fairness, the warpfire thrower is at least horrificly squishy and shortranged. In between only having 8", having a 6+ save, and only 3 wounds and literally nothing else resembling usefull apart from the mortal wounds it is arguably one of the few actually balanced sources of mortal wounds. There's very very clear drawbacks to them and very clear counters.

Stormfiends on the other hand, or judicators, or retributors, or quite a long list of stormforged really with (near) guaranteed D3 mortal wounds that also have other strengths are indeed problematic and kind of stupid...

And to behonest, looking at the saves, wound values & our lack of mortal wound mechanics seraphon mostly feel balanced for a different game. It might just be that we have such an old tome, but we genuinly need an update.

 

Agree with the Warpfire Thrower comments: Glass Cannons are fine.

I've tried to see if any 300 points of ours can stand up to 3x Stormfiends at 300 points. Nothing does it 1 on 1. Need to spend some more points units to get the job done and remove them or try and tie them up for a few turns with 4 units of 10 skinks... well away from everything else so they cant shoot out of combat.

 

Yea the stormfiends simply have too much going on, and the same goes for those various stormforged and a number of other models. But for example most wizards are fine in terms of mortal wounds due to their limitations.

And as for the warpfire thrower I might even go further than what I said earlier, it might even be on the weak side given how stupendously easy it is to kill. 3 wounds at 6+ save means it's basicly dead the moment it gets attacked by pretty much anything. Against a melee focussed army it can still function somewhat (though even those tend to have some minor ranged attacks) but most armies should be able to kill it reliabl before it ever gets to act in most situation. Kind of wish you could attach super squishy units like this to some bodyguards.

 

Came up with another one;

I'd like a rule to stop ranged attacks/abilities/spells from being able to snipe someone valuable from halfway across the board hidden behind 5 units simply because you can see his foot. Even with house-rules to stop the utterly stupid cases like "I see the tip of your spear so I can shoot at it" this remains an issue.

E.g. Curretly stuff that requires protection has no reliable way of being protected from ranged attacks. For example take the warpfire thrower, if the opponent is melee you can put a screening force in between the team and the opponent. But if the opponent has ranged attacks the only possible limitation is line of sight, and even that doesn't work for all attacks/spells/abilities. Which makes certain squishy backline units impossible to protect against ranged foes. Taking a horde of clanrats to protect that warpfire thrower does nothing if the opponent has even a single ranged attack. Similarly our skink priest & starpriest are simple to snipe, or our eternity warden in a eternity host which is far easier to shoot than the guards. Give me a rule where limited line of sight matters and it isn't just all or nothing.

 

I wish they announced (or even rumored) something about the General's Handbook v2 at Warhammer Fest this past weekend. Not a thing. =(

 

The lores in the newer tomes do ths to some degree. But yea, in general wizards just need more spells. And the ability to do something besides cast 1 spell. Stuff like starpriests you basicly literally bring for 1 spellcast per turn (and 1 venom ability in their case), but they're not going to be good commanders, they're not going to be good frontline fighters holding together a line, they're not even ging to provide some ranged fire support. Least they could do is to for example give them a fairly simple ranged attack like the warlock engineers. That gun isn't going to turn battles, but at least the guy can do something beside stand their and look pretty after casting his 1 spell/hero phase, even if it's still a fairly meaningless attack (would like a better attack, at least more rangethan 9").

 

I'd be fine with that if it was 3 attacks instead of D3. It's too unreliable to be all that meaningfull.

 

If our priests could regenerate our chaff units somehow, that'd probably solve a lot of our issues. We mainly suffer because we have limited mortal wounds, and it's super easy to wipe out our stuff... We're ridiculously squishy.

I think if the summoning rules weren't so anti-Seraphon we'd be way better, though probably verging on the OP. So regenerating our units through summoning instead is another way of achieving the same thing.

 

Doesn't Lord of Change get some special rules where he has 3 dice or something that he can roll to do certain things? Maybe something like that, 3 dice with a chance of summoning in dudes.

We'd need some re-costed Slaan for that to happen though... Maybe time for some new characters to be introduced.