AoS General's Handbook finally announced !!

I am a bit underwhelmed by the Saurus command traits, I had hoped for something preventing Sauruses near the General from being sniped by mortal wounds or something like that. Granted, it makes the Sunblodd, the Oldblood on foot, both Scar-Veterans and the Oldblood on Carnosaur a lot more scary. Still... It feels a bit like something is missing.

The Skink ones.... well... those are good. So my General (normally a Skink Chief) can use celestial rites. And so could a Starseer, making that point increase more bearable.
Sad thing is that none of the Skink heroes in the book has a command ability so I hope there are good command abilities included as well.

The Slann abilities:
Sounds like we have to dust off those old Frogs!
- The first ability is awesome. Although teleporting one unit is already great, I am glad that's not dependent on a Slann since it keeps the enemies on their toes. The Slann adding a second one opens up a lot of possibilities.
But I don't really know yet: Can that ability fail? Is there a dice roll involved?
- The second one is good as well, especially for summoning. On a Balewind Vortex near a Astrolith Bearer and the Sage's Staff ascendant a Slann's lowest roll normally is a five (double-one on the roll plus the three bonus) with that ability the chance of having that result is pretty low though. A six or seven is pretty much guaranteed then, never failing many spells. With more hordes being played in the future even the Light of the Heavens spell suddenly gets more useful. (With small groups our high bravery prevents dire battleshock results anyway, no need for buffing it)
So basically with this one the Slann does rarely fail his casts so he can do mystic shield, arcane bolt, and his buff or a summon every round. Not too shabby.
Still not what I really want (I had hoped for a more offensive spell being available to the Slann instead of only buffs) but not bad either.
- The third one.... well, Starlight is great, no doubt about that. Curse of Fates is OK as well. Still only buffs and the Rules of One prevent us from casting starlight on two units. Might be usable in some cases (the Slann buffing itself to get +1 to cast, unbind, one save, one run and so on) but IMO the other two abilities are better.

A problem IMO is the Slann's Command ability. If we get others I hope those are better, since only rerolling saves of against shooting for a few units might be not that bad against Kurnoth, Skyfire and Kunnin Rukk, but more useless against many other armies.

 

As our resident tournament celebrity I don't expect anything else from you!


As for the abilities:
Here's a blog post with a summary from yesterday (may be incomplete, the author says he didn't watch the whole stream)
https://aosshorts.com/ghb2017-warhammer-live-twitch-order-day/

I hope the answer to this is "no": "A new FAQ will cover teleporting out of combat and whether it counts as a retreat."

 

Also this sucks big time:

Missile units don’t get access to Massive Regiments

 

I am not sure..

Hmmm between that blog post and our writeup we don't seem to be fully consistent... We'll have to sort that out.

 

Also if the blogpost is correct we must choose between the unbind on the whole table and the teleport.

 

...and WOW I just realized how much this hurts wary fighters!

EDIT: .....or wait, does it? You cannot shoot in the same _turn_ but in a later turn in the same round you can, so yay?

 

Oh and what about this one? I don't see it on our list? What is it? The blog post says it is a command ability for the Slann.

Incandescent – roll a dice when it loses last wound, on a 3+ place it back on the board within 12″ (and more than 3″ away from enemy) with D3 wounds, no summoning points needed as happens before removed from play.)