AoS NEW *rumor*

sorry i haven't been paying attention. what's going on?

 

Skinks role in the lizardmen faction in the lore.

I said they've always been the backbone of the faction. The most numerous, you're average dude. They're the backbone of what the whole faction is built off of.

Am I off base?

 

very. skinks only get involved in war when things are going very very badly. they do man the big dinosaurs and they help with scouting but you don't see them on the front lines unless the enemy is at the door.
they take a bigger roll in AoS
as for on the table eeeeehhh yeah they saurus have been bad for a very very long time so they have been our bread and butter more often then not.

 

I'm talking about the faction as a whole, not necessarily just the fighting.

 

oh. well kind of?
if we set aside the fact that you originaly clamed they where the back bone of the army "Skinks are literally the backbone of thr army from a gameplay and lore perspective and slann are the Leaders. So when you say boring stuff you mean the basic building blocks of the army" then you have to remember that lizardmen society is very compartmentalized. yes they are the core of the economic section but thats only half of what makes a society in Warhammer run. they are less the core of the faction and more the second half of the coin and even then they shair that half with the slann and kroxigor. the army is entirely suarus.

 

I guess I just don't see it unusual for skinks to play a roll in peoples lists when they play such a prominent roll in the lore.

Its my mistake the way I used army. The lore and game are all kind of the same to me.

 

they are a part of the lore just not a part that fights very often. the war of the serpent was a stand out event where the skinks activly went to war. this didn't happen unless a temple city was under attack and so it very much stands out.
i think thats why it's so weird that skinks have always been the best way to play our army. it's like having a Britonnia army with only pesents on the field since knights suck so hard or a ork army with only gnoblars and no ork boys.

 

heck even slann taking the field is VERY uncommon(like once ever out side of Maz). they are far to valuable to risk in front line action they normally sit in their temples and trow storms at people. maz was considered a reckless fire brand for making a habit of leading his armies.

 

Fair enough man. Appreciate your insight. I get the perpetual annoynce with warriors, I'm right there with you, I just hate how it hijacks every conversation about the faction. From my perspective it's one unit that's unfortunately not the best it could be, yet somehow it continually transforms to the faction being garbage.

Its just kind of ridiculous and makes meaningful conversation on this forum about literally anything positive extremely difficult.

 

Don't disagree but also one unit being bad is hardly a reason to not play an army IMO. But you do you.

Its hard to talk about lizardmen in aos with someone who doesn't play lizardmen in aos.

 

I was just conflating the entire faction and the way they show up on thr battlefield as one thing because to me, while playing the tabletop game is obviously a battle, the faction I'm using is more of a representation of that faction as a whole.

As erta said, slann aren't often showing up in Battle in the lore but they are the most important part of the race and thus become the most important part of your collection when you build and play with that army.

I look at skinks in the same way. They are an integral part to how the race functions, therefor it only makes sense for them to have a prominent roll when it comes to again, creating that collection and playing with the army.

I just assume a certain amount of flexibility in how the lore is ultimately translated because playing with a ton of blocks of saurus with a slann sitting on a temple in my closet would be boring and not at all healthy for the actual game.

 

Yeah, feels less like they actually favour our faction and more like they just can't quite figure out how to balance the combination of teleports, ranged attacks & summoning, which has been our focus for most of AoS.

Also, it helps that we have one of the largest factions. With our unit-variety there's bound to be something vaguely decent in there. Essentially with every change the rules there's at least something we have that remains relevant, even if it isn't necesarly very fun mechanicly, leads to boring spammy lists, or results in weird armies according to the lore (e.g. full skinks armies, which even in AoS lore should be rare, they're still not supposed to form our dedicated frontline, yet they are fielded more than saurus in game...)

I mean, yes and no.

The Slann being a common general is acceptable. After all you can just pretend every battle we play is an "important" battle where the Slann is necesary.
Skinks as the backbone of our army is a bit more difficult to put up with they though. In lore, the skinks fullfill specialist roles (leaders, scouts, beastmasters) Fielding them in big quantities as our battleline kinda clashes with that...

 

Skinks playing a prominent roll in my army doesn't clash with the idea that skinks are an important part of the faction. It's no less of an extrapolation to me than somehow every battle I play being of massive importance where I'm somehow fighting God's several times a month

At the end of the day, to me it's a game first. I want the game to feel like the lore in a loose way because I don't want my mechanics (or my lore honestly) to be overly restricted.

Should saurus be better and show up in lists more? Yes.

I don't think it's nearly as big of a deal as seemingly this entire forum does.

Edit: I think I'll just clip this here thanks for listening to my rant I'll be better. I blame thralls getting 2" reach.

 

With the rumors of BoC getting combined with STD (why couldn't they have kept the name Warriors of Chaos? lol!) Maybe they'll finally be good? Of course, losing their unique army identity to do so is kind of sad...

I think this is the reason a lot of people are unhappy with how our army plays. There's no denying that if you play certain lists you're going to be A or even S-tier. But that's only half our army. Skinks, Salamanders and some Dinosaurs are good, Saurus, Carnosaurs, and flyers are not. It sucks that half the army isn't competitive, especially since a large portion of the fanbase likes that half. It's the same situation that a lot of armies have, to be fair, so it's not unique to Seraphon. But recent books like Stormcast and Soulblight show that GW is capable of making the majority of the army at least useable, so hopefully when our turn for a 3e book comes around they'll rebalance our faction so that something other than Skink, Salamander, or Stegadon spam is viable while still keeping the fun aspects of the Starborne and Coalesced factions.

There's more than one struggling unit, but you're right. The army *definitely* isn't trash. People just wish that they could play something other than spammy Skink/Salamander lists. But again, to be fair, Thunder Lizards was viable in 2e and is even better in 3e, so our listbuilding has gotten more varied so that's a plus (Actually, Thunder Lizards is probably the easiest constellation to run a "mixed" list in.)

I totally agree that you shouldn't be negative all the time. It sucks and it brings down the mood. I appreciate your generally optimistic outlook, but I do think that sometimes it comes across as you being just determined to never say anything negative. Any time someone says something negative about anything (example, my pointing out that the buffs for Fyreslayers were worse than the Idoneth), it sometimes seems like you automatically defend every decision GW makes. Please don't take that as me being hostile! I just think it would be nice if you could try and look at the viewpoint of the people who say negative things sometimes.

As someone who got into the lore during Fantasy, this was always my understanding. Quite jarring when I started playing before our 2e rulebook came out and the only viable way to play was by summoning hordes of Skinks to die in droves but bog your opponents down.

That type of hilarity is something I could definitely see being in thing in AoS's weird 1st edition ruleset, lol! "If a Slann is included in your army, he can be held in reserve instead of being set up on the board. As long as your Slann remains in reserve, he may cast spells during the hero phase as normal."

Added quote as the conversation went on while I was typing this up.

I also have a lot of fun playing! Admittedly, I've never gone to tournaments and been forced to run the gauntlet of all the top netlists, but for me casual play is where most of the fun of the game is. I think everyone else really likes the game and the faction as well, so please don't feel down about the negative comments! People wouldn't be on this forum if they hated the faction, and I really think the criticism comes from a place of liking the faction and wanting to improve it, not from pure negativity. Some of these talking points that you bring up do have some validity, I personally really do feel like we usually get screwed in the lore, for example. And New Kroak's rules were a revenge nerf, which I expected after how hated he was in 2e. It doesn't make sense from a lore perspective that Teclis is better than him. But that doesn't affect my enjoyment of the game itself. I have fun playing and I also like talking about the fun and positive aspects of our faction. So please don't be discouraged from coming on here, your contributions are greatly appreciated!

 

sorry bud. a lot of people care very much about this. the things we love are being treated badly to the point that i stopped playing the army entirely. we went threw 6 years of running skink spam in WFB just to get to do it all over again in AoS. many of us wanted the things we liked to be good. we want to use our toy soldiers that we put time and effort into and we aren't getting that chance.
we want cool stories about heroes we can talk about and convert models into we want to see our faction do well. and we aren't getting that after years of waiting we are getting profoundly disappointing lore and retcons.
we want cool models to build and pain or at the very least to not have to deal with very expensive badly made models.(don't get me wrong kroak is awesome)
these are things that every one that plays this game wants. i don't begrudge eldar or skaven or ogres for having the same problems. we do fine in games if winning is all we cared about every one would go out and buy a bunch of models we don't have just to win. but you know as well as i do that this hobby is about a lot more then winning games.

and really what is there to talk about? we know what lists work, theory crafting was over months ago, our wish lists have been made and revised years ago, any new updates that don't fix existing problems only bring up said problems. most of us old hats have had our armies done and painted YEARS ago. we have been righting our own lore for over a decade but there is very little AoS lore because we haven't been fleshed out. in the same vein no new stories to talk about since the last few have been depressing. "no oh did you read what (insert hero name here) did?" we actively avoid talking about our lore.

i am sorry that we are a fount of negativity you know i hold my tongue more often then i used to. i just don't know what i can say about us that isn't repeating my self or gripping.
any hoo i'll see you all when the next update happens.

 

Just theorizing...
What would happen if Saurus Warriors were made more viable, but nothing else in Seraphon changed? For sake of argument, what if they had similar stats to Liberators or Ardboyz? (maybe those aren't good, but they're easy for me to visualize since I have friends who play SCE & Ironjawz)
What would that do to our army?

 

those aren't good but mostly it would just make regiment combat better. we would be seeing a core of warriors with monster support as one of our options as well as full saurus lists (with skink heroes the saurus heroes still suck eggs)

 

I'm just gonna make a general comment that our army is more than spammy skink and salamander builds. Koatls claw literally just won a big east coast tournament.

Also, what exactly are people looking for when they talk about saurus? Because in 99% of situations, they do just fine. They only place you aren't seeing them is on top tables and I don't know if that's necessarily a bad thing. Top tables are often pretty restrictive and seraphon have more of their book represented in their competitive builds than any other faction.

I respect a lot of what you're saying and don't have the time to give it the response it deserves so I'm putting this as placeholder until I can come back!

Edit: im back!! There's a lot of truth in what you said and I was just being bitter and dramatic. <3 I do wish there was some more tactical discussion outside of just list building we can dive into. Maybe that's something I can work on fostering instead of whining about whining

 

you'd probably start seeing more mixed armies. Skinks would probably still be dominant (especially if you count our monsters as "skinks). But at least you'd start seeing vastly more lists were people use saurus as screens/objective grabbers/general supporting units.

And how representative do you think that one win is for the playerbase at large?

This is kind of the issue with using the tournament scene as a gauge of the health of a game. Top level players can make very strange things work, simply because they're very skilled. Plus the different meta & playstyles can allow very different units to be "good" compared to lower level play. Not to mention the fact that the focus of high level players is often very different (e.g. competitive mindset v.s. a more casual fluffy type player mindset), which can again change what is considered a "good" unit. It's basicly two different worlds, and when it comes down to it, the competitive scene will always be, relativly speaking, the smaller world that fewer people identify with.

And that's probably why you see so much complaining about saurus. A large chunk of the playerbase simply does not care, and will never care, about who wins those big tournaments. They will complain cuz unit X isn't true to the fluff, or spamming unit Y is boring, or unit Z has a convoluted clunky ability. Even when top level players are winning tournaments with those same units.