AoS 4th Edition is nearly here...

Nice to hear! Yeah, Kroxigors seem like the best overall unit and you need some type of cavalry to screen/take objectives and the Slann is the best caster (sucks that Kroak got nerfed so much). As for the rest of the army being weak, that's unfortunately always been a big issue with Seraphon in AoS. It's not an exclusively Seraphon problem, but having played since early 2nd Edition now I can definitely say that our army has always been held together by the Slann being consistently good and having a few strong/spammable units while the rest of the army hasn't been worth the points. By the end of 2e and when our book came out in 3e we had a bit more variety in options, but 4e seems to have gone back to 1/3 of the book being decent and the rest being bad.

 

AoS in general seems to suffer from factions revolving around fairly spammy-lists with the same handfull of units being constantly used.
But yeah, it's especially noticeable with the bigger factions. And especially with seraphon thanks to our split personality subfactions/playstyles that they can't quite seem to shake.

 

I think the bigger factions thing is a big part of it. The more units you have, the harder time GW seems to have balancing them. When writing rulebooks they seem to have clear "this army should be focused around this one specific unit type or playstyle" tendencies. They're very averse to having armies that are actually good at everything. With our army having basically every unit type available they seem to just decide "ok, this is how we want them to play so these are the units we'll make good" and leave the rest of them in the junkpile since they don't fit with the "intended playstyle" for the army.

 

It doesn't help to have a larger faction where half the units don't match with the intended playstyle, but the problem isn't just limited to the big factions. Smaller factions with a more focused playstyle have similar problems.

I think the biggest problem is just how badly they have failed with battalions. Battalions have been GW's only attempt at encouraging list building that requires a vaguely healthy mix of units in AoS. Both by requiring "tax" units and thus forcing you to bring a "weak" unit, and by providing unique benefits that could give a weaker unit the edge it needed to be relevant. Except battalions kinda sucked, and were never all that well implemented. And in 4th they're gone completly.

Which means there isn't really anything left to encourage players to use a unit outside of the top 3-4 units for their faction.

 

I think you could argue that Aggradon Lancers edge out the Kroxigor, only from the standpoint that they are a bit faster. Kroxigor have better potential damage and equal health/save, but they are a little slower. Regardless, you can't go wrong with either Aggradons or Kroxigor, or both. Right now, they are the same points. So, they are practically interchangeable in lists (from a points perspective).

But, this is also part of what leads to "spamming" them. They're the best all around combat units we have.

 

True, just wish that with so many other options in the army that we could see some variety in listbuilding.

My second army is the Idoneth and they obviously have a smaller number of units than we do, being limited to one melee and one ranged infantry unit, two cavalry units, one monster and few heroes.

I've noticed however that just about everything in Idoneth is viable, and I'm often able to play around with different army compositions and still do well. This was the case in 3e and it seems to have carried over to 4e.

 

Meh, it's less that everything is "viable" for Idoneth, and more that there is just less overlap, with more distinct roles between units.
So even if a unit is "weak" it still has a clear role, and you can at the very least make a halfway functional list with it.

For example, idoneth have 2 infantry units, one ranged one melee. Even if one of those is absolutly terrible, it will still have some kind of niche because it will always do something the other one just can't. Similarly, if you compare their infantry and cavalry, there's some clear differences. The cavalry has universally better stats, but they all come in small units with low objective score. So, even if the infantry is worse stat-wise, at least it will always provide more objective control.

In contrast let's look at our two hunters of Huanchi units. Those things fullfill basicly the same role. So one of these is always going to just be the bad one. Same with rippers & terradons, they fullfill mostly the same role. So one of them is just going to be "X, but worse". Or look at raptadon chargers & rippers. What is supposed to be the defining difference between those two? They are so increadibly similar in terms of stats. And neither of them have any superspecial rules. They're both just light cavalry, with a decent-ish damage output. They perform the exact same role. Why do we have both?
On that note; the two raptadon variants could've been rolled into 1 unit of skirmish cavalry that has an internal synergy. Was it really necesary to split that into two seperate units?

And this trend kind of holds for most of our army. There is just so much that is doomed to be "X, but worse", because there just isn't much to distinguish them from the alternative options they compete with.

 

many units now have abilities that trigger on charging. so the meta is pretty heavy into cavalry that can get the first strike to move block and limit charges. Since fast cav and spells are our two remaining strong points, we will do well until the inevitable meta shift to something else.