AoS 3.0 Battletome Wishlisting/Theorycraft

Its also one of the few heroes we have that can actually buff himself in a meaningful manner. Whereas the other heroes dont really need to bother Buffng themselves, its not worth the effort for say a starpriest to use his Venom on himself

 

Stegachief does buff themselves meaningfully, but that does lean in on the buff stacking that it sounds like we both want reduced. If the goal is for the model to just buff itself intrinsically like that, you might as well bake it in to the existing attacks, which I am more or less fine with on the chief.

I do wish some of our other heroes received buffs better.

Terradon/Ripperdactyl Chiefs

Every Saurus Foot hero (minus the Astrolith Bearer, I wouldn't expect him to plan to fight carrying that)

An argument could be made for the ScarVet or Oldblood, but I am fine with only one of them being a buff piece, but both having lethality baked in to the warscroll first. Again, leaning in on both models having different, meaniful, purposes. Something cool to see on Carnosaurs/Trog models is bonuses against understrength or wounded models (be it rerolls to charge, bonuses to wound, extra attacks).

 

My biggest hope for the new battletome would be for our units to better live up to their expectations.

Like, when I read that Saurus Warriors are ferocious killing machines bred purely for war, and I then look at the combat stats for the unit, there is a gigantic chasm between what I expected and what I'm getting. They're decently balanced for their point cost, sure, but I would rather pay more for a unit that is closer to what I imagined.

The same thing goes for a lot of our units. I would expect a cavalry unit to be fast, but our Knights are slow as hell. I take one look at a Carnosaur and I think that bite is going to tear anything in half, but it turns out its bite is a measly rend -1. In the stories Saurus Guard are set to protect multiple things and places, yet in game they are only ever glued to a Slann...

I feel that a lot of our units need to be redesigned, rather than just imported from the previous edition with minor tweaks. Especially all the units that are never used, like any of our Saurus foot heroes besides the Astrolith Bearer.

I think it should be possible to still preserve the buffing playstyle, but the buffs would likely have to either only work on units with certain keywords, or the effect would have to be different depending on the units keywords. A buff that would be strong on Skinks would most likely be broken on Saurus if they could go toe to toe with Chaos Warriors.

And I hope they have a really good solution for balancing Celestial and Coalesced against each other. The only solution I can think of would be to have separate point costs for them, but I don't imagine they will go that route.

 

Buffs aren't inherently bad, so the stega placing one on himself isn't really an issue. Stacking too many of them is.

Anyways, my point was more that a stegadon chief can always buff himself. His ability isn't useless if he finds himself without any good nearby allies to target.

Every single other skink hero cannot, at least not in a meaningfull way, not even as a last-resort kinda thing.
Which is a part of the reason why the skink heroes are so awefull independently. 99% of their power is stuck in abilities they can never use (meaningfully) on themselves.

 

Absolutely, but you have to make the cuts somewhere. It is an easy spot to turn the stega chief into the one combat tank that can dish out generic buffs if need be.

As for the rest of the Skink heroes, they are shamans and priests, that's like measuring up apples to potatoes when compared to the combat oriented leader models in the game (whether they dish buff or not). Khorne Slaughterpriests are not and shouldn't be the rule of a combat hero (and aren't even that good in a slugfest).

If those small buffing heroes are in combat range of anything, the board state has already gone south, and that is to the fault of the general (or kudos to the clever opposing general), not the model. This is true across the board for small buffing heroes across the game, not exclusive to us. If it were different, we would be playing a different game, and if I need my clerical order to be my combat powerhouse, I can always switch over and play space marines with their power armoured Chaplains.

 

I agree with just about all of this!

I don't know that separate point costs would be the route to go on it. I am honestly mostly happy with how the difference between coalesced and starborn has shaken out by the end of the battletome (the same is not entirely true for the subfaction to be fair). I don't know how much of a shake-up we are getting with BT 3.0, and that is going to be a big part of what makes Coalesced v. Celestial and the subfactions feel different, and if they do it right, they should hopefully not need to split the two into essentially two armies in one battletome, that feels like it could more easily lead to cascading failures in balancing two separate full points lists.

We have enough different warscrolls that I am okay with some becoming suboptimal in one faction thanks to nerfs, and long as they still have an argument for playability in one of the other subfactions. I just don't like having dead models that I can't really play in any flavour of Seraphon (okay, I still do run them in friendly games).

 

O sure, I wouldn't object to it being cut. Simply meant it's one of the few support abilties we have that can be used on the support unit itself without being a complete waste. Which, imho is how it should be designed. As this gives support units a last-resort, where they buff themselfs to achieve something. It won't be efficient, and things have definitly gone to hell at this point. But at least the support unit would have a last-ditch effort to salvage the situation. Unlike the current skink priests, who might as well roll over and give up, even if the opponent isn't much to write home about either.

 

I've really enjoyed a lot of the thoughts and ideas put forwards in this thread, whilst I doubt a lot of them will not come to fruition, it's still quite nice to be optimistic.

I'm personally a big fan of playing all our different sub-factions in both Coalesced and Starborne even if some are more optimal than others. I feel they all have unique gimmicks and tricks that are entertaining to play and I know my regular opponents are equally frustrated and excited when Starborne shenanigans are pulled.

Some of the things I'd like to see, which I'm sure echoes what has been said before, is making our less played units more playable. Saurus warriors as an example, I would like it if they could do in melee what a fully reinforced Skink unit does in shooting with similar buffs, either from Saurus heros or Skink heros.

For our other battle line, like Knights and Guard, the cavalry could maybe use a bit further movement, maybe some rend on their spears or damage on the swords to buff them, but overall I like the roll they currently fill and generally don't think much needs to be done to them. It doesn't bother me that they move the same speed as Skink, in fact I'd rather they didn't encroach on the speed that Terradon and Ripperdactyl riders have.

It would be nice to see Guard back in the role of immovable meat wall rather than ablative wounds for a Slann, but I think this could be done with some better buffs from the Eternity Warden to bring them closer to the old Eternal Starhost (not necessarily as strong as it was, but some aspects of it as commands would be nice).

Generally where I feel our faction really lacks is with our Saurus heroes. I don't think I've seen reason to really take any of the on foot heroes since 1st edition and the damage of our mounted monster heroes really doesn't match up to the damage output or durability of other factions beat sticks. A lot of the changes talked about here already I think would be nice to see, I'd like to be able to take a variant of the carnosaur that I knew would be a genuine credible threat rather than employing it as a distraction Carnifex.

I disagree with what has been said about Slann, or more specifically Kroak needing a better melee combat profile. He's always struck me as the Charles Xavier of our army and if he's finding himself in combat then I think better screens are needed to protect him. He's a monster in the hero phase, he doesn't need to even be good in the combat phase in my opinion.

 

I couldn't have said it better myself. This is basically what I hope the goal of the dev team is, regardless of how well they get there with it.

 

For clarity; he doesn't need to be "good" in the combat phase.
It's just that his current combat profile is a gimmick and can result in rather stupid scenarios because GW forgot to cover the edge-cases.
Ignoring any potential situations where the gimmicky weapon doesn't work, like say Kroak v.s. 1 clanrat. At which point he gets a profile of 1/3+/3+/-1/1, which is just hilariously bad for any hero, let alone a god-tier hero.

On top of that, even in favourable circumstances the gimmicky profile is quite bad. A lord of change is a better melee combatant than Kroak unless he's facing 8-9 enemies or something, and in that case the LoC is using the worst possible melee load-out & still has a ranged attack in his favour. And the difference with other magical powerhouses like Arkhan, Nagash, Teclis or Kairos is even more bigger, requiring Kroak to be facing 15-20 enemies at once to even start to compete. Which isn't exactly realistic. So it's not even like the gimmick is actually all that good.

It's just a poorly designed, gimmicky melee profile that needs to be updated to something halfway functional.

 

Whilst I totally get where you are coming from at a hero costing 450pts, I still don't think it necessarily needs changing massively. He has a flat +2 to casting/unbinding with 4/4 per hero phase, with a couple of buffs you can take that to a +4/+3 (Astrolith and Sage's Staff constellation), +5/+4 if you cast Celestial Equilibrium with another Slann, and he can dispel anywhere on the board. At most I'd bring it in line with other Slann and give him a flat 6 attacks, but really I don't think he needs buffing as he stands, enough people already dislike playing against him, making him any stronger would push him to auto include for every list.

 

I honestly wouldn't view giving him an actually functional combat profile as a genuine buff, nor would I view it as a particularly massive change.
Putting him on par with a LoC really shouldn't push him into anything even remotely OP.

 

So we now know we've got at least one new unit heading our way in the new book - some kind of unit (Skink?) mounted on a fast-looking raptor / ornithomimid.

This could be either a mounted hero or just one model from a cavalry unit. What's our preference here?

To be honest, I'm a touch disappointed that it looks to be all-new and not the resculpt of Saurus Knights that we've been waiting for. We've got a pretty large roster as it is, and I'm not sure the army really needs new units.

Our Skink casters are already pretty fast, so not sure I'd pay more points for a slightly more mobile support piece.

If it's a full mounted Skink unit, that might be a little more interesting. That said, Skink attack profiles have historically been pretty bad, so they'll need to bring a lot more to the table than their 5+/5+ blowpipe profile to make them appealing.

 

Honestly, neither option is particularly great.

If it's a cavalry unit it'll have to compete with Saurus knights, Rippers, terradons, and possibly even with Kroxigor depending on how you view their role in the army.
If it's a hero it'll have to compete with basicly all skink heroes & with the scar vet on cold one.

Either way, it's difficult to give it a niche of it's own. Or at the very least it'd require a rework of (some of) the competing units. And just giving us, say, a skink priest on a cold one seems a bit pointless. It'd need to provide something unique compared to all of those options to actually carve out a niche.

On the bright side; that may mean we might see a more extensive overhaul of our battletome to make it fit into a (new) niche.
But more pessimisticly (or knowing GW, realisticly ) speaking, it is liable to mean we'll get yet another useless unit that is simply outperformed by other options.

 

My guess is that it will be a glass cannonish mounted unit for the hunters and chargers, with bonuses on the charge for the chargers.

It looks like the hunters are all outfitted with shields and atlatls, so I have a hunch they with hit much harder than the blowpipes, but probably at a similar range.

 

I can't imagine them having worse survivability than 2 wounds 4+, so I'm guessing they will take the role that Saurus Knights fill today, who in turn will probably either be dropped or changed into more elite heavy cavalry.

 

Looking at other 3.0 battletomes, I am guessing that optional shields getting +1 to save will change to a replacement base save for units that take the option so that it just works as intended in 3.0.

 

Honestly, I wouldn't surprise if they become 2w 5+save just to make them "different" from Knights.

 

I can see the new chargers being slightly quicker and battleline, which could make them a more cost effective pick than terradons or rippers. I'd be disappointed if they hit harder than saurus cavalry, but hopefully the new book in summer will bring some buffs to our underperforming battleline units.

Especially excited to see the new warriors kit and if they get any buffs. Not that I think GW will need to make them good to get them to sell, but it couldn't hurt to get them off the shelves quicker.