Oh come on, this is so silly. Can we at least wait till we know how bound endless spells work before throwing a moan-a-thon?
TBH, our Tome could survive the edition change pretty well unscathed considering most of the rules are inwardly facing. Perhaps when we see terrain we will rejoice at the Coalesced rule no one cares about.
What they described there is literally just bound spells with a max range. Which means by definition that bound spells are no longer special. Which leaves two possible outcomes. Either A) we get nothing new and just lose something that made us special or B) we get something new but this results in an important faction ability in our tome already outdated. Neither option is exactly reason for much enthousiasm. Yeah, those rules might finally become relevant. That'd be nice.
Yeah, but to say our Tome is suddenly irrelevant is rather a huge stretch. We have, quite possibly, the best tome in the game. And even if 3.0 brings it down a peg, it'll still be one of the best Tomes in the game.
If I'm reading the rule right we can control multiple endless spells per wizard and control them beyond 30". The reason being that spells without a wizard or out of range are considered 'Wild' and behave like predatory endless spells previously did, with players alternating moving a spell until all are moved. Our Bound Endless spells specifically state only we can move them meaning even if they are Wild the opponent can't move them but we can What's even better is now Drain Magic and Bind Endless Spell are far more useful spells. We can clear multiple endless spells at once and even 'steal' ones our opponents think are controlled by them by putting the bound keyword on them for a turn. The best part though is now that the puny mortal wizards think they too can 'control' endless magic they can't complain about how 'inexpensive our bound spells are' I really only see positives barring a massive price hike in bound spells.
Until I see the full text about endless spells and the relevant FAQ of how bound interacts with that than i'm going to withhold judgement, as i'd suggest to anyone. We don't know the full context. Having a conversation over that context is one thing. Moaning that poor ol' seraphon has a tome that's "already outdated" is not accurate or a helpful conversation starter.
The new Priest buffs are cool, especially since the Skink Priest doesn't have an actual prayer, so he essentially just gets a free generic prayer each turn now
I wonder how many people are going to get confused during games by the fact that the skink statpriest is not a priest.
Frankly, they did a bad job naming our Skink heroes and it's always hard to explain to opponents when everything includes the word "star" and "priest" in some combination. Should've been: Skink Oracle Skink Seer Skink Starpriest Skink Chief on foot
I know, right. Thankfully our Slann aren't called Mage-Priests anymore Also, I think the cute Slann art at the top of the article is hinting at who the true masters of magic are going to be this edition.
I'm on the side that we seem to be coming out ahead so far despite it being very early to draw conclusions. My friend is an OBR player and we had a long conversation the other day about how the new command point system is really leaving OBR on the outside looking in, and that's not even counting if charge reactions require command points, at which point OBR would really be shafted. It's going to be a rough transition for a lot of armies, but we seem to be sailing smoothly for the most part
I dunno, OBR not having command points, but the rest of the books moving to a similar system, seems good for them. They've already got a lot of inbuilt generation for their points, and were already doing the things others will be doing. If anything, it's everyone else catching up in that department. I'm sure their FAQ will give them all the new fancy Commands they can then use their own points to do. The Lumineth book makes a lot more sense now though, with all it's CP generation and 'Free Command Abilities' from some sources.
O definitly not the entire tome. But it just kinda stings that we're liable to already need to carry around two books again just to get our full faction rules. Especially considering we spend most of 2nd edition carrying around multiple books & f.a.q.'s. Worst part is that I like the new rule itself. Giving everyone some control over their own endless spells is a nice quality of life upgrade that guarantees the spell won't immeadiatly crash into your own ranks and you'l actually get to use it for a turn or two. It's just such a shame it clashes with what is supposed to be a unique faction ability and the consequences that has. Ah well, hopefully we'l at least get something interesting in return. Makes me wish they had released the lumineth tome after this new edition. Or at least they should've added in some hints that the CP generation would become more important in the future. Then we wouldn't be so confused by half of the stuff they're throwing to show off.
Personally I think that Seraphon are going to be alright with the changes. If anything, GW seems to be pushing hyper-mobility and shooting as the preferred playstyle, and we're already really good at that. It sounds like they are really attempting to balance things better in 3e, so hopefully we'll see less of a difference between the "S-tier" armies and the rest. Of course, they are continuing their tradition of taking good ideas that are unique to certain factions and giving them to everyone else, but I don't think we'll be losing bound spells. I think that we'll just be able to control any bound spell anywhere on the board. And if people start to bring more endless spells, we have ways of countering that pretty easily. Core battalions seem like a great idea, as do the reactive command abilities in each phase. Since our army is generally swimming in CP, we'll be able to take advantage of those a lot more than many factions. I'm not as enthusiastic about the +/-1 cap on buffs, since every army has ways to get bonuses to hit and to save. It just means that good base warscrolls are now going to be even better, since it's going to be really easy to negate any buffs your opponent puts on their units or debuffs on your own. That rule does really hurt synergy-reliant armies like Seraphon, but at the same time it does negate some of the crazy cheese that some armies are able to do where they can get up to -4 to be hit or drop down to 1+ re-rollable saves...
If endless spells move at the end of the hero phase I wonder if that means they get to move twice the turn they cast. Once when cast, then again at the end of the phase.
Unit cohesion is changing. Can't conga line as far. This also makes units of more then 5 ogre sized creatures incredibly unwieldy.
People will have to learn to deploy units in triangles, its a common tactic in games requiring this type of coherency.
So does this mean that having any unit in a straight line is now basically illegal? Seems really strange, just makes screening and objective holding more difficult now...
IMO not a huge fan of this change. I don't feel like it solves a problem AoS had and creates a lot more new problems. Cav will suffer massively, as will any kind of infantry on a larger than 25mm base with only 1'' reach. I dunno, just feels unnecessarily punitive. AoS is flush with "wholly within" buffs and that combined with 1'' coherency means you saw a lot less snaking across the board to pick up buffs than you did in 40k.