The 10 obsec and Battleline in TL is about the only thing going for the stegadon over the bastiladon, and even then you'll find better sources for less.
I think they are trying differentiate profiles, giving them different roles. SEngine seems to be paying for that high rend to chew through high save models. We have (at a glance) enough mortals that I don't actually value that terribly high, but a non-degrading 2+ save is probably what we really care about on that profile.
Salamanders empower on 50/50 single shot, not sure how I feel about them yet. I would probably double down and run both. The point is that the basti can run as a standalone piece that can either walk up to an objective, or sit in home base and reach out with some shots, whereas you can build up a decent buff engine with the rest of our synergies, but it will cost you more resources.
I wonder if Skinks would have been too busted, in this battletome, if they were a unit size of 20 each?
Blocks of 60 Skink would just abuse the hell out of the Starpriest again. After digesting for a bit, my initial impression has sobered quite a lot. There are tons of weird rules interactions, Skinks are complete glass from the start, Saurus and Krox are pointed as if 4+ armor would mean anything in current AoS. Apart from the Ark of Sotek Bastiladon, monsters are overpriced. The new units are weaksauce. How long are Chargers supposed to live on a 5+ on the frontline to hand out the buff to Hunters? Why on earth are Charger lances 1"? Why do Aggrodons get a charge bonus in Koatl's Claw (where people would want to use them mainly), when the unit itself gets a bonus if it stays in combat? Why do the Aggradons themselves not get bite attacks? Why the f*** is the Spawn of Chotec Single? How did they manage to make the Ripperdactyl & Terradon Chieftain unuseable... again? Why are Terradons & Ripperdactyls still lingering in "for the lolz" territory? Stegadon 300 points? No Priest keyword anywhere to be seen? Engine of the Gods does something... twice per game? Someone is going to throw together a list with Kroak + Slann, to level the board with MWs and summon new fodder in the meantime, which will get Kroak nerfed in the first balance pass after the tome release... what's left then? Saurus blocks and what? Shame really. B-Team at it again. The comparison to the Gloomspite Gitz battletome is painful (and I'm not talking power level, I'm talking build variety and army synergies/mechanics).
Don't really care about points, we will hopefully get some points adjustments this summer for the overpriced models (up on Kroak down on a couple others) I think there are some builds with kroak in both SB and Coalesced that pump out MW like mad between spells and "bite rolls". I think the heroic action teleport trog-bomb will get nerfed, but I think that it could just be turned off for the first battleround and be fine-ish. I think apart from a spell slinger army, we have shifted over to a board control army. A lot of abilities we have that can shut off your opponents ability to score in the game, either literally (lets go gaze!), or physically (all hail Trog King, the champion tar pit!!). Skinks got a big upgrade to durability, star bucklers change the base save to 5+ which is huge compared to what we had. I think without the doubling of ranged attacks, and the loss of the priest keyword, we won't be able to spam a crazy amount of mortals through attacks anyways. A teleportable, highly mobile, 5+ save block of sixty wounds that could screen out a quarter of the board would still be kinda broken though.
Found it!, they are just rolling claw strikes and bite attacks together for simplicity. None of the mounts are getting bonuses to bite attacks, which is probably a bonus to balancing them pointwise in the long run.
After reading through all the leaks, I'm hoping that our base allegiance abilities are still good. Being able to control all endless spells no matter where they are would still be nice. The Engine of the Gods is pure garbage now, unless I'm missing something major. Each ability requires you to store up for 2-3 turns to avoid just doing nothing and hurting yourself. And the only one that seems at all useful would be to save up for the bolt of azure lightning and hope for a late-game big zap to a key target. Makes me sad. Skinks are essentially nothing but a screen now, which I'm sure a lot of people will dislike but I'm kind of glad that Saurus are actually coming forward as the main fighting force, as they should be. Realmshaper went from being extremely useful to kind of lame, but that's faction terrain for you Carnosaurs are looking much better than they previously were, even without the extra jaw attacks. Adding rend should make them more reliable overall and the Oldblood being able to double up on command points for free is going to be pretty useful. Ripperdactyls may actually be good again! I can definitely see using them as scalpels now to try and take out key units that aren't super tanky. I wonder if you put more than one toad on a single unit to counter save-stacking? There doesn't seem to be anything saying you can't put more than one toad on a unit... Salamanders are kind of meh now, but still useful overall and I'm glad we don't have to rely on them as the only thing capable of killing tanky units. Aggradons are looking pretty fun! They're roughly equivalent to Gore-Gruntas and Mighty Skullcrushers, and they really feel like what Saurus cavalry should have been all along. The Raptadons are basically Saurus Knights but better. Same base size, 2 wounds, 12" move, and I actually really like their synergy ability. I love the idea of the shoot, charge, shoot combo you can pull off with them. I think they'll be able to do a lot more work than people are assuming if you use them properly. Stegadons are essentially the same profile, why are they 300 points? I guess they got a little bit of a buff, counting as 10 models for objectives now and getting the mortal wounds on charge. But 300 points? Not sure they'll be quite worth it. But the Troglodon! I looks like GW has finally made it useful! It has rend, so it should be able to actually do a bit of damage now. It still regenerates, and it has two debuffs. The -1 to hit and blocking Inspiring Presence. It's unique spell is pretty interesting, if situational. But I can see it being pretty useful for blocking charges and slowing down an enemy unit to give you more time to shoot it or maneuver. Slann overall seem decent. Better stats for higher price but more utility and less damage. But Kroak seems like he got buffed and got his point cost lowered. He has Death Mask now, and Celestial Deliverance no longer gets harder to cast as you go. Spell-nuking with him is going to be a lot of fun, especially since you can channel it through the Troglodon who is now actually worth taking. Overall book seems like a nerf in terms of the number and strength of abilities we get, but that's typical for 3e books. Warscrolls have gotten much better overall, which is something I've wanted for a long time. I'm not sure why they removed so much though. No mount traits (again!) No generic battle traits, and why the heck did they remove all our priests!? EotG is trash, no longer a leader or a priest. Does GW just not want us to use prayers? Book looks pretty decent, but just decent. Not strong, not trash. I feel like this book was payback for all the complaints from 2nd Edition, but thankfully they didn't nerf us to the ground. I'm hoping I can still run Thunder Lizards with Stegadons being so overpriced and the TL special ability being kind of lame now...
Coalesced only having Slann and Saurus command traits is pretty weird, effectively being unable to run monster mash lists without a carnosaur or Slann being your general is lame. I guess that’s kind of a general problem I have with the book, the big focus on a Slann being sort of necessary because they’re such big parts of your utility belt, but I guess that is part of the faction’s themes anyway. They’re also counted as the footslog heroes the current season keeps giving bonuses to, so they’re made even better I’ve seen a lot of people saying Fangs of Sotek is dead but it feels weird to me, deepstrike in Dracothion’s Tail is fun but those free Redeploys are going to be really good at increasing the survivability of most of your units on turns they’re threatened, while also letting you pull stuff like stegadon and raptadons out of prolonged combat so you can charge them back in next turn for their bonuses.
Remember that with the Bastiladon, you have to choose the Solar Engine or the Ark. With the Stegadon with Skystreak Bow, you get both strong range (less rend) and strong melee.
I'm still digesting all the changes, and am not sure where my opinion will land. While the troops got a lot more rend, wounds and save, and our monsters don't bracket so fast, they lost a lot of abilities (not necessarily for the worse). Some of our strongest units got nerfed a bit, but our battleline has been boosted considerably, even without buffs. And there is a lot of differentiation or interesting utility in some (eg, Ripperdactyls aren't the terrors they once were, but they could zip across the table and take out a unit of archers or a wizard). Our faction abilities were reduced and simplified too. But overall, I think our spells, artefacts and command traits are better than ever, and there are a lot of interesting synergies. For example, a Carnosaur (Scar-vet or oldblood) is decent, but not amazing. But make it a Coalesced general and give it Prime Warbeast and a Bloodrage pendant, and it becomes a nightmare. It's 5 weapon, 2 claw and 3 jaw attacks become 6 weapon, 4 claw and 5 jaw. After it loses half it's wounds, it's at 7 weapon, 5 claw and 6 jaw, and while it's stats are reduced by bracketing from wounds, there are several abilities that let us keep using it as if it's still in the top bracket. For the scar-vet, including Maim and Tear, it natively deals an average of 11.2 wounds before saves, plus 3.7 MW. With the extra attacks, unwounded, it goes up to 17.2 + 5.7 MW. If it's Coalesced on the charge or has blood frenzy, it gets+1 to wound rolls. Now it's 21.5 + 7.2 MW. Add in an All Out Attack and you go up to 27.8 + 9.3 MW! That's nearly triple the original wound output, and these are not difficult combos to pull off! (Note: for more realism, against a target with a 4+ save, after saves we go from a base 8.3 + 2.8MW in the first scenario to 20.8 + 7MW in the last one; still amazing!) And yet, there are so many good choices for command traits and artefacts that it isn't even a given that this is the build. So I will continue to reserve judgement until we have fully had time to assess what we can do with the new battletome. Oh, and if anyone hasn't seen the new faction rules yet: https://imgur.io/a/1UswfZ2
The issue is that stegadons aren't even considered a good pick currently, and they barely changed between books while inexplicably becoming 30 points more expensive and losing access to a plethora of buffs from the old book. Sure, they now count as 10 on objectives and buff Skink bravery, but their output is so lacklustre that I don't think we can call them especially good at either ranged or shooting. At the very least, while the Basti is not suited for melee, he's uber-resilient, has a good monstrous action (that doesn't require a 4+ roll to activate) and offers big rend on his solar beam. I just can't ever see a reason to bring a steg given the other options in the book, and that's a real shame.
Yeah. I also want to lament that we still have no endless spells of our own. The Slann are among the mightiest of wizards. What cool endless spells we could have with our army's themes.
This makes me very sad. We were the kings of endless spells, now we are just like everyone else with no unique spells of our own. Our slans ability to control 3 and caste twice as far would be nice if we actually had some spells of our own.
I think this might be one of the bigger issues that most of our new stuff in here has. A 4+ save on Saurus sounds great, 5 years ago. The gimmick for the skink cavalry is fun. But doesn't exactly jump out as powerfull in the current meta. Some stuff like "Protection of the old ones" is fun and thematic, but 10 points is relatively expensive and unless you're spamming astroliths it's not really going to be covering a lot of units. It feels like the book we should've gotten in 1st edition, before all the powercreep. Why do we have so many once-per-battle type things? Why can't we have stuff that actually works consistently. Also, the spell lores aren't terrible. But the fact that they're split up between starborne & coalesced kinda sucks. It leads to weird things; like cosmic crush simply being better against 90% of opponents than tide of serpents, but they're basicly the same spell. Same for some of the command traits/artifacts/etc. actually. Like why do are saurus (and skink) artifacts/traits limited to only one subfaction? It feels like a bunch of rather arbitrary limitations that only really exist because we must have subfactions in modern AoS, but noone actually knows how to make that actually work for Seraphon. It's a hell of a lot more coherent than the previous stuff though.
Problem is, you don't want to get Skink stuff closer to the enemy in his turn because they can't take a punch at all. For running away it's nice, but current AoS resolves around standing in circles, so you don't want to do too much running away either. And finally, how does redeploy help with disengaging from combat? 2.67 damage against 4+ for a 300 point unit is the opposite of "strong ranged". It's a sad joke. And don't even get me started on the Skink Chieftain. Lost Sacred Asterisms, lost access to Cloak of Feathers, lost access to Prime Warbeast, lost his command ability, doesn't even count as 10 models, only gained the morale buff. Aaaaand it's 10 points more expensive. Insanity. I probably should shut up and be happy that the Troglodon is finally useable after what? Seven years? Like I said earlier, B-Team codex.
It's been over a year since my last game, so I'm hoping there's something in the rules I've failed to remember, but is the synergy between the Raptadon Hunter and Raptadon Chargers a double-edged sword? Lets say your Chargers made a successful charge at an enemy unit, thus triggering the Hunters ability to shoot. They do so, manage to kill a couple of models, and your opponent decides to remove the models closest to the Chargers. Could you potentially just have ruined your own charge, by no longer being in range to pile in?