Sorry for the long post, TLDR at the bottom.
@Jason839 said pretty much everything I was going to say about the lore, and
@Erta Wanderer summed it up nicely. The lore makes us look like super-elites but the game rules want us to play as cannon fodder. We waited and waited for GW to give us new lore for AoS, but when they did, it turned out to be crap. I know that's a very subjective opinion, and lots of people like the "space lizards made of magic memories" thing and are fine with us royally losing pretty much every battle we engage in because it's all "part of the Great Plan," but me personally I hate it. I'd much rather we stick to an army that shows up, kicks demon ass, and goes home, but that would mean that the Stormcast would have competition for the saviors of the universe role, I guess
Now, I really don't have a problem with a synergy-based playstyle. But that shouldn't be the whole army, imo. It's perfectly fine mechanically that our army is based around weak base stats that can get buffed until we match or exceed similar unit types. But it just doesn't match up with the lore that I've always loved and that got me into Warhammer in the first place. I never got to play Fantasy, I was too young and the thought of buying grey plastic figures that I'd have to assemble and then try to paint was just too daunting. But since I had friends and a sibling who were into both Fantasy and 40k, I learned a lot about both settings and grew to be a fan of Fantasy in general, but the Lizardmen specifically. So I never got to experience the rules, and therefore I can't speak to how Lizardmen used to play on the tabletop back then. But TW:W2 came out, all of a sudden there was a much more accessible way for me to play in that setting and experience the army I'd always liked. So I fully admit that's where my bias comes from, but at least as far as I could tell, the Lizardmen in that game play just how you'd expect them to. Saurus can out-fight most other regular infantry units, Skinks are quick and effective but weak, a Carnosaur can duel a Dragon, a Stegadon or Bastiladon can smash through an infantry unit with little resistance, and Kroak can wipe out multiple infantry units at once, and our legendary lords are unique and fun to use. You get the idea.
Then, when I finally get into the tabletop hobby and start actually getting to play AoS, while I still have fun and love the hobby, seeing how they actually play was a bit of a shock. Instead of our troops being able to go head-to-head with the enemy, our only strategies are suicide Ripperdactyl charges and trying to drown our enemies in enough Skink blood to prevent them from getting to a specific spot on the board, and all of our units die to whatever touches them. Not at all how the Lizardmen I've read about are supposed to be, as far as I can tell. Especially since in the new lore, they are essentially the only race that actually survived pretty much as they were from the old setting. But also apparently we're the last race in the game to get an updated ruleset for the current edition, and the first edition of AoS was apparently a free-for-all mess, so I guess it's somewhat understandable. Then the new book comes out and at first glance, it's really just mediocre. Lots of useless rules or rules that make no sense, Starborne are blatantly more powerful than the Coalesced, which hurts because Coalesced are how I want to play Lizardmen. We get a faction terrain piece that was the worst in the game at the time, but no new or updated models, faction endless spells, or named characters. For a faction that has a lot of big monsters, we don't get things like mount traits, which have been given to other factions with fewer monsters than we have. Our troops are still weaker than pretty much any other facton's units without buffs, (except BoC, sorry goat bois...) and our heroes are all squishy enough to make shutting down our buffs easily achievable unless we're playing the one list that seems to have almost accidentally become oppressively overpowered. That was my problem with the 2e book. Everything seemed haphazardly thrown together just because we had to have a new book, and little thought was given to either the lore or game balance aspects.
Did we come out of it very strong mechanically? Yes, if you were playing Kroaknado in Fangs of Sotek, because our whole army was based on how many buffs you could stack and that subfaction could take the most and the best buffs and use them the most effectively. But that was our only competitive list and everything else was more or less "just for fun." I honestly think that Seraphon becoming OP was completely accidental, as whoever wrote the book clearly didn't really pay attention to the rules and didn't catch how much you could pump up Skinks in FoS, but also didn't see how mediocre everything else was. I also dislike how our army (and AoS in general, to be fair) encourages a "spam unit x" playstyle. FoS? Spam Skinks. Draco's Tail? Salamanders. Koat's Claw? Saurus. Thunder Lizard? Bring 1 Bastiladon and a bunch of Stegadons. And the other thing I didn't like is how units are point costed for Starborne because they have summoning, but still cost the same and don't perform as well in Coalesced due to their stupid bravery rule and lack of mobility. But when the book came out I basically said it was good, but clearly lacked the creativity and passion you could see in other rulesets. Maybe we ended up being good because whoever wrote the book was looking at it from a mostly mechanical perspective, but I really wish that someone who actually likes and cares about our faction would get to write rules and lore for them.
Final note about our tome is the complete lack of named characters/heroes. I think that has a lot more effect on people that some might think. Again, we're supposed to be this super-elite army of complete badasses who's sole reason for being is to defeat Chaos, but we have no characters. That just adds to the feeling that in the actual game we're just cannon fodder. It's no wonder that all we do in lore is show up and die when we have no heroes with stories and goals to add to the setting. If GW's not going to bring Kroq-Gar, Oxyotl, and other old friends out of stasis, then they need to start introducing new heroes so that both the writers and readers actually have some way to get invested in the Seraphon when it comes to lore, and to give GW a good reason to actually give us powerful units on the tabletop.
All of that rambling out of the way, on the topic of our monsters specifically, I really do wish that they were actually powerful on their own and were not easy to kill and didn't rely on buffs to get to a decent damage output. Let's be honest, more than a few people who got into this army did so because they just liked the idea of lizards and dinosaurs. And come on, they're freaking dinosaurs! They should at least be able to hold their own in a fantasy setting. Again, I 100% agree that mechanically, they work. They're relatively cheap points-wise, and they can be buffed to perform better just like everything else in our army. But really, that's just not what I and a lot of other people want when it comes to having savage dinosaurs battling on the table. It just feels...wrong, that an Oldblood on Carnosaur literally can't 1v1 any other monster of a similar base size and have a reasonable chance of winning. That our Stegadons are basically missiles that we throw at an enemy to do damage and then die. That our Terradons and Ripperdactyls hit like wet paper and are about as durable. Yes, there are some units that actually feel like they work well and are fun to play without needing 2-3 heroes to babysit them. Salamanders, Kroxigors, and Bastiladons are all in a pretty good place. (But come on, GW, fix the Ark of Sotek to actually be good in melee, please!) But our army has almost no rend, and that needs to stop. It was a problem in 2e, but it's downright crippling in 3e since everything gets such high saves and our buff-stacking has been severely reduced.
What I want from our monsters is first and foremost for Carnosaurs to actually be good in combat, especially 1v1 with other heroes and monsters. As Erta said, they need to be faster, tougher, and hit harder. Carnosaurs should focus on taking out the biggest, most powerful threats, not being buff-wagons for Knights. The Oldblood should be the best anti-monster duelist in the army, period. The Scar-Vet should be slightly lower-tier, but still good at hero-killing and taking out things like cavalry and elite infantry. They would work best with a relatively small number of attacks that have high damage and high rend.
Stegadons are pretty good where they are, all they really need is a bit more survivability, even if at the cost of some of their damage. But I really don't think a Stegadon Chief should be our strongest damage-dealing monster, that should go to the Carnosaurs. Make them more tanky and better at clearing infantry and weaker monsters.
Bastiladons with the lasers are great. Tanky, with a good shooting attack. I'm not sure why they're not classified as artillery, because that's what they are. Bastiladons with snakes are clearly meant to be chaff and horde clearers that excel at bogging the enemy down, but for some reason GW just doesn't know what to do with their snake attack. Personally, rather than continuing to try and re-work the mortal wounds the attack does over and over again, I would just make it a straight-up horde-clearer. Either make it like the spells where you roll a die per model within x range and deal MWs on a 5+, or give it attacks equal to models within x range, make the attacks average in strength, and give him an aura debuff for the poison instead of mortals.
And last but not least, the poor, poor Troglodon. I've heard people say it was bad in Fantasy, and it's always been bad in AoS, even when it was our cheapest dino. Just copy Total Warhammer on this one. Make him a ranged-based monster that's ok in melee, but buff the spitting attack so that he can snipe characters effectively. Then his 1 spell cast per turn is fine. Or, give him 2 casts per turn and make him primarily a spellcaster that's ok in melee like the Idoneth Eidolon wizard. Then make him count as a Slann for the purpose of buffs that require Slann (like EotG), an ability to roll for CP, and now you have a monster that's a viable alternative for a Slann and lets you have some magic in your all-monster lists.
As far as Lord Kroak goes, I like him and I like his rules. He's fun to play, but I wish that all of the buffs he requires to actually be powerful were included in his warscroll and he just cost more. But I get that people like the lower point cost if they want to bring him just to be a buff-wagon and character sniper. As has been said, he really is the least lore-accurate high-tier character that has a model in the game right now. Of course, if he were able to instantly nuke the entire enemy army that simply wouldn't be playable, but I totally understand that it doesn't make sense that he has to have an entire support entourage included in the army to reach his full potential. I guess what GW could have done is to make the new Kroak a truly god-tier model with the rules and costs to go with it, and actually kept the resin Kroak as a Relic Priest that would be an upgrade to a normal Slann, but not on the level of Kroak himself. You'd have to remove Celestial Deliverance, but you could have kept all his other old rules and it would have made sense. Then people could choose the regular Slann, Relic Priest for extra spells, durability and CP generation, and Kroak could have been a fully self-reliant character.
But I'm sorry for going on so long, TLDR: I don't want our army to play like another army in AoS, I want them to play like the Lizardmen they're supposed to be. We should be Custodes, not Skaven, as Erta said. Our current playstyle is fine, even if severely nerfed in 3e, but it doesn't live up to how myself and quite a few other members of this forum wish it was. It's not that we wish that we were playing the same way as Orks, Ogors, Lumineth, etc. It's that some people have a specific idea of how Lizardmen should play, and it's largely influenced by the old Fantasy lore and games like TW:W2. And according to that lore, our monsters are supposed to be powerful, our Saurus are upper-tier infantry, not cannon fodder, that's what Skinks are for, and Skinks should not be the best way to play Seraphon. Our magic is second to none, and our one named character Kroak should be the single most powerful spellcaster in the game, regardless of the fact that his game power level will never match his lore power level.
