Jump to content

new death battletome announced!


tea_wild_owl

Recommended Posts

  • Replies 615
  • Created
  • Last Reply
7 minutes ago, Elmir said:

I actually introduced 40k to a group of AoS players where I live. It's getting hard to motivate any of them to play AoS anymore because of how stupid the shooting rules in this game are. The game sadly feels incredibly inferior to where 40k is at now, both in how weapon damage is handled, shooting can be locked down AND how characters/heroes are protected against these silly ranged units....

Having an army that relies on extremely easy to kill heroes, coupled with no real ranged units of our own is always going to keep death from playing along with the top  dog lists... The core rules are just sort of stacked against us to begin with. 

But I remain cautiously optimistic that these summoning rules can at least be better than the previous iteration. I'm pretty sure that's why GA:D is in the book to adres all summoning and possibly all spells for the faction too.  A simple spell to protect a hero from firepower (a shrouding if you will) would solve all our woes. 

Check out the latest malign portents story. it specifically mentions undead archers.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just gotta say, loving the limited information we've had so far and super pumped for the future!

Reading everyone's thoughts about it is helping me get over the finishing line to the end of the working week! So just a quick cheers!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think the playtesting is still a little inconsistent - I know the Nurgle book got more testing than anything before (mentioned by Russ Veal and Lez Martin on Facehammer) and I think that's one of the best books so far. I kinda assumed GW had started to take testing more seriously and that all the new battletomes were going to hit that quality.. 

I guess I'm still hopeful - once we have the whole picture - but its hard to understand why they seem to have made some of the existing units and abilities worse at this stage. I think everyone agreed that GA Death needed a bit of a boost to get them up to speed - on the competitive scene anyway.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

re: playtesting being impossible, the unattainability of perfection does not excuse the abandonment of the pursuit of quality.  The current 'just release it & we'll fix it in post' mind set is a blight on GW's design studio just like it's a blight in the film and software industries.  And in GW's case in particular, the only think they've proven particularly willing to regularly tweak after the fact is points costs, and that's just not going to fix issues like the proliferation of mortal wounds.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

28 minutes ago, Sception said:

re: playtesting being impossible, the unattainability of perfection does not excuse the abandonment of the pursuit of quality.  The current 'just release it & we'll fix it in post' mind set is a blight on GW's design studio just like it's a blight in the film and software industries.  And in GW's case in particular, the only think they've proven particularly willing to regularly tweak after the fact is points costs, and that's just not going to fix issues like the proliferation of mortal wounds.

Well it's not like that they won't playtest at all. As said above, there are some of the top dogs from the British tournament scene playtesting that stuff (and the US ones for 40k), but because this is a real world, there is a limited amount of time that can be used for that. Especially as there is the buisness aspect of that, which requires that to be done in secret etc.

 

What comes to the 40k shooting protection. It has it's own downsides. I don't know anything about the current meta, but last time I walked around in a 40k tournament, most of the lists seemed to be taking the advantage of either characters with aura abilities giving everyone re-rolls/fearless/whatever, or characters that were very potent on themselves (such as wizards, shooty tau commanders or daemon princes), that were basically the models that die last. It didn't look very interesting to be honest and hopefully it has been addressed already.

That said, I wouldn't mind a restriction of shooting out from a melee, to give some tactical options on countering the shooting, so that the countering wouldn't need to be only on the list building side of things. Making the characters untargetable by shooting (and thus often unkillable) would most likely just change the problems from one thing to another without a complete rewrite of the whole game.

For 40k something like that is of course necessary to have any reason for the heroes on the battlefield, as almost any army has shooting that outshadows the worst skyfire spam .

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It has already been addressed.  Fewer characters hand out immunity to the 40k equivalent of battleshock (commissars in particular no longer do), and characters no longer provide protection to other characters.

ICs are still typically the last to die, at least to ranged attacks, but IMO that's fine.  Good even.  Narratively/dramatically much better for a heroic fantasy game than AoS's situation, where they're the first to be removed from the table.  Game play wise, alpha rushes & first round shooting are still HUGE problems in 40k, but even there they're not as bad as in AoS, where the same problem is compounded by the inability to protect basically any element of your army or game plan from removal via non-interactive alpha strike.

Honestly, what both games most need, even more than character protections, is a shift from alternating player turns to alternating unit activations, but that's another conversation entirely.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2018/01/26/february-white-dwarf-preview/

This has got me worried though... despite the rumours of death getting their book quite quickly, it's not even mentioned in the WD preview in February... 

Not releasing models is one thing, to then continue slacking on bringing out the new rules while we are supposed to paint new armies for the upcoming campaign is just rubbing salt in the wound...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah i heard something like Feb 10th.

For me im okay with the warscroll changes as long as there is stuff to balance it out. Allegiance, traits, items, battalions, spells...all those have plenty of opportunities to buff this and that. Thats what im reallyhoping for.

What i dont like is the new summoning. I sure as ****** hope its better then that garbage system Maggotkin got cuz from the looks of things not a single Maggotkin player is going to actually use it for anything but summoning trees. Wonky mechanic + reinforcement points? No thanks. 

Also i totally agree AoS needs 40k shooting and character targeting rules. I get the changes are super fluffy. Yes thats cool and thematic but its a horrible game mechanic. If the entire game didn't revolve around who can stack the craziest buffs then the hero sniping wouldnt be a big deal. But as long as heroes need to actually lead and do stuff then the core rules need to change.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Man I am still kinda baffled.

I think this is the first leak of Battletome content since AoS start which seems to create mostly negative responses from the fanbase of the very army the book is aimed at.

Most times it was just players of other armies saying "Oh no that could break the game" and only sometimes people saying "well not bad but I wanted more or something different".

This time it is really weird. I have yet to meet a single person who - based on the warscrolls - is really excited for things to come.


I hope we are really just being paranoid idiots and everything will be fine for Death. I am a really positive person and I want to believe that we will have finally some sort of balance in the game with many armies from all grand alliances doing well using different play styles.
...but it is hard right now...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think it makes sense that Death could end up as the most synergistic of all the Alliances, and that people really need to wait to see the whole picture.  Clearly Death is the most united GA per the narrative and model themes.  I think that the rules will likely reflect this as well, ultimately.  We need to see all of the layers of rules and interactions before going full Banshee mode.

I suspect that GW has put a lot of resources into MP and this Death update and I feel that the last couple of years GW has done a ton of great things to AOS.

 I'm still really excited and planning to grab the Barrow Lords box to start my first Death force as soon as I can get to the store.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It doesn't matter how synergistic they are if the synergies depend on heroes with 5 wounds that have to be close to the action, because they will probably die unless you start daisy chaining or something to keep them behind terrain all game. And even then you are paying a tax to have your units not be worthless.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

"Next book will fix Death" should be a AoS motto.

Heard that about GA:D

Heard that about FAQ

Heard that about FEC Battletome

Heard that about GH2017

Heard that about FAQ2

As much as I'll love to see my troops out of the shelf and into the table, after all that time "fixing death" sounds less like a possibility and more like a rolling joke.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Fellow death-letdown-heartbroken players. Please, please be calm. 

I feel we are missing a crucial piece of information that will solve our problems. All we've been given is warscrolls. No battallions, no traits, artefacts, allegiances etc. 

We have a book coming, and within that book is going to be a tonne of new stuff to digest. Let's not get negative about the warscrolls from what we've seen. I feel there's a deeper combo we r missing and i feel it's within the new tome.

im still optimistic, but I DO see everyone's negative outlook. We've seen little segments, but not seen the bulk.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If the foundation is rotting (aka warscrolls) the rest of tree is going out with it.

Problem is that at this points it's hard to imagine what kind of bonus traits and artifacts should give to cover for "changes" in warscrolls, let alone to elevate Death's status in matched play from "why did I spend money on this army" to "well... I can do something from time to time". Even a death's version of Nurgle resilience going across entire death army wouldn't fix it. So we're either waiting for some mediocre traits and shinies that will lead nowhere and change nothing or some over the top, way to powerful "MUST TAKE X Y Z" type of stuff that will be mandatory and change GA:D into a one-trick pony.

I do kinda believe that it is better to set the expectations and standards low so I'll hurt less in the end (or - fingers crossed - be a pleasant surprise).

As always, time will tell, and as always, plastic death units make a great material for other armies bases :P

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm reading through these leaked warscrolls again and found another stinker of a change sadly...

Guess you won't see a necromancer allied to any FEC armies anymore. Sad that one of our  only "pseudo-competitive builds" aka "flying circus" aka "deadwatch flayer spam" gets quite a big hit in efficiency with the changes to Vanhell's Dance macabre. 

Unless they start changing the FEC units too ofc (technically these things can be summoned by some ghoul king variants) but I bet they won't be getting summonable keyword. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.


×
×
  • Create New...