feltmonkey

I'm far from an expert player, so forgive me if this is a stupid comment, but isn't the big variable there the chances of getting 15 Spite Revs into combat? It's easier to get Dryads into combat because of their 2 inch reach. Also, Dryads are a bit more survivable. Spite Revs have the bravery debufs, and are a lot cheaper, and you don't have to pay for the Forest Folk battalion as per Coyote's example. I'm going to try both out, and I'm particularly excited to try out a Spite-heavy list with Drycha and that scary tree endless spell. I'll see how they go. Mathhammer rarely translates to the table in my experience.

Does the Spirit of Durthu count as a named character? Could you take multiples of him?

Could Drycha be a candidate for that Winterleaf power where you can pile in and attack twice in a combat round? If you use the thing that gives her 20 attacks instead of 10 you'd be doing 40 attacks if all goes well, and you'd have another lot of her other melee attack too, plus you'd have done her flitterfuries shooting attack earlier. It's situational of course, but wouldn't that all add up to some pretty effective hoard clearance?

@Mirage8112 - I specifically said I have no idea about the book earlier this evening (I'm certainly not down on it - I'm looking forward to trying the new stuff out), and I wasn't having a go at you, I was just pointing out the part you seemed to have missed, and that I reckon what you are saying is a bit of a stretch. Genuinely sorry if you interpreted it as an attack of some kind! I agree it needs a FAQ. <checks knickers> I can report they are largely untwisted. Talking of FAQs, I was listening to the Honest Wargamer's "review" of the book and they bought up one rule that definitely needs clarification. It's the Winterleaf command trait - "Roll a dice each time a wound is allocated to this general and not negated. On a 5+ the attacking unit suffers 1 mortal wound." The question is, say your general has 10 wounds and something causes 20 wounds to it - do you roll 10 dice fishing for 5+s, or 20? If it's the latter this could be pretty good against those units that do insane amounts of wounds in melee.

You're picking one line out of context and ignoring the first line of the rule - "Instead of setting up a SYLVANETH unit on the board..." At the point when you are selecting a unit to set up on the board you can instead select one to put in the hidden enclaves. I get what you're saying, and good luck trying to get away with it in a game, but it's a bit of a stretch to call your interpretation rules as written.

I've got no idea about lists or anything. As a casual player I'm just a bit baffled by how different a lot of things are. My favorite model (Drycha) has barely recognisable rules, and my favorite way to play (Gnarlroot and loads of magic) has gone away, but I'm not shouting at clouds yet. I'm sure there will be fun stuff in there. My genuine complaint with the book though is that they didn't fix the bloody wildwood problem. If anything, they made it worse! They've replaced an awkward to use, expensive to buy, and nightmare to transport terrain piece that was pivotal to our army with a different awkward to use, even worse to transport terrain piece that is still just as pivotal but much harder to deploy and not as effective. And if we want the slight ease of use (for our opponents more than ourselves) advantages of the new kit we have to buy new expensive models. I thought wildwoods were "100% going away" - what happened?

You can't make "very limited" runs of this sort of thing and sell it at the same price they did for Looncurse. Printing runs, of both the books and the sprues, need to be of a certain size to even be profitable. The economics of scale come into play. Also, I seriously doubt that such a limited run could be produced as quickly as you seem to imagine. If a second print was to appear, even then we probably wouldn't see it for several months. Demand now does not guarantee demand in two or three months time. It just doesn't. The fact that you are amazed that something can sell out in the pre-order stage shows that you don't really understand how this sort of thing works. The print numbers were decided months ago. Taking pre-orders earlier wouldn't have guaranteed against selling out of pre-orders. The only way to guard against this is to do something more akin to kickstarter, but that's pretty incompatible with GW's business model. Kickstarters for miniature games tend to be fulfilled well over a year after being announced. If GW started doing this - announcing the concept of a big box and taking pre-orders eighteen months before they hit the shops, well it would be ludicrous. They would have to take payment at the time of the pre-order, otherwise a raft of cancellations due to a shift in the meta or something could have disastrous consequences. All the excitement about releases and announcements would fizzle away by the time the models appeared. You wouldn't even eliminate the problem you're talking about. You'd still have people who decide too late that they want a box and are disappointed, the only difference is that they could be disappointed a year before the thing is released. Sales of Looncurse seem to have been massive. Going by my local gaming store, who are admittedly one of the bigger ones in the UK, they had taken quite a lot of pre-orders, and for some reason held back a few for release day for walk-in customers* as well. When I picked my box up they had about ten boxes piled up on the counter. So they must have had loads of boxes in. I think rather than Looncurse being really limited, it just sold extraordinarily well. *If I had known they were planning to do this, I would have publicised the fact on these boards so that at least the few who were desperate for the box and geographically close enough could have made the trip to get one. Sadly, the rate they were selling made it obvious that it would have been futile to post about it by the time I went in and realised they had stock. Sorry all.

I think you're being overly harsh, and completely ignoring the economic reality of the situation. These boxes cost more to produce than the separate boxes of miniatures that they comprise of - the books they come with cost money to design and produce. They then sell them for less than the usual cost of the miniatures. The profit margin is therefore much smaller than selling the individual boxes of minis. Of course they need to sell out. It's not as easy as you suggest to predict demand, and they will have produced as many boxes as they felt they could sell without going over that number. Look at Speed Freeks - anyone would have predicted that would have been massive, but my FLGS still has six of them on the shelves. I agree that there won't be a second run, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the Arch Revenant appear as a separate model pretty soon. I reserve my grumbles not for GW, but for the ebay scalpers who buy up so much of the stock of these boxes to sell off piecemeal for a profit.

Perhaps bow and melee Hunters will be different points values? My hopes haven't been dashed - we haven't got exactly what we had decided we must be getting, but there are little buffs here and there. The Revs popping up anywhere sounds fun. The tweak to envoys of the everqueen is really good - the hunters and every unit near to them can benefit from something like the arch-revenant's command ability as well as the arch rev and the units near her - as well as, not instead of. I think I'm reading that right. Edit - nope, I was confusing that reroll 1s ability of the arch rev, and for some reason thought it was a command ability. Alarielle's ability doesn't have range. What is envoys for? 🤔 I guess the TLA's reroll saves of 1 thing.

They have three of them there so maybe it's not just a matter of having one of them and they do something similar to the woods. It could be that we still have to buy several of them to teleport around. They also don't look any easier to store and transport than the existing woods! 😂 It's still exciting. We'll see.

You'd be hard pushed to find anyone who would let you continue to use the old rules though. Mainly because of the woods!

I'm not sure the games console metaphor quite works, @Mirage8112 because even when a new console appears I can still use my old one if I prefer, or can't afford the new one. If the release of the PS5 causes all PS4s to explode you would have a point. However, I agree with every other word you say. Rules updates change the game, models become less usable, this happens - it is always painful, but it's a fact of life if we really do want the constant balance tweaks, new faction releases and updated battletomes we ask for. The disappearance of Wyldwoods (if true @Zanzou) is an extreme example of this, as I've never known a model to go from being absolutely integral to an army to gone in one update. However, they are an unusual case as they are such a pain to use, fight against, and transport that the removal is kind of a necessary evil. If the functionality of the woods is replaced by something less expensive, easier to transport, and easier to use, then I'd grudgingly take the hit, I think. Of course, we don't actually know what is going to happen. GW might keep Wyldwoods in some capacity, just make them less integral. I think we'll have a new scenery thing, limited in number, with some kind of teleport mechanism, and a fairly large "wholly within" area of effect. They'll mention roots spreading from this tree and giving us the powers. It would be an improvement on the long strings of dryads, wouldn't it? I've always found them immersion breaking and embarrassing to the point that I deliberately will not do them. Anyway, Looncurse will be up for pre-order tomorrow, I think, and out next Saturday. Can't wait! It's the perfect box for me because I play Sylvaneth and am starting a Gloomspite Gitz army. 😀

Heheh I'm just going on what everyone else is saying in the thread, to be honest. My post should probably have been prefaced with the words, "if the rumours are true." 😄 I didn't mean to make it look as if I have any kind of insider information or cast-iron facts about the future of the faction. Apologies if it came across that way.

The community site seems to say Looncurse is out "this weekend." Is that right? This Saturday? It doesn't seem to be available for pre-order anywhere. I'm not sure about that Gladeworm model - an big armoured worm that comes out the ground? It looks a bit derivative. It looks like a Tyranid or a D&D purple worm. Regarding the Wyldwoods, I'm conflicted about their imminent disappearance. They are simultaneously fundamental to the way the army plays and the worst thing about playing the army. They are a pain in the bum to transport, to use on the table, and become too much of a focus when you're playing Sylvaneth. The most important tactical decisions you make tend to be about trying to squeeze woods in to gaps, or models between the gaps between the trees. They are a fundamental mechanic for our army, but it's a struggle getting your treelords through them. You sometimes get into a stalemate with your opponent when they don't want to move their army close to the woods and you don't want to move yours out of them. They can rend the shooting phase irrelevant. They look cool when you plonk them down, but then you have take the trees off for practical reasons and that is immediately lost as they become brown or green patches of floor. I think the primary reason GW might be planning radical changes to the woods, either the models or the way they work, is because they can potentially make for a terrible playing experience for our opponents, especially if they are new players. This isn't something that had occurred to me - all my opponents seem to have a decent time and go away basking in the glory of victory, but I've heard it brought up on a couple of YouTube videos recently, notably Vince Venturella's Warhammer Weekly (I think.) Large areas of the board becoming no go areas, gotcha moments if they try to cast spells too close, ridiculous string of monkeys chains to exploit the benefits of the woods while miles away from the woods themselves, ranged units having nothing to do, and an enemy that keeps disappearing from where you expected it to be and popping up somewhere else. There's a lot of stuff that in the wrong hands could be used in quite an annoying fashion. Like I say, I've not come across these complaints myself, mainly because I am incapable of using these tricks effectively, but it has been brought up by some pretty prominent voices so I'm sure it is something that GW would definitely have in mind when looking at the faction. I suspect that for all our enthusiasm, this redesign is more geared towards making life easier for our opponents rather than for us. Hopefully we'll still be strong, but perhaps less of a ballache to play as or against. Personally, I'm very annoyed to have wasted money on five wyldwoods, one of which I haven't even built yet (bought it the day before the looncurse teaser trailer came out) and one which has been used once. I don't have a lot of money to spend on this sort of thing and no room for a gaming table in my house, so they will probably be chucked in the loft or something. £90 wasted. I won't miss trying to transport the things though.

Does anyone remember which episode Andrew told his story of the best/worst 40K game ever on, please? With the angry guy vs the kid with his army in a shoe box? I'm trying to convert someone to the podcast. 😁