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Soulblight/Vampire Counts deleted Characters


Shogun

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Dear Age of Sigmar developers,

I hope you're reading this. This is a plea regarding the recent deleted Soulblight/VC characters such as Vlad Von Carstein, Manfred Von Carstein, Isabella Von Carstein, Konrad Von Carstein etc etc.

While I was super stoked to see a Soulblight/VC getting their own Allegiance trait. It at the same time saddened me to see that you had killed off 5-6 of their named characters with each of their own unique warscroll only to have them all replaced with 1 and the same warscroll. Prior to the 2017 update they had 7-8 leaders now they have two. A Vampire Lord and Vampire Lord on Abyssal Terror.

This is what I don't understand Tomb Kings who are no longer sold on your website has kept all their previous named characters warscrolls, they are just no longer named characters. But Soulblight/VC whom you still sell on your website have had all their named characters and warscrolls deleted after giving them their own Allegiance? On your website you're selling 7-8 Vampire models who now all share the exact same warscroll.

Therefor I plea and beg you to restore their warscrolls, perhaps rename them like you did with all of Tomb Kings. As of right now all the Death Subfactions are lacking and incomplete all apart from TK's which are OOP.

Best regards

A massive fan of AoS

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Agreed.

I would have preferred them to have just simply taken the spells/abilities  from the named characters and put them in a vampire Lord generation table... a spell lore sort of deal. Like the bloodlines but for your hero.

 

In the short terms I would like to see the above. Restore the optoins but to generic.

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I totally understand the disappointment but the Von Carstein clan has been around a long time and has had a lot of attention given to them in everything from stories, campaigns, and video games.  I love vampires but they honestly always turned me off from starting a Vampire army due to the nostalgia of them from years ago as well as they are kind of cliché (no offense if these are the things that draw you to them).

I personally see it as rather liberating to be able to build your own vampire lord (yeah, I played way to much Masquerade RPG back in the day).  One thing that started to drag me down was the special characters being everywhere all the time.  I think half the fun is building YOUR general and heroes and breathing that personality into them yourselves.  Want to recreate Dracula and his four Vampire ladies from Van Helsing film with Hugh Jackman?  do it.  Want to do a new take on vampires that changes the way we see them? (RIP Tobe Hooper, I will always love the space vampire reveal from Lifeforce).  There is so much you can do now that throws off the shackles of pre-determined characters with decades of baggage from the land that was.

I do wish they added options for building your own vampire lord to make their abilities a little more diversified (and with that new models that bring shock and awe!) but on the other side of that, at least not every one will have the Von Carteins still moping about in their high collared coats and frilly skirts in the 9 realms (although I can picture a scene of the two of them bickering about how they will get their outfits cleaned and their castle rebuilt).

I do have to say that I instantly fell in love with the lady  Mortarch Neferata and she has been calling to me to purchase her even though I am trying to avoid a new army....

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2 hours ago, inunn said:

Well, though they are much less diverse than they used to be some of the models have unique rules even using the same warscroll. For example not all of them have flying horror or chalice of blood.

This. They can be quite different, so it's not that bad.

1 hour ago, Travis Baumann said:

I totally understand the disappointment but the Von Carstein clan has been around a long time and has had a lot of attention given to them in everything from stories, campaigns, and video games.  I love vampires but they honestly always turned me off from starting a Vampire army due to the nostalgia of them from years ago as well as they are kind of cliché (no offense if these are the things that draw you to them).

Exactly. Too much attention for them and too little for everyone else. Personality is what you insert in your models, and all we need is a plastic vampire on foot with plastic bloodknights. Really :) 

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By removing old characters they are only reducing variety and choice for players. Does it really hurt to leave a pdf with rules for a specific character? It takes no effort, more so if it already had one (pre-ghb2). If Vlad is no longer in AoS and the mini should "officially" be considered a generic Vamp Lord that's fine, but let him stick around the compendium so you still have the option if you want to do some narrative or whatever (and AoS is supposed to promotes this).

So I can only agree with OP, I see no advantage to delete all the characters, especially if you still sell the minis (!). On the contrary, it can irritate people (like the keyword removing did) which isn't too positive.... 

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4 hours ago, VBS said:

By removing old characters they are only reducing variety and choice for players. Does it really hurt to leave a pdf with rules for a specific character? It takes no effort, more so if it already had one (pre-ghb2). If Vlad is no longer in AoS and the mini should "officially" be considered a generic Vamp Lord that's fine, but let him stick around the compendium so you still have the option if you want to do some narrative or whatever (and AoS is supposed to promotes this).

So I can only agree with OP, I see no advantage to delete all the characters, especially if you still sell the minis (!). On the contrary, it can irritate people (like the keyword removing did) which isn't too positive.... 

So here's the thing. If you want to run "Old World in AoS", then grab the original Compendium and go to town. That's basically what they were there for from the start.

But for everyone else playing the game today, suck it up. Compendium were always on a life line, and in some ways, they got an extra year. IMO this change should've been done when the Grand Alliance books came out. It would've been a lot easier at that time, because GW could've said "Here's all the new factions, and hey, if you have some of these more unique models hanging around that didn't make the transition, here are some warscrolls you can use for them".

 

Overall, yeah, it kinda sucks that some smaller factions got even smaller and lost some of their abilities/tricks/etc. Here's hoping GW understands that, and they push out more updates for smaller factions faster in the future. Because ultimately, if Soulblight had got a battletome and some new miniatures in the last year, I doubt anyone would really care that compendium characters are going away.

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8 hours ago, VBS said:

By removing old characters they are only reducing variety and choice for players. Does it really hurt to leave a pdf with rules for a specific character? It takes no effort, more so if it already had one (pre-ghb2). If Vlad is no longer in AoS and the mini should "officially" be considered a generic Vamp Lord that's fine, but let him stick around the compendium so you still have the option if you want to do some narrative or whatever (and AoS is supposed to promotes this).

So I can only agree with OP, I see no advantage to delete all the characters, especially if you still sell the minis (!). On the contrary, it can irritate people (like the keyword removing did) which isn't too positive.... 

I can understand everyone's disappointment, they're two characters that have been around for years.  My counter is that there's nothing stopping you playing them if you're playing a friendly and have checked beforehand.  I know the gaming group I play in would be more than happy for me to use any of my classic models with Compendium rules.

One thought that has occurred to me, is that perhaps we need to create a new collection of warscrolls called "Legacy", which would contain all of the retired character warscrolls from the original compendium - so we'd find Vlad, Isabella, Kraggi, Archaeon on foot, etc.  It would mean we can easily play friendlies and it's very clear that we're using Legacy models.

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Personally I hate to see named characters in AoS - it just reduces their ability to move the story along. Once you have a named character they basically have to live forever (or get put in compendium and then removed like has happened now, and we can see from this thread how popular that is). I would much prefer to see (as they initially did with stormcast) generic characters where you can build them to be like a character from the storyline if you want, or build your own unique actor.

 

 

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59 minutes ago, KnightFire said:

Personally I hate to see named characters in AoS - it just reduces their ability to move the story along

I agree, it goes against the whole ‘your dudes’ thing, which is a big part of the hobby for me. But I know that other people like named characters so I think a compromise would be to have a generic warscroll for every named character, or better customisation options for hero characters.

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I think with less named characters there is less room for weird buff stacking and exploiting the game though. Especially the past year of tournaments, a lot of buff stacking and exploiting underpriced units was going on. A lot of games ending turn 1 because big units get sniped instantly for example.

I think with less named characters we may be moving into a slower format with more room for positioning and tactics rather than either buffing 1 unit to slaughter everything, or having some massively OP character plowing through everything.

I think, however, they should do the same thing with named characters as they did with stuff like scenery - good to use and pointed for friendly games, not tournament legal in matched play.

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Well it seems like there's quite a few people whom are getting my intention with this post wrong.

While some people like the idea of named characters coz it makes the army more personal which I can totally understand. However that wasn't my issue here.

My issue is that they deleted unique warscrolls for 8 heros of Soulblight. Personally I don't care if the 8 Heros were all called Vampire Lord A B C D E F G. But I don't see the point in making Soulblight Allegiance only to delete all the Hero warscrolls and leave slim to no options for leaders. Especially considering these models are stilling being sold on their website and the fact that Tomb Kings whom are not being sold kept all their unique Hero warscrolls, but had their names modified so they were no longer considered named and can now use artefacts. So my issue is why couldn't this have been done for Soulblight too?

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I do understand your point, but other than balance reasons, the only other reason for them doing this sadly narrows down to 1: Money. 

Tomb Kings is an out of print army, they changed all their keywords making it so they are pretty much only useful if you play tomb kings with other tomb kings stuff, but kept all their characters not to make TK owners even more angry. While the army functions by itself, it is not as good as it used to be, considering lots of good units are heavily overpriced now. So while the army is playable RIGHT NOW and still has their stuff (which many other armies can't say), in the long run TK players are kind of tunneled into buying new minis as the Meta moves on, because they will slowly lose any significant competitive edge due to lack of support.

The other armies on the other hand can still expect new miniatures in the future, Soulblight is getting a new Herald and such late this year or next year as an example. So to rob everyone off their options now, they kind of ensure you'll buy whatever unit they bring out in the future. Thats why I doubt they will go back on their decision of having named characters removed, leaving many armies in the dust until they may get an update them some day in the (far) future.

I just hope this isn't going to be a returning theme though... It doesn't feel nice to invest hundreds of euros/dollars on miniatures, spend months to paint them up, just for Games Workshop to decide they will drop support on the model and/or warscroll.

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6 hours ago, Kugane said:

I do understand your point, but other than balance reasons, the only other reason for them doing this sadly narrows down to 1: Money. 

Pretty much. I'm not really bothered because I still have the old warscroll and since we don't play matched we'll just keep using the old ones.

I smiled a few days back to a meme someone posted on Facebook (or was it Twitter?) On it was a picture of GoT's littlefinger saying something along the lines of this is the new GW, why won't you trust me?

 

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7 minutes ago, karch said:

Pretty much. I'm not really bothered because I still have the old warscroll and since we don't play matched we'll just keep using the old ones.

I smiled a few days back to a meme someone posted on Facebook (or was it Twitter?) On it was a picture of GoT's littlefinger saying something along the lines of this is the new GW, why won't you trust me?

 

That's funny XD. I hope there will be a few tournaments soon, so games workshop can see that the armies that will likely be topping are the ones that still have most their synergies, such as Seraphon and Stormcast. I don't think Death lists and such will make the top 10 anytime soon with the current system. Hopefully, that'll be a wake-up call that they messed something up and not assume that Stormcast is a fan favorite or something. I also hope that they will bring out some rules for people that can't play the army they like. Even if it's some free pdfs here and there or a white dwarf article giving us something new. Until then I'll stick with GA: Death and just play mixed death :P.

The thing I really liked in the first general's handbook and compendiums we had was the fact that barely any allegiance was left behind. Everything and everyone had something in the terms of a battalion and such. Granted, most battalions were quite bad, but it did give the feeling that you could play the army you like, and add in any of the units you like, plonk it on the table and have fun.

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