Malign Portents

[HorticulusTGA]

The Dread Solstice event is really cool ! 

Quite strange in starts in February, tho...

 

[Riluo]

At this point I am rather pissed off by the healing concept with stolen hours as well as a few other things.  I just hope they pull their finger out with some very sweet rules and further updates.

[Killax]

3 minutes ago, Riluo said:

At this point I am rather pissed off by the healing concept with stolen hours as well as a few other things.  I just hope they pull their finger out with some very sweet rules and further updates.

My bones would be more rattled by Keywords still being rather the same.



No Nagash general in 2018 either?  

[EMMachine]

1 hour ago, Killax said:

No Nagash general in 2018 either?  

Isn't a combined Nagash Army with him as general simply a Grand Alliance Death Army, because everything except Flesh-Eater-Courts are in it? Or did I misunderstand something?

[RuneBrush]

1 hour ago, HorticulusTGA said:

The Dread Solstice event is really cool ! 

Quite strange in starts in February, tho...

Was thinking the same - 6 week long means it finishes the 5th April?  Looks like it's a submit the results in store again too

[Jamopower]

24 minutes ago, EMMachine said:

Isn't a combined Nagash Army with him as general simply a Grand Alliance Death Army, because everything except Flesh-Eater-Courts are in it? Or did I misunderstand something?

Doesn't he have his very own allegiance in the book?

[EMMachine]

43 minutes ago, Jamopower said:

Doesn't he have his very own allegiance in the book?

Hm, you mean Deathlords? The Allegiance where Morghast Harbingers and Morghast Archai are Battlelinem but only contain Nagash the Morghasts and the Mortarchs as choices?

You have no generic hero there at the moment, so there is only the Battletrait and Battlelines in use.

I would say its mostly a Allegiance like Everchosen.

[BlooDeck]

Just now, EMMachine said:

Hm, you mean Deathlords? The Allegiance where Morghast Harbingers and Morghast Archai are Battlelinem but only contain Nagash the Morghasts and the Mortarchs as choices?

You have no generic hero there at the moment, so there is only the Battletrait and Battlelines in use.

I would say its mostly a Allegiance like Everchosen.

The announcement said there would four new Allegiances, one for each mortarch and the Grand Host of Nagash which pulls together everything. Also Soulblight and generic Death, but they aren't obviously. So we're getting a Nagash allegiance as well.

[The Golem]

A new story is up on the Malign Portents website: https://malignportents.com/story/deluge-of-life/

[Sete]

So I'm thinking that Death ironically will have live humans as main force.

Don't think Nagash plan is to turn everyone into skellies now, but in fact have civilizations worshipping him. 

And when they die he still gets their souls. He has all the time in the world.

Sigmar stole his souls, so Nagash now steals his people.

[Menkeroth]

Regarding the fact there are mortal nations in Shyish worshipping Nagash, it's logical and reasonable.

[Infeston]

Amazing reveals overall, escpecially the aelves. GW really seems to listen to the fans. I like their attitude. :-)

Quote

Sadly I had hoped the Grot shaman would be better. I don't like that his command ability works only for greenskins and not overall Destruction. Also even though he has a 5+ ward save, the 6+ normal safe makes him pretty useless. 

Also why does the spell only have a D6 range? Couldn't they have given him a better spell? :-(

Sorry I am little bit frustrated, because I had hoped the shaman would be a real cool and reliable addition to any Destruction army. Propably my expectations were a bit too high.

They could at least have made the mushroom ability permanent and not once per battle. Than he would have been a lot cooler.

[RuneBrush]

50 minutes ago, The Golem said:

A new story is up on the Malign Portents website: https://malignportents.com/story/deluge-of-life/

Spoiler

Amethyst fire arrows!!!!

 

[Kaleb Daark]

that's pretty cool.

I like the notion of the mortals of the realm actually having no problem with dying as they see it as just the final part of living before your eternal life in undeath.

I can imagine like the corpse bride where a child is looked after by the skeleton grandmother in the rocking chair while the parents are out ploughing the fields.

I'm really looking forward to how this story arc is going to pan out and where it ends up and what it points to next...

[Burf]

1 hour ago, Infeston said:

Amazing reveals overall, escpecially the aelves. GW really seems to listen to the fans. I like their attitude. :-)

Sadly I had hoped the Grot shaman would be better. I don't like that his command ability works only for greenskins and not overall Destruction. Also even though he has a 5+ ward save, the 6+ normal safe makes him pretty useless. 

Also why does the spell only have a D6 range? Couldn't they have given him a better spell? :-(

Sorry I am little bit frustrated, because I had hoped the shaman would be a real cool and reliable addition to any Destruction army. Propably my expectations were a bit too high.

They could at least have made the mushroom ability permanent and not once per battle. Than he would have been a lot cooler.

Hey, at least he's not as bad as the stormcast guy.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Burf said:

Hey, at least he's not as bad as the stormcast guy.

Yeah, the rules for all 4 of the Harbingers seem like a missed opportunity. They were billed as characters that represented their respective Grand Alliances, and GW are pushing everyone to buy and paint one as part of the muster for the campaign. To me that implied that there would be at least some justification for every army to include one, and that their rules would either buff everything with the Order/Chaos/Death/Destruction key word or be generic enough to have a small but useful role in any type of army. But actually their benefits are very specific and limited.

I've been banging on for ages that there are a ton of good reasons to have splash releases of models that have a role in multiple factions and even multiple Grand Alliances (think Dogs of War), and GW gave me hope that this was starting to happen. I was all fired up to buy and paint the Lord-Ordinator, but since my army doesn't (and pretty much can't) include any war machines he has no role whatsoever. I'm now very much on the fence about whether I even want to buy him just to paint.

These harbingers should have been (and could so easily have been) a 'something for everyone' release. These rules, in this particular context, are a baffling decision.

[Jamopower]

Making them simple 5 wound heros with some buffing ability or good close combat skills would have made them even less interesting I would say. The people would be still complaining, "Man these guys are sniped so easily from the table, they have no use" (Which seems to apply 90% of the releases anyways, just wait when the stats of the Daughters of Khaine are released).

[FractalRain]

30 minutes ago, Jamie the Jasper said:

Yeah, the rules for all 4 of the Harbingers seem like a missed opportunity. They were billed as characters that represented their respective Grand Alliances, and GW are pushing everyone to buy and paint one as part of the muster for the campaign. To me that implied that there would be at least some justification for every army to include one, and that their rules would either buff everything with the Order/Chaos/Death/Destruction key word or be generic enough to have a small but useful role in any type of army. But actually their benefits are very specific and limited.

I've been banging on for ages that there are a ton of good reasons to have splash releases of models that have a role in multiple factions and even multiple Grand Alliances (think Dogs of War), and GW gave me hope that this was starting to happen. I was all fired up to buy and paint the Lord-Ordinator, but since my army doesn't (and pretty much can't) include any war machines he has no role whatsoever. I'm now very much on the fence about whether I even want to buy him just to paint.

These harbingers should have been (and could so easily have been) a 'something for everyone' release. These rules, in this particular context, are a baffling decision.

While I agree with you and had similar hopes, it is important to remember that all of the Heralds will have access to the special abilities in the Malign Portents books - Omens/Prophecies etc.  Those are the abilities they'll be able to use for the Grand Alliance they are with.  What we are seeing here in the warscrolls is their use AFTER Malign Portents.  That is my opinion anyway.

[Infeston]

18 minutes ago, Jamopower said:

The people would be still complaining

I don't know. I wouldn't. If the Shamans would have gotten a better spell (maybe make 1 or D3 Destruction units faster, or a spell which makes one enemy unit attack at last in the combat phase, or a spell which protects one unit from shooting or literally any other spell other than a D6 range spell), a 5+ or 4+ save, maybe 5 wounds instead of 4 and an ability which benefits every other faction in GA: Destruction I would certainly not complain. Even if not all but one of those things mentioned above would have been in the warscroll I wouldn't complain.

And the shaman is still one of the heroes which is of some use. But only because of his command ability. On the other hand he has to be the armies general to use this ability. But who in their right mind would make a 6+ save hero the general of their army? 

This would be the shortest lasting general of all time. If he could use the ability even if he wasn't the general it would be better. But he has to be the general. And because the general often plays a very important role on the battlefield I don*t think Destruction players would take him as a general, because he simply is too weak.

I don't know. What do other Destruction players think? Maybe I am not that experienced, but I wouldn't take him as a general and which other use does he have if you can't use the command ability?

[Kaleb Daark]

11 minutes ago, FractalRain said:

While I agree with you and had similar hopes, it is important to remember that all of the Heralds will have access to the special abilities in the Malign Portents books - Omens/Prophecies etc.  Those are the abilities they'll be able to use for the Grand Alliance they are with.  What we are seeing here in the warscrolls is their use AFTER Malign Portents.  That is my opinion anyway.

These are my sentiments.  We're seeing a shift in the rules and also the campaign and storyline, and for the first time we have things which on the face of it don't seem to make sense.

I'm sitting back and thinking back to the End Times in fantasy battle 8th ed.

We got blight kings, wrathmongers, stormfiends, mortarchs et al.   in the case of the first three, they made no sense in the current game, three wound infantry on monstrous infantry 40mm bases?   this is balls, ddoesn't make sense, combined stats would be broken on characters, who'd take them etc,.  But enter AoS and they suddenly made perfect sense.

this experience tells me that we're seeing the same thing happen insofar that thee characters won't make sense until Malign portents hits the shelves.

What if there is a rule that says that a character can't be targeted if within 3 of a nearby unit like in 40k?  suddenly they take on a new dimension.

Keep the faith and lets just wait and see - I'm hoping and reckoning that we'll be pleasantly surprised.

[Guest]

21 minutes ago, FractalRain said:

While I agree with you and had similar hopes, it is important to remember that all of the Heralds will have access to the special abilities in the Malign Portents books - Omens/Prophecies etc.  Those are the abilities they'll be able to use for the Grand Alliance they are with.  What we are seeing here in the warscrolls is their use AFTER Malign Portents.  That is my opinion anyway.

You're probably right, but given how people choose to act like the Great Cities rules in the Season of War: Firestorm book never happened (even though GW officially approved them for matched play) I see very little prospect of the harbingers' campaign-specific rules being welcomed and actively used if they're presented in a similar way. I'll bet you £10 that those (possibly quite wonderful) rules will be dead and buried the moment Malign Portents is over, if not before. That leaves us with the abilities on the warscrolls. So to me this still feels like a release that was erroneously built up as being something for everyone when in fact it's anything but.

Look at the Lord-Ordinator. How many people can really justify taking a mid-tier hero (at best) as their general in order to gain access to a command ability that buffs war machines, the rarest unit type in the game? Without that command ability he's just a poor-to-average combat character, but you'll still end up paying for the command ability in points regardless. So where's the incentive to field him? The only way to justify his inclusion is if you build an army of Karadron Overlords or Ironweld Arsenal around him. GW may open up a Stormcast artillery chamber (which they probably will), but even then that's still only 3 factions that have a use for him. For everyone else he's a complete non-starter.

[Jamopower]

The Lord ordinator allows you to build a themed army centralizing on the war machines in the first place. It might not be the next UK GT Final winner list, but it can be very interesting and different army on the battlefield. I think that makes him a much more interesting character than say something that would allow you to re-roll hits for friendly unit within 6" and fortify a terrain piece on your table edge.

[Guest]

10 minutes ago, Jamopower said:

The Lord ordinator allows you to build a themed army centralizing on the war machines in the first place. It might not be the next UK GT Final winner list, but it can be very interesting and different army on the battlefield. I think that makes him a much more interesting character than say something that would allow you to re-roll hits for friendly unit within 6" and fortify a terrain piece on your table edge.

It may make him interesting, but that's not my point. My point is about expectation versus reality.

If you follow GW's various social media channels then these harbingers have been consistently talked about as though they benefit their entire Grand Alliance in some unspecified way. People have been getting excited for these models partly on that basis - a basis which has now proven to be false. And not just a little bit false, completely false. It's not the case that a small handful of people will have army builds that don't gel well with the harbingers' rules - outside of a few highly specialised army builds the vast majority of people will have no use for them whatsoever. That's a big difference from what was being communicated to us up to now.

If we'd been told from the beginning that these characters are designed to work as part of specialised armies themed around some force depicted in the Malign Portents narrative, no-one would have any cause to be disappointed. That would be really cool. It is really cool. But as I said, it's expectation versus reality, and I'm feeling a little bit bummed out by that today. 'Twill pass.

[AthlorianStoners]

With all the Vampire Thrall talk and the new war scrolls from existing kits going on, I was thinking maybe some of the free guild  kits could be getting the genestealer cult treatment? 

Adding in a command sprue with heads or shield or something and then you have a whole new slew of potential models to fill out Death/Soulblight.

[FERRUMITE]

Sad to say this, but I’m quickly losing interest in MP. I was hoping that the harbinger would have a GA ability, but seeing that they are limited just makes me want to give em a pass. Not only that, but the fact that it’s an entirely death centered event, and the campaign has been confirmed to start in February, it’s dissapointing to see that Death won’t get any new models before it to actually show what the campaign is going for. Right now it feels that death has been hyped up for their event only to not have anything whatsoever to help them, and they will just get smacked down by the overwhelming amount of other armies just like the 40k campaign last year where death Guard literally got all their units AFTER the campaign finished.