new death battletome announced!

[smucreo]

You can go for unique stuff for Death, imo it's just that for now GW have written themselves into a corner by turning almost all of GA Death into the classical horror monsters. If they start taking advantage of the new lore I'm sure they can come up with new stuff, specially for nighthaunt, which seems the easiest to design for.

[AverageBoss]

2 hours ago, Eppelwhat said:

Ok. Wow. Sensitive! And I don't think you're right. We only know the 4 new ones. I don't buy you as a reliable source for your earlier FEC / Nighthaunt statement, what with all the guessing your participating in.

So, let me rephrase! What two allegiances do you all think (because, despite all the bluster, we don't know) will be in the Battletome (from what we have now)?

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2018/01/06/new-year-new-armies-reveals-new-years-open-day/

"Inside, you’ll find the warscrolls for every single Death model (so far…) alongside four new Allegiances within Death – the Grand Host of Nagash, Legion of Shadows, Legion of Sacrament and Legion of Blood. You’ll also find rules for the Soulblight vampires, if you’re looking to field one of Death’s most elite armies. If you would rather have an army formed from multiple facets of Nagash’s legions, there are also rules for those who pledge themselves more generally to the powers of Death. "

[Sception]

I'm not condemning LoN when I say not to expect new models.  The book sounds cool.  Legion allegiances should at the very least be interesting, and the ground level fluff has been needed since day one.

I'm just limiting my expectations of the book, and trying to convince you all to do the same, to the content that has actually been announced.  Because convincing yourself that you're going to get dramatically more than that is setting yourself up for disappointment.

I've seen people convinced that this book would come with the unretiring of the entire tomb kings line, for pete's sake!  Those people are going to be mad at GW when that doesn't happen, even though their disappointment will be entirely of their own creation.  A lot more mad than I am right now, accepting as I am that there's not going to be a huge surprise model wave, because there's no evidence to support that belief.

Yeah there's some disappointment on my part now, how wouldn't there be after all that MP buildup?  But at least I'm working mine out now, so when LoN is released I can be excited for what it is, instead of angry about all the things I convinced myself it could be.

[RoyalDachshund]

I can't understand how people can get that hyped over a new GA:Death book. And how (and why) they expect new models, Tomb Kings, big releases etc.

With some keyword shuffling, adding battalions with bigger allies pool and a tweak or two for some of the death units, we might push Death from garbage to somehow playable garbage Let's just hope they will at least fix the fluff, so we can have at least that.

[lare2]

In truth I think I'd be happy with a new book for now - as long as there's a spell lore of some kind. That should keep me busy a good while.

It would be truly awesome though if we did get new stuff and until we know for certain... I can but daydream!

[Lightbox]

15 minutes ago, lare2 said:

In truth I think I'd be happy with a new book for now - as long as there's a spell lore of some kind. That should keep me busy a good while.

It would be truly awesome though if we did get new stuff and until we know for certain... I can but daydream!

Agreed. Some more fun to be had with my soulblight and other alleigances would be great  

 

I do hope for new stuff because well it'd be a pretty poor year of death if there wasn't but in terms of LoN I am happy just with some warscroll and allegiance updates. I don't find the death 6++ save when near heroes very enticing tbh compared to some other allegiance abilities. Though I may still be salty about deathless minions since my V-lord on zombie dragon failed all 14 of her rolls yesterday

I think units I'd like to see updated are: grave guard, black knights, vampire lord (feels like he could use a bit more tbh), something being given rend 2, more rend in general. Something to make zombies a bit more useful (I know they aren't awful and can be a lot of fun but do require a lot of point sinks to get a unit that can likely be outclassed by skeletons. Though they do make for a nice tarpit until dying in droves battleshocks them off the table)

I think some more rend access would be really useful for the army tbh. We seem to have a lot of good tarpits but not much with real bite.

[lare2]

9 minutes ago, Lightbox said:

Though I may still be salty about deathless minions since my V-lord on zombie dragon failed all 14 of her rolls yesterday

Deathless Minions sucks now - ha ha! Every now and then I forget that its distance is really reduced as well and leave a unit out the way to die!

I play Death Guard in 40k and every time I get to roll for Disgustingly Resilient (5+ Deathless Minions save, basically) a tear comes to my eye for Death.  

[Lightbox]

14 minutes ago, lare2 said:

Deathless Minions sucks now - ha ha! Every now and then I forget that its distance is really reduced as well and leave a unit out the way to die!

I play Death Guard in 40k and every time I get to roll for Disgustingly Resilient (5+ Deathless Minions save, basically) a tear comes to my eye for Death.  

Agreed. I feel the nerfs to it were so unnecessary...

 

Hopefully LoN will give us something worth the allegiance

 

At least our warlord traits and artefacts can be pretty fun. I do wanna try out the Ruby vial as the dude on that podcast seemed to rate it highly... possibly good on a turn you can get all your charges off to smash people.

 

I'll be honest I'm very interested to see how they form and do abilities for each of the new mortarch legions to make them fun and characterful. 6 Alleigance reworks would be super interesting to see how diversified they might all be. There's a chance they'll be near identical with a couple specials tacked on but I hope not. I also wanna see what they do with spell lores for us (provided we get them), I can forsee a lot of potential replenishing units or dealing weird curses & damage. I'd love to see more buffs & debuffs than mortal wound spells tbh as extra synergy is much more fun than dealing an extra wound or two with wizards in the hero phase (never feels too cost effective to take lots of wizards unless they have neat unique spells or the spell lores are good)

[lare2]

53 minutes ago, Lightbox said:

I can forsee a lot of potential replenishing units or dealing weird curses & damage. I'd love to see more buffs & debuffs than mortal wound spells tbh as extra synergy is much more fun than dealing an extra wound or two with wizards in the hero phase (never feels too cost effective to take lots of wizards unless they have neat unique spells or the spell lores are good)

Along these lines would be great!

Know I might be asking too much here but I'd also like to see something address battleshock. For the bravest army in the game, I lose more models to battleshock than I do to anything else! I always find it daft that zombies or skellies would run away... it just doesn't make sense to me!

[CoffeeGrunt]

It's the necromantic energies keeping them walking starting to fail.

That said, yeah, Death could use some Battleshock mitigation tools.

[TheKingInYellow]

So apparently Neferata is getting the Soulblight keyword.  News trickling out from LVO.

[TheKingInYellow]

Also Heroes will directly heal units now, Skeletons lose the ability to bring back their own models.

[TheKingInYellow]

New named vamp, Prince Vhordrai.   Lance, chalice, shield on Dragon.  I've got the Warscroll for him but I don't think we are allowed to post it.

Generic Heroes heal up to 3 units D3 wounds.  Mortarch can do 4 units, Nagash 5.

[TheKingInYellow]

Lance and dragons maw attack are -2 rend!

[Yeled]

3 minutes ago, TheKingInYellow said:

New named vamp, Prince Vhordrai.   Lance, chalice, shield on Dragon.  I've got the Warscroll for him but I don't think we are allowed to post it.

Generic Heroes heal up to 3 units D3 wounds.  Mortarch can do 4 units, Nagash 5.

By heal, do you mean heal wounds or return models?

[TheKingInYellow]

It heals D3.  If there are no wounded models it can bring back models up to that number of wounds.  Must bring back models at full wounds though, so this will never work for models with 4+ wounds.  Also only works on models with a new keyword : "SUMMONABLE"

[TheKingInYellow]

Okay this is official from LVO, so it's released by GW.  Should not count as a leak:

 

New Vamp https://imgur.com/a/SST97

[TheKingInYellow]

Nice summary from the Death fb page:

banners : dont revive models, reduce bravery 6''
black knight: 2 att 3 to hit
Necromancer cant be mounted anymore
New healing system D3W or D3models 2-3-4 units. per hero.
no more wight king with banner
return of vampire lord on abyssal terror...?
morghast can be equipped as they please. archai and harbinger stil lexist
arkhan is a beast healer
vamp prince on zombie dragon and new throne BloodseekerPallanquin

So now we act like a true undead summuning army, 2k games-5 hero max: that each roll a dice on 2-4 units= D3w or D3w worth of models
INSANE amout of regrowth

 

[AverageBoss]

Vampire Lord lost his debuff spell. Blood Knights no longer come back and instead deal -1 bravery, otherwise unchanged. Nagash can target 5 units for healing and reroll the heal rolls.

[Yeled]

12 minutes ago, TheKingInYellow said:

So now we act like a true undead summuning army, 2k games-5 hero max: that each roll a dice on 2-4 units= D3w or D3w worth of models
INSANE amout of regrowth

I don't play Death but this really does sound like a great mechanic to represent an army powered by necromancy.

[shinros]

7 minutes ago, Yeled said:

I don't play Death but this really does sound like a great mechanic to represent an army powered by necromancy.

Yup, pretty much even wight kings are using "magic" now. It's great it's quite flavourful. 

[Sception]

I expected the loss of mount option for the necromancer, but no more wight king BSB is a real blow.  I love my wight king bsb conversion, that one really hurts my heart.  Maybe FW will release rules for it, since they used to make a model, but they don't anymore so that's a long shot.

Summonable business sounds interesting, makes it important for opponents to remove our heroes.  But then again, unless something changes, it's also super easy for competitive opponents to do so, so I'm afraid that in practice it will actually be a lot weaker than units that heal themselves.  Also it further ostracizes tomb king compendium units, since none of them have the keyword.

Named heroes that amount to 'regular hero with different paint job' is certainly one way to round out our cast and unit selection even without any new models in the pipeline.

All in all, very interesting.  I won't call it 'good' or 'bad' yet, just interesting.  Bigger changes than I was expecting.

Oh, except for the black knight buffs, that's very encouraging.  Would have preferred if their lance rules were also changed to more resemble grave guard weapons.  Like, double damage on a 6+ to wound, with +1 on to wound rolls when charging.  But even if nothing else changes, two attacks and a better hit value should have me fishing mine out of the bin.

Assuming Legion of Sacrament can take them.

[skool]

Hope Hex wraiths also get buffed.

So are all these new war scrolls coming from Aussies who have the app?

[Sception]

Re: summonable.  The more I think about it, the more worried I am.  Banners are free, but heroes are expensive.  Filling out your hero slots to make use of this ability will literally cost you entire units up front.  Banners can't be sniped out of our units, but 5 wound heroes can be removed with contemptuous ease in this game, likely targeted for removal before your now less numerous than before units have even begun to take damage that they could even try to regenerate.

I hope I'm wrong, but this has the potential to turn out to be a *hard* nerf.

[skool]

5 minutes ago, Sception said:

Re: summonable.  The more I think about it, the more worried I am.  Banners are free, but heroes are expensive.  Filling out your hero slots to make use of this ability will literally cost you entire units up front.  Banners can't be sniped out of our units, but 5 wound heroes can be removed with contemptuous ease in this game, likely targeted for removal before your now less numerous than before units have even begun to take damage that they could even try to regenerate.

I hope I'm wrong, but this has the potential to turn out to be a *hard* nerf.

Very true!!! Hopefully there will be rules in LoN to delegate wounds on all heroes to other models, like the necromancer did. Otherwise all the deep strike and shoot list are going to really hurt!!