Age of Sigmar: Second Edition

[Gecktron]

3 minutes ago, Tip4Tap said:

I think the thing that worries/gets me the most is not knowing what is and what’s not going to be supported going forward. In 40k I know I can buy into most armies because they will 100% get new books/models going forward. 

I feel (this is just my opinion) that AoS is all over the place with releases. Yes people want to see new models and new armies and I think GW are doing an amazing job with the new ranges. However, people also want older factions to be fleshed out. Do we really need yet another storm cast chamber? 

We got an Update for Nurgle, new rules for a unified Death army, a great update to the Daughters of Khaine range and a giant release for Nighthaunts in the near future. Plus the rumored new Destruction and Chaos armies plus a Slaanesh Release somewhere between fall 2018 and early 2019. 

Thats a lot of fleshing out of existing factions. Also, GW hasn't phased out any army that survived the great purge yet. Its not a question if your army gets an update but when.

[Tip4Tap]

1 minute ago, Vanger said:

It's not the same design team. And communication between teams definitely needs improvement, just look at how GW and how Forge World designs unit profiles, rules and point costs.

What I would definitely love is a statement from GW what their plan is with AoS factions. Leave them fragmented and publish "Legion" battletomes or once again rework them into more cohesive armies. But that would be a commitment and I don't know if the AoS guys are ready for that.

Yeah I agree, I don’t care about rumours and what not. I just want some sort of security going forward.

[Tip4Tap]

1 minute ago, Gecktron said:

We got an Update for Nurgle, new rules for a unified Death army, a great update to the Daughters of Khaine range and a giant release for Nighthaunts in the near future. Plus the rumored new Destruction and Chaos armies plus a Slaanesh Release somewhere between fall 2018 and early 2019. 

Thats a lot of fleshing out of existing factions. Also, GW hasn't phased out any army that survived the great purge yet. Its not a question if your army gets an update but when.

Destruction rumours have been floating around for ages, I think I first heard a rumour 4-6 months ago. Doesn’t exactly thrill me.

The point I was kind of driving at is I feel instead of focussing on new models and what not, DoK, Deepkin etc They should first bring older stuff up to date. Ironjawz, Sylvaneth, fyreslayers, Slaves to darkness, skaven, Slaanesh etc. I guess I just want it all at once! Greedy like that

[Enoby]

14 minutes ago, Tip4Tap said:

I think the thing that worries/gets me the most is not knowing what is and what’s not going to be supported going forward. In 40k I know I can buy into most armies because they will 100% get new books/models going forward. 

I feel (this is just my opinion) that AoS is all over the place with releases. Yes people want to see new models and new armies and I think GW are doing an amazing job with the new ranges. However, people also want older factions to be fleshed out.

Do we really need yet another storm cast chamber? 

I like everyone else wants to know if I spend money on an army it’s going to get some love going forward. I don’t want to wait 2 years for a new release etc. It almost seems to me if you want guaranteed stuff go Stormcast or just wait.

 

I agree. It's why I've chosen Slaanesh as the army I'm going forward with; despite being the least popular Chaos god, I'm confident it will get support throughout AoS. I was thinking about a small Order Serpentis force but decided against it, thinking that it was likely they'd be phased out or just perpetually ignored. A lack of confidence in future releases has put me off really delving into some of the newer factions even though I love some of the models (if anything, I'll probably end up using the ones I like for conversions).   

[EccentricCircle]

At present there are 60 distinct factions listed for Age of Sigmar on the GW webstore. That is twice as many as the 29 presently listed for 40K. That means that even if they release something for an army once a month, it will take them five years to actually cover everything.
However its interesting to note that they put out "faction focus" articles for a total of 25 factions, which is more on a par with 40K, leaving them room to continue bringing in new stuff every so often. (although it would still take them two years to release battletomes for everything, at a rate of one a month...) It thus wouldn't surprise me to see Aelves, Grots, Beasts of Chaos, and even Skaven treated as single factions in second edition, albeit with different allegiances within them. It will be interesting to see how the new rulebook divides them up, i've not had a chance to look at one yet.

[Infeston]

34 minutes ago, EccentricCircle said:

At present there are 60 distinct factions listed for Age of Sigmar on the GW webstore. That is twice as many as the 29 presently listed for 40K. That means that even if they release something for an army once a month, it will take them five years to actually cover everything.
However its interesting to note that they put out "faction focus" articles for a total of 25 factions, which is more on a par with 40K, leaving them room to continue bringing in new stuff every so often. (although it would still take them two years to release battletomes for everything, at a rate of one a month...) It thus wouldn't surprise me to see Aelves, Grots, Beasts of Chaos, and even Skaven treated as single factions in second edition, albeit with different allegiances within them. It will be interesting to see how the new rulebook divides them up, i've not had a chance to look at one yet.

Which raises the question why they had to split so many factions even more at the start of AoS. The community always requested to flesh the factions out or unite them with each other again .

I still don't understand the reason for dividing all the Ogor factions. I see no reason lore-wise and rule-wise to divide them this way.

One Ogor faction would have been cool. Or maybe two Ogor factions (Beastclaw Raiders and Gutbusters). But why are Man-Eaters a seperate faction? Why are Firebellies a seperate faction? Those are both factions consisting of one warscroll. And there are other examples for other factions, which only consist of one or two models as well. A simple solution would be to integrate them into one of the bigger Ogor factions, which was suggested very often

At the time they made this I was okay with it, because I thought that this would mean that they will flesh out those factions with new models and concepts. I thought they planned a fiery Ogor faction and another faction of Ogors travelling all over the world (or a bounty hunter faction). But this didn't happen.

These are the things they should have prioritized on in the new edition. Instead of creating new rules they should have started to clean up all the different divided factions or unite them with each other. A new edition would have been a perfect opportunity. I mean people are criticizing this since the moment GW splitted all the factions. 

@EccentricCircle What I wanted to say with this is: We don't need a battletome for each faction. We maybe only need battletomes for the factions with many models. Or maybe a battletome for all the armies which they portayed in the faction focus. The rest could be integrated in those factions in some way or used united in a different faction. The coolest thing would be if they would flesh those small factions out and add new models. But I think this is just wishful thinking at the moment.

[GeneralZero]

It's been a while since I say that GW should do what they did for Death: Legion of Nagash was a great entry for death players covering almost everything except FEC that already had a battletome and NH which  will have one (they knew it when they released LoN).

So, the many factions too poor in units (some have only 2 entries)  could be gathered in "Legion of xxx" like battletome: for example:

legion of greenz AKA ork+gob+trolls and eventually some additions (giants etc...) (destruction)

legions of ogors 

Legions of free cities (human like? order)

legions of dwarves (order)

Legions of elves (serpentis, phenix, dragons etc...)

....

[AaronWilson]

What this FAQ really taught me is, despite GW clarifying things rather precisely people will still try to question if it advantages them. 

[Sheriff]

6 minutes ago, AaronWIlson said:

What this FAQ really taught me is, despite GW clarifying things rather precisely people will still try to question if it advantages them. 

Which is totally justified if the game is designed to benefit battletome armies, in fact the community has a responsibility to tone down such biases towards new armies. 

[Bloodmaster]

15 minutes ago, Infeston said:

Which raises the question why they had to split so many factions even more at the start of AoS.

Simply put, beacuse GW during the dreaded Kriby era was a hughe steaming pile of... well a giant mess. There was one motivation and only one - grab cash, do it fast, nerds will buy whatever we offer and tell them to, no matter the price and if it makes sense. They didn't know what to do with AoS and made things up on the fly.

With Rountree thing got better day by day up until a more thought through approce to AoS we saw since the beginning of 2018, at the latest*, and the culmination in AoS 2.0. With the new edition it is safe to bet, that some of the fractured factions will be folded into combined armies, e.g. see Aelves. Others probably will be dropped. Best way would be to let go of a whole lot of old WHFB factions and models and redesigning factions.

For example, give us a neutral Azyr Aelve, Free guild and dwarf faction, each seperated but possible to allie to represent different free cities and settlements in all mortal relams. Its not the easiest to pull of but would result in a hughe opportunity. May be keept the craftines and  inventivenessof dwarfs, the magical talents and highly specialised troops of elves and the numbers and resilience of humans. Make them all work as seperat armies but really flourish in combination.

It would leave room for factions like Wanderes and other flavourlike Subfactions  as indidiual armies, that can have abilities like cross-GA alliences or even be placed in other GAs.

Give us stuff like human followers of Nagash that are not part of LoN but of GA Death. Give usn a living version of Khemri, that is in GA Order but originates from shyish, have a hugh death cult but are rebellious against nagash, due to reasons. Would make an intersting Narrative and put a thorn in nagash side, that his old home is recreated and disloyal to him, right before his nose but out of reach....

 

GW, please be more creative and cut some dead weight from the WHFB days

[syph0n]

21 minutes ago, GeneralZero said:

It's been a while since I say that GW should do what they did for Death: Legion of Nagash was a great entry for death players covering almost everything except FEC that already had a battletome and NH which  will have one (they knew it when they released LoN).

So, the many factions too poor in units (some have only 2 entries)  could be gathered in "Legion of xxx" like battletome: for example:

legion of greenz AKA ork+gob+trolls and eventually some additions (giants etc...) (destruction)

legions of ogors 

Legions of free cities (human like? order)

legions of dwarves (order)

Legions of elves (serpentis, phenix, dragons etc...)

....

Whilst I agree in principle, isn't that pretty much what the Grand Alliances do? I know they lack artefacts and allegiance abilities, but GW have at least partially addressed this via Malign Sorcery and some of the Free Cities. 

I think there needs to be a bit of understanding that many of the factions are just tiny chunks of the Mortal Realms and don't really have a large enough population by themselves to be an army. Legion books might address that somewhat, but they make me feel a bit like Grand Alliance books anyway. Maybe if we have a set of new GA books, there could be subsections dedicated to the different races if people choose to assemble an army that way. Truthfully though, I suspect mixed alliance lists are supposed to cover this. 

Alternatively, some of the more bizarre factions like Shadowblades could have the Dark Riders as Battleline for Mixed Order lists for example, so they're not totally useless as a faction. 

 

[Trayanee]

4 minutes ago, Sheriff said:

Which is totally justified if the game is designed to benefit battletome armies, in fact the community has a responsibility to tone down such biases towards new armies. 

That is pretty poor excuse for bending rules. GW was really too conservative with AoS start. They should have given the axe to much more of the old stuff and only bring it back with a new tome/faction refresh,

[RuneBrush]

19 minutes ago, Infeston said:

One Ogor faction would have been cool. Or maybe two Ogor factions (Beastclaw Raiders and Gutbusters). But why are Man-Eaters a seperate faction? Why are Firebellies a seperate faction? Those are both factions consisting of one warscroll. And there are other examples for other factions, which only consist of one or two models as well. A simple solution would be to integrate them into one of the bigger Ogor factions, which was suggested very often

At the time they made this I was okay with it, because I thought that this would mean that they will flesh out those factions with new models and concepts. I thought they planned a fiery Ogor faction and another faction of Ogors travelling all over the world (or a bounty hunter faction). But this didn't happen.

One thing to bear in mind is that the way keywords are used now is completely different to how they were when many of these warscrolls were written, also keywords aren't necessarily there for game reasons.

With each battletome GW are tackling the army based on the warscrolls available.  A good example of this is the new Death stuff.  In order to build a Grand Host of Nagash army you basically have a list of warscrolls you can include - the only common keyword between them is "Death".  This allows GW to keep using factional keywords such as Malignant that have little to no in-game impact.

I fully expect Ogors to get some similar to this when the battletome is done, however I'd far rather them take their time than cobble something together

[EccentricCircle]

Legions of Nagash does seem a lot like an expanded version of the Grand Alliance Death book. I wonder whether, instead of grand alliance books they are planning to do something similar for each GA which includes everything which doesn't have its own tome yet. That way everyone has a level playing field, but the tomes feel a bit meatier than the old GA books.

[Kiloran]

They edit in a text overlay correcting the rule. Simple and cheap. 

[amysrevenge]

22 minutes ago, Kiloran said:

They edit in a text overlay correcting the rule. Simple and cheap. 

Maybe deemed too amateur looking?  I'm not saying that's how it went, but that's totally how it could have gone down (lol)

 

All of AoS2 is a smashing success for me, with only two exceptions.  I was blindsided by the Ogor base sizes, and utterly disappointed in the way Turn 1 Priority turned out.  If it had remained as per AoS1 all the way through I probably wouldn't have even noticed, let alone be disappointed by it.  But to see it there in clear English (and German haha) writing to be so greatly improved, only to have it taken away...  That hurts.

[High Overlord Xenu]

"I know, I'll play Kharadron Overlords! The models look awesome and they're a new army, so they're sure to be supported for years to come!"

*proceeds to get hit with the nerf bat so often that KO become on-par with non-battletome armies, and the battletome barely resembles current rules to boot*

[hughwyeth]

26 minutes ago, High Overlord Xenu said:

"I know, I'll play Kharadron Overlords! The models look awesome and they're a new army, so they're sure to be supported for years to come!"

*proceeds to get hit with the nerf bat so often that KO become on-par with non-battletome armies, and the battletome barely resembles current rules to boot*

I promise you a decent KO player will still do very well. The disparity between "best" and "worst" armies is not that great. I've seen mixed skaven and moonclan grots beat a load of "best" armies. If you got into KO because you like the models, you made the right decision. If you got them because they're powerful, every army's power will change +/- 5% every GH, so KO are still great. 

[amysrevenge]

It's hard to see in the present, but looking backward in just the 3 years of AoS, the tippy-top tier army list has swung and flipped and varied pretty wildly.  I mean, at one point about 2 years ago, Mixed Destruction (grots and stonehorns) was the bees knees.  And the top of the heap has shifted and swayed.  Tzeentch probably had the longest uninterrupted run at the top, but that's been interrupted now seems like.

There was never this sort of volatility at the top in editions past.  The new hotness would come in and join the winners' circle, and some of the older winners would slowly fade out.  But there weren't these seismic shifts and flips and flops.

[High Overlord Xenu]

12 minutes ago, hughwyeth said:

I promise you a decent KO player will still do very well. The disparity between "best" and "worst" armies is not that great. I've seen mixed skaven and moonclan grots beat a load of "best" armies. If you got into KO because you like the models, you made the right decision. If you got them because they're powerful, every army's power will change +/- 5% every GH, so KO are still great. 

I did get into them for the models. Then I unexpectedly won two tournaments back-to-back with a Zilfin Dropship before my local meta could shift to compensate, and I got the taste for blood.

[chord]

4 hours ago, Bloodmaster said:

Simply put, beacuse GW during the dreaded Kriby era was a hughe steaming pile of... well a giant mess. There was one motivation and only one - grab cash, do it fast, nerds will buy whatever we offer and tell them to, no matter the price and if it makes sense. They didn't know what to do with AoS and made things up on the fly.

With Rountree thing got better day by day up until a more thought through approce to AoS we saw since the beginning of 2018, at the latest*, and the culmination in AoS 2.0. 

Having started with GW at the beginning of AOS I see AOS 2.0 as a cash grab.  Compare the following :

To play Open/Narrative/Matched (including multiplayer, artifacts, etc)  in 2016 all you really needed was:

 Free Warscrolls, Free Rules and GHB 2016 (priced at $25 btw)

To Play Open/Narrative/Matched (including multiplayer, artifacts, etc) all you really need is:

Free Warscrolls, Free Rules, Core Rule book (for realm stuff, multiplayer),  Malign Sorcery, and GHB 2018 (no multiplayer)

Maybe this is normal for wargaming that things get more expensive as the version number goes up?  (not sure this is my first wargaming system)

[Gecktron]

2 minutes ago, chord said:

Having started with GW at the beginning of AOS I see AOS 2.0 as a cash grab.  Compare the following :

To play Open/Narrative/Matched (including multiplayer, artifacts, etc)  in 2016 all you really needed was:

 Free Warscrolls, Free Rules and GHB 2016 (priced at $25 btw)

To Play Open/Narrative/Matched (including multiplayer, artifacts, etc) all you really need is:

Free Warscrolls, Free Rules, Core Rule book (for realm stuff, multiplayer),  Malign Sorcery, and GHB 2018 (no multiplayer)

Maybe this is normal for wargaming that things get more expensive as the version number goes up?  (not sure this is my first wargaming system)

You dont need any of this. Id even argue the Generals Handbook become even less of a necessity. Most of the rules of one have been moved into the free core rules. The only Matched Play rule exclusive to the Handbook is that you can't choose another general when your first one dies. That it. The rest is either part of the core rules or can be found in the scrollbuilder app. 

Everything else is a add-on. Malign Sorcery is absolut not a must-have. Same goes for realm rules or multiplayer games (just use the old handbook for coalition of death, everything else doesn't need extra rules). 

[decker_cky]

23 minutes ago, amysrevenge said:

There was never this sort of volatility at the top in editions past.  The new hotness would come in and join the winners' circle, and some of the older winners would slowly fade out.  But there weren't these seismic shifts and flips and flops.

Safe to assume you did not play in 7th edition?

[chord]

1 minute ago, Gecktron said:

You dont need any of this. Id even argue the Generals Handbook become even less of a necessity. Most of the rules of one have been moved into the free core rules. The only Matched Play rule exclusive to the Handbook is that you can't choose another general when your first one dies. That it. The rest is either part of the core rules or can be found in the scrollbuilder app. 

Everything else is a add-on. Malign Sorcery is absolut not a must-have. Same goes for realm rules or multiplayer games (just use the old handbook for coalition of death, everything else doesn't need extra rules). 

No offense but that always gets said, but almost everyone wants allegiance abilities, artifacts etc.  So you need the GHB to play with others.  If you want to play battleplans, you need some battleplans.    If people want to use realm rules, you need to have it so you know what they are.  etc.

For pick up gaming (which is my area ), then you need to have the common things.

[amysrevenge]

I did play in 7th.  New stuff came in and joined the top armies, older stuff faded away.  You never saw a shift where something old was unexpectedly catapulted into the top (other than via new army books, which made them "new stuff" - there wasn't any actual "new" stuff, only re-releases of old stuff).