AoS 2e previews

[Sception]

But these artefacts don't represent where the battle is taking place, they represent where your army originally comes from.  No battles may take place in azyr, but it is where the majority of stomcast and free peoples armies are based.

[Honk]

well, that settles it: Azyr is boring and stupid 

[Sception]

50 minutes ago, Honk said:

well, that settles it: Azyr is boring and stupid 

That's all well and good, but isn't really a reason not to have items to represent armies that come from Azyr when the fluff very much says a lot of armies come from Azyr.

[Nevar]

1 hour ago, Sception said:

That's all well and good, but isn't really a reason not to have items to represent armies that come from Azyr when the fluff very much says a lot of armies come from Azyr.

True, but at the same time the type of artifacts and stuff made in Azyr are the sort of weapons and equipment the Stormcasts are wielding already.  For example the Starsoul Maces are auto d3 MWs, and some Stormcasts carry a couple of those per squad if you want.  Imagine an artifact you could give your characters that just did d3 MWs in melee when you attacked with it, that sounds par for the course in some artifacts.

I think it is safe to assume the artifacts are from all the other realms and Azyr is going to be the one 'forgotten' mainly because the Stormcasts themselves are sort of that realm's 'artifacts' of power.  All the other realms give rise to random and legendary stuff because of their own separate nature from where the narration of our story comes from... which is the mortal/order angle of things.

I don't think your points are incorrect, but I think it does make the most sense of all the realms to not have artifacts.

[ZaelART]

I suppose in GW’s eyes Azyr is equivocal to Sigmar and Stormcast. I suppose no other realms narrative has been driven so much by a singular force. I’m not that familiar with the fluff but is there anything out there that details what Azyr was like before Sigmar? Or what it might be like without him? Maybe Azyr is boring for that reason. If there were any Azyrian artifacts, they would definitely be Sigmar themed... and then it would just be weird to have your Maggotkin of Nurgle wielding said artifacts.

[Honk]

7 hours ago, ZaelART said:

then it would just be weird to have your Maggotkin of Nurgle wielding said artifacts.

If they can lay their grubby hands on one, they definitely would defile and use it.

maybe we’re wrong, maybe the announcement is wrong, maybe two realms are combined...

if my fluff is correct Azyr is uncontested and locked up, so there shouldn’t be an usable endless spell either. Not that they don’t exist, but because azyr is locked and not open for a good scrap

[Sception]

Preview up for measuring and piling in, and this is actually a preview I’ve been eager to see, because this aspect of the core rules of AoS is one of the most obnoxious and in need of updating.  https://www.warhammer-community.com/2018/06/03/3rd-june-rules-preview-measuring-and-piling-ingw-homepage-post-2/

Measuring to bases is just common sense.  Yeah, it leaves a lot of legacy players, including myself, with the ‘wrong bases’ on most their models, but it’s not like that hasn’t happened before, particularly in 40k (monsters and larger models going from square to round bases, and generally moving to bigger bases over time, terminators moving from 25mm to 40mm, regular marines moving from 25mm to 32mm more recently).  Official rules for handling that have never been needed.  In casual games generally no one cared, and tournaments could handle their requirements themselves.

The bigger thing is piling in, and frustratingly GW fixed the wrong thing here.  The problem with piling in in original AoS is that piling in must be towards the nearest enemy model.  I don’t know what the correct wording should be, it’s a tricky issue, but the current and 2nd ed wording creates situations where units can’t pile in at all because there’s some other enemy unit not involved in the combat at all vaguely nearby, and these situations are awkward and exploitable and gamey and immersion breaking.

Instead, models are allowed to pile in so that they end up no further from the enemy model, instead of closer to.  This basically means models already in base to base can slide around the model they’re touching, instead of being locked in place.  Which, sure, whatever.  I don’t really feel that’s better or worse, and regardless it really doesn’t the aspect of piling in that actually creates problems in the game.

To me this is a bad sign, because the picture I’m getting of 2nd edition is that GW is layering a whole lot of extra business on top of the games shakey, half-baked foundation, but they don’t seem to be putting in the work to actually fix the problem areas at the game’s core.

[Dracothjay]

54 minutes ago, Sception said:

To me this is a bad sign, because the picture I’m getting of 2nd edition is that GW is layering a whole lot of extra business on top of the games shakey, half-baked foundation, but they don’t seem to be putting in the work to actually fix the problem areas at the game’s core.

I hear what your saying, but I disagree to an extent. I have had numerous games where my units were locked in combat and when it came to piling in I wished I could simply slide my models around the enemy bases, still staying adjacent to the closest enemy models but also making room for some extra bodies to move in.

im excited for the changes, but like I said, I understand completely your concerns.

[Lemondish]

1 hour ago, Sception said:

To me this is a bad sign, because the picture I’m getting of 2nd edition is that GW is layering a whole lot of extra business on top of the games shakey, half-baked foundation, but they don’t seem to be putting in the work to actually fix the problem areas at the game’s core.

I'm going to be jumping into AoS for the second edition, but want to learn all I can beforehand. What are these problem areas you speak of, and should I reconsider?

[Sception]

The main problem areas I see are

The double turn.  On the balance side, I've seen far too many games decided by the roll for turn priority.  You can try to play for it or play around it, but no matter how you slice it, this one roll every round carries far, FAR too much weight.  Even worse from the pure gameplay experience, like Warhammer Fantasy before it, and like 40k, AoS's player turn structure leaves way too little for one player to do while the other is taking their turn, especially if the player taking their turn is running a shooty army that avoids or withdraws from melee engagements.  This isn't too bad in small games of up to 1000 points, but especially in larger games of 2k points or more, it can get downright boring as you wait for your opponent to finish playing their turn out before you get to participate in the game again apart from rolling saves and removing models, and when you factor in that you might have to wait through two whole opponent turns back to back before you get to play again....  To put it simply, the double turn literally doubles the problems with the already problematic player turn structure.

Either overpowered shooting, or underpowered melee, when facing small heroes.  How you count the balance of this is subjective, but either way what there is is wrong.  Shooting is just very strong.  The ability to pick out your targets freely at long range, and especially pick out heroes with laser precision even using ballista or the like, lets shooting-heavy armies quickly and easily drop the game's many small buffing heroes.  Seriously, every faction has bunches of this kind of hero, and it feels like the game wants you to design your armies around them, but then you run into one of the games many shooty armies who snipe out your heroes with contemptuous ease before slowly cutting down your unbuffed units.  Now, you'd think the answer to this would be to make such heroes untargetable, as they are in 40k, or as they could be made in oldhammer fantasy by joining them to units, but then the players of shooty armies cry foul, saying those force multiplying buff heroes would be stupidly overpowered if you had to kill the units around them first.  Except, that's exactly what melee armies already have to do, since most units can't just walk through those units to charge the heroes behind them, and even flying units are generally prevented from doing so by the 3" no-landing zone around enemy models.  The offensive output of shooting units is not, on the whole, noticeably weaker than their melee counterparts, so if the ability of shooting armies to shoot whatever they want is fair due to how powerful buffing effects are, then melee armies are just underpowered, but if melee armies are fine, then the ability of shooting armies to snipe out any and everything is unfair.  We see slight nudges to this with some of the shooting updates, but the underlying problem is still there.

Rules that were designed to be easier to write rather than intuitive to play.  This is impart a consequence of the shift of rules weight from a heavy core ruleset with relatively light unit rules to an absolute minimum core ruleset with almost all special rules and interactions needing to be handled by rules on the individual unit warscrolls.  There are a lot of examples of this, but some examples include:

• Pile in towards nearest enemy model.  To save space in writing this rule, no preference is given for enemy models in units that are actively engaged with the unit that the piling in model belongs to.  As a result, if a big unit is in a fight with an enemy unit to one side, such that a model on the opposite side of the unit is 9" away, but that same model is 8" away from an enemy model not engaged in that combat at all, then said model literally cannot pile in towards the combat.  Worse, since pile in moves must maintain coherency, other models in the unit that are closer to the fight might also be prevented from piling in.  When this situation comes up by accident, it's awkward and annoying.  When it is deliberately created, it's gamist and unfun.
• Re-rolls before modifiers.  To save text on handling some awkward interactions, all rerolls happen before any modifiers in AoS.  But the most common rerolls are for missed hits or failed wounds, so if you hit on a 4+, and re-roll misses, and some enemy rule applies a -1 to hit penalty, then if your roll a four you miss, but you don't get to re-roll this miss, because it isn't a miss until the modifier is applied, which happens after re-rolls.  This isn't so much game-breaking as it is frustrating and counter-intuitive and generally unfun.
• necromantic recursion.  A problem specific to the undead in general and the Legions of Nagash, we have multiple rules that let you restore wounds or slain models to certain units, usually d3 at a time.  So if you use such an ability on a unit of 2 wound knights that have lost two models and suffer a wound on a third, and you roll 3 on the d3, what happens?  Intuitively, you'd restore 3 wounds, bringing the wounded model back to health and reviving one of the slain ones, but that's not what happens.  Instead you heal the wounded model, and the extra 2 wounds are wasted.  Or if you use the ability on the same unit again, now with no wounded models, and roll a 1, what should happen intuitively?  One model back with one wound remaining, right?  But no, nothing happens, and the ability is wasted, because you didn't bring a whole dude back.  The intuitive way such healing would work, restoring wounded models one wound at a time and lapping over to bring back a dead model with one remaining wound before restoring wounds one at a time to it, that's how it worked in oldhammer, but that's because the long explanation it would take to properly lay out how that worked could be printed once in the army book, and every such ability could just reference that write up.  But that's not how rules work anymore, they have to be fully printed on each unit entry with such an ability, so instead we got something less intuitive but shorter to write.

And there are other examples of this as well.

At least the measurement issue was fixed. via base-to-base measuring.  The previous rule could leave models unable to attack or be attacked in melee unless you literally put your models on top of the other model's base, due to being too far from the edges of their bases.  Archaon was a big offender here.

 

I don't mean to say AoS is a bad game overall.  I do think it was at release, but it's come a long way since then, and what we've seen of 2e so far mostly seem to be continued incremental improvements.  The current state of the game after this past year is actually pretty decent, and if you're looking to get into the game i'd definitely recommend you give it a try.  I'm just frustrated because a whole second edition of the game was an opportunity for fixes that were more than just incremental in nature, and while their heaping big old additions to the game, particularly in terms of spellcasting, adjustments to the underlying skeleton continue to be rather timid.

[kenshin620]

Well I mean this is GW we're talking about.

 

I distinctly remember a few years ago people railing against GW because they themselves stated approximately something along the lines of "We don't make games, we make miniatures". You know...despite being called GAMES workshop and also writing rules for the past 25 years or so. Well could be worse I suppose, could be like Blizzard who have the largest card game video game with massive amounts of esports support (and money) despite the utter randomness of the silly game.

[Nevar]

Two things.

I agree with Sception about the state of this update.  I feel like they identified issues, but instead of directly solving where the issue was they layered what amounts to 'band-aids' onto them.  AoS2.0 will absolutely be an improvement over the current game it seems, and AoS has improved mightily thanks to the efforts of the GW and their team.  Props to where it belongs, but most of these fixes are just patches onto a flawed situation.  The Beastclaw Raiders faction focus even reminded us all with glee that they can delete buffing heroes at range on a 2+ from six mortal wounds.  I know there are issues with the 40k character targeting rules, but they are still better than the contempteous ease a lot of armies can just select out all of your buff heroes.  LoS needed to be wound transfer to nearby units or something at least.  The -1 to hit is welcome but not enough.  Likewise I agree with Sception's detailed ideas about the other problem areas including double turns and the like and there is no reason to rehash what he said so well already.

Secondly, I noticed when I was reading the endless spells for the new Ulgu spell portal thing... that is specifically states that "IF" the spell is cast in Ulgu then it can be placed anywhere on the table instead of it's normal limits.  This is pretty strong evidence that at least the endless spells are not realm specific.

[Honk]

Still not liking the pile in rules... especially for the large 40 skelli blob, the nearest enemy model might be already in combat with 4 other skellis. Terrain and positioning often makes it more or less impossible for a large group to encircle an enemy unit, because at the start of combat, it was declared, that that one model was the closest... please ignore all the other models.

[Sception]

Another thing that doesnt seem to be getting fixed is keuwords.  40k improved on this with faction keywords distinct from descriptive keywords, and with unit type keywords.  AoS 2.0 doesnt seem to be changing scrolls generally, so those bits of useful rules tech arent getting ported over.

[RuneBrush]

I think we need to be careful with looking too closely at the snippets of information we have and comparing them to the current state of the game.  There are a lot of pieces that are changing and until we have everything in our hands and (most importantly) have played some games, we don't know if we're going to have the same or different issues.  Completely understand people's reservations - personally I'm still concerned about sniping out those key characters, but we've a few changes that are going to help a bit - so who knows.

@Lemondish one piece of advice I'd give is to not worry too much about where the game currently is.  The new edition plus and generals handbook are going to change how every army plays, so what's currently an issue may not necessarily be an issue.  Death is looking pretty good all things considered - everything apart from Flesh Eater Courts is contained within a battletome that was written with the new edition in mind, and we've a brand new faction (which has parts that will simply slot into our existing armies!)

[Honk]

I think the Legions will still be strong in v2. Still not a total wishlist, but I guess even skyfire spammers will have issues and reservations with the new edition ?

on the other hand the summoning rules really brings back FEC, from punching bags to playable I think/hope...

let‘s see what emerges after the teasing and the guesswork is being hit hard by a new book

[Arael_Greywings]

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2018/06/05/soul-wars-announced/

Ok, I am seriously getting wet just from reading this^^ So much looking forward to the new starter box^^

[CoffeeGrunt]

Mortarch of Grief looks pretty epic in that trailer as well. C'mon GW, show us the damn model!

[ZaelART]

I originally thought she was riding something and had a big old head-dress.

But it looks like she is an actual big old ghost... Nagash size?

[CoffeeGrunt]

The silhouette teased next to the Craven King looks like she's floating with two clusters of spirits around her.

[Sception]

Soul wars on warhammer community:  https://www.warhammer-community.com/2018/06/05/soul-wars-announced/

Nighthaunt preview 2 (stats for wizard, executioner, chainrasps): https://www.warhammer-community.com/2018/06/05/faction-focus-nighthaunt-part-2/

I'm... not going to have enough money to buy all the stuff I'll want.  That starter box looks amazing.  The malign sorcery box looks good too, though it is going to be the expected big expensive box of every spell, instead of my personal hoped for separate cheaper boxes for the individual spells you want.  After getting the starter box, it's going to be a while before I can pick it up.

I don't know about the stormcast end, but the nighthaunt set in the starter box is the rather generous helping previously rumored.  Mounted knight of shrouds, executioner, caster, lock guy, 4 blindfold scythe wraiths, 5 horse head spear wraiths, and 20 little chainrasp ghosties.

Considering the larger starter collections, and the inclusion of the full big rulebook, I expect it to be more expensive than the previous starter.  If anything, it might be more expensive than dark imperium.  us$180 maybe.  us$200 wouldn't shock me, though in that case I might put off starting a nighthaunt army, and just stick to my Legions of Nagash, and grab the malign sorcery box instead of the starter set.

Other models also previewed, including a separate box of 4 (not 5?) horse head spear wraiths, including a drummer, plus a trio of anti-magic banshees.

The numbers on the wraiths kind of confuse me.  Starter box of five, but separate box of 4?  If the 2018 generals handbook maintains batch pricing, then that's going to be a bothersome mess.  But maybe they'll come to their senses and realize that, when they already have separate minimum and maximum unit sizes, there's no reason to micromanage what specific number of models you can take in a unit?  It would be a godsend to flesh eater players, who currently end up effectively throwing several models out of a box in the garbage if they want to convert one or two to use as their heroes.

............

Nighthaunt preview looks, ok.  The caster seems decent.  Might even be good with a favorable points cost and a decent faction lore, points depending.

The executioner seems rather pointless.  too slow to hunt the kind of heroes that it might actually threaten, as most frontline heroes will hand it its own ghostly backside on a platter, hit debuff or no.  But who knows, the 2e rules are trying to encourage more small frontline hero types, so maybe it'll have something to hunt?  Given the new command ability rules, I'm a bit surprised and disappointed that this thing doesn't have one.  Even as a very cheap model, I'm not sure what the point will be.

Chainrasps are... ok.  They're no skeletons, offensively, but the ethereal 5+ makes them a little tougher against exactly the kind of attacks that will tear through skittle hordes.  They don't get as good a boost for numbers, but they do have two attacks base, so they're less dependent on that to begin with.  The low bravery when their champion dies is a drawback, but it also feels very fluffy, and it's not like champions are especially vulnerable in this game, plus we have ways to bring it back if it does die.  If they're the same price as skeletons... they'll be better msu drops to fill battleline requirements, assuming that's what they are, but less useful as an actual hammer.  We'll see.  I'm neither over nor underwhelmed by they're profile.  Just regular old whelmed, I guess.

[Elmir]

I'm just glad they've thought about synergies with LoN with the summonable keyword. This was most surprising to me.  I'm hoping nighthaunt will be changed to have LoN as an ally, rather than just soulblight. 

If we get more summonable units in the NH faction and LoN is an ally, adding some allied necromancers  will be brilliant!

If Deathly invocation can get good mileage in a NH army, the coven throne you can make in the malignant box does stay relevant with this new box that way.  Three DI rolls and a good command ability makes it one of the hidden gems in LoN if you ask me. 

 

[Nevar]

3 hours ago, Sception said:

Other models also previewed, including a separate box of 4 (not 5?) horse head spear wraiths, including a drummer, plus a trio of anti-magic banshees.

The numbers on the wraiths kind of confuse me.  Starter box of five, but separate box of 4?  If the 2018 generals handbook maintains batch pricing, then that's going to be a bothersome mess.

A unit of 9 can make sense if they can come in units of 3 like Spirit Hosts.  Will still make the boxed starter weird with a unit of 5 but the Stormcast dudes are in a unit of 8 so we already see some weirdness  there.  Also, you get four of the banshees not a trio.

As to the Banshees, it is confirmed they are not a Shadespire warband and furthermore the debate about the bases ends up being the least interesting option that I never considered.  They are neither a Shadespire warband nor are we getting decorative bases released... they are just Push-Fit models.  That is rather disappointing, as I assumed if I was wrong and they were not Shadespire then we were at least getting cool bases from GW.

That said, I still love those banshees and they are supposedly mage hunters so I am stoked to pick them up.  When it comes to the horse headed wraiths... I think their arms ruin them for me.  They needed skeletal arms like cairn wraiths and to match their skeletal horse head... not to mention they are particularly static and boring poses except for the one guy in the additional pack who has it up on his shoulder.  All of them are basically left hand or right hand of the same model.  I am secretly hoping they are not very good units so I don't feel the need to collect any.

[lare2]

Just in case anyone's wondering and it hasn't been said yet, the new magic supplement will be £45 and will include all models for the spells. Personally I think that is a truly awesome deal. Would've been happy to pay £15 per model.

[Sception]

Not a terrible deal, though I still won't be able to afford that AND the starter box AND the general's handbook AND the Nighthaunt battletome all at once.