New Player Requesting Help

[SinisterSmooth]

Hey all,

 

Complete newbie to AOS and the TGA community in general here (so if this is posted in the wrong spot someone let me know so I can move it.) I played WHFB about 15 years ago and realize alot has changed haha. I also realize that I have no idea how to narrow down which army to play. I know the rule of cool is king but the AOS range has so many amazing models that I'm really having a tough time so I'm looking for someone that can help me pick or at very least point me to some good resources outside of the 1d4chan intro/tactics articles. A little info to possibly help any advice:

- I play Tau and DG in 40k

- I'm a horrid painter but fairly competent modeler / assembler

- My immediate play group is: Stormcast, Khorne BB / demons, Nurgle demons and Beastclaw raiders so none of those

- I'm not super into heavy meta armies / ultra popular armies not because I'm a hipster but because I hate mirror matches haha

- My first thoughts were wanderers, dispossessed, seraphon, skaven and something in the death GA (I love the soulblight / vampire fluff)

- Fluff is super important to me

Anyways this is a long ass post so thanks to anyone who read it, I look forward to any sort of advice!

[Overread]

A few thoughts:

1) When going with looks what I find helps a lot is to take each faction on its own on the GW store and click each unit in that army and open it up in a new browser tab. Once you've got a whole faction up go through the tabs one by one and look at each model and close the tab on any you dislike or are meh about. With what is left you can get an idea if you really do like a whole faction or if there's only one or two units you like. Or you might find you like all the heroes but none of the troops or vis versa. It can give you a proper idea of what you visually do and don't like. 

2) If you have a local store it might help to read through the battle tomes/generals handbook 2018. Get an idea of how the alliances function and the various factions work. The GW store is pretty rubbish at this right now and gives the hint that you've got 4 alliance blocks, which is false. Order certainly has sub-alliance groups within it. For example the old High elf and Dark Elf subfactions are basically sub-alliances that ally only within themselves and not between all order armies (only Stormcast can ally with everyone). 

This is more about helping you establish what factions are what and also with the alliance restrictions, let you get an idea how your armies might look. Reading army lists online can also be a big help too in this. Its not so much looking for powerful combos, but seeing how the armies actually function on the table and what unit counts are often viable. Eg it would likely teach you that Skaven are going to take a fair number of clan-rats so if you did step 1 and found you don't really like clanrats and then the rest of the research shows that you need lots it might well make you lower them on the potentials list (you still might love things like the Doomwheel and thus the negatives are not as much an issue for you cause you're going to get that huge wheel of rumbling warpstone doom).

3) If you like Vampire lore you might consider adding Daughters of Khaine to the list; they have some bloody sides to them and do feature quite strongly in the current Lore as well (or at least their Oracle Morathi does - and Daughters are likely to get even more important as they are pitched against Slaanesh who is due a big update/model release at some point so Daughters might well ride that wave if its twinned to a big Sigmar Story event).