AoS 2 - Hedonites of Slaanesh Discussion

[ibel]

19 minutes ago, Jaskier said:

hyper mobile assault armies like Slaanesh

:D:D rofl rofl made my day  

How Long? One Turn...(than oure Hedonit Army is death, not an the Table AnyMore, push back on the Floor, somethings like that) But okay okay we will see 🙄

[Jaskier]

9 minutes ago, ibel said:

:D:D rofl rofl made my day  

How Long? One Turn...(than oure Hedonit Army is death, not an the Table AnyMore, push back on the Floor, somethings like that) But okay okay we will see 🙄

Huh? What about what I said is incorrect? Slaanesh can do near guaranteed charges from ambush with multiple units, have loads of units that can run and charge and/or can move 14" base and do 6" pile-in shenanigans, giving them 26"+ threat ranges - what about that doesn't fit the description I just used? 

And to your point, let's do the smart thing and wait and see what the edition brings before needlessly doomposting, eh? 

Edited March 24, 2021 by Jaskier

[Yziel]

Anyone have any cool ideas for conversion ideas for Soul Grinders. Preferably something that would work in both AoS and 40k. What size is he on?

[Enoby]

To be honest, if the overwatch rules do come to AoS, I think it will overall make us stronger simply for the fact that we can get around it with our 6" pile in. Our archers will also be stronger, which is nice. 

I think what I'm most interested in is the points of the new Lumineth. Assuming BR Teclis was meant to be released this year (compared to DoK meant to have been last year), if the Lumineth have all gone up we can assume a price hike in AoS 3, if they haven't then we can assume we were a blooper and can be changed. 

13 minutes ago, Yziel said:

Anyone have any cool ideas for conversion ideas for Soul Grinders. Preferably something that would work in both AoS and 40k. What size is he on?

It's on a 100mm x 150mm - which is a weird base size. I'm not actually sure what else comes on this size? 

[Yziel]

14 minutes ago, Enoby said:

It's on a 100mm x 150mm - which is a weird base size. I'm not actually sure what else comes on this size? 

Is that a rectangle base?

Did some digging.

That's the old warhammer fantasy base. It's been changed to go on a 160mm round base.

[Enoby]

47 minutes ago, Yziel said:

Is that a rectangle base?

Did some digging.

That's the old warhammer fantasy base. It's been changed to go on a 160mm round base.

That's the base size of Archaon, which means you'll probably need to buy it separately as most models used for conversion won't come with a 160mm (unless you wanted to make Mecha-Archaon).

What is it you don't like about the soul grinder? Is it the entire thing or a specific part? Just as it'd be easier to build on top of the grinder rather than having a whole new model.

[Yziel]

42 minutes ago, Enoby said:

What is it you don't like about the soul grinder? Is it the entire thing or a specific part? Just as it'd be easier to build on top of the grinder rather than having a whole new model.

First of all I resent the fact that it's so expensive considering how old that model is. 

I don't think it's slaanesh looking at all, I dislike basically every part of it, the head kind of works and the boneclaw hand is kind of fine, everything else would have to be replaced or heavily converted. 

[Enoby]

2 minutes ago, Yziel said:

First of all I resent the fact that it's so expensive considering how old that model is. 

I don't think it's slaanesh looking at all, I dislike basically every part of it, the head kind of works and the boneclaw hand is kind of fine, everything else would have to be replaced or heavily converted. 

Yeah, that makes sense. I can't say I'm in love with it either! 

How about something using the Aracnarok? Maybe like a drider theme, with a person's upper body and a spider thorax and legs?

[Yziel]

7 minutes ago, Enoby said:

Yeah, that makes sense. I can't say I'm in love with it either! 

How about something using the Aracnarok? Maybe like a drider theme, with a person's upper body and a spider thorax and legs?

I've seen a few people do that but my severe arachnophobia would very much prefer another solution.

I was thinking maybe a centaur type creature or a naga of some kind maybe but that doesn't fit with the leg attacks. 

[AngryPanda]

So, I kind of noticed something weird; recently GW has been releasing a number of rules previews for the new Lumineth release coming out, which is completely opposite of what we received. 
 

Back in late January/early February I speculated that one of the reasons why we were not seeing a healthy number of rule teasers for HoS was because GW wasn’t confident in the warscrolls and rules, and didn’t want to deflate hype going into the release (which would potentially decrease sales). 
 

However, we can see the opposite is true of Lumineth, who are getting much more coverage. This could indicate that the design or marketing team is more confident with what’s being released, which if true reflects that they knew the HoS release was going to be bad coming out of the gate. 
 

I sort of expected that the FAQ would not have point adjustments this early, but it should of at least fixed Fiendbloods. Anyways, the whole thing feels really weird and sketchy. 

[Enoby]

5 minutes ago, AngryPanda said:

So, I kind of noticed something weird; recently GW has been releasing a number of rules previews for the new Lumineth release coming out, which is completely opposite of what we received. 
 

Back in late January/early February I speculated that one of the reasons why we were not seeing a healthy number of rule teasers for HoS was because GW wasn’t confident in the warscrolls and rules, and didn’t want to deflate hype going into the release (which would potentially decrease sales). 
 

However, we can see the opposite is true of Lumineth, who are getting much more coverage. This could indicate that the design or marketing team is more confident with what’s being released, which if true reflects that they knew the HoS release was going to be bad coming out of the gate. 
 

I sort of expected that the FAQ would not have point adjustments this early, but it should of at least fixed Fiendbloods. Anyways, the whole thing feels really weird and sketchy. 

While I get what you're saying, I think this may be a case of we should attribute it to incompetence rather than maliciousness. After all, they showed BoC rules previews and Slaves to Darkness chaos warrior previews which are considerably weaker.

Even if they only showed the unarguably good stuff, they could have made 5 days of content:

1)New allegiance changes 

2)Look at Sigvald and rules

3) Lore and art 

4) Look at the new battalions and some random rules

5) Look at Glutos's rules 

Considering they got some rules wrong (pretenders rr 1s and saying Sigvald made a good pretenders general), and that they didn't even preview our exciting good rules, I think whoever was writing the articles was told to pull something together without the book. It sounds weird but it felt like there was surprisingly little effort put into those posts even when they could have (and totally ignored Slaangors and points), so I think it's either mismanagement (e.g. not having a book available somehow) or the person asked to write it was new or just didn't care at all for Slaanesh.

It's odd and disappointing, but I think it was just a mess up than trying to hide rules. 

On the bright side, I think there's been quite a lot of talk from big names on how they are disappointed so we can hope that GW are paying attention.  

[pnkdth]

46 minutes ago, AngryPanda said:

So, I kind of noticed something weird; recently GW has been releasing a number of rules previews for the new Lumineth release coming out, which is completely opposite of what we received. 
 

Back in late January/early February I speculated that one of the reasons why we were not seeing a healthy number of rule teasers for HoS was because GW wasn’t confident in the warscrolls and rules, and didn’t want to deflate hype going into the release (which would potentially decrease sales). 
 

However, we can see the opposite is true of Lumineth, who are getting much more coverage. This could indicate that the design or marketing team is more confident with what’s being released, which if true reflects that they knew the HoS release was going to be bad coming out of the gate. 
 

I sort of expected that the FAQ would not have point adjustments this early, but it should of at least fixed Fiendbloods. Anyways, the whole thing feels really weird and sketchy. 

On the flip side, the rules preview for Hedonites we did get was a larger article with several units have rules shown. I'm thinking for this article (https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/02/12/discover-the-new-rules-that-make-the-hedonites-of-slaanesh-even-more-gloriously-despicable/) which previews multiple units at once + Siggie. Surprised they slept on Glutos though, his rules and entire model is awesome. Hedonites did get a good amount of model spotlights too. The Lumineth articles address the Vanari bladelords, the horsie bois, and characters separately. 

I fully concede I might have missed something but the marketing sure worked on me. The Battletome hooked me like a pair exquisite silvery flesh-hooks. 

Edited March 24, 2021 by pnkdth

[Carnith]

We will probably have to wait for ghb for any new point values for our troops. Slaangors maybe fixed in boc book? 

Maybe book 3 in 3 years?

[Enoby]

31 minutes ago, Carnith said:

We will probably have to wait for ghb for any new point values for our troops. Slaangors maybe fixed in boc book? 

Maybe book 3 in 3 years?

While I don't expect to see a battletome in any less than 2 years (probably for the best just in general for GW), I do think we're likely to see things like warscroll redos in narrative campaign books and allegiance ability fixes.

Like with Idoneth seeing a turtle and shark redo, we could well see some touch ups if we make it clear what we'd like to see.

[azdimy]

I think the new lumineth points reveal this week end is going to be rough for us in comparison to the points we got

[Ragest]

I've played a pair of TTS matches using Slaneesh while I wait for new Lumineth's book and i think Slaneesh is not a competitive army. Is hard, but is my honest opinion.

But It's one of the most fun casual army in the game. Everything they do is simple, easy to understand, easy to play around and way more strategic than before.

I think a point reduction will make the book S tier? No, far away. But, at least, will make the book shine a little more.

Edited March 24, 2021 by Ragest

[Popisdead]

6 hours ago, Yziel said:

Anyone have any cool ideas for conversion ideas for Soul Grinders. Preferably something that would work in both AoS and 40k. What size is he on?

I used Giant spiders (the forest goblin ones from AoS) for the legs and maybe  daemon prince as one top and I cannot recall the other.  Might have been the 4th or 5th ed re-evisioned chaos dread?  Hell something?  I had wanted to find some toys that were female tops but my greenstuff chops aren't up to snuff and I didn't want to buy 2 FW Keepers which I've seen done nicely. 

You can google AoS Base size and get the whole list.  GW updates it maybe yearly there about?  It's a comprehensive list you can keep on your phone.

[Lucky Snake Eyes]

16 hours ago, PiotrW said:

My general problem with AoS lore is that the whole setting is so big, crazy and cosmic that it's a bit hard to engage emotionally with all of this. There's so much magic everywhere, the world seems impossibly big (I mean, Hysh has what, ten continents? And it's only one of eight realms...) with only a few locations defined and everything is so surreal... As much as I don't like to admit it, when I read about the old WFB / WFRP fluff, I find the world more engaging. It's just more... tangible and cohesive.

I mentioned it over the Lumineth forum, but I'd really love for GW to publish something in the vein of "Guide to the Mortal Realms": a thick book dedicated solely to presenting the setting. An in-depth exploration of the realms, with more detailed chronology, some more info on which areas are controlled by which faction... Also, a closer look at the important characters and their personalities, as well as the factions and their philosophies. Not saying GW should define every single piece of the land etc., but a kind of "setting bible" for the players really would be great.

And coming back to the Hedonites - any ideas on how to make them sympathetic... or, at least, how to connect with them emotionally? They are so twisted it's a bit hard for me to put myself into their heads, work out any motivations for them etc...

I play slaanesh armies in both AoS and 40k, and have a hard time sticking to consistent colour schemes due to my painting skills vastly improving and acquiring second hand models with paint jobs too nice for me to strip. So I flavour my armies around that. For my 40k army I play emperors children and creations of bile and to represent that I have the bulk of "generic" units in different colours and schemes to represent the mercenaries that work for Bile, while my important stuff follows the horus heresy emperors children colours as clones of fallen marines, including discount versions of dead named characters like Eidolon and Rylanor. The army lore is sort of a twisted tragedy of this particular bile clone longing for his long gone brothers.

For my hedonites I like to lean into the civilized and tragic aspects of the army. Slaanesh can survive off of base pains and pleasures but they are at their apex when in a civilization that enables more complicated excess. Slaanesh has an entire subset of daemonettes called muses that urge mortals to pursue their passions to the point of self harm and tragedy. Musicians pushed to a breaking point of being willing to do away with any taboo to perfect their music and seek new sounds. Chefs looking to otherwise forbidden food sources for new flavours, warriors driven to be the best and master their martial arts. Twisted tragedy is the logical endpoint but you can find sympathy by focusing on the path to tragedy. My daemonette units are various different colours from pale skinned to vapourwave and represent the forsaken and discarded servants of other keepers serving a new master who takes joy in spiting the previous masters of their followers. My blissbrew homunculi are alchemists who where driven to the point of self experimentation, now finding kinship with the disenfranchised and the rookies that make up the ranks of blissbarbs. My myrmadesh are warriors who took their training too far and killed their sparring partners, now convinced to double down and take up the way of the painbringer, but hide their faces in shame. The twinsouls are the opposite, revelling in their sins and continue to try to stand out. My slickblades are hellstriders who grew to accept their fate and developed a bond with their seeker, aiding it in growing into an exalted seeker and earning a place amongst the elite knights of their master. My lord of pain takes pain not only in masochism but because he doesn't want his companions to get hurt in a twisted saviour complex.

There's so many ways you can flavour your hedonites to be ****** up people who mean well. The road to hell is paved with good intentions after all.

[pnkdth]

1 hour ago, Ragest said:

I've played a pair of TTS matches using Slaneesh while I wait for new Lumineth's book and i think Slaneesh is not a competitive army. Is hard, but is my honest opinion.

But It's one of the most fun casual army in the game. Everything they do is simple, easy to understand, easy to play around and way more strategic than before.

I think a point reduction will make the book S tier? No, far away. But, at least, will make the book shine a little more.

I'm holding out for more data. Two games, for example, is not enough to sway me either way. There are channels which are excited for Hedonites (Tabletop Titans, Meta Slayers, and thete made a good case too). The negative bat reps I've seen has thus far has forgotten key rules or played unoptimised lists. That said, I agree, it isn't S-tier, and thank Slaanesh for that because further we get into that territory we more extreme the power creep gets.

A point reduction could be pretty big though since it will have a cascading effect on DPs and Summoning. If the opponent has to deal with 1-2 more units then whatever you summon in will be that much more impactful. Speaking of summoning, I do not think we've seen or figured out the best way to use it yet. Not just in terms of what to summon (that's the easy bit) but how to optimise plays to get the most of it. Stuff like that is going to take much more than a couple of games.

 

Edited March 24, 2021 by pnkdth

[AngryPanda]

3 hours ago, Enoby said:

While I get what you're saying, I think this may be a case of we should attribute it to incompetence rather than maliciousness. After all, they showed BoC rules previews and Slaves to Darkness chaos warrior previews which are considerably weaker.

Even if they only showed the unarguably good stuff, they could have made 5 days of content:

1)New allegiance changes 

2)Look at Sigvald and rules

3) Lore and art 

4) Look at the new battalions and some random rules

5) Look at Glutos's rules 

Considering they got some rules wrong (pretenders rr 1s and saying Sigvald made a good pretenders general), and that they didn't even preview our exciting good rules, I think whoever was writing the articles was told to pull something together without the book. It sounds weird but it felt like there was surprisingly little effort put into those posts even when they could have (and totally ignored Slaangors and points), so I think it's either mismanagement (e.g. not having a book available somehow) or the person asked to write it was new or just didn't care at all for Slaanesh.

It's odd and disappointing, but I think it was just a mess up than trying to hide rules. 

On the bright side, I think there's been quite a lot of talk from big names on how they are disappointed so we can hope that GW are paying attention.  

I honestly believe that it’s a mix of poor design from the design team, and miscommunication and lack of understanding of how the game plays from the marketing team. As you pointed out that they had gotten some rules wrong , there were also the very strange rule teasers such as Twin Souls being the perfect unit for hunting characters, even though they’re not designed to character hunt at all. 
 

It just seems like a disorganized mess, and there’s no doubt in my mind something was happening behind the scenes, whether it was intentional or not. I heard a rumor that one of the writers for the book was on Twitter talking about how they purposely wrote the rules to be weak, but I’m not sure of the validity of this. 
 

On a side note, miniwargaming released a battle report against OBR: 

 

HoS vs. OBR

 

In all honesty, it’s a pretty bad report; they made a lot of mistakes (gameplay and rule-wise) that really worked against Slaanesh; it was extremely frustrating seeing the Slaanesh player not use the exploding 6s, and seeing Sigvald’s sword not ignore the deathless minions rule. However, even with thre mistakes, they performed better then I expected, despite almost being tabled at the end. 

[Lucky Snake Eyes]

19 minutes ago, AngryPanda said:

In all honesty, it’s a pretty bad report; they made a lot of mistakes (gameplay and rule-wise) that really worked against Slaanesh; it was extremely frustrating seeing the Slaanesh player not use the exploding 6s, and seeing Sigvald’s sword not ignore the deathless minions rule. However, even with thre mistakes, they performed better then I expected, despite almost being tabled at the end. 

MWG never played AoS correctly, they handwave rules and ****** stuff up all the time. Which while normal for your average person is a little disappointing if it's supposed to be your job. They where prime amongst the butthurt when fantasy was replaced by AoS and the gap in quality between there AoS and 40k content is drastic. MWG are a joke among the AoS community here in Canada.

[AngryPanda]

36 minutes ago, Lucky Snake Eyes said:

MWG never played AoS correctly, they handwave rules and ****** stuff up all the time. Which while normal for your average person is a little disappointing if it's supposed to be your job. They where prime amongst the butthurt when fantasy was replaced by AoS and the gap in quality between there AoS and 40k content is drastic. MWG are a joke among the AoS community here in Canada.

Interesting lol, I have always imagined MWG to be somewhat close to players. I’ve seen their videos since 5th edition of 40k from over 10 years ago, back when Killa Kan walls were a thing and Dan was the studio’s Ork player. However, I rarely watch their content these days; the Hedonites battle report was the only one I’ve seen recently. 
 

I don’t disagree, they’re extremely casual when they play and often make mistakes that would otherwise ruin the batrep, at least when I used to watch them more frequently. I sort of understand the butthurt when Warhammer Fantasy was replaced, but now that GW has announced its return via Forge World and the coming expansion of the setting (Cathay and Kislev are gonna have awesome models), there’s not much to be upset by at this point. Especially considering Total War has really nailed it with their Warhammer series. 

[Benkei]

5 hours ago, AngryPanda said:

So, I kind of noticed something weird; recently GW has been releasing a number of rules previews for the new Lumineth release coming out, which is completely opposite of what we received. 
 

Back in late January/early February I speculated that one of the reasons why we were not seeing a healthy number of rule teasers for HoS was because GW wasn’t confident in the warscrolls and rules, and didn’t want to deflate hype going into the release (which would potentially decrease sales). 
 

However, we can see the opposite is true of Lumineth, who are getting much more coverage. This could indicate that the design or marketing team is more confident with what’s being released, which if true reflects that they knew the HoS release was going to be bad coming out of the gate. 
 

I sort of expected that the FAQ would not have point adjustments this early, but it should of at least fixed Fiendbloods. Anyways, the whole thing feels really weird and sketchy. 

I'm more and more convinced the Hedonites book was a rushed job to go with the minis. The lack of flavorful/special rules for the units, not changing the hosts even if they don't make sense fluffwise anymore, not including the new fluff and the general lazyness of the book compared to other releases seem to point that way. 

Edited March 24, 2021 by Benkei

[Ragest]

2 hours ago, pnkdth said:

I'm holding out for more data. Two games, for example, is not enough to sway me either way. There are channels which are excited for Hedonites (Tabletop Titans, Meta Slayers, and thete made a good case too). The negative bat reps I've seen has thus far has forgotten key rules or played unoptimised lists. That said, I agree, it isn't S-tier, and thank Slaanesh for that because further we get into that territory we more extreme the power creep gets.

A point reduction could be pretty big though since it will have a cascading effect on DPs and Summoning. If the opponent has to deal with 1-2 more units then whatever you summon in will be that much more impactful. Speaking of summoning, I do not think we've seen or figured out the best way to use it yet. Not just in terms of what to summon (that's the easy bit) but how to optimise plays to get the most of it. Stuff like that is going to take much more than a couple of games.

 

Oh is not just an opinion based on two matches, in my community i had 3 slaneesh players (now just 1 slaneesh player) and i followed them with interest, because i love most of mortal models and i played it to confirm what they said.

[Yoid]

I still think lists based in Exalted Seekers spam and Glutos will do well (not top tier, but well). The sad part is the rest of the army heavily underperforming. Massive discounts needed for any other unit to be viable. The only thing that make you play other types of troops is the fact that Exalted Seekers aren't battleline, and still your best bet is to go 3x Chaos Warriors to have cheap object grabing battleline. Daemons are deceiving because they are good for their summoning points (DP fairly costed), but really bad for their regular points (built in-list terrible costed), so you still see them in games but is non-representative of them being balanced. They way overstimated the value of summoning.

Getting everything fairly costed is not going to be an easy task tho, but i can see almost every unit going down 20pts to begin with.