The Rumour Thread

[Gothmaug]

39 minutes ago, Nezzhil said:

Destruction needs a new Army, a real new Army. The Destruction players are the Ugly ducklings...

Well in terms of destruction models gitmob and greenskinz got retired, moonclan got a sizable update, Ironjawz/Bonesplitters were ignored, and Ogres got a new leader. There doesn’t seem to be much of a focus on destruction right now, but if we do see a big update, it will probably be a new unique army. Firmirs, human barbarians, gargants, or something totally out of left field. 
 

The problem is, how does it feel different than the current destruction armies. Orruks/ogres/troggoth are essentially Meele juggernauts, and is like to see something different. Perhaps a human culture from Ghur that has a mixed Meele/ranged aesthetic with massive beasts of war like mammoths or the spawn of god-beasts
 

 

[Beliman]

No need to build a new army from scratch . Just a faction with (ex.)  Giants+Ogres+Trolls , and then give them habilitites in a campaign book (like Legion of Grief/Lethis Defenders) and maybe 1 named character, and after that, just make 1 dual kit for this army with a new battlebox+battletome or a new character and you have a new army.
It's just an example, but with keywords, it's eazy to use miniatures for more than one factions and expand this "new" factions with just one minis+spells and/or terrain. 

[King Under the Mountain]

25 minutes ago, Gothmaug said:

Well in terms of destruction models gitmob and greenskinz got retired, moonclan got a sizable update, Ironjawz/Bonesplitters were ignored, and Ogres got a new leader. There doesn’t seem to be much of a focus on destruction right now, but if we do see a big update, it will probably be a new unique army. Firmirs, human barbarians, gargants, or something totally out of left field. 
 

The problem is, how does it feel different than the current destruction armies. Orruks/ogres/troggoth are essentially Meele juggernauts, and is like to see something different. Perhaps a human culture from Ghur that has a mixed Meele/ranged aesthetic with massive beasts of war like mammoths or the spawn of god-beasts
 

 

I think this is the problem with tieing the whole Grand Alliance to the Orc god(s) is that it really limits the scope of what can be in a Destruction army imo.  The only army I reasonably think of is the much talked about "Giant" army.  

Of course GW has surprised me in the past so hopefully they have something good in the works for Destruction.

Edited January 9, 2020 by King Under the Mountain

[prochuvi]

29 minutes ago, SleeperAgent said:

Been saying this more and more as everything gets consolidated. Order has 8 armies, Chaos 7, Death 3 and a half (since most of the stuff falls in Legions but is really 3 separate armies), and Destruction 3.  I assume Pointy Aelves are Order. So really this whole year should add 2 Death and 2 Destruction armies to even come close to some kind of parity.

Its kind of close to Ironjawz, but I want to see a big smashy destruction army. Like with dragons, and giants, and such.

And why every faction need same number of armys?

40k have more marines in diferents colours than all xenos armys together and gw dont care.

Meanwhile we dont get new colours stormcast with new name and rules and call it new army im fine with grand aliances having diferent numbers of armys

[sandlemad]

If they do go with grotbag scuttlers, I can see that being distinct from the existing destruction armies. Make it fast, ramshackle and shooty, and you'd have something that would play differently and be very visually distinct. Lots of messy airships careening about the place, with some skirmishers and maybe a bit of horde infantry.

The trick would be making them distinct from Kharadron but shifting the emphasis to, I dunno, insane gadgets, minimal armour and high volume of fire would probably work.

Edited January 9, 2020 by sandlemad

[SleeperAgent]

23 minutes ago, prochuvi said:

And why every faction need same number of armys?

40k have more marines in diferents colours than all xenos armys together and gw dont care.

Meanwhile we dont get new colours stormcast with new name and rules and call it new army im fine with grand aliances having diferent numbers of armys

To cater to the largest group of people. It makes sense business wise. I play mostly Death. My friend plays mostly Destruction. If they wanna sell plastic they need to throw the largest net possible.

[GeneralZero]

1 hour ago, Gothmaug said:

Destruction needs a new Army, a real new Army. The Destruction players are the Ugly ducklings...

Well, the Destruction grand alliance is on the poor side of diversity. Not only it has (far) fewer armies but for me, the main limiting factor is the poor synergies accross those armies. In term of gaming, that is a really limiting factor for replayability. 

In death,  you have several miniatures (and units) that can be used in several armies.

In order, it is even richer in this department thanks to Stormacast & CoS but not limiting to them (last example is KO which can add some other factions like fire slayers...)

The best in this account is probably Chaos with tons of possibilities accross all gods, most factions, most types of units mortals/daemons etc...

Those possibilities is a superb opportunity for a hobbyist to add some different units/miniatures to his collection AND being able to play them. It is also a way to gradually play an new army with some other units. Example: from StD to DoT etc...

In fact , Destruction doesn't have this leading red line allowing this in the lore. It is closer to a trash bag where you put all armies that can't be in the other 3 factions. Add to this that (personally) I didn't really like the last orruk tome: I wanted some more things to add to ironjaws like ork katapult or big ballistas... This is why in Destruction I only have Ogors (mostly thx to the opportunity with dual army box & start co!!!) while I have several chaos/order/death...

[JackStreicher]

1 hour ago, Gothmaug said:

Perhaps a human culture from Ghur that has a mixed Meele/ranged aesthetic with massive beasts of war like mammoths or the spawn of god-beasts

That sums up Chaos marauders.

[King Under the Mountain]

1 hour ago, sandlemad said:

If they do go with grotbag scuttlers, I can see that being distinct from the existing destruction armies. Make it fast, ramshackle and shooty, and you'd have something that would play differently and be very visually distinct. Lots of messy airships careening about the place, with some skirmishers and maybe a bit of horde infantry.

The trick would be making them distinct from Kharadron but shifting the emphasis to, I dunno, insane gadgets, minimal armour and high volume of fire would probably work.

Forgot about the Scuttlers, now that would be an army I'd collect.  Even if just to display them against my KO. 

[Gothmaug]

8 minutes ago, JackStreicher said:

That sums up Chaos marauders.

True, but the marauder kit is ancient, and the war mammoth isn’t coming back anytime soon.  Plenty of room for some distinct development of other cultures.

the “grot bag scuttlers” would be neat, especially if it was a hodgepodge of different races mixed in, like a crazy multi-realm mercenary force.

 

but most of all, the destruction forces are alike enough that you BBC oils add kits that can be used by all destruction factions, like the current aleguzzler gargant. Toss in a dragon, or some huge god-beast, other living engine of destruction or even a unit of human savages and make it useable by all destruction factions. 

 

[Bayul]

2 hours ago, Beliman said:

and then give them habilitites in a campaign book (like Legion of Grief/Lethis Defenders)

As a Legion of Grief player myself, this is a bad example.  Both armies aren't fleshed out, their meager rules are behind a huge paywall and they didn't get any support after their release.  I presume Legion of Grief accidentally works better than GW expected.

Sure, you mentioned a subsequent battlebox and battletome but why let people wait at all and present them a half-finished army in a campaign book?

[zilberfrid]

2 hours ago, sandlemad said:

If they do go with grotbag scuttlers, I can see that being distinct from the existing destruction armies. Make it fast, ramshackle and shooty, and you'd have something that would play differently and be very visually distinct. Lots of messy airships careening about the place, with some skirmishers and maybe a bit of horde infantry.

The trick would be making them distinct from Kharadron but shifting the emphasis to, I dunno, insane gadgets, minimal armour and high volume of fire would probably work.

I'd say a focus of crashing into other things, causing wounds to both the enemy and themselves. Doom divers could be the horde infantry, just stick a rocket on a git with wings on its arms and let them loose.

[Beliman]

10 minutes ago, Bayul said:

As a Legion of Grief player myself, this is a bad example.  Both armies aren't fleshed out, their meager rules are behind a huge paywall and they didn't get any support after their release.  I presume Legion of Grief accidentally works better than GW expected.

Sure, you mentioned a subsequent battlebox and battletome but why let people wait at all and present them a half-finished army in a campaign book?

Let's be real, an army that just appears on a White Dwarf to never "to be seen be seen again" it's just bad (hope someone catch that). I mean, after the release (white dwarf, campaing books, ....) it's the support that follows up what I'm talking about.
Of course having a Battletome helps a lot, but again, there are options to start a new army without a mass-release of new and shinny kits.

[sandlemad]

6 minutes ago, zilberfrid said:

I'd say a focus of crashing into other things, causing wounds to both the enemy and themselves. Doom divers could be the horde infantry, just stick a rocket on a git with wings on its arms and let them loose.

Yeah, random tables out the wazoo might not be all that popular in current AoS design but they'd be fitting and hilarious here. The goblin flagship could be called the Waaaghzoo.😊

[Walrustaco]

Ogors feel pretty isolated in destruction. Orruks and Grots can ally to eachother pretty freely. All Mawtribes have is Troggoths and Gargants. 

Hopefully some kind of Gargant army pops up that gives me more allies.

[willange]

11 minutes ago, Walrustaco said:

Ogors feel pretty isolated in destruction. Orruks and Grots can ally to eachother pretty freely. All Mawtribes have is Troggoths and Gargants. 

Hopefully some kind of Gargant army pops up that gives me more allies.

Definitely true, though I would point out that they also used to ally beastclaw and gutbusters.  Now they're just "super allies".  They don't actually have much synergy between their units, but they don't need to use ally points to play together anymore.  I'm all for a "giants" army though I don't see it in the near future. 

That said, Grotbag Scuttlers get so many lore mentions on such a consistent basis that I have to imagine that GW at least had them in development at some point.  I wouldn't be surprised to see them in the next couple of years.

[DantePQ]

Really ? Last year Destruction got huge and amazing Gitz release, great Battletome updates for Orruks, great book for Mawtribes. 

Sure there is something coming for Destruction in the future but 2019 was awesome for Destruction. 

[JPjr]

51 minutes ago, zilberfrid said:

I'd say a focus of crashing into other things, causing wounds to both the enemy and themselves. Doom divers could be the horde infantry, just stick a rocket on a git with wings on its arms and let them loose.

Totally. There’s loads of factions for the kind of people that use words like ‘tSports’ with a straight face to put together their mathematically optimised lists with. Let’s have some out and out craziness.

The kind of army that gets its ****** handed to it on a regular basis and then tables a Slaanesh 3 keeper build whose player is 4-0 up in a tournament.

My main issue with both Gloomspite & the Skaven battletomes is that there just wasn’t enough of that random wild card factor with them. They’re good books but a little safe.

I feel like Skaven warmachines should never be more than a roll or two away from either routing the enemy, wiping out half their own army or ideally both.

Grot airships should Be utterly ridiculous contraptions that defy all logic, reasoning and warscroll calculators. Just engines of total mayhem, after all who cares if a few dozen gobbos get accidentally wiped out by their own side.

[Aelfric]

3 hours ago, sandlemad said:

If they do go with grotbag scuttlers, I can see that being distinct from the existing destruction armies. Make it fast, ramshackle and shooty, and you'd have something that would play differently and be very visually distinct. Lots of messy airships careening about the place, with some skirmishers and maybe a bit of horde infantry.

The trick would be making them distinct from Kharadron but shifting the emphasis to, I dunno, insane gadgets, minimal armour and high volume of fire would probably work.

How about Grot paratroopers jumping overboard onto the enemy or objectives; or abseiling from ropes.  A flying aircraft carrier that releases short-range flying contraptions (maybe one-way only -  only keeps flying each round on a 4+).  Kerchiefs tied round the head to be mandatory.

[Fairbanks]

2 hours ago, JPjr said:

Totally. There’s loads of factions for the kind of people that use words like ‘tSports’ with a straight face to put together their mathematically optimised lists with. Let’s have some out and out craziness.

The kind of army that gets its ****** handed to it on a regular basis and then tables a Slaanesh 3 keeper build whose player is 4-0 up in a tournament.

Why is an army that gets it's posterior handed to it on a regular basis playing a player who is 4-0 on the last table of a tournament?

[JPjr]

Because this was a throwaway jokey comment on a toy soldiers website and not a peer reviewed doctoral thesis. 
 

 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Carnelian]

8 hours ago, Still-young said:

Well all that means is they aren’t allowed to say anything, because it wasn’t one of the reveals. It doesn’t actually say much as to whether they’re coming soon or not. 

The reports I saw (pic attached) were pretty clear that nothing is coming soon

[swarmofseals]

2 hours ago, JPjr said:

stuff

You make some great points, and it makes me wish that GW would be a little more aggressive in pushing the boundaries of "Three Ways To Play." 

The main problem with the kind of randomness that you are talking about is that it creates hugely different play experiences depending on what kind of gamer you are. I'll reference the classic Magic: The Gathering psychographics here: Timmy, Johnny, Spike, and Vorthos. 

A review for those of you who may not be familiar:

Spoiler

The basic idea here is that there are different motivations for playing a game, and many players can be loosely fit into one of four categories depending on what they enjoy and look for the most:

• Timmy: Timmy is attracted to big, high impact things: big monsters, big explosions, dramatic swings. Timmy doesn't care too much about competitiveness, he or she mostly just wants cool things to happen. The best example of this ethos in Warhammer (imo) is people who are entirely focused on Rule of Cool.
• Johnny: Johnny is attracted to building something intricate, with complex interactions and a creative way to achieve an end. Again, competitiveness isn't the main focus and many Johnnies won't mind losing a lot if it means sometimes winning with something that is creative and spectacular. This ethos doesn't map as cleanly onto Warhammer, but I think it loosely applies to players that are attracted to strange battleplans and like to listbuild with underused units and combinations.
• Spike: Spike is the prototypical tournament player who is mostly motivated by challenge, winning, and overcoming the competition. This maps pretty directly onto serious competitive/tournament players in Warhammer. 
• Vorthos: A later addition, Vorthis is primarily motivated by narrative, characters, and story. Vorthos might not even play the game at all, instead preferring to collect, read, and steep him or herself in the lore. This also maps pretty cleanly onto the Warhammer community.

Many players don't quite fit cleanly into one of these categories (humans have mixed motivations after all!) but I do think that quite a lot of players are predominantly one type.

So imagine the kinds of outcomes from the randomness that you described, @JPjr. Timmies are going to love the big, swingy events. Whether it's your entire artillery battery exploding or your entire opponent's army exploding, it's a good story for Timmy. Vorthos might love it too, as long as the rules are a good reflection of the fluff. Johnny could love it or hate it, depending on if the rules are something you can really build around in interesting ways. Spike is going to hate it, because it means that games are going to come down to a small number of dice rolls to the exclusion of strategy.

This situation puts GW in a predicament. They can either choose to ****** off one set of players to please another, or they can try to play it safe. Unsurprisingly, they generally choose the latter. Armies like Gloomspite and Skaven are a bit more random than others, but not enough to really satisfy Timmy and Vorthos and not so much as to really ****** off Spike. 

Instead, I think GW should have no compunction about publishing multiple warscrolls for the same unit: one for matched play and one for narrative play. Open play gamers can use either. The matched play warscrolls can be designed to satisfy Spike by tamping down on randomness while the narrative warscrolls can be really off the wall to satisfy Timmy and Vorthos.

I know that this risks rule bloat, but because these are warscroll variations they can be published on the website/in the app and really shouldn't be hard to keep track of as long as they are labeled well. 

I also think that this is exactly the kind of rules bloat that would be good for the game. You choose which set before the game starts, so it doesn't overly complicate actual gameplay, and it has the potential to impact every game unlike the relatively niche narrative rules that get pushed out in supplements. Narrative battleplans and things like siege rules are nice and all, but they don't have nearly the impact that actual narrative warscrolls could have. 

[Kasper]

6 hours ago, King Under the Mountain said:

I think this is the problem with tieing the whole Grand Alliance to the Orc god(s) is that it really limits the scope of what can be in a Destruction army imo.  The only army I reasonably think of is the much talked about "Giant" army.  

Of course GW has surprised me in the past so hopefully they have something good in the works for Destruction.

How is it different for Death? Every Death army is Nagashs puppets. I was really disapponted that OBR were yet again his toys, and was hoping for something ala Tomb Kings (not exactly them, Im not a TK fan) that were undead, but their own thing and had nothing to do with Nagash. Feels lame imo they are all one big happy family, and for someone not playing Death, they all feel the same.

[Sleboda]

Well, to be fair, it's not exactly a happy family. Two of his original Mortarchs would smoke him in a heartbeat if they could, but that can't.

Nagash's will instantly crushes any unwanted independent act any undead being may attempt.

It really could be renamed Grand Alliance Nagash. Nagash is all, and all are one in Nagash. 

I would love to see Khalida come back and somehow break away from Nagash, but the current lore prevents it from being an option.