The Rumour Thread

[Malakithe]

1 minute ago, shinros said:

I think what truly sparked off this issue is when the Slaanesh Tome and the DOK tome were released together which clearly highlighted there are clear design issues and the fact there are most likely two writers. It didn't help either that the Lumineth came along and continued this trend. So from there, people looked back on older tomes and even newer rules, people noticed a trend in terms of the writing style and design. This started to cause people to be bitter towards those two armies, especially Lumineth as we all know. 

I mean people can be positive all they want, but I think when design issues are this glaring I think the problems should be voiced. For example, the soulblight tome isn't "bad" but it's pretty obvious in comparison to the Lumineth and DOK tome, a writer in GW is phoning it in. Some warscrolls don't even work, or the rules aren't written properly, Legion of Blood basically lost it's theme of vampires and their very battleline unit is quite poor. It's stuff like that. Fell Bats as warscroll shouldn't exist. I don't know what happened there. 

As someone mentioned, just compare Kragnos to either Teclis or Morathi, issues pop up right away. There's no consistency and I think it's becoming pretty obvious why GW wish to hire a game design lead.  

What I dont understand is why is just down to maybe 2 people. Rule creating and balancing usually requires a team. Someone on the team comes up with something, its discussed, picked apart then put back together. 

Right now its 'You work on this book and you work on this other book. Have fun. Good luck. Go nuts.'

[MothmanDraws]

Just now, Enoby said:

Very annoyingly, this would be actually very nice on mortals.

it would but it also eats into value of the voice. The voice gets access to every spell but if it gives immunity to BS for mortals and already flies thats 2 of its 15 spells it doesn't need

The lore is

1 fly spell (not useful on twins)

2 Healing spells

slothfull (turn off a hero)

BS immune for d3 mortal units (command ability could negate)

roll over bravery to get a +1 to hit target unit

then rest are all variations on "do mortal wounds" based on either unit size, movement value or bravery, all of which can be taken on contorted epitome which is 2/2 cast and re rolls its casts.

really little of these have any value on infinite range outside of slothfull stupor(7+ with no bonus), maybe you can be cheeky with some endless spells. But these are all coming out of a 1 cast wizard, she would be cooler if you could spend 3 depravity to cast another spell. The actual spells you want on Voice are warscroll ones that it cannot cast.

[zamerion]

[Malakithe]

Definitely some kind of Hag/Shaman 

[LeonBox]

2 minutes ago, MothmanDraws said:

it would but it also eats into value of the voice. The voice gets access to every spell but if it gives immunity to BS for mortals and already flies thats 2 of its 15 spells it doesn't need

The lore is

1 fly spell (not useful on twins)

2 Healing spells

slothfull (turn off a hero)

BS immune for d3 mortal units (command ability could negate)

roll over bravery to get a +1 to hit target unit

then rest are all variations on "do mortal wounds" based on either unit size, movement value or bravery, all of which can be taken on contorted epitome which is 2/2 cast and re rolls its casts.

really little of these have any value on infinite range outside of slothfull stupor(7+ with no bonus), maybe you can be cheeky with some endless spells. But these are all coming out of a 1 cast wizard, she would be cooler if you could spend 3 depravity to cast another spell. The actual spells you want on Voice are warscroll ones that it cannot cast.

Any word on whether they get a warscroll spell, or just access to all the Slaanesh spells? 

Also, is there any chance at all that the terrible mortal lore gets spells added/reworked? 

[Pitloze]

There is a rumor going around that Kragnos will not getting a faction in the new book. Just his warscroll... that's it.

[Boingrot Bouncer]

Yes, some kind of wizard-type with a stick and what looks a bit like a snake in it's left hand.

[Chikout]

That's another intriguing sillouette. Just a day and a bit to go. 

The bin guy and sin guy thing us just a meme. There are at least three rules writers. 

[SunStorm]

12 minutes ago, KingBrodd said:

I'm so damn excited for today's RE. Hopefully we see a full model revealed or even a proper silhouette of a standard warrior!! 

As an amuse-bouche for the main course tomorrow. I wonder how the number of people tuning into the preview tomorrow will compare to previous ones. Would be a good sign of how AoS is doing. 

[Feii]

7 minutes ago, MothmanDraws said:

it would but it also eats into value of the voice. The voice gets access to every spell but if it gives immunity to BS for mortals and already flies thats 2 of its 15 spells it doesn't need

The lore is

1 fly spell (not useful on twins)

2 Healing spells

slothfull (turn off a hero)

BS immune for d3 mortal units (command ability could negate)

roll over bravery to get a +1 to hit target unit

then rest are all variations on "do mortal wounds" based on either unit size, movement value or bravery, all of which can be taken on contorted epitome which is 2/2 cast and re rolls its casts.

really little of these have any value on infinite range outside of slothfull stupor(7+ with no bonus), maybe you can be cheeky with some endless spells. But these are all coming out of a 1 cast wizard, she would be cooler if you could spend 3 depravity to cast another spell. The actual spells you want on Voice are warscroll ones that it cannot cast.

How many uninspired slaanesh spells can we create? 
 

Slaanesh spellore should be about exploiting your opponents. I feel like they should be a spell with a medium range that forces targetted unit to fight the nearest enemy if it is in the range etc. Something akin to mind control/luring your enemies to fight for you for a little bit. Situational but flavourful. 

[Acrozatarim]

Might be someone's innards rather than a snake.

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

Just now, Malakithe said:

Rules that arent terrible, make sense, and just maybe a little thematic. The Soulblight book is just...most of it doesnt even make sense. A lot of it was copy pasta then removed the actual pasta. 

Bin guy looked at his finished Slaanesh book and was like 'I think I can lower the bar even more"

I've been looking at the Soulblight book pretty in-depth over the last few weeks, and even though it was definitely an emotional roller coaster, it's not as bad as it seems at first glance.

Some people have said that the Soulblight book looks like someone tried to fix Legions of Nagash when it was at peak strength three years ago, and decided to nerf all the stuff that made that book OP. Even though that stuff is now not even good anymore. And I think that's somewhat true, but not in a bad way.

I think the writers of the Soulblight tome decided to keep the basic mechanics from LoN, but removed all the stuff that was just awful to play against. Full unit resurrection for a command point was always too strong of an ability. It's like Sons of Behemat counting for 15 models on objectives in that it is so good that you have to make the rest of the rules the faction gets garbage if you want to put it in there. It chokes out any freedom you have to design interesting rules and any freedom players have to build diverse lists: In LoN, you should always try to build lists with huge blobs of summonable units and not spend command points except on resurrection, because that ability was just so good.

Same with the free healing that was removed. It made it so that summonable units could easily heal 5d3 every hero phase, while anything non-summonable was basically not worth using because of the huge opportunity cost. Now, Skeleton Warriors can heal half the models in their unit, but it does not have to mean that Grave Guard need to be able to do the same just because both are summonable. That's an improvement, overall.

 

I think there are two factors that make people react so negatively to the Gravelords book.

One: There are a bunch of instances of bad design in the book, but they don't have anything to do with the powerlevel of the tome. List building is pretty tedious, some units and spells have received kind of baffling nerfs and there are a bunch of mechanical oddities and oversights. I won't defend that part of the book. That could have clearly been better.

Two: The play style of the book has changed a lot compard to LoN. A good LoN list had a plan it tried to force. A good Gravelord list needs to play a lot more reactively. Gravelords have the ability to spread out and project power in ways that LoN never had, because of the changes to gravesites and the mechanics related to them. LoN gravesites encouraged death stars. G-Lords gravesites encourage spreading your troops out. But to make the most of your new abilities, you need to play a control game, where you try to react what your opponent is doing and grind the victory out in turn 4 or 5, as opposed to snowballing to victory like LoN often did.

Overall, this book is no Slaanesh. It's mechanically fairly strong and there are some interesting things you can do with it. It just does not play at all like LoN used to.

[Feii]

5 minutes ago, Pitloze said:

There is a rumor going around that Kragnos will not getting a faction in the new book. Just his warscroll... that's it.

I asked the leaker about a subfaction and he said that too - well, there might be something for kragnos in the kruel boyz battletome though they worship him after all

[Enoby]

1 minute ago, Feii said:

How many uninspired slaanesh spells can we create? 
 

Slaanesh spellore should be about exploiting your opponents. I feel like they should be a spell with a medium range that forces targetted unit to fight the nearest enemy if it is in the range etc. Something akin to mind control/luring your enemies to fight for you for a little bit. Situational but flavourful. 

I think that's currently Shalaxi's ability.

But yeah, Slaanesh's spell lore is very dry.

[SunStorm]

14 minutes ago, zamerion said:

Now that's interesting! 

Bottle or bag hanging off the staff on the left. Would be crazy if he is holding innards, so many dead body parts we've seen in rumour engines suggest these guys are going to look brutal. 

[Feii]

2 minutes ago, Enoby said:

I think that's currently Shalaxi's ability.

But yeah, Slaanesh's spell lore is very dry.

Can we talk about that 1 attack on their spear??? What.

[IronHelmet]

We found a fragment of the rumor engine!

[mojojojo101]

16 minutes ago, shinros said:

I think what truly sparked off this issue is when the Slaanesh Tome and the DOK tome were released together which clearly highlighted there are clear design issues and the fact there are most likely two writers. It didn't help either that the Lumineth came along and continued this trend. So from there, people looked back on older tomes and even newer rules, people noticed a trend in terms of the writing style and design. This started to cause people to be bitter towards those two armies, especially Lumineth as we all know. 

I mean people can be positive all they want, but I think when design issues are this glaring I think the problems should be voiced. For example, the soulblight tome isn't "bad" but it's pretty obvious in comparison to the Lumineth and DOK tome, a writer in GW is phoning it in. Some warscrolls don't even work, or the rules aren't written properly, Legion of Blood basically lost it's theme of vampires and their very battleline unit is quite poor. It's stuff like that. Fell Bats as warscroll shouldn't exist. I don't know what happened there. 

As someone mentioned, just compare Kragnos to either Teclis or Morathi, issues pop up right away. There's no consistency and I think it's becoming pretty obvious why GW wish to hire a game design lead.  

I think putting the DoK book and Lumineth book in the same category kind of only really looks at the book from a power level PoV.

The DoK book to me is pretty much approaching the perfect book. Everything works really cleanly pick the stuff you like pick the sub-faction you like and you'll probably do fine. The Lumineth book on the other hand is the massive sprawling book with like 10 layers of rules interactions and loads of stuff that all does 17 different things. There is absolutely no restraint in that book It's just throw all the cool stuff at the wall and be done with it.

Then you have the Slaanesh book that seems to just do nothing and at least to me seems like a deeply frustrating book to write lists with and then Soulblight which seems to start going a direction and then just sort of fizzles out.

I don't really know what the hell is going on at GW wrt to batteltomes but it feels like they need a Lead Designer or at least someone who can set the tone and overall scope of what a tome is supposed to do. Right now they just seem a bit all over the place.

[Feii]

17 minutes ago, MothmanDraws said:

it would but it also eats into value of the voice. The voice gets access to every spell but if it gives immunity to BS for mortals and already flies thats 2 of its 15 spells it doesn't need

The lore is

1 fly spell (not useful on twins)

2 Healing spells

slothfull (turn off a hero)

BS immune for d3 mortal units (command ability could negate)

roll over bravery to get a +1 to hit target unit

then rest are all variations on "do mortal wounds" based on either unit size, movement value or bravery, all of which can be taken on contorted epitome which is 2/2 cast and re rolls its casts.

really little of these have any value on infinite range outside of slothfull stupor(7+ with no bonus), maybe you can be cheeky with some endless spells. But these are all coming out of a 1 cast wizard, she would be cooler if you could spend 3 depravity to cast another spell. The actual spells you want on Voice are warscroll ones that it cannot cast.

Spending depravity on different things than summoning is an amazing idea. Depravity points should be the allegiance ability but rewards should be different options imo. 
 

In the lore there are war bands that do not use any demons when they raid. Spending it on buffs and spells could be amazing. Maybe lock summoning to make them be able summon  only daemonettes in smaller numbers etc.

[Enoby]

To stop the rumour thread being clogged up by rules complaints, I've created a separate thread

 

 

[Pitloze]

31 minutes ago, Feii said:

I asked the leaker about a subfaction and he said that too - well, there might be something for kragnos in the kruel boyz battletome though they worship him after all

That only makes me want to skip kragnos more for now and focus on new faction.

[Snorri Nelriksson]

52 minutes ago, zamerion said:

Something like Troggorh Hag?

More probable swamp wizard but who knows.

[Nezzhil]

I'm a bit upset because in the preview they said that Destruction players are gonna receive new toys. Well, we receive Kragnos and a White Dwarf rules compilation. 

[Bayul]

Kragnos is 760 points, Lord Kroak is 430 points.

Someone posted a potato quality photo from the italian version of BR: Kragnos on Reddit.

[KingBrodd]

1 hour ago, zamerion said:

Snakes or guts? SNAKES OR GUTS!?