Soulblight Gravelords News, Rumours and Speculation

[Raptor_Jesues]

2 minutes ago, Sception said:

If the min size on dire wolves stays at 5, and the points cost stays under 100, I'm not sure it particularly matters whether blood knights or other units become battleline, as you'll be able to cheaply cover your battleline requirements via small useful wolf units anyway, which fit well into pretty much any theme, from undead hoards (they're zombies after all) to elite vampiric cavalry armies (as hunting dogs to help flush mortal prey out of hiding).

The question isn't whether blood knights will be battleline, the question is whether you'll be able to build a viable battle strategy with blood knights as the backbone of your army.  For comparison purposes, take the OBR deathriders.  They /are/ battleline, just by default, so if you want to field a cavalry army you technically can.  But while they're a great support unit for an army based on the OBR infantry, on their own the deathriders have neither the weight of numbers to contest objectives nor the extreme offensive power to sweep enemy units off of them, and as such while you can legally make an OBR cav army I'm not sure you can make one that's actually viable on the tabletop.

Soulblight armies under LoN could field full blood knight lists, and legion of blood armies could fill their battleline requirements with cheap dire wolves and have the left over points to run essentially an army of blood knights even though they weren't battleline for them.  But neither made for a particularly viable or competitive build on the table, and I'm not sure we're expecting the sort of changes to the unit that might better enable that in the new book.  Hope for, certainly, but expect?

fair point , but i still hope that a mono blood knights is going to be fun and competitive

[RocketPropelledGrenade]

I could definitely see Blood Knights being more offensively powerful than Deathriders, but I don't think it's guaranteed by any means. I do wonder if Dire Wolves will be pointed to where they are decent objective-holding chaff, though--that would be another way to support cavalry Gravelords. It would be wolves for objectives, Blood Knights as a mobile anvil, and big monster characters like VLoZD or the Vengorian Lord as your hammers.

Just throwing out guesswork at this stage, but I think I'd be happy playing something like that.

What I am personally hoping for is wolves cheap enough to serve as mobile screens, but maybe not objective holders, and offensively powerful Blood Knights, cheap skeleton bodies for the objective holding, and to be able to afford a decent amount of bodies of all of those while still taking a couple of our bigger characters. If Nulahmia (which has gotta be a subfaction, IMO) suits my playstyle, I would love to field Neferata, as that is one of my favorite models. I'd also like to field a VLoZD or Vengorian Lord. Maybe just the latter two if Nulahmia is not to my liking.

[Sception]

Just now, Raptor_Jesues said:

fair point , but i still hope that a mono blood knights is going to be fun and competitive

I do, too.  I hope we have multiple viable cav lists, not just mono blood knights, but also multiple units of black knights with maybe a unit or two of blood knights as the elite core, maybe some dogs & bats, maybe a mounted vamp lord & wight king, maybe Lauka or a Vengorian or a dragon lord... that sounds like an army I'd like to run.

Just, I mean, going on pattern recognition alone, and looking at GW's attempts at enabling cavalry armies in Cities of Sigmar, or Slaves to Darkness, or Seraphon, or Orks, or Sigmarines, or really anything other then IDK and BCR?  Just in general Age of Sigmar tends not to favor cavalry builds.  A unit or two of cav supporting an infantry core, sure, but not pure cav armies.  I'd love for SG to be one of the few exceptions, but I'm absolutely not holding my breath for it.

Maybe AoS 3.0 will do something to help cavalry armies in general.  I'd like to see it, though it might require some adjustments to the few viable cav armies that already exist.

[Raptor_Jesues]

what base size would you say the vengorian lord is on?

[Sception]

wild wishlisting here, but maybe if GW does something interesting on the psychology front with gravelords beyond the usual meaningless penalties to bravery.  Some sort of old school terror rule that could force enemies to withdraw from combat if they suffer too many wounds in combat from a charging vengorian or unit of blood knights could have some dramatic applications in the objective game, potentially making SG cav armies viable even if they can't outnumber enemy units or wipe them out on the charge.

Something like "terror: if a unit suffers more casualties in a single combat phase than their bravery characteristic from attacks by enemy units with the 'terror' rule, then that unit gains a terror token.  If a unit with a terror token is within 3" of any enemy models in its controlling player's movement phase then it must make a retreat move and must run, ending the the move as far away from enemy models as it can.  A unit which cannot move at least 3" away from any enemy models is not required to retreat or run.  At the end of each player's movement phase, remove any terror tokens from their units."

Lauka/Vengorian would get the terror rule, Blood Knights would have the terror rule as long as they had a banner in their unit, and other vampire heroes could get the terror rule via a vampire ability, command trait, or artefact, allowing for terrifying VLoZD's as well.  An 'undead horror' themed bloodline/dynasty subfaction might give the rule to Vargheists as well.

Edited May 4, 2021 by Sception

[Sception]

Just now, Raptor_Jesues said:

what base size would you say the vengorian lord is on?

I'm thinking 100mm round, but that's just a guess.

[Aren73]

2 minutes ago, Sception said:

LoN wasn't pre split warhammer undead.  It explicitly didn't include any of the tomb king stuff.  It was absolutely Vamp Counts that traded the ghoul units for a new coat of paint.  Gravelords are just legions of nagash that have traded the ghost units in order to go /back/ to the vamp count paint coat.

Our army is skeletons, zombies, dire wolves, wights and vampires.  It's vamp counts, my dude.  I'm not saying there can't be varrying builds.  Even in the old vamp count days there were varrying builds, including more elite cavalry builds.  But the core of the faction was, and remains, a hoard of weaker lesser undead buffed and sustained by necromantic casters & support heroes and led by a small handful of powerful vampire heroes and elite units.

I still think SG will be closer to Vampire Counts than LoN was. Sure LoN wasn't *exactly* pre-split undead but it was more towards that feel. It was a toolbox of "Run your undead however you want" with no heavy emphasis on neither the "Vampire" nor the "Counts" part. 

In essence: 

Vampire Counts was a subfaction of Legions of Nagash. Vampire Counts IS the Soulblight Gravelords faction. 

[Sception]

Thematically, yeah, Gravelords are more Vamp Counts than Legions of Nagash were.  But in terms of unit selection and play style, they're all variations on the same concept.  Slow weak undead infantry buffed and reanimated by necromantic spellcasters and led by powerful do-everything (ie they fight and cast and buff and heal) undead lords, mostly vampires.

As long as there's a warhammer game, I think there will be an undead faction that embodies that core archetype, and for the foreseeable future that's going to be the Soulblight Gravelords.

I'm not saying there won't be other possible builds, even other viable or competitive builds.  I honestly hope there are.  But the core identity of the faction is still built on a foundation of shambling undead hordes, and IMO that's the most important thing for the designers to get right.  If there's a bleeding edge, top table competitive hard core cavalry build for the gravelords, but the basic undead infantry build is garbage, then personally I'd consider the battletome to be a failure mechanically.

I'd like to see a viable SG cavalry list, but I absolutely DO NOT want to see another IDK situation.

Edited May 4, 2021 by Sception

[Nactigal]

I already have a bunch of wolves, black knights and VLoZD. I'm stoked to get the mother of nightmares, blood knights, wight king and Belledona for a fast and hard hitting list. 

I hope that this book isn't too complicated. There is a certain charm to the run up and smash them strategy. Especially for the beer and pretzel games. 

[JackStreicher]

45 minutes ago, Raptor_Jesues said:

pinky swear it, else be known as a cheat and a liar

Minute 29:00 They don‘t specifically say that BK will be battleline but they mention them as „direction“ you build towards with your army.

[Aren73]

7 minutes ago, Sception said:

Thematically, yeah, Gravelords are more Vamp Counts than Legions of Nagash were.  But in terms of unit selection and play style, they're all variations on the same concept.  Slow weak undead infantry buffed and reanimated by necromantic spellcasters and led by powerful do-everything (ie they fight and cast and buff and heal) undead lords, mostly vampires.

As long as there's a warhammer game, I think there will be an undead faction that embodies that core archetype, and for the foreseeable future that's going to be the Soulblight Gravelords.

I'm not saying there won't be other possible builds, even other viable or competitive builds.  I honestly hope there are.  But the core identity of the faction is still built on a foundation of shambling undead hordes, and IMO that's the most important thing for the designers to get right.  If there's a bleeding edge, top table competitive hard core cavalry build for the gravelords, but the basic undead infantry build is garbage, then personally I'd consider the battletome to be a failure mechanically.

I'd like to see a viable SG cavalry list, but I absolutely DO NOT want to see another IDK situation.

Agree with a lot there. 

I'd say a few other core themes of the army are: 

Our core is an attrition kind of unit. 

Our more elite units are very strong, surprisingly strong for what would otherwise be a horde faction. 

That's what distinguishes Vampire Counts for me from the other horde factions. The elite units. It's what gives our army a distinctive feel. Other horde armies' elite units may have still quite a few models in them, whereas ours are like Blood Knights - very powerful and hit like a brick, if somewhat fragile for their points. 

I am 100% onboard with you on our chaff units, I just want our elites to keep their identity too. 

[Liquidsteel]

If the leaks for Zombies are correct I expect at least one horde to be the go to for competitive play. 

I'm already preparing to run 60 of them but likely won't go higher. 

One big tarpit plus a necromancer and corpse cart to support, then wolves to flank and the rest filled with hammer units.

[Erdemo86]

Sorry double post

Edited May 4, 2021 by Erdemo86

[Sception]

These are the core mechanical themes of the 'classic' warhammer undead army as I see them:

Spoiler

• "deceptively weak" - while not offensively threatening on their own, the undead hordes that make up the core battleline of the army are empowered by the abilities of support heroes and necromantic spellcasters which either buff the undead or debuff their enemies, either way making the undead hordes more dangerous than they first appear on their own.
• "deceptively fragile" - while the individual skeletons and zombies are easily killed, they are also continually replenished throughout the game by summoning, healing, & other recursion abilities, generally also tied to the heroes.  Enemies find their attacks against the horde to be ineffective since the undead they put down just keep getting back up.  Hence "deceptively fragile".
• "deceptively slow" - the movement speed of the undead infantry hoards is low, and may be further penalized by not letting them march or run or other similar restrictions on their movement.  However, the army typically has tricksy methods of getting their units where they need to be.  Maybe spells to make units move multiple times, or to simply summon them into forward positions that they couldn't have walked to, or outflanking abilities, or gravesite deployment, or the ability to place models in front of the unit when you heal them, effectively turning recursion abilities into movement abilities.  Taken together, these movement shenanigans make the undead battle line much faster than it appears from raw stats, especially when a handful of actual fast support and hammer units is considered.  Hence "deceptively slow".
• Heroes are both the strength and the weakness: the leaders of the undead hoard - typically vampires - are powerful, do-everything characters.  They fight, buff, heal, cast spells, they're often individually fast or flying as well.  Even lesser support heroes are still multi-function - necromancers heal and cast, wights buff and fight, etc.  They are absolutely a strength of the army, but they're simultaneously the weakness.  Since they do everything, they also cost a lot of points, making them high priority targets.  Worse, the core of your army relies on the support of these heroes to provide their strength, toughness, and speed.  Without their commanders, the whole army falls apart.  Sometimes even literally so via army crumbling rules.  So the heroes are both the greatest strength of the army and its most exploitable weakness.  Because they're such a glaring weakness they often have extra rules protecting them - vampires have self healing, necromancers can throw lesser undead in the way of attacks directed at them, etc - but if a persistent and aggressive enemy fights past those defenses to take out your heroes, then the battle's basically over.
• Strong magic - this is basically part of all of the above, spells being just one of the unorthodox methods used by the army to buff, debuff, heal, or move, but specifically using spellcasting as part of your bag of tricks is a core part of the army's thematic identity, and it should be, If one should choose to build for it, one of the strongest spellcasting armies in the game, albeit one that mostly uses its spells as indirect support abilities, rather than blasting enemy units off the table.
• Melee based - the army in general wants to get in close and overwhelm you in a horrific tide of dead, grasping hands and claws and rusted blades.  they don't hang back and shoot.  The narrative/cinematic structure of the game should revolve around the undead horde overwhelming the defended hold out positions of the mortals, not the other way around.  some offensive spells and ranged abilities is fine, but the classic warhammer undead faction is not meant to be a primarily ranged based faction.
• Psychological threat - the armies of the undead aren't just scary like a big monster barreling down on you, they're supernaturally horrifying, driving mortal foes to madness.  Whatever the psychology rules of the core game in question are, the undead should exploit them.  In oldhammer this was via Fear and Terror, in newhammer this is via abilities which lower bravery for battleshock tests or banshee scream type abilities that target bravery to do damage.  In some other game it might be something else entirely.
• Undead Monstrosities (wolves, bats, knights, monsters) as support, not the core - while the core of the faction is the slow, weak undead hordes empowered with speed and strength by their heroes, the army always also includes a few support units and hammers that buck the core trends - units that are fast or tough or hard hitting on their own, allowing them to provided needed support to the core battleline, or a hammer for the battle line's anvil, without requiring you to divert buffs and spellcasting resources away from the undead hoarde.  Not only do these units not require the support as much, they typically can't benefit from it as much even if you wanted to, so that super-buffed elite units don't render the entire core concept of the undead hoard battleline obsolete..

 

To me, that's what defines the archetypical 'Warhammer Undead' faction, and from what I've seen that's the core of what the Soulblight Gravelords are, with the other AoS Death factions being increasingly divergent variations on the theme.  FEC are pretty close to theme, but the undead monstrosities bit is played way up, to the point of being equal to or even more prominent than the core undead infantry horde.  OBR are also pretty close to theme, except that their undead infantry battle line are elite phalanxes rather than shambling hordes, and the factions core units in general are obviously tough rather than deceptively fragile, and less dependent on their heroes to function.  Nighthaunt are the most divergent, being both tough and fast by default due to army wide ethereal, flight, and higher movement speeds in general.  But while they don't have to be hoardy, they still can be, and they're still pretty dependent on their support heroes, which are if anything a more exploitable weakness than for the other death factions.

I do hope the battletome can support builds and play styles apart form the 'classic warhammer undead' outlined above, but as this faction is the only one that can provide the undiluted core of that archetype, and as that's the only archetype that all of the units in the army have a potential home in, that's the one that I personally really feel they *need* to nail.  If there's not a viable pure cav list that's too bad, but that's also par for the course for AoS.  But if it can't do the classic undead infantry horde with hero support I would consider that to be a major failing.

 

I'm not too worried about it, though.  Rumors of changes to skeletons and zombies could be problematic, but I'm fairly confident that it'll come together, more or less.  Looking back at undead and vamp count faction books through the years, they get the core into at least some sort of workable form more often than they don't.

Edited May 4, 2021 by Sception

[Lich King]

It’s been an issue with Aos for a while - and there was a thread on it not too long ago, but to me it’s always about the “living dead” and varied troops in general. I’m not a fan of the Spam same box theme going on so I hope we can build a cohesive and competitive-ish force around multiple different boxes without going into one subtraction.

  Things like “wolf only layout “ or “skeleton only army “ would be things that although allowed - not  be necessary to make a thematic but somewhat respectable list on the table . I like lots of different things rather than one .

Edited May 4, 2021 by Lich King

[BaylorCorvette]

I really would like to see the "unit leader" for Blood Knights be a Vampire Lord. So the rules would be something like this. "One model in this unit may be a Vampire Lord. A Vampire Lord has a wounds characteristic of X. The Vampire Lord may cast one spell and unbind one spell. The Vampire Lord knows Arcane Bolt, Mystic Shield (and maybe something else?). Command Abilities may be issued by a Vampire Lord. Deathless Minions may be used by a Vampire Lord"

The idea being is it is kind of like OBR's Hekatos in the sense that they are kind of like mini Heroes for issuing some CA's and generating their Deathless Aura. However unlike OBR where pretty much all of their units have access to a Hekatos we would only see this on a Blood Knight unit leader. I still think the Black Knight unit leaders would just get like 1 extra melee attack and not be a pseudo hero.

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

4 minutes ago, BaylorCorvette said:

I really would like to see the "unit leader" for Blood Knights be a Vampire Lord. So the rules would be something like this. "One model in this unit may be a Vampire Lord. A Vampire Lord has a wounds characteristic of X. The Vampire Lord may cast one spell and unbind one spell. The Vampire Lord knows Arcane Bolt, Mystic Shield (and maybe something else?). Command Abilities may be issued by a Vampire Lord. Deathless Minions may be used by a Vampire Lord"

The idea being is it is kind of like OBR's Hekatos in the sense that they are kind of like mini Heroes for issuing some CA's and generating their Deathless Aura. However unlike OBR where pretty much all of their units have access to a Hekatos we would only see this on a Blood Knight unit leader. I still think the Black Knight unit leaders would just get like 1 extra melee attack and not be a pseudo hero.

Rumour has it that unit champions will all (or mostly?) be able to use command abilities in AoS 3, so we might get this across the board in the near future.

[Sception]

For deathless minions at least, I rather expect vampire units will have access to it regardless of hero range, like hekatos in obr.  we'll see, though.

[dirkdragonslayer]

3 hours ago, Raptor_Jesues said:

anyway i did a fast photoshop of Lauka Vai and it looks a lot better.I think part of the weirdness of the model resides in the paintjob, this looks a lot more natural

That looks much better. I think the bottom and the top being two completely different color schemes on the official paint job really emphasized the disconnect between the two halves. This looks a lot more like a cohesive piece.

[Ghoooouls]

The dire wolves pack was shown in a group of 10, all different sculpts,  so I would assume they run in 10s now rather than 5s.

Or we get 2x5 units in one box which would be cool.

Edited May 4, 2021 by Ghoooouls

[Honk]

The real issue I have with all this soulblight awesomeness...

vhat about deathrattle awesomeness?

 wightking on mount, okaaaay, but black knights , skellis and graveguard look kinda left behind. I hope they get integrated well into all the ruler of the night dynasties 

[Erdemo86]

Guys will we get new skellies? Like the one from the cursed city box? Or will they be only cursed city exclusive?

[BaylorCorvette]

25 minutes ago, Erdemo86 said:

Guys will we get new skellies? Like the one from the cursed city box? Or will they be only cursed city exclusive?

We absolutely are getting new skeletons & zombies.

 

 

Uggggh now I just want someone to leak warscroll and/or battletome info!!!!

Edited May 4, 2021 by BaylorCorvette

[warhammernerd]

25 minutes ago, BaylorCorvette said:

We absolutely are getting new skeletons & zombies.

 

 

Uggggh now I just want someone to leak warscroll and/or battletome info!!!!

Same. Feels like a looooooong time

[BaylorCorvette]

1 minute ago, warhammernerd said:

Same. Feels like a looooooong time

I'm going to be gutted if this Sunday they don't announce preorder for May 15th. I realize there is a handful more weekends in May that it COULD be but I just want it to be ASAP..