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Soulblight Gravelords News, Rumours and Speculation


Neil Arthur Hotep

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1 minute ago, Aren73 said:

@BaylorCorvette - I suppose no matter how people may complain or praise this release, it's quite a safe release. Mostly resculpts and some decent looking special characters. 

Thanks for linking btw, I'm new here didn't know if it was against forum rules or not. 

Totally this. If they chucked in a brand new unit or 2 it might be a different story

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The release itself has so many amazing kits. I understand that the Vamp-taur is super polarizing and that some (many) really dislike it but the amount of just outstanding sculpts and re-sculpts are fantastic. I've seen so many posts like 'Ex fantasy player here waiting X amount of year to get back into the hobby and now I won't'.....ok buddy 😜. Especially if you are into classic looking sculpts. You can easily do an old school looking vampire counts army with the minis in the SBGL.

On another note I am really, really hoping Neferata is solid! I listened to her audiobook last fall and almost purchased a Legions army right then and there but I had a good feeling there was an update coming. I think the only thing that could stop me from purchasing this army is if it is ridiculously expensive...and that is coming from a guy that gets 30% off at a store I play at occasionally.

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38 minutes ago, Aren73 said:

On a completely different note to all this - I recently ran a poll on an fb Soublight group about this release. Options being:
Was the reveal: As expected, better than expected or worse than expected?

The split is sitting around 35%, 34%, 31%, for expected, better, worse respectively. 

This tells me the community is surprisingly non-extreme on this release, with most people thinking it's "alright". I thought based on some reactions that we'd get a lot more people being extreme one way or the other. Something more like a 20:40:40 split or even more skewed. It also tells me that GW didn't blow many people away with this release, it's not one of those cases where they've massively overdelivered. But they also didn't drop the ball majorly, they didn't betray the fanbase so to speak. 

No idea what to do with that data...it's nice that people online aren't as extreme as one might think? 

In general, I think you want people to have strong emotional reactions towards your products, both positive and negative. As far as I know, that's considered more of a success than everyone thinking your product is not bad or great, but just OK. I could not tell you whether a combined 65% better/worse achieves that or not.

I feel like this was one of those releases that is kinda inherently unexciting, but necessary due to the amount of updates sculpts. Personally, I am happy we got it even though GW could probably have sold more models if they had released a majority of new kits and scrapped dire wolves/fell bats/zombies. It signals that they are willing to do overall less profitable long term support updates to factions.

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2 days later and I'm still completely undecided! I just can't make my mind up with the new stuff - 1 minute I'm pumped and ready to drop heavily on release, the other I'm thinking, nah, not for me. Never had this much internal dispute over an army range before in my life. Perhaps old age is making me indecisive... 

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7 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

In general, I think you want people to have strong emotional reactions towards your products, both positive and negative. As far as I know, that's considered more of a success than everyone thinking your product is not bad or great, but just OK. I could not tell you whether a combined 65% better/worse achieves that or not.

I feel like this was one of those releases that is kinda inherently unexciting, but necessary due to the amount of updates sculpts. Personally, I am happy we got it even though GW could probably have sold more models if they had released a majority of new kits and scrapped dire wolves/fell bats/zombies. It signals that they are willing to do overall less profitable long term support updates to factions.

That's sort of what I'm settling on now too. The rescultps are necessary, I love the Vengorian Lord and the named characters are I guess a bonus though not one I care much for. All in all the release is positive, but the lore and rules/playstyle is what will make it either a success or failure for me. 

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1 minute ago, Aren73 said:

That's sort of what I'm settling on now too. The rescultps are necessary, I love the Vengorian Lord and the named characters are I guess a bonus though not one I care much for. All in all the release is positive, but the lore and rules/playstyle is what will make it either a success or failure for me. 

exactly. And now i feel bad cose i need the rules very very badly

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9 minutes ago, lare2 said:

2 days later and I'm still completely undecided! I just can't make my mind up with the new stuff - 1 minute I'm pumped and ready to drop heavily on release, the other I'm thinking, nah, not for me. Never had this much internal dispute over an army range before in my life. Perhaps old age is making me indecisive... 

if you’re not sure - rule is don’t buy.

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1 minute ago, Lich King said:

if you’re not sure - rule is don’t buy.

This one speaks too much sense, can't have that much wisdom going around, will need to do some hair-trigger impulse buying to balance it out. 

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I’ve had some time to let it settle, and quelle surprise I’m still super into the release as a whole.

They gave me everything I was looking for, namely replacing the absolutely garbage zombies, updating the skeles, dire wolves and bats and crucially FINALLY replacing the Blood knights. For me, everything else was really a bonus.
I get that some people wanted more of a reinvention across the board in this regard, and/or the addition of some more elite foot troops.
Ultimately, this release is gonna appeal to those that loved the faction as it was (it’s just an update of the core stuff with some nice new characters) and potentially disappoint those who were hoping for more of a re-imagination or chance to replace certain things, VLoZD for example. Hard to please everyone, but as the post above suggests it has been broadly well received and most retained the status quo, which is cool. Personally, I’m ok if it’s not everyone’s cup of tea cos I don’t want everyone to jump on this bandwagon.

The marmite vamp-taur character I think, once I’ve got it myself and built it, I will love. It is undeniably weird and out there, some might even say nightmarish... But yeah. I’m onboard with that dual kit. One nice thing about that model, is it looks like magnetising the torso to switch between either build should be easy enough - so yay there.

I love all the other characters, can’t wait to see about ratty and masked vamp characters both of whom are no doubt cursed city expansions. 

My only three gripes are, we aren’t getting a new grave guard kit and that stinks cos the old one is just as bad as the old skele kit (and like a twit I sold off my 40 with great weapons in hope they’d get replaced... doh) AND we don’t seem to be getting any endless spells - but perhaps there is a big change coming in that regard with AoS 3.0 so we have to wait and see. Finally, it’s a bit annoying about the Cursed City 680 point Radughast gang not being able to be ran as individuals, but I totally get why that’s the case.

Personally, I’ve been running the Soulblight sub-faction for the last couple of years and have really struggled in tournaments, but have done pretty respectively all things considered. I never really suspected Soulblight would get their own faction, so it’s been a real treat for me.

I’m crossing fingers toes and eyes that above all else we still have choice of running Swift Death bloodline or something close to. Flying Blood Knights is immense fun. Probably tho, this will become a spell a bit like Spectral Host for FEC, and if that’s the case I’m cool. 

Edited by warhammernerd
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19 minutes ago, warhammernerd said:

 

Personally, I’ve been running the Soulblight sub-faction for the last couple of years and have really struggled in tournaments, but have done pretty respectively all things considered. I never really suspected Soulblight would get their own faction, so it’s been a real treat for me.

I was in the same boat, in terms of wanting to play Vampires and take them to a tournament and not get completely stomped. As a result, start of 2020 I started a personal project of "Khorne Vampires", it is basically using Khorne Allegiance and mostly Slaves to Darkness warscrolls (with Khorne mark of course), but I kitbashed a good chunk of the models to be vampires or vampire themed. For instance, I made custom Vampire Chaos Knights, the horses are the old Chaos Knights and the riders are the Vampire Lord from the VLoZD kit, but with the Chaos Knights weapons. I have them on the current Blood Knight bases so I use them as Blood Knights in my Legion of Blood army and then magnetize them to larger bases for Chaos Knights. My hope is that Blood Knights base size goes up, which I assume they will. That way I can just go ahead an convert them permanently. Then I did custom Vampire on Karkadrak, and other things. Overall the list proved competitive, I finsihed 6th in a two day tournament several weeks ago.

However, my hope is that Gravelords book will be pretty competitive, I don't need it to be S tier but low A tier would be very nice. We certainly have bodies for objectives in Skeletons and Zombies and a quick objective grabber in Dire Wolves. My concern is being too reliant on Spell casting for buffs, etc and not having strong enough Spell Casters in todays meta. The other concern I have is whether or not we will have a deep strike / outflanking source. Obviously we don't have shooting, which is fine (not a huge fan of shooting in AoS), however I am going to be disappointed if we do not have a way to deep strike / outflank / teleport. I think Blood Knights are going to provide a fast hard hitting Cavalry option. Would be AMAZING if they had a way to retreat and charge but I'd also settle for run and charge. As someone else mentioned, I suspect the competitive way to play Gravelords is going to be 1-2 large units of Skeletons and/or Zombies, with at least one maybe two units of Dire Wolves, 1 unit of Blood Knights and then proper Hero support. I am very interested to see what they do with Heroes. I've never been a fan of a Hero that is over ~600 pts, too much is tied up in that one unit. But what Gravelords is getting looks like we will have a lot of Hero options in the ~200-500 point range which I am super excited about. There's a lot of potential here. Lets hope we didn't get the "bin" writer for our book!

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9 minutes ago, NicholasFlamelGames said:

Would anyone here have any photos of the new Vampire Lord with alternative paint schemes? I actually really like the model but not the paint scheme on the hair and remember some posts previously that were photoshopped with different paint schemes. Thanks!

image.png.4767bc3f86caac37e7f8f3179099e5f6.pngsure there you go

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Gotta say GW have once again managed to nail the "tragic antihero, fallen hero" theme and aesthetic for their vampires. 

"A hideous amalgamation of bat, drake, and humanoid body, Vai is nevertheless possessed with a sliver of self-control and even conscience. She remembers the pride she felt as a fierce warrior queen, and she hasn’t allowed herself to succumb completely to her instincts."

Just have a read of that! That really greases my gears and bats my belfry - the idea of these horrific, twisted, blood-hungry abominations nonetheless nobly fighting against the Chaos hordes (insert other). 

 

Vampires should never be one-dimensional, it's a real shame whenever they are. 

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1 hour ago, lare2 said:

2 days later and I'm still completely undecided! I just can't make my mind up with the new stuff - 1 minute I'm pumped and ready to drop heavily on release, the other I'm thinking, nah, not for me. Never had this much internal dispute over an army range before in my life. Perhaps old age is making me indecisive... 

I’m quite fortunate at the moment; nothing will stop me dropping £££ on this!

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I'm actually happy that, as a long time LoN player, I feel like I can take my time with all those characters without the need to paint a lot of troops.

New sculpts are cool and all that, but there's no rush to paint a new block of 40 skellies when I already have 80 painted ones... The new dire wolves look great, but I don't have to rush them to tabletop ready because I can just use the older version meawhile :)

So I'm definitely dropping some cash on those characters first. 

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7 minutes ago, Raptor_Jesues said:

do you people reckon we are going to get endless spells and a scenery with the book preorder or...

Possibly. I am hoping for dice! If there are no terrain pieces I won't cry about it. I feel like it just adds more to the carry around pile sometimes. From a deepkin player, carrying around two big ass boats it can get annoying. I would be happy to see our vampire lords as being complete badasses on the tabletop though.

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51 minutes ago, Raptor_Jesues said:

do you people reckon we are going to get endless spells and a scenery with the book preorder or...

Might not happen, narratively the Necroquake is over right? So endless spells might not be so prolific anymore.

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