The Winter Rules Update

[ArkanautDadmiral]

3 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

It seems there is a general move away from mixed armies this edition. First with the removal of Grand Alliance allegiances and now with the changes to coalition rules for Chaos.

I get why GW is doing this. While it suck for people to have the option to play a mixed, lore friendly army taken away, it sucks even more when the best way to play a certain army is to mostly run models from a different army. Plus, it must be a nightmare to balance S2D and Beasts units across 5 or so extra factions.

Ultimately, what I think is overall worth criticizing here is the change in direction: One moment you can build mixed armies and are even encouraged to do so, the next they are more of a "I guess the option is there if you want it, but it's not going to be good" thing. AoS is a hobby where you expect longevity for your armies. This is the opposite of that.

I have personally stopped including coalition units in any of my lists except in the most minimal capacity. Even in Cities of Sigmar, I don't really feel like including Stormcast or other coalition units is really all that stable. It feels like you are just setting yourself up for your list to break when any of the inidividual armies or the core rules are updated the next time. If I built a Living City list that contained Sylvaneth and Stormcast, that list could potentially break with the next Cities, Sylvaneth or Stormcast tome, as well as any other rule updates such as new GHBs or I guess Battlescrolls now. That's just too much of a risk for me.

I’m glad I didn’t pick up an StD start collecting over Black Friday to use in a Khorne army now. I’ll not be buying any more  Khorne minis now until they get a new battletome and even then the loss of StD units using allegiance abilities might still turn me off.

[Neverchosen]

19 minutes ago, ArkanautDadmiral said:

I’m glad I didn’t pick up an StD start collecting over Black Friday to use in a Khorne army now. I’ll not be buying any more  Khorne minis now until they get a new battletome and even then the loss of StD units using allegiance abilities might still turn me off.

Yeah I was so close to picking up an old set of Wrath and Rapture. I still might do so but now I am more interested in checking out the Xmas reveals or maybe getting a battleforce... Now how to explain to my partner all the Aelves on the shelves when I pick up that Lumineth battleforce while she is away for the holidays? 🤔

Don't forget Chaos Warriors make good proxies for Blood Warriors. I might use mine for that purpose and or Myrmidesh.

I should just get Varanguard... but they are no where to be found 😨

Edited December 22, 2021 by Neverchosen

[The Red King]

4 hours ago, Klamm said:

  Quote

Coalition units included in a Blades of Khorne, Disciples of Tzeentch, Hedonites of Slaanesh or Maggotkin of Nurgle army no longer benefit from allegiance abilities.

Question about this. Does that mean that, say, a Slaves to Darkness Daemon prince with the mark of Slaanesh can't be given a Hedonites command trait? Or is this just allegiance abilities?

TBH I'm disappointed with how much GW has discouraged taking BoC/StD in mono-god armies. They struck a good balance in AoS 2.0, where allegiance abilities worked with the god mark but most command abilities required Hedonites/Maggotkin etc.

I should get more synergy from a unit of Slaaneshi chaos warriors in a Hedonites army than just allying in some Plaguebearers, but the only difference is I'm not limited to 400 points with the former. It's a bad change. 

Where is your qoute from? Is that the exact wording in the FAQ somewhere I missed?

[AaronWilson]

5 minutes ago, The Red King said:

Where is your qoute from? Is that the exact wording in the FAQ somewhere I missed?

It is not written in such way but things for example the Blades of Khorne book are now tied to Blades of Khorne keyword, not just Khorne. They have added Blades of Khorne key word to the whole book, so if you include a coalition unit it lacks the keyword now to gain the benefit of the books allegiance abilities. This is true of all four the chaos books. 

[The Red King]

Just now, AaronWilson said:

It is not written in such way but things for example the Blades of Khorne book are now tied to Blades of Khorne keyword, not just Khorne. They have added Blades of Khorne key word to the whole book, so if you include a coalition unit it lacks the keyword now to gain the benefit of the books allegiance abilities. This is true of all four the chaos books. 

Ah got you.  I just wanted to make sure it wasnt that exact wording because as it stands now coalition units CAN still take artifacts and the like if they have the proper keywords because (at least in khorne) they only applied keyword restrictions to blood tithe and subfactions. 

[PrimeElectrid]

Remember everyone complaining about SCE move after teleport?

[chosen_of_khaine]

10 minutes ago, PrimeElectrid said:

Remember everyone complaining about SCE move after teleport?

How is that remotely the same lmao

[PrimeElectrid]

6 minutes ago, chosen_of_khaine said:

How is that remotely the same lmao

Yeah 3d6 charge on every unit within 12” in armies that have teleports (OWC), deep strikes (gits) and double moving units (Ironjawz) is way better than one unit being able to teleport 9” away then move (and suffer from redeploy), or one unit running 6” and charging, or Gavriels +3” CA, which were all deleted.

Edited December 22, 2021 by PrimeElectrid

[readercolin]

4 minutes ago, PrimeElectrid said:

Yeah 3d6 charge on every unit within 12” in armies that have teleports (OWC), deep strikes (gits) and double moving units (Ironjawz) is way better than one unit being able to teleport 9” away then move (and suffer from redeploy), or one unit running 6” and charging, or Gavriels +3” CA, which were all deleted.

Hey now... don't forget the 14" move deals impact damage based on how long your charge is beastclaw raiders.  They get angry when they get left out of the discussion.

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

26 minutes ago, PrimeElectrid said:

Remember everyone complaining about SCE move after teleport?

Why is it such a problem to you that Stormcast are now a less mobile army and that a 700 point god model can give +1d6" charge distance to a bunch of Destruction armies at the same time?

You really seem excessively salty about Stormcast sometimes. They objectively came out quite well from the FAQ and will probably one of the main contenders to do well in tournaments for a while.

[Doko]

5 hours ago, Zeblasky said:

I can understand not wanting to play with a summoning army (all those extra models to buy and carry around can be quite taxing), but even now summoning potentially is extremely strong mechanic, as it gives you a unique ability to adapt your starting army both to your opponent composition and to the situation on the battlefield. This summoning flexibility is extremely underestimated.

 

And yet some competitive lists for Hedonites included both Archaon and 30 Blissbarbs. And honestly, even on paper they are quite good right now. They now cost the same as Irondrakes now, and sure, they can't get buffed hard, they have worse to hit and their save is bad, but they are faster, have better range, don't need to stand still to have 2 attacks and they can run and shoot in a roster that is all about dealing damage. Seriously, do you need them to be more cost effective that Irondrakes damage wise while being much more mobile and with much better overwatch?

Yes,i laugth so hard when i see peoole saying blisbard are bads but irondrakes must be nerfed.

 

I hadnt idea about stats of blisbards but then i go to his scroll and i see how they are so much better than irondrakes for same cost and this unit is supossed to be bad and overcosted due to free sumon???

I would play blisbard above irondrakes everyday.

Irondrakes 8,8damage output at 18" treathrange and 4'4 at melle(new unleash hell makes irondrakes useless) or at 22" treathrange

Blisbarbs 6,6damage at almost 30" treathrange and dont loose damage at melle.(can run and shoot)

So in my experience blissbarbs gonna do more damage than irondrakes allways because enemy know how play and stay at 18'1 of irondrakes so his damage is useless while blisbards have a insane 30" treathrange

 

[MothmanDraws]

Blissbarbs have never been bad, their issue is not having enough bodies around to protect them due to cost of whole army, their damage is great but contradictory to armies design, army wants you to not kill so you usually split fire with blissbarbs. They have great general wound output but due to splitting shots usually those wounds are less impactfull.

Other issue with them is bravery, like alot of hedonites they need babysitting or they run away. Also very little in army synergises with them, most stuff only effects melee. We amusingly had that battallion of 3 blissbarbs and 1 lord of pain where lop buff doesnt work on them.

If slaanesh had access to a solid cheap chaff unit blissbarbs would shine. Designers intention is likely you screen them with summon units but if you go 2nd it can be turn 3 before you summon anything meaningful.

[PrimeElectrid]

44 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

Why is it such a problem to you that Stormcast are now a less mobile army and that a 700 point god model can give +1d6" charge distance to a bunch of Destruction armies at the same time?

You really seem excessively salty about Stormcast sometimes. They objectively came out quite well from the FAQ and will probably one of the main contenders to do well in tournaments for a while.

SCE did very well yes; but also have lost almost all their tools/ delivery mechanisms to get melee units into combat. Both can be true.

There is exactly one way of reliably boosting a charge in the Stormcast book: one thunderstrike unit per turn from  7” out of scions under 4w with an imperatant; assuming you aren’t playing Tooth and Nail. That’s it. No other sources of +x to charge exist. That’s a huge number of caveats. SCE start moving after teleport and GW nuked it to rapturous applause. 

Meanwhile that same GW hand out a 3d6 charge aura with just a 12” clause to every single destruction unit, every turn, in armies that can really abuse it way more, like it’s no big deal. So yeah a little salty.

m4 paladins: can you help us get into combat? GW: no, you move or roll a 9+ unaided

m4 ardboys: can you help us get into combat? Gw: sure here’s a teleport and a hero phase move and move again and a 3d6 charge and a musician 

Edited December 22, 2021 by PrimeElectrid

[JackStreicher]

3 hours ago, ArkanautDadmiral said:

I’m glad I didn’t pick up an StD start collecting over Black Friday to use in a Khorne army now. I’ll not be buying any more  Khorne minis now until they get a new battletome and even then the loss of StD units using allegiance abilities might still turn me off.

Indeed. Right before 3.0 launched I was creating a Hedonites Army with my Slaves to Darkness. Luckily I had only bought 25% of the models I wanted before they made it unplayable. 
If you really want people not to buy your Christmas Slaanesh box, then such an „update“ is the perfect way to so.

 

@PrimeElectrid also: Most of our melee units start off at only 2 attacks which is too little for their points. The best thing about SCE however: You simply lose against MW spam unless you play Hollowed Knights with Gardus. It’s just wtf.

Edited December 22, 2021 by JackStreicher

[The Red King]

Careful words like that will make them delay the rules updates in the future to ensure it doesnt stop you from making bad purchases.

[JackStreicher]

1 minute ago, The Red King said:

Careful words like that will make them delay the rules updates in the future to ensure it doesnt stop you from making bad purchases.

Instead they could simply fix the issues the whole community is crying about instead of changing points to +-15.

This whole update looks like they tried to make it look like they actually had to put work into it, when the reality is that this was mashed together on two lonely evenings, without knowing what to do.

[Doko]

Yes seems how if they heard the opinion of some random testers with 0 idea about the game(as the sc dragons nerf before release) in place of make their changes after read and get a idea of actual meta and tournament data.

Best army of the actual meta:sons of behemat and ironjaws.

What have done gw? Buff behemats and a sligth increase to gruntas while doing nothing to maw krushas and also overbuffing kragnos doing him a autoinclude and broken model at the level of old archaon and nagash.

Also random nerfs to middle tier armys as irondrakes and gotrek even if data show how these units arent in any 5\0 tournaments

[The Red King]

Do we have any actual indication that there are more FAQs coming? Like we literally only got 5 armies? I asked on facebook and they didn't reply.

[vinnyt]

You guys know that it's like comically easy for stormcast to kill kragnos, right? And that there's a slight difference between a 3d6 charge and a 4-5" charge after teleporting? And that dragons still get their hero phase move/charge? 

SCE are insanely mobile with a reliable teleport of any unit, ability to deepstrike across the army, ability to deepstrike and auto-make a 12" charge, etc, etc. You also have things like fulminators, dragons, chariots, etc, etc. Plus some of the best shooting in the game that escaped the update completely unharmed. And if your reponse is to just "kill the raptors", then I know you have no idea what you're talking about. They can deploy in the sky to avoid the alpha and are outrageously maneuverable with the teleport and 30" range. 

Like every post is just SCE players being extremely salty that their army isn't the most broken thing imaginable. There are multiple competitive builds that will absolutely compete at the highest level and SCE are absolutely an A-tier army. And in case you're wondering, here are 2 builds just right off the cuff that are extremely competitive: Incantor, relictor, drake hero, 4 dragons, 6 raptors, 3 aetherwings. Flavor to taste. Incantor, Relictor, imperator, 9 grandhammer annihilators, 6 raptors, aetherwings. Flavor to taste. Feel free to swap out whatever with fulminators since they're also unbelievably good. Meanwhile armies like Skaven, Gitz, and BoC are still practically unplayable after this update.

 

[yukishiro1]

Khorne and OBR got nerfed harder than SoB (or frankly probably than anything else other than Tzeentch Archaon). Warshrine went up 30 points for no discernable reason, while Fulminators, Kairos, Khorne Daemon Prince didn't see any point increases. Morathi actually got buffed. The update is full of random nonsensical weirdness like this practically everywhere you look. 

The overall changes to the game in this patch - heroic recovery, unleash hell, etc - are good. The specific factional changes are classic GW pin the tail on the donkey stuff - occasionally the tail goes on the right part, but judging by how often it doesn't, I'm not sure it wasn't just pure chance. 

 

Edited December 22, 2021 by yukishiro1

[Andrew G]

I'm skipping quite a bit of the discussion, but a couple things...

How the hell did Fulminators fly under the radar? Foxes?

This was advertised in the Warhammer Community previews as "Focused on bringing under-performing units/armies up", which clearly doesn't seem to be the case. For example, last time I looked at stats, Gitz was looking at ~30% winrate at GTs yet they got close to nothing to address that.

Even if they have a book on the horizon, would it really be that crippling to meta to give some of these underperforming armies a 5% to 10% points decrease across the board in the interim?  

Anyway, definitely better than nothing, but I think all this did was reposition some of the S-tier armies to A-tier and some of the A-tier armies to S-tier. 

[Doko]

8 minutes ago, Andrew G said:

I think all this did was reposition some of the S-tier armies to A-tier and some of the A-tier armies to S-tier. 

I dont think nothing have changed,the same s tier armies remain as s and a tiers are a tier yet,but the gap betwen s and a is bigger now.

Only changed the lists of these s tiers,as tzenth change his archaon list for other only tzenth lists or seraphons change his salamander spam(8+) for estegadon spam and 2 salamanders etc

[Andrew G]

2 minutes ago, Doko said:

I dont think nothing have changed,the same s tier armies remain as s and a tiers are a tier yet,but the gap betwen s and a is bigger now.

Only changed the lists of these s tiers,as tzenth change his archaon list for other only tzenth lists or seraphons change his salamander spam(8+) for estegadon spam and 2 salamanders etc

Idk, SCE was on the rise in A-tier and they went completely unscathed. Wouldn't be surprised if they kept creeping up.
Amulet change has bigger impact on IJ, Sons than most other top performing armies (they're still going to be ******-kicker armies, no doubt)
ETC. ETC.

I think we're mostly in agreement, really all this is doing is shuffling around the rankings of the top ~8 armies, but none of these armies are going to bumped out of the top spots and we won't have any new armies introduced into the ~55+ % winrate bracket.

Meanwhile, we have like 6 or so armies at sub ~40% winrate and they will remain there. 

[yukishiro1]

Yeah, it's very difficult to see this being successful re: its stated objective of bringing up lower-tier armies to competitive viability and more generally "making the game feel fair."  

Is the game better than it was before the update? Yes, probably, to at least a marginal degree. But these changes are far too underwhelming and scattershot to appreciably move the needle on making underpowered books viable, and they actually somehow managed to make some of the struggling factions even worse than they were before. 

Edited December 22, 2021 by yukishiro1

[JackStreicher]

1 hour ago, vinnyt said:

You guys know that it's like comically easy for stormcast to kill kragnos, right? And that there's a slight difference between a 3d6 charge and a 4-5" charge after teleporting? And that dragons still get their hero phase move/charge? 

SCE are insanely mobile with a reliable teleport of any unit, ability to deepstrike across the army, ability to deepstrike and auto-make a 12" charge, etc, etc. You also have things like fulminators, dragons, chariots, etc, etc. Plus some of the best shooting in the game that escaped the update completely unharmed. And if your reponse is to just "kill the raptors", then I know you have no idea what you're talking about. They can deploy in the sky to avoid the alpha and are outrageously maneuverable with the teleport and 30" range. 

Like every post is just SCE players being extremely salty that their army isn't the most broken thing imaginable. There are multiple competitive builds that will absolutely compete at the highest level and SCE are absolutely an A-tier army. And in case you're wondering, here are 2 builds just right off the cuff that are extremely competitive: Incantor, relictor, drake hero, 4 dragons, 6 raptors, 3 aetherwings. Flavor to taste. Incantor, Relictor, imperator, 9 grandhammer annihilators, 6 raptors, aetherwings. Flavor to taste. Feel free to swap out whatever with fulminators since they're also unbelievably good. Meanwhile armies like Skaven, Gitz, and BoC are still practically unplayable after this update.

 

*hyperbole start* Nice, we have 4 useful units. It’s a really good quota in a book with 100ish Warscrolls and basically zero defense against MWs. 👏🏼
*hyperbole end*

Comparing something bad to something even worst doesn’t make your argument, or any argument for that matter, any more viable. 
 

Are SCE better than the worst armies? Yes.

Does that mean they are fine? No.

So what were you saying?

Edited December 22, 2021 by JackStreicher