Forrix

One of my hobby dreams is attend a tournament with an insane model count army and just pour them out of a bucket onto the table.

Slaanesh isn't as crazy as I expected. I think FEC and DoK both got to almost 80% if I'm remembering right, balance is actually look pretty good if you disregard the less than 1% of the meta faction due to sample size.

I'm liking what is effectively 8 inch movement Ogor bulls (now Gluttons) with bravery 8 in melee (assuming that part of their warscroll doesn't change).

Honestly, I think Wild Riders are best in Hallowheart as they get access to an easily cast +1 wound spell that you can give to SotT who can keep up with Wild Riders. And since Hallowheart is in Aqshy you could also get the +1 wound and charge spell too depending on how your local group plays (mine generally says you can take a realm spell from the realm your army is from in place of a battletome spell).

I'm planning on keeping an eye on ebay and facebook as Feast of Bones comes out. So far the Ossiarch side is waaaaaay more popular amongst my local gaming group than the Mawtribes. I'm hoping people wind up just dumping the Ogor side for cheap. I just don't want to miss out on the Tyrant as going off other boxes it might be a year or more until GW releases him separately.

This might not be a popular take but with 4 new battletomes out in roughly a one month timeframe I'm ready for GW to shift their focus to 40k for awhile. I've got a cities and a mawtribes army going and I want to see how the meta shakes out.

Pretty much this, Mortek Guard look crazy good but for all we know they'll be 20+ points a piece. If I had to make a bet though, I'd bet that Bonereapers end up on the higher end of the power curve. Blanket immunity to battleshock and access to an army wide +1 save are good enough its hard to imagine this army being weak. Gotrek was ridiculous, some people were so fixated on his damage and tankiness that there was nothing that could be done to convince people he wouldn't be the most op thing ever.

I'm not sure what game people have been playing but these traits look alright to good based on what very little information we have. Not having to waste a spell to dispel an endless spell is quite nice. The heal is nice too but we won't really know how good until we see his warscroll. If he's going to be getting into melee combat or if he has the ability to damage himself to get bonuses to unbind/casting ala Hallowheart then a full heal just for dispelling an endless spell will be quite handy. Note that it does not specify an endless spell cast by an enemy. The Tyrant/Frostlord traits could be very good on what are very likely going to extremely strong melee heroes. Again, note these are just command traits not artifacts. Getting full rerolls to both hit and wound, while offset by being situational, is extremely good by the command trait standards I'm used to. We won't know for sure how good this stuff until Saturday but I really really wouldn't start groaning about how weak Mawtribes are right now. Hell, I remember people raging about how weak Skaven were going to be when their warscroll rewrites came out.

Oh hey, I got like super quoted in this thread :P. I think my fourth guess about shorted playtesting time frames is the most likely given some more time to think about.. I generally agree with this but some of the stuff that makes it through (like the aforementioned Drakespawn Knights or the pre-nerf Gristlegore General) are so out of whack that it doesn't really take much in the way of playtesting to see that they're either wildly under or over powered. That said, in Cities there are a metric ton of warscrolls. It is possible depending on their testing that they basically ran out of time before getting to them. Or there was a last minute change right before the deadline. Likewise with Flesh Eater courts its possible Gristlegore was the last court to be made and playtesters never got around to it. Or mount traits were added at the last second so Terrorgheists weren't rerolling hits on their maw for the actual testing.

Honestly, considering some of the stuff that slips through I think its safe to say their playtesters are either incompetent, aren't being listened to, or that playtesting isn't actually taking place. I suppose I could add a fourth option that playtesting is being rushed so not everything gets tested though that kind of falls into the 3rd category.

All the Nighthaunt players in my area have all quit or switched to different armies. The addition of the ability to ignore the ethereal rule to the game (currently just Bonesplitterz but I bet it will pop up elsewhere) seems like the final nail in their coffin. In my experience their major weakness is a reliance on heroes that are very easy to kill. Points cuts alone won't help since their heroes are already pretty cheap for the most part and are limited to 6. Nurgle is in a rough spot too but with shooting making a come back (which Nurgle is strong against) and some aggressive points cuts in a few areas I could see Nurgle make a strong comeback without a new book.

I've found Squig Hoppers are useful in minimum units to threaten unguarded objectives with their ridiculous movement and sprinkle mortal wounds around on high value targets. Bounderz though I wouldn't run in less than 10 and I'm thinking 15 is probably best.

I'm thinking GW has picked up on how poorly releasing new rules for models then almost immediately cutting the models went. So I think its unlikely we'll see a repeat of that but time will tell. There was some redundancy in the elf kits (so much elven Calvary and two handed models) but I very surprised when they cut the sky-cutter given it was a very unique and modern plastic. I thought for sure it was going to be folded into Wanderers or Phoenix Temple (or actually I had thought all the Aelven micro factions would be combined).

Definitely this but there is also the issue of the severity of the loss. I don't mind losing games too much but feeling like there is absolutely nothing I could have done is a big downer. I always try to make armies that can at least "give a game" against the top tier lists.

Pretty cool, makes me want to take both to fill different niches (though I'd run out of points fast). Personally I'm thinking of running Irondrakes in 10 man units to max out on Torpedoes. They're basically 20inch cannon shots.

I have seen several people in my area say "they don't care about an armies winrate just that its cool" then get frustrated when they get stomped in all their games.

Something I've wanted from GW is more specific terrain set-ups for scenarios. Terrain can have a huge impact on games and directly affects the value of abilities like flying. Though now that they've done it with Terrain cards in Warcry I've ran into the issue of people only wanting to play on terrain set-ups that EXACTLY matches a card so the fact that I assembled my Warcry terrain slightly differently renders it useless now. Still, its something I'd like to see explored more.

Yeah, I really think the CoS paranoia is a little out of hand. I would say everything in it is safe for the forseeable future. Down the road, who knows? I think there is a good chance for future battletomes to break down by city (though we have been seeing a trend towards bigger battletomes lately) or to break out by faction (Like Battletome: Wanderers). The time to remove models they didn't want to support in CoS would have been before it released and we certainly saw them do that. The silver lining to such a big cull is that it gives even less reason to do one after the battletome releases.

I think balance will get better simply because I expect the rate of new battletomes to drop off within the next year once all the existing armies are updated to 2.0. GW could definitely be better with their playtesting and more aggressive in the GHB and FAQs but they generally move things in the right direction at least and no longer let unbalances continue indefinitely. Edit: I went to a tournament that experimented with a sideboard and it was actually disliked quite a bit. They went with 500 points and it was surprisingly difficult to write a list that could have 500 points changed out in such a way that it meaningfully got better against certain match ups or scenarios and required more time between matches. Most people just juggled endless spells around or had one unit to switch out (or just didn't use a sideboard). Since our scene was newer a lot of people just didn't have the models for the extra 500 points either. Also, I think Balance is very important in AOS as people generally don't play very many games (outside of tournaments I probably only play one or two games a month) due to how long they are. So just one or two very bad games can really skew a person's perception and enjoyment of the hobby.

Dawn of War was my first exposure to GW. Several of the guys at my local club learned about GW via Total War: Warhammer. I'd say videogames are the primary means of recruiting new gamers nowadays for GW. Especially in areas that don't have a large scene yet. I'll also add that the paint guides and references to Warhammer TV in the newer battletomes are very nice and have been good at helping new players get into the hobby side of things.

I think the real issue with HGB is that they are also a top tier damage dealer too and have access to attacking at the start of the combat phase.

I noticed in the gamesworkshop webstore that Ironbreakers and Hammerers have pictures of their box. Is this something new? Are they moving off of webstore exclusive?

Question for people with the book, Is there any way to give a unit other than Darkling Covens run and charge? There's a handful of artifacts and command traits like Swift as the Wind in Tempest eye but the way its written on 1d4chan it would only affect the bearer.

If they do Felix as a Bonereaper he could share a body with Ulrika...