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Kadeton

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Everything posted by Kadeton

  1. Yes, I suppose it depends on your perspective. I very much stick to what I have, but I'm fortunate to be at the point now where I have enough to cover quite a few options across the three armies I collect. At the beginning of a new meta, taking a mix of whatever you have will work just fine competitively, because that's what most people will be doing. As the meta becomes more settled, that stops working as the competitive lists get more and more meta-optimised - you either have to optimise along with them, or accept that you're not going to compete. It's true that the meta keeps shifting and evolving a bit after that point, but not to the extent that the armies which got shoved to the bottom of the pile ever make their way back to the top. At the end of the day, every GHB meta-shift is going to be hard on some armies. If one or more of my armies is going to struggle for an entire meta cycle, I'd rather that cycle was only 6 months rather than 12.
  2. I don't understand - that sounds like an argument in favour of 6-month seasons to me. The bit at the beginning of a new meta, when everyone is still switching up lists and experimenting with different ideas, is the fun part. You get a more diverse range of armies and units, outside-the-box builds, and unpredictable games, because nobody really knows what the best choices are yet. After that, once everyone is aware of "how it panned out", that's when you get to the boring late-meta phase where the same three power lists are dominating every tournament podium. Why would you want to do that for another six months when you could just shake it all up and go back to the exciting new meta stage?
  3. Slaanesh's imprisonment is an interesting one to talk about. Okay, they are imprisoned... in practical terms, what does that actually mean? What restrictions does it place on Slaanesh's activities? They still seem perfectly capable of granting powers to their followers, and they even birthed the new demon twins into the world. If Slaanesh was freed, how would things actually change? The main effect seems to be that the aelven gods have access to Slaanesh to 'extract' souls, but even that doesn't seem necessary any more. The realms are already teeming with aelves, and they don't need Slaanesh to remain captive to make more. The aelves want to keep Slaanesh captive, and the forces of Slaanesh want to free them, but the stakes are so unclear that the outcome doesn't really matter either way - it sounds important, but it doesn't mean anything in terms of the game.
  4. I think it's more than fair to point out that things are better over in Black Library land, and I'll definitely check out those Omnibuses. However, first impressions really matter, and if the setting as presented in the sourcebooks is giving the wrong impression, not encouraging people to seek out the deeper lore, and inviting accusations of being shallow and bland, that's GW failing its readers, not them failing GW.
  5. That's really good to hear, and I'm glad the authors managed to inject that level of human interest. I've barely read any AoS fiction, so my impressions are mainly based on what's given in the game manuals (rulebook and battletomes), which are obviously the main studio's output rather than that of the Black Library authors. Unfortunately, I'd imagine those sources are how 99% of players are introduced to the setting, and that's where I'd say the problems lie. I'll never understand why GW maintains a stable of very competent professional authors (plus a host of freelancers) and then doesn't utilise them to add colour and life to its sourcebooks through stories and vignettes. Or, for that matter, let the authors have much creative input or freedom to build the setting. Josh describing the plan of splitting the realms between the authors and building a sweeping, collaborative patchwork of stories to flesh it out, only to almost immediately be expressly told not to invent anything new, was hard to read.
  6. Stormcast as Space Marines has to be (in my opinion) one of the worst corporate decisions for an IP. That kind of anti-heroic stuff works great in sci-fi, because it highlights the tension between the power of technology and the dangers of its misuse... it doesn't work so well in fantasy, and rather tends to come across as juvenile. There was the opportunity there to make the Stormcast actual heroes. They're hand-selected as the best of all the mortals to fight against Chaos - they should be compassionate, merciful, humble, and vibrant. They're literally angels. Let them show how those virtues can be a source of strength, not the weaknesses that Chaos believes them to be. The flaw of losing pieces of their personality is similarly poorly-conceived, IMO. Yes, it's tragic that they're slowly slipping away, but that doesn't lead to them becoming more interesting characters - quite the opposite! They just become more dull and flat over time. Instead of that, how about showing them constantly struggling to remain heroic? It's difficult to be merciful when your enemies are remorseless killers. It's hard to feel compassion for mortals when they're constantly undone by their own weaknesses. It's tough to stay humble when you're a legendary superhuman warrior. It's exhausting to stay emotionally engaged with mortals when all they do, over and over, is suffer and die. And yet, all those things are worth doing. And their tragedy would be that at the end of the day, no matter how virtuous a hero they are, nobody can shoulder that burden forever. Eventually, every Stormcast faces something that tips them over the edge into compromising their principles and taking the easy or expedient path, instead of the righteous one. Then, when they die, their souls are no longer virtuous enough to return to Azyr, and they are lost to the underworlds of Shyish instead. Every Stormcast understands that they will eventually falter, because what they are asked to do is impossible... and they do it anyway, for as long as they can, because that's what heroes do. That's also where I think the setting isn't really post-apocalyptic enough. Yes, Chaos won... at some point in the seemingly distant past. Some areas of the Realms are still a bit manky as a result, but all the fluff suggests that Order is basically back on top - there are large, permanent cities all over the place, well-established trade, even factions launching incursions into the Eightpoints to strike at Chaos at the heart of its remaining strength. The apocalypse is just history, and the rebuilding already happened. "Mortals and angels fight side-by-side to reclaim magical realms overrun with horrors" would have been a great and compelling sales pitch for the AoS setting, but that doesn't really describe what we ended up with. "Now that Chaos has been beaten back, the callous gods of Order are left to bicker over imagined insults and betray their former allies for the sake of petty revenge" would be closer to the truth.
  7. As far as inspiration goes, sure AoS isn't strongly Tolkien-esque, but there's plenty of other fantasy it's still cribbing from. The setting always reminds me of Weis & Hickman's Death Gate Cycle, for instance, and there's plenty of Moorcock in there too. I don't think that's a bad thing - nothing is ever truly "original", and originality is often over-valued. But it does lead directly into a discussion on the "echoes of 40K" feel, and I think that's been a perpetual mistake on GW's part. It's one of the most successful sci-fi settings of all time, and the Black Library authors are absolutely steeped in it, so obviously some of those elements and story beats are going to bleed across... but this comparison has plagued AoS right from the start, from the moment that "Sigmarines" became the focus of the new game. To me, it feels like WHFB and 40K were thematically distinct, and had different audiences (or at least catered to different expectations of a broadly similar audience). The inception of AoS was an attempt to more closely align those themes, presumably in the hope that the fantasy audience would pick up more of the 40K audience's spending habits along the way. Instead, it was a huge failure, with significant backlash from the established audience whose expectations were abruptly no longer met by the setting. They had to slowly build up a new audience almost from scratch. Within that initial framework and ever since, I think the writers have actually been doing a good job at developing the Mortal Realms in interesting ways that thematically diverge from the 40K-esque vision. But for whatever reason, GW are deeply unwilling to let go of that goal and keep nudging the game in that direction wherever they can.
  8. I was surprised that this wasn't followed up - in Broken Realms when Neferata's dread abyssal died, it seemed so specific and deliberate that I assumed it was supposed to be important. Then Soulblight Gravelords came out, and... she's still riding around on Nagadron with absolutely no comment as to whether the abyssal was somehow resurrected, or if this representation of her is meant to be from before those events. Either one would be fine, but at least acknowledge that something happened!
  9. Lore-wise, I'd say AoS and 40K have almost the exact opposite problems. AoS is still new, and has vast areas of both space and time that are no more filled out than a rough sketch. They wanted to allow for growth, so they built a setting that was unfeasibly enormous - it's going to be a long time before it's filled out enough to feel grounded. I like what they've been doing with it so far, but I definitely want to see more attention paid to what ordinary people are up to, not just gods slapping each other around. I liked the stuff in the Nighthaunt battletome about how Shyish was supposed to work before Nagash screwed everything up, that actually felt quite well realised. 40K, by comparison, is getting stifled by the weight of its own lore, as secret histories and retcons collide while the writers try to make some kind of coherent sense of it all. This calcification of the setting's history is at odds with the need of a model company to keep producing and selling new stuff, and the result is bizarre elements or story choices that contradict the established tone, tropes or history of the overarching story. At the end of the day, sales will always win out over consistency.
  10. Right - and if you had a system of options that allowed you to build whatever characters suited your army, including facsimiles of those legendary heroes with names, you wouldn't have just two, or nine... you'd have potentially hundreds of special characters. That's essentially what I'm dreaming about - a flexible character-building system that doesn't require special one-off exceptions to represent notable individuals, and doesn't lock the representation of those individuals to a single moment in their character arc. Edit: Yes, like the Anvil of Apotheosis. Except faction-specific, with greater scope and flexibility, and much better balanced. An Anvil of Apotheosis with actual effort put into it.
  11. I don't think special characters should be unique, personally. There should be no difference (in terms of power, scope, variety or complexity) between a character that an author creates and a character that you build yourself. You should always be able to unlock the entire potential of your faction without restricting yourself to a specific individual. If the character-building mechanics we have are not interesting enough to represent named characters, then I'd argue they're not interesting enough to represent any characters. Give the generic characters enough options to make them interesting, and then use that exact same system to build representations of the named characters. Edit: Hadn't read through to the mod notice yet, apologies. Feel free to move this to the new thread.
  12. I don't think we should have named characters (in the game rules) at all, just generic options - and then have sidebar advice like "If you want to represent <special character> in your games, take this character with this command trait and this artefact" or similar customisation options. Characters need to be able to come and go in the fiction without it affecting model releases or game rules - you could even represent characters at different points in their story using different choices.
  13. The big problem with the Scriptor is the limitation that his main ability doesn't affect Death units at all. In those matchups, he's literally just dead weight. If that wasn't the case he'd still be an unreliable slot machine, but at least he wouldn't be a non-functional slot machine. Taking away the non-Death requirement probably wouldn't be enough to get most people to take him, other than just for fun, but I do think it's needed. Adding the Priest keyword would be a neat boost to his usability with minimum change to the warscroll.
  14. The Grimghasts are probably the better choice in the broadest range of scenarios - they're a good "default" option. The Bladegheists will outperform them in some specific circumstances (or almost always in a Scarlet Doom list). There are way too many variables to say that either one is better than the other in general. They're both good choices, it's just a matter of individually determining which one suits your playstyle best, and understanding how you need to position and support them differently to get the most out of each unit. Take one, take the other, take both - it's all good.
  15. Sadly, we know exactly what a Scriptor Mortis would do to 2.0 Nighthaunt - absolutely nothing, because they're Death units.
  16. To me, that seems symptomatic of a setting so completely unmoored from the normal passage of time. Things jump around in the fiction by hundreds or thousands of years, and the only way you can have characters "persist" and have an ongoing impact in that framework is by making them immortal - otherwise, they're probably long dead by the time you turn the page. If I had to guess, I'd say a lot of the effort going into "making mortals relevant again" will have to go towards having a more coherent and reasonable time scale, focusing in on a particular set of events (presumably the Dawnbringer Crusades) which occur over a relatively short period. It will be interesting to see whether they can pull that off.
  17. It's very hard to go wrong - everything you have available is good and can be used to good effect in a range of lists. To start, I would pick your favourite out of Olynder and Reikenor - this will give you a basic theme to build the list around. (Do you have the NH Endless Spells available? If not, Olynder is probably the better choice, as Reikenor is really at his best when using the Terminexus and/or Scythe.) The Spirit Torment and Krulghast will then add a solid base of resilience and resurrection. The Chainghasts synergise with the Torment, so they're also a good inclusion. A unit of Spirit Hosts will give your characters a lot of bodyguard wounds to help keep them alive. From there, it's just a matter of juggling the points and units for whatever you want to include. The Black Coach is super cool and pairs well with Olynder in Emerald Host to ensure a constant stream of mortal wounds to pick off enemy characters. A block of 20 Reapers has good staying power and hits hard. Hexwraiths make excellent screens and objective grabbers, and their impact damage is nice too - run them in units of 5. Any of the other heroes are also great options. You won't be able to fit in everything, so just focus on the stuff you like. For battalions, I'd suggest going one of two ways: 1) try to fit everything into a Battle Regiment, which lets you drop the whole army in one go and hopefully secure the choice of first turn, or 2) put your three most important infantry units in Hunters of the Heartland to give them some protection from monsters and then fill out a Warlord for the bonus enhancement.
  18. Awlrach certainly seems like a solid centerpiece to build around, but I wouldn't say he's an auto-include by any stretch. There are so many excellent competing options for that slot - Kurdoss has less mobility but is a better brawler, Reikenor is surprisingly hitty and a great caster. Or you can splash out for Olynder, she's awesome. There are so few misses in this book, it's amazing. Only the Craventhrone Guard, the Scriptor Mortis and the Glaivewraiths could really be considered bad - everything else is solid to excellent. Fitting everything you want to take into a list is almost impossible, because you want everything. No battalions were leaked, and people seem pretty sure that there aren't any. The core ones work just fine for us, we're structured around small heroes and infantry so meeting requirements is easy.
  19. The important thing to note is that the Harrow doesn't copy the ability immediately. Instead, it gains the option to use that same command for free at any point during the same phase. The normal timing requirements for using the command still apply.
  20. That's more or less the fundamental theme that separates "noble" from "grim". In extreme circumstances, do your characters band together to help one another, or do they turn on each other? AoS has tended more towards noble, so far, though there's always grim elements seeded throughout to keep the door open for narratives to go either way. I don't think it would be a good idea to have the premier "mortal" faction be xenophobic fundamentalist human-supremacists. But I'm also not convinced that's what GW is saying they plan to do.
  21. I certainly like the core concept of putting mortals back into the Mortal Realms. I'll be a bit disappointed if "mortals" somehow becomes exclusively synonymous with "humans" in the process, but I would definitely like to see more representation of the people who presumably make up 90% or more of the population but are mostly invisible in the game.
  22. ... Is it, though? The shoe is the same, but the coronets (just above the hoof) on the Chaos Steed are much shaggier, and it has leg armour that's missing in the RE. I wouldn't be surprised if the RE was a Chaos horse, I just don't think it's this horse.
  23. Yeah, that lore description is so puzzling. Nighthaunt already have multiple ways to get wherever they need to be - From the Underworlds, Spectral Summons, Dreadblade Harrows, just generally fast movement with universal Flight - so either the mobility boost that Awlrach provides is remarkable even in that context (e.g. teleport himself and several nearby units anywhere on the board?) or it's on par with other mobility elements in the faction and they just didn't have anything better to say about him. Hope we find out more soon.
  24. What kind of enhancement is it? Presumably it doesn't "cost" the slot of a command trait, artefact, spell lore, prayer scripture, mount trait or triumph, since it's clearly none of those things. I would have thought it was a "unique enhancement", and you get one of each kind of those for free. I don't think you can take two Incarnates, and you get the enhancement for the first one automatically, so there doesn't really seem to be a cost other than the points.
  25. Yeah, I don't think the Incarnate will be a common choice for armies that already have strong monsters available. Where it will really shine is in armies that don't have good native monster heroes - Nighthaunt, Kharadrons, etc. For everyone else it's merely decent, but in those armies it's a literal game-changer.
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