Kadeton

I would suggest trying a simpler list, at least until you get more fluent with the system. In my first two games I played Beastclaws - my list only has four warscrolls and a very simple plan. I still forgot some stuff in the first game, but by the second I felt like I had a good handle on the new rules and it was all going smoothly. Then I played my third game, using a "little bit of everything" Vampire army - fifteen different warscrolls, multiple casters with spells from the battletome and the core rules, lots of synergetic abilities to keep track of. I was completely overwhelmed and stressed out, and floundered through the whole game. Fortunately that army was just a grab-bag of stuff I had available, and I'll be able to make it more consistent and focused in future games. Start simple, and build up as slowly as you need to.

In fairness, that's exactly what Mannfred von Carstein currently does. And he's not limited to using it once per game, and he gets a free teleport at the same time. Not a counterpoint to the general thrust of your opinion by any means, I just found it amusing that the example you were using already exists in the game, only it's way more powerful than your suggestion.

Great in theory, I suppose. In practice, getting the whole spectrum of capability (in this case, wizardly power) appropriately costed and represented almost never works, especially at the extremes (and especially especially for GW's balance team). I'd expect that the tipping point where minor casters become "viable" is also the exact same point at which super-casters become "trash", simply because that's generally how these things go.

Cynically? The "loss" in that scenario would be the loss of super-casters as a viable playstyle. They're taken specifically because they can dominate both magic phases - if they didn't, the meta would shift towards cheaper wizards. Like it or not, GW has a strong incentive to keep big, expensive centrepiece models being used as much as possible.

18.2 references 18.1.1: "Other types of terrain feature are controlled in the same manner as an objective (see 18.1.1), except..." 18.1.1 references 18.1.2: "To [see if you have gained control of any objectives], you must count the number of friendly models that are contesting each objective (see 18.1.2)." 18.1.2 defines which models count as more than one model. So yes, models that count as more than one model for objectives also do so for controlling terrain features.

Putting more than one Mount Trait on a single hero seems completely unintended to me, so I'm definitely not playing that way. I'm open to the idea that duplicate mount traits on different heroes is possible, as there was precedent for this in other books. But right now, none of these questions actually have answers in the rules - they're just not covered. Come to an agreement with your TO or opponent. I imagine things like this will be written more clearly in new battletomes as they are released. Hopefully we also get a better set of FAQs at some point - enhancements are a real mess right now.

The role of minor wizards is really crippled by the restriction on attempting the same spell more than once (in Matched Play only, but that's the default game mode for almost everyone). That allows the super-casters to cancel the opponent's key spells, unless they have a super-caster of their own. If redundant casting was allowed (i.e. a spell could be attempted multiple times, but only successfully cast once per turn) then enough little wizards could break through a super-caster's magical defences to deliver an important spell just through weight of numbers.

If duplicate mount traits are allowed, then Metalcruncher is by far the most valuable. Black Clatterhorn is okay, but you can spend 1 CP on All-Out Attack to get a much stronger effect which doesn't stack with it; there's no command ability to deal a bunch of mortal wounds. Yes, there are situations where Metalcruncher won't work (your enemy has universally poor saves, for instance) but in those cases the pure damage of a Frostlord tends to wipe them out anyway. Metalcruncher gives you the edge against targets which are highly resistant to normal damage, where Clatterhorn is the opposite, working best against lightly-armoured targets where it will often be wasted on overkill. And when (or if) the FAQ comes out to prevent duplicates, you can just switch back to using the other traits. But until then, might as well enjoy going CRONCH CRONCH CROMCH through the enemy forces!

Seems technically correct, but unintuitive and most likely unintended. I think the "reasonable" expectation would be that you gain the command point at the start of the phase, and can then Rally. But the rules would need an errata (or one of GW's signature back-formation "clarifications" that are errata in disguise) to actually work that way.

Eh, maybe. He's already got more hitting power and survivability than the big monster heroes, so if he had their movement, I presume he'd be well above their points cost too. Is he still a meta-defining auto-take at Move 12 if he costs 1000 points? Regardless, playing against Gotrek did require opponents to understand how to screen and tarpit an unstoppable force. It was easier because he had limited mobility, sure... but he costs half as much as Archaon, so you can afford to expend a lot more resources keeping Archaon occupied. People get really caught up on "But I can't kill <insert monster hero here>!" and forget that you don't need to kill that dude to win, like, at all.

That doesn't seem like "counterplay" so much as just restricting the opportunity to use Unleash Hell in general. Counterplay implies that the defending player would still be able to use the ability, but the attacking player has done something to mitigate the effect, at least making some kind of basic tactical decision or forcing some kind of trade-off (e.g. you can still Unleash Hell, but not at the target you'd prefer). The whole dynamic of Unleash Hell works pretty well in practice, at least in the games I've had so far. Mortal-wound-on-hit shooting is the only real problem with it, and it's worth focusing on addressing that (since it's also a problem outside of Unleash Hell) rather than neutering the intended play of normal shooting.

You can only ever have one "unkillable hero monster" (utilising all those buffs and healing) per army, though. Some comments here make it sound like every hero heals 6 wounds every round, but that's simply not how it works in practice - heroic recovery has a decent chance to just fail, and even when it works it's certainly not enough on its own to keep a hero alive under sustained pressure. That means your opponent will generally be stacking all the survival and recovery tools at their disposal on their single uber-hero. Everything else is fair game... or just tie them up and focus on objectives. Surely we've already learned enough from facing Gotrek lists last edition to understand how to handle an unstoppable hero that kills everything it can touch?

I played a game last night, 2000 points of Beastclaw Raiders against Kharadron Overlords. My main takeaway from that game is that traditional focused fire has become very inefficient. When the entire Kharadron army is set up to shoot at a single Frostlord, spending one CP on All-Out Defence is a no-brainer, and seriously blunts the impact. Even if that Frostlord dies, it took everything they had, and now you're set up for the counter-attack. Mortal wounds really are king at the moment - the Kharadrons did more damage with bombs in melee than they did with their regular shooting. Unleash Hell didn't add enough damage to strongly affect the outcome of the game. So the insight I had based on those factors was that you have to use your mortal wound output to focus something down if you want to kill it outright. Your regular attacks aren't as good for destroying units outright, but are still good for spreading chip damage around to multiple targets, which can't all be defended with CP and heroic recovery. I'm further convinced that the Beastclaws are excellently suited to this edition, having very strong monster heroes with 3+ saves and 5+ wards, access to a lot of mortal wounds, strong objective-holding, and extremely high mobility. Meanwhile the Kharadrons, with their heavy reliance on traditional shooting and limited mortal wound output, seem to be hurting a bit - they can still play the keep-away objective game with the best of them, but their aggressive alpha-strike builds just aren't cutting the mustard.

While I did have a lot of love for the old Forest Dragon, the metal dragons in general leaned into the Trogdor style (draw an S, put some beefy arms coming out the back of his neck there). Now that the plastics have established a more chunky style (e.g. Dhorgar, cabbages, stardrakes) I'd love to see that treatment applied to some of the "classic" dragons, and their fantasy nature turned up to 11 - a Forest Dragon entirely made out of trees, for example.

I said commutative, not cumulative. Learn some maths before you spout off about maths. I couldn't follow much of that word salad, but your concepts of "influence" and the "stack" are just flat wrong when talking about probability.

That doesn't sound right, math-wise. Everything in the attack sequence should be commutative, unless a special rule breaks the sequence (by converting it to a mortal wound, or adding bonus hits, or whatever). You could roll saves first, then to-wound on any failed saves, then to-hit on any successful wounds, and it would have no effect on the statistical outcomes.

With the old Soulscream Bridge rules, they would definitely get a D6 (this was commonly used with Irondrakes in Cities of Sigmar for similar "doesn't count as moving" reasons). There's a new version of Soulscream Bridge in the GHB2021, which I don't currently have, but I believe the wording has changed. You might want to check that version.

A classic case of GW trying to "simplify" and accidentally making way more work for themselves. I would assume that the intent of this change was to standardise these units to use Unleash Hell like everyone else, but to avoid the CP cost. The only reason there's any confusion is because the Core Rules for command abilities are themselves badly worded and open to far too much interpretation. There are so, so many ways they could have made this clearer if their intent was to allow it in addition to the normal use of Unleash Hell. Since they didn't, I would default to the safest (i.e. weakest) assumption, which is effectively that they can Unleash Hell, it doesn't cost them a CP, but that's your one and only use of Unleash Hell for the phase.

@yukishiro1 Not aimed at you specifically, though I realise I did respond directly to your comment. More that the thread had generally swerved into "This is what I think the competitive meta is going to look like," rather than "Here's how my recent games went." I just don't think this is the thread to be discussing in depth what future hypothetical tournament-winning lists might do. But results of actual tournament games would be great, if anyone is already playing competitively!

It's a valid concern to have - I know my Frostlords feel like they're in an ideal position to dominate this edition, as heroic monsters with 3+ saves and 5+ wards with significant mortal wound output and in-faction healing. But, this is an Actual Games thread. Can we keep the theoryhammer to a minimum, and focus on feedback from games played? Run some of these monster-hero-and-reinforced-shooting armies, or play against them, see how it goes in practice, and let us know!

Played my first actual game of 3rd Ed this evening, Beastclaw Raiders versus the new Stormcast from Dominion, at 1250 points. Since this was the first game of 3rd for both of us, we went with a simple Open Play mission instead of the full Grand Strategy, Battle Tactics, etc. Overall: I had a really good time! Having plentiful command points felt like a huge boon to the Beastclaws, especially using All-Out Attack on Mournfangs. I certainly felt the loss of warscroll battalions - without the Eurlbad, my units were doing a lot less damage. The deadliness of attacks felt somewhat lower in general (given the use of All-Out Defense, ward saves, and more healing) and fights tended to drag out for several turns rather than just being over immediately. I forgot about Monstrous Rampages (not doing that again, they would have made a huge difference!) but I enjoyed the Heroic Actions. The extra stuff-to-do (more CP and better generic commands, heroics etc) did seem to create more of a sense of engagement and active participation. I'll try to arrange a game against something more shooting-heavy, because I do want to see how Unleash Hell and other controversial shooting elements work in actual gameplay, but as a first impression, this was great - more fun and more engagement than most of my 2nd Ed games. Also, Yndrasta is a total beast who tanked my Frostlord for five turns and eventually took him out. Definitely felt heroic!

I'm strongly ambivalent about this kind of thing. On the one hand, it's certainly annoying when 'classic' units are retired and later recreated in all but name, with the expectation that you should buy the new version and abandon the old. On the other hand, a like-for-like replacement actually gives you a perfect opportunity to dig out those old models and reuse them with the new rules, since they couldn't be more perfect proxies.

My Wood Elves were the only squatting that really got me. When I first got into AoS I was so looking forward to seeing how they would play once I ported them across from Fantasy, but there seemed to be so much missing that I couldn't make it work. Later again, when Cities of Sigmar was being hyped, there was hope for a reinvigoration of the Wanderers... but they were just as incomplete as before. Then I sold them, and now I wish I hadn't because we've had a local surge of interest in WHFB and I would have loved to get them back on the table. Still hoping we'll see a full Kurnothi release one day, and a return of the Wood Elf-style gameplay and lore with a Mortal Realms twist. I was never into the Sylvaneth side of things.

When one runner demands that another competitor be disqualified because they're wearing a certain colour of shorts, that runner is an idiot who should themselves be disqualified for unsporting conduct and causing an unnecessary disturbance with their spurious objections. The more that person raises their voice and gets mad about stylistic choices, the more foolish they look.

This whole proxy discussion seems like a pointless distraction. GW has pushed people towards official paint schemes and GW-only model conversions for ages, and nobody takes any notice. It's just standard corporate guff.