Kadeton

I don't think you can really succeed at board control in the current state of the game without the ability to summon new units as well as replenish existing ones. Otherwise the threats are simply too mobile and hit too hard, especially for an army that can't stack saves at all. Beasts of Chaos (post-update) have shown that board control can work and be fun - they do it by being able to reliably summon a new unit every turn, and rally on a 4+. I don't particularly want Nighthaunt to go down that playstyle route, but if they did, that's roughly the level of summon + sustain they'd need to make it actually viable.

"In the thick of it" there should be plenty of enemy targets, so being forced to attack your own models shouldn't be a concern. The enemy will target your other units anyway, since they can't kill the Incarnate quickly. The only downside is that you can't use the All-Out Attack aura - which you can't do anyway if you're hiding the bonded hero away from the action. But I don't think that's the best way to use the Incarnate anyway. It's the ideal solo monster hunter - if it gets into combat with a monster it's a permanent tarpit until one of them dies, and the Incarnate is much more likely to come out on top. If it's wild, it does more damage and you can even try feeding it with your own low-CV endless spells to make it literally unkillable. Archaon is about the only monster that has a chance of getting out of that bind.

It's neat that battalion exists for people who are worried about it. Again, though - why would you want to stop the Incarnate from going wild? The penalty is trivially mitigated, and the bonuses more than make up for it.

Why would you care if the bonded hero dies? After that, the Incarnate gets better. There's no reason to ever put yourself in a position where you're at risk of it attacking your own models.

The Incarnate definitely seems like a much more effective monster than the Mourngul (which is a shame, but so it goes). It's an immovable object you can use as the anchor for our glass cannon units. It blocks charge lanes, absorbs fire that would otherwise kill whole units, and presents a credible threat that can't be ignored. It will solo an entire army of Stormdrake Guard by itself, should you happen to run into that kind of list.

Also, once it goes Wild, it can eat your Endless Spells (since your Wizards are now treated as enemies) so you can chuck out low-casting-value stuff like Malevolent Maelstrom to keep it well-fed and to lead it away from your forces if necessary. It feels like there will be tactical approaches where it's an advantage to kamikaze the bonded hero into the enemy in order to deliberately drive the Incarnate wild.

Perhaps. But if you needed to spend $900 on Sons to make an army and were also forced to spend an additional $1600 on scenery at the same time, they probably would have been a lot less popular.

Yeah, the rules are fairly compelling but the combination of a pretty uninspiring model and the ridiculous upsell packaging (I already have plenty of terrain, thanks) is definitely pushing me towards 3D-printing an alternative. Feels like GW have really shot themselves in the foot with this one.

Yeah, having the Incarnate go wild isn't much of a setback at all. Since you still get to control its movement (and it's not slow!) it should be trivial to avoid it charging your own forces even if it means messing up your army's movement for a turn. Plus if it goes wild, you can start feeding it your own endless spells and probably keep it alive forever. The only real reason to kill the bonded hero is that the Incarnate then can't hand out All-Out Attack as an aura. Which is certainly tactically significant, but not a game-winning advantage. Agreed. This thing is the Rock to every elite melee unit's Scissors, it just counters them completely (especially monsters). I'm not sure what its Paper is, though - I guess it doesn't like gunlines very much, but it's not exactly hard-countered by them either. I do like anvil units though, and I think the current pace of stuff dying is heading towards too fast with all the recent Rend increases... it's just a worry that the Incarnate also contributes to that deadliness-creep with its attack profile. But overall, I prefer this mechanism for guaranteeing that a unit will survive an alpha-strike over the Morathi-style version which caps the wounds that can be suffered.

Which is pretty much the case for every big monster/hero/god already. Where this seems interesting (and possibly overpowered) is in how it can zone out opponents. Normal screening units can get shot off the board, or will do their job by eating a charge and dying. By comparison, you can never shift this thing before the end of the turn (or at all, if it's level 2 or higher), so even if it "dies" to shooting you still can't get past it, and in melee it will get to fight even against ASF hammer units that would kill anything else before they could swing. If it gets into combat with a monster, that monster is locked there until either it dies (and the Incarnate powers up) or the Incarnate dies. You can throw it directly into your opponent's face on turn 1, knowing it will either still be there on your next turn, or even if you get doubled your opponent will have to throw a ton of damage into it that would otherwise go into your other units. It plays the "anvil" role like nothing else in the game right now - really powerful area control and tarpit, which also does significant damage. For 400 points, it seems a bit too strong to me (on paper). On the other hand, it eats Stormdrake Guards for breakfast, lunch and dinner, so perhaps it's not such a bad thing for the game.

I don't think it overly matters if the hero bound to the Incarnate dies. You still get to control its movement and it gets buffed by going wild, so just throw it into the enemy and let it go to town. Even in the worst case scenario (where your opponent has no endless spells and no monsters for it to prey on), it's still impossible to kill quickly. Once it gets into combat - which should be pretty easy - it's guaranteed to get to make its attacks, since no matter how much damage you deal it cannot die before the end of the turn (and if it's Primal or higher, it cannot die at all - plus you can still get lucky on the roll even if it suffers a lot of damage). For an army like Nighthaunt which are total glass cannons, having access to that kind of resilience seems like a huge boon. Use it to lock down (and probably kill!) your opponent's biggest hammers in the melee, while giving out bonuses to hit and rerolls for charges (great if we end up keeping some version of Wave of Terror) and preventing retreats. It also seems great for blocking charge lanes, zoning out space, etc. - all the "anvil" stuff that we've never had a piece capable of doing.

People probably won't like this idea, but I personally think the best thing they could do for Skaven would be to simplify and consolidate the range. Pick a single governing theme and stick to it, dropping stuff that doesn't fit from the range rather than updating it just for historical reasons. An army that tries to mesh Mad Science, Plague and Ninjas is never going to feel thematically coherent.

I agree, they've been doing an excellent job with the 3rd Ed battletomes. Where they haven't been doing a good job is in conveying what makes each faction strong and fun to play ahead of the release. Hence, people think the sky is falling, it gets worse with each reveal, and only after the book actually comes out do people start to realise that the army is actually great - this has been a consistent pattern across all the new tomes. I don't know if that's mostly down to the player community and their tendency to interpret anything GW does as persecution, or if it's more the fault of WarCom and their tone-deaf hyping up of abilities that are merely reasonable and well-balanced, while downplaying or staying silent on all the stuff that actually makes the armies work. But yeah, at this point it seems well-established that the previews of 3rd Ed tomes are met with horror and despair, and then once the tome is released it turns out that people were just leaping to conclusions over incomplete info and it's all good. I see no reason to think that Nighthaunt will go any differently.

I think what they were saying was more along the lines of "No unit sizes have changed with this box. The last time unit sizes changed (at the edition change) they went up, not down."

@Neck-Romantic Yeah, that's all a fair assessment I guess. It doesn't really match my experience, but that doesn't mean it's not right. I'll give my perspective for contrast. Our heroes already have a bunch of other ways to heal themselves, but healing them rarely seems to matter to be honest. As you say, they're squishy - they tend to go from full health to dead without any healing opportunities in between. I've never used a Mournghul though. I'm not sure what you mean by unit sizes going down? We do have some ridiculously small units, no question, but I'm not aware of unit sizes changes. And yeah, we seem to be getting a lot more units with 5+ saves now, which isn't great - I would have preferred that everything (including Chainrasps) was shifted to 4+ just for consistency. Are some of them less ghostly for some reason? Anyway, two things are keeping my hopes up there: one is that it shows a willingness to broaden the range of Nighthaunt saves, which might mean we end up with some 3+ saves as well; the other is that we've just seen the first instance of an ability that modifies a characteristic rather than giving a bonus to die rolls, so there's the option of abilities that modify those poor saves despite Ethereal. It just seems very unlikely that the designers looked at the existing Nighthaunt range and decided they needed to be even more fragile. Losing the reroll aura was inevitable, and I was never much of a fan of units that relied on fishing for mortal wounds to be useful. I suppose the hope is that the removal of rerolls means there's scope for Frightful Touch to be expanded into a faction ability. And while I totally agree that needing both a Torment and a Chainghast is an annoying faff, it's still worth noting that +1 to hit is a significantly better buff overall than rerolling ones. The loss of interaction with Bladegheists hurts if they stay the same price, for sure. But even if they're still expensive initially and not very good for a while, points get adjusted over time. I find it hard to worry too much about this one - if they're bad now, they'll get cheaper at some point. I'll be back with a mountain of salt if they hurt my precious Guardian of Souls, though. 😂

I'm a bit surprised that the Scriptor doesn't do anything else, yeah. I was vaguely expecting he would do something similar to the Scinari Calligrave and interact with objectives somehow. You think the Torment has gone down in usability? Seems to me his resurrection ability is way better now. Hero bloat is definitely a problem for Nighthaunt though.

Instead of having 1 attack on their Chill Dagger and gaining a bonus attack after successfully unbinding a spell, they have 2 attacks. They also deal 2 damage instead of D3. Spell Eaters was formerly just an unbind with an 18" range, plus the ability to dispel an Endless Spell and suffer D3 damage. Now, it's very different: It happens when a spell is cast and not unbound, so it can be combined with unbind attempts from friendly wizards It applies whenever the effects of a spell would be resolved on a unit wholly within 12" of the Banshee unit (regardless of the location of the wizard casting the spell) To prevent the spell effect from being resolved, they roll 2d6 (adding +1 if there are three or more Banshees) and have to equal or beat the casting value (not the casting roll) It's not limited to just one spell, or just one unit - it's every time a spell effect would be applied Because it simply ignores the effects and does not unbind the spell, it doesn't care if a spell can't be unbound It still lets them eat Endless Spells and they no longer suffer damage when doing so.

I ran them before this - they were bad, but everything in Nighthaunt was bad, and they would still occasionally wreck face. With +1 attack all the time instead of only if you managed to unbind a spell, flat 2 damage, easy access to +1 to hit, and the best magical defences in the game, without even a points increase? They're nuts.

I'm going with "Myrmourn Banshees as Battleline" as my preferred allegiance bonus, please. They're just straight-up awesome now - Spell Eaters seems enormously overpowered and will probably get a rewrite at some point (though even if it was once per unit per turn and you couldn't roll multiple times against the same spell it would still be really strong), but they also seriously improved their attack profile.

I agree. I can even see the devs wanting to include some points adjustments in this kind of update and being told not to because the GHB is coming soon enough. However, I also think the Priority Target list was most likely an idea that they came up with and wanted to implement on its own merit, not just because they didn't have anything else to put in their mandatory update. Having a third balancing factor in addition to points and rules is a smart play. Having that factor be something that you can adjust independently of the imposed restrictions of the publishing timeline is just a nice bonus.

Well, yeah - that's exactly why GW does it. They've already got double the money from you so they're laughing all the way to the bank, and then you get to do their marketing for them as you try to find a buyer and recoup the extra cost. You (or at least a significant portion of people like you) might decide it's not worth the bother, and just keep the models - the perfect up-sell. Arena of Shades is the first dual box I've even considered purchasing, because I actually want everything in the box. Otherwise, I refuse to accept buying stuff that I'll have to sell on. If I can find a friend who wants the other half, that would be fine, but it rarely shakes out that way. Never give in to FOMO.

Thanks for this Neil, it's a good way to keep the conversation on track. I'd like to engage with your points. "Fixing" mechanical problems is too blunt an instrument to achieve anything approaching balance, especially in the hands of GW. In almost every case, the result of such a 'fix' is that the unit goes extinct. (In the cases where that doesn't happen, it simply means that the 'fix' wasn't sufficient, the unit is still a problem, and more nerfs will be coming until it does disappear from play.) That provides a solution to the problem in a sense, but it's hardly a satisfying resolution - competitive and casual players alike have now had their existing armies ruined, and the meta will simply move on to the next overpowered combo of units. This is a choice of perspective. Are Battle Tactics and Grand Strategies a 'reversal of cause and effect', because they also grant victory points? Or is killing Priority Target units an additional kill-based tactical objective that players can engage with, similar to Broken Ranks or Slay the Warlord? What competitive players want, generally speaking, is for their own advantages to be preserved or increased, and everyone else's advantages reduced or removed. High-level competitive list-building is never about evenly-matched forces in an equal contest, it's laser-focused on finding any source of competitive advantage and maximising it. Balance changes aren't about giving tournament players what they want, just keeping them in check. A common sentiment from casual players (on these boards and elsewhere) is that competitive play has way too much influence over balance, and they hate it when tournament results are used to justify changes which wreck their armies when those armies weren't causing problems in their local scene. What this change does for casual players is leave them alone, and I really think it's important not to overlook that. The established avenues of balancing the game are demonstrably insufficient. The set of units which are considered 'competitively viable' is a vastly smaller cohort than the set of units in the game, and changing points or rules simply swaps units in and out of that set without meaningfully expanding it. In light of that, some additional complexity is needed to make the choice of competitive units less clear-cut. When you're restricted to points and rules, all you can do is change "For the points, this is stronger than that" into "For the points, that is stronger than this". When you introduce another factor, you instead have "For the points, this is stronger than that, but..." and now the evaluation is far more open to interpretation and individual preference. That ideal may not reflect the reality of this set of rules at this point, because it's still in its infancy and will need to grow and evolve over time. But breaking away from the rigid and artificial restriction of only changing points and rules provides the potential for a more nuanced set of balance mechanics, and I think that's a very positive change.

I'm really not a fan of abilities that mess with the core 'hard choices', like which single unit to give All-Out Attack to, and turn them into brainless routines. This thing seems absolutely tailor-made to synergise with Nighthaunt, and probably a bit overpowered in general.

Instead of -1 Bravery within 6" of Nighthaunt, just turning off the command ability to auto-pass Battleshock checks would be wonderful and thematic. But I'd take anything that works with the terror theme, honestly.

Seems like a decent way to finish off models like Bastian and Yndrasta, who can otherwise tank significant amounts of damage and then heal back up. Very satisfying if you can pull it off, but fairly low impact overall - I think it's a great thematic ability.