Kadeton

Just reiterating an earlier point: None of the things that people are arguing for are mutually exclusive, because GW is not one monolithic single-minded entity. Some people at GW will have game balance as a high priority, and will push for that. Some of those people might be incompetent at balance, others might not be given the time and data they need to achieve their own standards. Sometimes the incompetent people will get the balance right anyway, by accident; sometimes the competent ones will be allowed the resources they need to get it right. Some people at GW will have sales as a high priority, and will push for that. Some of those people will recognise that an overpowered unit can have a spike in sales. Some of those will see an opportunity there, and attempt to influence the balance of the game to more easily achieve their targets. Sometimes they will succeed, other times they will fail. Sometimes, when they succeed, it still won't significantly affect sales. Some people at GW will be in charge of balancing those (and other) priorities and allocating resources accordingly. Sometimes they'll lean more towards one or the other. Sometimes they'll intend to support one, and inadvertently end up making choices which don't achieve that. Sometimes people in this position will oppose one another. All of this happens at the same time, with everyone's individual priorities shifting over time and under circumstances. Even the most tightly-run businesses with clear policies and strict governance still can't eliminate the chaotic factor of actual humans, and GW doesn't strike me as a particularly draconian organisation. That's why for every theory put forward here there will inevitably be counter-examples and alternative explanations - there's no one simplistic take that accounts for everything that GW is and wants. The balance outcomes of such a chaotic system might look random, but it's not. It simply doesn't conform to any predictable pattern, because the human factors affecting the process are so complex that they can't be modelled, eliminated, or even fully understood. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

One thing that stands out in this thread is the people saying how cool it is to have a low-model faction that plays fast. Honestly, have you all not seen Beastclaw Raiders on the table? They've been doing this for ages! (And just quietly, they're really good at it - better than the Gargants, in my opinion.)

I actually don't see the need for knowledge of GW's intentions there. The essential question is "Do we want a competitive scene which uses GW's rules as-is, or do we want to alter them ourselves?" Who cares why GW isn't writing the rules the way you want - if you don't like them, it's better to focus on what you can do about it, not why it's happening. Um... a bunch of people have been saying exactly that, in this thread. Sure, those people might be accidentally conflating GW and GW's design team as being one and the same, but that's a distinction that I think is important enough to call out whenever people make that mistake. Whenever people ask "Why don't the designers just write better rules/fix imbalances/do the obvious thing?" the answer should always be "Because GW doesn't enable them to," and not any other reason.

Probably. Hopefully, even? Either they'll see what's coming and adjust, or (if they either don't see it or choose to ignore it) they'll quite rightly go bust. It would be an excellent wake-up call for the company. FWIW, I think AoS is in a much better place than 40K. It has a better core system, better gameplay, better variety, and much better balance. The only thing it doesn't have is vast quantities of established lore that has fascinated and engaged people for decades. For some reason, when I say things like that, people sometimes take it to mean that I think AoS is perfect and doesn't need any improvement? What I really mean, I guess, is AoS has its problems but Jesus Christ, look at how bad it could have been. And yeah, sadly people have been predicting the imminent death of GW as a result of their poor quality rules for the 25+ years I've been in the hobby, and presumably before that too. These conversations have literally never stopped. That said, I think GW have actually shifted significantly over the years towards better rules and a more stable competitive meta. It's just that those changes have always happened far more slowly than players are happy with, and in some cases more slowly than anyone really notices at the time. It's only by looking back into the grim darkness of the distant past that we can see how far we've actually come... and how much further there still is to go. Nice. This is basically all any of us can do, I think - vote with our wallets and our hobby time, and encourage others to do the same. I guess for me it's less a case of "GW should never have let Beasts of Chaos happen!" and more a matter of "When something like Beasts of Chaos happens, how do we make sure that GW knows it's a serious problem?" Bad things can always happen - as you mentioned earlier, mines collapse and people die. The courts aren't there to prevent mines from collapsing. What they do is ensure that the companies responsible face financial penalties that are (hopefully) severe enough that it's in the company's best financial interest to do everything they can to try to avoid a collapse. If there are insufficient penalties (as unfortunately seems to be the case in some parts of the world) then there's no corporate incentive to prevent disasters, and bad things will happen all the time. So calling it out on forums, writing letters, and other forms of non-financial protest has zero effect on GW (but, IMO, has a generally negative effect on the player community, and should therefore be avoided). There's only one way to meaningfully hurt a company enough for them to address a problem: impact the bottom line, again and again, as much as possible.

I'd say the opposite. They've learned exactly how much effort to put into their releases in order to minimise their overheads while still satisfying their customers. There's literally no reason (beyond personal pride on the part of the developers - but again, they don't make these business decisions) to put in more effort than that. If people are happy to buy armies with wonky balance going on four decades, then clearly people just don't care enough about balance to look elsewhere. If they charge too much for you to be happy with the quality of the products they produce, then just stop buying their products. Support their competitors instead! I stopped buying GW stuff ages ago, because their prices are way too high for me to get a sense of value from them. My point, overall, is that getting mad at GW for the quality of their products, or at their designers for not somehow managing to produce perfect rules in the limited time GW allows them, is a fundamentally pointless stance when GW are still posting record profits. You and I can say they should do better, but why should they listen? Is it an acceptable outcome? Apparently! Tons of people are still buying GW models. I make "excuses" for the designers, because most of the commenters here have absolutely no idea of the challenges of balancing a complex game. People call them lazy, incompetent, malicious, and so on all the time. I think that's totally unfair. They're just people doing their best under the circumstances. I don't make any excuses for GW as a corporate entity, because I think their business practices harm their games and the community. But that doesn't mean I can ignore the fact that vast numbers of people around the world are queuing up to throw money at them, and that they have absolutely no reason to behave differently until those people stop doing that. I honestly wish that GW customers would be less forgiving. I just don't think there's any point in railing at GW about it when they're unable to hear you over the roaring river of cash flowing into Nottingham, and I hate it when people go off at games designers. I just support other companies instead.

Or a testament to the difficulty of the challenge (which is another way of saying "a lack of ability", while recognising that lacking said ability is in no way unusual or unexpected). I wonder if you've actually been involved in any games development before? I help manage the community forums for Wyrd miniatures, and they have done multiple large-scale closed and open beta tests of their rules. I've seen firsthand the combined efforts of teams of hundreds of volunteers putting thousands upon thousands of hours purely into balance testing over periods of eighteen months or more, and on release there were still errors, unintended rules interactions and balance problems that snuck through. It's simply a fact that when developing such complex systems, at some point you just have to bite the bullet and call it "ready for release". No matter how much time and effort you spend on it, it will literally never be "finished". GW's decisions on when to release a given set of rules (in whatever their current state of balance might be) will, I guarantee, not be made by the designers of those rules. That's a marketing process, not a development one. A "free pass" for getting out of what, exactly? Are you proposing to punish them in some way? The simple fact is that if balance mattered beyond "good enough", those cheaper games with better balance would be the ones dominating the market, and GW would go out of business. The fact that they are doing better than ever demonstrates that they have captured a substantial market for whom the quality of their game rules is "good enough". So what's the business incentive to throw more resources at development? To increase the demand that they already can't supply? To appease a handful of players bitching on internet forums? GW don't owe you anything.

You don't go to court for making a mistake. Everybody knows that mistakes happen. You go to court to determine whether you, as a person responsible for safety, deliberately ignored or circumvented the procedures that are in place to help ensure that harm is minimised when mistakes happen. Imagining that an industrial disaster and minor balance issues in a wargame represent equivalent danger to human lives is insane. However, if you believe that GW have caused you measurable harm as a result of their negligence in failing to write better rules, you are entirely within your rights to take them to court too.

Again, it's not an either-or situation. The designers at GW aren't Machiavellian manipulators expertly milking the unsuspecting public for every last cent, and they're not drooling half-wits bashing randomly at keyboards. They're just ordinary people trying to navigate complex and contradictory pressures in their jobs. They're beholden to their employers to continue to promote sales and the overall success of the game, and they're also trying to make a game they can be proud of so they can go home satisfied at the end of their workday. Being human, they sometimes ****** up. There's really nothing more to it.

I totally agree. This is one of the reasons I initially went with "these things aren't comparable". In League, it doesn't matter if the meta churns. People have their favourite champions and don't like to see them nerfed, but ultimately there's basically no opportunity cost to picking a different champion - it's just another button on the selection screen. Playing a different army in AoS is, by comparison, a huge undertaking. Sadly, churn is the process that makes all of these video games feel "balanced". At no point can you ever snapshot the meta and say "This is well balanced right now." There will always be some champions who are god-tier, and a whole bunch who are unplayable trash. The illusion of "balance" comes from the fact that the state of the game changes quickly and constantly. That kind of "balance" would be a terrible thing for AoS. So that leaves the designers in a pickle. Actual balance - where all the available options are more or less equally competitive with each other all the time - is so incredibly difficult to achieve that the most "balanced" video games don't even attempt it. The players want balance changes to be immediate and drastic ("OMG Kharadrons are so OP, why haven't they nerfed them already?!") and at the same time conservative and careful ("OMG I just finished putting together a Slaanesh army and now they're worthless, ****** you GW!"). GW could definitely be doing better - anything can be improved. I just think we (as players) have a tendency to imagine that creating balance is simple and obvious, when in reality it's anything but. Thank you for this. That's a far better question! I'd say this isn't an either-or proposition. There's clearly some corporate pressure to sell certain models (especially new ones), and it's hard to imagine that this doesn't influence the designers' attempts to balance the game. Capitalism is evil, etc. However, I've never met a game designer (and I've met quite a few, albeit not any currently working for GW) who would be able to knowingly and deliberately do a "bad job" on game balance. People don't get into that career for the money and fame, they do it because they love and care about designing game systems that work. Corporate forces might be able to convince them to slightly over-tune something for a while, but they'll still try to do the best job they can. Which brings me to "GW don't know how to balance things." There's obviously an aspect of that - after all, nobody knows how to make a balanced game. It's never been done. Balance is something you approach, not something you achieve. And the closer you get to it, the harder it is to improve without making a mistake that breaks everything. On top of that, the players are demanding that you make changes right now but also extensively playtest them, and that those changes should be both drastic and extremely subtle. No matter what you do, there will be a group of people up in arms at the decisions you've made, using it as evidence that "GW don't know how to balance things." For what it's worth, I'd say that AoS is becoming more balanced over time. The first edition didn't really attempt balance at all. The second edition was all over the place at launch, but it had at least started to work towards building a competitive mode of play. We're now in a position where GW themselves are openly discussing the concept of meta-analysis and relative performance between the armies in the competitive scene. Those are huge steps in the direction of improving balance. What that doesn't mean, though, is that we should have any expectation that the next army release should be right in the middle of the pack, and won't have any unintended combos that break the competitive meta, or any glaring deficiencies that make the army unreasonably weak. Or, for that matter, that there won't be a "patch" a few weeks or months after release that will attempt to address those issues. Or that said "patch" will effectively address every balance issue. All of those are, quite simply, unreasonable expectations.

Since I assume that's aimed at me, I'll respond. The original claim was "If AoS were a video game, no one would play it given the current imbalance. Can you imagine dota/league/sc2 having the following 'meta':..." This implies that we're taking DOTA, League and/or SC2 as our model of "good balance", and that they are generally regarded as well-balanced games. So how are we measuring balance in those games, in order to compare it to AoS? For something like League or DOTA, we'd have to look at something like champion pick/ban rates in major tournaments (we have to work with the statistics we have). I haven't played League for a long time, so I'm going on reports like Worlds 2020 Champion pick rates, win rates, and bans. Right at the start, they note that balance - in the sense of the variety of champions picked across the competition - was enormously increased over previous years, where only about 10-15 champions had a notable presence. 2020's Worlds had 78 different champions played, so that's pretty good variety, right? Note, however, that League has 151 champions on its roster - almost half of those were not even played once. That's more or less a direct equivalent to "not appearing in this chart"-tier armies like Sylvaneth... except that we might presume Sylvaneth did get played, they just didn't get a top-5 finish. We know for a fact that there were 73 champions not played at all. We then move very swiftly into some eyebrow-raising stats, such as Ornn and Orianna each having a 91% win rate. Given that AoS players were up in arms about Slaanesh armies when they were sitting around a 65% win rate (and yes, that was a problem!), that seems pretty over the top to me. So given that we're looking at some champions winning 9 out of 10 games, and that nearly half the champions are considered to be garbage-tier unplayable at the tournament level, I can only see two possible interpretations: League is "balanced" in some other sense that can't be directly compared to AoS in a meaningful way; or League is way less balanced than AoS. Which is it? My initial post charitably went with the first, noting that in my opinion they weren't comparable. If people insist they are comparable, then let's have an honest comparison. Explain how a 90% win rate for certain picks represents "good balance", but AoS has "bad balance". I'm not saying that AoS has good balance. I'm saying that it's remarkably well balanced considering how difficult it is to balance a game like this. If you look through the forums of any of these "well balanced" video games, you'll find hundreds of threads with these same complaints - the balance in the game is terrible, nerf this, buff that, why can't the devs see that such-and-such is OP, etc. Any critical analysis of the highest levels of play will find imbalances that are just as severe, if not way more severe, than the imbalances that exist in AoS. Basically, GW's chart looks bad on the surface, but actually represents a significant achievement - it's honestly surprising that the balance in AoS is only that bad, and not far worse. In our darkest nightmares, balance in AoS could be as bad as the balance in League of Legends! Imagine Kharadrons sitting at a 90% win rate and literally not even one person playing a Chaos or Death army in any major competition.

I don't think this actually reduces the potential design space in the way you're thinking. For starters, there are really only two modes for rank and file: massed, or elite. Every army is going to have one or the other or both. Additionally, the Lumineth being universally competent shouldn't step on the toes of future Cities releases (if there are any) - if anything, it's an excellent distinction between army styles. The Cities troops shouldn't be anywhere near as competent as the Lumineth at base level, but they should benefit much more from their leaders and command synergies. That way, Lumineth can feel strong because they're extremely well trained and naturally talented, while the Cities troops can feel strong because they're ordinary people who are inspired to greatness. I don't get how they're "more magical" than Tzeentch armies, honestly. Pretty much every unit in a Tzeentch army is a wizard too. Yeah, Teclis is a better caster... because he's an actual god. If Tzeentch themselves showed up on the battlefield in person, I'd expect them to blow Teclis out of the water in a purely magical duel. Also, all those wizard units casting spells becomes a real liability when going up against a Tzeentch army, so the Lumineth end up feeling like an army that relies heavily on magic while the Tzeentch army feels like an army that feeds on magic, which is exactly as it should be. Neither magical nor martial mastery is the Lumineth's "main thing" - the combination of the two is their thing. That's their unique niche within the overall design space. I don't see "animal themes" as represented in any way by the Lumineth rules, so it feels like you're expanding the discussion into aesthetics without any reference to game design here. The only animals used in the model designs are one-for-one mapped to their elemental temples, so from a rules perspective we can talk about them in the same breath, and they don't interfere with the design space of the Beastmen in any way. One area where I do feel the Lumineth are too limited compared to other armies (and this does tie in to your point about the elemental themes) - they are entirely Hyshian. Most other armies can be themed to come from any of the Mortal Realms, and I think that's a great strength. With the Lumineth (and the rumoured Umbraneth) they're going in a very different direction, and it's one that I think genuinely does put unnecessary restrictions on their design choices. I totally agree with you on this one. Aetherquartz may or may not have needed representation in the Lumineth rules (personally I think we'll see a lot more "expendable resource" mechanics in future army releases, and it's a very conscious design choice to keep adding these types of systems) but it could definitely have just used an identical mechanic to Aethergold. Or, it could have used a completely separate unique mechanic. There was no need to come up with a system that was very nearly, but not quite, identical. Sadly, this is totally wrong. It might be nice if AoS was first and foremost a game, but it's not. We know (from GW game developers describing the internal process) that the people who write the rules actually come in quite close to the end of the chain, long after the lore and concept art is established. So for a release like the Lumineth, the game designers don't get to look at the current state of the game and say "Hey, it seems like there's design space for an all-elite, elemental-themed magical faction that would fit a good niche alongside the existing armies. Let's make that happen!" Instead, the lore writers come to them and say "These are the Lumineth. They're super-skilled magical elves who venerate bestial elemental spirits - see the cow hats? - and rely heavily on their realmstone to boost their magic powers and dampen their emotions. Make up some rules which represent that." It doesn't really matter whether we (the community) think GW should work rules-first, because they've made it abundantly clear they're not going to.

Even aside from the tiny sample size, I don't think the video game comparisons are anywhere near like-for-like. DOTA/League uses team composition, which helps to disguise the dominance of characters in certain roles. Compare the stats on Lulu vs Anivia in the support slot, for instance, and show me how they're in any way "balanced". In Starcraft we can at least compare factions, like in AoS. Except that there's only three. Leaving aside mirror-matches, that means there are only three opposing 1v1 matchups the dev team need to balance. For just the 21 AoS factions listed in the graphic, there are 210 matchups to balance - AoS is, measurably, at least seventy times more complex to balance than Starcraft. Oh, and... Protoss still only have a tiny number of major tournament victories, so the chart actually looks similarly skewed to the AoS one, if you had Zerg in the Kharadron position and Protoss as Legion of Azgorh. All things considered, AoS is remarkably well balanced. That doesn't mean it's perfectly balanced, and it never will be - but neither are any of the games you're comparing it to, even if those comparisons were valid and fair.

I think if your group is open to you designing your own characters and trusts you to make them fair, then just set the points at whatever level feels fair to you. I wouldn't bother trying to find a way to fix the Anvil points, since they're so clearly out of wack with the pricing of other models - you've already gone beyond what the Anvil rules normally allow in terms of character options, so just take it the rest of the way and homebrew your characters to have stats and points that you think are balanced.

One thing the ThunderHusk is great for is warding off charges, like if you're concerned that your opponent is going to be able to get their heavy hitters into your Frostlord at the top of turn 1. You can park the ThunderHusk in the middle of your wall of Stonehorns, and make it really difficult for the enemy to charge your important, useful models without also charging him. Since he'll have the mount trait that makes enemy units within 3" fight last, your Stonehorns can smash the chargers to bits before they swing. (Note - that won't work very will in the list @spenson suggested, because the ThunderHusk will get left behind when the Jorlbad takes the free move you're paying 120 points for. If you can juggle the points around, I'd thoroughly suggest taking a Eurlbad instead!) I'm honestly surprised to hear you say that. The Eurlbad is usually responsible for at least a dozen or so additional mortal wounds in my games, and it brings the Mournfangs from "a bit ******" up to "pretty decent" just by their weight of attacks. In contrast, the Jorlbad does literally nothing after turn 1. After playing Beastclaws a lot recently, I would recommend that if your opponent tries to stay out of melee range in turn 1, just let them. They'll be cringing at the back of their deployment zone while you grab all the objectives, and then you'll crash into their lines on turn 2-3 anyway. The opponents you have to worry about are the ones that actively want to go toe-to-toe with your Ogors, and have the chops to back that up.

I ran a Huskard on Thundertusk in my recent games and I wasn't very impressed, tbh. They struggle to keep up with the Stonehorns, their snowballs and prayers are surprisingly short-ranged, and they're soft and squishy so you have to keep them safe. I'd recommend another Stonehorn Beastriders instead, honestly - but if you've got the option to experiment (e.g. magnetised models, or playing virtually) then trial the Priest and the Riders a few times each and see which works better for you!

Interesting thoughts, and a good perspective on hobbies and mental health. Positivity definitely reinforces positivity. Nice photos, too! When we're discussing wargames specifically (rather than cameras), I think there's an interesting split. Hobbyists who primarily get their joy from the painting and modelling side of the hobby tend to be (in my experience) more satisfied, supportive and overall positive online. Those who focus more on the gaming side of the hobby have a higher tendency to be negative about it online. I have a theory that hobbies where you can show other people the end result of your efforts, like a well-painted army (or a great photo), generate more positive discussion, especially in online spaces. Even when the output you're posting is terrible, people will find ways to be encouraging and give helpful advice on how to improve. You can then apply people's feedback, see noticeable improvements in your work, and post your latest efforts to receive further positive reinforcement and tips. It's a wonderful community-building cycle. In most gaming discussions, by contrast, the default mode is argumentative. This is better than that, so that is garbage. This is broken! If you disagree with me, then it's because you're bad at the game. It's a form of discussion that naturally breeds negativity. The problem is, I don't think there's actually much discussion to be had in those circles that is positive while also being meaningful and engaging. The closest thing I can think of is helping newer players to wield their army more effectively or strategise against a specific opponent, but even that tends to devolve quickly into The army you've chosen is rubbish, take these units instead if you want to win. At the heart of all hobbies is a sense of mounting achievement - acquiring a skill, building a collection, working towards a goal. Without consistent and noticeable gains, any hobby will eventually become stagnant and unsatisfying. Unfortunately, beyond the initial stages of learning the rules, it's really difficult to have any kind of consistent improvement in whatever metric you use to engage with the game, whether that's "fun" or "wins" or something else. Anyway, I suppose the idea I'm putting out there is that conversations about improvement are generally positive, and conversations about optimisation are generally negative, by their very nature. Painting offers almost limitless room for improvement, but gaming quickly caps out and turns into an optimisation problem. Try to be aware of that, and balance out the negativity with some positivity once in a while, even if it means switching your hobby focus for a bit, I guess?

What kind of Boulderhead list are you running? That will determine the tools you have available. Generally, Seraphon summoned screens will be units of 10 Skinks. If they summon them too close to their own lines, you can simply smash through - charge a couple of Stonehorns into a screen unit and they will be almost entirely dead just from impact damage, and you can then pile in during the Fight phase into the units behind. If they summon them further away, you can still wipe out multiple units of screens, and the rest of their army will have to be hanging back in their deployment zone, so you can keep them locked there and win on objectives. You can definitely kill screening units much faster than they can summon them - it's rare that they will be able to summon more than one unit (occasionally two) of 10 Skinks per turn. Bastiladons are super tough against normal attacks, but weak against mortal wounds. As soon as you do three or more mortal wounds against them, they lose their effective immunity to Rend and will die easily - you should be able to do this just by charging them, but knocking off those first three wounds is also a great use for Blood Vultures. A single Stonehorn on the charge should kill a Bastiladon most of the time.

It definitely seems that GW has an idea in mind of roughly how much a "complete" army should cost, and they price the individual components of such an army out in order to reach that total. They don't want any army to be a significantly cheaper option than the others. SoB just takes away their ability to "hide" that cost among overpriced hero and monster units - this is their standard predatory pricing model writ large. At least this release has made a lot more people sit up and take notice of just how far GW is pushing their effective monopoly. Just a reminder that, as always, the amount of actual plastic you get in a kit has essentially nothing to do with the price of that kit. Plastic is dirt cheap.

Yeah, that's certainly made the Ogor monsters enormously more viable than in their previous battletome, all other changes aside. I was actually pretty surprised that Mancrushers counted as 10 and Megas 20 - that's a significant jump in objective-holding power even over the Ogor monsters, given their relative costs. But I think it's also (hopefully) indicative that GW is acknowledging the problems with monsters more generally, and taking steps to slowly shift the balance closer to neutral. Mega-Gargants sure cost a lot of points, but I think they will really deliver the goods even at that price. If future monster releases are adjusted upwards along similar lines, I think that will be great.

This is so important. People have a tendency to cling to their hobbies long past the point where any joy they once got out of them has drained away, and it builds resentment and bitterness. I was feeling the sticker shock on recent releases very acutely, but that led me to start thinking about what I was actually feeling excited about in the hobby, what was giving me energy during my relaxing downtimes - and I was coming up empty. The price of entry is definitely a problem (I live in Australia, GW prices are unbelievable) but that isn't the root cause of my discontent.

The fact that a lot of the monsters in the game seem designed to be underwhelming definitely isn't fun. I think the Ghorgon is perhaps the most emblematic of these - looks absolutely terrifying, but plays completely pants. (It's worth noting that all the Anvil of Apotheosis options are also underpowered by design.) That said, there's no reason that monsters can't work in the current AoS system. I play Beastclaw Raiders, and to me a Frostlord on Stonehorn gives a more or less perfect feel for what a monster "should" be. They're tough as hell, hit like a freight train, and will delete any horde unit in the game in the blink of an eye. If you're unhappy with the state of monsters in general, try putting six Stonehorns on the table (two Frostlords and four Riders - a totally valid 2000-point list!) and see if you still feel the same way after. Of course, a Frostlord is four hundred points - and that's about what I feel most scary monsters should be. I was shocked at how useless a Ghorgon was when I first encountered one on the table, but then I realised they're only 160 points... and still too expensive at that reduced price! If they were similarly in the region of 400 points, with a profile to match, then they could actually be as terrifying as their model suggests they should be. Most of the monsters in the game just need to be a lot more expensive, and a lot more powerful, in order to properly feel like monsters.

Yeah, I think you've cut right to the heart of the debate with this observation - even if it feels a bit 40K-oriented! I played 40K when small arms couldn't hurt vehicles. I played WH Fantasy when ethereal models were immune to non-magical weapons. In both cases, I thought those mechanics were bad for the game. More broadly, I find mechanics where one player's resources can suffer a near-total loss of effectiveness to be unsatisfying, and lead to poor game experiences. However, other players will find it unsatisfying that small arms are even capable of damaging a tank - or more pertinently for these forums, that a mass of goblins can eventually bring down a dragon. In that case, it doesn't matter what abstraction you use, because if it's theoretically possible (albeit completely impractical in actual play) then those players will not be happy. And that's where I would draw the line and agree to disagree, I think. It's worth noting that 40K's current Strength-Toughness system also says that a rifle hurt a tank - replacing To-Wound with S-T doesn't change that paradigm, and in either system you can make it so that a rifle will barely hurt a tank, if that's the outcome you want. But if what people actually want is a system where a goblin cannot hurt a dragon no matter the circumstances, then I will strongly oppose AoS becoming that system.

Not by only adjusting To Hit and To Wound, no. But there are a lot of other factors in that statistical model that you can tweak instead - for instance, using conditional modifiers. You'll never get the probability distribution to be exactly the same in all cases as a Strength-Toughness model, but that's not the point. The extreme outliers, where any differences will be most apparent, are generally not where the design focus is aimed (and even in those cases, you can compensate in other ways, like adjusting Wounds, Saves, damage resistance, special rules, and points). Adding more factors to the model will always produce greater opportunities for subtle differentiation, it's true. But that has rapidly diminishing returns - past a certain point, the subtleties don't really matter. I imagine, as others in the thread have suggested, that you could do away with the "roll to wound" step altogether, and still produce a perfectly satisfactory set of outcomes.

The change from Strength and Toughness (in Warhammer Fantasy) to To-Hit and To-Wound (in AoS) was a big shakeup, and a lot of these same points were made at the time. A lot of that sentiment was fundamentally linked to backlash against the death of the Old World, so it's interesting to see the argument resurface as "adopting mechanics from 40K". Strength and Toughness make a kind of intuitive sense - they map approximately to measurable factors in the real-world, and thus produce a more satisfying "simulation". The main advantage of the Hit-Wound system is that it saves a considerable amount of time (lots of small comparison operations add up over the course of a game). What's important to remember is that ultimately whatever set of stats and mechanics you put in place, it's just a statistical model that produces outcomes which are bounded and weighted by those parameters. The process of "balancing" different units doesn't happen when you're defining the mechanics, it happens by adjusting the expected outcomes - tweaking the numbers that plug into those mechanics. For any desired outcome in one model (e.g. a Strength-Toughness mechanic), you could work within a different model (e.g. Hit-Wound) and adjust the numbers to get broadly similar results. Yes, there will be subtle differences in specific comparisons, and the two models will never exactly match. but that's a matter of tolerances. As a practical example, you talk about grots attacking with a 2+ To Wound. In a Strength-Toughness system, that would presumably be equivalent to boosting those grots to Strength 14 or so (depending on prevalent Toughness values). Ridiculous? Of course, but so is boosting them to 2+ To Wound. I think there's definitely a strong argument to be made that the Strength-Toughness abstraction makes those "ridiculous" situations easier to spot. Players are more likely to balk at the idea of a grot that's literally stronger than a mega-gargant than the next-level abstraction of being ineffably "extremely good at wounding," whatever that might mean. But in the end, it doesn't matter, because the designers are still working in the same mathematical space of expected outcomes - if it's necessary for their purposes that grots can wound Archaon on a 2+, then they will find ways to twist the Strength-Toughness system until that's the case. At the same time, moving away from an abstraction that's rooted in measurable characteristics allows the designers much more freedom to play with the maths - if they want the outcomes generated by 2+ To Wound they can simply do that, and the players can argue all day about what that stat actually "means". Basically, the Hit-Wound model already has all the tools necessary to achieve the outcomes you want - tipping the balance in favour of elite units, heroes and monsters and away from hordes, for instance, would be easy (trivial, even - just wipe out all the mechanics which boost units based on the number of models in that unit). Conversely, moving to a Strength-Toughness model wouldn't inherently change the balance between hordes and monsters, for example - that would still be up to the designers to determine by pulling the various levers available to them. If AoS were to adopt anything from 40K, I would like to see the "Maximum +1/-1 modifier" rule brought across. That was an excellent change to 40K's mechanics.

There is definitely often a big disconnect between how the GW designers think an army should work, and the way that competitive players actually make it work in the meta. Often, that relies on unintended interactions. In the case of the Community previews, though, the designers aren't even involved as such. It's more that the Community writers want to highlight something that they think players will find exciting, but they never think to provide the essential context in which those rules operate. This often leads to rule snippets being posted on WH Community and then being received by the players as either utterly worthless or hilariously overpowered, and everyone loses their minds... It's only when the full rules are released that we are able to look back and go "Oh, that makes sense now." (Often the rules are still worthless or game-breaking even in context... I'm just saying that before the actual release, it's usually hard to tell whether that's genuinely the case or if there are missing pieces that Community just haven't bothered to tell us about.) Just as a for-instance: If the Warstomper's Jump Up and Down attack has to be done instead of all their regular attacks, and it really sucks, then the mercenary's earth-shaking ability on JU&D isn't so great. If the Gatebreaker has an ability they can use to suck in units around them and force them to pile in close, then the Halitosis ability starts looking a whole lot better. I don't think either of those are likely, but hopefully it illustrates the problem of missing information!