Fred1245

I personally thought the tournament players that brought it frequently(and it was included in a lot of 'competitive' lists) were overvaluing it by quite a bit. With how hard it is to get any spell off reliably, even WITH Morathi, I'm not a huge fan of endless spells in general. On the flip side, if you DO want to leverage our spellcasting, we now have more competition in terms of spell slots. +1 to save makes Mystic Shield a lot more valuable(especially if you're like me and you're not too enthralled by cauldrons at the moment), I still really like Anzipal as a harrassment tool, you're obviously going to want your lore spell and both Shackles and Emerald LifeSwarm are much more attractive picks than they were.

I'm not worried about powercreep at the moment tbh. To me it feels like GW saw the absolute nightmare that was Tzeentch into KO into Seraphon into Lumineth and went 'wait no, do a reverse'. SoB wasn't particularly high tier, Hedonites of Slaanesh and DoK were both heavy nerfs to their respective factions, and it's honestly kind of debatable if Soulblight Gravelords are even as good as LoN was. The only outlier was the second Lumineth book which felt like it was actually supposed to come out in the Mega-death block that was DoT+KO+Seraphon. I know predicting trends with GW is impossible, they don't seem to know what they're going to do next most of the time, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the books going forward are actually the same or worse than they are now. Look to the Orruk and SCE books to be at best a shuffling of what's good and at worst a straight downgrade on the current tomes(even though neither are great) and then watch the tomes after them chase that same level. Which will absolutely suck when it's down to 15 out of the top 16 factions at events are Lumineth (most recent book, least likely to see quick update) but w/e.

It's not even just the core rules either: The DoK battletome was basically an across the board nerf to the post BR:Morathi army(which the Morathi 20 stalkers with full reroll lists were absurd so fair enough) but the thing is, they put just as much effort into making sure Witch Aelf and SoS builds were reigned in by the same amount. Problem is, WE and SoS builds are very vulnerable to heavy shooting(especially character sniping) and thus had already been falling off since at least KO. The hard, HARD nerf to witchbrew in the early turns exacerbated this issue to point where a big unit of Witch Aelves is so easy for shooting units to kill in the early game that Lumineth, for example, don't even need to go after the characters, they can just trash the unit and let them kill themselves to battleshock. This has the Knock-on effect of pushing competitive DoK lists EVEN FURTHER into the Morathi+Stalkers builds they were doing before, despite losing their hero phase TP, their Hero phase shots going first, all Non-CP rerolls, and a fair bit of their defensive bonuses. TLDR they seem to be just as worried about melee getting out of control as shooting, while totally overlooking that shooting is the much bigger issue right now.

Dice have 6 sides. Inches function in multiples of 6. Whether you like imperial or not, it's very convenient for this one specific thing.

I mean...just extending coherency to 2" would do a lot to fix the issues. That's how it is in the game they stole their coherency rules from.

I can see why it would be confusing to people who expect there to be some sort of rationale behind things like this. I mean, why come up with 'sub-commander' and 'commander' when it's as simple as 'small leader' and 'any leaders'?

The ONLY reasons those distinctions exist is to limit how many high wound heroes you can take in 1 battalion and to force you to take small heroes. It means you can't have The Shadow Queen and a Cauldron in the same Battalion. It is a 100% gameplay only distinction Also, it's not a Keyword, Leader is a battlefield role like battleline is. Commander has no meaning beyond 'Leader you take in a battalion'. You can just cast a magic word spell and make a unit of Grots a commander because they lack the Leader battlefield role. Also the Core rules say General like...100 times.

Not when people are making up rules that do not and have not existed whole cloth. We've known general's were still around for weeks.

Except we won't because we still appoint a general, as was spoiled by command abilities stating they could be given within 18" of your GENERAL.

We've already seen the the entire rules spoiled and that didn't happen. All of the unit markers have been defined already. Commander: Leader Sub-Commander: Leader with less than 10 wounds.

It literally says Commander: Leader. The word 'General' isn't in there at all. Commander isn't a thing that exists in current rules, Leader is already a defined battlefield role. The only reason the Commander tag exists at all is to differentiate it from sub commanders. Sub-Commander says: Leader with a wound characteristic less than 10. By your logic, sub commanders can only be General's with less than 10 wounds as the entries are EXACTLY THE SAME except for that clause. Reality is that it's just forcing you to make your high wound Leaders your Commander and you low wound leaders your Sub-Commanders. Add to that the Monster unit Icon using the Behemouth battlefield role to define itself as part of the precedent and it's pretty obvious that all they're doing is stopping you from having 3 KoS as you battalion leaders. So it's not true RAW and it's stupid RAI to make this whole mix and match battalion system that only a handful of armies can use. It would basically make battle regiment the default choice for EVERYONE. I don't know who 'the consensus' is but their consensus doesn't make any sense RAW or RAI.

Slaanesh doesn't count. Also I assume that part of the FAQ for day 1 with be removing her 3 wounds per turn limitation and forcing the shadow queen to stay within coherency of Morathi-Khaine. She still won't be allowed to heal.

Doesn't have to be a monster, just has to be a non-leader behemoth. You can do it with 2-3 Avatars of Khaine.

Commanders don't have to be your general. They just have to have the leader battlefield role. You're conflating the two but Leader =/= general.

The morathi one is easy: because the rest of army took her increases. Witch Aelves (which, like I have said many times, no one was taking in the new book) went up 20% so that Morathi would still be on every table.

Huh. The rule is written to not include the 'this unit' clause in the new book like it did in the previous one so it looks like you are correct. One major issue from pirating/memorizing the new rules in order to avoid endorsing the battletome is occassionally weird stuff like that slips by. What a terrible way to write that though. It's stupid to even KEEP that rule at this point. Even when this book does good stuff it does it in a terrible way.

Exactly. For @KrispyXIV, think about it this way, if you put Blessing of Khaine on you Blood Stalkers, does your Bloodwrack Shrine get to reroll its ward? Or even more accurately, if you put Sacrement of Blood on your Witch Aelves turn 2 in a kellebron army, does that mean your Slaughter Cauldron can reroll 1s to hit? Prayers only effect the unit they target.

Matched play battlepacks all include 'No warscroll battalions' so probably not. GHB has already been spoiled.

If you're smashing in, there shouldn't BE much damage coming back. It's value comes almost entirely from blunting an opponent's charge, not as much as a 'win more' option when you fight first. Ironcirclet was difficult to get before and now requires you to forgo an otherwise easy 1drop setup. Avatar is also harder to justify than ever, even with circlet. I don't really understand what you're going for in the third paragraph. You talk about Mirror dancing the Cauldron UP for the Avatar bonus but the Avatar will be BEHIND you unless you deployed everything else on the back table edge for some reason. Also, are you saying you would sacrement some Blood Sisters and that would somehow wake up the Avatar before turn 2(as the list is Hagg Narr)? Because that's not how that works. Morgwraeth is much less than the sum of her parts. I get that she shouldn't be cheaper than a regular hag queen (who are also quite a bit too expensive now that witchbrew is much worse), but 175pts is insane. She exists to give out witchbrew and prayers. Her ensemble exist to die before she does. None of them are capable of accomplishing anything more than that. Pricing them per wound like Witch Aelves ignores basically everything about how Sigmar works. 100% of the blade coven's value is letting Morgwraeth shrug wounds to them. Pretending they can fight or even hold objectives is wishful thinking at best. (And witch aelves were high at 10 ppm). Hag Queens are at 105ish now, yeah? Realistically I think 90 is probably more fair. If a Hagg Queen is fair at 90 I would put Morgwraeth at 120-130.

Still doesn't explain Slaanesh or DoK. Slaanesh has been well documented but the DoK changes are just as baffling. 20% factionwide bump despite the last battletome pruning back power from every aspect of the army. Morgwraeth going up more than double despite being a mediocre take after the witchbrew change. Witch Aelves and SoS seeing 15-20% bumps despite no competitive list taking them since BR:M. Mediocre tech choice units like Doomfires also going up above the average. Cauldrons recieving significant hits despite the priest changes being extremely harsh on them. Morathi only going up 10% despite being the uncontested best unit in the book and an auto-include in any even semi-competitive list. Keeping in mind that she gets BOTH hero abilities AND rampage on The Shadow Queen and a seperate set of Hero abilities on MKUltra herself.(My assumption based on current precedent is that they'll be removing her 3 wounds per turn only ability. She still won't be able to heal though.) Even if you liked the new book(which I did not) the changes don't make much sense. DoK weren't necessarily bad after the last codex but they weren't in the discussion with Seraphon, Tzeentch, KO, or Lumineth and took a bigger hit than three out of 4 of those armies.

This is an incredibly optimistic take that somehow makes it even more predatory that the reality. GW makes clearly overpowered units as a design crutch, not as a 'reward for number crunchers'. They leave themselves obvious above curve units because they know they're terrible at balance on the margin and at least if they leave something OP, there'll be ONE reasonably effective way to play the army. They did that to DoK right now. 'We'll bump the whole faction up 20% compared to the average 10 but we'll only hit Morathi 10% (despite her being the uncontested best unit in the book) so at least they'll still have 1 really powerful unit to pivot off of. Armies generally get out of control when they make those OP units/strategies and then accidentally get the rest of the codex right (see Drukhari, Late 8th Space Marines). Secondly, the strategy you're outling is dumb as spit and is likely responsible for bottlenecking sales far more than it is encouraging them. Rotating which MODELS WITHIN A FACTION are powerful drives sales, rotating which factions are dog**** stagnates sales of the bad army as much or more than it boosts sales of the good army resulting ina net zero change AT BEST. Less than 1% of the playerbase is concerned enough with tournaments to go out and buy a brand new faction if their army gets bad and another army gets good and the players who DO have multiple armies have them because they LIKE them and it's incredibly unlikely that even with 3(which is an insane number for one game if you ask me, how do you STORE it all?) That even one of your armies will be that rotations so called 'good one'. It's far more likely that your average player(specifically player, not hobbyist) will stop purchases and/or switch games temporarily or permanently. Any increased sales that come from fixing bad factions come from people already within those factions or who were already looking for an excuse to get in on the faction. Not people who see a GT winning list and go 'whelp time to spend several hundred dollars and several dozen hours for no guarantee!' Anecdotally, I stopped buying stormcast models after the last codex was lopsided, uninspired bunk, to the point where I'm skipping dominion entirely and only planning on buy yndrasta from ebay box breakers and haven't bothered to pick up the DoK battletome or their endless spells or Shadowstalkers. I used to see that stuff as being on the same level as my electric bill, now I just can't justify spending anything on it and I don't like any of the other factions enough for good rules to matter(even as essentially a tournament only player). You give GW both far more and less credit that they deserve and seem to think the community is a bunch of powerchasing lemmings who don't have anywhere else to go.

No it isn't. There's nothing to suggest 1500pts will be any more common than it is. 2000 is tournament standard. That's what most games will be. Half the factions in the game are completely reliant on their large centerpiece model to do ANYTHING now. No possible way will people want to go down to 1500.

It didn't change up how you play the army. That same combo was what was used as soon as broken realms Morathi dropped. They just nerfed it in multiple, multiple different ways (which was mostly fair, the previous version was bonkers). The problem was they nerfed everything else too so that same unit combo was still the most powerful way to play the army. It was just much worse. Nothing changed about how the army played, the numbers just got worse. Now the numbers got worse again with an average 20% bump, second highest of any faction as far as I can tell.

The got 2 shots in the last update and were part of a broken combo the new battletome killed. GW's making pointing decisions for the army based on a made up reality where the last battletome was good and didn't nerf almost everything across the board. We get the honor of being the second hardest hit faction behind Tzeentch (including the single largest nerf in the update with Morgwraeth going up more than double her current point cost) despite doing nothing meaningful competitively since the Battletome dropped. At least we're not Slaanesh.

Links or it didn't happen. I've seen nothing to suggest anything but the endless spells are getting updated warscrolls.