Fred1245

Priests have less value because they have half the prayers they used to and invocations can be unbound. Again, it's not a great sign that the DoK discussion is mostly revolving around how much better idoneth and CoS units are then ours.

If the tournament let a grey army play 5 games and it wins all 5 it should ALWAYS win over 4-1 if you dare call your event 'competitive'. The error here was in letting a grey army compete at all. That's what minimum paint standards are for. A barrier to entry that ensures at least some level of respect for the event. Tournaments that have heavily weighted hobby scores are jokes. It's almost alway just an excuse for the TOs to give free wins to their friends via subjective paint judging (Cough*Michigan GT*Cough) or a (for sportsmanship scores) tool for WAAC players to punish opponents they lose against.

What you're describing is called 'hamstringing'. You either hamstring your army by not having a monsters or you hamstring your army by bringing a garbage monster. Either way you end up worse off than armies that have good monsters.

I hate every realm rule GW have ever written and think the new missions are a significant step back in terms of design from the 2020 GHB missions. They tried to be 40k and failed rather utterly. Personally, I would throw out the GHB 2021 entirely, minus point changes.

1. Morathi is still by far the best unit in the army, but at Ap-1 she's not going to kill anything and with Kroak, Tzeentch, and Teclis alive and well her spellcasting is heavily going to be heavily neutered in most games. She's still irreplaceable for what she does but only because she doesn't die and she gets hero actions+Roar. 2. SoS have a 6+ save and no battleshock protection for 115 points. Your opponent doesn't need to unleash hell them because A) they probably died turn 1 and B) they're only slightly better than most shooting units in melee anyway. If you manage to get a chaff unit of SoS close enough that they can just pile in to something that would want to unleash hell, that's a massive failure on your opponent's part. Also, preliminary games suggest that thanks to armor stacking, anything without decent rend or mortal wound output will be essentially toothless. Bad news considering no one was taking Aelves before the new edition. 3. Medusa's are still very middle of the pack Wizards and will likely not be around long in games against even a single competent shooting unit. They're a better choice than they've ever been but they're far from underpriced (unleash hell gimmick notwithstanding.) 4. Fair enough, we can steal objectives very easily, at the cost of being more fragile and less killy. This may well be a worthwhile trade in most games. 5. The problem with Khinerai is that with points going up they take up a much higher percentage of available list resources than they used to. In order to take Khinerai you'll absolutely be giving up something significant. Again, this might be worthwhile in order to play objectives even better, but you'll feel it more than you ever have. 6. Wasteful overkill against non-magical armies, completely paltry against magical armies. Unbuffed unbinds aren't going to stop anything that relies on their spells and having 7 denies against armies that DON'T rely on their spells means you'll have 5 more than you can use in most games. Nice against endless spells but that's where most of the value is. 7. Avatars of Khaine wouldn't exactly be a premiere unit if they just...worked and retreat and charge is dubious in an army with units as fragile as DoK. Especially considering just retreating is what we'll be doing most often with the army pivoting to an almost exclusive objective control bent. Khellebron is likely our only real competitive choice. This is an interesting way of pointing out that every viable DoK build is completely locked in to the same minimum 1400pts(1655 if you want a Cauldron) and that once we've got the mandatory units, other factions unbuffed units lacking allegiance abilities are likely better than what we have available. Especially galling considering our anemic allies chart. We can still win games off of perfect objective control but it's a crying shame that we've been reduced to the point where Morathi and Blood Stalkers kill off 500ish points of high priority threats while the rest of the army kites around playing keep away instead of actually killing anything.

Or the awesome daughters of khaine release of...3 endless spells? After 2 years.

Even those builds aren't exactly lighting the competitive scene on fire after the new battletome. They're just OUR best option. Even leaning into them completely we still don't have anywhere near the raw ability of Lumineth, Seraphon, KO, or even Tzeentch thanks to pinks being insane again. If they want to nerf that combo down to where witch aelves and Sisters of Slaughter are now...well I guess they'd just be figuring they sold as much DoK as they're going to.

There really isn't though. Most players don't know or care what the actual iconography of ANY faction that isn't their own is. If they're relatively tuned into the Lore they MIGHT know SOME of the basic color schemes. So in the vast majority of cases Red=Blood Angels is the only meaningful connection of paint scheme to lore a player is going to make. Which in my opion makes the whole 'paint job determine rules' thing even dumber. The average player's grasp on the minutiae of the narrative is fairly tenuous, saying 'Hey, these guys have Advance and Charge instead of +1 to wound in combat' is much less likely to create confusion than running your red blood ravens as Blood Ravens and not saying anything about it. So running two canonically Red armies and not spelling out which set of rules you're using (even if the iconography is picture perfect) will be more confusing to the majority of people than just saying 'yeah, these red guys do what the green guys normally do.' Lore is useful up until it creates inconvenience on the tabletop. At that point it should be discarded.

Personally I think one of the absolute most garbage things you can do is try to pigeonhole people into stupid ****** like 'your army must be hammers of sigmar because it's blue and gold!!!!' The only possible motivation behind behind it is a Karen-esque powerplay to enforce your will on others to the detriment of definitely tournament play but also the hobby as a whole. Only the most self entitled, self involved, borderline sociopathic people on the planet could possibly care about something so stupid. ESPECIALLY when you consider that in AoS, less than 10% of the playerbase even knows ANY subfaction color that isn't part of the box art. At least in 40k most people know the big name marine schemes, nobody who doesn't play stormcast knows anything but Hammer's of Sigmar. Trying to tie rules to paint schemes is stupid and has always been stupid which is why every time it comes up it is soundly rejected. Even GW's events don't usually actually ENFORCE it, even if the rule is on the books. You can also tell that they're full of ****** too because when you point out that under the same logic both ANY conversion and ANY non-standard posing should be banned, you get 'well wait a minute now!!!' Oh really? My army being blue totally breaks the game for you but you completely changing your model's silhouette is fine because...why exactly? That's a far more significant and hard to account for change than color scheme. You want every army the correct scheme? Fine, put up or shut up. Build every model in your army to look EXACTLY like the box for your entire army. Make a mistake? Toss the model. Any attempt at repair won't exactly match how it's 'supposed' to look so throw it out.

Melee DoK crying in a corner, lol.

Sucks for armies that rely on large numbers of low rend attacks for damage and don't do much in the way of mortal wounds. Things like Witch Aelves are basically worthless against 2+ or 3+ saves, especially when AT BEST they'll be 5+ themselves. So THEY still get deleted outright but they can't delete things themselves anymore.

Hate that model, glad it's not good.

They didn't include Morathi's rend fix so she's Rend -1 again.

To be fair, only like 12 people had a Sisters army at that time and of them maybe 3 ever bothered going through the heartache of assembling those ridiculous (and terrible on the tabletop at the time) metal penitent engines and the only things that really suffered in the new book were the new models and the exorcist/immolator. Even then, the immolator was bad before.

People said that at the start of AoS 2.0 when Kroak was doing 100 mortals per turn and Grots did 64 damage per swing, too. How did that end again? Was it that everything turned out to be fine and there were no significant issues? Oh wait, no. They FAQed it all away because it was stupid.

The problem is that those nerfs don't consider the armies as a whole. Irondrakes are the only Cities of Sigmar unit I've heard mention of being powerful for months and DoK are 100% reliant on their stalkers and Morathi to compete since the new book. Also, Bloodstalkers already got a far above rate increase(the only major shooting unit that did) at 18%. An army like lumineth has enough variety of viable units that eating a significant nerf to their best ones is pretty survivable, armies like DoK and CoS don't necessarily have the same luxury.

@Andalf You put forward the idea of every army being much more cookie-cutter as a positive thing. Generally it is not considered as such.

It sounds to me like you've kind of missed the point. In order to avoid a unit of 30 sentinels nuking you on the charge you have to have take multiple risks, invest multiple units, enough points to take the geminids, a spell cast, and possibly several other abilities. In order to nuke a charging unit with 30 Sentinels you need: 1 CP. The problem is that there is a disproportionate effort vs reward difference in the shooting players favor.

A lot of this is subjective. I personally thought late second edition was pretty unplayable with how pigeonholed every army was into their shooting options.

One of the big differences for me has been Army Book Design. I play DoK and Sisters of Battle in 40k. Both have gotten books very recently, both were absurdly strong before the new books, both were significantly reigned in by the new books. The difference between them is still very starkly in Sister's favor though. The absolute top end of what Sisters were capable of were nerfed(potentially overnerfed) but were given consolation buffs that left even the hardest hit units still meaningfully powerful(Retributors gaining ignores cover and having run and shoot with no penalty in Argent Shroud clawed back ground from the other nerfs). Several other mechanics and improvements were also added that never quite reached the ceiling they had previously, but offered interesting new ways to play the army that were still very effective. If it hadn't been for a few facepalm units/rules(-1 to wound against S3 attacks? Cool...no one cares) and the two books before it being absolutely busted, it would have been an absolutely solid book. DoK was just a flat nerf. Everything plays exactly the same as it did post BR:Morathi, the numbers just got smaller. What gains were made(point drops on bloodwracks, mindrazor buff, Avatar buff, endless spells) didn't really mean anything compared to what was lost and certainly didn't help open up more competitive playstyles beyond 'Morathi+BloodStalkers'. TLDR: 40k Codex design has been so much better than Sigmar's lately that even their missteps are way better.

I want two so that I can paint one and someone who doesn't suck at painting can paint the other one. Display version vs Play version.

That first point is interesting to me because it's from such a wildly different perspective than my own. From my POV the last year of AoS has been one of the worst, even without Covid. The DoT-KO-Lumineth-Seraphon codex block was the worst powercreep AoS has ever seen. I haven't purchased anything AoS related in more than a year except Morgwaeth, which I immediately regretted when they butchered her points. I haven't even bothered to fully pirate the DoK battletome rather than just memorizing the rules from places you can get them for free. I used to buy SCE and DoK models like they were part of my electrical bill but I hated the last DoK book and all of the boxset SCE except Yndrasta are terrible. They look exactly the same as every other stormcast foot soldier and it's SO BORING. My thought right now is that I'd rather buy Two Yndrastas off of ebay than spend the same money for 1 Yndrasta and the other stuff in the box.

Skink priest's 'on a 3+ do x' ability is technically a prayer, it just isn't called that so they didn't have to give you a prayer lore. With the core rules FAQ it'll likely be made officially a prayer and the skink priest will gain acces to generic prayers. You feel like you're missing stuff because the prayer rules are based on DoK, BoK, Fyreslayers, etc that already had prayers that worked in roughly the same way, but seraphon didn't really. Any endless spell that is not bound to a faction can be taken by any faction unless stated otherwise. Invocations on the other hand are all faction bound and as of yet, Seraphin have none. The factions that have them are well aware that they do. If certain enhancement types don't make sense to you after reading your Battletome, you probably don't have access to them. There are no generic mount traits, only artefacts, prayers, spells, scriptures, and Tiumphs. Triumphs are an old balancing tool for armies that have lower points than their opponents that have been baked into enhancement. There are generic prayer scriptures(3) in the core rules, the rest will be in your battletome or on the priests warscroll. The skink priests ability will likely be FAQed into a scripture.

It's in the core rules that priests get 1 prayer and 1 invocation now.

It's not that I don't think the powercurve will be inconsistent, I do, wildly so. I just think based on the most recent three books and a lot of the frankly baffling point changes that GW intends for the edition to creep downwards rather than upwards. It's hard to make a book equal to what came before it, it's not at all hard to make it worse. I know conventional logic suggests that GW will want every book to be better than the last to sell models (or because they just can't contain themselves) but they had chances for that with Slaanesh, Soulblight, and the Broken Realms books and all they managed to do was sell a lot of Allopexes and make a bunch of DoK players glad they already had Morathi and unbuilt snakes.