madmac

I figured there was no way they'd get rid of the Doomseeker when the range is already so small, but I was hoping for a bigger surprise than just re-releasing him. Oh well. I imagine this time he'll be an actual brutal melee hero instead of a joke, though. Also sounds like the Forge is a buff center instead of just re-rolling prayers or whatever, so that's interesting. More Herdstone than Blood Altar, I'm thinking.

I mean, a unit of 2 wound models with a 5+ or 4+ (with shields) re-rolling, isn't exactly made of glass. It just makes them a touch weaker against mortal wounds, mostly. I think Fyreslayers should be tough-KO are made of glass, and it just feels wrong for heavily armored Duardin. That said, they could definitely stand to hit harder on a per model basis, it's weird to see a horde of rune empowered berserkers with a huge axe in each hand rolling dozens of dice and dealing out like 4 wounds. Basically they just need to be more elite and less on the cannon fodder spectrum. That's really at the heart of most of the Fyreslayer problems, old, bad warscrolls that have been fighting years of power-creep with point drops as their only weapon.

It's an interesting thought experiment, Fyreslayers currently are a horde army that is extremely durable (for Vulkites anyway) with weak monsters and combat heroes but a lot of support buffs. Vulkites are versatile and tanky but typically don't output a lot of damage on any given round, Hearthguard have fairly steady but low mortal wound output, Magmadroths are squishy and dragged down by gimmicky rules that don't work most of the time, Runefathers and Runesons just have bad combat profiles. 2.0 Rulebooks on the whole so far are tilted more towards being extremely killy, lots of mortal wounds or high regular damage, ect. They're also more build focused, you have basically a clan equivalent devoted to buffing every unit type individually, so that Vulkite Focused, Hearthguard Berserkers, Auric Hearthguard, and Magmadroths will probably all get a clan to give players an easy way to focus on that unit type. Likely with Volstag as the default hold with more generalized bonuses. If Fyreslayers are being heavily overhauled it's probably not unrealistic to assume they're going to be more damage focused overall, even if their staying power gets reduced slightly to compensate.

Would be a interesting change, for sure. Removes the main incentive to only field only max size units of Vulkites, which in turn opens up army building a lot. And if Vulkites are 2 wounds than so are Hearthguard, presumably, so they should stay fairly elite. Also potentially ups the value of the Battlesmith quite a bit since you'll be relying on armor saves more. I hope they do something for the heroes all being hopelessly squishy though.

I think barring a complete failure in rules writing, the book will probably fix Vulkite Spam. Just going from the brief blurb we get, it sounds like fixing Vulkite Spam is pretty much the mission statement of the book. The two examples it gives, Magmadroth packs and crowded lines of Auric Hearthguard are both examples of things that are unthinkable with Fyreslayers presently. If they had just thrown in something about Hearthguard Berserkers they would have mentioned literally every possible unit that isn't Vulkites. Mind you, I still really want to see those previews to see what these changes are actually going to look like, but I am optimistic for once that the days of 90 Vulkites or gtfo will be behind us. Though I'm sure you'll still be able to do that if you want, FEC gave a lot of options but going full-on Ghoul spam was still one of them. Also, assuming Hearthguard are buffed, they need to be made more elite at the same time, because encouraging blobs of 30 Hearthguard is actually even worse from a money/time perspective than Vulkite spam.

Yeah I also grabbed the Doomseeker just this week. It's old rules were useless, but it would be a odd move to discard the poor guy now given that there's a semi-prominent Doomseeker character in Spear of Shadows and it's the headline Fyreslayer archetype in the AoS RPG. Maybe they'll bring it back when Fyreslayers go on pre-order? *shrug* I hope we get some previews soon, I'm really curious to see what the warscroll changes are, between the talk of Magmadroth herds and columns of Auric Hearthguard, and what not. People have focused on the Magmadroth thing, but I take the mention of Aurics being used as an actual Battleline formation to hint at a possible big buff to both types of Hearthguard. Auric Hearthguard aren't exactly useless, but it's unthinkable to take them as the core of your army in their current "5 wounds for 100 points and made out of paper" state. Give them two wounds and a 6 up shrug, maybe a second melee attack, and it might work. Likewise, buff the Hearthguard Berserkers to 2 wounds and 2 attacks each and they might actually be worth using as a Vulkite substitute.

I am curious what they plan to do with Magmadroths, since I don't think there's an easy way to plug the hole in their backs without the saddle. I wonder if they're going to rebox magmadroths with an extra bit for the riderless version. Alternately, I could see them doing something like renaming the Runeson with an Axe to a Karl or whatever, demoting them to a non-hero unit.

Probably Sylvaneth, given Looncurse. After that who knows? I suspect STD/Darkoath is not coming this year, rather Warcry will be their thing for now. With Slaanesh confirmed, that leaves maybe 1 or2 openings for "new" factions, in addition to the steady churn of updated battletomes.

Yeah, pretty much. I got into Fyreslayers last fall, anticipating some sort of update to make them more interesting. I do like the models up to a point, but what you get is not far off from picturing if the entire non-hero unit selection of Stormcasts was limited to just the liberator box. Liberators with swords, hammers, greatweapons, two hand weapons, there you go an entire army range. Who could possibly not be sold on that? I mean also Stormcasts need to be more expensive to buy, and you need to have at least 90+ Liberators to make an army, it's your only kit after all, and you're playing a horde faction, so just deal with it man. I'm sure if that's how Stormcast were presented with no further updatesthey would still have been a top selling army, no question. I think the thing that bugs me the most about it is the very real fear that not doing enough to fix Fyreslayers is just going to leave them to go continue their death spiral of popularity and eventual removal as an army, it's frustrating. Even Fyreslayer players are barely interested in the update, and I don't think I've seen one person convinced to get into the army by it so far. I'm not planning to sell off my Fyreslayers just yet, but I'm looking for the army book to give viable builds that are relatively light on models, and I'm adjusting my expectations of long term army support way, waaaay down.

For real, before I got into Fyreslayers I thought this was failing of mine, but in reality there's just no meaningful difference between the Vulkite and Hearthguard kits aside from weapons. There's little things, the Hearthguard have smaller beards and slightly different loincloths/jewelry and more small details ect but the overall design is 90% the same. It's a lot like first wave Stormcast where almost everything is just a liberator with different gear but with even less variation. I'm gonna get all the new Fyreslayer stuff but at this point I kinda want GW to put out a new Fyreslayer model just to prove they're capable of coming up with a different Fyreslayer design after four years.

The most support I could see for the non-Chaos warbands short-term is going to be character box sets like they released for Kill Team. Soulblight for example getting a whole warbands worth of models on release is extremely unlikely, but plastic Vampire hero on foot? Yeah sure whatever.

Well yes, but it's also the ultimate stagnation of the army. Going full Vulkites means buying, assembling and painting at least 90 fairly detailed but repetitive and mono-pose models, and means playing Fyreslayers is pretty much just pushing huge blobs of Vulkites around the board. So many of the things that drag the army down ultimately come down to Vulkite spam and the lack of alternatives. I fully expect the battletome will do it's best to give Fyreslayers the FEC treatment, and make every unit (Including Magmadroths) at least semi-viable as an army core. It won't completely fix their problems, they still need units that aren't literally just samey-looking naked Dwarf and one Monster model, but it will help if they pull it off. For an army with so few unit options, it's crucial that all of them be viable and present multiple army builds.

From what I heard people who went to the conference saying, it sounds like Warcry is all STD/Darkoath is getting for a while. In fairness, once all 6 warbands are out, it's actually going to be a huge range of models dedicated to Chaos Barbarians. There's a lot of other factions getting the book+spells treatment now that would kill to be the continuing focus of an entire skirmish game release.

I think the text of the preview all but confirms that non-hero Magmadroths will be a thing. Aside from making all units viable, my one big ask for the new armybook is to make Fyreslayers a little more elite across the board. They would be much more bearable to both build and play as an army that isn't 90+ models minimum. Make the Hearthguard units into true elite infantry, and maybe make the Vulkites a little less dependent on being fielded in blocks of 30. Recent armybooks have had much more reasonable battalion requirements, but yes all the 1.0 battaltions requiring 3+ units that are only viable in huge blocks was ridiculous.

Yeah, I mean even Skaven and FEC at least got a new hero each. Fyreslayers, an army with two unit kits, got the Beastmen treatment instead. They also didn't get a vs box, so we could end up with even Sylvaneth getting more new stuff than they did. That said, apparently someone at the presentation asked about Gortrek and they were very evasive about answering, so I suspect that will happen eventually. For now this is going to be one of my survey gripes for sure.

Listening to the Wednesday Warhammer guys, it sounds like the question was asked about Slaves to Darkness, and the answer was pretty much that the Warcry models would have AoS rules and "scratch that itch". So probably not an actual armybook for a while yet, but I would say the implication is that Warcry is Darkoath, pretty much.

Honestly, I can't say. It doesn't do much at all to break up the main issues of the army being samey looking and a chore to paint, but OTOH new rules could potentially breathe some life back into the army by creating more elite builds. Right now, on top of all the units looking the same they also all pretty much cost the same to field and magmadroths suck so you're building a horde of identical looking dudes no matter what. The preview hints at new builds like columns of Auric Hearthguard (a laughable proposition with their current warscrolls) and mass Magmadroth builds (Ditto, and hero only, unless they introduce a non-hero variant) so they could squeeze more variation out of them by giving them a book roughly on par with FEC. And of course the terrain and spells are very nice to have and potentially change up gameplay quite a bit, remember this was a completely non-magical faction until now. Still though, in the long run they need more units, without a doubt. This is just a band-aid at best. They might be hanging on to a hero model or something they haven't shown yet, though.

Yeah, I also wish the Golem thing was a unit. I don't think it's going to be an ordinary spell though, that thing is huge. Whatever it does will probably be pretty unique.

Hoo, that's a lot to take in! Scattered thoughts: The new Slaanesh models are gorgeous, and I say that as someone with absolutely no interest in the faction. Gloomspite vs Sylvaneth battlebox? so random... KO Warband is amazing, can't wait to pick that up. Warcry having rules for non-Chaos factions may get me to pick up at least the core set for terrain. Especially because Deepkin are one of the 9 factions, so I'm ready to go. Fyreslayer update! Looks super cool, but mixed feelings. It sounds like the giant lava monster is a spell, which is kinda disappointing. At the same time I don't think we've ever had a spell nearly as huge and elaborate as that thing, so I imagine it's special in some way... Also, talk of a Magmadroth heavy build, probably along the lines of Gristlegore. I'm guessing they'll introduce un-mounted Magmadroths as a conditional battleline unit, which would be...interesting. I still really want more unit choices, but what they've added looks really cool, love the monster and terrain piece and look forward to seeing the book previews.

There's additional pictures showing Fyreslayers as part of the presentation, it's definitely for them.

That Magma Golem looks sick, I'm a happy Fyreslayer fan. I can't really make much out from the pictures, I think that's the only new unit though. Still, a big old monster to fill up points with should make it easier to put together a Fyreslayer army that isn't pure horde, especially if they buff the Magmadroths to be worth using again.

I would say it was this weeks Rumor Engine with the very Aelven looking rune/horn that got that particular ball rolling.

I won't say I'm surprised, because I was leaning towards Dark Oath being a late release, after Warcry and what not, and Slaanesh was the other suspected big release for the year. Still, more Chaos...hopefully it does mean some kind of Aelf release this year.

Had to google it, but Runemasters and Runesmiters are apparently both considered Zharrgrim Priests in Fyreslayer lore. Not to say it couldn't be a new unit, but I do think those two will get the Priest keyword in any update regardless.

There will be salt no matter what they announce, that's just the way of things. I personally am a guy who invested into Order and Ogres, so I haven't had an announcement go my way since last summer. If they announce one armybook for something I own, it'll be the most exciting conference to me in ages. If they announce yet another Chaos or Death armybook instead, it won't be any different for me than the last like 6 conferences were.