Ggom

Not a fan of these shadow aelves, they don’t share the same feel as the rest of the army in my mind. There are some visual cues like the circlet on the leader and the greaves they all wear that are similar, but I’m really not feeling them.

I would love for us to get a more elite unit. I also agree on the “we have enough monsters lets get some regular elves please” but think that is unlikely the way GW will proceed. It would be nice if we could get rules for the dark elf sorceress, since she is aesthetically very fitting.

Thats a legendary face sculpt for LotR. Looks like a Rohirrim hero. Amazing - the FW studio really knocks it out sometimes in terms of high end sculpting. in other news, looks like lumineth are headed in a weird direction... a few of the earlier reviews put me off them, and I suspect today’s news will continue in that direction.

Lumineth I’d say. Matches the aesthetic for Eltharion.

You got 4 copies to replace 1??? That seems pretty generous/possibly overkill.

While I love dragons, I think that is more likely to fit the Malerion aesthetic. If the Daughters were to remain independent, I would expect something in the vein of greek mytholgy to match the Medusa and Harpy theme we have going on. Alas, the other sources of inspiration that would be clearly Greek seem to be occupied by other factions or ill-suited for us: Cyclops, Minotaur, Satyr, Sirens... Sirens would make sense but are a little close to Idoneth design space. The others are already their own models. An interesting point of tension in the Daughters battletome is that there are Witch Aelves that question Morathi’s authority. This might not go anywhere if the Scatheborn are incapable of independent will, but I would love to see this explored further with rival factions amongst the Daughters. Perhaps a questing sisterhood uncovers a powerful relic of Khaine that brings revelation, perhaps Kharybtar the father of Kharybdii manifests himself as a champion amongst the Witch Aelves to sow discord and seek vengeance. Such splits would allow the designers to introduce new themes to the army and explore new model concepts. The realist in me argues that mawtribes and warclans set a precedent for small factions to get rolled up. It will be interesting to see whether Tyrion and Teclis are combined in one army. If so, it seems like further precedence for Malerion and Morathi to be joined (in terms of model range, not necessarily lore.)

I think a new hero choice (I’m partial to the Khinerai for the sculpts) and a medium monster would be neat. I hope we don’t just get folded into shadow elves when those come out.

Excellent. Sounds like I can accomplish what I want by taking a Medusa as general then. We could really use a second wave of models, although it feels like quite a few factions could say the same (Fireslayers, pure Ironjawz, perhaps Flesheaters to an extent.) An alternative Behemoth would be really nice, besides Morathi - I don’t really like her in the lore.

Thanks @Overread. But, do battleline taken as part of battalion requiremnts satisfy the 3x battleline requirement?

Might be dumb question. I’m also coming back to Daughters after a hiatus (to be honest I didnt get very far my first time round.) At 2k points we need 3 battleline - doesn’t that mean that we will always need 3x 10 Witch aelves or SoS at a minimum? And then if we want to get any use out of buffs, at least one of those squads should get beefed up to 30, which makes the core of our list 50 Witch Aelves/SoS? How do battalions interact with this? Lets say I took Cauldron Guard - does that mean that if I intend to add anything outside of Cauldron Guard, I would need another 3 battleline? Since Cauldron Guard has 2 Witch Aelf squads, does that mean that if I’m trying to add Morathi or any other unit not included in Cauldron Guard, I need to also add 3x 10 WE/SoS? Coming from Horus Heresy, the list building in AoS seems waaaaaay more strict. I like painting WE but I don’t want to paint 5 squads of them just to throw in a Kharybdis or something cute. Like, is there a good way for me to run Cauldron Guard + some Blood Sisters + a Kharybdis? The Kharybdis just looks really cool and themey for DoK imo.

I’m really curious for rank and file actually. I’d be all over a lower model count rank and file game set in a “historical fantasy” world. Having flanking matter seems cool.

Sorry to keep waving the Heresy flag, but 30k has a distinct aesthetic actually. A lot of 30k players find the 40k aesthetic too “busy.” Compare for instance the 30k grey slayers forgeworld kit and the 40k grey hunters - the former goes heavier on runes and has much less “wolfy everything” and the heads are all more sculpted to look more serious (leather masks, braided hair) whereas 40k has mohawks and wolf heads on everything, and things tend to look a bit more cartoony. It’s less true now with the move to different sculptors, but 3 years ago Heresy was very much distinct and you could easily identify the FW sculpts from the GW ones. If you are curious, the ageofdarkness podcast discusses this in their centennial episode (Myles from lillegend talks a bit towards the end about a shift in the aesthetic post Bligh) I would not be surprised if TOW gets a different aesthetic from AoS. The story has a different tone (just like Heresy has a different tone than standard 40k)

I do 30k as my main hobby and yeah, most games I’ve played are pretty fast/loose on rules with a goal of having a narrative and fair game. Don’t hate on historicals guys. We don’t take the winning part seriously. (Or many of us don’t)

I don’t think Mistweaver is part of this. Her description on the GW webstore states she hails from the realm of Shadow, and has her much more sinister. I do think the design cues and paint scheme make her feel like she could be aligned with tecles because of the crescent smbology.

The phoenix guard are a bit old in style, but the phienixes themselves are very modern sculpts. Maybe they will be used in the new army?

Do we expect them to absorb any existing models? Similar to how Daughters of Khaine absorbed witch aelves and the avatar of khaine. I’m a terribly slow painter and would love a head start if possible. Suuuper excited about these guys.

Slightly tangential - but the 30K community is extremely welcoming. It’s a much smaller forum but pretty tight knit. Google Heresy30k if you are curious! Even more of a tangent - some people think of 30k as boring from the outset because they imagine it to be a battle of mary sues against other mary sues. I was one of those people. However, if you dip your toes into the fluff and campaign books you quickly discover that it is extremely rich and diverse. The conflict is much deeper than a Good/Evil or even Chaos/Order dichotomy - there are so many shades, and I actually find that some of the so called “traitor” legions are the most relateable (and tragic.) The moral dilemmas are also fascinating - eg the choice between loyalty to your brothers and dedication to an abstract ideal - which is something many of the traitor legions chose the former for.

I would do Wanderers in a heartbeat if I had confidence they would be supported in the long run and they got some new sculpts (and were ideally not a horde army.) I really like that Underworlds allows them to play with cool ideas though. They’ve put out a lot of sweet warbands, wish they got side rules for an AoS version of kill team (it’s not appealing to me personally to have to buy new warbands to keep up with the card meta, so I don’t expect a ton of use from them.) Back on topic though - sounds like the next 2 quarters is pretty likely to be Slaves to Darkness, followed by ... Giants perhaps? We’d also expect the full Sisters of Battle release, and likely HH book 9. Seems like they’ve still got some room for surprises. No doubt Adepticon will have something cool revealed!

Any rumors around the kurnothi? I wasn’t a fan of the sculpts until I got a copy of Beastgrave, and the models are so much nicer in person (and some alternative paint schemes help too, not sure I’m a fan of their official scheme.) Now I’m chomping at the bit. Fawning over the 5 models I got. Etc. When might we expect them to be released? The alternative rumor for some of the aelvish rumor engine pictures is 40k exodites, which is also HUGE if it came to pass. Honestly I think I win in either scenario lol.

As someone who loves 30k (I love the aesthetic, the narrative, and the community) I am excited for this. In the US anyway, 30k has created a way for folks more interested in the hobby and narrative to come together that would otherwise be hard to create if we all spread out in the broader 40k community. For many of us in the 30k community, I’m not sure we would necessarily be big consumers of 40k even if 30k didn’t exist. I personally wouldn’t really engage in 40k even if 30k didn’t exist. I wouldn’t be worried about the old world fracturing the AoS community.

This might be slightly off topic, but I figured it might be interesting to take an analytical approach to this: Maintaing a lower price is mainly beneficial for attracting new players. However, due to the nature of the hobby I don’t expect this to have a very strong positive impact (ie. dropping the price from $85 to $79 isn’t going to make everyone and their grandma buy a start collecting set.) Because of this, there’s little incentive to maintain the price or (crazy idea) decrease the price. For players already engaged in the hobby, as long as GW stays within a threshold of increase, players will grumble but generally not quit the hobby, especially because of sunk cost fallacy. Really GW’s goal is to optimize the trade off between decreased purchases (which should scale slowly and operate like a step function because of how people generally view expenses, ie. $89 is easy to justify when you are used to $85) and increased profit per unit sold (which is obviously the linear component.) The trap this leads into is that eventually you can get caught in a spiral where the game goes into decline because the rate of new blood entering the game drops below the rate of attrition but it is still possible to maintain profits by optimizing the price towards a local maximum. This is unsustainable because games like this operate on a network effect where, if the player base drops sufficiently, the whole thing collapses - so eventually the model doesn’t work. Given that GW is a large business interested in staying in business though, we can have confidence that they keep track of metrics around long term sustainability/avoiding the local maxima traps. Certainly they must hire some real business analysts and model this more than the average armchair analyst (yours truly.)

I have been waiting for wood elf models to get new sculpts, but I feel like the ones spoiled are kind og ugly 🙁 Maybe it’s just the paint job, but I feel like the DoK models are much prettier.

Looking fabulous!

DoK warband would be cool. A khinerai, 2 witch aelves, a sister of slaughter. Hell I’d buy it even if it had a melusai as long as I got new sculpts to mix in for my units. Barring that, my wishlist is wanderers, then any other aelven faction. No, I’m not fixated on pointy ears or anything.