Reinholt

For my part, I find this a very positive first step. Namely GW said they would do a certain timing, and they actually did it. They accurately identified at least a handful of the top tier imbalance issues (Tzeench Archaon, Amulet being LITERALLY EVERYWHERE because apparently they sell that stuff at Sigmart or something, etc.). Is it perfect? Nowhere close. Is it a first attempt going in the right direction? Yes. If anyone from GW is reading this, my constructive criticism would be as follows: 1 - You should do a little more to try to help the absolute trash tier armies because in terms of customer engagement, having a non-competitive army for long periods of time is a good way to lose customers. 2 - You should be willing to move points on units you never see a bit more to improve internal balance in armies. But overall I think this is a good first cut and if they keep iterating every few months I actually like the forward path as they didn't just do totally random things and miss the point while nerfing gluttons and bonereaper cavalry armies or something.

@NinthMusketeer I think the unfortunate reality you are not thinking through is given everyone knows the double turn is no longer a thing, what does that do to the current play space? I think if we also keep the original methods of scoring, that's likely to create an equally ****** meta for people (in fact, probably much worse). The double turn is a band-aid on a serious issue: going first is too powerful. But talking about why going first is too powerful leads you down the rabbit hole of board sizes, alpha strikes, projection of force, how magic works to set up spells, etc. The core changes you need after that to make things work are strange. I think the estimate of a >60% win rate for going first in a world where everyone knows going first means no double turn would be correct. So should you eliminate the double turn? I think yes. However, I think you also need to re-work a lot of the other elements of the game and the scenarios when you do that. So essentially that is an argument for AoS 4.0. Removing the double turn alone neither makes things better nor worse: they are just dumb in a different way, as your disappointment on faces when the double turn happens will instead just move to the same disappointment on faces when they lose the coin flip / roll off to go first.

Gargants should have been giant ants

Nobody fight him, that's what he wants and it is a trap. The correct response to Khorne is to either use magic on him, trick him, or shoot him. This message brought to you by Tzeentch.

As screwed up as Cursed City was, it's still arguably better than Chaos! With that said, the irony of Death is that in true Nagash style, the vampires there are their own worst enemy. If you established a coercive, autocratic state that behaved in function basically the way Cursed City worked, but put a veneer of civility over it, you'd actually have held on: Citizens are still consumed for blood by vampires, but rather than done in horrible hunts or dragged screaming, they are taken as volunteers and held up as sacrifices for the greater good and their families honored Instead of murdering people in size to create an undead army, raise human legions, and when they die in battle, raise them from the dead anyways so they are now honored ancestors fighting for the good of the city Convert the aristocracy to vampires to ensure "continuation of expertise and chain of command" and other such niceties so that the populace sees it as a tool for ensuring you always have an upper class able to fight off Chaos So on and so forth. Basically, dial the megalomania back from 10/10 to 8/10 and in the Mortal Realms, that might actually create a place where you still get everything you want AND people want to live there as it's objectively better than many other options! Vampires not being able to control themselves in the end and succumbing to their urges / desire for power is kind of the core of the story, though. Their own worst enemies.

The true unpopular opinion

The BoC minotaurs would have been cooler if it was the lower half of a man and the upper half of a bull rather than the other way around.

Triangular bases would be superior to both squares and circles.

There's a pretty good body of law on this issue (in both the US and the UK), so it will be clear for people in the know to police it properly. A quick shorthand is: You cannot claim something is a product from company X when it is not You can make similarity claims in the US (the status in the UK and Europe is significantly shakier), e.g. "partially compatible with X or on the same scale as Y" GW obviously cannot prohibit people from making derivative original products (and given GW's IP itself is largely derivative, should be careful about pushing such claims because wow that's going to boomerang) What GW can do, and quite frankly, probably should do, is aggressively go after people who are engaging in deceptive marketing, claiming their products are GW products when they are not, or claiming direct compatibility when such products would not be allowed in GW stores / at GW events So my quick thoughts are basically that a crackdown on 3rd party stuff misrepresenting is good, but GW needs to be careful not to overreach too much or (at least in some US jurisdictions) they could find themselves on the bad end of some counter-suits around anti-SLAPP or anti-commercial interference. With that said, most sellers are also totally uninformed as to how to do things correctly and legally, so it might be a slap fight by incompetents. In reality most platforms will just take things down, people will re-post them, and it will be a perpetual game of whack-a-mole.

I see you too are looking forward to our 5 wound, 400 point, 6+ save treelord ancient who can deal 1d3 mortal wounds if you roll a 6 on his only attack followed by having to roll a die for every enemy model and not roll a single odd or even number. I jest, but only slightly. Hopefully GW figures out what to do with Sylvaneth this time and doesn't just break them further.

Please explain the Redeploy / Unleash Hell FAQ then. Regardless of our opinion here, it's clear GW does have some concept of the trigger needing to not have occurred / been interrupted already in at least one other spot. If they had ruled that the other way I would agree with you here, but they've already contradicted how their watertight rules supposedly work, so what you stated is obviously not always true as there is an existing counterexample in the core rulebook FAQ!

So here is the key point: technically every moment in the game where the model is not yet removed is a moment BEFORE the model is removed. Can I just use Blaze like, you know, always? No. Because the slain condition is in there. Okay, so it's been slain and I haven't removed it from play yet. That's the exact moment where you can use Blaze. Here's the problem: Cycle prevents it from being removed from play. So the unanswered implication in GW's statement (to which I am suggesting there is no answer, and why I think this is the perfect target for an FAQ) is that for Blaze to be triggered, it must be "before" a model is removed from play in a situation where the model is removed from play. If you cancel the removal of play of the model, is that: 1 - A legal interaction because you choose the order of resolution? 2 - An illegal interaction because the pre-condition for Blaze never occurs? This is sort of like Redeploy & Unleash Hell where, given the looseness of language that GW uses, there's actually no precise way to tell with the English language what they have said here. Those are also a good example because it appears you could (viewing both capsules in isolation) use UH after Redeploy if there was no concept of previous action/trigger, but that's not how GW ruled it, which tells you they do think about meta-context. I can make a logically coherent argument for both 1 & 2 and while people may have strong opinions about it, those opinions rely on assumptions and intent. It is not as though they wrote: "If a friendly Stormcast Eternals model is slain within 1" of an enemy model, before removing that model from play, pick 1 enemy unit within 1" of that model and roll a number of dice equal to the wounds characteristic of that slain model and after doing this, remove that model from play as part of resolving Blaze of Glory. It counts as having been slain." That would have made it very clear that you can't then jam another effect in there because the model being removed is the end of resolving Blaze. Likewise, they could have written the reverse (expressly saying this effect resolves and then other effects may resolve before the model is removed from play) to make clear they meant you could Cycle after Blaze. Instead, they have done neither. My prediction is we need an FAQ, because I honestly couldn't tell you which one they intended.

I think the nuance here that @Beliman was referring to is that he was implying these might not be simultaneous: E.g. Cycle is triggered to prevent you removing the model, instead of removing it you end up resolving Cycle, and Blaze happens after you have already made the decision to remove the model / failed to prevent its removal. Thus if you Cycled, you don't get to Blaze, and if you are at the trigger point of Blaze, you are too late to Cycle. At least that is the argument as I understand it, given the wording is not identical and may or may not be intended to be simultaneous. (Put differently, one says "before removing" and the other says "instead of removing", so the legalistic argument would be that if you did something instead of removing it, there was never a moment directly before its removal because the removal never happened) I have no strong opinion either way, to be honest, but I think this is unclear thanks to GW's laxness with timing triggers and should be cleared up with an FAQ.

I completely agree this is why they have gone to this method, but it also reveals how wildly intellectually bankrupt GW is as a company. Many firms have tried this exact policy, and do you know what you find in almost every case? Most of the "pirates" were people who never were going to buy your product anyways, and a huge number of these downloads among your actual customer base convert to actual sales. It's literally free marketing. Hilariously, the musicians who were the most aggressive about combating piracy on Napster back in the day (and the push to shut those things down and move to subscription services) instead lead to a massive drop in market share and revenue for the entire industry. Ooops! So I agree with your statement, and if true, it's also a sign that GW has somehow managed the rare two-for-one of being environmentally unfriendly while also harming their own sales. Well played, GW. Well played.

I would say both yes and no. They are chaff, but can teleport and make some long bomb charges people don't expect. So cheap, expendable, used for holding positions and being really annoying. Thus, definitely have value. Dryads, if you can get to 20, have value. Dryads can also come via summoning so I want to give a shout out to armies that use that as a mechanic as there have been at least a few. Late game dryad body pile on can be a thing. Spite revenants I rarely see, except as a 1x when I played against a list that needed the extra handful of points and they were used for holding backline objectives. Has anyone seen a list with them recently that worked?