Reinholt

The hilarious part is that I would be happy to pay them the same price for a PDF that I pay for the physical book, and the production cost of the marginal PDF is lower... but they refuse to take my money. This is the opposite of for-profit behavior. Is GW an anti-profit company? Also to the person linking the 2018 Custodes book... can you link me to a GW produced PDF, complete with background, rules, etc. and everything in the print version, of the current Necron or Space Marine codices? Just asking. Thanks!

I'm personally out on this and haven't bought a single model from GW since they implied they were killing PDFs / online books for AoS 3.0. Waiting to see for sure with the two new books, but I'm not going to give money to a company going backwards on environmental issues and murdering trees in size over misguided and incompetent IP policy in 2021. If GW can't be bothered to release a PDF and save some trees, I'm not going to be bothered to give them money.

That's because all terrain is faction specific terrain for Stormcast. The other factions just don't know it yet.

As someone who manages a team in an industry where compensation ranges from around there to extremely high, I will say this: Too many companies view workers as a cost to be minimized. In reality, they are a resource to be cultivated. With that comes responsibility; my preference on my teams is to pay above market wages but also demand strong performance. As a manager, it's on me to coach the people who work for me and help them develop their skills (ideally to exceed my own!), but with that comes the ultimate responsibility to cut the people who can't perform after being given fair chances. It's unfair to the rest of a high performing team to keep sub-par people and thus increase the workload on the good ones, if you can replace them. Most companies, in my estimation, do the reverse: treat everyone like a cost so they keep around the mediocre, turn good into mediocre by clearly not valuing them, and thus lose their best performers consistently over time. If a company often loses the people who seem to have talent, that's a sign this is going on. Fix your management, GW.

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert in UK law, but much of this is transparently unenforceable under US law and in many US states would lead to GW having to shell out $ to anyone they sued thanks to how our anti-SLAPP laws work in many cases. Discussion of rules, stats, and posting of some of GW's material in the context of reviews, good faith discussions, parody, etc. are clearly protected under fair use doctrine in the United States, after all. Essentially, GW can write anything they want but it doesn't prevent people from doing some of this stuff (the fan projects in animation using their IP to make money actually probably are illegal) and in fact probably hurts GW's ability to enforce it (as you can point to transparently illegal motives in court citing their own website); GW doesn't make laws and doesn't have unilateral rights to restrict discussions. Edit: obligatory this is not legal advice, talk to a lawyer, etc.

This but unironically if you play Chaos. The sacrifice will bring power to your future actions. I think more people need to consider the possibility that the Word Bearers ethos from 40k is really what wins you tournaments. How many Tzeentch players can show you their old non-Tzeentch armies? That's what I thought.

I will once again state that these are pretty solvable problems if you actually design your rules set properly. There will always be edge cases but GW's extreme looseness with language creates way more problems than necessary. Do I think I could create a perfect ruleset? No, zero chance. Nothing is perfect. Do I think anyone with a solid background in something like contract law, technical writing, or certain forms of software design could edit for GW and produce a rules set with 90% less ambiguity out of the gate? Yes, trivially. So many of these are own goals by GW (making abilities a thing then failing to define what those are or giving things a keyword that clearly defines them) that it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at them after their claims. But these are not watertight rules. This basket is so loose that marbles and bricks will fall out of it, much less water. The sad part is for a close to zero pound expenditure of just studying some methods of writing clarity / technical design / proper QA so that this stuff doesn't leave the house before being looked at, GW could fix most of this. That they choose not to, as a billion pound company, is on par with Elon Musk smashing the unbreakable windows of his truck on stage.

This is an obvious example. Let me give a less obvious example: 1. You may not shoot if you did X. 2. You may shoot when you use this ability. Assuming that earlier in the phase you did X, which of those trumps? That's actually much more complicated and relies on override/order of operations type issues. The former tells you that you cannot shoot, the latter tells you that you can shoot with no further restrictions. GW needs to get much better at saying things like "You may never shoot in this turn if you did X at any point in the turn, even if another ability or effect would allow you to do so" if that's what they mean.

I can guarantee it is definitely not 100% clear given some of the hilarious GW FAQ's of the past... maybe 95%, but that's about where you max out with GW. And this is part of the problem: the people arguing that "we don't know the minds of the designers we just know what is written down" are correct that you can Unleash Hell after Redeploy right now, assuming they are both abilities (hilariously also seems obvious and yet not defined...). Watertight indeed. What GW really needs is a proper technical writer reviewing the rules.

I want to be clear that my core point is exactly that this is a problem, as someone who has had to interpret language in documents as a part of my job for two decades: In the case of genuine lack of clarity (Unleash Hell vs. Redeploy would be a good example here, as it hinges on several key points that are actually undefined in the rules), you will often have a case where two different parties come to separate conclusions, both of which are in good faith, both of which are mutually exclusive, and both of which are based on starting assumptions that there is no factual way to reconcile (unless, in this case, GW were to errata / FAQ it). This is the case where a TO needs to "make a ruling", but that is always going to leave a very bad taste in someone's mouth or, back to my point above, to play the game you now need non-GW documents that everyone has to review and agree upon in advance. I suggest this is very sub-optimal vs. GW just fixing their rules. The key point is there is no "bad guy" or person trying to game the rules here. It's just two people coming to different conclusions reading the same text and both are totally and fairly supportable. In the case of what I would term manifest errors (I expect the CA / CP thing is one of these), the problem is that what the author intended vs. what the text says are actually two different things. People saying "I'm playing this game based on what is written down and it clearly says X!" are actually correct, even if the creator would be like "No, no, it's supposed to be Y" and other people are making that argument. This will feel like an extreme gotcha to the first part and will lead to a lot of complaints about cheating, in my experience, and is also probably the worst possible case to have house rules unless you are very clear about those things up front. Annoyingly, with GW, "up front" also typically means "before someone buys a unit and spends all the time building and painting an army" if you really want to avoid pissing people off. Then there are the edge cases where people are pushing very unlikely or minority opinions for a gamey advantage. In that case, I agree the problem is the person doing it. However, as you can see, the first two cases are a problem even for a community of entirely well-intentioned people, yes? As in, if everyone is trying to do the right thing and have fun, you can still have a lot of conflict there, and the only real solution is if the community has a single set of commonly accepted standards and those standards are widely known about and communicated to new people, in writing. Otherwise you end up in exactly the situation of most legal systems in most countries: you need years of education and a professional association and it's still total chaos where nobody can exactly predict what will happen in advance. To that end, I think the best thing the community can do is put actual pressure on GW, in size, to answer these questions themselves, as that eliminates almost all of the problem (excluding the jerks from #3).

I will throw my hat in purely to say the behavior of bashing people for doing "gamey" things when the allegedly watertight rules set doesn't clearly answer them and contains internal contradictions is not cool. You can trash people for that behavior all you want, but you're just a random ****** on the internet. Some of these questions are highly salient not just for tournament players, but also random people just playing pickup games at a local shop; without a common understanding of the rules there is actually no community or game to be played. It's just atomized bodies of everyone doing their own weird local thing. If you want to be able to play with people who are not your immediate friends or whom you don't sign a 90+ page document cleaning up various rules interpretations with first in orderly fashion, it's nice to have rules that make sense, are intuitive, and everyone understands. I will personally say as written, I think both the CP + CA issue at the start of the phase and things like Redeploy vs. Unleash Hell do need to be clarified by GW, because I expect what they meant vs. what they actually wrote are two different things, but because we don't live in the minds of the GW game designers, the only actual shared experience is the second one. If they meant something different, they should probably errata it.

I will also say I have heard the scuttlebutt for the Chaos release is Nurgle. No idea on FEC though. I would like to see it; they are probably the model range that needs the most work for death (and Nighthaunt have a beautiful range with terrible rules so a book update with a handful of models would probably do them fine). Also related to a previous point way back in the thread, part of what I dislike about the Stormcast aesthetic is that they gave them actual literal masks, but then paint them like regular armor. I think if you have a highly stylized mask, it should be a key part of the persona, not just "oh it's the same as my leg".

This is my read as well. I have been chatting with a few people to talk about winners and losers locally and here is what I would say: Winners Armies with efficient melee on 25mm bases Armies with efficient minimum unit size (5 or less) melee on any size bases (as there are less giant blocks) Shooting, especially if you can condense into a unit that can use Unleash Hell effectively, but in general shooting because large melee on non-25mm bases are less effective Heroes, and especially Heroic Monsters, though the small former ones are still solid if you can self-heal to avoid the Tecnado type issues Self-sufficient units or units that did not rely on overlapping buffs but rather army-wide abilities (as many of the latter you cannot stack and/or can use only once) Fast armies Losers Melee on >25mm bases without 2" reach or better Units that relied on stacking buffs or repeated buffs (e.g. if you can't use a command ability more than once you can't spam it all over now) Slow armies (several of the new ways to score points will hugely benefit those who can either pick their fights or pick their situations) "Balanced" armies that are neither MSU nor single-unit deathstars that can still be adequately buffed Regular monsters (this may be counter to popular opinion, but they will give up a lot of points in contexts and don't bring enough vs. heroic monsters; some exceptions if a warscroll is great but in general they may be more of a liability than people expect) TBD: Endless Spells Toughness based non-offense armies (I think with things being more survivable there may be builds where an army kind of doesn't need to hurt the opponent much except in specific moments but instead runs around just doing their thing) So based on that, obviously there's a lot of internal balance shifts within armies, but in terms of entire armies I just have no idea what I would do to win, it would be this list: FEC, Sylvaneth, Slaanesh, and to a lesser extent Fyreslayers, Nighthaunt, and Khorne. I am ignoring Stormcast (ex Shootcast) because they will be outdated momentarily. Thus I can see the frustration from those players: the core thing that made the army work is gone in many cases, the units that should be good are hamstrung either by base size or move limitations, and some of them (like FEC and Fyreslayers) just don't really have other things to go to that I see. I've played two games against an opponent with Fyreslayers now, and rolled him so hard it was uncompetitive twice; we played a third where we swapped armies and he rolled me (so clearly I had no idea what to do with the little guys either). HBG just don't have the critical mass now, the priests not throwing multiple prayers sucks, and the lack of speed really harms them on some objectives. Maybe there would be a list with magmas and more shooting and like one unit of HBG; I think there is something there? I'm not an expert with them so I don't know which way I would go but I can see frustration for a lot of factions in the new system because the things they would like as answers just aren't in the book in size. Certainly someone like FEC I have no idea what I would even do to make that work...

On the upside, two more of my friends have now jumped ship on AoS 3.0 because of this. The whole "paper books only" thing is genuinely not acceptable to 20s/30s New Yorkers who care about the environment, and I think GW is going to learn the hard way that reaching for profit by doing environmentally unsound things is not a path forward in the current world anymore.

@ZeblaskyDo we just call this Unleash Hell(s)? Edit: why did adding an s to Hell get censored of all things!

This is actually a much weirder question than most people expect because it depends on a lot of underlying assumptions being made from a mathematical perspective. So here is the question, somewhat more properly described: "If I place a model exactly 6" away from an object on the board, such that a perfectly constructed 6" line could be placed between the object and model I placed without overlapping either of them but being directly adjacent to both of them such that if I moved either the object or the model even an infinitely small amount closer I would overlap the line, am I within 6" of the object or not?" And the answer to that is "what do you mean by within" from a mathematical perspective, or rather, do you need to overlap or do you need to just be adjacent? As, back to our perfect conceptual example, if you need to overlap then it's pretty trivial to see that you do not (you are exactly touching the 6" line but not overlapping it at all), but if you just need to touch any point that is 6" away (as in, you need to be adjacent to the line rather than overlapping the line), then you clearly are within 6". I just hope GW knows they've accidentally waded into one of the most hilarious parts of math here (boundaries).

This has been my experience with a few more nuggets thrown in: The coherency rules are a massive buff for 5 person or less units, units on 25mm bases, and shooting units. They are a massive nerf for anything that wants to melee on a >25mm base that doesn't have 2" or better reach (maybe more depending on base sizes). Just keep this in mind when you build armies. Back to @yukishiro1's point but I think the overwhelming majority of AoS games will now be won in the list building stage. Unleash Hell has been a huge issue in my games, but that may have to do with my choice of army (Shootcast, as well as 1 game with my new SBGL army). Anvils + Unleash Hell has been downright unpleasant, and I've been testing a unit of 6x hurricane guys since they haven't moved in my opponent's phase so the interaction with Unleash Hell is pretty fantastic. Armor saves being easier to amp up is going to lead to very high rend (-2 / -3) or MWs being even more valuable. The latter were already the most valuable thing already. Command points are plentiful, hero actions are useful if you don't get smoked immediately. In short, I think the story of AoS 3.0 so far for me could be summed up as this: Build a list with a plan to win using the new tactics Balanced armies will likely perform worse than specialists designed to maximize grand strategies / battle tactics The strong got stronger and the weak got weaker, in terms of things that were already good vs. bad

I want to re-iterate that what I find particularly troublesome about Unleash Hell is the ability to do it when the unit providing the response fire is not the one charged. If they didn't allow you to Unleash Hell when someone charged a nearby screen, I think the ability is probably still not needed, but now more in the realm of "dumb but we can live with it". As it stands, when I can bubble wrap a very powerful shooting unit and potentially cycle screens repeatedly, putting my opponent in the world of "congrats you're going to get shot so many times and your counterplay is to not charge me" is pretty grotesque. Not just because it's powerful (it is), but because some armies do not have a meaningful counterplay. If you don't have your own shooting or magic powerful enough that you can deal with the threat, you don't really have a great option (maybe if you have very fast flying units that are also tough enough to get a meaningful charge in, like eels). And unfortunately, thanks to the state of the design space, that's probably at least 50% of armies. This is where I think the real issue is. As we look at the math, also consider the NPE of repeatedly banging into things like Aetherwings or Arkanaut units while the giant shooting unit continues to just pummel you in their turn as normal and in your turn whenever you charge a screen. The combined weight of fire for units that were already very good being amped up dramatically at the low cost of using a screen, which is something anyone with two brain cells to rub together was already doing, is the issue. You are rewarding some very NPE tactics to the point they will become dominant plays in the meta. That is my fundamental concern. Again, for those who think it's not an issue (and not just with Sentinels, though it is definitely one there), go play some of the other armies with good shooting units. 1 CP per turn to nearly double the efficiency of your best shooting units if someone gets near you is pants on head dumb. On a comparison basis, just to be clear, your equivalent melee buff would not be +1 to hit, it would be you get to pile in and fight immediately when someone charges you at -1 to hit. I think if that were in the game, people would also lose their minds.

My specific problem with Unleash Hell is that what it adds is significantly more efficiency for already powerful shooting units. I know people are going on specifically about Sentinels (a problem), but there's Vanguard Raptors (both flavors, now), Ironclads, Salamanders, Flamers, etc. that are going to pop up all over the place. Unleash Hell would be acceptable in a world where shooting was underpowered and/or you couldn't take shooting units that had insane punch at scale, but that's not the gamespace we are in. There are many units that are going to be a real problem with it, and given the points on those units did not go up dramatically, I think this puts the game in a very negative space. Essentially, you have given a potential plus ~35% (for units that could double tap) to plus ~70% efficiency boost to strong shooting units, as they can now shoot 50% or 100% more often at some reduced efficiency (hence my knocking down the percentages above). I will re-iterate that these were already the most powerful units in the game with the largest impact on the meta. So while melee has more restrictions, shooting was increased in power, in a meta where shooting was already the thing. This is why I maintain Unleash Hell is going to be a real problem. I've played test games with it. It's absolutely great. I will totally be building armies to abuse it if I intend to go to a tournament and win. If you're playing against someone and they do that, you cannot be playing a basic couple of units here and there theme style army and think you're going to have a fun game; you're not, you're going to get run over like a dump truck running over a beach ball. If anyone doesn't think it is a problem, I challenge you to play against a solidly competitive Lumineth, Seraphon, KO, or Shootcast list and tell me how that game goes for you with the new rules. It's not going to be fun, and that's my core concern here, because that drives people away from the game and kills enthusiasm, like when WFB died off for a bit in my area when the Daemons book was super oppressive.

This is a good take, in that I would say this about start collecting: 1 - If you want the Grave Guard, it's a great box because they throw a Wight King and the Black Knights in almost for free. I wouldn't currently use either of those units in the game, but it's either great conversion parts or useful if GW rebalances them later. 2 - If you do not want the Grave Guard, it's trash tier for a box.

The problem with this is that you can just use the Blood Knights themselves as the battle line in a Kastelai army, or if you go Vyrkos, use the also fast Dire Wolves to get more output and wounds. @Jaxler mentioned it above, but the problem is there is nothing they can do that something else doesn't do better, and when you look at their specific package, it's not worth the points in comparison. Unless I literally do not have enough points for any other unit and 100% need the speed, I'd always rather have Dire Wolves or Blood Knights. Now, in the niche case where they were the same cost as the Deathrattle on foot (after four GHBs of GW moving the points down in very small increments), I would likely take one unit (maybe two depending on the meta and need for blocking gribblies) for screening and objective grabbing, as well as potentially fulfilling movement based VP conditions in AoS 3.0. But that would be because they have reached sub-100 throw away points levels. Which sucks, because they are cool and I want to use them. Unfortunately, I just can't find the niche in the current army, especially when for ~50% more I can get Blood Knights which are about 500% more awesome.

The story of Age of Sigmar, so far, is a series of iterations, rules changes, points changes, and scenario changes that all point to one inevitable, all-consuming goal: making Idoneth Eels even better.

2 turns: 2x shots on my turn, 1x unleash hell to wipe my screen, 2x more shots on my turn, 1x unleash hell when they charge my unit, if I dumped it all into the HGB, which as stated, is not the correct decision (you block and fall away from them to shoot other things). Edit: not usually the correct decision, I suppose. The nice part about long reach shooting is you always have options so there may be games where that is the correct decision. I shouldn't state it as a blanket rule as the optionality of targets is part of the power. Edit: the math is slightly better if you double turn, but if we live in a world where "you must double turn to have a chance" is the dominant paradigm, that means there's no winning strategy and your neutral expectation is a loss. Also assuming I didn't just take multiple Aetherwing units to keep blocking charges... which most stormcast players do.

This is a good post overall and things that were essentially tried. The problem is not just Unleash Hell, it's how Unleash Hell interacts with the cumulative rate of fire from SCE to unload on units. Take a 6x unit of Vanguard Longstrikes in Anvils. On a single round of shooting, they put out 6 shots at 2+/3+/-2 rend/2 damage with 2xMortals on a 6. A 15 man HG unit will have 30 wounds coming in on that. If I'm using Anvils, and I'm an idiot not to use Anvils with that unit, you're taking something like ~24 wounds through your saves on the way in or more, which is most of that unit. This is ignoring the fact that I will very likely have my own buffs and also ignoring the fact that shooting the unit of 15x HG is not the way to go (you use cheap screens on them and move to the side and leave them behind and/or teleport) as what the VRs should be doing is deleting all the characters and smaller units so that at the end of the game all you have left is the 15 HG unit and I'm just rolling up the score on all the other stuff as the maneuverability of 15x HG is not such that you're going to win a game with just those. This is what I mean: the efficient projection of force with shooting while melee has been stealth nerfed for a lot of units by the coherency changes is legit puzzling. When you pair that with Unleash Hell meaning that in 2 turns, my Raptors used to be able to shoot 4 times (double tap with Anvils) and now can potentially shoot 6 but the points did not go up accounting for this additional output... like what is going on here? They were already one of the best shooting units in the game, in a game where shooting units dominate and some can literally never be brought into melee (hi, Severith), so your fix to this was to up the output of many kinds of shooting units by ~35-50% when the enemy gets close? I just don't know how you make it work with an army that can't very rapidly project power across the board with shooting, the few armies that have enough movement to DGAF (Eels, again, though I hold the off market opinion that there may be some gross SBGL builds around Blood Knights, who function similarly to Eels now with their charge / leave engagement by flying move), or I guess in theory have enough magic dominance that it's about the same as the shooting. In none of these cases is melee really the answer, especially slow melee. This is why I have been testing this to see if this really would be the edition of monsters, but I think it's more likely to be the edition of monsters getting shot like chumps by shooting units, so far.

Very few armies have effective shooting in comparison to shootcast, and I know how to position my screens. If you are going to counterplay this, you need to be one of the few armies that can shoot back effectively (Lumineth, Seraphon, etc.) or you need fast, flying units that can completely dodge my screens (esp. given how Aetherwings work) while saying out of shooting range (30") prior to that, which basically can be summed up as Idoneth Eels. My opponent for this game is decently good; he's won a few local tournaments and knows how to play the game. But if you have something specific you think Fyreslayers can do against this, I'm all ears, because if we swapped armies and played again, I am very confident he'd smash me. The answer shouldn't be "Well, obviously playing 3/4 of the armies in the game is a dumb mistake".