NinthMusketeer

I would say to check out Road to Renown and see if there are any ideas you can cannibalize from that. All my best progression ideas are already in there 🙂

On the one hand, I totally get this. However, as a narrative player I enjoy such rules as long as they aren't overtuned. Having a unit that re-rolls hits of 1 against Chaos, or a spell that does 3 instead of d3 to daemons isn't breaking a matchup. Having undead ignore the bravery penalties imposed by other undead makes sense (and affects both sides of that equations). Yes they are unfair on a certain level but part of the game is about dealing with the myriad of factors which favor one side or the other. Some units are great counters to others just by virtue of stats and without any sort of keyword-based advantage. Some scenarios favor certain types of army build over others. And so on; there are countless factors like that in the game. The problem happens when an advantage is so strong or unavoidable that the opponent has no counter-play available. I can prioritize killing the unit or unbinding the spell that is good against my army, I can alter my deployment to keep certain units away from others that might hard counter them. But what if I show up as ogors against a coalesced army? That -1 damage ability puts me at an insurmountable disadvantage and there is nothing I can do. One might also note; that ability isn't based off keyword. In short; problems arise not from the concept but the execution.

I like to see a mix of mechanics that act both within and across grand alliances. I am hoping with the hobgrots we may see GW break the artificial barrier of units being unable to exist in more than one alliance at a time.

But having GAs are useful for abilities that affect models from certain GAs differently. The keywords are used in dozens of different rules & abilities. Removing them just eliminates the potential for such abilities and gives literally nothing in return. And they would still exist anyways; people would reference them and the common clusters in alliance matrices as well as lore would be more than enough to see their continued use in conversation. In a nutshell the stance I am seeing here is 'it would be good for AoS to have more options, so remove options' which has me rather confused.

Up until GHB2021 it was fully matched play legal to run Fyreslayer/FEC mercenaries outside of their Grand Alliance. And GHB 2017(?) had the mercenary rules which did the same. Not only do Grand Alliances not prevent rules as your describe from existing, rules as you describe already exist and are still available for people to use in narrative play such as Path to Glory.

I just don't see how that improves anything. The grand alliances would still exist in practice via units/effects that act off the keywords. Removing those keywords reduces granularity because it it removing categories. Nothing is stopping a table like the one you listed right now.

I have always liked them. They are solid divisions into broad categories of philosophy, some people don't like them (which is fine) but then look for evidence as to why they are bad. Beastmen and Sylvaneth I see raised a lot as being better candidates for Destruction, but not by actual players of those armies who understand their lore. There also remain gameplay mechanics that go by grand alliance, and it would be a shame to throw away that keyword in the name of... what's the benefit again?

This is an amusing observation and I am glad you made it but hardly a PSA! Needing to ignore obscure RAW details to play the game sensibly is a foundation of Warhammer and many other games besides 😆 Not to mention real-life legal systems.

I feel like The Trap needs to push the invader's first victory point score to round 2. The ambusher cannot be reasonably expected to wipe out a significant number of units the first turn. As to content, I personally find PtG3rd to be incredibly bland. They made the decision to have compatibility with matched play and built a great skeleton with which to do that, but there's no flesh on that skeleton. It ends up squandering a huge amount of potential on being just matched play + extras. I am sure they will introduce loads of content via battletomes but I know from Crusade that it can actually make things worse because it creates haves and have-nots. Some armies have tons of options and depth, others have a puddle. That (albeit combined with the blatant power divide of 8th-9th codex) killed Crusade for me so hard I've actually quit 40k over it. On top of that, the 'order of battle' system really kills continuity. When units can be added or dropped at will, it isn't really a progression campaign anymore because lists can be changed as needed. PtG goes a good way to resolving this by introducing the glory cost, but the cost is so small and glory has so little things to spend it on that I don't really feel the difference. The only thing lost is xp, but the veteran rewards aren't even very good and have diminishing returns to boot. I've found I don't even bother tracking renown on my regular units, because I just don't care. The warlord it literally does not matter for, and others the only matter that numbers is 15 (or not even that, for armies that get multiple command traits). The real progression is on the army level with additional enhancements, battalions, endless spells, etc. Territories too, technically, but I've found most armies only need 2 and a basic fortress to bring everything they want anyways. Again, I am expecting the battletomes to fix this. But only for those factions. Poor Gravelords are basically screwed for the two years at least. My fingers are desperately crossed for a PtG supplement like the one they did in 1st edition that gives bespoke content to each faction for them to perform reasonably on par until they get their battletome update. That said to some extent I see a matter of preference, and I simply prefer the old style of PtG. The execution was sloppy, but I made Road to Renown which fixed that. The upside is now I have two very different styles of narrative campaign I can run. And it's all better than Matched Play anyways amirite? 😆

Ok, let me be more blunt. Just because you do not understand the tactical use, does not mean it does not exist.

When you play as much AoS as I have you lose count of the number of matches decided by d3 points of damage.

Healing d3 every turn from heroic recovery and stomping for d3 MWs every turn helps considerably, enough that a LoC can do fine if he avoids dedicated combat units. But it's always going to be a secondary role. Probably more useful is simply roaring to prevent command use, and/or flying around to break faction terrain.

C'mon guys, the errata makes it so the split ability functions as intended; trying to rules-lawyer it so all abilities which return slain models bypass core rules is obviously an unsportsmanlike exploit. Doubly so for horrors being so good already. And that is even before getting into the actual RAW, which is quite clear that splitting, and only splitting, can add models to the unit when it is at or above its starting size. No event judge would ever let the endless horror bloat interpretation stand. With all due respect, some people here need to step back and re-evaluate the attitude with which they are approaching the game.

Reward tables have been updated! Mostly the same with a few rewordings and tweaks to fit with the new edition but also some changes; -The Veterans reward has been completely rewritten. -Deadly Onslaught & Deadly Counterstrike have had the charge-based rend buff increased. -Soulblight Gravelords have new allegiance-based rewards, replacing the Legions of Nagash and Soulblight ones.

So funny thing is I actually made these rules like two years ago for use in Road to Renown but it completely slipped my mind that hey, people might appreciate these for use in general AoS 😅 So I split them off, updated the wording and included a print-friendly version for folks; https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8gg82tjqf5x5d4y/AABjxoNTQTu-2fCGLFiNVK5Ra?dl=0

Yeah, if you couldn't dispel it during the opponent's turn it wouldn't really be worth it. But at any rate my ultimate point was not a comment on its overall effectiveness but rather that it is still useable, and that it isn't comparable to the heraldor because they are so different.

You can just drop him from your order of battle and add in a 'new' warlord on the bell; the only thing you'll lose is the glory cost. Warlords don't have any benefit from collecting renown anyways.

They removed the 5" damage pulses and increased it's casting debuff range to 10". It's main impact remains when it is first summoned, after which the best use is to dispel so it can be resummoned. It's a small nerf at worst and depending on local meta the longer debuff range can compensate for losing the short-range MWs. As for why, you know why.

Well the Heraldor must pick a terrain piece wholly within 18" of himself and only hits enemy units within 3" of it. Compared to comet which is a 20" diameter circle that is dropped up to 36" away. The Heraldor is a hero offering a mobility buff, the comet is an endless spell putting out a casting debuff. Comparing the two directly isn't helpful, instead they need to be evaluated within the context of the army as a whole and what tools is has/will benefit from. Unilaterally declaring one as superior is, with all due respect, not thinking things through.

Something very important to consider is the SCE monsters come in two varieties; with or without the Amulet of Destiny. That artifact is, in effect, a 50% increase in wounds and healing. That can easily bump a monster from UP to OP.

Nice work on that banner!

Stardrake with Amulet of Destiny is OP. What was in 2nd edition a model that took 16 damage to kill becomes a model that takes (statistically) 24 damage to kill by default, can heal 2d3 per round thanks to heroic recovery, gets monster actions, and its ability to pick out individual models allows for killing unit leaders and/or disrupting coherency which are both more important this edition.

If the argument is that an ability must explicitly say ward to be a ward then congrats to Death, Nurgle, and a number of others because all those negation abilities are NOT wards and thereby get to stack.

Let us not forget that once stock does run out it will take about that long for the criticism of how GW printed too few to start.

Ehhh, command tokens aren't much of a freebee. I'd guess that the terms & conditions are just to cover a bit of excess over the 33050, otherwise It'd be a hard cap (by their measure, at least). Also 33050 worldwide or for a certain country? But my FLGS sold out the day of release so maybe my perception is colored.