NinthMusketeer

I am a fan of the endrinmaster with the aethercharged run from Barak-nar. Attack, burn gold to re-roll non 6s, then change a miss to a 6. Not hard to get 6MW that way, can be quite the nasty surprise. Obviously not very meta, but fun.

Fan replacement. Like a second edition.

Actions speak louder than words, and yet the pen is mightier than the sword. The world isn't so simple that only talking about something equates to not doing anything about it.

The middle of the book is a bit stale, but it comes together at the end.

When talking meta pursuit you can broadly split players into three categories; -There for fun. Obviously they have optimized their lists within the context of what they have/like, but these players do not show up expecting to win or place top rankings. They are as you described, and I would agree this group has the most presence. They may be running with the latest meta but if they are it is so they can show up and have some good games as opposed to getting crushed, and/or they previously had the army and were grandfathered in when it became OP. -Bandwagon. These players have jumped on the latest cheese but aren't as good as they think they are. Note that just having the latest cheese doesn't put someone in this category, it's more about being TFG. I would like to say this is the smallest category but I'm not much sure. -Top players. These players are genuinely very skilled AND are running a tier 1 or 2 army. These are the people who consistently get in the top 30% and have a chance to hit top rankings. They may not be super competitive or even expect to do well, but they consistently do. This group bleeds into the other two a lot. Obviously these are generalizations and should not be taken as anything resembling a rule, but there is some trending there.

Misread earlier, whoops! But yes, I agree that nerfing fly high as a rule is not the correct approach right now.

Whenever I am helping someone asking for list advice my first question is always 'what power level are you looking for, what is your local meta like?' Because the difference can be game-breakingly vast simply by accident even when all tourney builds are cut from the picture. Also @swarmofseals I think you meant to say "overestimating" in the first sentence given the context of the rest of your post.

Looking from the rear I can see GW's logic. The mortal stuff wasn't ready to expose yet, but Slaanesh needed and players really desired a battletome much sooner than it was going to be. I think it is plausible their original plan was to simply thrust the warscrolls for the new stuff in a broken realms book--it would slide perfectly fine into the existing battletome after all. But they opted for a whole new 'tome because of the core design issues. Here's hoping they nerf the Keeper's healing hand so the other equipment options are viable! It does arouse my interest though especially because of the larger meta context. Normally a battletome is treading new ground with completely new or very reworked mechanics and/or new models. This time will likely be similar, but it is a very short period after the first where the core game has not changed in any significant way. While the meta may be shaken up a little, AoS now still plays like AoS did when Hedonites1 hit. So Hedonites2 will give more direct insight than normal into the power level AoS devs expect a battletome to have.

Woa, calm down there! I certainly never meant to come off as hostile and I apologize if it seemed that way. Like I have said before, I am perfectly willing to discuss the specifics of KO in a place where it is not off-topic, and actually did detail out my earlier post over in the KO thread yesterday when someone else asked about it. As for the rest, I totally agree. I am unsure how you got the impression I was suggesting otherwise. Perhaps I did not word things very clearly.

Ah, I missed that distinction with the BOUND cogs. Thank you for the correction!

Still not going to get into KO specifics, but that does touch on something relevant to the thread. More than once I have seen players insist that while one strategy for an army is dominant, other ways of playing the army cannot be properly examined. I think I understand the mindset behind this, but it isn't true. First there is the obvious; alternate strategies are not only entirely available to play they are extremely common on the tabletop. Not everyone playing a given army will use the meta-dominant build, but since those players are the same ones not likely to attend tournaments (read: most of them) they can be near-invisible from an outside perspective without close examination. Secondly, the battletome itself can be examined by experienced players even without actual games. It is not uncommon to know the most OP options in a battletome the same week it lands, and while the specifics may take time to crystallize (if they even do at all) it still shows that mathhammer and theoryhammer can be strongly predictive of results. But again, where is the discussion focused on this? The OP stuff. I remember discussing with a decent degree of detail the week of the Slaanesh 'tome as to exactly why keepers were OP, and how triple-keeper could be a dominant tourney build. I was far from just fooling around with myself on that one. I spent much less time talking about the huge girth of non-cheese army builds the battletome opened up despite them being both harder and deeper in tactics. Because that kind of build simply did not whip up the same level of excitement. Moral of the story is that armies exist outside of their meta builds. In fact, most of a given army generally exists outside of its meta build. A significant portion of those options are viable, commonly seeing play, and very important to include when evaluating the overall power of an army.

I am willing to cut them some slack given the pandemic, and lockdown, and Brexit, and everything.

The ability to fly high and redeploy vast amounts of the army at will would remain a problem, but one that IMO can be managed via point changes. There is a bit of a skill curve there, so I am willing to forgive GW for not realizing quite how strong fly-high transports are. @stratigo with all due respect, I do not feel you understand the army very well. Do you play KO, or have the battletome? Regardless, the nuance of KO strategy is outside this thread's topic but I am happy to discuss it in the KO thread.

Spell in a Bottle will summon the Cogs, but that's it. To generate one of the two effects you still need a wizard to activate them.

I was assuming just KO models, if you are willing to expand into Fyreslayers things open up considerably. But I will say... Don't run vulkites. Hearthguard berzerkers are simply SO much better point for point. With a hero around they are rocking a 4+ resilience so are effectively 4 wounds each. Also the 1-per-4 units as part of allegiance are not mutually exclusive with allying in Fyreslayer models normally. So you can bring a high point cost 20-man hearthguard berzerker unit as part of the army proper but then ally in a Fyreslayers hero and a 5-man auric hearthguard unit to protect them. That way you can bring three Fyreslayers units without needing nine KO ones to accompany them. What are you allying in to actually activate the cogs? Knight-Incantor?

I will add that if you practice while they have bad rules then you will be ready to pounce when the rules are inevitably updated be, if not the new cheese, than at least decent. Bandwagon players have nothing on those who practiced with the training weights of sucking! One day the die-hard beastmen players are going to absolutely DESTROY us.

Do they, though? We can all say that Kharadron Overlords are "the shooting faction of AoS" but no one would call that an appropriate summary of the army, and it is possible to have certain builds from other armies be shootier than the average KO build. KO have several models that fight far better than they shoot, and they have a unique transport mechanic no one else does lending high mobility to otherwise slow units. And that is the reality; the design space available may not be unlimited but it is so vast that GW would run out of release windows before they ran out of unique army mechanics. Something GW has done exceedingly well in second edition is ensure every army has a special 'thing' that is theirs and makes them different to play than other factions.

So this is a response to @Beliman who was asking about KO melee tactics in another thread, but this would have been off-topic there. First off, KO melee is focused on not being transported. If KO are in melee is is generally because they either were charged on an objective or are charging onto an objective. The army has plenty of shooting to kill enemies behind the lines. Being outside of transports means the models count for objectives and can benefit from several buffs that don't work onboard. When charging onto an objective it is all about endrinriggers. They don't have high model count but they do have the lethality, the durability, and the speed. MSU is particularly notable here because of a mizzenmeister's extra attack and ease of getting cover. But fewer bigger units are good for getting the khemist buff, which they really, really like. Spending a command point to use the generic ability and giving them RR hit rolls of 1 for a combat phase isn't shabby either. Sidenote; as you noted Barak Zon is a trap. Urbaz (give endrinrigger units aether gold) or Thryng (attack when you die) for a melee focus. Defensive melee is all about thunderers + khemist. Putting the khemist surrounded by a horseshoe line of thunderers with a fumigator creates a bubble of -2 to hit which is absolutely crippling to a lot of melee enemies. Yes, they will still lose combat. But that's ok, all the surviving thunderers have an extra sattack on their guns next turn to even the score. Now here is the key to taking the above two and making them work more than as a backup plan; support. Admirals and Endrinmasters are good in melee; either charge them in next to other chargers or position them such that they will be pulled into melee range when the opponent charges what's in front. They add extra oomph and make it harder for an opposing unit to focus on any one of yours. Just 1 or 2 wounds that go on a hero can see that mizzenmeister or fumigator for another phase. Speaking of splitting damage, skyvessels. On offense, charge with your skyvessels alongside the endrinriggers. It forces the opponent to split up attacks, making it harder to focus down any one target. Wounds on skyvessels can be healed quite readily and given their chonk it can be difficult to put them down all at once. And if they get too damaged you may be able to retreat without penalty (especially if you use said endrinriggers to repair it first). The additional benefit is damage output, not from the attacks but from bombs. It isn't a ton but it happens at the start of the phase allowing you to inflict damage before anyone swings, even on the opponent's turn. On defense, park skyvessels on flanks for the same reason. You are trying to force the enemy to split attacks, allowing you to attrition them to death with your bomb dropping healing armored wound sponges and a healthy dose of shooting that even the most khornate of KO builds will have. Hope that helps!

Well the other part of the post was basically '...buuut it isn't as good as the fly-high-and-shoot builds right now.' Which is the point; any KO build WILL be worse than that, but it is a problem with the one build being OP not the other ones being too weak. Melee-focused KO are going to struggle against top-tier builds. Which is perfectly fine because any balanced army will. Many players slip into the hyper-competitive mindset of 'if it doesn't win tournaments it is bad' often without even realizing it, but that stance doesn't make sense, and more importantly is toxic to the community. As for specific advice, I'll put some pointers over in the KO discussion thread since it isn't really on-topic here.

Is this a rules question or a fluff question? At any rate, appropriately warded fortifications can block Nighthaunt from moving through them. And there is circumstantial evidence to suggest NH have trouble simultaneously attacking and moving through solid objects, presumably because their weapons need to be solid when they hit the enemy. So a coach charging a barricade makes sense, even a warded one. The other option of a diagonal or vertical charge would mean trying to hit the Order forces and phase through the ground at the same time. Further, bar the heroes NH are not exactly fully-concious as we would consider a sentient being to be. They are more like constructs, given that so much of what once made them a person (who was, in almost all cases, dysfunctional or insane at the time of death) has been stripped away. The wraith driving the coach is unlikely to consider or care about the tactical viability in charging a manned barricade head-on. But given he was a psychopathic murderer in life and is charged with an absolute hatred of the living in death, he is very likely to do it. Long story short; your diorama is justified fluff-wise and you should totally go for it.

KO can work just fine in melee and have plenty of tools to succeed there both offensively and defensively. But the melee is still in support of shooting. Which is fine, that is how the army is supposed to function. However, certain factors (namely the strength of fly high and double-turn shooting) make going all-in on shooting stronger by a large enough margin to render other builds much less attractive. But without those factors they would not "struggle" just as Slaanesh does not struggle without a keeper-centric build. You know where they would struggle? Getting top rankings at tournaments. A trait shared by every army build that is not game-breaking cheese. Anything consistently pulling top tourney rankings is overpowered. A balanced army/build will not consistently pull top tourney results. I cannot stress this enough.

I say leave it in the core rules--just remove it from matched play. Matched play is about removing strongly random factors and providing a framework in which skill takes precedence over cinematics. For the same reason I totally support the comparatively bland realmscape rules used for matched play while also supporting the crazy ones available for narrative. AoS would be worse off if either of those things were gone, because they are each appropriate for the context.

Then they are at a disadvantage if they don't get an early double, which is about half the time. Not particularly fair to armies which have to build that way.

*sigh* yeah, you make a completely valid point.

The relevance is because a double-turn doubles the magnitude of power differences. Something that was once a minor power disparity can suddenly become noticable when you get to slam your opponent with it twice in a row. And on the other hand it can also mask disparity by giving a statistically weaker army extra wins based on luck. It even distorts the meta--it is no coincidence that shooting & magic armies do so well in overall stats. If we are going to examine power creep it is important to understand and factor in these elements. But I readily concede that the double isn'teverything--I've played hundreds of games of AoS so I know full well the varying factors that go into a win. Just above I was explaining how winning based on a 'lucky roll' generally has a huge amount of player action going into it. I should note that I don't speak in absolutes; if I meant to say that literally every single round 1-2 double results in a win I would phrase it as such! Obviously an advantageous double will not correct a large mismatch or compensate for total incompetence. Indeed, I have lost games myself after getting a round 1-2 double and each of those losses was due to critical tactical errors on my part. I had a massive advantage handed to me and in all three of those games I managed to squander it.