Nightseer2012

Looking at the "new" shielded Grave Guard, they are statistically close to Mortek Guard, which I find kind of funny. I would love to see an in depth comparison between the two, considering in OB Mortek are the whole infantry, I wonder if it is feasible to use Shielded GG as mainstay infantry instead of just a hammer now that the extra +1 to save is now "native". In any case, the only reason I hesitate to use them shielded is because our army is chalk full of anvils. I find in most of my lists I need better hammers. Even most of our hammers are kind of anvilly. Blood Knights don't really burst down targets, they wear them down using mortal wounds, a better save, and Hunger based attrition. For its points, a VLoZD is certainly capable of killing lesser targets in one combat, but is geared (again with its better save & hunger) to dive in and preferably cripple a strong enemy, than outlast them. GG w/GW are a hammer, a glass hammer, but a true hammer none the less. Everyone here knows how scary they are if you can get a whole bundle of 20 into something unprotected. When they connect, they regularly out preform my VLoZD, but it requires that they connect. I guess all of this isn't me disagreeing with you, I am actually intrigued about the "new" shielded option of GG and the uses we could get out of them. This is more me commenting on how the paradigm of our 3rd edition book has shifted even more into the "you win by grinding" mindset with almost every army build, and I am somewhat loathe to give up my last true blender unit, lol.

I was under the impression that Legions of Chaos in DoT gave StD units with Mark of Chaos the Tzeentch keyword itself.

I feel like flamers will shine the most in Silver Tower deep strike or as summons, but even having them out near a demon hero for the -1 to hit and an increased save it still more resilient than they were. I feel like making use of "disruption" Chaos Spawn summons is also going to be something I try to make more use of in this battletome. T1 Disrupt key units with Arcane Totem & Bolt of Change, move up the Summoner & Magister with a "Silver Tower" squad of flamers and horrors and pick something to melt with ranged firepower?

Yea, I feel like they wrote his warscroll in its entirety to be pretty good, but forgot that sub factions are a thing. So instead of having to re balance him around sub factions, they just added into his equipment restrictions that he cant have a sub faction. Granted, if he DID get access to LoB buffs, I would still take him at a +50 pts increase, so I get why they didn't let it happen. It just feels weird when they add these restrictions without any rules to back it up. At least Nagash has "Warmaster", but for this guy, it really just feels tacked on as an afterthought, to the point a lot of people online are missing it entirely. All in all, he is a solid pick, who does a different job than a normal VL, direct combat instead of a VL support combat, and still good at his cost. Just the "snuck in" sub faction thing bothers me. It reminds me of the whole Lumineth Loreseeker Unique thing where GW keeps flipping back and forth on it.

I agree, but I guess my feelings lean more toward that this is part of any game that leans so heavily into asymmetrical warfare. I feel I would be more ok with this thought process if the warscroll was better and the allegiance abilities were light buffs for flavor, but that doesn't seem to be the theme of 3.0 right now. If you "need" an allegiance ability to take a warscroll, than imo you have already failed step 1 of good unit design. On the other end of the spectrum, you are right, we don't want a situation where NH absolutely HAS to take two units of Blood Knights as allies to be competitive or something like that.

So my observation is related. A theme I notice for 3.0 is that most units are "meh" on their warscroll, and their allegiances are what bring them to a good level. Even IF the NH book makes the Crossboos decent through allegiance abilities, their warscroll is still not that great. It discourages allying different factions quite heavily, which is something I love to do. It is actually why my Death armies grew the way they have. I was able to grow my collection in any way I wanted, and I knew they could work together at least decently. It is actually something I would love to go back to, I actually have a Path to Glory coming up where I am taking Soulblight simply because they have a territory they can take that lets them share the Soulblight Keyword with Nighthaunt and Flesh Eater allies.

Ah, ok, I fully admit I didn't pay attention to Fury of the Deep very much since I have little interest in those two factions. Just goes to show, feelings vs facts is hard when it comes to marketing vs my personal laziness.

Now that you mention it, it does "feel" like Arena of Shades hasn't gotten a lot of attention. I mean, it is available for preorder, and it didn't even get a whole article to itself that day, just the usual copy announcement from the preview article a week before. It got an unboxing video, 1 article about the one rule that the Scriptor gets, 1 article about the 1 rule the High Gladiatrix gets, and 1 article about the 1 rule that lets the Crossboos fire through terrain. Is it just me or does that not feel like a lot? Did the Fyreslayer/Iodeneth box only get this much coverage, or am I just being over-critical?

I agree in a sense. I think Bravery/Battleshock just needs a whole rework (which we wont get for years now). In the majority of games I play, I may see one or two vanilla battleshock rolls. Most of the time it is "Inspiring Presence", "Oh they are immune to battleshock near this hero/feature", "They are immune to battleshock". And the rest of the time it is a squad of 3+ multiwound models with 9 Bravery, and you finally manage to kill one, but they are such a low model count that battleshock doesn't matter, because they are dead by the time they have to roll it. That last one is very prevalent now in 3rd ed with the strength of save stacking+multi wound models. Skeletons should 100% roll a battleshock after losing over half their unit, no question there, but at least let me roll twice for the models you are penalizing me for losing twice. Especially after you took away all my shiny +1 attack stacking to skeletons (admittedly over powered)... just let them do 1 thing well, plz thank you.

I mean, I may start arguing for the more beneficial version. The amount of points I have to invest to get skeletons to survive combat with literally anything nowadays is getting ridiculous. Suffering double battleshock for losing models because "that model still died this phase", but not being allowed to roll another resurrect even though "that model still died this phase" is actually a surprisingly frustrating. I may start arguing that you get one or the other since they are based on the same phrasing. Like, if you want me to take x2 battleshock, I will roll "all" my resurrections both times if I benefit from Danse Macabre. Battleshock is already such a weird thing this edition. I mean hell, I just went through a game this weekend, where the ONLY thing in the whole game that even had to roll battleshock was my x20 skeleton squad, because I lost something like 22 skeletons in one phase, and only survived because of Skeletal Legions.

Eh... I think you would see lists with 1-2 a lot more. Their warscroll (even without the objective & deep strike abilities) are one of the better heroes that lumineth could use. Being able to hold an objective if you get their first is very strong in general. While other A+ tier armies would be able to deal with this just fine with all their various flavors of nonsense, other "normal" armies, and ALL the armies with the least GW attention would be at immediate disadvantages, especially considering you would also see squads of ablative Blademasters a lot more to protect the Loreseekers, as it is one of the only tools to defend scinari foot heroes the lumineth has outside of screening. Personally I think the abilities should be toned down. I would remove the "deep strike", forcing you to deploy the Loreseeker in a different way if you wanted to get to an objective first to claim it. Speed of Hysh, Transporting Vortex, Soulscream Bridge... there are plenty of options for movement, even inside the Lumineth book, it would just not be all self contained, and guaranteed on turn one. I agree with BadDice, that I think the Unique tag was put here because someone didn't feel like rewriting the warscroll in a more balanced way. So now we don't get Command Traits or Artifacts on one of the cooler styles of hero, one who is famous for collecting Artifacts, lol. And it never gets used.

And relying on GG to make a 9" charge out of the Graveyard is... a longshot, even with rerolls. I try to leave my GG in the grave for a flank charge over time, but then you have plan for zoning, have a reroll prepared for the charge (command point or command trait), preferably have access to Chronomatic cogs... it is a lot of things to have to go right for a charge out of the Grave.

Yea, but back then they were still overshadowed by 40x Skeleton Warriors w/Spears getting up to ~400 attacks in a phase. Now that "reinforcements" are a thing, the thought had left my mind entirely. Now I am interested, just because 30 wolves sounds hilarious.

Jebus... I don't know why, but it never occurred to me to ever reinforce a unit of wolves. Must be because I used to prefer running units of 5xDW for perfect little cheap screens. 60 Wounds of wolves as a speedy blob actually sounds pretty hilarious to try. Definitely check in after you try it.