Btimmy

Bats and rats not getting an aos warscroll. I read that from the official aos Facebook page as a comment on one of the endless threads about cursed city.

They have been confirmed for awhile. The community post that references the new wight king on steed talks about him leading black knights.

This lists is better but 4 is almost certainly overkill. You need more heros to generate rdp and draw fire, even if they are only bait.

Crawlers are in fact extremely reliable, even if they don't instantly kill the support heros, they force your opponent to be worried and deploy differently. I think this list doesn't have the damage nor the durability to play at the top tables. Your heros are going to die extremely early, and by taking the first turn you open yourself to getting doubled, which is disastrous in this shooting meta.

My comment pertained to all LRL in comparison to the other armies of the game. The first wave was strong, and the second wave introduces a variety of crazy mechanics that are even more powerful. Some examples include piling in 6 inches and not being required to move closer, free terrain piece that buffs casting and provides for free CP generation, messing with your opponents ability to pile in, and the 24 inch movement bowman that cannot be charged because he moves 12 inches at the end of EVERY shooting phase.

Creation of a new army is not a win, its an excuse to sell models. I am talking about actual head to heads with other lore characters.

Not sure why you are assuming I don't have games against them. I've played enough against the first wave to know that playing against them is going to be like playing against seraphon but worse. 20 archers for 280 that ignore line of sight requirements and regularly spit out 6-8 mortal wounds per shooting phase means there is quite literally nothing you can do to protect any support hero.

This applies to all LRL, I dont know what the rules writers were thinking with the amount of absolute bullshittery for that army, and I mean just pure warscroll text, not even counting their amazing army wide rules.

-Archers: I don't really want them. Crawlers already fulfill this role very well, and adding more shooting to the game isn't something I personally want in light of the current KO/DoT/LRL/Seraphon meta. -Shadow Skeletons: Not sure this is really on brand for the army. Teleports would be neat, but not every army needs that specific trick. OBR definitely needs SOME sort of tricks, as right now any skilled opponent can look at any OBR list and know exactly what the game plan is, but I'm not sure deepstrikes are it. -Chariots: Would be great, but Big K is pretty anti-chariot in the lore, which is unfortunate. - Acolytes/Missiles: Like I said above, increasing shooting saturation is not something I want, and death's wizard units have always been stand-alone hero's, so not really on brand. I would want more bone constructs similar to the necro-sphinx, who's job is simply to kill. A liege foot hero that is actually killy, more infantry options for battleline, such as a unit of 5 2/3wound bruiser skeletons. Morghasts need a warscroll overhaul to be even remotely worth it. Spells I actually think are mostly good, drain vitality is a fairly decent spell against hordes, and arcane command is good for lower point games. Only Mortal contract is pretty meh, and empower shields got hit with the death nerf to after saves. More offensive spells, which would give us access to mortal wounds would also be good.

Gonna need a second release of units for anything like this to change. I imagine eventually OBR will get the LRL treatment and have a series of new units added, probably with another battletome. If not, yeah looks like its going to be Katakros + MP + Double Crawler for the foreseeable future.

I can't believe people still think petrifex needed a nerf. Objectively speaking PE on release was a completely balanced sub-faction whose only issue was that the other sub-factions were so much worse that no one would ever take them. The solution was to buff the other subfactions, not nerf PE. Ivory Host? Crematarions? Jokes. Null Myriad? Either amazing or worthless with no in-between, meaning it is useless for a take all comers list. Mortis Praetorians? Only with Katakros, and this is now the default. Stalliarch Lords has the worst mandatory command trait and artefact in the book. To the people who say that 3+ rerolling saves in combat mortek guard were too good, allow me to invite you to play against any competently built competitive army. You'll note that these armies, and pretty much every army, already has the tools to deal with PE OBR, as long as you used a bit of strategy and didn't just literally push your models into them and try to fight them in combat. They are slow, vulnerable to spells, shooting, mortals, screens, teleports, etc. Reverting the change to petrifix would have actually zero impact on the meta for tournaments, and would do nothing but allow for variety in making OBR lists. By contrast, the Lumineth rules are far, far more problematic. Essentially table-wide archers that spit out mortals on 5's (or 6's if they managed to fail an extremely easy cast) that get to ignore line of sight requirements, meaning there is almost zero counterplay to someone trying to save a support hero. Models that get to pile in 6" in any direction, meaning they can charge, activate two units because RULES, and one of those units gets to pile in out of combat like the old skink rule? The units warscroll could be only entire garbage and they would still be worth it for that kind of mobility and flexibility.

That battalion has some positioning requirements, gotta keep the horses within a certain distance of the lord. This one lets you send them off in different directions and maybe recoup some RDP. Not saying its good, but it encourages different playstyles.

Run and charge in one legion, movement 7 for the guard at the cost of limited resources that we also need to ensure the guard don't fall over in combat. My opinion is from someone who plays in and with tournament players. The army functions because of Crawlers. Without them the gameplan of march up and try to fight is not going to work against anyone who knows what to do.

What are the easier ways for OBR? Crawlers are literally essential for the army to function because they are a long range big damage threat that forces the enemy to engage our extremely slow, no trick army.

That is definitely true, but NH has some cool stuff even now, despite being slightly gimmicky. I would say the army has more legs than OBR, just worse warscrolls. I say this because OBR does not have really any sort of complexity or list building variety. The strength of the army comes from the warscrolls of the units. NH, by contrast, is actually a fairly complex army that has a lot of player skill expression and interesting gameplay decisions insofar as what units to deepstrike, and the ability to CP relocate any unit to your general. Despite being a "weaker" army, I think NH has far more potential if they weren't held back by outdated warscrolls and a totally random casino-fight-when-charge-once-a-game-maybe effect.

I don't think you would actually want that. The army quickly becomes a boogie man and people in this hobby love to complain. I saw it with my OBR when they first released and PE was allowing us to have multiple viable army builds. It is also the case now with Seraphon and KO , which can lead to an unfun play experience for the opponent. Plus, when/if GW does correct it, the most likely correction would be one to horribly overcorrect and leave the army in a bad spot until the next battletome. I personally would much prefer a battle tome that has multiple builds of medium high strength and allows for a good amount of army building variety.

I think this slightly misses the mark when it comes to crawlers. We don't have to take them to mitigate shooting, because they functionally do not perform that role. We take them to force the opponent to engage with our army because we have NO tricks, low mobility, and pitiful ranged/melee mortal wound output. For the army to function, we need that huge long range threat to force the opponent into melee with our units. OBR's playstyle is painfully linear simply due to absolute lack of complexity insofar as actual access to teleports, or viable threat alternatives to crawlers and mortek guard. Unless the new archers are sentinel levels of unfun and power, they aren't going to fill the role the crawler has in the army.

I strongly disagree with the assertion that OBR's basic infantry, cav, and stalkers/guard cover all of the possible melee roles such that the only design space left is more shooting in an army that already has to bring 1 or 2 crawlers to even be competitive. I'm not terribly interested in whether or not thematically it makes sense for some skeletons to pick up bows. I am/would be disappointed that the path GW would take is, in my opinion, the least effort and most boring one. Its already annoying that the heavy infantry elite army requires a commitment of at least one maybe two crawlers to function because the army lacks any other tricks or threats apart from march up the field and fight.

I feel like your argument rests upon warhammer fantasy (bring back armies) and theoretical change grounds, neither of which I can address. In the current state of the game giving even more armies access to shooting is in my opinion only going to worsen the game. Almost all of the most competitive armies currently use shooting to dominate, and it creates an extremely unfun play experience. Perhaps this could be changed by sweeping rules changes, but without access to what those changes would be, I am categorically against randomly against adding shooting to armies. Especially in the case of OBR because we already have a mandatory shooting tax to even be remotely competitive in the form of crawlers. At best, a new shooting unit replaces the mandatory crawler tax, but I would much prefer more varied melee units to this heavy infantry army, in a way that enables builds that do not require shooting to function.

The more shooting centric the game becomes, the closer it gets to 40k and a general unfun experience. Adding shooting to every army because its "realistic" in a war game is going to make the game worse.

I don't. Another army gaining access to unnecessary shooting is not the direction that I want AoS or OBR to be going. We already have mandatory crawlers.

Not sure what you mean by the extra range, both have wholly w/in 12. Unless you just mean having another use case of it. Also even in 2k you are hard pressed to use more than 5 RDP a round, and having extra is just a waste. The harvester was suggested as it is exactly the 200 points that the liege kav fills, and provided some variety. The better choice would probably just be another crawler, but some people probably wouldn't find that as interesting. Alternatively, a chicken legs would also simply be better to be at 6 RDP and provide double casting/dispelling and buffs.

This list looks good, but I would probably ditch the Kavalos as Big K already gives you a ton of RDP and the extra liege is unnecessary. You would likely be better off with a harvester or a caster in the base list.

That's disappointing. I was hoping OBR's range would be extended similarly to the huge Lumineth range. I guess there are plenty of armies that would want the treatment LRL are getting though.