Rors

My concern is that if Nighthaunt are adding a krondspine because it's simply a power pick, way too many other armies will as well. Then we have a meta where most battles have a krondspine on both sides of the board, which will get stale very quickly. I guess it's a meta where the new crossboos can theoretically pop the bound hero early if you drop a ton of them and roll hot.

He's not the 1st but in terms of AoS he's condensed a lot of different tournaments (in collaboration with another Rob and Ziggy) and has the most data on AoS. He's also an exGW employee. https://thehonestwargamer.com/aos-stats-centre-state-of-the-meta/ There's similar stuff with 40k. The recent changes made by GW used his stats, they creditted his sight temporarily before going back to pretending he doesn't exist. His data is also now used by other well known voices in the community such as Vince V.

I hear you and nothing I was saying was directly speculating on NH as this discussion has gone slightly off topic. I think their recent success, like Lego, is because a lot of us started as kids, left, and have come back as adults with disposable income. Of course the quality of the game is relevant to sales but GW upper management don't have a clue what game quality is. Until folks from places like honest wargamer started actually tracking stats GW had no clue where their game ballance was at and they had shown very little interest in finding out. Since no one else knew, all they had to do was proclaim it's great and no one can really argue it. That's changing now and it's making them work on game ballance reactively rather than proactively, at least so far. Now that the community is actively doing stats themselves, GW are reacting to this with greater effort at game ballance because they know the no longer have a monopoly on informing customers about the product. Anyway, night haunt.. hopefully it's a decent book.

Unfortunately I think a vassssst majority of the consumer base just buys new shiney stuff and GW will do just fine on sales. Most players aren't competitive, then there's the collectors and hobbiest who just like models and don't play at all. That being said, I think streamers like honest wargamer are having a hugely positive impact on informing the community and dragging GW along for the ride since the company no longer has sole control over their own marketing and the narrative they create when pitching to the consumer.

At this point I'm waiting to see what comes with allegiance abilities and the subfactions. The fyreslayers had what should have been a warscroll effect as a book rule with the grimwrath or whatever it's called. It's the allegiance abilities and subfactions that often make the best factions what they are and even if our two crappy old one get reprinted, I'd expect 2 more with them. That being said, I'm keep my expectations very low for this. Still, given how out of date the current book is, I'm confident it'll be an improvement. I'd be happy of the faction moves into the 45% win rate area.

We don't know the points cost so we don't know if bladegeist or harridans are better, just that one has more power built into the warscroll.

Okay, doesn't sound like enough for my meme to be in any way viable competitively but it's definitely an improvement! Still -2 rend? I think while I still have waaaayy too many, they're going to pop up in most lists now, assuming the points stay about the same. A 24 inch diameter bubble front the unit easily covers a lot of units. By the sound of the wording, units you protect don't need to be wholly within their radius just a toe in. Against some armies they'll punch crazy amount above their weight simply by denying critical spells and with 2 attacks base their not as pillow fisted. Oddly, Nagash would probably fear these ladies more than anyone else now..

I have a meme list with 48 banshees... Can someone summarize what what's changed with them? Oh boy hearing they might be the winners in this book brings warmth to my undead heart

Having them play in the terror space is a unique and cool place for them that's thematic both as night haunt and as Death. Bonereapers are immune to fear and Night Haunt are the scariest, it feels like opposite sides of the same coin. To make it viable they need more abilities/imoacts based on LD and ways to mess with stuff like command points. Something like any unit with 6 of NH unit must pass leadership test to be able to give or take commands.

I think the debates between the optimistists and cynics will continue for as long as GW keep producing previews. There's really no point in calling out one side for being negative and the other for over hyping in most cases. It won't stop the debate and it's unlikely anyones opinion will change much. The rules we've seen so far tend towards being lackluster - no point pretending they're not. The remaining 99% of the rules that wv haven't seen could be amazing or similar. Rather than putting any emotional spin on it, I'd note the following when speculating about the nighthaunt release. 1. Game ballance has been slowly getting better and GW is actively working on live ballance - a horribly weak release isn't as likely as it once was and if it is, we'll get updates much sooner than waiting for the next book iteration so it's less of a problem. Beasts of Chaos and the new regular patches are examples of this new trend. 2. GW have seemed to have two main writers, with different game design philosophy. We often see dual release with one strong and one weak release. Unfortunately, history would suggest the writer who makes the stronger book (not necessarily better but stronger) will get DoK again. 3. GW have shown a pattern of being conservative with Nighthaunt, I suspect because they break a few core game mechanic that could be problematic if they tip the scale too far and aforementioned tendancy for the same writer to get the book. 4. There's still a general power creep trend across book releases, although I think they're getting better. Thats good for a stronger release into the meta now, worse later. It's also possibly going to be mitigated somewhat by point 1.

It's really hope this new boat boy has some kind of damage aura/pulse that turns slain models into spirit host. We have so many support heros already, we need a hero that fits a different role.

Definitely not super impressed with their weapon profile but as said, with the right synergies they could be a threat. I'll wait and see before saying it's a dud but my concern with them being a shooting unit that has to teleport to within 12 inches with a support hero to buff them is that your stacking points into a combo that is very easily counter charged. Assassination a 100something point support hero by sacrificing a (probably) 100something unit and 100 something points hero isn't effective. I suppose they could work as units that sit behind chainrasp hoards and only teleport out to assassinate a hero when it's later in the game but then that support hero has stuck around most of the game (likely earning their points already) and just on that profile alone, unless they're very very cheap, they don't really add anything by hiding behind screens. We'll need to wait and see but I'm definitely setting my expectations very low for this unit. On a positive note, one (possibly) dud unit doesn't mean anything for the strength of the book when released.

I'm just starting my collection with Seraphon so I haven't tried the old power combo but I think it's still viable. It's a combo that nukes the opponent off the board, as such they were already priority targets and if you lost the combo early you lose anyway. Most of the time, they'll just kill everything and if you lose a couple while nuking the opponent, it's not going to lose you the game, just reduce the margin you win by.

Has anyone here ever tried vortec beasts? They don't look crash hot but they're only 175 points, seems plausible to spam. At which point they're random effects can all stack together to really nuke a unit or support character. The none damage debuffs last all game and as you stack them get fairly nasty although really you're just fishing for 6s. I feel like I might just be convincing myself to embrace the congestive dissonance though.

It's a side topic but if people are interested in smaller games that are really well ballanced check out Malifaux. It's waaaaay cheaper, the rule system is tighter and the models are almost as good as GW. While I love Age of Sigmar and it's been great to see the growth of AoS and 40k. I can't wait for it to bleed I to these smaller communities. Actual competition will be good for GW and some of these smaller companies and honestly making better games right now, they just don't have a large a player base making games harder to find.

Not at all. My statement was more of a neutral comment that within the community there'd be resistance due to this. As mention people who bought god models and other big combo units will cry foul. On the note of god models and the price increases, I suspect GW have created a feedbacks loop that will see more Gods on the table. Dollars to points ratio, a lot of the gods are actually cheap if you want to reach 2k quickly. I think Nagash might have one of the best dollars to points ratios in the whole game. We could actually see an effect where people buy gods because it's a quick way to 2k, and GW marketing notice this and double down on mega units making it harder to reduce game size even though that's inadvertent what players are actually trying to do by taking gods.

I've heard really good things about the format that was created for 1k games too, although I haven't tried it yet. I 100% agree that the games functionality changes with points in the game. The you go I go systems of turns gets less and less ballanced as you go over 2000 points. Under 2000 points it's harder to make combos and a lot of the top tier armies are actually just vehicles for top tier combos. Also the hoard armies tend to be the weakest in the current meta and these will have a distinct advantage at lower points, where an army like SoB will really struggle. If we moved to say 1500 as the new standard I'd expect some factions to drop off competitively, that might also cause a backlash as these are generally the popular armies. DoK for example can't really do the Morathhi snakes combo. Pink horros remain really point efficient but it's a big investment in holding one objective when you have less points to threaten others.

Did you run anything with Nagash as support? Can we see your list? Apologies if you've already posted it somewhere in this thread.

How important is spell portal to support Nagash and does anyone know where you can get it second hand or if there's a decent proxy model for it?

Yeah it was just a link for the pic haha

Given the only death release this year is nighthaunt, I think we'll be getting a ghost ship. https://spikeybits.com/2021/09/straight-to-davy-jones-locker-gw-rumor-engine.html

I think you're out of luck there. Fine lines like that are much easier with a high quality fine nib pen than a brush if that helps at all.

Yeah I'm expecting a significant boost to the army. Just have a few subfactions would help (I know we got those token updates but they're not good and very mono-build). It's also interesting to think about what they might be too. I guess we'll find out soon.

I have 48 banshees for a banshee themed army so I'm very excited and nervous to see what happens with them.

In my opinion they should just use the activation design used by Malifaux. It's objectively better as it's simpler and creates more nuanced choices. The idea of a whole army taking it's turn is low interaction and has terrible synergy with how the game is designed to scale, because the more you put down, the more is unbalances. Seriously though, I love AoS but if you want to look at a game that's actually created a functional activation system for combat board games, check out Malifaux. IMO it sets the bar on where good game design is at.