Zeblasky

Oh well, I hoped for a real rule update, but I guess that's okay? It definetly should have been just a warscroll update, but those don't sell White Dwarfs as well.

Oh yes, this is what I really wanted from Black dragon breath attack all this time. It's not a warcroll change, but still. Gryphon buff is just bunkers though, a free get out of jail card. You can just take one of those mount traits for free in any city btw, correct? And only one without additional enhancements? I also would not call this grand strategy useless. Specific, sure, but that's a potential 0-9 EXTRA points from your grand strategy. Against certain factions it could win you some tight games. Also, are there any warscroll or point changes? Anything else at all?

Could you please elaborate? Or at least PM the leak pretty please?

I'd say that Dragon is quite underestimated. Sure, he is not really tanky, but his damage, while somewhat random, is good on average and can be quite devastating. Just today my dragon charged in and under Titanic Duel finished off Killaboss on Vulcha general, who still had 7 (or 4?) wounds together with his last 6 Gutrippaz of his retinue ( Killaboss passed some of his wounds to them, they all died). Is it way above average for his rolls? Oh yea. But he still basically went through 19/16 3+ wounds. Somehow. Yea, may be my opponent forgot about Mystic Shield at this point and used 4+ save, but I doubt it, he remembered it for shooting attacks. And even then it would be quite impressive. And yes, +1 to hit on him really helps with his randomness and damage in general. By the way, just now I've realised that Dreadlord is pretty good at dueling monsters. One Titanic Duel, one use of Dreadlord CA (can't be roared down, used at the start of Combat Phase) and he has +1 to hit and wound versus chosen Monster target. + 1 to wound is useless for his Jaws most of the time, but it's still good for his other attacks. (Battle reports are soon to follow btw, probably in Living City thread).

I really like elves and I want way more of them in the game. Yep, let the Aelvetide sweep away the Stormcast. But seriously, if aelves (as in 3-4 different factions) would take the flagship role from stormcast, this would be so much better for the game health.

I completely agree, that Dreadlord can be better than Stormdrakes, I even said it my previous post. Mostly due to being a hero and Amulet of destiny, but still. I did kinda forget that you can no longer make coalition heroes into a general, so yes, it does makes Dreadlord slightly better in CoS roster, while in SCE Dreadlord would be ultimately pointless. The funny thing here hoveewr is that most of those command traits buff chances to wound, which is both great and bad for a Black dragon, as Black Dragon Jaws get to a 3+ to would only on an second (third?) bracket, so otherwise this bonus is wasted most of the time on one of his most powerful attacks. And yea, you can make Dreadlord your general only if you're set on taking CoS default battleline. And while we have a pretty good selection of unconditional battleline choices, it's not always a good choice.

Hell again, this is your friendly admirer of Sisters of the Watch and Dreadlord on the Black Dragon. Today I come to talk about the latter. So, Dreadlord got some new draconic competition, and his name is Knigh-Drakonis. So, how do they fare against each other? Well, it's not looking great for Dreadlord. First, basic stats and abilities. For the Dreadlord, we have: 14 move instead of 12 14 wounds instead of 11 And that's literally it. While Knight-Drakonis has: NO DEGRADING PROFILE WAT 3+ base save (much better for save stacking) instead of 4+ or 4+ add 1 from shield. 12 range shooting attack, for which you do not have to lose +1 to save if you want to play in Living City 4+ spell shrug Once per battle free shooting in hero phase for him or other Stormdrakes Yea, it's not looking that great. Dreadlord can be quite tankier with Amulet of Destiny and even without his shield thanks to 3 more wounds (and with wards it does add up), but other things, especially actually being balanced by degrading profire, drag him down so, so much here. But hey, let's look at the damage, shall we? Save Knight-drake Black Dragon Drakes with Blades 2+ 5.48 5.02 5.48 3+ 7 7.03 7.63 4+ 8.52 9.03 9.78 5+ 9.11 11.04 11.93 6+ 9.11 11.88 12.89 - 9.11 12.04 12.89 Black Dragon is modelled with Crossbow and Lance on charge, as usual. Stormdrakes ranged attacks though are not included, it's only combat damage for them. And yea, I included unit of 2 Stormdrakes with Blades (285 points), just to show that if you need a monstrous unit with 18 wounds and 3+ save that also looks amazing, has 2 ranged MW attacks (that's extra 3-4 MW on average) and does a lot of damage in combat phase, look no further. The only reason I look at Hero monsters is because Strormdrakes can't take Amulet of Destiny, hah. So yea, at first it looks like Black Dragon does more damage versus low armour, hurray. But then you remember that Knight has a shooting attack that causes 1.8 MW on average. But then you remember that Black dragon has a shooting attack that causes MWs as well, but it has much shorter range and can do anything between 0.17 and 6 mortal wounds on average, depending on a target, so much more situational. Knight however can also somewhat reliably remove 1-3 wound models from play, and you can even try your luck at destroying 5 wound heroes, so that also adds up to his damage (although in a weird and hard to calculate way as a pure damage). So... overall, Dreadlord has a much better time when clearing out from tarpits with a lot of cheap bodies due to his breath attack and less rend, but Knight just has a much easier time achieving his max potential, especially versus high save targets. It pains me to say it, but Knight mostly wins in a damage department. Or, in short, Dreadlord is better versus big blocks of low armoured chaff, Knight is better versus elites and middle ground. And THEN, at the end of it all, you remember that Black Dragon is 290, while Knight-Drakonis is 255. Yeeep. Honestly, why pay 35 points more for slighlty better tankiness (if you're taking his shield) and situationally better damage (and against hordes of all things), when Knight-Drakonis has so much more going for him AND he is quite cheaper as well? I hope that someone could show me that I am wrong, but for now, if you want a mobile and heavy hitting dragon in your min-maxed Living City army, take Knigh-Drakonis P.S. I would expect some point nerfs to Stormdrakes in the future though. I hope.

I was just about to write the same response. I personally still agree that Blades are generally better and more reliable if you can't get a charge every turn, but to call Stormdrakes damage lacking... First of all, we were talking about combat damage only (and even it alone was quite impressive). We also have 1.83 MW on average from every Stormdrake model that shoots. Then you can reasonably add up 1-3 extra wounds removed with a single non negatable dice roll per every stormdrake unit (go on and make that Blood Knight fly). Oh, and you also potentially can use all of the Monstrous rampages every combat phase with 2x2 of them as well, which can indirectly cause or save you some wounds as well. Together that's A LOT of damage from a unit that costs just 285 points. My poor Black Dragon is literally green with jealousy (yea, he is painted as a Forest Dragon x) ). If they were a hero and could take Amulet of Destiny, they would be incredibly broken. I am not that versed in SCE units current balance and prowess, and there for sure may be some units that are more point efficient damage and/or tankiness. But that still does not make Stormdrakes damage less impressive if you compare them across all the other faction units in the game.

A bit late, but Stormdrake Lances are actually not as bad as some claim. But only IF you talk about min sized units of 2 or especially about a single Stormdrake (who can be a solo champion too for some reason). All that because a champion gets extra attack, and an extra attack with Lance is much more impactful than an extra attack with Blade. I do agree that Blades are still better, buuut if you really need to shatter something on a charge, Lances can be a decent option. Below are damage for a unit of 2 Stormrakes on a charge without dragon Fang and Talons attacks. Save Drakes Swords Drakes lances 2+ 1.93 3.11 3+ 2.89 4.15 4+ 3.85 5.19 5+ 4.81 6.22 6+ 5.78 6.22 - 5.78 6.22

Honestly, yea, I kinda do not get why some people said that new app is much better. For rules - sure, it's easier to read them now, once you get used to a simplified version, that's a big plus. But warscrolls are less easier to read due to a new design (too oversimplified), and army builder seems like a pure downgrade if compared to the old one. Units are not organized by their roles, but in the order you take them, you can't see artefacts and spells they take in the main list... Even if this was completely free, I would still use Warscroll Builder or BattleScribe for listbuilding instead.

Hey, GW, could you may be modernize a bit further and post all the rule related information in a coherent and organized way for free on your site and apps, so it could be viewed and comprehensively updated at any time, thus benefiting both your customers and your game popularity? Such transparency would make getting new people into the game much... Oh... Instead you... OH... Honestly, there are 2 reasons I personally can see for this desision. It's either a short sighted and short term greed (AoS is popular enough, let's milk it like 40k from now on) or GW is afraid that due to 3D printers they could become rules and content company in 15 years. Both reasons are not valid for such a desision right now, so if we want to have a slight change of GW changing this... Well, you know the drill, boycott, "constructive" riot and drama. It would probably not get us a desired effect, but hey, at least it's fun.

There was a russian player list with 5 Steam tanks that recently took 1 place in some TTS tournament, if I remember correctly, so that was pretty interesting.

Hey guys, quick quiestion - do I uderstand it correctly, that only new battletomes and a few new models will be on preoder 18-19 and not new dragon models? I've never done a preorder yet from a GW directy, but I really want to get those dragons, so apologies in advance for this and other questions that will follow.

Here's the funny thing. When in TW:W 1 and 2 Singleplayer people were occasionally attaking Multiplayer crowd for "ruining SP fun with their pointless balance changes and diverting resources from a main game mode for a pointless MP almost no one plays", MP crowd, besides other reasons, defended themself by an argument that WHFB was primarily a tabletop multiplayer game, and as such, TW:W should be focused on good multiplayer balance and support as well. So yea, there are actually a lot of parallels here x)

Of course. I do believe though that getting the backing of certain big figures/tournament organizers probably should not be too hard, provided you would have at least a decent ruleset for them - people generally like to promote some variety, and even if your ruleset won't become a new constant, it could still be viewed as playing the base game with a remaster mod for a slightly different kind of fun. Getting most of the community to be on board with rebalance though would be... tough. It's not just nerfs and buffs that create problems. When you change the rules for a unit or a faction, and make them behave differently, you could alienate some people even when that unit becomes stronger than it was. But as I've said, I understand that this is not easy. Interesting idea, but getting stable and deep statistics for such undertaking would be somewhat challenging.

Oh, I absolutely agree here. GW can do both crazy good and crazy bad things in term of rules. And fun is one of the things you should never forget, even in a competitive environment. It's just people that are too focused on a heavily competitive things tend to dismiss fun things as they are usually hard to balance x) And, well, one men fun may be another men pain, but that's another story.

The same thing that happens when a player does not want to play by a ruiling of some Council of Games Workshop : P People like having freedom of choice. And when they spend cash for a FAQ for FAQ for FAQ... yea, that's not great. So having an option to play in a tournament run under one or the other rulesets would be pretty great. Of course not. But community can create a few centres of gravity in terms of rules, and one of those could eventually become large enough to eclipse official rules. It would not be perfect, it would not make all of us rejoice in unison, it would still produce a lot of screaming and toxicity... yet it could still become better then what we have. Of course it's not easy. Sure it does not always goes as planned. Yes, it needs time and dedication. But should that stop a community forever from trying it anyway? If it goes well, great, and if it fails, some good ideas will come from it anyway. The main thing here is NOT to have a single big rules project, but at least 3 smaller ones, which would both compete and learn/borrow ideas from each other. That's the best way in my opinion, as this allows for more creative thinking and better natural selection. I'm thinking that quite an opposite thing would happen - if home rulesets woud become dominant, that would lead to a noticeably less battletomes sales, and that leads to GW trying to fix it. If there is one language this company understands, it's money, and you've seen how hard they push for physical book sales in 40k, they need it. And true, CA did focus on a SP over MP most of the time. But, thanks to the MP community, our tournaments, rulesets, feedback and even some mods, over the course of WH2, CA quickly realised how great a value can MP generate. So they started investing in it much heavily than in WH1: gradually created mostly great balance (if complared to WH1 it was night and day, first game was extremely unbalanced), started sponsoring grand promotional tournaments and implemented quite a few things from us into the core MP. It is however also true that CA generally listens to feedback much closer than GW, as (for one example) lead balance developer (great guy btw, we love him) was in our then small tournament discord from around 2017, then joined a much bigger Turin Discord, played very well in one tournament and from time to time he still freely talks to us about bugs and balance, including to yours truly. Yea, it was that good. Now just imagine talking to GW lead balance designer on a open Discord server about new battletome instead and you start to see, that GW needs to change some things around. Well, I know almost nothing about Ninth Age, so I cannot say anything about that. Still though, if a single project, based on an initially very ploblematic ruleset of WHFB, failed to produced something more balanced and good, does this mean WH community should never attempt this again? I still believe that if we would have not one, but a few rule projects working in parallel, it could eventually lead to a more stable and balanced ruleset, as competition in this field produces much better results. Or at least GW noticing this enough to invest more into quality control would be a satisfactory result.

My guess that such things would still happen in the future, but pretty rarely. But honestly, just recently I was wondering about this. Why community struggle with GW produced rules of quite a fluctuating quality for so, so long? Why not finally stop buying battletomes, say "no, this service is bad, we'll do it ourselfs" and produce a set or sets of partially or competely remade home rules for all factions and subfactions over time and then play by them at most tournaments? Honestly, coming from TW:W competitive scene, where all tournaments are played by their own rules and army caps (mostly by Shetland then Turin approved ruleset), this strikes me as extremely weird. Sure, it would be rough at first, you'll need a year or even two to rewrite and balance everything properly, but it would open doors wide for community feedback and creativity! Both 40k and AoS communities would be free from current sets of problems (most of imbalance, FAQ wait time, steep power creep, etc), rules would be widely available for everyone... And the best part, if this would eventually become mainstream enough, it would force GW as a corporation to invest in much better rules quality in the future. In other words, win-win. The most obvious question though would be "and how would we organise such rule creation process?" The answer is quite simple - however you'd like! As long as there are a few sets of home rules in circulation, natural selection will choose the best one and the most popular for most tournaments, while still providing alternatives for some. The most logical way though is to get together a small group or interconnected groups of most experienced and well respected players and start from there, probably beggining from the core rules, trying to keep everything as laconically as possible. I also do not believe that GW would try to legally stop such a thing (unless they want to make a really, REALLY bad and probably quite illegal PR move). It would not be a free distribution of their battletomes rules (and they are already in a free access on youtube and some other places anyway), but it would be just a free distribution of free home rules, may be somewhat remade from battletome basis, but remade nonetheless. As long as you'd play it with official models, you should be fine. So, why not?

I agree it's less of a choice, and more of a "spend a CP for a twice as much (Sisters) or just more (Handgunners) powerful attack from a long distance while being safe" or "get a free complimentary attack for one unit when it's being compromised and when you have no chance to use long range UN in this phase anyway". And the simple fact is that you will rarely use "stand and shoot" not just because it's one per phase together with UH, but because if you have a chance to use a long range version of it, even on a second big unit, you will use a CA most of the time anyway. This change transformed warscroll overwatch from an unconditional charge deterrence into a consolation prise of 1 CP for when you messed up. Not terrible in itself, but terrible for units that were priced around old functionality. Sisters would still be a great alternative to Irondrakes if they would have been priced at 160 as well (quite less tankiness, quite less buff potential as well, worse bravery, better default damage, more speed and range), while Handgunners need to go down to 95 points, probably even 90. Also, I do not believe that hit stacking was the main reason for Handgunners success. By default Handgunners are better only versus 2+ save, while Crossbows give much better damage versus 5+ save or worse. And in the AoS 2.0 Crossbows gave better benefits from hit and wound stacking on them if compared to Handgunners with the same buffs (excluding 2+ save). You could aslo stack +2 to hit on Crossbows from outside sources instead of +1 on Handgunners, so Crossbows were and still are a prime target for a General on foot CA, and with 8 extra range as a stationary gunline position behind screens they were quite superior. But there were 3 things that made Handgunners slightly better - long rifle, mobility and overwatch. Long rifle was great with mass MSU Handgunners, and when moving, handgunners lost only +1 to hit instead of +1 to attack, which was a small price to pay for not standing still the whole game. And their overwatch gave them a great spike in damage, so they would usually do around the same damage as Crossbows during the game anyway. But now Handguns were soft nerfed by hit and save stacking as well as getting their overwatch hard nerfed, while Crossbows got Unleash Hell instead. Sooo yea.

At the same time my fears have been made real and Warscroll overwatch is indeed made mostly useless. Now it's an ability that you rather never use both on Sisters of The Watch or on Handgunners. Instead you'd definetly want to spend a CP for a long range Unleash Hell to get double the damage on Sisters or to get a 4+ overwatch on Handgunners. Sister may yet survive this out of the nowhere nerf due to their versatility, but for Handgunners it's a death sentence. Due to their mediorce shooting damage they were balanced around always having a ready 4+ to hit overwatch, not once per phase per whole army 5+ one. Crossbows now are simply much superior.

Oh god this is both hillarious and sad. Still though, while stacking such things on frost phoenixes would be hillariously broken, it kinda feels like overkill most of the time. And you can still get killed by insta kill effects. Now, getting Phoenix and Black Dragon/Griffon with Amulet together, supported by Luminark right behind them... that would be quite good, haha. Also, inbuild overwatch for Sisters of the Watch and Handgunners is treated the same way as using Unleash Hell CA (means only 1 overwatch of any kind per phase). So, yea... my bad on treating GW rule team as competent in this regard. Clearly, when you introduce overwatch for literally everyone, you need to make inbuild overwatch as bad as possible AND give units that were specialized around it a price hike, so it's like overwatch units are priced around warscroll overwatch that is no longer does much and in best case scenarious should not be used at all (yes, this made me juuust a tad salty). Sisters may yet survive this due to their good versatility and having a possibility to use a much stronger long range Unleash Hell. One CP for double the damage? Yes please! But for Handgunners it's a hammer to the face. Their viability was based both on their usual shooting and around their overwatch hitting on 4+, not 5+, and being ALWAYS available to them. Crossbows now are a much more superior choice.

Ahah, no, of course you're not paying for a sneaky inbuild newsletter, it's just more Warhammer, more often, all Warhammer news you could possibly want! x) Jokes aside, even if you completely remove any direct or indirect GW advertisement there, this whole platform concept is basically one big advertisement/promotion and expansion of Warhammer universe/franchise anyway. And in longterm it is a very smart move, so in 20 years GW could both evolve and survive by constantly generating streamed content and using their franchise for shows, games, etc, while selling/giving freely 3D models for advanced 3D printers, not quite being a model company anymore, but a franchise company instead. The problem with this plan for now is that they do not have nowhere near close enough popularity in order to pull it off. And killing off fan animation support so early and so harshly made that task so much harder (and put it solely on GW), all for some very questionable short term profit.

Objectively speaking, speding money on WH+ is spending them quite well even now. For 60 bucks for a year you get 2 models, eventual access to 2 functioning apps, 10 free britain pounds on your next order and even some meh content to watch on top (hah). But honestly, while assasin model does look great, I just want to show GW, that no matter how hard you push, you can't push things half baked, and some guys in upper managment will have to get acquainted with reality for mismanaging this whole mess. The way GW hit themselfs (and the whole WH community) in the knees with fan animation debacle also left a sour taste in my mouth, so... yea.

It kinda feels that GW can be either focused on AoS or 40k, they just can't keep the balance well enough between them. Or may be that's the point, to move the centre of hype between them.

I am quite tired that most corporations due to some idiotic managment ethics think that lies, deceit and disregard are mostly better than honesty and transparancy. No they are not, it only works for a time and only versus people that do initially do not give it much though. If you fail your promise, you can't really hide it, but you can lessen the blow by taking it on the chin, not by hiding under the table. Or better yet, be clear about your situation and warn people that you could fail beforehand. An innovative thought, is it not? It's not that big of a thing for me personally, but such attitude sure feels... condesending.