OkayestDM

Same! I've got a bunch of armies, including Stormcast, and all of these rules reveals have me extremely excited! The weapon rules look clean and neat, the ability sequencing is straightforward and consistent, and the clearly defined unit roles are awesome! The changes to saves and rend will require more info before I'll commit to being excited about them, but I'm leaning towards optimistic. The fact that we'll be getting the indexes before the proper battle tomes is a plus in my book, meaning we'll get a good sense of what our units and armies will be doing, and can get a solid feel for any other factions that we might be interested in picking up or expanding.

I suppose it's more of a lateral move than anything else. For my part, I'm happy about it. People either felt like they were flying in the face of the lore if they used the "wrong" subfactions, felt like they were pigeonholed into a subfactions they didn't like, or else just ignored the fluff entirely and did what they wanted. There were obviously also folks for whom the subfactions and rules lined up perfectly, and any disappointment on their part over the changes is valid. Ultimately, it seems like a more permissive structure, which matches the direction they seem to be going this edition with regards to list building. I'm interested to see whether or not they expand the battle formations in the actual battle tomes, both in rules content and number of formations, and how those might inform list building.

Love the new models! Really looking forward to painting and fielding them! The addition of the priests is an unexpected bonus, and is a cheeky way of making a 3-man unit into a 5-man unit. Might also be a way to increase their wounds slightly. The article said that the Ruination chamber had been opened, so I'm quietly hoping that there's a few more units to be released separate from the starter box.

I'm backtracking a little with this, but I'm a little disappointed with the color choices that GW went with for the rules phases, specifically the Hero/charge and Shooting/end phase colors. I'm a bit color blind, and those color pairings are close enough that I'll almost certainly have some difficulty telling them apart (I know because I thought it was weird that Nagash had so many abilities in the Charge phase until I read the text.) Fortunately, the qualifying text in the color bar is very helpful when present, and the ability text is also seems sufficiently informative that I should be able to figure it out. It's also entirely possible that the actual colors printed on the cards will be more distinct from one another than the reference chevrons, but my aforementioned confusion over Nagash's warscroll leaves me uncertain how often I'll have to ask my fellow player for confirmation as to whether I - or they - are using an ability at the appropriate time.

13 you say? 🐀

That's my assumption; there's no need for redundant greathammer wielding Paladins, and Annihilators are obviously going to be the choice. It's a sensible move for a variety of reasons, and I approve of it, I'm just gonna miss my Retributors (and by miss, I mean proxy as Annihilators ). Same! The javelins always looked better anyway!

Part of me will be sad if Paladins are gone for good. They were easily my favorite Stormcast units. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if they're departure is meant to make room for the new Ruination models. Given the heavy armor and overall theme and tone of the units from the trailer, that would make sense to me. Also, I am desperately hoping that the updated Prosecutors will finally have an elite warscroll rather than the lackluster ones they've had to contend with over the last few editions. Love the models, and the Thunderstrike redesign looks very promising, but I hope they're treated as a proper heavyweight unit going forward.

This one genuinely surprised me too. Maybe part of it is meant to tighten up and balance the range, and there's still a chance some of them will return as Thunderstrike. Pity though, they were some of my favorite designs. I'm also sad that the BoC rumors are true. I liked my beastly boys. Still, I have plenty of unopened BoC boxes that I can work on. After all, beastmen are a pretty universal fantasy concept. I'm also holding out Hope that there will be a Lumineth-style refresh of the BoC concept. The crazy fun chaos things they could do with that!

My only addendum to this would be to buff up Hunters into a slightly more elite unit, definitely more powerful than the rank and files like Liberators and Vigilors. Hunters are/were (new edition, new warscroll, yadda-yadda) a unit designed to walk off the edge of the map into enemy territory, far away from any supporting units. They need to be tough enough and deadly enough to stand on their own and represent a credible threat. 3rd edition Hunters just never quite made the cut for me, which was dissapointing because I love the models and concept for the unit.

They're definitely big, but they don't hold a candle to the old liberators hammers. Those things are monsters! The new ones only look worse because the rest of the model is less chonky. They're actually smaller.

GW is getting more creative with their Critters and Keys models . . .

Last I checked, there were more heros than actual units in the SCE roster. Slash out the excess heroes and the Stormcast range becomes significantly more reasonable.

I've been wondering the same thing. Of course, what I would love is a band of the afore-mentioned little creatures, plus two massive mega-gargant feet as "units" that can stomp around the battlefield. Utterly impractical for many reasons, but good gosh it'd be a laugh!

This actually makes sense and ties in with the 'Declare and Effect' nature of how abilities work now. It would be very hard to properly points balance units that loose the thing that they do (magic, in this case) due to a modular rule set being taken out. However, if each wizard model is given a special ability (Boneshaper, Swampcaller, etc) that they always have access to, then magic really can become modular, provided none of the wizard abilities are treated as unique spells. The spell lore is simply tacked on, and only wizard-keyword units can cast them. For balance purposes, they may have to make a Swampcaller choice, where they can either use their ability or cast a spell, but not both. How good this modular system actually is will depend a lot on how they've approached warscrolls and abilities for this edition. There's plenty of room for error, but they demonstrated in 3rd that they have the capacity to write goodvrules and keep things fairly well balanced. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt until we have more than wild speculation and a defunct edition to go off of.

It has been said that in the new edition, armies will pick a single spell lore and then every wizard will have access to those spells. Depending on how many "universal" spell loses they design, this might be how they restrict access to the universal endless spells while still making them free. The Orbs of Ulg-Hysh cannot be taken alongside the Pendulum because they come from different spell loses. They may also parse out the generic endless spell to different factions, or else retire them and release a wave of Faction specific ones over the course of the edition. On an entirely different note, the replacement of Battleshock with Control has a lot of potential. It might just be a rebranding, like Health, but there's a lot of interesting possibilities here. They could go the 40k route and make it a roll off to see if the unit can contest an objective and receive commands. It might also become a stat that determines how well a unit holds an objective, possibly a more refined/granular version of what we have now (heroes, monsters, ogres, gargants, etc.) This option strikes me as the more interesting from the lore/immersion perspective, but also more likely to cause imbalance.

Should be easy enough to file or scrape off though.

We also need to consider that there were quite a few SCE kits released after Dominion, and we may be getting a lot of the Oldcast updates and/or Ruination units that way.

My baseless theory regarding Darkling Covens is that they will remain in CoS until Malerion is released, at which point it will be revealed that they've been secretly working for him the whole time. If, as I hope, Malerion is no friend to the other Order Factions, this could result in uprisings thruought the CoS, with the possibility of another Anvilgard or two. Doubly so if Morathi comes to her son's aid.

Wouldn't it be interesting if GW went with the narrative that Nagash's defeat has weaken his grip over the death faction as a whole, allowing them to assert more individuality and deviate from his overpowering will? Imagine Bonereapers who no longer hold any particular enmity with the living? Cunning and duplicitous vampires who nevertheless see an alliance with Order to be in their best interests? Nighthaunt no longer trapped by the vindictive judgment of Nagash, able to embody more of their former personalities? No need to change FEC, their lore is already perfect. I doubt GW would really go for it, but what a fun narrative twist it would be! Made all the more tragic by Nagash's inevitable return to power, when he would reassert dominance and strip the individuality and independence away from them again. (Though perhaps he never regains total control? Much more interesting that way.)

1: Stormcast - the Greek/roman aesthetic coupled with the immortal demigod champions theme appealed to me greatly. A clear "goog guy" faction, all dressed in heavy armor. 2: Ironjawz - look no further than the megaboss on foot. Brute strength coupled with bulky, rough-hewn armor and an overall theme of violent savagery made them a good counterpoint to the Stormcast I was collecting. 3: Tzeentch - I've always loved the "cunning, scheming, deceptive" factions in games (Romulans are my favorite Star Trek race), and the undertones of mutation and cosmic horror were icing on the cake. 4: Beasts of Chaos - I honestly got into BoC because of the models. Beastmen-type models have a place in most fantasy game systems, and though the community is often split on them, I quite like the Bullgors (minotaurs are my favorite fantasy monster.) 5: Cities of Sigmar - I had started collecting Wanderers because classic eleven factions have always appealed to me, and I love hit-and-run fighting styles in games (though I'm also keenly aware that it often isn't fun for the other player.) When they were grouped into Cities, I saw it as an opportunity to have a respectable elf faction - as nothing else existed that appealed to me at the time. 6: Ossiarch Bonereapers - At this point, I had at least one of every Grand Alliance except for Death, but the available selection at the time did not appeal to me. When ossiarch were released and I saw the Necropolis Stalkers for the first time, I knew they were the faction for me. The lore bit of elite, specially crafted and assembled legions that served as a twisted Nagashian mockery of the Stormcast was icing on the cake. 7: Lumineth Realmlords - Spiritual successor to High Elves, hailing from the realm of Light, crusading to burn chaos from the realms, sporting unique spirit temples? This faction was the Elves I had wanted, and better thanks Elves I already had at home. Some of the Aesthetics were a bit of a miss, but the themes were so good, as were the hinted at future releases. Wave 2 was everything I had hoped it would be, and with Foxes being my favorite canine, the Wind Temple was a solid win for me.

EDIT: Misread the original post, my reply was not relevant to the question.

For 3rd edition, I counted 15 new Stormcast heroes and units released in combination. If the new/updated units for 4th edition total about the same, GW could still update an impressive number of units to thunderstrike while having plenty of space left over for a well-rounded Ruination chamber.

I'm of the mind that if something happens to BoC, it will be the current models shifting to TOW and a new range released for AoS. There's a lot of excellent design space for weird mutant beasties, but the "all goats" motif of current beasts does put a design limiter on how far they can stretch the envelope before the models don't look like they belong. An overhaul would allow them to add Pestigors, Khorngors, and updated or faction specific chaos spawn, and then release rank-and-file BoC who tie the disparite god-specific beasts together aesthetically. There's a LOT of design space available if they overhaul BoC, I find it hard to believe that GW would pass up that kind of opportunity (especially since, as others have said, it allows them to create a copyrightable IP in the process.)

OBJECTION! There are only two crows in the relevant image! This is clearly only an attempted murder!