Ganigumo

Model is great imo, except the face. This is one of the worst female faces we've seen in a while I think. They don't even read as non conventionally attractive women to me, like the chaos lord we had a while back, both of the faces just look really manly to me. The helmetted one looks like a hockey player, who may have taken a few hits to the face over the years, and the unhelmetted one looks like an old man. The hair being the same shape as the helmet is pretty silly though.

Maybe casual players and 40k players don't like it. But a ton of aos players actually do like it, myself included. Also if it actually did decide games the general winrates would be much closer to 50%, as winning or losing the game would be a coin flip. Its statistically evident that it isn't the deciding factor in every game, or even most games. Thats even ignoring the fact that some of the best players in the world can still go 5-0 piloting ham sandwiches. Anecdotally I can't remember the last time I won or lost because of a double, usually what happens is I'm already winning or losing pretty badly and the double turn seals it. If you look at the TSN player stats, some players have scores of 30 wins, 0 losses over the last ghb, over 6 GTs. If that isn't a sign that player skill is THE deciding factor I'm not sure what is. The priority roll exists in large part to negate the first turn advantage, an issue that is prevalent in most turn based games. They provide a bunch of incentives for going second as well, so if anything they've buffed going second, instead of nerfing the double turn, to the point where many players will pass on a double turn to keep the benefits. 40k tends to favor the player going first 60-40, and even Chess favors white somewhere between 52-56%. A lot of the issues with the priority roll really come down to experience and how you interact with it. You can't ignore it, it warps the entire game around it, and that's the point. You need to play around it or you're going to have a bad time. You can't just ignore a major mechanic in the game and expect everything to work out fine. priority rolls shift the game away from a t1 advantage in a big way and create way more possible game permutations (32 vs 2). Its also coupled with a way to control it, which is important, since just having one of those things would be disastrous. Imagine 40k if you had a way to always go first (other than toilet dice). Its definitely a hard hit for casuals who don't think about the rule though, but more important than just the listbuilding part is how you think about it. Just stopping and thinking about holding some of your force back, and not walking into a slaughter is important. I highly recommend heywoahs video on this. If two people of the same skill level, play at the same skill level, with similarly strong armies, literally the only other possible deciding factor is luck, outside of luck it would just end up as a draw. Also as I mentioned above some players actually do have winrates of 100% last season, and 12 players with winrates of 90% or above mostly over 6 GTs. Also because of the way tournament do pairings, these top players will end up playing against each other in the final rounds of a tournament.

On the one hand I get it, on the other its mostly because players don't play around the possibility or think of it at all. From their perspective they're playing a game and the double turn just "falls out of the sky" and hands them a loss. HeyWoah's video on this is really good. Sometimes, if you're behind you need to gamble on that 50% to turn the game around, but if you're just blindly throwing yourself into a position where a dice roll will lose you the game thats a skill issue. If it looks like its going to rain, and you go for a run you might get rained on. I'm not trying to be dismissive here, but we should really do a better job of explaining it to new players. For tons of outsiders double turns fall from the sky, and the nuance of controlling drops, or even stopping to consider that if you go second you can't get doubled, is lost. Its also a massive problem that the core rules say you roll for priority on t1, it actively makes the game worse. At the very least they could've let you roll before you deploy. The core rules even have unified battalions, that do literally nothing unless you're using drops to determine priority. There's also plenty of situations where you actually want to give away double turns, either passing up on them, or choosing to get doubles. At least twice in the past couple weeks I've forced my opponent to double me. Also people thinking shooting will be less impactful without the priority roll is just flat out wrong. Without threat of a double you can hide safely behind your screen without the risk of a double smashing open your castle. Alpha shooting, like 40k will be far more common. Shooting armies take second more to protect their shooting units than to auto-win on a double turn. Shooting just becomes so much more reliable when the board state becomes more predictable, since you don't need to worry about things like making charge rolls, or how you're going to get over the screen. Also I'll list the things I want to see: Entire secondary system gutted, no BTs, or GS. Instead build a secondary scoring system into each battleplan. Removal of Monstrous rampages and heroic actions. Just make the scrolls good. Turn the army specific ones into abilities they can still use though. Rework of battalions. Current ones suck. More unique effects, like bodyguards, as the extra cp ones are clearly bad. Unified battalions should only have 3 units in them tops. Removal of miscast. Its narrative but also dumb. Autofail on snake-eyes is fine, but it shouldn't prevent you from casting more spells, even after I got blasted by nagash over the weekend Removal of Rally. I get it, but the narrative is dumb, and its supposed to be anti-shooting, but it only feels worth it if you get it on a 5+ or 4+, and that was so problematic it had to be capped to 10W of models. Lets just get rid of it. Remove Triumphs, or incorporate them into the game in a better way. They might be interesting if you could take them as an enhancement and use them regardless of the points difference. Sort of like special 1/game commands Do Not Change Battleshock. Battleshock sucks, its just a terrible set of rules, but if it was impactful at all it would be worse, losing like 1/3rd of your army because a spell splashed d3 mortals around isn't fun. There just isn't a way to make battleshock impactful that doesn't make the game less fun. Its also not at all fairly balanced across armies. you'd think its a way to help kill hordes, making a bunch of them run away, but death and chaos are just nearly immune to it because bravery 10 narrative reasons, tons of armies are effectively immune, because they have like bravery 8 and small unit sizes, and so it ends up only being strong vs destruction, BoC, and Skaven. Anecdotally I had 3 super buffed gore gruntas run from 2 longstrikes and 2 dracolines over the weekend, because I decided all out defense would be better than inspiring presence, then I rolled a 6. Rewrite the enhancements section, maybe just remove it and write good artefacts and command traits for the actual armies, or use it to set a proper baseline for the power of artefacts across the edition. There's no excuse for something like kruleboyz where all of their artefacts are worse than the generic ones. Keep priority roll Removal of reinforcement points entirely. It hurts like 2 armies in the game that aren't broken, and nobody else cares. The rule just does nothing. They wrote the 3e book intentionally to nerf horde armies, because they wrote the rules during the 5 minutes in aos2 when hordes were good. Removal of behemoth, and artillery limits. We can keep the roles, if we want to interact with it, but really we don't have a problem with spamming these things. Most artillery in the game is just bad, and even if we had good artillery it would only be a problem if those scrolls were problematic in the first place. So many behemoths become battleline now to dodge the limit, and we have armies of entirely behemoths too. I think the leader limit should stay, but I'd be fine getting rid of it. There might be some cheese with running like 20 individual webspinner shamans or something. bring old coherency back. Current coherency sucks. They had already fixed conga-line buffs when they released the 2e books and changes buff ranges to wholly within instead of just within. Sure there's still a little cheese to be had with that, but its better than the current wierdness.

best part of slap chop is that its a good base to do some advanced stuff on top of. Mostly its a rebranding of a technique that has been used by painters for ages in a way that's more accessible for less experienced hobbyists. Namely "transparent ink over zenithal highlight". Before THWG's video I'd never even seen a tutorial for doing a zenithal with a dry brush before. Pretty much all the guides were using airbrushes. I get comments on how well my models look even with just a slap chop and maybe a little bit of extra highlighting/drybrushing over the top. Painting armies is a lot about time management too, slap chop the 120 grots, then if you want to take something really far go wild on the heroes and monsters.

Hobs are perfect as they are. I'd happily take a point drop to 60 or 70 though, or a change to be unconditional battleline. Them going to 120 for 20 is probably worse for us overall? Most KB lists have the same 1600 points, so upping them to 120 for 20 eats into our already slim flex spots.

even throwing ghouls on the back of the knights could work, since it would at least be visibly cavalry then.

The stabbas cover more space than 10 hobgrots too, and are cheaper than the 20 hobgrots you'd need to cover the same space. Sometimes the stabbas fit into battalions better too so you aren't wasting as many points.

Unless its one of those new tome release boxes I think there'll be too much. Ardboyz, ardboy boss, and big pig at least. with the rumors of two other kits. although maybe a box with everything except big pig is possible?

I'm happy as long as I don't need to care about 2/5 shields anymore. Played an event over the weekend with 30 ardboyz, and making sure each unit had the right number of shields, needing to pick out the dudes with shields to allocate wounds to, making sure to keep the shield dudes in the back, and actually rolling the 6+ ward saves 1-2 at a time to make sure I didn't roll any extras was a massive PITA. brutes canonically do it bare handed (p29 of the warclans tome). Its always all new models in those boxes and kroxigor got a refresh. if it was seraphon it would pretty much have to be skinks.

This dude and the new ardboyz will probably still be 32mm bases, so visibly smaller. Shouldn't be tough tough to tell. In terms of the armor, and the look I am a fan of this guy. But Ironjawz forge their weapons and armor by smashing metal into the right shapes and sizes. Its incredibly crude. Something that would have been good for new ardboyz would've been mostly scavenged armor instead. So instead of having the same armor as the brutes, they'd have scavenged armor that tries to mimic the style. With the narrative reason being the ardboyz aren't strong enough to smash the thick metal into shape nearly as well as brutes.

Just strength and toughness don't actually do this, you also need to block damage spillover. Its just always better to have more strength, and a list built to take all comers just needs to take what is most efficient against everything. Unless that s3 hammer is balanced around wounding on 5's you're better off just taking the higher strength option. In contrast Lack of damage spillover does the job of making those elite heavy attacks super inefficient against infantry, lowering damage by as much as 80% in some cases, which forces you to take those low strength options. Without strength and toughness but with damage spillover 1 damage attacks are just the best, since they're never effected by damage spillover. So if you make those damage 1 attacks low strength they become bad against elite stuff. So you need both things to make it work. I'm not sure it would be a good fit for AoS though, as it seems like it would be less rock-paper-scissors and more "fighting fire with fire". Monsters would be bad against infantry, because multi damage attacks would be terrible against them, infantry would be terrible against monsters because of low strength. So you'd need to bring monsters just to fight other monsters, and infantry to fight infantry.

To each their own. From my perspective nearly the entire sections on aircraft, USRs, and strategic reserves are bloat. Like I get why they exist, but I'm not sure they add enough to bother with being in the rules. The charging rules are pretty needlessly bloated too, needing to declare a charge target doesn't add much, but I'm fine with it. The multiple targets part is nearly pointless though, through clever positioning, and since engagement range is 1" but pile in is 3", you can just sit models 1" away from the second target and pile into them. There are also generic stratagems that probably just shouldn't exist like grenades, and ones that seem made for specific armies like smoke. Then I have more issues with the general layout, consistency, and writing of the rules in 40k than in aos. Stuff like important rules being in sidebars, instead of using them just for more detailed explanations or examples, shooting weapons being all the ones you're equipped with, but melee weapons not being that, pistols having a lot of complexity for one of the weakest weapon options, and the USRs interrupting the flow of the core rules, planting themselves at the end of the shooting phase, instead of just going to the next phase, which means you'll need to flip backwards anyways when you get to the combat phase. Thats not to say aos doesn't have bloat, as I think most of the stuff added going from 2nd to 3rd constitutes bloat, but personally I find the 40k rules to be written at a lower quality (not necessarily the quality of the game, just the rules writing). I'm probably biased though, but I do find the 10th rules to be leagues better than the 9th rules. Heroes being in units and giving buffs is nice, since it makes units more independent, but we can have that to an extent in AoS. It mostly comes down to book and army design. Cities of sigmar humans are very much a castle build, so it makes sense that they have a lot of aura buffs, but then theres stuff like ironjawz, or ogors, or even gitz that just work without buffs, or with buffs that apply and stick with them after they move. Heroes joining units helps alot with the issue of keeping the hero close to the unit though, as they'll get the benefit of many of the movement buffs and can charge with the unit, for the armies that care about those kinds of power pairs.

Monstrous actions, and to a lesser extent heroic actions, seemed to be a bandaid to fix all those terrible monsters and foot heroes, but buffed hero monsters the most, when all they needed to do was write good monster scrolls and/or point them correctly. Are they 'ardboyz? They look exactly like brutes to me, and they look like they're the same size as the guy on top who's presumably also a brute. I figure new ardboyz would look more like ironskullz boyz. Weirdbrutes sound like a bonesplitter unit to me honestly.

The problem with index rules is that even less time is spent developing and balancing it. The last batch of tomes we had felt really rushed in the balance department, as did the warclan tome in the development department. Indexes mean they have to write 25 armies worth of rules in the time it usually takes them to write a few battletomes, and its unlikely they'd double or triple the size of the team just to get them right. 40k is the flagship and the indexes were full of errors and poorly balanced, although possibly more balanced than the mess that came before it. There's basically no chance aos would be more balanced after an index treatment. You basically give the bonesplitterz treatment to every army in the game, where you strip most of the rules because you need something you can roughly balance without testing much. Yes it will shuffle the balance of the armies around, and different armies might end up on top, but I doubt it will change that much. The top down design the AoS studio uses tends to lead to certain armies being created "greater" than others, as those concepts lead to more powerful allegiance abilities, and its often harder to point something abstract like an allegiance ability, than it is to point a statline. Its a big reason why certain armies fall through the floor too, often their allegiance abilities are often nearly worthless. Now that we can't shoot heroes when they're near units, and so many heroes trigger units to fight anyways it wouldn't be a big stretch to just have them join units either.

Do you know what they don't like about 3rd? Anecdotally most of the complaints I've heard have been around things that don't need a complete rules rewrite. Mostly around secondary objectives, coherency, balance (forever a pain point but tighter than it used to be), and general complexity. Most of those things feel like they were just tacked on to the game though, and we could lose or replace them without too much hassle. Personally I'd be fine dropping heroic actions, monstrous rampages, grand strategies and battle tactics for a start. I will say I've hated the release schedule for this entire edition though. Slow to start, releasing multiple tomes every couple months, with a mad dash at the end, and at the moment it feels like things have slowed down a bit again. Its always been overwhelming or underwhelming. I think the 1 book per month cadence they kept up for a lot of aos2 felt like the right pace.

They're bad and don't have interesting lists because most of the warscrolls are trash, nothing but the wurgogg has an interesting ability, and they're pointed terribly. Most of those were complaints when the battletome came out, but some good players figured out that a big stabba spam list was pretty cheeky when you can ignore ward saves and nurgle was dominant, but it got promptly nerfed into the ground and got nothing in return. Bonesplitterz aren't a popular army at the best of times, but combine that with abysmal rules, and no signs that things will get better and it isn't surprising no one is playing them. They somehow also ate nerfs in the winter update, and everything except pig spam is awful without gally vets.

I really hope this isn't the case. Things aren't nearly bad enough balancewise to justify it, and honestly things are more balanced now than they have been for most of aos. At the start of 3rd we had like 4 armies with 60% and a handful of armies that had fallen way below like gitz and BoC. Plus the actual core rules are good, and players tend to agree, with the only sore points being coherency, core battalions, and secondary objectives. All of which are pretty fixable with minor changes. The last handful of battletomes were overcooked a bit, but they're getting reined in based on stats, and at this point Gitz might even be underperforming again. They just need to make a bigger effort to make balance changes, instead of just looking at the stats 2 weeks before the battlescroll and taking random shots at armies. Like I know they addressed one of the zombie warscroll issues, but who in their right mind thinks those things are remotely appropriately pointed, even with the change. They also tend to just throw crumbs to low performing armies in the 45-48% range, when they should be a little aggressive, especially since even if they go higher than intended they probably won't break the 55% mark.

The first battlescroll of the edition did that too. Remember "the hunt"?

Clearly they're finally fixed and don't need any more help, and there is no way this could be skewed by a few recent results. 😃 Also I don't really know where they pull their stats from. I expected KB higher because they did have a few good recent results and not many overall results. Ironjawz seem higher than they actually are, and BW seem way lower than I expected based on other stats. Gitz are also considerably higher than other stats show, and poor bonesplitterz don't show up at all. Feels like someone at GW was personally traumatized by BS being playable at the start of the edition and has it out for them.

They probably drank all the blood and are out getting more.

looks like a bray shaman robe too, or gargant patchwork. I'd love if its gitmob though.

Its basically a new isabella von carstein model. Female vampire with a sword and a chalice of blood.

The second pic looks like blood bowl to me, although it could maybe be an armored troll? 4 & 6 could be on almost anything, as its just pictures of a base. they could even be the same model. wouldn't be out of place on a kruleboyz model, or just as terrain. 3 & 7 could be FEC or bonesplitterz I think. 5 looks like it might be FEC to me, mostly because of the candles, although it looks a bit like a bird foot so it could maybe be tzeentch? the first image looks like a kruleboy arm to me, but its got a spike through it so I've got no idea.

I guess it is only melee I missed that part, they still hit and wound on 3s and I did the math for them with no buffs so it doesn't really change anything. They bench pretty similarly to boltboyz, and have nearly the same offensive profile as blissbarbs and reavers for around the same points. They still have a role in dwarf builds, but don't have the same kind of buff stacking the fusiliers have access to. The problem with the dwarf stuff in the book (and elf stuff to a lesser extent) isn't so much the points as the lack of support. I'm not saying some of the stuff didn't get worse, just that the points don't feel off for most of the units. You can't fix bad allegiance abilities or incentives through points, and we have examples of this in stuff like kruleboyz and old BoC, spiderfang come to mind as well. These changes really do solidify irondrakes as the dwarf shooting unit, since it matches their playstyle. The old buff and teleport strat was just something you threw irondrakes into any cities list to do. The armies around units have a big effect on their usefulness, and you really feel it sometimes. Marshcrawla sloggoth is a perfect example, absolutely useless in warclans, but tons of armies would kill for a big aura of +1 to hit, and dropping the points down to 90 or whatever to try to get kruleboyz to take it is bad for the game. You can't just point irondrakes at 120 because the dwarves can't buff as well as the humans, because then you just end up spamming them because of the raw warscroll efficiency, and they start warping the entire army around them. There have been a few times in the games' history when this has happened and it is always a disaster.

130 points for 10 1 wound models on a 3+ is fine, and the potential for the 4+ ward is really good at those points. 100 points for 10 dudes on a 4+ is pretty standard for dudes who get in the way and stand on objectives, and you pay a little extra for the higher save and potential ward. Sure you need a hero to stand near them, but thats how the army works, and you don't need to give orders to your ranged dwarves since they are both melee focused. Its only during the enemies turn, but during your turn you control combat priority, and the army has a bunch of fights first/last, and you can just retreat if you need to, so you don't really need it on your turn. Irondrakes are still on 3+/3+/-1/1. The runelord still has a +1 rend prayer, it just chants on a 4 now instead of a 2 for some reason, and there are tons of ways for dwarves to get +1 to hit. The loss of the teleport shenanigans sucks, but they seem to be making an effort to kill that game-wide with the changes to bridge and lauchon, so while they're worse if you play them the way you used to, the book pushes dwarves into a playstyle where you support durable dwarf units with irondrakes and blast anything that comes near you, and if they don't you advance slowly, and I think the warscroll works for that. They're pretty comparable to 6 boltboyz actually. 6 boltboyz using hasty shot do roughly the same damage as 10 irondrakes with 2 attacks, the boltboyz do a little more but cost 80 more points. 1 shot irondrakes do about half the damage of those 6 boltboyz using aimed shot. 20 Irondrakes cost the same as 9 boltboyz and do more damage with the 2 attacks, and only slightly less with the 1 attack. Fusiliers are on 4+/4+ vs reavers and blissbarbs on 3+/3+. But with the command trait your all out attack also gives +1 to wound, so if you're building into fusiliers they'll be on 3+/3+, which is slightly worse than blissbarbs and reavers who can get AoA to be on 2+/3+. That said fusiliers have a much better threat range, 24", with an order to get +3 move and still be fortified, giving a threat range of 32", which is further than blissbarbs running 6", and there are 2 ways to increase the shooting range on top of that, and they can shoot back in the enemy shooting phase if something gets shot, or apply strikes last (maybe). Also if you really want the damage you can take the dirt cheap alchemite warforger who you'll be bringing in multiples anyway to hand out orders and +1 save auras and try to cast his spell for mortals on 6's, which pumps a unit of 10 fusiliers up to 10 damage, or 30 up to like 30 damage. So they do slightly less damage, with better range for less points than blissbarbs, plus they actually have a frontline to protect them. Thats not to say blissbarbs aren't too powerful either, which they are, in large part due to the allegiance abilities letting them spam CA, the bonus mortals from temptations, and the blissbarb seekers shredding armor for them. So fusiliers are like Reavers+ in an army that better supports a gunline strategy.