Neil Arthur Hotep

Imagine the vampire manacingly floating in the air or looking on some poor advanturers from a half-collapsed archway. I think it might be a woman, actually.

I was debating with myself whether or not I should include that in my post. For now I will just say the same thing as last time about it: It's an ambiguity that could turn out to mean something, or could mean nothing

The arch looks kind of gothic, so I could imagine this being a weird creature of the night. On the other hand. the grime on the bottom kind of looks like icicles. Some people were already speculating about some of the rumour engines we have seen being Ogors/Beast Claw Raiders. Could that be possible?

I also find it really plausible that GW writers might be setting up a twist where Lumineth are secretly chaos corrupted (or at least shaped in some way by having their souls be consumed by Slaanesh for so long). There are just a lot of parallels between the two that seem to be deliberately set up. People noticed the whole cow theme and the fact that Hysh's geography looks like the chaos insignia pretty much right away. And the hints just seem to keep coming.

I'd say there is a chance for gargoyles to replace some of the old bat themed models: Another thing that's pretty crazy: The new leaked Vampire lord does not seem to solve any rumour engines. Really makes you wonder what else could be in store.

Even though the Dire Wolves are a plastic kit, I'm not sure they will get carried over unchanged. They are a bit mundane for AoS, and their sculpt has to be one of the worst plastic sculpts in the game. I think now would probably be the best time narratively to break Nagash's stranglehold on Death. Soulblight Vampires becoming more independent would make a good pretense, Legions of Nagash being a single faction is not necessary anymore and Broken Realms gives us a good narrative opportunity to explain this change. Plus, it would help explain why there are still skeletons around if OBR are a thing. There are Deathrattle kingdoms in the lore where their inhabitants are all sentient skeletons. They would probably be the most likely to object to the OBR bone tithe. Leaving open the possibility of some LoN infighting makes the setting much richer with narrative possibilites in my opinion.

I think that will be part of the expansion of the Deadwalkers subfaction, along with those rumor engine pictures of wooden stocks with hands nailed to them. Literally zombies bringing their graves with them. The new years tease showed something that looks to be a Deathrattle hero. It's easy to miss, since the paint scheme of that model and the axe zombie are similar, but the model with the viking shield appear to be a separate, skeletal hero. So I'd predict that normal skeletons are not gone, they will just be under the command of vampire lords now like in the good ol' days.

I believe Gravelords will be the new LoN, more or less. People in the Death subforum have been speculating about the possibility of Soulblight replacing LoN since October. I think Arkhan, Nagash and the Morghast will be out, and Nighthaunt will finally be properly separated from the other undead as well. I expect a build out of Deadwalkers, Soulblight and the bats and wolves portion of LoN. Deathrattle will probably be in the book, but I don't think they will get a lot more than maybe a new hero, since they are by far the most complete subfaction already. I also think that GW will use this opportunity to discontinue all the Finecast stuff currently in LoN, so if anyone wants to pick up any of the old Vampire Lords, now is probably the time.

Seems like you didn't get your wish. Better google "Soulblight Gravelords" real quick.

Between this and the "re-vamping of LoN", Gravelords sure are looking good in the pun meta.

To me, it makes a lot of sense to release armies in the Lumineth style. You get a release that is substantial enough to play and collect, but small enough to not be overwhelming. Plus, it's got to be easier from a production/logistics standpoint. And then after a little while you get a second wave, which results in another hype infusion and makes people who already have their 2000 points of Lumineth bought buy more, new stuff. I could see how that would result in higher sales and, honestly, I don't even think it's especially anti-consumer.

That is pretty clearly a vampire hunter, though, with his stake bandolier and all. If that guy is for a Warhammer Quest, there needs to be another vampire coming our way. Can't have a vampire hunter fighting zombies.

Von Carstein, you say? I posted this back in November: Subscribe for more spurious speculation 😎 Just, you know, ignore that huge whiff regarding Slaanesh.

Well, @Sception, it seems like you called it: Soulblight Gravelords.

That Vampire model and the Gravelords name are such a relief. As a Legions of Nagash player, I have been low-key worried the faction would just eventually go away or stop receiving updates since OBR was released. I'm glad that this won't likely be the case anytime soon with this announcement. I'm qlso happy that this seems to be exactly what people wanted: Neo Vampire Counts. I for one am happy we are probably getting a full Castlevania army, hopefully with a place for skeletons, zombies and other creatures of the night.

I would agree if your statement was about viability in general, not just competitive viability. Or maybe I should have written tournament viability instead of competitive. Because in that context, I definitely stand by the point: I don't especially care if not every army has a balanced list that is good enough to go up against the Kroaknado, Shootcast or Changehost. And while I don't think 2000 point lists should be be just Demigryphs, I also don't really think they shouldn't be. But I can get behind the idea that every army should be able to support a balanced list of some sort. On the Stormcast podcast, one of the AoS rules designers said that they do think about possible playstyles a book should be able to support when they design it. I don't think it's too much to ask at all for the balanced list to be one of those in every book. I just don't think it should be pushed any more than other lists in terms of competitive/tournament viability.

They could do the reveal like they did with Hedonites, where we knew about the Lord of Pain and the Dread Pageant for a while before it was made clear that there would be an army release/new battletome. I am expecting the same in this case: I think we will get a full Death army release, but I don't expect it to be fully announced on saturday.

Let's be real: I'd totally buy a nice stand alone vampire hunter vs. undead game. That would probably be a super fun little side project. But LoN also desparately needs a rework. And I think we have been seeing too much Death stuff for too long for it to be just an iteration of Warhammer Quest.

Yeah, I think so too. All their basic units are single kits, as well, so that increases the variety of roles these units serve. But overall I think just the number of warscrolls does not actually tell us that much about how many different play styles an army can actually support. Some armies certainly seem to be doing a lot with only a few units. If that can be achieved consistently, I'm in favour of small rosters. I'm a fan of not having to read 30+ warscrolls to start building lists.

If the release of AoS 3.0 is supposed to be the culmination of the Broken Realms storyline, I would think the next edition will almost certainly need to be delayed until next year. I don't think GW has the option to trim down and speed up the narrative of Broken Realms significantly. The release schedule for the next few battletomes and faction updates just seems too strongly connected to the narrative of Broken Realms. Hedonites, for example, were first teased in a rumor engine in March of last year. But they had to delay the army until the Broken Realms narrative had progressed far enough to release them. They were almost certainly planned to come out shortly after Sons of Behemat in 2019, which we know also got delayed by probably 6 months. And now, we are seeing them delayed again in relation to their GWs revised schedule: Since the Hedonites coin they are distributing in GW stores was for January, it's a fairly safe bet that they were originally trying to get the new Slaanesh mortals in stores for that month. Plus, GW will probably want to release a new edition of AoS at the beginning of their fiscal year. I believe that means July for them? They are definitely not finishing up Broken Realms by summer of this year. Not to mention that the time between the announcement of Broken Realms and the release of the first book was also likely longer than intended. We are probably both behind schedule to start and releasing books more slowly than intended as far as Broken Relams is concerned.

I voted 11-15, but I had to think about it for a while. Currently, I think only Lumineth is in the 5-10 space. I think they have better variety than some armies in the 11-15 space, though, like Fyreslayers and Sylvaneth. As far as armies go, which ones I find appealing from a gameplay perspective does not really have that much to do with the number of warscrolls they have. While both armies I collect (Legions of Nagash and Cities of Sigmar) have deep benches, I did not get into those armies because of their deep benches. In fact, I often found list building for them pretty overwhelming before (mostly) restricting myself to one of their subfactions. And then there are factions like Khorne where their huge amount of near-identical warscrolls are actually a turn off for me. On the other hand, an army like OBR seems interesting to me from a list building perspective. I feel that army delivers several interesting playstyles with a limited amount of warscrolls (16 in total, but more like 12 if you ignore the duds). In that case, it's not just that I don't mind the small amount of warscrolls, it's actually a positive for me.

A bit late to the party, but I also want to put down some predicitons: For "Dead", it's got to be the AoS Death stuff we have been seeing for months now. I still think the "new Death army" is a LoN update/rework. Narratively, it seems to be vampire focussed. At least that's what has been set up in Broken Realms with Ven Brecht. Plus, we have seen that vampire hunter teaser. But there are also a lot of hints for other Death subfactions we have seen, like what people are calling a the Draugr and the birdhouse zombie from the Halloween teaser. There are less definitive hints of Deathrattle models, too, such as the skeletal looking model from the new year's teasers and some of the rumour engines with their callbacks to the Black Knight kit. The variety of different Death things makes me think we will not see a former LoN subfaction be built out into a full army (no dedicated Soulblight or Deadwalker faction), but an overall rework of LoN. Now, for what we will see specifically in this reveal show: I think it's still too early to reveal that we are getting a new battletome, since Hedonites is not yet out (or even really being previewed on the website). I think it's more likely that we will see teasers of supplementary releases, like a dual box, Warcry warband or the Vampire Underworlds warband. I think a proper reveal will come later. In late February or so. For "Divine", I agree with most of the people here that it will probably be 40k ecclesiarchy. But if it is AoS, I think the most "divine" faction we have is actually Stormcast. There are one or two rumor engines of Stormcast stuff still unsolved, as well.

Good post. This is one of the reasons why I don't personally want extra restrictions on army composition. I think the point that some people have been making that the rules should be able to represent the lore is valid. We probably all want that to an extent. Battletomes should probably take care to make it so that a balanced list is buildable and somewhat strong. Where I don't really follow is the idea that this list should also be especially encouraged above and beyond other lists (like through composition restrictions). If that list shakes out as valid naturally, through the advantage bringing a lot of different tools provides, then that's good. If it becomes mandated by introducing rules that force unit variety, I'm not that into it. I also definitely agree with the point on build variety. I think in general, a balanced build lends itself to a kind of defensive, more reactive playstyle. That's where having a lot of tools is the most advantageous: You don't necessarily go in with a specific plan you are trying to force, but try to get an edge slowly over time from (hopefully) having some way to deal with whatever your opponent is trying to do. Of course, this gets flavoured by the warscrolls and allegiance abilities provided by your army. This type of army will probably be more offensive for Ironjawz and more defensive for Legions of Nagash. It will not, by it's nature, be as offensive, defensive, mobile or magic heavy as dedicated lists, though. At the moment, I enjoy that different lists in the same army can play very differently. I think it's nice that we have rules that enable this. To me, which list turns out to be the best at a competitive level is not as important. Contrary to what some people in this thread have said, if the best lists all happened to be balanced, kinda defensive goodstuff lists, I think we would see people complain about that pretty quickly, as well. So, while I think that it's important to enable "a little of everything" lists, I really don't believe having them be competitively viable needs to be a priority.

Optimistically, we might want to read this as making space for all the Old World armies they will have to produce soon. Maybe Bretonian players that have stuck with the army since their last release in 2004 are finally due for their update.

It's probably fair to say that alternate assemblies should not be required for a list to be diverse. I don't think most people would expect to see both Eidolons, both Arkhelian Kings and both eels in a list before they consider it to properly represent what a Deepkin army is supposed to look like. I believe the problem with Deepkin was fairly easy to fix: You didn't see most of their units for a long time because their warscrolls were hot garbage. They got buffed and now you see them. That's really all there is to it in this case. They never really suffered a lot from keyword gerrymandering that discouraged mixing units of different subfactions, like in the case of Gloomspite. I think Gloomspite is not easily fixable if the goal is to enable balanced lists. While Gloomspite also has a bunch of bad warscrolls (Spider Riders...), but more than that the book excessively encourages you to only stick to a single subfaction through allegiance abilities. In my opinion, they need a new battletome. GW has done all they could to make every of the subfactions within Gloomspite playable in a pure list, but the tome just does not support mixing them without hamstinging yourself. In the future, Gloomspite could follow the Cities of Sigmar model. Even though Cities has a bunch different subfactions, the synergies within those subfactions are usually limited to heroes buffing their subfactions troops and enabling "battleline if..." . There are also a few general buff units anyone can take and magic benefits everyone equally. The different sub-allegiances are also mostly keyword agnostic. All this combined make mixing subfactions easy.