Neil Arthur Hotep

I personally think the timeline will be: Slaanesh battletome announcement today Release of the line in February First Death stuff (like the Underworlds Warband) in March Release of Death within 3 months That seems realistic to me given the recent timeframes between the reveal of the Dread Pageant and the Slawnesh release. Would be nice if they cleaned up all saves now that the battletomes are all out. 4+ is probably the highest saves on Battleline should go without expending a resouce.

It's going to be a win/win situation for me in any case, since if it's not Slaanesh I get new Death models to be excited about, and if it is Slaanesh I get the smug satisfaction of having been right with my dumb predictions 😎

The christmas reveal has to be Slaanesh. There are enough units in that release to warrant a new tome plus several models we have not seen yet. It would make no sense to announce another battletome now while the Slaanesh hype cycle is not yet done.

Could this be the leathery-winged creature that saved Ven Brecht? Although you can never really rule out Chaos either when it comes to bat wings.

I voted Mindstealer Sphiranx. It might not be the most ambitious model, or the most spectacular or technically impressive. But I loved painting the first one I bought so much that I got a second one right after. And I don't even play Warcry or Slaves to Darkness.

We have one image of another weirdly skinny hand holding a rapier in a similar way: They could well be part of the same model/unit.

The +1 to saves was just especially egregious in OBR. +1 to saves gets more valuable the higher your base save is. Going from no save to 6+ gives you an extra 17% effective wounds against no rend. Going from 4+ to 3+ gives you 50% more. 3+ to 2+ doubles your effective wounds. Plus, OBR have all the tools to play a grindy game, with their access to good healing, magic and artillery. At some point you just have to adjust your design when a significant number of your players don't enjoy it, even if it's not "broken" at the top level of play. Top players can handle a lot of unbalanced stuff, but that does not mean the sam stuff won't ruin the game for the majority of players. I am not actually sure every faction has the tools to handle pre-nerf Petrifex (and Hearthguard spam Fyreslayers as well, who only ge away with it because nobody plays them), but I know that dealing with them was a struggle for the average or even somewhat tuned casual list that brings a bit of everything. and it's not like shoving a bunch of Mortek and Nagash into a Petrifex list is some kind of advanced list building, so casual players are likely to run into this wall. Of course it would be nice if Nagash was still good somewhere. Right now he's OK in OBR and probably not so good in LoN. Let's hope they find a better balance for him in the future. If nothing else, his rules should be consistent in his different factions. It makes no sense that he gets all OBR spells but only three LoN spells. Or the ability to self heal in OBR but not LoN. Even if it means nerfing him, he should at least work the same everywhere.

I think we need to have all of Slaanesh revealed before we get anything concrete on LoN. If Slaanesh is the main driving force in the next Broken Realms book I don't see them squeezing LoN in there, as well. It's just too much at once. I think LoN is the book after next, so we would need to get the whole Slaanesh hype cycle out of the way first.

Fence. FEC. FEnCe. Coincidence? I THINK NOT! Honestly, though, this could be 40k, Death or possibly even Slaanesh.

Agreed, plus it's fun to just throw something out there so you can see how wrong you were in retrospect be completely right 100% of the time! VAMPIRE HUNTERS BAYBEE 😎

There are duel boxes all the time, what are you talking about? The most recent one was Shadow and Pain, so we know they can be part of Broken Realm. It's almost standard practice at this point to use these boxes to give new foot heroes to two factions, so a Vampire Hunter and plastic Vampire Lord are totally in the cards. And no matter how you feel about the quality of the sculpts in Cities, they are a popular faction.

Around march, in a Cities of Sigmar/Soulblight duel box.

If we are getting vampires in march, this has to be a vampire hunter. I mean, the other rumour engine with the same glove has a hammer in it, like for staking vampires. But whether it's witches or vampires, I'll definitely buy it if it's AoS.

Here's an article about top Cities lists: https://aosshorts.com/top-cities-of-sigmar-lists/ It features the Demigryph spam you mention, plus two other spam lists in Pistoliers and Scourgerunner Chariots. But it also features three diverse lists. It's also worth noting that one of the spam lists does not have an associated battalion. It really does not seem to me that Cities in particular has a diversity problem. In fact, if we don't focus on tournament lists, there are a lot more viable lists in Cities, many of them quite diverse. You said before that you don't mind themed lists if diverse lists are also playable. I think they are in Cities. There are still many reasons to prefer spam if you are a tournament player. Spam lists are easier to pilot and have a clearer game plan most of the time compared to balanced lists, for one. But you can play balanced lists, at least in CoS. As for other factions, there is no denying that there are factions with bad internal balance. Fyreslayers are the prime example. OBR was before the Petrifex nerf (although diverse Petrifex lists were stll possible, even good). IDK is another stand out, but end while they still lean eel heavy, sharks, turtles and the Eidolons have become a lot better recently. Marauders in Chaos are another instance where bad balance leads to spam. There is also the other camp with low diversity lists: Factions with overly restrictive battletomes. That's Gloomspite Gitz for example, where your keywords punish you from not picking a tribe. Khorne is another book like this. But other books with multiple factions don't suffer from the same problems. Both Mawtribes and Ironjaws can play mixed lists. Even some old books like Legions of Nagash or Skaven are better about mixing keywords.I I really don't think the viability problem of diverse armies is inherent to the core design of AoS. It's down to the individual books whether they get it right or wrong, and I also think more books get it right rather than wrong.

I feel you are overly focussed on Gitz, which are among the worst offenders as far as restrictive army building goes. But they are not representative of the state of the game as a whole.

They are not currently, but they could be. I could easily imagine a Cities battalion that makes you take equal amounts of elves, dwarves and humans. The Syll'Eske suballegiance already does this for demons and mortals. I believe that battalions and suballegiances are good tools to make army compositions viable that would not naturally be. There's no reason this could not include "no repeating warscrolls".

I'm not a ware of an official ruling, but my interpretation is that they do. All the language around LoN resurrection suggests that you return the same unit that previously died when you use Endless Legions: "You can use this command ability at the end of your movement phase. If you do so, pick a gravesite that is within 9" of your general, and then pick a friendly Summonable unit that has been destroyed. Set up that unit wholly within 9" of that gravesite and more than 9" from any enemy units." I take that to mean exactly what it says: You don't summon a new unit, the same unit you had before is returned. This is nice, because you keep battalion bonuses and battlefield role (which is set at the list building stage; summoned units don't get one). But it can also be a downside: If a unit is hit with a "for the rest of the game" debuff, dies and you resummon it, the debuff sticks around.

Looks like this could be the same mini as this one: Could possibly be the 40k priest from yesterday.

To me, what is happening in 40k seems more indicative of a more immature meta game after the recent edition change, to be honest. Younger competitive metas are usually more diverse compared to older ones. But I don't follow 40k very closely, so that might well a wrong assessment. I somewhat disagree. I don't think it the case in general, or for newer battletomes. There are some like Khorne or Gloomspite that are extremely balkanized by their implementation of keywords. But if you look at Cities of Sigmar, for example, it's not as much of a problem even though the synergies follow keywords pretty closely. Mostly this is because it's viable to have a block of dwarves buffed by a dwarf hero and a block of elves buffed by an elf hero in the same army. Battalions are a mixed bag. I already said that I think in general battalions increase the viability of different units in an army. But they don't usually serve to encourage diverse lists in the sense that you want. It's worth noting that the least restricive battalions, the ones like Changehost where you can just take whatever you were going to take anyway, encourage spam the most. More specific battalions do more to encourage diversity in a list. Battalions could also in theory be used to encourage more diversity by forcing you not to repeat warscrolls. But that's not being done anywhere yet as far as I know. It would be absurd to claim that there could not be rules that would result in more diverse lists. Like Enoby said above, if you just forbid taking multiples of a unit, that will do it (but it's kind of admitting defeat in terms of game design, because it's an admission that you can't manage to naturally make diverse lists attractive). But I think it's reasonable to claim that AoS is not especially bad in terms of ensuring the viability of diverse lists. At mid levels, a lot of units and lists are playable. At top levels, I don't personally see an inordinate amount of overcentralization (compared to other competitive games).

I disagree, and I tried to make the mechanism by which not universally optimal units still reward spamming clear in my last post. If your opponent has a diverse list with one or two counters to what you are spamming, but units that don't have an advantage against your spam otherwise, you will still likely be able to muscle past their counters. To pick up your example: Gyrocopters are good anti-horde units, but they do bad against elite units or monster. If you bring a normal amount of them, that is. Bring one and it kind of just does nothing. Bring three and you will be able to deal with hordes. Bring six and they can take down two-wound elites, just with raw damage numbers. Bring more than that and they will be able to deal with monsters by using spamming their once a game 1d3 mortal wounds ability. I'm not saying that Gyrocopters are the next big spam list, but it illustrates how spamming even a specialized unit increases that unit's ability to deal with it's counters. I would not look to competitive lists as my yardstick for list diversity, in general. The top level of any competitive game I have ever played or paid close attention to has always had a much lower diversity than the average game at all levels. Fighting games, deck building games, strategy games... Nobody really seems to have cracked that nut of diversity at the top level. AoS seems very much in line with other games in this regard, in my opinion. Again, I would not necessarily look to the top level for this. But at the 7 to 8 out of 10 power level, it seems to me that Gloomspite have what you want, currently. In as far as any Gloomspite list is viable, goblin horde, troggoths and squigs all seem OK after the recent White Dwarves. Possibly spiders too, since apparently there is a battalion that lets Arachnaroks move like Kharadron Airships now.

There is a general tendency in games like AoS where you get your build your list/team/deck to go spammy. It is a natural part of games that are built on a limited rock/paper/scissors mechanic. The idea of why it happens is this: As a player, you have the option to build a generalist army that can do a bit of everything and has one counter for any problem you are likely to encounter. But if an opponent goes all in on one choice, they will likely be able to overwhelm the counters to their choice by sheer brute force. For example, if they have high armour units, you'd usually be able to muscle past them with mortal wounds or high rend. But if they have only high armour units, you won't be able to keep up and they will eventually be able to get rid of your sources mortal wound/high rend. At the same time, your low rend units won't be able to effectively deal with their high armour. This kind of dynamic is, in my experience, part of any game with that works on countering opponents. This kind of design makes generalists weaker. Additionally, in AoS specifically, you frequently need to commit to a unit choice for it to clear a certain threshold of effeciveness. Ossiarch Crawlers are an example: You could probably just ignore or play around one of them, but if your opponents bring two the threat gets too high to ignore. Since the core mechanics of the game naturally encourage spam (same for Warhammer Fantasy, by the way), are there mechanics that encourage diversity? In theory, that should be the role of battalions and subfactions. And from one perspective, they do: In the most recent army books, for whatever unit you want to bring, it's likely that there are battalions or subfactions that make it workable (at like a 7 to 8 out of 10 on the power scale). But of course, that does not mean you are very likely to see all the different units an army has to offer in the same list. However, I believe that you would see even less diverse lists overall if there were no battalions or subfactions, because at that point whatever has the best/most spammable warscroll is just what becomes optimal. As far as diversity goes: It's true that it would be nice to have mechanics that encourage you to play armies with lots of different warscrolls, just as an option. But if this type of goodstuff list becomes the optimal thing to play, that is not necessarily more satisfying than a tendency towards more strongly themed armies. Overall, I don't think AoS is terrible at encouraging diversity., if we ignore certain outliers where faction internal balance is just not good (pre-broken realms Idoneth, Daughters of Khaine, Fyreslayers...). At least, I don't think AoS does worse in this regard than other games I know.

The first rumor engine teasing Slaanesh is from July 2019, so I'd say it's likely that we were supposed to get Sons of Behemat, the DoK update and Slaanesh mortals a lot earlier than we actually did. I believe that it's the most likely that that GW's release schedule has been pushed back 6+ months, but that their planned release order has not majorly changed. That's why I would not assume that GW is going to stick to whatever marketing plans they originally had in terms of reveal timing. It's more likely that we will get to see the remaining Slaanesh stuff around Christmas than whatever was planned before COVID.

Interestingly, the raven is sitting on the same kind of pillar found in this picture: Would be interesting if they are all part of the same model.

I hope it's an overhaul because I don't want my Legions of Nagash Deathrattle army invalidated for a second time after converting them over from being Tomb Kings.