Neil Arthur Hotep

I don't know, the Magic the Gathering people manage to thoroughly play test their stuff without huge leaks all over the place. I'm sure it could be done if GW was willing to invest enough money into it (that is, actually pay tournament players to play test).

In my opinion, even if you are mainly interested competitive play, looking at the raw numbers should only be the first step. When analyzing how good a unit really is in a competitve context, it's much more important to look at how it matches up to common meta threats and whether it can play a role that other units in your army can't play. If a unit has good match ups or a valuable niche, then it can definitely worth taking even if it is inefficient by the numbers. And that's not even getting into more casual play where janky units that do interesting things definitely have a place. There, the question is not necessarily just "Is this optimal?" but " How strongly am I handicapping myself by doing this?". In my opinion, 255 points for a unit of 30 skeletons which may or may not tarpit something for the whole game is definitely a casually viable gamble.

Here are a few guys I have kitbashed for use in DnD: I made these guys out of spare Dreadblade Harrow, Black Knight and Mortis Engine parts. Black knights are a nice source of skeleton bits because they are dual assembly. If you build Hexwraiths from them, you get a bunch of nice extra skeleton upper bodies. Everything except legs, basically. The Mortis Engine kit comes with three banshees, three vampire ladies and a necromancer. You will also have a spare shrine or basin depending on how you build it, and probably some other deathy decorations. EDIT: Forgot to say: While base size can be a bit of an inconvenience for DnD, there is always the option to play gridless and just measure distances like you would in Warhammer. That even has some advantages, such as making movement at weird angles easier.

Given that Whitefang's teaser implied Skaven heavily and Sylvaneth weakly, if this is independent confirmation of Sylvaneth, I think we can treat Skaven as basically confirmed, as well.

I agree with this. I'd like to add, though, that I think skeletons have exactly two ways in which they can go in a list. You can take them as a few units of 10 to satisfy battleline as cheaply as possible (in which case, I think 20 zombies are better if you can afford them), or you can take them in a block of 30 with some support to make them perform. You probably don't want more than one block of 30 either: Having one unit that is slow and does no damage but can hold an objective well is good, but having a lot of them probably won't work. It helps that the Necromancer and Corpse Cart are only minimal taxes. They are both cheap enough and have uses outside supporting the skeleton block. So if things go bad and you lose all your skeletons early, they are not useless. They can still go support all your other units, especially SUMMONABLE units, quite effectively.

I think it's fair to say that skeletons are not super good right now. Zombies are probably generally better. The question is whether skeletons have a role play at all. Even recognizing that they are not a super strong unit, I think they are the closest thing in the Soulblight battletome to an anvil that is also good at capturing. So if you want a unit that can stand on a point and hold it even after taking a hit, skeletons are probably the only game in town. The question is whether you feel like filling that niche with a kinda janky unit is worth it, or whether it would be better to play around in a different way. When thinking about units, I like to think about them in terms of both their strength (very strong, strong, OK, weak) and how likely it is that they will get to apply that strength (generally useful or situationally useful). A unit of zombies is probably generally strong. There are a lot of ways to use them and in any given game you will probably find a way to bring their strengths to bear. Skeletons are more like a situationally strong choice. If your opponent has no good way to fight them, they can be a menace. But setting up that situation is not super easy and not 100% under your control.

I'd definitely hope that GW is foreward looking enough not to release a tome celestial and then a battletome for the same army just a few months later. But the recent DoK battletome announcement does not exactly inspire hope that they'd be above stunts like that. In any case, here's the current state of battletomes in one picture: Everything is in order of battletome age, except the armies with tome celestials, who are in order of that instead. Not really sure what conclusions to draw here, but right now Gitz, FEC and Khorne look like pretty strong candidates for new books in autumn.

I think we are now at a point where we need to consider how long of a gap there is likely to be between a White Dwarf Tome Celestial and a battletome update. Personally, I think a new tome a year or so after a WD update does not seem out of the question. An Ossiarch update next winter would not necessarily surprise me, although with their WD update and the amount of rumour engines that could possibly be FEC, they seem like a stronger candidate to me.

The Handgunners are really the gift that keeps on giving in terms of rules discussion. For what it's worth, I don't think them having the ability to Unleash Hell out of phase with their special rule would be game breaking. It would probably not even be enough to make you take them over Crossbowmen. In general I don't think the reasoning that they should get to Unleash Hell on any charge, regardless of phase, is bad. But then again, I also thought they Handgunners should be able to Unleash Hell multiple times per phase, and GW eventually shut that down. It's hard to determine intent in this case, and the rules as written are ambiguous. I would not have a problem allowing the more powerful version of the rule for friendly games, myself. But you probably should not assume that it's uncontroversial.

There have been two to three big model waves per year for AoS alone since the start of second edition fairly consistently. If Skaven come out in summer and there is no big AoS release until then, it's totally possible that the Skaven release could be pretty sizable. Even if it's not, I think there is a chance of at least new Eshin models or something like that.

Oh, that's a bit unexpected. But nice! I would like to live in a world where we get small FAQ updates in a timely manner without having to wait until there is enough for a big drop. With Nighthaunt for example, they could totally have done nothing until the next battletome comes out, so I appreciate the quick bug fixes. In this case, it seems like it's mostly clarification of how Nagash works in Nighthaunt. It has been clarified that he does not benefit from the ability of Hexwraiths to bodyguard your general in Emerald Host, which is what most people expected to happen. He still acts as a nexus for other Nighthaunt allegiance abilities, though (broadcasts that 6+ ward bubble), even though he does not benefit from them. Other than that, the only thing that happend is that the Nurgle portion of Wrath of the Everchosen has been invalidated. That stuff has been integrated into the newest Battletome, so that makes sense.

I have a bunch of metal Phoenix Guard still kicking around. With their bendy metal halberds they really are a nightmare. For me, proxying Swordmasters of Hoeth is the way to go. I think they look cooler, anyway.

Thanks, you two. I will definitely see if I can manage to find a way to build a few Helblasters, as well. Although man, those things seems sub par even by artillery standards... I think I might just mount the guns on other models instead in the future. I'm sure there will be a time I'm going to look at a unit and think that it needs more GUN.

I'm currently very close to pulling the trigger on expanding my Cities of Sigmar army to be fully Ironweld Arsenal themed. Steam Tank Commander, three Steam Tanks, four Hellstorm Rocket Batteries, Cogsmith, a bunch of Gyrocopters... For people not familiar with Cities of Sigmar: That's a very bad list. None of those units are really all that good. The reason I am thinking about doing it is that the original list that I wanted to play (shooting focussed Tempest's Eye, mostly Freeguild, some KO units, some magic...) just won't play well anymore. Handgunners are not really a good backbone unit anymore after buff stacking was removed. Same for Pistoliers and Outriders. If you want a Freeguild/human list right now, the way to go seems to be to use the "knightly" themed melee units: Greatwords, Demigryph knights, Freeguild General... But those were never the units I was most excited about. I always wanted to lean more into gunners, tanks and artillery and was only going to compromise on other Freeguild to make the list play well. Now, from my perspective, I get to make a choice between playing a good Cities list that I don't really care that much for, compromising on an OK list where the models I like don't really help the game plan or just embracing the bad list with the models I actually want. Since I have other armies where I can actually field a mechanically strong list if I want to, I think I'll just embrace the jank for Cities this time around. Maybe I'm lucky and Steam Tanks and Rocket Batteries become good in the next Cities book, or maybe they don't. But I'll still have a cool looking army either way. Plus, I think having both a strong and a casual list avaliable might actually be nice so that I can adjust the power level of my army to match whoever I am playing with. I think it helps that the Rocket Batteries are not super expensive models and that I have a fun modeling idea for them. I plan to put them all on a big diorama base, with each rocket being in a different state of readiness: One empty, one reloading, one fully stocked and one firing. It would give me the opportunity to model the crew in the process of performing various tasks, too. And since artillery does not need to move a lot, a big shared diorama base would actually be gameplay usable, too!

I thought the Eidolon of Mathlann was the manifestation of the Idoneth's belief in a dead god or something like that?

Can you go into a little more detail? Am I understanding this right that you are a pro painter and GW or some third party reached out to you to paint a presumably upcoming Sylvaneth and Gitz (or do you mean Skaven?) bundle?

Wasn't that a rumour that showed up on Warhammer Weekly at some point? The dwarf summer?

My view on this is that someone had to make the decision to have a DoK battletome release in spring 2022 knowing they would have a release in Februrary 2021, as well. Those decisions are made years in advance, after all. I'm working under the assumption that whoever makes that kind of decisions at GW would also find releasing two battletomes for the same army about a year apart to be undesirable. In my mind, there is no value in releasing battletomes in essentially random order, not taking into account the age of the tomes (that is, not updating the oldest tomes first as a general rule). So it seems to me that there would have to be a good reason to release a new DoK tome now. A battlebox hero is not a good reason, because the decision to release a single new DoK model as apart of a battlebox would be made at the same time as the decision to give DoK a new tome. There is no pressing reason that it DoK specifically need to be in that battle box instead of any other faction that is only getting a book release this edition. That makes me think that DoK might be getting more models like Lumineth did. Maybe Lumineth were a split release because of COVID/Brexit difficulties, or maybe GW is just doing Lumineth-style split wave releases now as a way to sell more books. Whatever the reason may be, a decision to split the DoK release would at least make sense by those lights. Which, at least to me, releasing two battletomes a year apart without any substantial expansion of the model range for DoK would not.

9 books is a decent pace. I'd rather the delays happen in the beginning when a lot of armies are still playing with their 2nd Ed tomes than when half of all factions are updated. Let's hope the release schedule ramps up for year 2 of 3rd edition, though.

I actually find it very hard to make sense of DoK getting a new tome unless they are also getting a bunch of new models, Lumineth style. It just seems like there is no reason for it otherwise.

I had actually already forgot about that again, haha. But yeah, it looks a lot more likely now.

So it seems like Fyreslayers remain their own army for the time being. The DoK battletome surprises me, to be honest. I did not see that coming at all. Are they getting another model wave? The next Chaos battletome is probably Khorne, Skaven or Beasts of Chaos. I'm going to tentatively call Skaven since they have an Underworlds warband rumoured that would fit the time frame. For Order, all bets are off. Probably not combined dwarves, but maybe a new dwarves army? A Cities rework? Sylvaneth?

The list definitely seems to be set up to take maximum advantage of those battle traits and the Phoenix Temple units. A lot better than other lists I have seen that play around with stuff like Flagellants. The Assassins are really a great call. It's easy to forget how good Phoenix Guard still are. And right now, in the MSU meta, a unit of 10 is even decent at playing the capture game. A list built around just Phoenix guard and Anointed on Phoenix is actually super solid.

This list apparently did quite well at LVO: It's been a while since I have seen a Phoenicium list anywhere, much less one with three Assassins in it! Kinda makes me want to go over all the different cities with a fresh mind again to see if there are any more hidden gems.

I am still working on this Hurricanum. It's definitely at a point where I would not have a problem putting it on the table, but it has become a passion project for me and I want to really paint all the details before I call it finished.