Neil Arthur Hotep

This is apparently the LVO 2024 winning list of Jeremy Lefebvre, according to reddit: What stands out to me: Misthavn cavalry list Two drop No Fusiliers (which I agree with after playing with them, they are a build around unit that is not splashable). Seven heroes for maximum ordies Zenestra + double Command Corps goodstuff All the witch hunters Seems like the human cavalry list is pretty good! Misthavn seems like a strong contender for best city right now.

What do you mean by that? The NDA on the rules for the pdf only factions?

The Command Corps is taking shape: It's a very fun set of models to paint, by the way. Definitely recommend it for anyone struggling through the process of batch painting Steelhelms or Fusiliers. EDIT: War surgeon close up

Balanced and lore accurate. I see no problems here.

Did steam tanks do anything specific at LVO or do you just think they are too good?

It's interesting to think that we have actually never played "normal" 3rd edition, because every GHB has been modifying things so much. I wonder if the game would feel less cognitively demanding if we didn't always have seasonal rules layered on top of it. Personally, I don't think heroic actions, monstrous rampages and reactive commands are too hard to keep straight (although they could be simplified in some ways). But when playing with the current GHB rules, I do get tripped up by the added magic stuff and frequently feel like I would rather just not deal with it. During list building, too. Of course, "basic" 3rd ed would still have battle tactics, though, so that would not fix the main complaint of a lot of people. To mention another negative about battle tactics that has not yet been brought up: Even though battle tactics help with competitve balance, they do it in a way that doesn't feel satisfying. Imagine your army is sitting at a 30% win rate, doesn't feel good to play, can't kill anything and is bad at objective play. But then it gets 2 free battle tactics. Maybe it now has a 50% win rate, but it won't feel any more fun to play.

Fish knight and his weird dog.

Meta is short for meta-game, which refers to factors beyond the game that have an impact on how you play it. For example, when Seraphon is the best army for tournaments, players start bringing units that can deal with magic and mortal wounds, or reliably beat Lord Kroak. Maybe they don't bring as much anti-melee stuff. But when Sons of Behemat is the best army for tournaments, they start bringing lists that can reliably do 35 wounds every turn in order to kill Mega-Gargants instead. People often use "meta" to mean "what is strong right now", but your local play group also has a metagame. Maybe everyone in your group just loves to run hordes of infantry. In that group, a tournaments list that is designed to beat high-armour units and deals small amounts of high quality damage would not to do well. It would be a meta list for tournaments, but not your specific group.

What do you mean? They are fish friend and brezel guy, it says so right there They are Gargoylians from the new Cities of Sigmar kits. Basically a bunch of little medieval art creatures you can use to decorate your bases. In the lore, they are mysterious beings characterized by being drawn to strong expessions of faith and their hate for chaos. I just really like those little dudes. I think the idea of a small land fish biting a chaos warrior in the ankle is hilarious.

Fish friend and brezel guy.

In general I think it is fair to say that recent Warcry warbands have also been proper AoS units, while Underworlds warbands have not. That seems to be how GW views it.

That was the one big upside of Battle Tactics, I guess. They really helped with competitive balancing of older books.

List building was always pretty complex, but game play has definitely become less smooth this edition. Battle tactics are the main thing here, in my opinion, with the seasonal rules stuff from the current GHB being a close second. I don't know if that matches your experience with what new players struggle with. Heroic actions and monstrous rampages are stumbling blocks, but IMO that gets better quickly once you realize you can just default to extra command points and roar and be correct, like, 80% of the time.

Sucks, but I guess Tahlia is kind of squishy like that. After I finish all the models in my current list, I want to look into getting her and Karl Franz for a monster heavy list that focusses on counter charging. See how that works out. She's definitely a good pick, but personally if I was just slotting her into a list without focussing on elves, I would be doing so for Tenebrael Blades. And then I would definitely want a unit that makes better use of the spell than 10 Dreadspears (can actually get or survive a charge). That's why I would consider the Sorceress + 20 Blackguard the basic package, which runs a good bit more expensive. I think if you are planning on getting off Blades anyway, it does not matter that much that the damage output is technically lower than it could be. Whatever you hit will die anyway.

It's cool that they improved the old kits a little bit. I still plan to pick up at least a few models from the Tomb Kings range that I don't yet own and it is nice that they have been made easier to work with or given additional detail.

All that stuff relies on running other elves, though. I already understand the Sorceress is good if you have other elves, I was just confused by you saying she's an auto-include even in list without elves.

Reducing mental load overall should definitely be a goal for 4th edition. I think AoS is at its best when it focusses on good game flow. I definitely think monstrous and heroic actions could be tweaked in that regard. I like the suggestion of having battalions do other things than they do at the moment, but I want to somewhat disagree that Battle Regiment is a boring default option. I think the decision between high and low drops is significant and allows for skill expression. I have recently been playing a high drop list (11 drops) in a meta where most people go for Battle Regiment or Command Entrourage+Battle Regiment, and I feel like I get a significant information advantage in deployment just about every time from it. At the same time, having to be able to play either first or second depending on my opponent's decision is a downside I have to deal with. IMO, controllable drops make the whole priority/double turn aspect of the game interesting, so I personally want to keep them. Agreed on terrain rules. I was thinking about that too, but forgot to mention it. The current terrain rules both do too much (mysterious terrain) and too little (nothing forces you to have defensible/impassable/LOS-blocking terrain at all). I want to echo that. I think AoS is a very fun and tactically interesting game right now and 3rd edition was, overall, an improvement over 2nd.

What does the Sorceress do in a list that doesn't bring elves?

Path to Glory is one of these things I still mostly ignore. Even though on paper I have a lot of interest in playing narrative campaigns. But path to glory misses the mark for me by being too restrictive in many ways. I feel like I would rather just have rules for making a campaign map, bulding up settlements and controlling territory, but just play regular 2000 point matched play games to decide who get to own what.

Since 3rd edition is almost over, I think it might be a good time to look back at the rules and gameplay changes of 3rd edition and think about what we liked, what didn't work and what could be changed in 4th. I'll start by listing some stuff that comes to mind and giving my opinions. Heroic Actions When we first got them, I thought they were unnecessary bloat. Heroes were already useful in the game and didn't really need a boost or extra reason to include them in a list. Adding the generic heroic actions seemed like just another thing to keep track of, plus in the beginning Heroic Healing was kind of a problem (remember stuff like big monster-heroes with Amulet of Destiny being basically unkillable?). Over time, with the introduction of army-specific heroic actions, I think these got much better. I really appreciate them now as a way to add a limitation to certain abilities that might otherwise be too strong or too spamable. Monstrous Rampages For those, I was pretty much on board with them from day 1. Being a monster was generally a downside in 2nd edition, and I think monstrous rampages are a nice boost to them. Just getting access to Roar is a good reason to seriously consider taking a monster in your list. However, internal balance of the generic rampages is kind of bad: Roar is clearly the best one, followed by Stomp, with the others being really situational. Some of the army-specific rampages are great, though. Grand Strategies and Battle Tactics At the start of 3rd, I was excited about getting a secondary objective system. I think the fact that AoS is an objective based game is one of its big strengths. But sadly, battle tactics don't quite feel right yet. They create bumps in the flow of the game, where at the start of the turn players need to take a few minutes to consider their options. And sadly, they frequently feel like you are just doing stuff unrelated to the fiction of the scenario. Grand Strategies work a bit better, in my opinion, although I think, during list building, you mostly just take the one that requires the least effort to accomplish. New command abilities All of these seem to have created some problems at some point during the edition: Rally: Fine in its base form, but pretty bonkers once you get 4+ rally or rally into combat. Unleash Hell: Got several nerfs over the course of the edition and might still be too good. Maybe "stand and shoot" should be a warscroll ability instead. Redeploy: Probably the least obviously problematic of the three, but I have seen a fair share of people raging about it at times. All-Out Defense: Save stacking got pretty out of hand in the first year of the game, but now feels more managable. Overall, though, I still think these abilities are a positive for the game, because they break up the long periods where one players doesn't have anything to do and doesn't need to pay attention. I would not want to see them removed again. Core Battalions Remember how we had warscroll battalions instead during 2nd? At the time, I thought those were great to help you structure your lists. Now I vastly prefer not having to deal with them. For my preference, though, they could cut basically all the battalions except Battle Regiment, Warlord and Command Entourage. These three have a nice balance of influencing the deployment and priority game, because extra enhancements and command points are worth going high drops for. All the other ones kind of feel like bloat. The purpose-bound command points don't seem impactful enough. GHB seasons I like that we got some interesting rules experimentation as part of these. Fighting in two ranks and new Look Out, Sir! would make good permanent additions, IMO. But overall I think the GHBs were a bit overstuffed with weird, wacky twists. Like the current Primal Magic system, which is somewhat fun but feels excessive to have to deal with every game. For me, the pace of change in these GHBs was too rapid, and for a few of them I didn't get a single game in under their rules. But even then, they made it harder for me to plan and build lists, which had an impact on my enjoyment of my painting and hobbying time. Battletomes It's great that every faction has a current battletome this edition. That will probably make 3rd edition a rule set people will return to play under in the future. I think overall the quality of the 3rd edition battletomes was also quite high, at least from a purely rules-based standpoint. Of course, there were some outliers: Gitz, Soulblight and OBR were pretty overtuned, and Ogors and Skaven kind of felt a bit undercooked. Small stuff Command Points Getting and spending command points more frequently definitely seems more fun than the 2nd ed system of buying them all at the start of the game and hoarding them. Massive Regiment Discounts/Reinforcement Points Although I play a lot of horde armies, I think removing point discounts for big units and limiting the amount of huge blobs on the table was a good move. Big units were already very good in 2nd, they really didn't need an extra boost. Some armies can still play hordes (those with 20 model troop choices) and it makes them feel more special. Not sure if Reinforcement Points are actually needed, tough. It feels like you very rarely run up against the limit even without them. Armies and Regiments of Renown A pretty new addition to the game from Dawnbringers. Regiments of Renown are interesting to me, because I wonder if they are what we will get instead of allies in the next edition. Armies of Renown seem like a fun idea (kind of like TOWs Armies of Infamy, which kind of seem like the same concept but executed better), but they need a little more time in the oven, I think.

Perfect for AoS, then. Unironically love this about the game.

I don't even think we need to compare Irondrakes to the best shooting in the game. The best thing in the game should not generally be the measure of whether or not something is reasonable/viable/balanced. The reason why I think Irondrakes could use some kind of buff is because I figure out their role. This is also why I think they need something other than a point drop, ideally. On paper, their stats are reasonable: Their shooting profile is fine if they don't move, their save is OK and they make good use of the 5+ ward order. But how do they actually help you win games? Since they are short-ranged shooting (can't usually shoot into the opponent's deployment zone from yours), they will need to move into position turn 1. Naturally, I think you would want them to advance into the middle of the board with your objective capturing units and provide fire support. Turn 1, they will probably get half damage or not shoot at all, which is bad because the first two turns of AoS games are crucial. To have reasonable play, these guys will probably need to be a unit of 20 with a hero for orders. A Runelord with 20 Irondrakes is 420 points (is this why they get the "Blaze Away" ability?). That puts them into the same ball park as 20 Fusiliers with an Alchemite (450), which just seem way easier to use. Or a Steam Tank Commander and Command Corps (440). I find that hard to justify. Probably because Duardin are the weakest subfaction in the book, all things considered. Not unplayable, but I think Humans and Elves have a lot more obvious play. This further hurts the viability of Irondrakes, IMO, because the book encourages you to build around only one or two races at once. Unless you are already all-in on Dwarves for the theme, I think a much more natural small unit inclusion is something like a Sorceress and some Black Guard for that sweet Tenebrael Blades combo. Although, since running multiple units of Fusiliers is pretty bad, I could imagine a mixed human and dwarf shooting list that runs one Fusilier block and one block of Irondrakes. This would be very locked into the shooting-castle build, but would be reasonably playable. Until you run into Kruleboyz or Deepkin or that one anti-shooting battleplan, that is.

Not going to say "should", but Pestilens and Eshin definitely have the potential add just a few heroes rather than being full-fledged subfactions (priests and assassins, respectively). It's kinda like in Cities of Sigmar you would not necessarily expect to be able to field a full army of Witch Hunters. I like focussing on Moulder, Skryre and Masterclan for subfactions. They all have the potential to fill established AoS archetypes (monster mash, shooting, hordes). It makes sense for them to have their own troop-level units, too. I think a redesign of Skaven that is mainly those three subfactions, with Pestilens and Eshin filling more supportive roles but unable to field "pure" lists would not be the worst.

They revealed BR: Kragnos before BR: Belakor was out, so they might reveal Dawnbringers 5 before we get the Dawnbringers 4.

If I recall correctly, she was in Ghur during Seasons of War: Thondia, dealing with the Krondspine Incarnate. If future Seasons of War and thus the Incarnate subplot were indeed cancelled (as it seems), then that probably hurt the AoS narrative and character development quite a bit. Might be why it feels like not that much happened this edition. EDIT: Should have read @BarakUrbaz post before commenting.