Leshoyadut

This is very true, and you can look at the subfaction breakdown on Woehammer to see it (though it is admittedly a couple weeks old). Cities has both the highest winrate and the 6th lowest winrate, Seraphon has the 4th highest and the 10th lowest. They've done a good job of balancing factions overall, but there are still huuuuuuuge swings in winrate between subfactions. It goes from about 4% of the factions (1 out of 24) being in the red zone, and only just barely so, to about 40% in the red zone (28 out of 70), ranging from 39% to 65% winrates. The faction breakdown they give tells a very simplistic story that seems much nicer than it really is. Hopefully they start getting better about subfaction balance within a faction in 4th edition. I know as a Soulblight player continuing to catch strays because Night still sits at a 60% winrate, I'd really appreciate that.

I agree with that assessment. I think she'll actually fit very well into the "second small wizard" slot for Legion of Blood. In some lists I theorycraft, I have ~150-200 points left that I want to fill with another wizard, but a Vampire Lord feels like a bit of a waste when I don't have anything that'd really care about the +1 attacks buff after my first Vampire Lord's buff. Currently, I just slap a Necromancer and an endless spell in, but I think Sekhar would fit in quite well. She doesn't really want to be in melee for long with no Hunger, but is relatively resistant to shooting and can be in melee if she needs to be, which means that she can accompany a block of zombies or skeletons pretty well. Also, two casts for 160 points is nowhere else to be seen in our army, and I think that's valuable on its own. I don't think she's an every list kind of character, but surprisingly I think they did a good job of giving us a foot hero vampire that somehow finds a niche not yet covered by the numerous other foot hero vampires we've gotten. Also, as for why she doesn't have The Hunger, I saw someone give a lore-based hypothesis on the Facebook group that made sense to me: she's spent a lot of time in Ushoran's court and is above drinking from the filthy ghouls there, so she's learned to subdue her thirst for blood (at least as much as any Soulblight vampire can).

That one was probably the next AoS book I was planning to read. I liked the Annandale books about Neferata, and the one book about the Avengorii, plus a couple non-Soulblight books, so I'm excited to get to this one. He sounds like a cool character, so I'm excited to read his book.

Once again, I absolutely love the model. And once again, I am slightly annoyed by us getting yet one more foot vampire model. Still a truly wonderful model and I'm probably picking her up, though.

Oooo. I've been looking to do some Soulbound stuff with my tabletop group, and this would likely do quite nicely. Also looking forward to the eventual Champions of Chaos book, too, since one of my players is really into Skaven.

I would agree with that if LoN wasn't both more played and had a higher winrate than Vyrkos did before the nerfs. Vyrkos was absolutely a problem, and zombies needed nerfing along with their support pieces in the subfaction. But we didn't need more stuff like how hard Spirit Gale got hit (needed something, but 3 targets is rough), or the additional points changes to units like Neferata and the VLOZD, let alone Vengorian Lords getting side-swiped for some reason. Saying it was just for the sins of LoN was an oversimplification, maybe, but the army needed deadwalker and LoN nerfs, not army-wide hits, at least as far as I was seeing.

Well, Soulblight seems to be in a pretty healthy place winrate-wise now at a nice, fat middle 51%. Oh, wait, what's that? You want to look at subfactions? Ahhh...yeah...cool. That's a 17 percentage point difference between Legion of Night and Legion of Blood. Vyrkos doesn't have enough results to show up, but it's probably somewhere in between there. So our 51% winrate isn't at all because the army is actually balanced, it's because the Good Subfaction is so powerful that it balances out against all of the rest combined. Honestly, as much as I prefer to be at least somewhat competitive when I play and try to keep an eye on the meta as part of that, I feel like I just need to stop looking at winrates solely because it's making me increasingly annoyed with GW's balancing. Some of the early nerfs were definitely needed (zombie MWs, Neferata's repositioning ability, Endless Legions, the first round or two of points changes), but it feels bad being punished across the entire army for the sins of Legion of Night.

A movement-oriented priest buff, say, themed around some kind of bird, maybe? Like a crow?

SBGL can also have Zombie Dragons and Terrorgheists as battleline.

I'm finding myself surprisingly excited to play this when it comes out. I'm generally pretty bad at RTSes despite enjoying the idea of them, but with the slower pace and more limited controls, this may actually fit me quite well. Looking forward to sending out the endless legion of ghost friends.

I don't think you need Halgrim at all. I tend to play skeleton/grave guard heavy lists and don't really have problems with their mobility. Popping out of a grave site will get them plenty close enough to the objective that they can threaten it or take it, and running with a single unit of skeletons is fine. Dire wolves move plenty fast enough on their own, as well, so they shouldn't need the extra movement. The 100 points you save by not taking Halgrim can be better spent on other things, like an endless spell or two or put toward Torgillius or something. As for buffs when you pop them out of the grave? Well...you don't buff them that turn, at least not with hero phase stuff. A unit of 20 or 30 skeletons will be able to survive fine without spell buffs, and you don't really need them to do a ton of damage (not that they really do much even with buffs) the turn they pop up. The skeletons are there to stay for a while, you'll have time to put buffs on them later.

I am almost certainly looking to play Nighthaunt, as well, though I'm very curious what the Chaos faction will be. I don't know that we've seen even any hints to what it is?

I actually really like the one per Vampire or Deathmages hero idea. Ties it to our two types of wizard, both of which should be capable of raising the dead, both keeping it thematic and limiting its max potential. Gets away from the problem of every summonable getting semi+50% wounds (not entirely accurate, but close enough for this discussion) just by virtue of being in the army. Adds a little bookkeeping, but I think it's worth it. But anyways, here's my very-much-joking list that I just thought of as a goof. And then the actual list that I'm going to be trying against a friend on Tuesday. I know Blood Knights are not in vogue right now for us, but I think they still have legs, and I want to try the Vengorian Lord to see if it would be a reasonable alternative to a VLOZD. It is, of course, not as powerful, but it's also 180 less points, which means more other things. Andtorian Acolytes because I want to try Merciless Blizzard instead of Hoarfrost; I found Hoarfrost was leading to a ton of overkill with the GG, so I think getting some extra primal dice and blasting something other than their target might work better. If the Blood Knights don't work out, I'm honestly not sure what to replace them with. More Grave Guard? I could fit in another 10, and dropping the Maelstrom would allow another reinforcement on the skeletons on top. Could just upgrade the Vengo to a VLOZD and have another 50 points. But that also ends up in the awkward position of skeletons being 110 (10 more than I'd have by also taking out the Maelstrom), so I guess I just take a second endless spell? Dunno. Things to play with. Regardless, very much an experimental list to see what might feel okay right now by throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. Don't have a particularly cohesive idea for it, but I think things generally work alright in it and nothing really sticks out as not synergizing with the rest. Just sad about not having a VLOZD since it's such an iconic centerpiece for the army that it's weird not seeing it there.

I think possibly changing Hunger to be 4 wounds max would still make it really good while significantly reducing the amount they need to alpha the ethereal VLOZD to eventually bring it down. As for Endless Legions, I think it needs to end up as our turn only, and probably be at least more than 6" from enemies for placing the units. If it ends up being not good enough anymore, it could get changed to a 2+ or something to make it a little more consistent; if it's still too good, just push it to more than 9", and then just only on a 4+ if that's not enough. The combination would let a lot of things go down, though. But I'm not a game designer, by any means. These are my initial ideas, and there may be a better/more elegant solution to the problem. I also don't work at GW, so my thoughts probably mean very little for what's actually going to happen to the army, but it feels nice to speculate a little.

You can find the full article of data (though one that's more up-to-date than the image in my previous post) here. The likely reason there's no Kharadrons in the subfactions list is because Woehammer does a cutoff at 20 results for the subfaction in the given time period; if the subfaction doesn't have that many, then it doesn't make the list at all, regardless of its winrate. They have a 53% winrate as a whole faction, as you can see in the faction winrate chart. Given they have 75 total results as a whole faction, I imagine there were one or two subfactions that were close but not quite. But since there's 6 subfactions, it's pretty reasonable that none quite hit the mark.