yukishiro1

I think that's right, but the problem is that it really exposes the limitations of an IGOUGO system re: the "each other" part of that formulation. It's not really a lot of fun or satisfying to have significant portions of your army removed before you even get to move them, particularly when it's via long-range shooting that is difficult or impossible to mitigate. Whoever thought letting Longstrikes have a hero phase shoot you can use to double shoot T1 doesn't understand how to create engaging gameplay experiences, for example.

The arms race between melee mobility and shooting effectiveness hasn't led the game to good places. At this point, almost all competitive lists can go hard into their opponent from the top of T1, which just feels a bit weird TBH. There's no "maneuver" phase of a game really in competitive AOS, models die in droves from the very start of the very first turn. But the developers have only doubled down on this with the new books (except Nurgle I guess, though even Nurgle has fairly reliable T1 charges with pusgoyles in the faction with the pregame move - 16" move puts you at a 3-6" charge from your opponent's line depending on the plan). SCE and IJ have probably the strongest alpha in the game, and they're two of the three newest tomes. So it seems like the developers like this world where every army can hit every army from T1.

People might want to make a new thread to argue about Stormcast vs Ironjawz teleports, it doesn't really seem particularly relevant here.

Oh, the times we live in, where people complain that a 2+ rerollable teleport that can't be stopped in any way is insufficient mobility. 😁

I don't think this is really the place to argue about it, but Blissbarbs have a 6+ save as opposed to a 4+ save with +1 to save vs shooting, which is a pretty massive difference, and they also don't have easy access to -2 rend.

Wholly within, not just within. If you're wholly within that there probably wasn't a need to teleport in most cases (or alternatively, you were 3" out and a 3d6 charge isn't going to make much of a difference vs a 2d6 charge). It will occasionally give you something, don't get me wrong, but it's not the wombo combo you're making it out to be. It's going to see a lot more play on ogres than on IJ IMO, IJ don't have any trouble with making charges in the first place. But again I agree IJ shouldn't be able to move after teleporting either. It was a bad mechanic on SCE and it's a bad mechanic on IJ, even with the much lowered reliability.

They're unlikely to have a 3d6 charge if they teleport then move, the IJ teleport is super unreliable compared to the SCE one (less than 50% chance of success vs ~96% chance of success), and the living city one is limited to board edges once per game, but I don't think many people would be upset to see moving after teleporting / deep striking go away from those other factions, too.

The flip-side of this is that I can't think of a single other army that has 17 viable warscrolls. Certainly it is significantly more than the average faction has. A lot of the reason so many SCE warscrolls are bad is simply because there are way too many of them period.

Yeah, it's very difficult to see this being successful re: its stated objective of bringing up lower-tier armies to competitive viability and more generally "making the game feel fair." Is the game better than it was before the update? Yes, probably, to at least a marginal degree. But these changes are far too underwhelming and scattershot to appreciably move the needle on making underpowered books viable, and they actually somehow managed to make some of the struggling factions even worse than they were before.

Khorne and OBR got nerfed harder than SoB (or frankly probably than anything else other than Tzeentch Archaon). Warshrine went up 30 points for no discernable reason, while Fulminators, Kairos, Khorne Daemon Prince didn't see any point increases. Morathi actually got buffed. The update is full of random nonsensical weirdness like this practically everywhere you look. The overall changes to the game in this patch - heroic recovery, unleash hell, etc - are good. The specific factional changes are classic GW pin the tail on the donkey stuff - occasionally the tail goes on the right part, but judging by how often it doesn't, I'm not sure it wasn't just pure chance.

That only impacts Chaos because <reasons>. Cities still has real coalition that gets allegiance abilities and subfactions. Go figure, they just really wanted to nerf those meta-dominating Khorne and Slaanesh lists I guess.

Yeah, and that's fine if they do it the way they did with the Nurgle book where the book gets a rework at the same time. But it's a kick in the teeth to take away one of the few things that makes a book work and give nothing back in return, especially when that book is already low-tier competitively. It seems very odd that a so-called "balance patch" ends up nerfing several weaker factions more strongly than it nerfs any of the strong factions.

Yeah, sure, individual units got minor points nerfs here and there and unleash hell got a minor nerf that indirectly impacts MW spam lists to some degree. But MWs got even stronger overall as a mechanic with amulet being nerfed. We're still firmly in a save stacking vs MW spam meta. Maybe it was too much to expect them to change that since they seem happy with it, but it was on most of our lists as a problem in the game and it didn't get addressed at all. I'm not saying it's a terrible update, just that in typical GW fashion they've managed to also do a lot of weird and ugly things along with the good ones, while overlooking a lot of obvious changes the community was more or less agreed on.

Yeah, for Khorne it's basically just using blood tithe. Nobody ever took anything but Reapers anyway and that only benefitted daemons so there's no real loss there re: coalition (I mean I guess the Khorne Daemon Prince can't double fight any more, but that's a once in a blue moon sort of thing anyway), but not being able to use blood tithe on coalition is a massive kick in the teeth for no real reason.

- Save stacking still as strong as it ever was - MWs stronger than they ever have been - OBR and Khorne gutted competitively (to the extent they had competitive builds in the first place) for no discernible reason - Khorne Daemon Prince, Fulminators, Kairos, Mawkrusha remain unchanged - Bizarre changes like the Chaos Warshrine going up 40 points while Morathi goes up zero and even gets a buff There is some good stuff in here, but there's also a lot of changes that do fall into the "random stuff that completely misses the point," "didn't go something they needed to do," or "did something that resulted in unintended changes that hit already hurting armies without adequate compensation." Like if they had reworked OBR at the same time they nerfed Nagash, or Khorne at the same time they nerfed coalition, that would be fine. But they didn't. Instead they apparently just got hit with a collateral nerf bat that wasn't even aimed at them. Overall Grade: C Scaled Grade given GW's past performance: B-

Hmm. A massive nerf to Khorne (STD units no longer getting allegiance ability, the only thing that kept the army going competitively) while most of the top armies get insignificant nerfs is not really what I was expecting from a balance patch. A very strange grab bag of the good (heroic recovery and unleash hell nerfs) the bad (overall army balance changes doing little to reign in the strong while doing even less to boost the weak and in some cases actually making them weaker) and the ugly (many of the points changes, the amulet change which was needed but they chose the worst option).

Oh yeah, that's a good point. A bit out of date now (i.e. Sons and Lumineth have been seen a massive uptick since then) and probably a bit skewed towards competitive play too, but not as much as the Honest Wargamer stats. Here's the graph from that (blurry, but the only picture I could find) You can get a better quality graph on the video itself:

There was also the fact that they got rid of the whole setting of their previous game, thereby essentially eliminating both the rules and the lore of their setting at the same time, without replacing either with anything significant at the time the game "launched."

It really depends on your local scene. The Honest Wargamer has the tournament breakdown stats, but that's only for competitive play, so it only matters if that's what you're interested in. One of the good things about AoS is there is no one army that's played by almost everybody the way Space Marines are in 40k. If you're looking for an army people don't hate playing against, I wouldn't pick Sons of Behemat or Lumineth (for totally different reasons), but that isn't based on popularity so much as the way the armies work. And all that may be about to change in the FAQ that's coming in the next few days (supposedly) too anyway. But really, I would just pick what you like the look of and the general playstyle of. It's generally a mistake to try to pick an army based on what other people like rather than what you like.

I was talking more about specific stuff like are Bullgors good or bad. I don't think that impacts sales much for the typical customer. I think those larger-scale rules things like the structure of an edition absolutely do impact sales even for those customers, and I think the reason for that is even people who barely play the game in practice are still tuned into it as a game in theory. Basically I think the average GW customer doesn't actually play the game very much, but they also aren't actively not playing the game, and they still see it as a game, not solely as a painting/assembling hobby. I.e. they're assembling and painting an army to play with in theory, they just don't do it much in practice.

The majority of people who buy GW miniatures don't even play the game, or play it only a couple times a year at most. For those people rules probably have pretty limited impact on sales. There is another contingent of people for whom rules matter a lot, though. Witness the people who have reacted to the new Maggotkin book by going out and buying 10 Beasts, players who bought four foxes, etc. They make up a definite minority of sales but they also spend a lot of money per person so they are significant to GW for that reason. I really doubt they're waiting to drop the FAQ for sales reasons, they will get a boost from the FOTM crowd as soon as it comes out that is probably larger than any hopeful buys people are making now. Plus on a more fundamental level I just don't buy GW has that level of joined-up thinking. Like are the people doing the FAQ reporting back to the inventory managers and being like "cast moar bullgors they are about to hawt hawt hawt!"? I really doubt it. GW doesn't give the impression of a company capable of that level of coordination.

The most GW thing ever would be to release it on the 24th and break something fundamental about the game in the meantime, like last time when they allowed ward stacking...then go on vacation for two weeks.

Army-specific GS and BT are a terrible idea for competitive play and I'm glad they're mostly bad. Even having 1 extra BT you can reliably do (which most books have for at least some builds) significantly increases your chances of going 5/5 and makes it that much more important that every other competitive list can go 5/5 too, which radically restricts build diversity. They absolutely should be banned from tournaments.

If you can use Blood Tithe without using all of it up, Khorne lists made mainly with STD units are going to actually be very good. Assuming they don't nerf the effects, which I really hope they don't. It would be so sad to see it turned into some brainless thing.

Of course. But the point is those predictions don't suggest inside knowledge, just someone making obvious guesses.