yukishiro1

"December" FAQs have historically come out in January, or, if we're lucky, in the last week of December. There are a lot of rumors about points, but it's basically all what you could predict if you have a functioning brain, so it's hard to say whether they're true or just someone stating the obvious. It doesn't take a galaxy brain to predict that Salamanders and Fulminators and Sentinels are going up in points. The interesting stuff IMO isn't what gets nerfed but what gets buffed and how it gets buffed, and AFAIK there have been basically zero rumors about that side of things.

The reason AOS can get away without army caps (I still wish it had them TBH for fluff reasons, but I get that my vision of AOS is not the same as the developers, and they clearly think part of the attraction of the game is the weird skew lists of 15 cockatrices that you're allowed to make) is that there's no toughness stat, so everything can more or less threaten everything else. In most games a horde of goblins can't rip a dragon to shreds, but in this game it can (well, could, at least, until save stacking became a thing - but even that is limited enough that you can't really do it on a whole army).

I certainly hope they aren't AOS' version of Ynnari, given that Ynnari have got zero support over the last couple years and currently have rules that are borderline unplayable and that appear to be fundamentally incompatible with where they're taking the game in 9th (e.g. DE losing power from pain when they're not in a pure army). They feel like a failed experiment that only still exists on life support because it takes more effort to pull the plug than to keep the machine going. 😒 It'd be great to see Kurnothi as their own multi-racial faction, though, and that is something I can see happening in theory...but not for a long time in practice, they aren't in any of the leaks and the timeline suggests that there isn't room for another new faction beyond the ones planned until late 2023 at the very earliest, and more likely 2024.

Also, it's a bummer if this is replacing the cycle. The cycle is a really cool mechanic and it is one of the few times in history that GW has actually managed to nail the full extent of what Nurgle is all about in the lore - death and decay, yes, but also life, and, above all, the cyclical relationship of the two. Trading it out for MW tokens and more "6s to hit" mechanics doesn't feel like an upgrade in game design.

I guess in theory it saves a little bit of time since if something runs due to battleshock this way you don't have to spend the time removing the tokens down to 1 first, then remove the model and the last token, you can just remove the unit and all the tokens at once. Though when you're dealing with a system this heavy on bookkeeping it seems like it's a bit silly to care about that.

It's not impossible they'd change wounds, but it'd be another step beyond what they did in the 40k balance patch. They've spent more than a year and a half now in 40k resisting just issuing a free update to give CSM the same 2 wounds they gave to normal SM at the start of 9th edition for example, despite the constant (justified) griping and bad will that has generated. I also don't think it's really the problem with gargants TBH. The wound count for a 4-gargant army is 140, which is on the high side for a 3.0 army but not ridiculously high. The issue is how much you can string out those wounds using the 5+ ward and arcane shield, and that you get most of the benefit of the model even when it has only 1 wound remaining. Better to just go after the problem directly IMO. Nerfing the base stats just makes them even more reliant on the gimmicks.

I don't think they're going to change wound counts in a free update, that isn't something they have ever done in the past either in AOS or in 40k. There's no reason in theory they couldn't I guess, but it strikes me as very unlikely. More likely IMHO is adding objective counts-as to the degrading tables, raising points in such a way that you basically have to take 3 megas + some minis instead of 4 megas, or maybe even adding a rider that Gargants can't use the generic artefacts because they're too small for them. The wound count and durability of a Gargant army becomes significantly more manageable if they get nerfed to either a 6+ ward or spells depending on their allegiance, instead of a 5+ ward AND spells like they get currently. More broadly they are in a tough spot with Gargants because they are oppressive at the lower echelons of competition but not actually all that overpowered at the top. But the army is so point-and-click and limited in its design that there aren't many levers they can tweak that will make them less oppressive for lower tier armies and opponents without also making them non-competitive.

December usually means January.

Good old Nurgle, God of disease, decay, and accounting. Hopefully the scrivener will have a special warlord trait table that lets you do things like amortize your disease tokens on an extended schedule, invest them to earn interest, or cash them out without having to pay capital gains tax by using a shell company based in the Eightpoints.

I have heard people say you can only reuse 80%, but even if so, that'd still allow you to recycle all the empty sprues that get sent back since that's comfortably less than 80% of the material of a new one.

Yeah, unfortunately this is neither the first nor probably the last time that GW has sent out stuff knowing it has faults and deciding to just gamble that most people will suck it up. FWIW they're always good with taking back the faulty stuff, but it really shouldn't come to that.

There's always a next great Skaven clawlord, that's the great thing about 'em. Infinite supply.

TBH it's just a bad model that doesn't capture at all what she's supposed to be, one of the most graceful and lithe duelists in the galaxy. It'd be fine for some Necromunda cage fighter, it isn't very good for her.

Most of Eldar culture seems to revolve around producing, transporting, and posing on bits of broken runes.

I think it's pretty obvious they realized at some point that they didn't have enough ideas to make 3 endless spells per faction that were worth anything. Why that led to still making 3 for every other faction I don't know. Why not just make 1 for each faction instead and make it actually good and useful? All those "does d3 mortal wounds" endless spells just scream "couldn't think of anything else to do." It seems like a classic example of where model-led design goes wrong - sculptors come up with all these things that the rules designers have no ability to actually do anything with. Well I mean I guess I do know the answer, they need 3 per faction to put them in a box and charge you a pretty penny for them. But that's not a great reason.

It doesn't eliminate legal liability for injuries caused. You can't put out a defective product and then immunize yourself from liability simply by issuing a recall. That's not why companies do recalls. Companies do recalls to try to limit the extent of the damage by making customers aware before injuries happen so they can avoid them, to comply with recall laws, to force resellers to stop selling the product, and/or to lower the possibility of being hit with punitive damages for having knowingly disregarded a safety risk. In some cases if you can specifically show that someone was aware of the recall and chose to disregard it it may limit or in extreme circumstances even eliminate the company's responsibility, but that's typically difficult to do unless the company goes to the trouble of hiring someone to make actual physical contact with every purchaser, which companies don't usually do unless the defect is really extreme and super dangerous. It's especially unlikely to be effective with injuries to children, since children can't knowingly disregard a risk, and judges and juries are typically very reluctant to let an adult guardian's knowledge of a risk prevent a child from recovering for injuries caused by a defective product.

Whenever a new edition comes out they tend to slow-roll the releases of stuff besides the two release factions to get as many people to buy the new models as possible. I don't doubt Covid has made it even worse, but GW likes to spread things out at the start of a new edition anyway. 9th didn't get anything that wasn't based on the SM or Necron lines until January, a full six months after the new edition's release. From that point of view AOS is actually on track to get a quicker release of its 3rd army book.

That's old. The current allies list is in the 2021 Pitched Battle Profiles, which says Gitz (Aleguzzler Gargants and TROGGOTH units only). So the only Troggoths you can take as allies as ones from the Gitz book per the actual rules. Maybe they will errata that at some point to match the app and allow KB Troggoths too, but right now the app is out of step with the actual rules.

The rumor said KO would get the female sculpts, not FS. Which honestly probably makes sense. AOS already has one line of scantily clad angry females, adding another one is probably not the best way to provide more female model options.

Honestly, that's what makes it most plausible. Of course Skaven are getting nothing. 😭

You can't easily fix the Slaanesh book, the whole thing is built around the fundamentally badly designed but very strong summoning ability that informs all the other choices made. The summoning needs to be nerfed and everything else scaled up, but that means basically doing a rewrite of the whole thing.

The thing that gives me hope about that is they said it's like the 40k one, which was about making datasheet changes, not points changes. That's absolutely what they need to do - cutting the points on bad stuff just raises the price of running a bad army, and in the end, your units are still bad. They need to be brave and actually deal with the problem issues, not just hand out points reductions to stuff that's bad.

I'm glad they finally put out something making clear that 40k remains a cautionary satire. I just wish they had done more in the recent past to keep that clear; it's obvious to those of us who have been in the hobby a long time, but that's partially because it used to be so much clearer in the past that the Imperium were not the good guys. GW has spent the last decade or so making Space Marines into something approaching more generic heroes, and I've always said that was a very dangerous thing to do given the basic set-up of their universe, and so it has proven. I hope this heralds a return to 40k's roots, but I suspect it's more of a one-off PR statement (albeit a welcome one, don't get me wrong).

The 3.0 rules around coherency and command abilities result in a competitive game where people take MSU melee and big blocks of shooting units, and that feels and looks dumb on the table. When they went to 1" coherency they should have also gone to fighting w/in weapon range or w/in .5" of another model that is itself w/in weapon range. And unleash hell should probably be changed in some way that limits its effectiveness on big blocks - either make it cost 2CP for a reinforced unit to do it, or say you can only ever fire as if the unit was not reinforced (i.e. you only get the amount of shots you would on a min-size unit, no matter how big the unit actually is). I prefer the latter approach, because it deals with most of the feels-bad that comes from the ability when put onto something dumb like 30 sentinels.

Are they really, though? I obviously don't know for sure, but I'd be surprised if battletomes and codexes make up a significant portion of GW's income, and even more surprised if that income wouldn't largely be replaced by people buying more plastic instead if they didn't have to spend that money on paper.