yukishiro1

The obsession AOS has with Gods and God-tier characters squeezes out normal characters and leads to the underdeveloped non-God characters that are littered throughout the setting. It's the main way in which AOS is inferior to WHFB IMO. AOS has some great, original faction ideas that could be populated with interesting, original characters...but they're almost all just ideas, left at the level of vague sketches, because the game story is more interested in a soap opera about Gods fighting each other, which personally leaves me cold. I mean like take FEC for an example. FEC is a far more interesting and original take on Bretonnia than WHFB's version as an idea...and yet there are no FEC characters worth mentioning, because the AOS designers don't care about that, they care about Nagash getting punched in the face for the fifteenth time.

Ok, thanks, that makes sense and clears it up for me.

Oh, that's an interesting point. Weirdly enough, Spell in a Bottle doesn't even say it's cast "as if you were a wizard," it just says you can cast the spell, period. So I guess you're right, you can't stop it (unless they took arcane tome and made that dude a wizard, then you can...lol).

So are you saying that 1.6.2 applies not only to resolving the effects, but also stating that you're doing the thing? So the player whose turn it is does not have to state an intention to use any "start of the hero phase" abilities until the player whose turn it is has done everything they intend to do at the start of the hero phase? To give a concrete example: I have a bloodthirster I could charge your hero with in your hero phase using Blood Tithe. Your hero could use Finest Hour, but you would only want to do so if I'm going to charge. Both of these abilities are done at the start of the hero phase. So since it's your turn, you have to declare whether you're using Finest Hour before I have to say whether I'm charging?

This is something I can't figure out from the 3.0 base rules - when two abilities resolve at the same time, the player whose turn it is gets to choose the order of resolution. But that doesn't address when you have to declare such abilities in the first place. For example, a bunch of stuff in this game now happens "at the start of the hero phase" - notably heroic actions and battle tactics, but also stuff like Blood Tithe. Many of these things are optional, and in many cases it's extremely beneficial if you can wait to declare them until after your opponent declares their battle tactic (i.e. responding to slay the warlord with finest hour, using blood tithe to move a unit away after your opponent declares a plan that involves killing it, etc). To the extent that sequencing matters, the player whose turn it is chooses the order of resolution - but that doesn't answer the question of order of declaration. My read is that because declaring a battle tactic is mandatory, that gives the opponent a chance to react to that by exercising any optional ability they may have that also occurs at the same time. Does this seem right? The heroic action example is complicated further by the fact that the player whose turn it is has to declare first, making it clearer that the player whose turn it isn't gets to react to that choice, and thus presumably also to the battle tactic - unless the player whose turn it is can elect to do heroic actions first, and only declare their battle tactic after they're all done? When both effects are optional, I honestly have no idea what you're supposed to do if both players are playing "chicken" and want to wait for the other person to declare. A concrete example would be that it's my opponent's turn, and I would rather wait to see what heroic action he picks before I choose whether to use Blood Tithe, but he'd rather wait to start declaring heroic actions until I declare whether I'm going to do anything with Blood Tithe. Do you just have to roll off and whoever wins can force the other player to declare whether they'll use theirs first? Is there some answer to this conundrum I've missed in the rules?

Blades of Khorne has the best-designed allegiance ability in AOS. Fight me. No, really, fight me, it'll only illustrate the point.

I honestly think the AOS vs WHFB stuff has cooled down tremendously in the last couple years overall, and a lot of what's left is just people with old scars that haven't healed.

If you think people don't like Luimineth now, just wait till they get their 3.0 release in a year. 🤣 GW Executive 1: "Haha, did you see their faces when they realized we only released half the Lumineth book, then released the other half of it a year later? Pwned!" GW Executive 2: "Hold my beer..."

The big thing is Translocate not having the wording preventing you from moving after teleporting. I mean there's stuff like dragons being stupidly undercosted but that's not something they're going to fix in an initial FAQ anyway.

Dragons aren't even released, they can't nerf them yet. 🤣

Honestly I'd personally prefer if they weren't just big heroes but something fundamentally different. E.g. Gods don't start on the table, they get summoned in based on accomplishing certain things particular to each God and faction. So like to summon Archaon for example you'd need to summon him by earning the favor of the chaos gods - you'd need to get 4 dedication points, one to each chaos god, and you could accomplish them in a variety of ways - an objective you control could be dedicated to a god that matches the mark of one of the controlling units and you get that god's favor, or when you roll on the eye of the gods table that would get the favor of the god corresponding to that model's mark, or there would be a prayer all STD priests know that they could pray for the favor of the mark that matches them, or you could accomplish one specific thing for each god (i.e. wipe out an enemy unit in a single combat to get khorne's favor, cast a spell on a 9+ to get tzeentch's favor, complete a charge with a unit that's taken damage to get slaanesh's favor, heal a model 3 or more wounds or deal 3 or more MW to the enemy to get nurgle's favor). Undivided marked units can earn points for any god (only one per turn per unit, though). In terms of on the table abilities, they could have roughly the same powers they have now, but with a reduced points cost to account for the fact that they likely won't get onto the table until T3 or later unless the stars align. This makes Gods more interesting and less of an all-or-nothing choice, and also reduces the alpha potential in the game as well. Morathi, Archaon, etc are far less oppressive if they only appear halfway through the battle after you'd had a chance to wear down their followers first, instead of having to deal with a God alpha-striking your army with perfect support.

I don't like the ubiquity of big god models and I think the game has gone substantially too far in that direction. It's boring having a god in almost every game, and I don't like that they are such compelling choices competitively. I'd prefer a game where the big god models are playable but not competitively ideal. That way, if people want to play with them they can and it won't make them lose every game, but it also won't be competitively required or even encouraged.

Hmm, interesting. I do see that the FAQ only explicitly addresses climbing, not jumping. But the core rules don't say anything one way or the other re: whether you can jump partway (just as they don't say whether you can climb partway - and the fact that they said you can via a FAQ rather than an errata implies that they think the core rules don't need modifying, they just do allow you to climb partway, so why wouldn't you also be able to descend partway without the rules explicitly saying so?). Those FAQ answers are super confusing if they are trying to draw a distinction between going up, where you can end halfway, and going down, where you can't even though they don't say you can't. Climbing isn't even defined or mentioned in the core rules themselves (the only reference is in the diagram), making the whole thing even more of a mess. If you can't go down a terrain feature part of the way, that leads to even weirder results where e.g. a unit can be stranded on top of a terrain feature it can't get down from, but that it was able to climb.

Oh hey, good point. It didn't used to matter because a normal move used to include a retreat, but that isn't true any more in 3.0, and it hasn't been FAQed. I guess that does mean you can't use it in combat any more. Lame. Especially weird given that they FAQed the treelords and tree-revenants so you can do theirs in combat, but it looks like they either forgot to do it for the allegiance ability, or they meant to nerf it.

A redeploy (what a teleport is) isn't a retreat. There are no base rules restrictions on what you can or can't do after a redeploy, but typically, you can do anything except move normally - shooting is fine, charging is fine, etc. The new Translocate doesn't even have the "no moving afterward" restriction, though most of us think that's probably an error rather than something that's intentional. Some redeploys can be used on stuff in combat, some can't, but they will say if you can't - e.g. "choose a unit outside of 3" of any enemy units." If there isn't any of that language, you can do it on a unit that's in combat. The sylvaneth one has no restrictions on targeting other than being within range of a wyldwood - so you can do it on a unit in combat - and no restrictions on what you can do afterward except move. So you can shoot, you can charge, whatever.

Do you mean using the teleport, Navigate Realmroots? Yes, you can use it in combat, and you can shoot afterward as normal whether you were in combat or not (you can shoot if you just stay in combat and don't teleport, for that matter, you just have to target what you're in combat with). edit: Oops, see below. It looks like you actually can't in 3rd edition any more, due to the change in what counts as a normal move.

Fixed! I have completely reliable 100% accurate inside info that Malerion's sculpt is being modeled off David Squires' Emo Mourinho character.

Well, no. You might want to read through to the end of the post - you know, where it says "and the best thing of all is..." But fundamentally this isn't a "grievance" thread, it's a thread about peoples' views on what makes the ideal model from a detail point of view. Far from a grievance, my post was expressing my happiness with the kit I bought - I made it just as a follow-up to the original post, now that I have the models and can actually look at them in person.

Yeah, but note that RAW you can't dispel an endless spell in your opponent's hero phase with most of these models using their on-the-warscroll ability, because it specifically says you can do it only in your hero phase (because that's how it worked in 2.0). This is something that needs a FAQ/errata to fix it to work with the 3.0 rules, but it hasn't happened yet. I'd still play it that you can, but RAW you technically can't. edit: Strangely enough, Heroic Willpower doesn't let you dispel an endless spell in your opponent's hero phase, either. Go figure.

So my "old" Chaos Knights arrived. I'm glad I opted for them instead of the new ones. There are flaws for sure - the mold lines are downright egregious (I probably spent as much time removing them as actually assembling the models), the torsos don't always fit perfectly onto the legs, etc. But it is so nice to have a kit where everything is interchangeable, where magnetizing the arms is reasonably easy, and where the riders aren't molded onto the horses so the only "sub-assembly" you need to do is to not glue the riders on until after they're painted (I'm compulsive, so I'm also painting the pauldrons separately, but you really don't need to). And the best thing of all is that looking at these models...I can actually see myself painting 15 of them. Each one is going to be subtly unique because everything is interchangeable (napkin math says you can make at least ~8,000 different unique knights from this kit, even counting the shield arm as one piece), but they all look similar enough that you can use the same painting approach for each, and while there is detail here and there, none of it is excessive or difficult to reach.

Yeah, it's super weird. And the FAQ just makes it weirder.

There's no answer to this in the rules, unfortunately. AOS lacks any "wobbly model" rule like there is in 40k. So you just have to resolve it with your opponent, or roll off to see whose interpretation is correct if you can't agree. That said...there's nothing in the rules that says that a flying model must fly - it says "you can," not "you must." So if you had the movement to do so, you could choose to charge using the normal, non-flying model rules - see the thread linked above for a discussion of what those rule would be in a similar situation. My interpretation is that this would allow you to finish a charge move halfway down a terrain piece, essentially "inside" it, even if there's no space for your base to be placed on the other side of the terrain piece - in practice your model would stay on top of the terrain piece at the edge, but it'd "count" as being vertically down through the terrain to whatever height you choose to end the charge move at, as long as that height is within .5" of the base of the model you're charging. But that depends on me being right about that, obviously.

See my edit. The rules for jumping down seem to imply you can push down through terrain. And then if you end halfway through that move, you leave the model on top of the terrain, but you treat it as if its base was x inches from the ground, within the terrain piece. So yes, this ends up with your model "in" the terrain piece in terms of the rules. You don't have to agree, but that's how I'd read the rules for jumping down. The picture very clearly does not show the model being moved into the air until its entire base clears the terrain feature before it can drop down, it shows it moving till the front base edge reaches the edge of the terrain feature, and then moving straight down through the terrain feature until it reaches the ground, then it begins moving forward again. So I do think you can end your move (charge or otherwise) 1mm from the ground, with your base "in" the terrain feature. We are dealing with an imperfect system here either way in that the rules are clearly not very well thought out for vertical engagements. Honestly I kind-of wonder whether the FAQ answer that you can end halfway up or down a terrain feature was answered incorrectly by someone who wasn't thinking very carefully about it before answering.

No, you can't actually get on the ground, but you can get to within 1mm of it, and that's within .5" of the enemy if they're right on the other side of the terrain feature. There's nothing in the rules saying you have to be at the same level as the thing you're charging, just that you have to be within .5" of it, measured base to base. So if you position your models say .51" away from the terrain feature, and there is nowhere for the charging model to move off the terrain feature to end their movement within .5" of you because you've blocked it off, that would indeed RAW make it impossible to charge them. If what you are saying is that you can't do that because your base "ends" inside the terrain...that's a gap in the rules. The rules don't specify where your base is while you're halfway up or halfway down a piece of terrain. I.e. if you end your move halfway down a piece of terrain, is your base on the ground adjacent to the terrain as if you had moved off it, but you're floating in the air, or is your base still on top of the terrain piece until you get to ground level and move off it? The rules don't say, but the picture for how to measure "jumping down" on the page with 9.3 doesn't seem to show you have to clear the terrain piece with your entire base before jumping down, it seems to show you get to the edge of the terrain and then measure straight down, without having to first move forward into the air far enough to get the back edge of your base off the terrain too. So that IMO implies that when you end a move halfway down a piece of terrain, your model stays on top of the terrain and you just pretend it sunk down through the terrain.

The terrain rules in AOS 3.0 are super weird and difficult to play with in practice. Per the FAQ, a model can end its movement halfway up or down a terrain piece, even though it's not possible to actually place the model that way. So you only end your charge "on top" of the terrain piece if your movement is exactly enough to get you to the top but not to get you partially down the other side. So the way I would treat that is to say that the charge can be completed as long as the model has enough movement to "make it down" to within .5" of the model it's trying to charge, even if it can't "make it down" all the way because there's a model blocking it from ending its movement that way. The language about being able to charge up and down a terrain feature "and finish a move at any point when they do so" seems to imply this is the answer. So you can charge down the wall and end 1mm off the ground, even though you can't end on the other side because there's no place to put your base.