yukishiro1

At least AOS is getting one new model per codex, it looks like nids aren't even getting that. 🤣

I'm glad you're enjoying yourself (genuinely - not being snarky at all), but there's no need to flame people who feel differently. The feelings of being underwhelmed (or at least whelmed) are clearly fairly widespread and not restricted to people with a generally negative orientation about the game, as this thread illustrates - nobody is going to accuse the TGA mod team of being negative towards the game, and yet even they have mostly expressed agreement or at least sympathy with the idea that the game feels a bit stalled out at the moment. And the thread also shows there's a wide spectrum of opinions on this, with a lot of nuance being displayed both positively and negatively. It's not like this thread is full of "LOL this game sux haha and u suck too if you like it!" This thread has done very well so far in avoiding getting into the tired and boring fanboi vs hater thing, and it'd be nice if we could keep it that way.

I agree it's mostly a lack of forward momentum. Very little has happened since the launch of AOS 3 - no lore progression whatsoever, and very limited gameplay changes. And because the overall structure of the new tomes seems to be based around removing as many or more things than they add, they don't necessarily give you a feeling of forward momentum either. What's the main changes we've seen in AOS3 since launch? The Stormdrake debacle, overly pushed Longstrikes and Fulminators, Bonesplitterz getting gutted, Archaon and Nagash being nerfed? They released a whole new faction that looked interesting at first but that seems to basically add up to "spam a ranged MW casino unit for a 45% win rate." The Nurgle book is a solid thumbs up from me, but I'm struggling to find other clear success stories. The much-vaunted balance update that was explicitly supposed to buff weak factions ended up being a bit of a Friday-afternoon special in terms of effort and even less in terms of impact. The biggest change we've really seen for underpowered factions since AOS 3 is arguably the BoC buff, and that was in a white dwarf. It all adds up to an underwhelming package.

Yeah there was a massive amount of FW stuff that I never even knew about back in the day as a kid playing fantasy. Like I literally had no clue that stuff even existed.

I do think de facto getting rid of sub-factions is a mistake, especially when it devolves to the point it does in the SCE book where the main reason to pick a subfaction is often what spam lists it unlocks. I think they went in precisely the wrong direction on that one - what they should have kept is the interesting, thematic rules, not the "you can take X overtuned unit as batteline" rules. It's good they don't force you to take a command trait and artefact any more, but by removing most of the interesting abilities, they end up feeling extremely thin and not the sort of thing that inspires you to make armies any more - except of the spam variety when they unlock spam potential, which is not the sort of inspiration you should be aiming for.

The Nurgle tome is great and is what battletomes should be. The other 3.0 tomes are all disappointing in different ways - Orruks because Bonesplitterz got done so dirty and because they somehow managed to create a whole new faction that just isn't very well thought out, SCE because the internal balance is atrocious and it's spawned the three most problematic units in the new edition (fulminators, dragons and longstrikes), and IDK and Fyreslayers for being clealry low effort reprints of their prior tomes, just with some of what was good and bad swapped in seemingly random ways. IDK may also end up being deeply problematic from a balance point of view as well due to what looks to be incredibly overpushed namarti. 1 out of 5 being good is not a great start. But I recognize I'm more negative on stuff like this than most people. Maybe some people love the new non-Nurgle tomes.

GW is going to regret doing such a low-effort job on the IDK tome (and I say this as a sometime IDK player, this isn't sour grapes speaking). Not changing High Tide is going to be a balance nightmare that is going to continue to haunt them, and the decision to even expand the ability to get fights-first in the army via the King and to give a subfaction that allows you to charge *and* fight again - which can be comboed with the fights first in particularly horrific ways - is going to result in some truly epic feels-bads where people literally lose their entire army in one combat phase during High Tide with no ability to strike back before it happens. Maybe the aim was to create a book that can create as much NPE in melee as some books can create via shooting? Like the other side of the coin to Sentinels? It also seems to have pretty terrible internal balance, it's just that what's good and bad are reversed in a lot of cases from the old tome. No more eels, now you'll get tabled on High Tide by Namarti instead. I am not 100% sure the Namarti build is going to be competitively overpowered (though I wouldn't be surprised if it is), but I am 100% sure it is going to lead to some really serious feels-bad moments. Unless of course THWG's source turns out to be garbage, which I guess we'll find out tomorrow. But I have to think that isn't the case, I really don't think he'd have published this if it wasn't reliable given everyone will find out tomorrow if it isn't.

They discontinued that with AOS 3.0, just like they discontinued it with 40k 9th. You are correct that they still sell digital versions of AOS 2.0 rulebooks if you want to buy those, but they don't offer it for anything new and won't unless they go back on that policy.

There are events that don't use the normal battlepack rules. Nashcon, Holy Wars, etc. But those tend to be less cutthroat competitive events where that happens. There's a natural tension between coming up with your own battleplan and creating the most competitive format, and for various historical reasons, community comp tends to be a bit of a scarlet letter for a lot of AOS players. It's a lot safer and easier for TOs just to go with the GW pack, and then any blame goes to GW rather than themselves, and they don't have to deal with trying to please everybody and respond to their comments about how this or that should be adjusted. GW itself has recently moved towards taking over the competitive game rather than towards giving it more room to grow on its own (see e.g. them essentially buying out the ITC), so I don't think GW is likely to show much enthusiasm towards people creating their own battlepacks, either.

Still waiting for "counter-charge" that lets you immediately charge something that shoots at you, or make an immediate normal move closer to the shooting unit if you aren't in charge range.

The whole point they do these articles is to stir people up and get them ranting about how something will be great or terrible. They don't want to give people the full context, that doesn't "generate engagement." TBH I barely look at them and if I do I certainly don't get worked up about them, it feels like playing into the whole lame game the marketers are playing.

GW is so opposed to selling digital things that they won't even sell you a digital version of their rules without buying the physical version too.

I'm shocked they kept the Tides (and even kept the exact same effects for T2 and T4), though I am 99% sure they will have changed High Tide. Ironically it's not even such a big deal any more in a meta where so many armies rely on ranged damage and games are decided so quickly that T3 now feels like the old T4, i.e. the late game, where bonuses are less important - now you pretty much have to reverse the tides to get it to be game-changing. But I'm still sure they'll change it, one thing GW is super reliable about is nerfing the hell out of whatever was a problem 1.5 years ago.

Yeah, certain things like LotfP summoning become absurdly oppressive at 1k. Having a ~60% chance to summon 25 wounds each turn at 1K is just silly, you're literally summoning more wounds than the vast majority of armies start with. And a lot of the battle plans just aren't going to work at 1k for a lot of armies. How is a SoB player supposed to play a 6 objective mission at 1k when they very probably have only 2 models? I guess you can say "play 1 mega and 3 minis each alone, suck it up" but that's not a real answer to the player who plays with megas at 2k. Whereas conversely a 2 mega list on a 3 objective plan at 1k is probably oppressively powerful for most lists to face because the SoB player will just win simply by moving onto two objectives and sitting there, as not many 1K lists can kill a mega at 1k by T3, and if you don't you can't win. The fact that AOS doesn't have dedicated 1k missions in the GBH like 40k does says a lot about how seriously GW takes it, which is to say...not very.

Legion is a better game than AOS in terms of design (though it still has its flaws, mainly with activation spam being rewarded so much). And the minis have gotten a lot better from the 1st generation to what you see now. But they're still not really on a GW level, nor are they that much cheaper on a per-model basis for normal units - though armies cost significantly less since they're smaller, and heroes are much more reasonably priced. You pay ~$20 for a hero that can be between 100ish to 200ish points in an 800 point army standard, which is much cheaper than GW even without adjusting for the point scale difference.

Longstrikes should be artillery, and one of the special rules of artillery should be that you can't fire while in engagement range. In return it should get the damage and range potential that top-tier ranged units currently have, while said top-tier ranged units should either become artillery themselves or have their damage and/or range nerfed. Pretty much anything with range over 18" should have the artillery keyword and pay for it with no shooting in melee. Look out Sir should become a two-part rule - (1) you can't target a character unit that benefits from it at all unless it's the closest target or within 18", and (2) the normal Look out Sir we have now if you can target the character. Maybe even put it at 12" for part 1.

Artillery is fine, it's normal shooting that's too powerful, which in turn has produced an arms race with melee speed, to the point where almost all competitive armies can now hit you hard from the top of T1 if they want to, whether that is through shooting or though T1 charges. It's stupid, but it is where we are, and fixing it would require rebalancing the whole game. I don't know where I fall on whether making artillery as powerful as normal shooting would make the game even more broken, or just even out the brokenness, but my instinct is to say that anything that makes the game shootier is a mistake as long as the shooting rules remain as brain-dead as they are.

Why do you think GW is taking over the ITC? Yeah, right now they're saying they're not going to enforce a GW-only rule at ITC events (and I get the impression Brandt really believes that they have no plans to). But I think we all know that'll last precisely as long as until someone in the C-suite at GW decides otherwise, and then there'll be some rancid announcement on warcom about how it's actually in everyone's interest not to allow non-GW models at ITC events, and half the people in the hobby will defend it as "common sense" and "just a company protecting its brand."

Yeah, some of the gunpla stuff is way better from a technical engineering point of view than GW. It's a really different sort of modeling though, I'm not sure you can directly compare them.

Premium companies don't generally release products full of typos because they don't bother to pay an editor to proofread them, stuff like that is usually seen as a no-no for a premium brand image. I think it is a fair criticism to say that GW doesn't really walk the walk on being a premium company when it comes to anything besides models (and prices, of course).

The half your points on a single unit thing isn't in the GHB battlepack that I can see. I don't know if it's in the battlepack in the core rule as I don't own that and basically nobody else I know owns that either.

Just the generic CustServ@gwplc.com, I wasn't able to find anything else that seemed like it'd bit better for general feedback. I've sent general feedback there before and they just send you a form response indicating receipt with some PR nonsense about valuing your opinion. Maybe it just goes straight into the virtual trashbin but I have to think that if they get enough of them maybe someone mentions it to someone higher up.

People love ban lists. Nothing like being told you can't play with your models because someone (not even GW) decided they were too powerful. Don't get me wrong, if it works for your local group go for it by all means. But in my experience community comp tends to lead to arguments and bad feelings as people inevitably disagree as to what should be on said ban list and what shouldn't. My point is basically just that for 1K to be a serious thing competitively it needs a lot more support from GW than GW seems willing to give it at this point in time. If people aren't competitively minded I'm sure it can work and may well be a way to give people something to do with their armies while they're working towards 2K...but I don't see things shifting to 1K overall without a fundamental shift from GW. And I doubt GW is going to want to halve the amount of money you need to spend to get a competitive-sized army.

You can't balance the game both at 1k and 2k, it just doesn't work. So if you play at 1k in a game that's balanced for 2k you're going to have even bigger problems than we do at 2k with getting a balanced experience. Add to that that AOS doesn't even have a smaller board size and unique missions at 1k the way 40k does and you'd need to do a lot of work to make it a decent play experience. Like for example how does a 1k gargant list play a 6 objective mission or the one where you win if you control all 4 when your army is 4 units at most, and could be only 2? Conversely, how do you deal with stuff like longstrikes that can shoot in the hero phase once per game? You have a 450ish point unit that can shoot literally half your opponent's army off the table on the top of T1 in a 1K setting. Morathi can easily kill an entire 1k army herself in the 3 battle rounds she lives. Etc etc. It seems like you'd need house rules limiting certain units to avoid them being utterly dominant.

I know it's anecdotal, but I've seen more actual reaction to this price hike than any other. It's still just people talking - is someone who says they are shelving plans for a new army really going to do so? Who knows. But I'm hearing a lot more of it, both on the internet and in real life. Past price hike have been people forecasting doom and gloom generally, this time it seems to be less that and more people specifically saying how it's impacting them. I myself have decided not to pull the trigger on the soulblight army I was considering - not because I can't afford it per se but just because it's left a bad taste in my mouth. I've also emailed GW to let them know this - not because any one data point maters, but because if enough people do, they will tabulate it. I think the best we can hope for is that if this price hike really does diminish GW's sales significantly it will become a data point for future price hike decisions and may lead them to be less cavalier about it in future. Of course, it's possible they'd take the exact opposite conclusion and decide that it's a reason to raise prices even more to try to make up for the lowered volume. It is GW after all.