Bosskelot

I mean that's more a problem with the Necron codex; they haven't been a faction known for good AP on basic weapons since like the days of 5th-7th, 8th onwards they've just been completely pathetic in that respect. Where GW fell short in the design of the Necron codex is making them a melee army (because they actually get great ap and damage profiles on their melee weapons) but then still trying to present them as a shooting army in marketing. I will agree with you that AOC is a bad "fix" for a perceived problem, but ever since AOC was introduced I've actually tabled Marine armies, which is not something I was ever doing with Necron armies previously. Turns out buffing the anti-Marine combat units does wonders for flipping the match-up on its head from where it was in early 9th.

People will put up with, and actively prefer, a certain amount of complexity if it brings with it increased variety and freedom with how to build armies. 40k just has more of that currently so it's much easier for people to have their imaginations captured by a concept. Also Tempest of War is a god send for more casual players who don't want to or can't keep up with new mission packs. For the people whose local scenes are seeing a haemorrhaging of AOS players; is everyone just using the new GHB packs with all their new specific battalions and the new balance updates that added bolted-on additional scoring methods for very specific units and factions? Locally we have more 40k players than ever despite the edition behind 2 and a half years in and an oversaturation of new mission packs and updates. But that's probably because there are easy and accessible ways for non-competitive players to enjoy the game through those different mission packs and y'know, despite what you may have heard, in like 95% of cases armies are exceptionally well balanced towards each other with "autolosses" only happening in competitive environments with optimized lists. I still hear and see horror stories of some Sigmar armies just being incapable of winning vs certain others, even in a non-competitive environment.

Again, it doesn't help that a lot of the tomes have been very low effort affairs; many of them have very little in the way of meaningful changes and you're being asked to spend £32.50 on what amounts to a tiny range of changes and in some cases doesn't solve some long running legacy issues from previous books. It's just a good way to suck the hype and enthusiasm out of releases.

What's the general consensus of Bladelords now? Worth maybe taking in a unit of 10 even?

Hopefully. AOS's shooting rules have been consistently bad throughout its entire lifespan so far and having a more 40k Look Out Sir rule would at least be a marginal improvement for them.

Especially since they've tried to reintroduce "common" Orcs back into them with the Kruleboyz... who just don't fit in with the rest of the army at all because they visually look like a completely different species entirely. 🤦‍♂️

Gitz really are massively overdue for a new book and it's also not like they're hurting from old models or a small range. It's weird that they haven't already been released with their mandatory new plastic hero on foot already.

Getting MW's on 5+ isn't and never was the actual issue with Sentinels and you focusing on that shows you probably never had much experience playing vs the army. It was that they could shoot stuff out of LOS and re-roll all their hits with Lambent Light to explicitly fish for mortals. You cannot do either of these things anymore.

GW are not a rules driven company, they are a model driven one. The current state of the rules and/or balance has 0 relevance to what they decide to release.

As expected, the Lumineth book is mostly minor tweaks to warscrolls and allegiance abilities. Very hard to get excited about playing this new edition with my army and paying £32.50 on new hardback books when there's barely anything that changes in the rules.

Not necessarily. Remember they use CAD when making models. If you compare the monopose CSM from shadowspear with the multipart kit they have a lot of indivudual identical poses, arms and heads. I guess it's not completely new but this could just be the case of them splitting the monopose designs up and giving options of how to build them.

Comp AOS continues to have the same issue it's always had too: samey lists just focused on spamming a very small amount of units. Like, if I was to compare the unit variety of my competitive Craftworlds list in 40k, to a potential competitive Stormcast list in AOS it's actually embarrassing for the Stormcast.

This feels like a consistent issue across a lot 3.0 Tomes honestly. On the one hand it doesn't seem like it's leading to any excess craziness in terms of balance, but it's not exactly making a lot of people excited to either play their armies again or start new ones. At least from chatter I've seen around online and locally.

And Craftworlds.

The CSM codex was also obviously massively delayed, even accounting for covid etc. They repeatedly stated that the Traitor Guard would be in the CSM dex and then the dex comes out and they're nowhere to be found. That could really only happen if the dex was intended to be out before the KT box. In fact I remember leakers earlier in the year stating that Chaos was going to be before the Aeldari stuff, so clearly at some point GW's overhauling of their ERP system really probably hit a catastrophic speedbump.

Why do they need an insane re-imagining that throws everything out and starts again? When people want updated sculpts, its because they like the core designs and just want the actual models to be brought properly into the 21st century. Eldar and Chaos especially have such strong visual designs and aesthetics that have been honed over 30 years that like, what would you even do to "improve" them? That's the sort of thinking that gets grinning muscle skeletons and Alarith Stoneguard. Yeah I guess they have their fans and they're certainly unique, but they aren't going to be entering the pantheon like all the OG Jes Goodwin stuff.

Dawnbringer Crusades are probably closer than people realise. They said WE were far off and showed off some CAD renders of axes to make it seem like the project was early days; then 3 weeks later Angron gets fully leaked and then properly announced. Truly got their balls exposed on that one.

Then the question needs to be asked; why is the AOS loretuber/wiki scene so lacking and why are lore discussion hubs so barren? For a game we are repeatedly told is more popular than WHFB ever was you'd certainly expect more content about its lore or larger communities around it. Just going by reddit, r/aoslore has 8600 members compared to the 175k of r/40klore. But this giant disparity isn't really reflected in the "main" subs where r/ageofsigmar has 180k members and r/warhammer40k has 500k. Still smaller but not by nearly as much.

That's what I mean; the normal cycle is 3 years. But the last 2 years have been anything but normal and everything they are releasing is massively behind. They also really love their Summer releases for big new editions so I couldn't see a delay into the fall/winter if there is a commitment to 2023.

In normal times I'd have expected 10th next year, sure. But conservative estimates put 9th ed about nine months behind at this point so if GW really are going to try and push for a new edition despite all the delays then they must have either cut a huge amount out of the release schedule or they planned for 9th to last 2 years to begin with.

There's nothing confirmed about 10th ed next year. The recent "leak" about it was highly suspect and full of holes.

Yeah this is pretty my feelings on it too. At the end of the day leaks are just better for consumers, especially with how companies like GW operate their hype and marketing machines.

It's funny because there's elements of the Votann I like, but then those elements are ruined by squashing everything down to fit on the squatter more compact frame.

They essentially had zero input already and yet were blamed, as evidenced by a few posts in this thread, for all issues with game balance. Notice how massive leaks of the rules only happened relatively recently. When you exploit peoples labour by taking advantage of their passion without paying them and then still manage to ****** things up of course people will get pissed off. These people were giving up their free time to try and make 40k better and were getting nothing out of it in return. One has to wonder if that was always the plan by GW; to foist any responsibility for failings in the rules onto third parties. Or more likely it's just something very symptomatic of big successful corporate entities; they're insular and love to sniff their own farts and see any "outside" point of view of their ways of doing things as completely ignorable.

That's because GW wasn't listening to the feedback at all. The reason for the increased frequency of leaks was because a lot of the playtesters were getting frustrated and pissed off with things.