Dogmantra

Oh, do you have a link? The way the article was written really suggested to me that the rules for sacrosanct were fully being retired and that refreshes would be for some of the non-sacrosanct units. That's great news if the rules are staying because I know a lot of folks, myself included, think sacrosanct is the best.

I think the list is which kits are being discontinued rather than which models are being removed (as we already know that Liberators will still be around as thunderstrike liberators), and in that case, knight-incantor doesn't have an official standalone kit, if you're not getting one out of a starter set or one of a bajillion unique sculpts, then the way you get one is by building a foot evocator as an incantor. That said you can just use a Knight Incantor as a Knight Arcanum if they don't continue to have non-legends rules. Silly that they even thought there needed to be another foot wizard hero but yknow.

My understanding from the article is that sacrosanct isn't getting new sculpts, it's just going away, and I imagine some of the random foot heroes are in the same boat - things like the knight heraldor. I imagine some of the other stuff is staying, just getting thunderstrike updates like we know liberators are. If I had to guess I'd say Prosecutors will be in that boat (based on the fact they are in the realms of ruin rts, which also had thunderstrike liberators). I already have in mind some counts as ideas, things like running dracolines as dracothian guard, foot evos as annihilators, I think there'll be a place for most of it. It is disappointing though, as it's by far the best set of sculpts in the entire SCE line, and had the most interesting rules for 2nd and 3rd ed. It's definitely tempered my expectations for 4th, which is a bit of whiplash given the army organisation thing got me super excited.

I don't think so, I believe we're in different countries. It's more likely to be the only real way to do a big MW bomb for a decent price and support it with generically good units.

I've played against a less all-in version of the list, if I recall correctly it had 3 vexillors, the everblaze comet, and a decent amount of shooting support from deep strike Tempestors. It ended up being more interactive than you'd think with the mind games, obviously you expect to get bombed turn 1, so you can try to deploy against it by spreading out to minimise it, but then it becomes a game of can you lower their potential output enough before they decide to pull the trigger and drop the bombs on you. In the end, the dracoths ended up being the main threat, and there's really about the same interactivity between vexillors dropping their MW bombs and tempestors dropping from the sky to shoot something important.

It's interesting to see how different people's experience with AoS is from mine. I only played a little bit at the end of 2nd, so perhaps it's the thing where your first edition is always your favourite. A bunch of stuff about scoring, heroic actions, and monstrous rampages I really like Heroic Actions and Monstrous Rampages. At the start of the edition I thought they were a bit conservative, and as newer tomes have come out we've seen some armies that use them well with their own bespoke actions. Unfortunately given the way armies are updated that does tend to make it into a bit of a haves and have nots situation. Heroic Actions would be a great way to add some more variety to the twenty odd foot heroes Stormcast have, but they don't have any because of the point they were released in the edition, it's a shame. Hopefully they stick around for the future and we see some more robust use of the systems. Battle Tactics seem like such a polarising topic, and I really like them, conceptually at least. Again, it feels like the first GHB was very conservative but they've got a bit more interesting as the game goes on. I think they're at their best design-wise when they ask an interesting question about how confident you are about this turn - offering you the option to score points if you make things a little harder for yourself. Sadly I'm not sure there are too many of these, Bait & Trap is probably my favourite example from the latest set of tactics, it's not too tricky to do if you're set up for it, but the interesting part is do you really want to do it? Will the loss of two units' worth of fighting output and the engagement of two units who are probably not your primary hammers be worth the 2 points in the long run? You can see evidence of this sort of thinking in other tactic designs - Magical Dominance almost manages it, suggesting a neat risk/reward calculation where you have to weigh up how many spells you want to cast with the idea that the more you cast the better your turn will be, but eventually one will get unbound. It doesn't quite come off that way though due to how powerful +s to cast are and the unbinding range, so in actual play it seems to be more like can you manage to not miscast mystic shield turn 1. I think ditching them would be a shame, they're close to something really special and interesting! Heroic Actions, Monstrous Rampages, and Battle Tactics are also all the targets of the critique that they're too hard to remember, but I rarely see Battleplans mentioned, which I find a bit strange because HAs, MRs, and BTs work the same in every game you play in any given season, but for battleplans you're playing one of twelve, most of which swap out each season. Some of them are very gimmicky and tricky to keep track of (limited resources), some are fairly straightforward, but most of them have at least one extra rule to remember that only applies for that battleplan. In my experience at least, with repetition over several games the things that happen every turn of every game become fairly rote, while you need many more games to get the same kind of repetition for batleplans. Kill Team's approach to Matched Play was to separate out the board and objective setup from the way you interact with them to score points, giving more variations but less to remember because it's a combination of two things. I think that's doable for AoS, and it's sort of what those open play decks already do, you know the ones with a twist for each battle. Grand Strategies are currently very bad but could be much more interesting and have most of their problems solved with a single rules tweak: choose your grand strategy at the start of the game, not during army construction. Having to pick the same grand strat to apply to every single battle pushes everyone into the most conservative choice which is usually one that disincentivises interaction. Looking at the latest GHB, something like Overshadow is what you want from a way to score - it gives both players an incentive to chase after fights and make things happen because if they are good enough they either score or deny 3vps for doing so. Except when you build your army you have no idea if you'll be against someone taking three lots of five liberators just for the battleline requirement, or someone running 120 zombies and you will just not have enough damage output to compete in the game and get your grand strat. That's sort of okay in itself, but when that grand strat exists in the same universe as Spellcasting Savant, where you have a lot more control and your results are going to be a lot more even across matchups, why would you ever choose Overshadow? (It also lets you rewrite Slaughter of Sorcery to remove the very silly fact you can just get 3 vps for free if there are no wizards in the game without replacing it with the equally bad you just can't possibly get your grand strat if there are no wizards in the game). With this tweak I think there are still a few strats that would need changing (fyreslayer invocation lol) but it makes the decision a bit more interesting without adding too much extra. Core battalions On battalions - they're too much of a halfway measure for me. The list building straddles this annoying line where it's loose enough that it feels like you should be able to just put whatever you think will work well on the table together, but then the battalions add so much extra reward for sticking to certain patterns that if you don't take advantage of them you're playing with a hand tied behind your back - especially at the start of the edition fitting into one drop was so important for some armies. I'd like them to either ditch core battalions entirely or to double down and make them mandatory more like force organisation charts. With warscroll battalions and now core battalions it feels like there's some faction within the AoS design team that really likes the idea of force organisation charts, like the old 40k detachments, or warhammer fantasy, or any number of historicals but they're told no, that's not in the scope of what AoS is supposed to be, so they keep trying new battalion ideas to get a semblence of the idea but it just never works quite right.] The GHB The actual physical spiral bound book that you get when you buy the ghb is absolutely fantastic and was a brilliant innovation for this edition. It makes a ton of sense to separate out the core and matched play rules for the more competitive crowd, and spiral binding is just nice for it to lay flat on the table. I want to see this happen for more games! The only criticism I have is that they go out of date so quickly, the expectation from digital games being patched on a regular schedule carrying over to tabletop games is... eh. It's nice that companies are willing and able to do more tweaking to make a balanced experience, but I think there's a lot to be said for letting rules just stick around for a while and seeing if people figure out new ways to play. Six months is just not a really long time for a tabletop wargame to develop a stable metagame. I was once part of a card game community with 20 selectable characters. Broad consensus was that there was a clear top three best characters although most were considered playable, but there was a period of a couple of months where a couple of dedicated players really dived into a character thought to be mid-tier and ended up essentially adding a fourth top tier character in the minds of basically everyone. All of this happened with no changes made to the game, just to the perspective of players figuring out how to use things. AoS is on a completely different scale but I think letting the fields lie for a bit is a good thing. Six months is way too short, but I think GW realise that now. Battlepacks Side note before I talk about the Pitched Battles stuff, I like that 3rd edition properly formalised the idea of battlepacks and it did feel at the time like GW expected more events to make up their own battlepacks in addition to events using Pitched Battles. I started writing one of my own a while back and it was a fun design challenge, it's something I'd like to see more of because I think there are interesting things you can do that GW are not likely to do, and it also lets you address your own criticisms of the game (e.g. if you dislike battle tactics, just leave them out of your battlepack, or write new ones. I do think it's a bit of a cop out to say oh yeah just houserule it but the section on battlepacks in the core rules really does suggest it to be an expected mode of play that your local store might make up their own battlepack for example) The official Pitched Battles battlepacks have been mixed. I think the best way to characterise them is that they have mostly achieved exactly the opposite of what they wanted. Speaking here mostly about Galletian Veterans and the Primal Magic ones. Bounty Hunters ended up making it so the play for many people was to just avoid taking any veterans at all as they died far more easily, and primal magic dice seem to end up with more spells being unbound and endless spells being weaker due to the order you have to choose to use dice in and there being no risk to adding unbinding/dispelling dice. I also mentioned above that I think the battleplans can be a bit too gimmicky. Random final thoughts That was a lot of words, I hope someone reads all that. Not much else but I did think - I don't miss rerolls in the sense that eliminating a lot of them does help speed up the game but I do think something is lost with the switch from things like Mystic Shield being reroll 1s to being a flat +1. It is strictly more powerful, but that's not really my issue, I think it slightly lessens the importance of the original characteristic. A +1 is, on average, 1/6 more attacks being blocked. In absolute terms, if you're getting hit with 12 attacks, a +1 will on average block two more than you would have without the +1 regardless of what your save was beforehand, whereas gaining the ability to reroll 1s will block more attacks for a 3+ save than a 5+ and with rend so prevalent that just sort of feels more right to me. Minor quibble.

Having run him a fair bit, I think it's rare that you want to keep the celestant prime in the sky til turn 3. 7 attacks is really enticing but it can be a trap - I think he's best suited to using the d3 mw bomb as much as possible and if that means only 3 attacks and going after weedy support heroes then so be it

They lose the Leader role, not the Hero keyword. Since you have to take them with another Leader, it means you're not spending two of six leader slots on comparitively few models.

Vanguard Hunters & The Farstriders seem like really high value units for their cost. The ability to teleport for battle tactics is super duper useful and has only got better with the later GHBs I think. Same with the LA on Gryph Charger who I always loved, but he gets so much value from that teleport - stay out of unbind range turn one for a magical dominance, give him the luckstone and you have a guaranteed hero charge for led into the maelstrom. I played an event at the weekend where the only teleportation I had was Translocation and it felt like playing with a hand tied behind my back. In other news, the FAQ drop today fixes the little bug with the army of renown by adding the "including unique units" disclaimer to the prayer scripture and spell lore.

Also Knights-Judicator, occasionally Vanquishers instead of Libs for your cheap battleline, I've seen Vigilors used to surprisingly good effect recently. It's hard to beat Dracothion Guard for pure efficiency though, especially as battleline.

According to Goonhammer, they forgot to specify that unique units can take the spell or prayers. However, the only priests and wizards you can actually take in the army of renown are Ionus and Krondys, so it's pretty safe to say it's an accidental omission and will be addressed as soon as they notice. Ionus still can't take Curse though which makes me a sad panda

This is the rule as of September 2023, exact text copied from the pdf. I've broken it down into sections to explain them bit by bit: This part is the same as it always was, but be careful here with "enemy" and "friendly", the Hero doesn't have to be in combat at all. The sentence is written entirely from your perspective, so if the enemy Hero is within 3" of an enemy unit, that means those units are both your enemies (i.e. they're friendly to each other). The name of the rule helps here, as you can think of it as the unit warning the hero to watch out. This bit is new, and it is an addition to the previous section. If the previous bit would apply, and the enemy Hero is on foot, then you cannot target them at all (instead of the -1 to hit) unless you are within 12". So if your enemy has a foot hero, say a Necromancer, and that unit is within 3" of a unit of 10 Skeletons, then you can't shoot the Necromancer if you are more than 12" away. If instead that Necromancer was only within 3" of your units, then you can freely shoot it from anywhere on the board with no penalty. This is again, the same as before, and it means that none of the above applies to any Hero with 10 or more wounds.

And here's the rub! I think the GW system of rolling battletome releases rather than redoing everything in one go per edition has stopped them doing this because they currently have to use really clunky terminology like unit with wounds characteristic of four or less that doesn't have a mount (except companions), when you could just give that an INFANTRY keyword and be done with it. 4th edition would be a really good opportunity to either go the index route or just add more keywords to everything to enable something like this to work elegantly.

This was added to the FAQ released recently:

Yes