swarmofseals

A fair point -- there are some battleplans where you can't do this. Blood and Glory, Border War, Three Places of Power, Gifts from the Heavens, Take and Hold, Starstrike, Shifting Objectives, and Blade's Edge all have smaller deployment zones like you describe. That's a little less than half of the battleplans, and some of those are pretty rarely played. Of the GHB2020 plans only a quarter have problematic zones. Anyway though, I think that if the matchup is only bad on less than half of the battleplans and even then only if they get to choose to play first (50% chance against 3 drop KO, and never against any other KO build) is a fine matchup overall.

@DJMoose Ahh OK, that does explain it then. When playing against KO if I am not getting the turn choice I'll keep my snakes 15.1" back from my front edge if they are using Grundstok Thunderers and 9.1" back if they aren't. That way my snakes only have to worry about the torpedoes and the big gun. Even using aether-gold that's only going to kill 3-4 snakes on average.

I find this surprising -- have they not folded pretty quickly when you take out their Ironclad on turn 1? Also, I have to admit to everyone that I'm embarrassed to have completely forgotten that Lauchon exists. It's not foolproof, certainly, but it makes the Morathi + 20 stalkers combo work even without Khailebron, not to mention the Mirror Dance shenanigans that you guys described earlier.

I have to respectfully disagree with you there. The problem is rounding. Let's say you develop mathematically consistent way of pointing warscrolls. You put a warscroll into the model and it spits out a value of 95 points. You put in another warscroll and it spits out a value of 94 points. These warscrolls are going to be almost identical in power level, but 10 point rounding will leave one at 90 points and the other at 100 points. If the warscrolls are within the same faction that can be the difference between one being competitive and the other seeing no competitive play. If we're talking about basic battleline for two different factions it could have a significant impact in faction balance. The less rounding we have the better.

@Chumphammer I've tried very stalker heavy lists pretty extensively and have slowly moved away from that approach in favor of a balance between stalkers and sisters. Pure shooting proved to be too vulnerable to losing the first priority roll and I don't think that being able to cut more battleline would help with that problem. Having stalkers as battleline would be great, but unless there are other changes that enable a full shooting approach I don't see myself going full ranged. EDIT: I can imagine going 20 stalkers + Morathi though, of course.

Ahh OK, didn't realize you were factoring in any new rules. Where did you see the battleline thing in the new book?

@Nuitari you're missing a battleline

I think that access to Vyperic Guard and Scathcoven in non Cobra Kai temples puts and end to my Temple Nest experiments, although the announcement of the new tome really obviates any experimentation until the new book is out. With that said, here's my vote for the most busted list of the soon to be sunset tome: Morathi Medusa 20 Stalkers 2x5 Sisters 10 Witch Aelves/Sisters of Slaughter Vyperic Guard This leaves 160 points which should probably be spent on either a Hag Queen or a unit of Khainite Shadowstalkers plus an endless spell (if the metagame supports going to 3 drops) or 10 further Witch Aelves/Sisters of Slaughter if it doesn't. Subfaction is Khailebron.

I've been playing a lot of snake heavy lists recently against competitive opponents (several games against Fangs of Sotek Kroak lists, Teclis Lumineth lists, Tzeentch Archaon, Nagash/Katakros OBR lists (better than it sounds), KO, Changehost, etc) and have found that Melusai already perform competitively. There are bad matchups for sure but I have very rarely had a game where I didn't think it was winnable and most games were quite close. __________ Regarding the command models thing -- I find this to be a great opportunity to convert some of the standards. I usually have one model with the typical unit standard and then any other standards are much smaller. So the "main" banner bearer is holding something akin to the Platoon standard while the other standards are squad standards. Musicians often don't stand out as much as 2-4 identical standards, but if there are plausible conversions for them I'll do what I can.

It's definitely a powerful ability. I think there is a lot of potential there as their baseline stats are OK. The problem, as always, is finding room for them in lists. Edit: here's a rough sketch for DOK: Bloodwrack Medusa (general) 2x Hag Queen 2x20 Blood Sisters 1x10 Blood Stalkers 10 Witch Aelves 2 Akhelian Allopexes This list isn't going to break the game or anything, but I think it'd play well in a lot of matchups. The combination between the net launchers and Blood Sisters should be pretty obvious. I hate not having room for shadowstalkers, but at least the speed of the allopexes helps mitigate that a bit.

Love the model but man is she about to give herself the weirdest haircut.

Good point. This and the way that the Vampire Lord seems really tacked on makes me wonder if the Lumineth bit was a plant but the Vampire Lord was a true leak.

I was kinda meh on the archer mounts initially but I like them quite a bit in these new pics. The poses are great, and the riders look fantastic aside from the (likely fixable) crazy hats. I'd like the mounts more if the heads were a little bit larger but overall a solid hit. That Lumineth lord though... amazing. Love it.

I have to admit when I saw a notification that @KingBrodd had replied to my post my immediate reaction was "no no, a cataput that flings a mega gargant is way too much." But I'm glad to see that you are being completely reasonable here XD

Bah! nothing could be cooler than a squig mangonel. And yes, GW model designers that is a personal challenge. Prove me wrong.

addlasdlhsdjhd it's criminal that GSG didn't get a re-envisioned doom diver and perhaps a variant that tosses squigs. The doom diver is probably the most greenskin thing ever made. Can you imagine if they had made it into a large scale artillery piece that you could load with whatever you want? Putting more stuff in it would reduce the range and increase the chances of a malfunction perhaps, but you could try to throw trolls or even mangler squigs down the board if you wanted.

@Chumphammer Personally I'd probably stick with the CP as gives you insurance against an opponent who can take the first turn and kill a bunch of sisters. I don't think you can afford to have that unit eat battleshock on turn 1. If you wanted to try endless spells though I'd definitely take the first package over the second. Geminids are amazing and I think that you're right that maelstrom can be nice in a few matchups. I've found that shackles rarely works because it rarely actually prevents movement due to being so easy to dispel.

Thanks for the heads up! I managed to snag some things off the US website just before they went out of stock.

@yukishiro1 @mojojojo101 A fair point, to be sure (and one big reason why I think everyone should be playing on TTS or proxying before investing in a tabletop army. That being said, anyone who is playing enough AoS to have a realistic shot of going 5-0 at a GT is probably testing before buying/building/painting the entire army OR is good enough that they don't need to play strictly on meta or both. If you don't have the time to extensively test lists before you buy, build and paint them then (in my opinion) you would be much happier not worrying about the meta and what lists are 5-0'ing majors because you yourself aren't really going to be doing that. A side note -- while it's clearly a risk to buy, build and paint an off meta army I'd argue that it's just as big of a risk if not a bigger one to buy, build and paint on meta. The majority of top meta lists get nerfed and it's quite a crapshoot as to how big the nerf will be.

@NinthMusketeer, wasn't @stratigo arguing that nobody cares about playing/discussing off meta lists? My point is that there is a small but vocal portion of the AoS community that indeed does only care about discussing meta lists but that most players (and even highly competitive players) don't really approach the game this way. Hence underestimating.

@stratigo@NinthMusketeer stratigo, I think you may be underestimating the appeal of playing off meta. I've been playing a lot of competitive games on TTS with largely serious players (many of the folks that have been putting up good results in Hammertime and other COVID times online tournaments have been regular opponents). I was surprised to see that most people seem to enjoy pushing lists that are a bit off meta -- either underplayed factions that still have some decent builds or unconventional builds of powerful factions. It's actually really rare that I've found someone playing a straight meta list. Personally I think one of the biggest problems with the AoS community right now is that the most vocal parts of the community treat the game like the only worthwhile pursuit is trying to 5-0 a GT. The vast, vast majority of players aren't really even trying to do that, nor are they good enough to have a reasonable chance of doing so even using the hardest meta list out there.

I've played against LRL competitively quite a bit on TTS. The most I've seen in a list was 15. Generally I think they are quite strong, but they are very feast or famine depending on what they are up against. They are pretty awful with no attack bonus, decent with +1 and excellent with +2. As a result it's very risky to overload your list with them as you will have a very hard time in certain matchups. Armies like Orruk Warclans, SCE, Ogors, Fyreslayers that pretty much exclusively have 2+ wound models will be tough, as will quite a few builds of other armies (most IDK, some DoK, StD/Nurgle, etc.). I think 5-15 is probably the sweet spot.

Ohh for sure, I'm not suggesting that this will actually happen and certainly not any time soon. Mostly just that I wish it would! Disciples of Khaine were never in tabletop but they were such a cool class in WO:AOR.

I'm not seeing that image as 100% a gun. Looks like it could be one of those weird-grip knives/swords too.

Nothing strategic to post today, but I started thinking about Warhammer Online and got to musing about how incredible it would be if GW would develop a unit for DoK based on the Disciple of Khaine class from that game.