Sception

Yeah, I was very wrong about not much changing. They re-wrote like every unit, and all the faction and subfaction rules. It's going to take a long time to absorb all this. I think it looks stronger overall, but so much has changed that I really don't feel comfortable calling it one way or the other.

New hunger presents an interesting tactical dilemma in terms of when you activate hungry units in combat. Do you activate first to get their attacks in before the opponent has a chance to kill or bracket them but at the cost of wasting hunger since you can't heal wounds you haven't taken yet, or do you activate them later in the hopes of healing whatever damage they do take? Obviously the choice will depend on whether they're already hurt & what it is they're up against, but I like rules that make you stop to think and maybe not do what would otherwise be the obvious best thing.

Exactly. Pretty much the only thing I'm not happy about from the OBR previews are the points, and either I'm wrong and they're actually fine as is or I'm right and they come down over time. I suppose I'd have preferred if the crawler hit harder, but I'm not surprised that the devs are still snakebit from how strong it was on its initial release. I mostly like how they've resolved the relentless discipline thing to work with 3rd edition core rules, and that's been my biggest frustration with obr since the edition change. IMO things are looking pretty good. I'm eager to see the remaining warscrolls.

ppints leaks are in, along with nagash's warscroll. The new one is 'better' as in better designed - cleaner & less confusing. but they didn't do much to increase his durability and cut his damage output way down by remobing the ability to spam arcane bolts (what are you even supposed to do with 8 casts now?). some bits did get stronger (5+ ward aura, damage brackets don't reduce his casting & unbinding bonuses), but overall I'd call it another nerf even before the +65 points cost increase he's also been hit with, so pretty bad for those who actually ran him on the table. honestly everything feels a bit overpriced, even if nagash is by far the worst. but even if my kneejerk reaction is right about that, the worst case scenario is that points get adjusted down in the future.

warcom preview article is also up: https://www.warhammer-community.com/2023/04/05/ossiarch-bonereapers-our-top-five-new-rules-from-the-battletome/ looks pretty good to me, but I'm not expert enough at the game to call overall impact out from rules alone without seeing them play out on the table.

Battle report is up. I've been going through slowly picking out rules details over here: vampirecounts dot net/threads/warhammer-obr-battle-report.33160/ about half way through the video now, but gotta do actual work so I'm not able to finish it or translate over to a new thread here yet. I'll try to get to that later.

You know, if their rules stay mostly the same as they are now, the Askurgan Trueblades would work pretty well with Ivya. Maybe not the best aesthetic match, but mechanically they'd pair up to make for a heck of an anti-monster silver bullet. I'm not sure what monsters exactly are tearing up the current meta enough to justify that sort of dedicated counter, but still.

The problem with more playtesters is that it inevitably leads to more leaks. This has been a recurring pattern over the last couple decades of GW rules development. They'll start taking balance more seriously and bring on more play testers, including people from the competitive community, then they'll start having entire playtest army books leaking months before release and respond by firing most of the play test crew, going back to mostly just the dev team and a handful of trusted individuals who maybe aren't the most competitive & don't necessarily have experience with any particular faction. But then you start seeing wildly unbalanced books - stuff that clearly had no QA applied to the rules themselves, and eventually that gets enough negative attention that GW makes a show of re-committing to balance and taking on more testers again. We've seen this go back and forth a few times. The main thing is that rules dev attention seems to go hand in hand with model range attention. Not in the sense that new models are deliberately made op, but rather a big event release that gets the studio time to design and manufacture a bunch of new kits also gets the studio time to take a close look at the rules and get more games in to see how those rules feel on the tabletop. Hence the heavy revision to our warscrolls - including many that had been largely unchanged from Compendium: Vampire Counts to Grand Alliance: Death to Legions of Nagash - corresponded with the major update to our model range last time around. Hence why I do expect major updates to the Seraphon Rules with their new book and model range, and still hold out hope for major updates to the FEC rules later this edition. If the minis side of the studio only had time for a quick pity hero, then I doubt the rules writer had much time for more than a quick revision to our faction rules & warscrolls. That doesn't mean significant changes are impossible. As an example off the top of my head - again, just an example, not a change I actually expect to see - removing the 1/turn limit on healing a given unit with invocation is a miniscule change that would have a significant effect on how the army plays on the table. .... Another thing worth considering is that the memories of developers last longer than the rules that form those memories. There's an expression, 'snakebit', relating to the phrase "once bitten, twice shy". Negative play experiences can result in continuing nerfs over multiple revisions to the rules even after rules that caused the initial negative experience were removed. In 40k, the 3.5 revision to chaos marines was amazing, but also way over the top in power level relative to the rest of the game, and caused such a reaction that chaos books seemed to be held down for multiple editions thereafter, all the way to late 7th edition, out of fear of bringing back the bad old days of 3.5. It might be hard for some of us to remember today, but early 2nd edition Legions of Nagash was absolutely one of those legendarily-bad-play-experience factions. Multiple major tournaments closed on Nagash+grimghast mirror matches. LoN recursion was off the charts for its time, and even as other books caught up in power level and our win rate fell back into the midfield, it was still a memorably bad play experience when 30 grimghasts died only to reappear at full strength moments later. Preventing the crossover power of invocation & ghosts is likely part of why both nighthaunts and soulblight had their rules re-written to not play nice together as allies anymore (SBGL allied heroes can't invoke in nighthaunt armies anymore, allied vamp lords can't use their command ability to buff nighthaunt summonables, nighthaunt allies in SBGL armies aren't even ethereal anymore), and that over the top recursion leading to bad experiences against LoN is exactly why our healing is so much weaker now than it used to be, weaker even than some armies where healing isn't a core part of their narrative identity. Frankly, I'm /still/ impressed that the devs had the presence of mind and restraint to improve the power of many of our warscrolls while they were weakening our faction rules. SBGL was a nerf to LoN, but a dramatically more considered and better implemented nerf than pretty much any such faction nerf I'd seen in the past, and I've been playing GW games for a long time. But the point is those memories of losing hopeless games to overpowered undead legions in the early days of 2e are still strong in many people's memories, likely including some of the devs, and it seems likely that they'll be, if anything, overly cautious with our rules for a while, particularly with the recursion.

I'm not saying there will be no changes. just that from experience the things that get changes are often not the bits people want or expect. Once again, consider the mawtribes book. people expected obvious needed improvements to the bcr traits and to chronically bad units like the thundertusk. instead those things were left the same, the already strong frostlord on stonehorn got even stronger, and the big cannon got such a big buff that the whole faction went from a melee charge army to an artillery countercharge army, like obr were back in 2e when the crawler was good. Or consider the spell lores in the current book and how they changed from LoN. in LoN the deathmage lore was pretty goid & the vampire lore was pretty bad, and in SBGL, a book that specifically centered vampires, they left the pretty good necromancer lore mostly in place and took the pretty bad vampire lore and made it way, way worse. You can't just assume the devs see the same problems with our book that we do. they likely aren't a long term player, and may not have played any games at all with or against the current army before rewriting their rules. making vampire lords stronger in particular. I want to see it too, but vampire lords, at least those nit riding zombie dragons, haven't been meaningfully stronger or tougher than regular human fighty heroes since age of sigmar's release, despite 4 chances at their rules, so it seems gw just doesn't see vampires that way in AoS. regardless, we do finally have a rules preview, albeit specifically for the new named hero: https://www.warhammer-community.com/2023/04/04/ivya-volga-is-a-consummate-monster-hunter-who-brings-the-cruelest-creatures-of-ghur-to-heel/ without profile or points cost you can't say for sure of course, but from the preview she's already looking a lot better than I expected, so if you want a strong counter argument to my reflexive negativity, there you go. Look at that debuff on monsters in melee! the end of the article has mentions further battletome previews later in the week, but the phrasing is curious: "Check back later this week for your first look at some of the new powers available to the Soulblight dynasties." "new powers", eh? Sounds interesting. Sounds almost like... No. Not getting my hopes up. We'll see it when we see it.

LOS is short for "legion of sacrament", no? Locus of Shyish wasn't unique to Legion of Sacrament. It applied to the deathmage & vampire spells regardless of subfaction, just like it does now. unless by LOS you just mean 'locus of shyish' and im just confused over what 'specific to them' means.

nit picking details aside (locus of shyish wasn't an exclusive LoSac thing, it was part of the lores as it is now), many 3e books have a bunch of copy pasted stat lines, warscroll rules, & faction rules from their 2e versions, particularly in the case of books that didn't get major model range updates. This is even the case for existing rules that were pretty much recognized to be terrible by just about everyone who had any experience with the faction. The current ogor book is inarguably an improvement on their 2e book, but ask any ogor player about how the 3e battletome handled the beastclaw raider faction traits, or the thundertusk warscroll, and they'll let you know how how copy-paste from 2e can still blight 3e tomes. I'm not saying there won't be any changes, just that it's probably a bad idea to pin a great degree of hope on any given perceived problem getting fixed, no matter how obvious that problem might seem.

the 3e trend has mostly been positive, but that trend started with our existing book. remember that, as the last 2e battletome, the existing SG book was designed for 3rd edition. Apart from missing faction tactics & strategies and 3e style ptg rules, our book effectively already is a 3e book, so there's not really any reason to expect any significant change to the current rules to update them to the edition's design philosophy.

nah. one column is obscured behind the box. the gravesite tokens we see are r2c3, r3c1, and r3c2. if the tokens are ordered left to right, top to bottom, as typical for english text, then in order you're looking at gravesite, ???, gravesite, gravesite. the natural assumption then is that the unknown token in row2, column4 is another gravesite.

I jave mixed feelings there. on the one hand skeletons ate cool, so i certainly wouldn't complain if it happened. on the other hand now that the faction is back to being vampire counts i feel like the focus should still be there, plus i wouldn't want to step on obr's toes as the bone faction.

If I were writing the book, there'd be a significant re-think of the basic rules and roles of the subfactions, with some new lore here and there to justify the changes. Legion of Night would become the Deathmage subfaction. Say mannfred went out of his way to find and recruit survivors of the legion of sacrament. give them a casting bonus for deathmage spells, re-roll 1s on endless legions as long as a LoN general is on the table, a trait to let a vampire wizard general cast as a deathmage, make mannfred know all the deathmage spells, fitting with his old world necromantic training and mastery. bonuses mostly going to deathmages would encourage more necromancers and fewer vampire heroes in LoN armies, which fits with Mannfred distrusting others of his own kind, and his own bloodline in particular. drop the battleline vargheists, mannfreds connection to them is old world fluff that doesn't really fit into aos all that well. legion of blood would be the vampire lore specialists, with that lore of course getting reworked to be good. less direct damage spells, the ones that remain being more threatening, and more personal buffs to the caster, or to other vampires. then give legion of blood the current vykos traits but refluffed, bonus to vampire casting (the strongest blood magic), and vampires gain a buff aura to enhance nearby summonables (aura of command). This makes legion of blood the archetypical undead legion, with a classic battleline of ranked lesser undead supported and enhanced by vampyric champions. Drop the battleline black knights gimmick. there's nothing especially legion of bloody about them and kastellai are already the cavalry subfaction. vyrkos then picks up the outflanking gimmick that legion of night traded away to be deathmage specialists, which imo better fits a hunting wolf pack than their current rules. If that needs any justification, say that with the final destruction of Ulfenkarn the bulk of Vyrkos forces hace temporarily abandoned civilized pretensions and returned to the wild hinterlands of shyish, skulking the forests as they did in the age of chaos. Belladamma stays a strong caster, but is no longer stronger than the first vampire and basically inventer of vamyric blood magic who has had countless thousands of years longer to perfect the art. Radubeast on the other hand becomes even more of a terrifying monster skulking the wild forests when he can appear from any table edge. for avengory, i'd switch their battleline monsters to battleline vargheists, while also making vargheists stronger in general (trade deep strike for 3d6 charge, more rend, add hunger). the subfaction is about becoming monsters, not animating their carcasses. leave the all monster all the time gimmick to gristlegore FEC. But that's just what I would do.

Thanks for the link! Dang, I really want the terrain from the soulblight-vs-stormcast box, but I've already got the minis in the set from underworlds. Do warcry vs. box terrain sets typically get released separately later? As for the FEC guys... they look ok. The leader(?) I like in particular, but the rest... they're not bad. I keep hoping that some sculptor is going to crack the code of portraying the FEC as the monsters they are while still capturing some sense of the noble knights they see themselves as in their delusions. I don't know if any FEC models ever will be able to capture that dichotomy, but these ones aren't quite what I'm looking for yet.

I agree that battletomes are more important, and I'm certainly on pins and needles waiting for warcom articles hinting at what, if anything, might be changing. But the bigger part of me expects that both new tomes will mostly be copy-paste jobs. I mean, the same pressure that meant neither of these factions are seeing significant new model releases - ie studio time and attention focused on other major projects - also means there likely wasn't a lot of spare effort to put into the battletomes themselves. Additionally, the devs who write new battletomes don't necessarily actually play the factions they're updating, which means they may be totally unaware of even the most obvious points of friction for players. For Example, OBR are super awkward and frustrating to play in 3rd edition due to how aggressively their faction rules refuse to play with the core rules of the edition. However, while this is super obvious and annoying to people who main the faction, it hasn't really translated to their overall event win rate, which has stayed mostly in the goldilocks 45% to 55% zone, so a dev who doesn't spend much time with the faction might think 'they're fine as is, no need to change much. Soulblight on the other hand started strong but over the course of 3rd did sink well below the 45% mark. But a dev might think that was mostly due to just meshing poorly with the previous matched play season. And they wouldn't necessarily be wrong there. Bounty hunters did hit soulbight's infantry based battle of attrition core build very hard, and since the new season their event win rate has already recovered back to above 45%. In the soulblights case, I honestly wouldn't be that put out by a copy paste job. There are definitely areas that could be improved, but my own biggest complaint about them really is just having to bring a random white dwarf issue with me to games, and trying to remember what rules are in the magazine and what rules are in my tome if I have to look something up. If that's the only thing the new book fits, I'll see it as a bit of a missed opportunity sure, but I won't be sorely upset or disappointed or put the army into storage Ilike I might for OBR if their new book is a copy-paste job. Which I guess just goes to my overall point. I think that OBR are in more need of a hefty rules revision that soulblight, even though by the metrics soulblight have been struggling more in 3rd edition. If the devs who wrote the rules in the new battletomes haven't been maining these armies, and if they didn't have a lot of time to lurk forums and reddit due to needing to finish the book over a weekend so they could get back to the all-hand-on-deck 10th ed 40k project, then I just don't know how they'd see that for themselves.

I like the new hero as a model in and of itself, but even accepting that we were only going to be getting a pity hero this time around due to studio attention being monopolized by lizardmen, cities, and 10th ed 40k it is still a baffling choice when 'vampire mage', 'skeleton mage', 'vampire cavalry lord', 'zombie hero', 'Wight King that doesn't come packaged on a square base', and 'named foot hero for literally any of the other dynasties' are all still missing from the current range. But whatever. Maybe I'm just old so time has lost all meaning to me, but I'm still riding high from the previous soulblight model wave, so I'm not too worked up about a lack of exciting new model releases this time around. Instead I'm more interested in the new army book. On one level, I'm not really expecting anything more than a copy-paste job incorporating cado, the new hero, the warcry warband, and the white dwarf update. After all, as of the last metawatch article soulblight did make it back up into the 'goldilocks zone' of 45% to 55% event win rates indicating that the faction overall is neither too strong nor too weak, and while we were trending below that for a while, the devs could attribute that to our faction just interacting poorly with the previous matched play season. And they probably wouldn't be wrong in that. Bounty hunters did hit us harder than most. So if soublight doesn't strictly need much attention, and studio attention is mostly focused elsewhere, a copy-paste job seems likely. Honestly, I wouldn't be too bothered by that. I was pretty happy with the current book when it released, and while the 'new car smell' has worn off, I'm still rather content. Most units are fairly distinct and at least interesting. The subfactions are cool. There are mutliple build options that play very differently. They managed to reign in the over-the-top recursion from Legions of Nagash that led to a lot of feel-bads without massacring the tone and feel of the faction. So yeah, if the new battletome releases and the only meaningful change for the faction is that I won't have to haul a random issue of white dwarf around with me when I play them, I'll be content with that. ... But it's hard not to hope for more, and there's some grounds for that hope. After all, there's a time delay on book production, so at the time this book must have been written, soulblight were in fact trending below the 45% win rate, giving the devs a reason to think they warranted some attention. And some issues with the book have been apparent for a while, or even from the moment the book was released, including: 1) the vampire spell lore is absolutely terrible. Extra embarrassing now that the faction is basically 'vampire counts' again. 2) wight kings are bad and, worse, boring. The mounted king barely has a role thanks only to the lack of mounted vampire lords, the foot version is just a worse vamp lord. 3) generic vamp lords themselves, while not terrible, are pretty bland and boring, mostly there for the command ability which means there's no reason to take more than one of them per army in 3rd edition. This maybe wasn't a big problem in the Legions of Nagash days, but now that the faction is basically 'vampire counts' again it's a problem that the vampire counts themselves aren't particularly exciting. 4) the black knight warscroll is so weak that their points had to be dropped over and over again, only becoming playable when they got cheap enough to treat them as expendable fast chaff. But now they're stepping on the toes of dire wolves and fell bats, and not even trying to live up to their narrative place as medium cavalry 'mounted wights'. 5) Vargheists - vampires who have been overwhelmed by their vampiric hunger - don't have the vampiric hunger rule. Plus their deep strike is pretty redundant with the outflanking faction rule of the subfaction that's supposed to favor them. 6) Nagash's current warscroll is confusing and incredibly fragile for is over-900 point cost. 7) this last one's maybe just me, because I don't know how popular path to glory actually is, but the PtG rules for soulblight from the white dwarf are terrible. In particular, removing summonable units from the roster entirely borks up the campaign system's unit restrictions and totally undermines half the point of a slow-grow campaign - ie, the extra motivation to get your units painted so that you can give them a cool name and write them down in your roster as a running tally of your growing army. Yes it makes sense for summonables not to gain exp or casualties, but they should still be in the roster and count towards normal unit limits. ... None of these are disasters exactly. Again, if none of them are fixed I won't be too put out. But the point is there were reasons to think the book needed some patching up at the time it was probably written, and if the writer was looking for problem areas to patch they could easily find a few. I don't want to waste much time imagining particular solutions, that sort of wishlisting is setting myself up for disappointment. But I am on pins and needles for warcom articles in the coming weeks that might indicate whether the new book will be just a copy & paste job, or something more.

No accounting for taste, I guess. 😛

Alright, I've had a sleep, and I'm feeling less salty. Soulblight: We're a couple years out now from the 2nd edition army book release, so it's a bit harder to remember now, but the 2e book did come with an absolutely huge range overhaul, still one of the best in AoS history (though the recent StD and the new Seraphon are strong contenders). The Grave Guard are a sore point, as is the lack of a cavalry vamp lord, but apart from that the range doesn't really /need/ anything, and the rules still mostly hold up. It'll be nice to not need to haul an issue of white dwarf around alongside the battletome - that's all the gravelords really need, so good. Really nothing to complain about here. The new Vyrkos named infantry hero is an odd choice, but the faction really doesn't need any new infantry heroes, so whatever. She's gravy. You could treat her as another limited edition model, just a nice looking display piece, and in that light she's fine if you like her and can be ignored if you don't. Worth pointing out - while the old grave guard are a sore point, there is a potential alternative for them that does have nice new models - the recent warcry warband. If their rules don't change much in the new book, they are a solid alternative for infantry glass hammer, particularly in legion of Night and Kastelai where at least currently they benefit from subfaction rules. ..... As for OBR - yes, this is a low key release. But their existing range was already a pretty impressive showing for a brand new faction only one edition ago. As I'm always reminding myself, it's easy to look at lumineth and start to feel jealous, but if you look at fyreslayers or KO it helps put things in perspective. And narratively, now really just isn't the OBR's time. Nagash is out of the picture. Arkhan is out of the picture. Katakros is fighting to hold captured territory in the 8 points, not currently active or expanding in Shyish or Ghur. OBR certainly needs more than Gravelords, but what we need most is new rules to make our faction's special rules play more nicely with the 3rd edition core rules. It's too soon to say we're definitely going to get what we want here, but hope is absolutely still strong. As for the new model, yeah, another mortisan is /not/ what this faction needed or wanted, and aesthetically it is overly close to the boneshaper - though that's not necessarily a bad thing. But the particular specialty of this mortisan? Supporting our big stuff - stalkers, immortis, morghasts, harvesters, and crawlers? That's potentially relevant. People have been trying to make monstrous infantry based OBR armies work since the 2e book's release, and this hero might just prove to be the missing link in that chain, at least mechanically. Plus, they just look really cool. In particular, I like their gribbly little fingers, that look like they're twisting and contorting to perform the somatic components of complicated necromantic rituals that no mortal could enact. I like their back plate with the boney tendrils extending from it. The model really captures the themes I love about the faction as a whole. ... So yeah, can't deny that I would have been /more/ excited for /other/ new hero choices, but I'm not unhappy as it is. Definitely looking with interest towards future warcom articles previewing the new battletomes. Also crossing my fingers hard that we'll see something more substantial when the FEC get their day, because that's a faction that does need a significant model range expansion and overhaul. Copy-paste battletome & a pity hero won't cut it there.

as i understand it, the people who write the books / understand the game aren't typically the ones coming up with new units. rather the sculpters make what they think would be cool. dynamic, expressive character models are the kinds of things artists find cool to craft. Also the vampire's bat swarm & the mortisan's floaty pose suspended on a tendril of magic that is also drawing away raw bone from the base to craft a new morghast above him is the kind of showy stuff thatx again, is fun & expressive to make as an artist and shows off the stuff gw can pull off with their superior production methods & materials that rival mini companies just can't do, and that even 2d printing has trouble with.

I lied, I have to get the whinging out before I can go to sleep. ... Rumors aside, I wasn't expecting anything more than the standard 'pity' hero with the two Spring books, not with the major Seraphon and Cities revamps plus 10th edition 40k this year. But that said, even for pity heroes these are rather piteous. Don't get me wrong, they both look amazing, but 'another vykos dynasty named hero' and 'another generic obr infantry caster' are literally as far as you could possibly get from what these factions might want or need or find exciting. Like you could not come up with less exciting concepts if you tried. If they wanted to give OBR a morghast support hero, which seems to be this guy's gimmick, why not an actual morghast hero? Or if that would have been too large, why not an infantry liege, since currently the only generic liege is mounted, while there are already 5 40mm-or-smaller base OBR casters, if you count the special character & underworlds model, two of which already don't see any use due to the overcrowding of that niche. If they wanted to add another subfaction-locked named vampire, why not one for literally any of the other bloodlines, which currently only have their big game monster bosses? Or if they desperately needed something vaguely vyrkos themed, because everything new has to be vyrkos for some reason, then why not a generic version of the gravedigger named character from the Ulfenkarn box? Zombies are actually popular in the army now, it would be nice if they had a dedicated hero to go with them that wasn't named, subfaction-locked, and currently dead in the canon lore. And is there really some rule saying pity heroes have to be infantry? Because it is /still/ downright shameful that the same book that finally gave us plastic blood knights also /took away/ the cavalry vampire lords who should have been riding into battle alongside them, so if there's one hero model that the faction sorely needs, it's that. They're giving us what has become the bare minimum, but in a way that feels like going out of their way to give us even less than that. Is this what Ogre players felt when their pity hero was a worse alternative to their already rarely played infantry beast hunter guy? Which is all particularly a shame because, apart from all that, just looking at them as a couple new models, these two are pretty fantastic. Like, I hate that these are the models we're getting, but setting that aside I really love both of them. ... There was one notable surprise here in that the expected death books weren't Ossiarch Bonereapers and Soulblight Gravelords, but rather OBR and Flesh Eater Courts. Partially a shame, because FEC need the rules update much more than SBGL do. On the other hand, FEC even more desperately need a significant revamp and expansion to their model range, a pity hero absolutely will not cut it. If they're not coming now, then at least there's still hope that when they do arrive we might see a proper model wave for them.

So FEC are not one of the two springtime death books. On the one hand, boo, they really need an update. On the other, at least there's still hope that when the 3e FEC book does release, it might yet do so with a more significant model wave attached, rather than just a pity hero.

Stream's Down: but you can see the new Death stuff previewed on Warhammer Community: https://www.warhammer-community.com/2023/03/23/new-ossiarch-bonereapers-and-soulblight-gravelords-heroes-rise-from-their-graves/ What I was thinking going in: What we actually got: ... First announcement is the dark angels primarch. Not undead, but dang he looks good. Second is a Horus Heresy campaign book. Still waiting on AoS ... And the age of sigmar preview is... seraphon? Wait, didn't their book already come out? No? Well, don't I have egg on my face! New cold one riders & kroxigors. They do look very nice. .... Wait, no, there is some death news... The 2 Spring Death books are officially announced: Ossiarch Bonereapers and Soulblight Gravelords, both with a single new hero. ..... New OBR pity hero, apparently buffs elites/monsters/monstrous infantry .... New Vyrkos named small hero for soulblight? Because that's what we needed more of? Eh, I can't be bitter, she looks good ... So, the Death books are OBR and Soulblight, not OBR and FEC. And while the rumors had suggested a Soulblight update later in the year, this is not the model support that was supposed to go with it, so I think we can put those rumors to bed. I'm ok waiting longer for FEC, if it means there might still be hope for a more complete range revamp & expansion, as they dearly need it. OBR has a lot of untapped potential for expansion, but what they need most critically right now is an in depth rules revamp, so I can't be /too/ mad about the pity hero treatment. Will definitely be looking with interest towards future articles that might indicate how much the new battletome will change. Same with Soulblight, I really had my fingers crossed for new grave guard, but the main thing they need is just a slight rulebook update incorporating the white dwarf update. ... Tzeentch and Sigmarines for the new underworlds season. Is it really time for a new box set/season? It feels like the very last release was the box w/ the grave guard warband? ... And of course, 10th edition 40k. Ultramarines vs. Tyranids, not Blood Angels. Some interesting news, including fully free rules on day one. Not on topic here, though. ... So, with the previous rumor pile dead, what's the future look like for AoS releases? So the undead books are still the next ones. Seraphon out in summer, along with a new ghb - I'm straight done buying those. I haven't bought the current one, and I'm glad I didn't because I've played, what, four games since it came out? I won't even get to each of the matched play scenarios before the whole book is defunct. I used to happily buy every ghb, but a significant price rise coupled with 6 month seasons just kills it for me. Anyway, that aside, Cities of Sigmar out in autumn, and two additional yet unannounced books, one in summer and one in autumn. Unless I missed something, we don't know anything about them yet, so more death this year could still be possible. ... I've got more to say here, stuff that mostly amounts to "these new hero models are cool, but they're also about objectively the furthest you could get from anything their factions actually needed or wanted," only with way more words than that, but it's going on 1am and I've got work in the morning, so that'll have to wait.

how's the dismounted knight of shrouds working for you? I want to like it - probably my best painted nighthaunt model, but whenever I look at it it's warscroll, it just doesn't seem to do enough things, or the right things.