Sception

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.

Nighthaunts were big beneficiaries of the previous matched play season, with Galatian Veterans letting 32mm base battleline infantry fight in two ranks (big boost for bladegheists in scarlet doom and dreadscythes in quicksilver dead), and the scenarios further encouraging the use of these same units. The Krulghast Cruciator was also heavily favored, as it allowed nighthaunt armies to negate the effect of the bounty hunter detachment, which tended to keep galatian veteran units from other factions in check. Naturally, given how much the previous season's rules played not just to nighthaunts in general, but to specific nighthaunt units, heroes, and subfactions, the upcoming change in season is likely to affect how the Nighthaunt faction plays more than many others. The actual rules for the new season have fully leaked at this point, including battlescroll, points changes, & all. I'm not going to post the leaks here, iirc that's against the rules, but it doesn't take much googling to find it. Here's some notable points: Focus shifts from gelato vets to gelato champs. 2 rank fighting for battleline infantry is gone (but see battalions below), extra rules for battleline infantry claiming objectives or scoring secondaries is gone. Instead we get extra rules for non-named infantry heroes below 10 wounds, in particular that they can't normally be targeted by shooting while near other friendly units (but see battalions below), gain preferential scoring rules in some missions and secondaries, gain some new heroic actions, special enhancements, artefact options, etc. new core battalions (replacing expert conquerors and bounty hunters) one special bodyguard battalion for a gelato champ plus a unit. no actual bodyguard rules, instead the hero and unit can activate back to back in the combat phase. the unit also gains some favorable scoring in some of the secondaries. one for ranged units to let them shoot gelato champs even when they're near other units one for infantry units (not just battleline) allowing them to fight in 2 ranks There's also a new command ability for use in the combat phase that gives the target unit +1 attack in exchange for not being able to pile in. Obviously better on single model units with multiple weapon profiles (monsters, heroes). Potentially useful on smaller units with reach or 2 rank fighting, but even then pile in will often get as many attacks, so iffier there. .... so, some first impression thoughts. Down, but still very good Krulghast Cruciator. Still very strong, but less of a must-take without bounty hunters in the mix. I certainly wouldn't consider taking multiple like I might have last season. Bladegheists / Grimscythes. Again, still very strong, but now they need to be part of a specific battalion to fight in two ranks, meaning they can't be part of any other battalion Crimson Doom / Quicksilver Dead. In addition to their signature units being slightly down, its no longer as important to make them battleline (no bonuses for scoring objectives & secondaries, no longer need to be battleline to fight in 2 ranks). Spirit Hosts? I mean, our non-named heroes theoretically can't be sniped as long as they're near any unit. Then again, hosts still protect heroes against sharpshooters and melee attacks, so still likely a must take. Named & Mounted heroes - Olynder, Kurdoss, Reikenor, the Drowner, Dreadblades, and KoSoES - all are quite good, probably good enough to still field, but you have to consider that they're filling hero spots that could be going to more Jello Champs Up, but maybe not by enough to be must takes Chainrasps and Grimghasts. These units are battleline regardless of subfaction, and more importantly they can fight in two ranks (thanks to small bases and reach respectively) without having to be part of a specific battalion to do so, making them ideal for the bodyguard battalion or even just a battle regiment to reduce drops Emerald Host. While not as flashy as the Doom or the Dead, the Host does provide an easy source of chip damage on 2 to 4 enemy champions. generic melee/aura heroes - the season wants people to run multiple small generic infantry heroes, and nighthaunts have several solid ones that already prefer to be in or near melee, which also puts them in position to contest central objectives. Gelato Champions: Guardian, Cruciator, & Torment especially were all units that already regularly saw play. Could we also see Executioners, KoS (on foot), Cairn Wraiths, Tomb Banshees, or even Scriptors? I'm skeptical, but it's not outside the realm of possibility. Spirit Hosts? Shooting units are somewhat downgraded due to having to give up other battalions in order to snipe heroes, but then again with the missions and secondaries favoring those same heroes armies that have access to good shooting units are likely to run even more such units than they did before, even with that penalty. Spirit Hosts could prove as critical for countering sharp shooters as cruciators were for countering bounty hunters. Craventhrone Guard - as the only valid sharpshooter unit in grand alliance death, crossboos are finally worth.. .. .. finall... BWA HAHA ha aaaaah, no, sorry, I couldn't keep a straight face. These guys are still trash. And the reason they're trash is the weapon profile of their crossbows, which isn't something a points adjustment can fix. Until they have better range and/or threaten more than 0.5 damage per model before saves there's really no point to them. Honestly, while this season isn't quite as perfectly tailored to (a subset of) the Nighthaunts as last season, we still seem well situated, as we have several solid Jelly champ options, some units that can seriously take advantage of the double rank fighting battalion, some units that /don't need/ to take advantage of the double rank fighting battalion, and while we don't have good sharpshooters, we do have the speed, flight, and alternate deployment options to hunt down enemy gelato champions AND a solid bodyguard unit in spirit hosts to protect our own champions from enemy sharpshooters. That said, where last season wanted you to field very specific nighthaunt lists - bladegheist or grimscythe spam in their associated subfactions plus 1 (or more!) cruciators to protect your ghosts from bounty hunters - the new season seems to encourage a much broader array of ghostly units, armies, and tactics. That said, while I still think the previous style of Crimson Doom and Quicksilver Dead lists will continue to be played and to do well, I'd in particular look for Emerald Host armies to show up more, with builds that focus on a death star of several Jellato champions plus maybe Kurdoss for more damage clustered around a central unit of 3 to 6 spirit hosts, with chainrasps and grimscythes to fill out numbers, battalions, and battleline slots. It's a style of list that saw some play after the battletome landed, before the previous matched play season heavily skewed nighthaunt armies into a couple particular builds. Then again, the heroes most favored for the build back then were special characters (kurdoss, awlrach, even olynder) and KoSoES, none of which are valid galatian champions, so we've yet to see if a version of that build using mostly units that /are/ champions can come together or not. Regardless of whether we see that specific build or not, I do think we'll see a fair bit more Emerald Host, thanks to its ability to put free damage on enemy champions. ... Quick List Sketch, Emerald Host: Kurdoss Krulghast Cruciator Guardian of Souls Lord Executioner Spirit Torment Spirit Torment 6 Spirit Hosts 20 Grimghast Reapers 20 Grimghast Reapers 10 chainrasps 10 chainrasps Comes out to exactly 2000 points after the leaked points changes (unless I'm reading the potato cam image wrong), all wrapped up in 2 battle regiments for a 2 drop list. Torments go with the big grimghast units to support them with some healing and a galatian champion for scoring, the rest of the units cluster around the spirit hosts in a big death star. Assuming everything gets into combat, the death star puts out 5 ap-3 d3 attacks, 5 ap-2 d2 attacks, and 7 ap-1 d2 attacks, hitting on 3+ (I'd like to fit in some chainghasts, but I'm not sure what to drop) and wounding on 2+, while imposing -1 to wound and -1 damage on anything swinging back, and all that before counting enhancements, attacks from the spirit hosts, or 5 separate wave of terror results, plus the blob puts three champions front and center on whatever objective it smashes into. Not the deadliest formation in the game, but nothing to sneeze at and pretty tough to take down. Chainrasps claim otherwise unattended objectives. Still need to work out enhancements. For grand strategy maybe the new one that you claim by having more galatian champions from your starting army alive at the end of the game than your opponent? This army starts with 5, protects them fairly well with spirit hosts, and will likely kill d3+1 of the enemy's champions by the end of the game with subfaction rules alone (average 8.3 mortal wounds before wards by the end of a 5 turn game on each of d3+1 target units). Standard deployment would likely be hero blob in the middle, a grimghast + torment block on each flank, chainrasp on backfield objectives, then use vanishing phantoms to relocate one of the two grimghast/torment blocks - refusing a flank and/or grabbing an objective. Again, that's just a quick sketch, I'm sure a better version could be put together with more time, or the attention of a more experienced player. In particular I'd like to see some chainghasts in there to get the death star hitting on 2s, plus some hexwraiths for utility, even with the coming points increase, because that stupid fast first turn movement to put them /exactly/ where your opponent doesn't want them is just too good not to take, but maxing out hero slots just makes it so hard to fit them...

I hope he's a dwarf! My favorite thing about the current Cities of Sigmar is their cosmopolitan nature, with a variety of fantasy races all living and working together. That sort of thing is surprisingly rare in fantasy settings, even relatively diversity-minded fantasy settings might have a mix of skin colors and racial features within their human, elven, dwarven, & what have you groups, but they almost never have a culture or society where they all live together. I kind of wish GW had gone fully the other way with AoS, with factions themed on something other than what type of guy they were. Like if instead of 'ghouls, ghosts, skullingtons, and-the-rest' the undead factions had been 'here's the pirate undead with vampire pirate captains & their ghosts and zombie crew' or 'here's the necromantic academy undead with necromancers and liches and vampire arcanists and their monstrous flesh golem experiments', etc. Or how I think bonesplitters and spider goblins would have fit better with each other than with other orcs & other goblins respectively. Or how I would have rather seen elves split between the grand alliances rather than all bunched up in Order. Like maybe daemonic slaaneshi elves under morathi on team chaos, maybe mixed in with the hedonites; maybe anti-urbanization, back-to-nature half-beast-half-wood elf hunter-barbarians on team destruction, maybe bringing the sylvaneth & Alarielle with them; maybe the soul-consuming aquatic idoneth, abandoned by the gods of life and order, might have found a place serving Nagash on team undead, perhaps as part of that hypothetical undead pirate faction, etc etc. Oh, well. The factions and alliances we have are good enough, I'm not really complaining. But the current Cities of Sigmar are kind of the last bastion of that cosmopolitan fantasy that AoS could have been, and while my hopes are slim I have my fingers crossed hard that this stays a key part of their identity post-revamp, rather than just becoming 'the human faction' or 'whfb empire 2.0'.

A handful of soulblight heroes picked up as xmas gifts to myself. A couple models I've been wanting to pick up since they released (including the start collecting wight king - purchased off ebay since it's still not available on its own from GW), plus the previously posted vampire mage conversion. Maybe I'll even get around to painting them some day.

I'd be happy with GW devs relying on metrics more if their army books were still written by devs who had at least played the faction in question like... one time ever in their life. There are problems that don't show up in the kind of metrics metawatch tracks. Further, while I'm fully convinced the people who handle points updates and balance patch battlescrolls take metawatch metrics into account, I'm not as convinced that the devs who write the actual battlescrolls do. How else would you explain, for instance, the copy & pasting of the thundertusk warscrolls in the ogors book? They were bad to the point of nobody really using them in the previous battletome, something which /should/ have shown up in their metrics and /should/ have been a priority to fix given that the unit is pretty iconic to the faction. While a bit off topic for death, this video is a really nice in depth examination of the state of the ogor faction following their recent battletome release: And a key takeaway for the purposes of this discussion is that, while the current ogor book did manage to improve the faction and bring at least a few of their builds up to a decent competitive place, it's /also/ clear that a lot of the previous book was blindly copy-pasted forward in a way that could not have happened had the book been written by someone who had ever played those units under the previous book, nor even by someone who had been taking a careful look at meta metrics, at least not in terms of usage statistics for individual units and options.

To be clear, my last post was very specifically trying to see things from GW's perspective. From my personal perspective as a player there are a *bunch* of things that want or even need changing, I just don't think they're issues that show up in the places the dev team is watching. Like, yeah, I agree that the current generic vampire lord falls well short of what their lore implies they should be, even in AoS where the strength of a vampire lord relative to their divinely empowered rivals and peers in other factions is less than it was in WHFB. BUT people still regularly field vampire lords even in highly competitive games, mostly as support pieces or to activate auras in certain bloodlines. We've been told what factors GW looks at to determine what aspects of the game need changing - does the faction show up in competitive settings, what is the overall faction win rate in competitive settings, does a particular unit or option see too little use in competitive lists (or too much in the case of generic options), and does the presence or absence of a particular unit or option affect the win rate of lists that have the option vs. ones that don't too greatly. None of those factors would inform GW that the vampire lord - or honestly pretty much any other SBGL unit - is problem in need of fixing. We do get more in depth examinations of questions like 'does this units rules and use on the table reflect its lore and narrative' when books get in depth re-examinations and updates, but not every battletome release /is/ an in depth re-examination or update, and given how recent the previous soulblight book was, how GW's metawatch metrics are signalling that the current book is fine as it is, and how packed the 2023 calendar is with other major projects that clearly require far more attention... look, there's room for significant changes to the SBGL book, and I'll be happy if we see some, but actually expecting any at this point strikes me as setting ourselves up for disappointment. TBH, I still find the idea that we're even on the schedule for this year to be pretty iffy. Even seemingly reliably rumors in the past have fallen through, and GW's had a lot of problems with serious delays in recent years. Heck, such delays have heavily impacted soulblight already what with whatever cosmic disaster befell the Cursed City release.

this is exactly what they did with the second lrl book. and they specifically asvertised that book as being optional "if you already have the lrl book from not that long ago, you don't need to buy a whole new book already, you can just get the white dwarf with the new warscrolls". the point is to minimize frustration from players who just bought the book already, but also they couldn't not put out a new book since the old one is now missing units, and that white dwarf that has them isn't going to be in circulation for long. 'why not revise other stuff if you're putting out a new book anyway'? again, to avoid making players feel like dupes for buying the original book in the first place. also because new revisions require more dev time and playtest time, not to mention writing, proof reading, & editing. There's limited time, budget, & worker hours to go around, & I imagine projects like 10th ed 40k, codex: world eaters, the entirely re-imagined cities of sigmar, or honestly any of updates to older 2e AoS factions that weren't already designed for 3e like the current SBGL book already was are all higher priority. besides, by all gw's competitive metrics, the current sbgl book is doing fine to great. solid internal variety despite the huge number of units. overall win rates holding very close and steady within a couple percentage points of that magic 50% target number. Right now there's literally nothing about the current book that needs changing, excepting only that the book still depends on a white dwarf supplement for stuff like faction objectives & 3e style path to glory rules, and that white dwarf is hard to find now even if new players knew they were supposed to look for it. That's what a new book would be printed to fix, assuming again the rumors are even accurate. And its a fix that wouldn't even take any dev time to implement. why add costs arbitrarily where none are needed? Why eat into limited dev time when 2023 is already packed to bursting with major all-hands-on-deck releases?

i wouldn't even expect small changes, other than scroll for the new unit & the changes from the white dwarf update. most of the book i'd expect to be a page for page reprint.

I mean, is that so different from what we've had with the current book? mixed armys - ie looks like a (warhammer) army - yeah, we've seen that, seems to be what the book is built to deliver, and in particular seems to be the default focus of the new Vyrkos bloodline, who have received the lions share of this release's attention from GW in terms of new lore and new model kits.. skeleton/zombie horde - not so much skeleton horde, but yeah we've seen some zombie horde oops! all bloodknights - yeah there's a whole bloodline dedicated to this, and it was one of the most popular ways to run the book when it first released & in the early days of 3e. Yes, this build wants vamp lords on nightmares back - for aesthetic reasons if nothing else - but otherwise they're quite well supported. monster mash - again, there's a whole bloodline dedicated to this, AND we got an entire new small monster hero unit to go with them which helps make this build more viable, plus the white dwarf added mount traits for VLoZD. Nagash List - we saw plenty of this right up until the update that rewrote Nagash's warscroll. Maybe they'll eventually reduces the big guy's points value in a way that makes the new scroll viable, or maybe not. Maybe the 2k point competitive scene is better off without him, and he belongs in narrative big games. I personally don't think making Nagash a viable build for tournament matched play should be a significant focus of dev time, but maybe that's just me. IMO all of these builds are about as well supported as anybody could reasonably ask for. Popularity of particular builds on the competitive scene has shifted with warscroll updates, points changes, and matched play seasons, but that's to be expected and even desired. Regardless, I could make lists for any of these out of the current book right now and not feel like my intended army had been ignored by the devs. So that leaves three slightly more contentious builds/themes: All that said, if we do get a new battletome in September/October as rumored, I wouldn't expect any significant changes to it. It's too soon for us to be getting that much dev attention, especially given the rather packed new release schedule in 2023. If the rumors come true, then what I'd expect is effectively a reprint of the current book, but with some or all of the white dwarf updates folded in, plus a new warscroll for just the new skeletal crossbow unit if that gets to be a thing, but nothing more than that yet. Any hopes for more significant changes or additions to the existing SBGL rules will almost certainly have to wait for the next battletome after that, possibly as late as some time in 4th edition.

Conversion for an "Arcane Vampire Lord" from WD464's 'Anvil of Blood', intended for eventual use in a homebrew Legion of Sacrament side project.

bonesplitters got rolled back into orcs. you can run other new orc models alomgside your savage orcs if you want. i would honestly have fewer complaints about the fec range if they had been reabsorbed into the gravelords.

The faction is missing key units. the model range is missing key kits. they're barely half a faction. for the first new FEC model we've seen in a while to be a limited release - which thus deliberately adds nothing to the faction and nothing to the model range - is just frustraring. Even if the model itself is pretty great.

The plausibility of those rumors has risen considerably with the recent new model teaser video that seems to confirm the new seraphon, slaaneshi, & khornate models that the rumors predicted. If the rumors do pan out we'll be looking at a September release with new necromancer model, new grave guard / skeletal crossbows kit, and an revised battletome including a new warscroll for the new deathrattle unit and, I'd imagine, some or all of the white dwarf update. I wouldn't expect any meaningful updates or changes to the existing battletome rules beyond that, though of course anything is possible. As with several others, I'd really like to see bloodline powers for our generic vampire heroes as a unique enhancement sort of deal, perhaps replacing the mount traits for ridden monsters & minor buffs to LoB vampire heroes from the white dwarf update. Unique bloodline powers could do a lot to give the vampires in this vampire army some oomph, and maybe to differentiate generic vampire lords enough to be worth running more than one of them in the same list. The other thing I personally would really want to see is the return of Vampire Lords on Barded Nightmares. They wouldn't even technically need a new model for it, they could just tell you to paint a blood knight unit champ fancier than usual, like you're supposed to do for half the FEC heroes. It's laughably frustrating that we lost the ability to field cavalry vampire lords just as we were finally getting a fancy set of plastic models for their blood knight retinues. Sadly, the rumor has us getting a new necromancer model instead, so... *shrug* But even with a bit of support, rumors are still rumors and all of that could come to nothing. We were the last book release in 1st edition, and the last in 2nd edition. Rumors aside, it seems unrealistic to expect an update before 4th edition is ready for release.