Grimrock

If they were to put FAQs, Errata and points behind a paywall then I'd be out of the game. There's already a yearly fee for the GHB, a fee every couple years for the army book, and a fee every 3 years for the edition change. Now if they say something like "you pay 8 bucks a month and you get full digital access to all codexes and army books and rulebooks and everything is kept up to date with all erratas and FAQs" then I think we're in business. Of course that sounds like way too much to hope for.

The biggest impact I've felt so far is the coherency rules is in the list building stage. I still take screening units, but I just focus on taking 5 man cavalry units that I can turn sideways (which looks about as ridiculous as you might expect) or conga lining exclusively with 25ml bases. Taking big blobs of 32ml bases still happens, but I only do it with units I never expected to get damage out of in the first place (chaos warriors, plaguebearers). If I want to do damage with anything it's always coming in the form of 5 man units, small bases, or monsters. As long as I build lists like this I haven't really had too much issue with additional time fiddling with coherency because nothing in my lists care. Big units of large bases don't do damage anyway so I don't bother trying to optimize, and everything else pretty much works the same as it used to. Thankfully my armies seem to have plenty of ways to build in the new style, but I imagine it's not so easy for others. Edit: thinking about it, this could be exactly what GW was aiming for. As long as all armies have some way to build around the new coherency then it just means people will naturally go that route. It does nerf a huge swath of models, but ideally for GW that just means that people will go out and buy different models that aren't affected by the new rules as harshly. Ex. Nobody wants to spend 10 minutes fiddling to get gluttons to attack, so they just buy some mournfangs. You can't use bloodreavers to screen, so just buy flesh hounds instead. Sure it might mean that some people stop playing, but most will work on their lists to figure a way around it. In the end it just means more money for GW.

I do like those spells, but the issue with the majority of the lore is it's so unreliable to try to cast on a 7. If I'm not casting Daemonic Power then I'm probably in a pretty desperate situation where reliability will be extremely important so having that low casting value and consistent 3 MW makes it pretty attractive. I'm imagining a scenario like trying to clear out the last few wounds on an engaging enemy unit before the movement phase or maybe a last ditch emergency to kill a chaff unit that has made its way to my side of the board. That being said, it just occurred to me that the universal command trait to reroll one spell a hero phase would be amazing for a ravagers sorcerer. Now I need to write up a ravagers list too haha.

@W1tchhunter If you only need one artifact then I'd usually go Mark of the High-favoured in Ravagers for the extra aura range. If you need a second then I think the Amulet of Destiny from the universal artifacts list in the rule book could be pretty handy on your sorcerer lord or daemon prince. @Eldarain I do like your list, it's got a good mix of speed, tankiness, raw damage, and mortal wound threat. Very solid overall, but I'm wondering if you aren't losing more than you gain by making Be'lakor your general. With the abundance of command points you shouldn't need to worry about morale on the marauders, and having that +1 to wound for mark of khorne from your prince could be a really big deal. This is a list I put together tonight that I'm pretty excited to try out (points have been adjusted manually): Allegiance: Slaves to Darkness- Damned Legion: DespoilersLeadersSlaves to Darkness Daemon Prince (210)- General- Sword- Command Trait: Paragon of Ruin- Artefact: Doombringer BladeBe'Lakor, the Dark Master (360)- Mark of Chaos: Undivided- Spell: Mask of DarknessChaos Sorcerer Lord (115)- Mark of Chaos: Tzeentch- Spell: Spite-tongue CurseBattleline30 x Chaos Marauders (270)- Axes & Shields- Mark of Chaos: Khorne20 x Chaos Warriors (400)- Hand Weapon & Shield- Mark of Chaos: Khorne5 x Chaos Knights (170)- Ensorcelled Weapons- Mark of Chaos: Khorne5 x Chaos Knights (170)- Ensorcelled Weapons- Mark of Chaos: KhorneUnits1 x Mindstealer Sphiranx (95)BehemothsChaos Warshrine (185)- Mark of Chaos: Khorne Everything fits nicely into a Battle Regiment for a single drop, which makes the pre-game move from Paragon of Ruin actually viable since there's a really good chance you'll have control of who gets the first turn (something that always bothered me about the trait before, no one drop battalions that could include a prince). I'm not sure, but I think the list definitely has potential, super hard to shift, lots of damage potential from the mark of khorne, and Be'Lakor can absolutely rock it in combat for a round with All Out Attack and Finest Hour.

One thing I noticed in the core rules, as far as I can tell, is the warscroll battalions don't offer a one drop or free artifact anymore. Those benefits only happen if the battalion specifies them (like the new core battalions), and obviously none of the warscroll ones do. In addition I think you have to go through a pretty convoluted method to get a battalion in a PtG army and getting one of the better ones like changehost is extremely difficult or expensive with campaign resources. Maybe not so bad all things considered.

Had a game last night against Nurgle with this list organized into a Warlord and a Vanguard battalion: Allegiance: Khorne- Slaughterhost: The GoretideLeadersBloodthirster of Insensate Rage (280)- General- Command Trait: Hew the FoeBloodsecrator (125)- Artefact: Thronebreaker's TorcBloodstoker (85)Slaves to Darkness Daemon Prince (210)- Sword- Artefact: The Crimson CrownBattleline5 x Flesh Hounds (105)5 x Flesh Hounds (105)5 x Flesh Hounds (105)5 x Flesh Hounds (105)Units5 x Skullreapers (205)5 x Skullreapers (205)5 x Wrathmongers (155)5 x Wrathmongers (155)5 x Wrathmongers (155) I have a few takeaways from the battle. First up, the insensate thirster is definitely a beast with the new rules. Being able to guarantee the +1 to hit and adding in a stomp is super strong. The one thing is he's pretty squishy and has a huge target on his head, so I think I'd prefer to make the daemon prince the general. I lost the thirster after he took out about 20 plaguebearers in one swing, and losing that auto command point every turn really hurt. Speaking of the prince though, he's rock solid. A 2+ save when needed or a +1 to hit when he isn't charging feels fantastic. Putting on Finest Hour the turn he charges makes him a blender for one round. Also I was able to combo his command and Redeploy with some screening flesh hounds to totally take a unit of blight kings and Gutrot out of the game. Running the list without slaughterpriests felt... kinda weird. The command points made up for it, but they did start getting scarce after the thirster died and it would have been nice to have at least one priest to toss out a buff. I could possibly see dropping a flesh hound unit for one but I'm not sure if it's worth it. On the flesh hounds, they made great screens and put out an impressive number of attacks but they died to a stiff breeze and wounding on 4's really sucks. I guess I can't really expect much from a basic battleline unit but it's always disheartening to do like 2 wounds to an enemy unit after picking up 30 dice. Not having warscroll battalions definitely sucked some fun out the lists but on a positive note it's really refreshing to be able to combine daemons and mortals without concern for what battalions I'm using. My list building with Khorne had become a little formulaic with slotting in major components (ex. Gore Pilgrims or Dark Feast, Blood forged or Slaughterborn) and then putting in a couple units to taste. Now it feels like I really have a lot more freedom. It's pretty nice for now but I am a little worried that without those major components I'll eventually focus in on a single 'best' list and not feel any incentive to try different things. Maybe I'm just paranoid though, we'll see how it goes.

Sure, I think this is pretty close to what I was using. It wasn't pure daemon as I put a couple units of blightkings in there, but I think it can hold it's own. Allegiance: Nurgle- Host of Chaos: Munificent WanderersLeadersGreat Unclean One (320)- General- Bile Blade & Doomsday Bell- Command Trait: One Last Gift- Artefact: MucktalonSloppity Bilepiper Herald of Nurgle (150)Spoilpox Scrivener Herald of Nurgle (140)Lord of Blights (140)Battleline30 x Plaguebearers (300)30 x Plaguebearers (300)5 x Putrid Blightkings (140)5 x Putrid Blightkings (140)Units3 x Plague Drones (190)Total: 1820 / 2000Extra Command Points: 0Allies: 0 / 400Wounds: 148 It was made before knowing the point changes, but with GHB taken into account I think I actually come out with about 100 spare. Definitely needs some tweaks, but i could see an emerald lifeswarm for sure to keep the plagueberers healthy.

Facehammer did a review of the new GHB and showed all the point costs. You can find it on youtube pretty easily, but people have also taken screen shots and they're floating around the web like on the age of sigmar subreddit.

Yeah not a huge fan of the size increase on them. Running them in units of 15 was my goto if I used them, so being forced into 10 or 20 is pretty rough. The changes to marauders were interesting. It's nice that they can be used as cheap battleline now, but they got a decent hike in points and you're limited to a max of 30 is a big hit to their performance. It's also annoying because i built them for 20 man units (ie. for my 40 models I built two banners, two leaders, two musicians) so they don't work very well in units of 10. Not the end of the world I guess. I'm also surprised to see that the rumor was wrong and Archaon is only 830. He's going to be an absolute beast with the new buffs so I'm definitely going to need to try him out.

In large units yeah, but they're untouched with units of 3. I've been finding that a unit of 3 with sloppity and spoilpox and the command ability from a GUO just wreck face. All the more now if they buff themselves with all out attack. Plus they're super tanky if you switch the buffs to defensive mode.

So just so you know the reason I said that the brass stampede wasn't an option is GW has removed warscroll battalions from matched play in the upcoming version. They're still allowed in Narrative or Open play, or for that matter they should be fine in any friendly game, but for matched play GW has replaced them with what they call core battalions. They're much more generic than the warscroll ones and their benefits are generally much smaller, but they don't cost any points. The new 3.0 rules are available for free to download here if you haven't seen them: https://www.warhammer-community.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/fZD0X060Qn7ZO0EE.pdf On page 35 of the PDF (section 26.3) you can see the new core battalions. The reason I bring them up is you can actually take a Battle Regiment battalion to get everything in it dropped at once, so hopefully you won't need to combine your units too much to cut down on drops. That's particularly important because the new coherency rules make it much more difficult to run skullcrushers as units of 6, and the same goes for chaos knights in units of 10. If you keep your units split for 4 skullcrushers and 2 knights you should be able to easily fit your army into two Battle Regiments for a 2 drop army, or tinker around with the other ones like the Warlord battalion to give yourself that extra artifact you're looking for. Of course the points of your models aren't guaranteed either. There are rumors that everything is going to get a 10-15% points increase with the new generals handbook coming out at the beginning of July, so your army might end up being a bit smaller.

Like you said, things are a bit up in the air these days so it's difficult to pin down what will be good or not in the upcoming edition. Normally I would have said khorne really runs on slaughterpriests and buff units, but with the changes to priests and the addition of the improved command abilities I'm not so sure they're needed anymore. I can say for sure that if you're aiming for matched play then brass stampede is not an option. Otherwise your lists look solid enough. Skull crushers should be extremely annoying to deal with for your opponent if you're using all out defense, and they should be able to hold objectives fairly well. I'd definitely consider throwing in the bloodthirster as I think you'll have trouble cracking heavier armor or bigger units without it. I think in the 2k list you could probably drop karanak (nice but a bit too expensive right now) and the skull cannon (really too dicey if you take only one, but has potential if you were willing to lean into it and run three) for more bodies in the list. For artifacts you'll have to decide what you want to do for sub faction as they'll dictate what you take first. Goretide is pretty good and will help all the mortals a bit. The artifacts is great on the Lord on karkadrak so that's easy. If you run the command battalion for another one I would look for whatever buffs the insensate thirster best as he'll be your hammer, but I don't have my book on me right now to offer a suggestion.

Tried out a game of slaanesh vs maggotkin the other night. Since the points aren't known the rumors were used and slaanesh used their current points while maggotkin played down about 260 points. I did have a few takeaways. First, all the buffs to heroes and monsters made the great unclean one into an absolute weapon. He was running the support loadout (bell and blade) but combined with the sloppity and the new abilities he killed dexcessa turn 1 and completely solo'd a summoned keeper turn 3. Rolls were a touch hot against the keeper, but the buffs can absolutely change the game in unexpected ways. I think the GUO killed more points in that game than in all of my games with him in AoS 2 combined. Second, both armies were absolutely swimming in command points. It wasn't infinite, but there was enough to make some significant impact on the game. There were definitely some weird cases where the limitations on issuing and receiving made optimal use difficult though, so I'm starting to think the battalions that let you get a one time use for free without counting as issuing or receiving could actually be really huge for some builds. Third, the smaller board definitely felt... smaller haha. Maybe it was partially the 18" no man's land, but the armies were all over eachother starting tun one and it didn't stop until the end of the game. Objectives were closer and shifting around was way quicker for nurgle. It wasn't a massive change, but everything felt snug and almost a little claustrophobic. I know some people have been saying it won't make a difference but it certainly felt different to me. Finally, I'm still not sure I like the changes. The lack of warscroll battalions really felt bad as they were a source of character for units. Things just felt so... vanilla without them. Not worse, the command abilities more than made up for the power loss, but just kinda boring.

Pretty much exactly what I was thinking for list building. The thing I'm running into is the list will chew through MSU like nothing, but it has some trouble against the one or two deathstars that the opponent is likely to bring. Wrathmongers and Skullreapers are great but they just don't do enough damage to chew through something with a 1+ save and I'm not sure if the bloodthirster will do enough to compensate. Need to play a few games and see how it goes I guess, but tossing in at least one priest might be mandatory to try and get a wrath axe on the table.

The thing that makes me unsure is that currently battletomes themselves dictate that their allegiance runs off the keyword. Heck all of the chaos tomes still have tables for artefacts/spells/whatever that are specifically there for marked StD units. For example khorne has command traits for daemons, bloodbound, and khorne mortals. Since battletomes are supposed to override core rules, and considering the precedent of the whole history of AoS working that way, there's still an argument to be made to allow marked units in the god specific armies. I think GW is definitely going to have to FAQ it.

I know it isn't the same thing, but keep in mind that you can still use warscroll battalions in anything that isn't matched play. Unless your gaming group is super hardcore I can't imagine they wouldn't be ok with just letting you run a warscroll battalion in a quasi matched play game either, it's not like Brass Despoilers was running the top tables or anything.

So I tried out a game with Maggotkin using the new rules and I have to say that the monster, hero, and command ability rules made some absolutely massive differences. I had a support Great Unclean One with bell and blade kill Dexcessa on turn one and then 100 to 0 a summoned Keeper of Secrets on turn 3. I got some lucky rolls on the keeper, but combining his command ability, mortals from the sloppity, spell mortals, charge mortals, stomp mortals, and All Out Attack made him into a shockingly significant threat. It absolutely sucked to lose out on the warscroll battalions but I made an easy one drop list that included both daemons and mortals which was a really cool benefit. Also having all those command points throughout the game was huge for the army and made all our great command abilities seem a little more usable now. Has anybody else tried out the new rules?

Not 100% sure, but the rules say you have to pick a faction for your army. A faction is now defined by a battletome instead of a keyword, so unless we get tomes for grand alliances or an FAQ/update somewhere that says a faction is a battletome or anything with a given keyword then I'd say grand alliances are dead. Also has strange potential consequences for chaos armies that were using slaves to darkness models with different marks of chaos. Since they're not in the battletome that defines the faction an argument could be made that they can't be taken anymore.

You monster

Interestingly, this only is only a possible issue if the shooting player is the Attacker. If the shooting player is the defender then they are solely responsible for terrain setup and can organize the table however they see fit. It'd be a terrible move in a friendly game, but they could easily push all 8 terrain pieces to the side/back of the board and just leave the middle a wide open wasteland. No idea what the point of that rule is honestly. Friendly games should just have both players putting terrain down together until they're both happy and tournament games will just have the terrain set up before the game begins.

It means choosing who goes first. The rule for that is in section 4.1:At the start of each battle round, the players must roll off. This is called the priority roll. The winner has priority in that battle round and must decide who will take the first turn and who will take the second turn

The thing that worried me about the battle tactics is that 4/6 of them necessitate killing a unit completely. That runs contrary to the usual gameplan of whittling units down to try to generate more depravity. It also creates a stronger incentive for the opponent to focus down the slaanesh units and pick their targets wisely. Not a huge deal, but it could have some interesting ramifications. All in all though it's a very slight blip, if the points rumors pan out then I think Slaanesh could be one of the stronger contenders at the start of the edition.

Hard to say honestly. The issue is in section 20.0 the core rules specifically say that a priest can chant 1 prayer that they know. I don't have my battletome on me, but I thought the wording was something like they can chant a blood blessing in addition to the prayer on their warscroll. In the old rules it never gave rules for how many prayers you could chant, the rules for that were typically on the warscrolls themselves, so the khorne rules don't completely make sense anymore. I'm hoping that we get to chant the blessings and warscroll prayers, but I'm not holding my breath. I believe we can definitely summon a judgement (called an Invocation in the core rules now) in addition to prayers. I'm also sure that you can't chant a given prayer more than once per phase, so even if we can chant a warscroll prayer and a blood blessing, we'll still only get a single instance of blood boil and a single instance of blood bind per turn. Either way I think we're going to need a FAQ to clean things up for our priests. For example, all priests can now suffer what they call 'Divine Wrath' and take a mortal wound if they roll a 1 on their prayers. As it stands right now that'll double up with our prayers and we'd take D3+1 mortals if we get a 1 on our warscroll prayers. In addition all priests can now attempt to dispel endless spells. I'm not sure if that means that ours can attempt to dispel two endless spells each (one from the warscroll and one from the core rules), or if we're still only supposed to dispel 1.

Not true, like I mentioned before there are two sections you need to look at. First is the Matched Play battlepack. In the section for Stealing the Initiative, it says: Do not roll off to determine who has priority in the first battle round. Instead, the player who finished deploying their army first has priority in the first battle round. Now you need to look at the rules for priority. In section 4.1 for The Priority Roll it says: At the start of each battle round, the players must roll off. This is called the priority roll. The winner has priority in that battle round and must decide who will take the first turn and who will take the second turn. So in matched play the person who finishes deploying first gets to decide who gets the first turn. Just to answer these two. First, the caps work for a final value after all +/- modifiers. So if you have a +3 to your save and your opponent has a -2 rend, you'll be left with a +1 after modifiers and meet the limit. If you have +3 and your opponent has -1, then you will have a +2 which is over the cap and will get reduced down to a +1 as a result. Second, you can't partially deploy the one-drop battalion. It's in section 26.2.1 on page 278. Essentially when you go to deploy any unit from a Unified battalion you must then immediately deploy all other units from that battalion, one unit at a time, until you're done. No choice.

I think we can definitely have some play but a lot depends on where the points go. Priests only being able to chant a single prayer and no repeat prayers are big hits to our best unit and devastating to their mortal wound output. Being able to move through invocations is a big hit to their effectiveness for screening. Reavers definitely seem dead, doubly so if they bump their minimum size to match their box. Blood warriors could still work if they don't bump their size, but I like flesh hounds much much more for the basic battle line/screening unit. Wrathmongers and Skullreapers should work fairly well if MSU takes over as they can pack a lot of punch into a small package, especially with the new command abilities. Thirsters are OK, but without tyrants or easy artifacts from battalions I don't think 3 or 4 are going to work nearly as well. Maybe 2 might be the sweet spot? Along with some bloodcrushers to tie up ranged units with Rejoice in the Slaughter. Smaller boards and smaller no mans lands help. Redeploy could help by letting us push forward onto objectives that we're normally too slow to reach. Marauders are still as good as ever. Being able to mix and match daemons and mortals together in the same core battalion is certainly nice. Easily attained +2 to saves helps a lot against high rend attacks. It's really hard to say where we'll be at in this edition. I don't think it'll be much better, but maybe not much worse either.