Grimrock

Rustfang. Not quite -1 rend, it reduces the saves of one unit within 3" for the rest of the game at the start of every combat phase. Can't do it to the same unit more than once, but you can use it on different units in later turns. It's good on him for sure, but the problem is that you're still relying on his base stats for hitting/wounding which are only so so. Certainly an option but not great, I still think Khorne is the only way to use him now.

Yeah if the shadowblade still existed I'd say that the Karkadrak discount was amazing, but without it I really don't think he has any place. Without any rend on the halberd his average damage is absolutely abysmal for his points, even as a general with the mark of Khorne. The only way I can see him working is in ruinbringer but even then I don't think he'll put in enough work to make up for his cost. Too bad since I love the model, but I don't think I'll be using him again outside of the Khorne alleigance where he can still get some functional command traits and artifacts.

Well, if you compare him to similar casters like the Changeling he pays about 100 points for the ability to summon pinks. That's still technically a discount, but you'd have to decide if it's worth the risk of losing him first turn before you get a chance to summon. Personally I'm glad I held off on buying him until after this FAQ. Seems much less appealing now.

Well, I guess I was wrong about the leaked FAQ points. I absolutely disagree that marauder horsemen needed to go up but what can you do. That along with the loss of the thermalrider cloak has killed my Corona painting project before I ever got to put it on the table. Guess I'll have to rework the list and see if I can make something fit. Edit: I'd probably say that I'm very unlikely to pay points for the horsemen now, don't seem worth it. They can do a lot of things but a 23% hike for models that do essentially 0 damage all game is too steep. Summoning them is still fine, but even in a ruinbringer I don't think there's much point since they just die after they cause their d3 damage. Knights seem fine at 160 so they can probably fill in but I probably won't buy any more of those unless we see a full resculpt with standard and musician. Warriors still need a specific build to make them useful but I guess it's a little less punishing to use big units now.

Well I play all of the chaos god factions and they've all got at least one unit that's sub optimal or massively disappointing. I'd wager a guess that's consistent for every single book in the game. So I guess they're all bad and sloppy? Just because a book has a sub optimal choice doesn't immediately mean it's bad. I get that chaos warriors are iconic, but they aren't critical to the success of the tome or the faction. Would I love them to be amazing and match their lore? Absolutely. I feel the same way about skull cannons or blood warriors or plaguebearers or screamers or fiends, but that's not how the game works unfortunately. We either make due with what we have or give it a pass and don't spend our money on it.

I may be wrong, reading the book again it does seem to suggest he has to pick a mark. There's still a little room that it might be referring to a mark for the purposes of the rule, not that he loses the other marks for the duration of the game, but it's a bit of a stretch.

Yeah, the FAQ was only for the Aura of Chaos battle trait. He still has all of the marks on his warscroll so he'll still get all the benefits that entails, he just only emits one type of aura. He can also benefit from ally abilities like the Nurgle bell, Blue Scribes rerolls, or the Khorne Bloodstoker.

Well, fun is pretty relative but I don't disagree with you that it was fun to change it up. I had lots of fun playing different games and it seemed like a breath of fresh air every time the smaller company did something I knew the giant corporation never would. But like I said, the more I dug into it and the longer I spent playing the game the more obvious the similarities became. The game that was supposedly one of the most balanced games in the business had matchups where an entire faction simply had no answer. Background was ignored or botched entirely in the interest of improving sales. Models were invalidated with newer releases and the lower powered stuff was left to languish in obscurity. It certainly took a few years to come to the realization, but there wasn't any avoiding it when I did. Also I'm sure you're not referencing me, but just to be clear I didn't have issues with playerbase. There was and still is a solid following for the other game in my area. Anyway, this isn't rumor talk so I'll stop there. I'm really hoping we see some AoS stuff this weekend, or at least the FAQs for the missing point changes. I've got a 500 point hole in a project that I'm working on that has a Mega Gargant's name written all over it.

Sorry, but I just figured I'd chime in here for a second. I did feel very similarly once and actually got so fed up with GW and their system that I departed for what I believed to be greener pastures. I totally abandoned GW tried out their main competitor for about 5 years and researched a number of other games and companies. The main thing I discovered? Everyone else is pretty much the same. Every company botches releases, every company makes mistakes, every company has their eyes focused on the bottom line one way or another. No matter how much you hear about other games being balanced, there are still balance issues present no matter where you go and the further you dig into a game the more evident it becomes. In the end I came back to GW because I realized that if every game is unbalanced, and every company is only out to make money in the end, then I might as well play a game that looked amazing and I enjoyed playing (for a variety of factors I won't bother going into). Just my humble opinion I guess.

Yeah like I said I'm not an expert or anything, but I'd like to see it handled better too. Pure made to order (like with pre-orders) would be an issue because it takes quite a while to make these boxes and get them to the customer. People get excited, order the box, and then it takes 4 months to get? Decent chance some will cancel their order after a month when the hype dies down and then GW is stuck in the same situation with leftover product. Actually from my limited view, I think their hybrid of a limited initial run and opening up made to order is probably the best compromise so hopefully they keep it up in the future.

I'm not a business expert or anything, but I can at least address this to an extent. There are definitely considerations that need to be made for making, shipping, and storing material combined with a healthy dose of risk management. Just to go through a basic exercise: You have a product that costs 50 dollars to make and you can sell for 100 dollars. If you make 1,000 units and sell all of them, you've made 50,000 profit. Now, lets say you make 2,000 units and sell 1,500. True your revenue is up to 150,000, but due to your increased costs of making the additional product your profit is still the same at 50,000. In addition, you now have to store the additional 500 units until they're sold, which could be an incredibly slow process if you've already eliminated primary demand. Now you might say why didn't they make 1,700 units instead of 2,000, but the demand might be extremely difficult to judge (maybe a global economic crisis caused by a pandemic has skewed predictions?). In the end the best practice is to try to get as close to the actual numbers of purchases as possible without going over to fully maximize profits. 100% of product sold means no losses due to excess production or storage. Obviously they undershot the mark on this product and most of the past limited runs as well, but it makes perfect sense that these box sets are designed to sell out from a business side. Certainly not ideal for the customers that miss out though.

The game is great, much more fluid and thematic while the nuances provide a lot of things to master. Scenarios are also an incredible improvement over old warhammer games and are a huge boost to tactical play. Honestly I can say I don't think I've ever wanted to play Fantasy after I got into AoS, the game is just so significantly superior. I do miss the lore and quirks of some armies I guess, but not the game. My only gripe currently is the way they organize the rules. The core rules are simple and well made, but the actual rules for playing an army are needlessly complex and can be scattered around in too many books. There's the GHB, your army book, possibly a supplement like Wrath of the Everchosen or Malign Sorcery, White Dwarf, campaign books, and of course FAQs and Designer Commentary. For example if I want to play my Nurgle army I need 6 separate documents, 4 of which cost money. Then with the way GW is regularly releasing massively overpowered books and then nerfing them into the ground, you can't trust anything you buy will be worth playing within 6 months. Generally it's made me pretty jaded towards new armies and entirely uninterested in promoting the game with friends. I enjoy the game so I'm pretty much stuck with it, but I wouldn't want to get anyone else into the same mess.

This is what I'm most interested in with the anvil. I'd love to remake some old school AoS Lord's and rock them on the table. Grimgore anyone?

Hmm... weird. I do remember it touching after I finished basing but i believe there was still room for the stinger. You should be good just building it, worst case it touches the base and pushes the model up a touch. You can still glue everything together without issue.

It's narrative though, just pick whatever weapon you like the stats of and call it whatever you want. Just look at @Beliman above, he took a bow and statted it out how he liked and then called it a 'Doom-Rifle'. You can make a note of what the weapon is like in the above example, but the flavour text and design is all whatever you want it to be. This is just a tool for giving tabletop stats and rules for that cool character you've always dreamed of, it's not a strict by the book WYSIWYG matched play template.

Yeah I won't argue with you there, it certainly seems like it would be better to go slaves in nurgle rather than the other way around. I am interested to see the actual changes via pdf though. Pretty much everything else I play is probably getting nerfed or not changing much so S2D and Nurgle are my best hopes for new and interesting list writing for the next few months.

I get the idea of splitting out the different rule sets from the book and having everything separate. I've literally never used anything that isn't in the Matched Play section, and I'm not even a regular tournament player. I just don't have a group of people even remotely interested in anything that isn't Matched Play, so in the end it's just a waste of money to be paying for Open and Narrative stuff. It's too bad because I really would like to at least try out Narrative, but at this point it just feels like a tease more than anything. To be honest though, I don't think splitting things out would really increase the quality for anything. The Matched Play section is lacking because... well there really isn't much you can do for Matched Play without it becoming an edition change. Meeting Engagements were a surprise to be sure, but you can't really get zany or introduce anything too off the wall because that would surely unbalance the game and defeat the entire point of Matched Play to begin with. Realistically, maybe the best way forward would be to drop the Matched Play section from the GHB entirely and let it focus on the things it actually does well. Release the point changes along with it online so you don't have any printing issues and if there are any rule tweaks or changes just do them in an errata. Release the mission pack online just like Privateer Press does for Steamroller every year. Then if they want to release something like Meeting Engagements or brand new systems they can do it in a separate release like Malign Sorcery and just incorporate them into the main rules in the next edition change.

...what @Gistradagis said. You use them to buy upgrades for your hero. Base stat line, upgrades, weapons, they all increase your total DP. So for your question a 40 DP hero will generally be significantly stronger than a 20 DP hero because they have more upgrades from the base stat line.

All that means is that the book went to print before they were able to decide on the point changes for the next book, not that they shipped it immediately after Cities released. Bonereapers didn't release until early November, so the book may have gone to print around then. Considering that it could take a couple months to gather information and make a proper informed decision on point changes, it could have even gone to print in January. Still makes likely they knew points would change when they released the FAQ for Slaanesh in December though. Not sure what you mean? Everything I've heard is that there is a separate points pamphlet for the GHB 2020. You can even see a picture of it in the pre-order article last week.

It's a narrative tool, base them however you feel is appropriate. Making a stormcast character? 40mm. Salves to Darkness? 32mm. If you're planning on matched play then surely anyone who is ok with a custom built character should be ok with whatever base size you decided to use as long as you're not intentionally trying to game the system.

@Sinfullyvannila for the scribes and Kairos, the rules in the spell lores are only referring to taking the spell at the army construction stage. They don't say anything about needing a keyword to cast, just to take them in the first place. Casting restrictions usually come on the spell itself. For example on the Lord of Change it says to refer to the damage table on its warscroll and since the scribes don't have that table they can't cast the spell. Also if the spell says something like 'a NURGLE wizard may attempt to cast this spell on a casting roll of a 7...' or something like that. The rule is explained a bit more on the designer commentary for the tzeentch book.

On the plus side, it looks like we can ally in the glottkin now. Not sure if it'll be worth it, but their command ability is extremely good since it's still not wholly within. Plus with the loss of additional save after saves the harbinger is less interesting now. Might be better to just play in Nurgle allegiance, but could be worth testing out.

Maybe, that would be pretty strange though since GW doesn't usually change the scrolls after release (only one I can think of is plague monks?). If the rumors are true the only thing I can think of is they dropped the points on the chaos warriors and noticed that the marauder horsemen were the same price but still drastically better, so they needed to bump their price up. Would be a pretty terrible excuse though, I think of all the S2D warscrolls the horsemen were just about perfectly priced for what they did.

Glottkin going down below 400 would be a huge deal. He'd make a pretty exciting ally for slaves to darkness or clan pestilens.

Yeah I have a really hard time believing that leak for the points. I absolutely understand marauders going up, but marauder horsemen going up by 20? I don't agree with that at all.