Grimrock

Personally I'd say it's because one round of attacks from a bloodthirster generally isn't enough to kill your target. Against a 4+ save a wrath or unfettered thirster will do about 8 damage unbuffed or 10ish damage buffed, which leaves most units or monsters alive, and bloodthirsters really aren't particularly tanky so the counter punch might just kill them. The double attack bumps the damage enough to pretty much guarantee they'll kill what they hit and survive through the combat phase. If the reaper thirsters can get one good round of combat they can kill 2-3 of the enemy heavy hitters and might just be able to ensure the opponent doesn't have anything strong enough to kill them later. Plus the strike first is only on the one bloodthirster. Doesn't matter much on the Khorne turn, but on the opponents turn they can just avoid or shoot that one bloodthirster and then fighting the others is much easier. In Reapers all of the bloodthirsters present the same threat regardless of whose turn it is. For slaughterpriests, honestly to me they're the crux of the army. Killing frenzy or bronzed flesh can nearly be as good as +1 attack from the bloodsecrator, but unlike the bloodsecrator they provide a lot more for the army than just the buffs. Their mortal wound output is fantastic and provides a substantial way to kill things at range. The utility from Blood Bind has won me numerous games when opponents think they're safe hovering just outside of threat range or screening their important pieces. They also give access to the judgements which are absolutely fantastic. I'll definitely take a bloodsecrator in the vast majority of armies, but slaughterpriests are always the first thing I grab.

There are definitely some excellent StD units for Khorne. For leaders, the Chaos Lord on Karkadrak is a beast in the army if you make him your general in Goretide and give him the dimensional blade. The +1 damage trait applies to both of his melee weapons, and the -3 rend on the halberd lets him blender pretty much everything. The Daemon Prince with mark of Khorne is also pretty excellent with a similar loadout and his command ability is really nasty when you're facing another combat army. Archaon is mind blowing in Khorne but still requires an army to be built around him. Otherwise the new rules for chaos marauders make them probably the best troop choice for any chaos mortal army period, and they're excellent in khorne with all the available buffs. The Chaos Warshrine is a great choice if you're taking any StD units as it also benefits from the Skull Altar prayer rerolls, and getting a re-roll when using the prayer of chaos undivided (3+, StD mortal unit gets full rerolls on attack and wound rolls) is amazing. Combine the shrine, marauders, and some other buff units like a bloodsecrator and/or bloodstoker and you'll have an incredibly consistent blender with an absurd threat range. The shrine itself is even a passable beatstick now and if it gets a few buffs it can do some real damage.

I believe a tyrants of blood battalion with 3-4 bloodthirsters in the reapers of vengeance sub faction is generally viewed as our most competitive option. One or two insensate, skarbrand, and either a wrath or unfettered depending on which you prefer. After that it's usually a small gore pilgrims for battleline and support, but I think you could run flesh hounds for battleline instead. Either way with skull altar at least one or two slaughter priests are pretty much mandatory and a bloodsecrator is always nice. The judgements are pretty solid as well. The main thrust of the list is to get all the thirsters into big targets and then attack like 6 times in a row without your opponent being able to respond, hopefully gutting them enough to make sure they can't fight back.

It can vary from unit to unit, but in Khorne usually it only means you'll have to do some extra work to build around the deficiencies and emphasize the strengths. Using your example, which as an aside I should say that skulleapers are actually quite good, you might want to make sure you have a bloodstoker to compensate for them being generally quite slow. Maybe a Slaughterborn battalion to help increase their resilience. That sort of thing. One of the things I love about the Khorne book is pretty much everything can be built around in one way or another and there are a lot of little buffs everywhere that can take a mediocre unit and make it a star. Some things might take ore work than others, but that's part of the fun of making the list.

I don't know, I like it in theory but it's always looked so overwhelming. Even playing kill team it's hard to remember a dozen or so stratagems and know which applies best to each situation, and when you start pulling your army from 4 different books all with their own stratagems.... Ugh.

The blast rule they're talking about sounds interesting. Basically a subset of weapons that naturally get an advantage against larger units. I think it'd be nice if they ported something like it to artillery in AoS. I know that there are usually bonuses to hit, but nothing ruins a shot like rolling a d6 for damage and killing one piddly clan rat. Maybe reroll the damage against units of 20-30 models and always max damage when the unit is more than 30? It would certainly make older artillery pieces nobody uses more interesting/useful.

Yet again I'm reminded of the difference in costs based on location. I'm in Canada, and a start collecting box is around 50% more expensive than a brand new video game, and easily 2 times as expensive as a brand new video game when it's on sale. They're also 10-30% more expensive than a premium board game (ie. one chock full of miniatures and gaming boards like zombicide) or again 2-3 times as expensive as a normal board game without miniatures. I'd actually be really curious to see a comparison of the people that have real issues with the pricing increase and where they're from. Wouldn't be surprised at all if the majority of them are from outside of the UK.

Yeah like I said, the fear has been around for a long time but the game hasn't died yet and there are are still new players. For example my gaming group has about 15-20 semi-regular players and maybe a third have started in the last two years. I do see a pretty worrying trend of people starting to drift off to other game systems at the moment (well... pre-covid anyway), but I'm not sure if that's cost related or if people are just looking for something new to spice things up. I imagine there are a lot less new players than there could be, but I'm pretty sure that GW has run the numbers and is carefully optimizing their prices to maximize profits just like any good corporation. If they lose out on 1,000 new players that would profit them $200/year but get an extra $30 per year from the existing 10,000 players, then they're still ahead. As long as they can keep it cheap enough for at least a small number of new players the game should survive. I think that's part of why they re-introduced the start collecting boxes a few years back, I'm guessing that they were seeing a low enough rate of new players that they had to act to lower the barrier to entry. I'm curious to see what else they do the next time they hit that point.

I think this is exactly the case, and of course the end result of that line of thinking. I believe most players have a budget of sorts and will continue to spend it as long as they're in the game. GW doesn't care if a customer stops a particular army because it's too expensive or got nerfed or whatever, as long as they continue spending their budget on GW products. Really the only issue they face is the minor amount of attrition that comes along with the price increases, losing some players completely. In theory that should be made up with new players but of course as prices get higher and higher the likelihood of new players gets lower and lower. The fear is typically that the flow of new players willing to pay the frankly absurd entry cost for the game will eventually dry up and the game will wither on the vine so to speak. Of course that fear has been around for years and the game still seems to be doing fine, so who knows if it'll ever actually come to pass. Personally, I know that the hikes have basically made me embarrassed to suggest the game to people because I just can't imagine anyone willing to pay the costs out of the gate, and I know exactly how people would react to the sticker shock. They've also killed my desire to start new factions because it takes too many months of hobby budget to get a functioning force up and running. That leaves me with fleshing out my existing factions which is plenty of hobby time for now, but will also eventually dry up unless GW starts going back and adding new models to the ranges.

I wouldn't have thought that the Bloodthirster would have gone from $130 to $170 (CAD) last year either, but they bumped it and the Lord of Change up to be in line with the other greater daemon prices. There are a lot of kits of a similar size and price on that list, I would actually be very surprised if they didn't get the same treatment. Glottkin, Nagash, Verminlords... they're all as big or bigger than the greater daemons physically and they fill the same army role. Why would the changes be any different?

Wow... that is one heck of a list. If I had to guess now, anything remotely similar to a greater daemon is probably getting the same treatment as the real greater daemons last time around. That means if you want to pick up Nagash, Glottkin, a Maw-krusha, Verminlords... basically anything big, you better do it now before it gets a 30-40% price increase. Too bad really, I was planning on getting back into nurgle when they release the next book and finally picking up the kin. I don't think I can justify a knee-****** purchase to dodge the price increase right now and I'm sure I'm not going to buy it once the price jumps by 30% for no perceivable reason. I guess that pretty much writes off a return to Nurgle for me. I am really curious if this is all increase or if some of these will actually be getting price decreases. A number of the terrain kits on here are already massively overpriced... I already can't imagine anyone actually buying them as is. It'd make more sense for GW to just drop them from the line entirely if they're going to jack the prices up.

Hmm, well I will say that right off the bat you're in for a bit of an uphill climb competitively. The great thing about the Khorne book is you can run pretty much anything you want to some degree of success, but certain things require more effort to build around. Blood warriors and chaos knights aren't exactly the best units but they can certainly be made to work with a little elbow grease. For support the first things you'll want in Khorne are slaughter priests and the scenery piece. They provide a lot of the support the army needs through their prayers and shore up the lack of ranged damage. If you're going to include StD units then a warshrine is a really good choice as well since its buffs are very strong. I think a bloodstoker is also a must for the army since it helps knights and blood warriors quite a bit. A bloodsecrator is welcome in pretty much any khorne list... and I guess to keep with the cavalry theme you could also pick up a Chaos Lord on Karkadrak. He's pretty beefy, buffs chaos knights, and hits like a truck if you give him one of the -3 rend artifacts from malign sorcery.

They typically work on a pretty structured release schedule, so I wouldn't be surprised if the Sons and even more are ready to go. That being said if they follow their regular pattern and release all of that at a normal pace then, after it's done, there's going to be a couple month gap where we get absolutely nothing again. I'm pretty sure they'll add a few extra weeks between the next couple releases to try to and absorb the time lost in quarantine and keep people at least partially engaged. I expect they'll be milking realmlords and then Sons for quite a while.

I use marauder horsemen often in my slaves lists. They still have potential in Khorne although they overlap with bloodreavers a bit. For strengths they're relatively cheap, extremely fast (for Khorne anyway), and bring a relatively unique ranged weapon. The ranged weapon is total garbage but... yeah at least it's there. Might pick off a single 1 wound model per game haha. My preference is to use them as 5 man units for whatever the need is. They make for solid screens on their long bases, fast forward objective grabbers, or to harass flanks and threaten back field objectives/support characters. Basically they're swiss army knives that shore up gaps in your composition and can bring flexibility in game. I can't imagine running them in huge units though because, like you said, there are so many better choices, but a couple minimum size units can be really useful.

You need a slaves hero with mark of khorne and 8 units of slaves with the mark of khorne. Since the darkoath can't take a mark he can't qualify for the battalion. Personally I'd prefer to keep the 40 man unit because it will keep its rend longer. If you lose a single model from the 20 man units your damage drops off significantly, but the 40 man unit can take a solid hit and still be a real threat. Screening will help, but if all you have is 20 man units then I think you might drop off in the later turns of the game. Although I guess that's something you can easily tinker with later while you're playing it.

I can offer a few notes: 1. Ruinbringer is solid, although I haven't played with a ton of knights to really put it through its paces. Knights are pretty expensive and don't do a ton of damage, but ruinbringer helps that and they're pretty resilient. I'm happy with a unit or two but more than that might be difficult to build with. 2. Mammoth is definitely playable and by all accounts rock solid for its points. Never tried it though. 3. Haven't tried chosen yet. I just can't seem to make a list that I like for them and I think marauders will do far better for their points. 4. Karkadrak can take the sword of judgement, but I think the dimensional blade (-3 rend) is better. Makes him an absolute blender. 5. I've found the ravagers summoning very helpful in games. Threatening back lines skews how your opponent plays, and the flexibility in options is huge. For example, you can put a durable iron golems unit on an objective, bring on a marauder unit to almost guarantee the charge on a squishy support hero, or summon a quick unit like marauder horsemen to toss some javelins and threaten objectives in a wide section of the board. You certainly don't want to use it every turn, but it can be really good in the right circumstances. Finally, if you're looking at playing slaanesh you could also consider playing with the slaanesh allegiance instead of slaves. The exploding 6's there don't need hero's nearby, and while you lose out on ravagers and a few battalions you do gain a much more aggressive summoning mechanic. Plus you get easier access to heavy hitting daemons like the keeper and contorted epitome, and of course the locus of diversion. Definitely worth considering.

@Rune your main problem is the list is currently illegal. Your battalion needs one more slaves unit with the mark of khorne. I think the least disruptive method to get one would be dropping the extra command point for a chaos spawn. That would make for a good blood sacrifice target as well if you're taking it. Other options might be to drop the slaughter priest and grab either a slaves hero or a unit of marauder horsemen, or you could drop a unit of marauders and take marauder horsemen and a chaos spawn. As for the list itself, I'm not really sure. It certainly packs a punch, but it's lacking resilience and heavily reliant on the darkoath bubble if you get alpha struck. You'll have to be really careful about screening your marauder units to make it work.

Maybe this is a bit presumptive, but it's kind of weird to see ignoring rend as a new defensive ability since it conflicts with the more recent re-rolling save abilities. What I mean is, the way you deal with re-rolling saves is generally having rend. But if things start to just ignore rend en-masse, then that tactic is just shut down. Generally the answer to deal with ignoring rend is to just to not bring rend at all so you aren't wasting points. Wear them down over time with volume to get the edge on attrition. This doesn't create a scenario that you can work around with tactics, it creates no win situations. If you bring rend to deal with rerolling saves, then you lose to ignore rend. If you bring the bodies to deal with ignoring rend, you'll lose to rerolling saves. If you try to go somewhere in the middle and you run into a skew of either you get completely destroyed anyway. All you can do is hope that you don't run into your counter. It should be mentioned that mortal wounds can answer both, but very few units can generate the necessary damage without magic and relying on that against the likes of OBR (Nagash and Arkhan) or the Lumineth (Teclis, maybe others?) doesn't seem viable.

I've been working on building a list around chaos warriors and it sounds like it might work for what you have collected. I'm not sure if it's going to be competitive or not, but initially it seems to have some potential. Allegiance: Slaves to Darkness- Damned Legion: RavagersMortal Realm: UlguLeadersChaos Lord on Karkadrak (250)- Artefact: Dimensional Blade- Mark of Chaos: Nurgle- Ravagers Command Trait: Eternal VendettaChaos Lord (110)- General- Reaperblade & Daemonbound Steel- Command Trait: Bolstered by Hate- Artefact: Mark of the High-favoured- Mark of Chaos: NurgleChaos Sorcerer Lord (110)- Mark of Chaos: Nurgle- Spell: Spite-tongue Curse- Ravagers Command Trait: Master of DeceptionHarbinger of Decay (160)- AlliesBattleline5 x Chaos Knights (180)- Cursed Lance- Mark of Chaos: Nurgle20 x Chaos Warriors (400)- Hand Weapon & Shield- Mark of Chaos: Nurgle40 x Chaos Marauders (300)- Axes & Shields- Mark of Chaos: Nurgle5 x Chaos Marauder Horsemen (90)- Javelin & Shield- Mark of Chaos: NurgleBehemothsChaos Warshrine (170)- Mark of Chaos: Nurgle BattalionsPlaguetouched Warband (180)Endless Spells / Terrain / CPsExtra Command Point (50)Total: 2000 / 2000Extra Command Points: 2Allies: 160 / 400Wounds: 144 The basic idea is to abuse the chaos warriors as an incredibly durable tarpit with the warshrine nurgle buff, harbinger command ability, and aura save from the shrine along with their native rerollable save. Marauders kick butt, horsemen grab objectives or screen the marauders, and the knights and lord on karkadrak look to hammer whatever the warriors have tied up. The list is very resilient overall with decent objective play as well, but is certainly strapped for command points even with the extra so you'll have to be careful about summoning.

Yup, that's what i did. You can usually tell if you check the sprues on the GW page. If the box comes with 20 models but the sprues they show only have enough to build 10, then that usually means that there is a duplicate set included. Oh and in this case it also says it in the description at the bottom of the page.

Yeah, like I said mostly from preference. I haven't played nearly enough of the insensate thirster, but I'd be worried about actually getting him into heroes to trigger the extra tithe point from master decapitator. There's the dream scenario of charging a unit and exploding a couple backline heroes with outrageous carnage, but that feels so dicey. At least with the second activation you're looking at more chances to roll a 6, and you could take the generic artifact that adds +1 to attacks to help some more. The list is a touch light on anti magic too so reapers helps there, especially if you make the slaughter priest your general. Either way, I do really like the list. I look forward to hearing how it works for you. A solid tithe generation list that also hits hard sounds like a lot of fun.

@Roark I like the list, it's a lot like the ones I've been trying to build using StD. Most of it should work pretty well, and the only changes I'd add would be from personal preference. I think I'd swap the chaos lord for Skarr Bloodwrath. The chaos lord is solid and getting the marauders to attack twice is golden, but even with the thermalrider cloak it might be difficult to line up due to their extreme charge ranges. On the other hand it's really easy to use Skarr on wrathmongers and he makes them excellent suicide units to send against your opponents hardest hitting units. Plus he could be a decent blood sacrifice target early on since reavers have a tendency to run away with their low bravery, but if skarr dies he can just respawn. I also might try Reapers of Vengeance instead of Skullfiend tribe since I think the extra set of attacks would be better than the trait/artifact from Skullfiend.

Yeah I think anyone getting excited for non-chaos warbands to spice up their faction needs to take a long hard look at the current ones. There is very little reason to take any of them, even when summoned on the table for free, and I can only think of a single warband that I would actually pay points for to support a weird mechanic for one sub faction. Also from my experience GW has sculpted them in a way that's almost overtly hostile towards conversions. I got two boxes of the cypher lords and it was an absolute nightmare converting them so I didn't have any duplicate sculpts. I guess it's the cost of their nice dynamic poses, but in the end it means that from a hobby perspective you'll never want more than a single unit on the table anyway. I'd be happy if GW learned from these mistakes and improved the new warbands, but I doubt it. They had an opportunity to improve the chaos ones when they released the StD book and didn't take it, and they've had multiple chances to make the underworlds warbands usable but completely wasted those as well. I don't know if they just don't want to have to balance the extra units or they figure there's no point in trying to sell them to AoS players, but so far they always seem to make them deliberately underpowered to avoid rocking any boats.

Which is the problem with mathhammer, it's always circular haha. If you say that witherstave and rustfang are in range to affect my units, then I can say the harbinger can't be hiding from my snipers at the same time due to the 7" stave range. Oh but if there is a summoned a tree in the way then maybe it can hide, oh but then I have changehost and a spell portal, etc etc. Actually now that i think of it tzeentch might have been the better option because you can guarantee the +1 attack with destiny dice and getting the spells off is significantly less dicey there.... see now i'm stuck in the circle lol. In the end the only way to be sure is putting it on the table and playing it out. In my personal opinion and experience it's a nasty looking list for sure, but it certainly has counters and will struggle against a lot of competitive lists or varied scenarios. But thankfully that doesn't matter! If someone wants to run it and thinks it'll be fun or a good hobby challenge then all the power to them. Go nuts and paint your heart out!

First thing, I'd i totally agree that the army will look amazing across the table. However I'd also say it's important to note that this game isn't just mashing one unit into another unit and roll dice for a while. I don't need to kill 81 wounds on a 4+/5++. If I can outnumber them I can take the objective anyway, or if I can kill the harbringer I can take out half of their resilience. If I can throw in some models that are more resilient while also outnumbering then, again, I take the objective and I don't really care. The thing with an army this small is it reduces the synergies available to combat those different tactics. In addition, if the objectives are spread across the board you lose the ability to cover everything with your buffs, so the opponent may be able to pick you off piecemeal. You requested mathhammer though, so I'll try out a few. My favourite is blocks of chaos marauders. 40 marauders is 300 points. If we add on a sorcerer and warshrine we match the points for the blight kings, but we could probably toss in some more support to compensate for the harbinger as well. Possibly a khorne daemon prince which could turn those objective grabbing run rolls to a 3 instead of 6 and pretty much guarantee you never get a charge off, or a bloodsecrator allied in from khorne. Just for optimal results, lets do a bloodsecrator. 40 marauders can trivially get into contact with 20 kings. With bloodsecrator, daemonic power, and khorne aura (assuming a khorne general nearby, and you have no magic resistance so assuming the spell goes off) they get 121 attacks hitting on 3+ with a reroll for about 107 hits, wounding on 3+ with a reroll for about 95 wounds at rend 1. That's about 63 after save and 42 after your harbinger save. Almost half the unit exactly. The warshrine could toss in as well, which should cause the three remaining wounds to kill the 11th king. Assuming you use the remaining 9 kings to attack the marauders you get 27 attacks, 18 hits with ~5 explosions adding about 12 extra hits for 30 total. 20 wounds which cause about 12 damage after the 6+ rerollable/6++ on the marauders. So the marauders will survive the battleshock and take the point. if you've banked a CP that's great, but if not then battleshock will kill another 6ish kings on average. If the other player has a chaos lord nearby for double activations then the kings just die, but otherwise they lose to attrition in the next couple turns. Alternatively, a ranged army like tzeentch or stormcast could snipe out the harbringer pretty trivially and then focus down the unit of kings that doesn't have the Lord of Blights command ability on it (you'll only ever have a maximum of one protected unless you forgo the harbinger save). If the harbinger goes down then 20 pinks with a few buffs get 60 shots at a 3+ to hit and reroll hits for 53 hits, wound on a 3+ for a measly 26 wounds, but if they charge after you'll spend the rest of the game trying to chew through the unit of 100 wounds while they control the objective anyway. Tzeentch can also get chaos marauders and give them +1 attack pretty easily, so take my example above but remove the harbinger saves and they'd be expected to kill about 15 kings on the charge.