Lucentia

Presumably either all priests just have warscroll abilities and there's no bespoke prayer system or (more ideally) spells and prayers are now operating under the same broad ruleset and are both classed as 'magic.' Might get a little messy for factions with both spell and prayer lores, but I'm sure they can figure something out. In AoS in particular this makes a good deal of thematic sense, I think, where we know that deities are not infinitely powerful, like, what's the material difference between a slaaneshi priest or a slaaneshi wizard if they're both basically drawing from the same source?

Perhaps notably the core rules and unit warscrolls, including FAQ/errata updates, have been available for free in every edition of the game thus far, it's probably worth waiting to see if that will remain the case before hinging a bunch of speculation on a poorly worded statement.

I guess in a choice between removing battleshock or trying to make it actually impactful, I'd rather see it removed, yeah. And, hey, maybe it means we also lose all the useless 'roll 2d6 over bravery for a mediocre effect' abilities.

The easiest test to see how much thought they've put into the Spearhead stuff will be if it has a different variant on the priority roll, imo. Personally I very much like the prio roll/double turn threat structure in AoS, and think it adds a challenging but dynamic aspect to the game. However, that only holds true at 2k+ points levels, in sub-2k games you don't get enough stuff on the board to properly play around the prio roll, and it does kinda become the coin flip for victory bogeyman that people sometimes talk about. So if the Spearhead stuff as tinkered with various warscrolls and battle traits but left the core rules unchanged to accommodate the lower model count, it could be tricky to get off the ground

Possibly I'm misunderstanding what they're actually doing with the new combat range, but doesn't it kinda just make all weapon ranges 3"? You'd still need to measure to see which models are within the 3" range to swing, no? I assume the whole unit doesn't get to fight if one model toes into 3". Like, it is less measuring, and mostly cuts out the problem of base sizes effecting melee output, but it doesn't mean you suddenly don't have to measure per model or anything, unless my read is wrong. (And, obviously, without seeing the actual rules.)

Probably doesn't help that even 40k chaff units tend to have, like, 8 weapon options of varying degrees of uselessness. To kind of square these two tangents, we could be looking at something like clanrats just being armed with 'rusted weapons' and the starter box squad will be mixed swords and spears. The new FEC cryptguard do this, where their swords and halberds have the same profile, potentially written with 4.0 in mind.

At the very least we'll probably see faction focus articles for each army in the run up to release (which might actually be a little juicier than the ones for 3rd Ed, which were mostly just, 'Er, I guess you can use All Out Attack to hit harder?') With no scheduled warhammer fest it's hard to say, but I'd imagine they'll trickle out the starter box models over the next month or so.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with secondary objectives, but the battle tactics as they stand in 3rd edition are just not it, they're not particularly engaging or interesting, and have a outsized effect on game outcome/'top armies,' that system wants a ground-up reworking, imo. Hopefully they're just using the same name for a reimagined system in the new rules...

Can't say I'm very excited for USRs, I've never much enjoyed how GW tends to employ them in their game. Hopefully they're rather more interesting than the current 40k incarnation, where every other unit has some combination of lethal/sustained/deadly hits and everything winds up feeling kinda samey even across factions. Axing melee ranges is probably a good change, though I wouldn't mind it sticking around on monsters/single model units and the like. Notable, killing it completely will have a huge impact on deployment and gameplay if friendly units can't attack over one another, etc.

Dark elf (and DoK) blades are almost always curved, and often asymmetrical, and they don't typically have the fuller either. Though DE spearheads are generally straight, it doesn't really look like a spear. I would say vampires, but there are already a lot of vampires running around!

I have run 10 Painbringers in the past, but found them fairly lackluster. They're +1 save ability can be deceptively tricky to trigger in some missions, and their damage output is fairly middling until you can get up to 24 dp. And, of course, 1" weapons on 32mm bases is always a pain to deal with, but perhaps that won't be a big issue of 4th edition makes changes in that area. On paper I like them, but in practice they didn't really work how I'd like them to. 2x5 is potentially interesting as high armour objective sitters with a bit of punch, but at that point I'd almost rather just run 2x5 Twinsouls as little mini-screens to blunt potential charges.

Whilst this is true, I'd add that that mobility is absolutely crucial. Even if you're just using slickblades to punch a screen out T1 for +10 depravity, their extra 8" of movement over daemonettes/fiends means they won't have to deploy right on the starting line for a reliable charge and can be kept safe with your own screens. Or, ideally, it means they've got the movement to threaten juicier stuff behind the enemy screening lines. I'm not necessarily looking to maximise damage with these units, I just need something that can hit for at least 12 wounds ASAP so that I don't lose the game immediately, and slickblades remain the best option for that despite their middling damage output, imo. I'm running a 6 fiends list currently, but it still also needs a slickblade unit for a reliable, punchy, early charge.

Isn't there a plastic plague priest in the Screaming Bell kit? Or does he have weird feet that won't stick on a base? DoK have multiple hero models stuck in the cauldron kit in a similar way.

I can definitely see an update for basic Eshin ninja rats coming via a warcry squad, seems like the perfect venue for that sort of light skirmish unit, really. And personally I don't think you necessarily need all the clans to be equally represented, the sneaky assassin clan with a hero, monster, and skirmish unit feels reasonable for that sort of theme. I guess maybe you could re-flavour jezzails into a skyre/eshin cross-clan sniper thing, or something. Plague Monks, on the other hand, don't feel like a good fit for warcry. Warcry squads tend to be 8-12 ish models and they have to fit entirely on two standard sized sprues, whereas plague monks have historically been more of a horde unit (though I guess, again, they could just reflavour them into something more elite.) More likely they'll look at things like pestilens as part of new release waves in later editions, prime candidates for a supplement as part of a future broken realms/dawnbringers style series, for example.

DoK have +1 to chanting auras from their avatars and cauldrons, at least.

To me it looks like the image is upside down, and the antler could be being suspended from those dark straps at the bottom of the image, as a trophy or decoration, perhaps.

I imagine if they wind up removing faction terrain generally, they'll just shift all the sylvaneth wildwood abilities to the overgrown terrain mechanic.

One of the things I thought was quite clever about Broken Realms was titling the first few books after known quantities and established personalities, then swinging in Kragnos for the final one, to my mind that immediately works to place him on roughly the same level as Morathi, Teclis, and Belakor. Now, narratively I don't know that that particularly holds true, but I do think it was a deliberate choice made to help associate him with that sort of middle-weight named hero bracket.

They still tend to use 25mm for massed units (even stuff like the brand new crypt guard, or wholly AoS kits like mortek guard) so I would expect that at the very least clanrats would stay at that size. Potentially more elite stuff like stormvermin could jump up a few millimeters to make them look bigger.

Mm, no harm in waiting for further details to emerge, I suppose, but removing a full (albeit undersupported) faction from the game at this point in its life cycle without a replacement lined up would be a pretty demoralising move, to say the least.

Euphoric Killers in both combat phases makes that sound like pure wishlisting to me. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd be excited for the change, and it might work to push melee builds into favour, but it throws the calculations on DP generation way out of whack for them to just toss into a battlescroll, I think.

Perhaps I'm the minority, but I don't know that that sort of bespoke hero customisation would really add much to my AoS games. I have four armies, they all have their own backgrounds and stories and characters, I have sketchbooks and pages of background bits, but I don't think that being able to points buy a few extra artefacts/heroic traits/etc. would make it feel more compelling when my vengeance-driven Slaughter Queen gets eaten by squigs, or whatever. Tables of extra options are all well and good, but for me they don't really add much to an army game beyond some extra busy-work in the list building. If I want to go deep on character stuff, I'll happily stick to a more ttrpg space. That said, I do think it's a little silly that all AoS heroes have more or less the same melee stats, and I wouldn't hate to see some work put into making 'combat hero guy' a real thing in the game, but I don't think addressing either of those points would need huge, ground up changes. I'm generally with Chikout on this, battle tactics are the major standout flaw in the 3.0 rules, adjust how secondaries work, tighten up some of the sloppier rules, and I don't see any huge need to trash the core mechanics for a new edition, I think the base of the game is quite solid at this point.

I quite enjoyed last year's warhammer fest myself, but, yeah, they're probably trying to cook up a different approach to it, I'd imagine. But if you're not attending the actual event then the preview show is kinda the big draw, so they can just run one of those round April time to much the same effect, I guess.

Chariots seem like a pretty bad choice when your main shtick is fighting in tangled forest terrain, but I'm no expert.

I guess Ushoran doesn't have The Hunger either (or a directly equivalent ability à la Arkhan) and he's literally a vampire mortarch, so maybe they just decided that they don't need to slap such a valuable ability on every vampire in existence, who can say?