Lucentia

Potentially! Though I don't think any hedonite models have identical dual weapons, they tend to go for asymmetry. I am extremely confident that it's not DoK though, unless it's an enormous departure from the existing DoK design elements.

The paired, symmetrical weapons make me lean Lumineth, though they do look like they're dancing off of a route or branch, so maybe Kurnothi. I think we've had LRL warcry rumours floating around for a while now?

I see Nighthaunt in there, obviously, but it doesn't look like a hero model particularly, so perhaps another new unit on the way? There's some sort of flippy elfy acrobat figure too, but it does not look like DoK to me, potentially Lumineth I guess, they are wearing a helm/plume with some sort of animal head design. And a cavalry model, fingers crossed for marauder/darkoath horses, perhaps?

I do tend to run mirror when I can squeeze a spell in, I suppose it's a side effect of the same design flaw as most list building choices; depravity points are everything, so another potential source of them is very valuable. Plus it can be useful for forcing small heroes to make bad movement choices on occasion. I do intend to play around with visage at some point though, I don't think it's a bad choice necessarily.

Hmm, I saw that 'blade' as a stylised lightning bolt, I feel like we've seen that sort of design before? The joinery looks kinda neat for Destruction, but I haven't really examined the KB sculpts that closely. My guess is somewhere in the CoS/Sigmar Order zone.

I'm not sure if Ushoran's ability actually combos with the 4 point Feeding Frenzy delusion? His warscroll specifically requires him to have 6 HD points before the effect triggers.

They mean the eyes in the wreath itself, though I imagine that's just for visual flair.

If skaven are going to be in the starter boxes, they will want to fill those boxes with brand new minis, and they will want those forces to be playable out of the box, so I would expect to see at least one battleline unit resculpt for the skaven, most likely Clanrats, much like the tyranids got new gaunts. However, the alternative possibility is that they focus on a new/less supported Skaven clan for the starter boxes, which brings its own brand new battleline units with it, in which case some of the older kits might remain as they are.

I was curious if the zombie bishop would be an actual priest or if that would be flavoured as delusion too, but I suppose that answers that. The current ghoul/horror/flayer courtiers are neither priests nor wizards, so I wonder if they will gain one of those roles, or if they've just been replaced wholesale by the new suite of heroes.

My guess, and it is purely a guess, is that dawnbringers 2-5 will all feature models solely from a single grand alliance, that's been the case for the past two at least, and it sounds like the next one will be all Death stuff. Possibly I'm reading into a pattern that's not really there, but I'd expect book 5 to come with models for chaos factions only. They could go back to a multi-GA 6th book to wrap things up, that seems possible, or the rumoured DoK stuff could be unrelated to dawnbringers and will come with their 4th Ed battletome later down the line.

The tactical rock on there kind of looks like a crumbling archway, which isn't a totally unusual feature, but could match in with other skaven scenic bases we've seen from Underworlds or with the new deathmaster.

It says plastic right there in the headline. But I would agree that I'm not totally convinced in the effect from the pictures shown, it would have to be a pretty different grade of transparent plastic to what you normally see to avoid looking cheap or out if place, I think. The transparent ringbearers that they already sell don't exactly look great to my eye, though those are much older products.

The very granular hero customisation of WHFB (and older 40k editions for that matter) never really worked for me, to be honest, whilst you got occasional moments where you could use some weird combo of baubles to make 'your guy,' a lot of the time there were pretty clear best choices, so you just saw, y'know glittering robes + fencers blades, and dispel scrolls all over the place, or whatever the current top picks happened to be. Particularly I did not much enjoy the WHFB 8th generic magic items system, where each item cost the same number of points regardless of who was using it, even though a sword of +1 strength is a lot more valuable on a base S5 hero than a S3 one, etc. so it's very tricky to even pretend to balance out that kind of system. Maybe one way to square that circle would be with a reworked and better integrated heroic actions system? I don't need 'my guy' to be carrying around a sack full of artefacts and command traits, so long as they get to do some cool and impactful things over the course of the game.

Mm, I can't say for 100%, but I assume without including the marrowscroll herald in the count, note that 8 kits is a rough estimate based on new warscrolls only, not exact detail.

FEC: ~8 new kits, ~5 new heroes, a few resculpts, new battleline unit (I'm guessing these are the ghouls we've already seen?), new cav unit, centerpiece is explicitly a Mortarch.

Mm, there are definitely copies of the FEC tome out in the wild, I'd thought maybe people were talking vaguely around playtest stuff, but influencer copies makes more sense.

I don't think Ushoran would make it into the box, at least to my memory it would be the first time a big, unique character was put in a launch box. 20 ghouls and some sort of cavalry seems plausible though, a couple of small/mid sized heroes and some sort of bruiser unit on top of that would probably do it.

I think it's the golden demon, the mascot of the painting competition, so presumably organisers would give those cards as awards for best painted warbands, etc.

FEC for AOS is definitely the safe bet, but my guess is that they will be receiving one of those book + new minis bundle boxes, and they will only show the models from that boxset in this preview, holding off the full range till the main release (presumably in January at this point). We might see the next Dawnbringers bits, I guess, but I feel like they might sit on that till next year too, they've still got a few months to fill before they start ramping up the new edition hype train.

I think 6 fiends is an interesting unit now that they're allowed to spread out under the updated coherency rules, but that's 400pts, in my experience 3 model fiend squads can't quite cut it as replacements for slickblades cos it's 8 less wounds and the damage output is too swingy when you really want to be hitting that magic 12 number. I'm not sure if the innate debuffs make up for 8 less wounds than min sized slickblade units, but maybe! Still, I do wanna play more with the 6 pack at some point, I don't think they're useless or anything. I wish we had easier access to +1 attack buffs, fiends would love that.

The problem with slickblades, though they are certainly very good, is that they're almost mandatory in any hedonites list just by the design of the book. You need to rack up depravity to win (at the very least you need 12 dp asap, ideally turn 1) and the only reliable way to generate dp is through Euphoric Killers. So you need at least one unit that is fast enough to hit a favourable T1 target and with enough damage output to get those 12 wounds done, and realistically only Slickblades fit the bill. (Potentially Fiends could work too, but they are pricer and slower.) It's a bit of a flaw in how the book is designed, I think, there are quite a lot of interesting warscrolls in there, but because every core battle trait in the book rotates around the depravity system I find you end up pretty limited in what you can actually take in a list that won't just fall apart.

I think using Broken Realms to establish Kragnos as a player in the same sort of league as Morathi/Teclis/Belakor was a pretty savvy and clever move, but then his actual background and plot relevance was a big fumble in my eyes (But, then again, I don't hold a lot of warhammer lore stuff in super high regard beyond the broad strokes and occasional fun detail, so I don't know that my view counts for much there.) The model I think is basically fine if uninspiring, but that style of cross-faction piece never really works for me cos it breaks the shared aesthetic cohesion that really make a warhammer army pop on the table, same reason I'll never really run allied units in my lists.

This is why I've never been any good at cryptic crossword. Khorne and S2D, FEC and OBR, then DoK?, CoS and Skaven, maybe? Though I don't know where the books would split in that case.

Double post.

The Adeptus Sororitas have their whole witch hunter shtick, so they've had anti-psyker crossbows in the past, I can't remember if they have any in their modern range, but it's possible this RE is part of whatever the sisters of battle are getting in their 10th Ed codex.