Lucentia

I guess I'm in the minority on this, perhaps, but for me 'my dudes' is something that has always mostly been something you do in your head, rather on the table. Like, even in WHFB, a game with a reasonable amount of extra options for your heroes, the leader of my ogre army was Frigga Blackfoot, a bruiser BSB who'd chewed off her own frozen leg so that she could use it to club a poisonous drake/monster to death whilst trapped beneath a treacherous glacier (amongst other bits of back story she'd pick up along the way) but none of that was represented for her mechanically, there was no 'sky-iron peg leg (10pts)' weapon option you could take, or whatever. And the same has kinda continued to be true for my through AoS, I don't feel like I need to points buy extra wizard levels or a smiting sword of +1 attack to make my guys feel unique (Maybe partly because they still wouldn't be, if everyone's playing with the same set of options) that sort of personal narrative is something that exists better off table in my mind, like choice of paint scheme, or how you want to theme your bases, or what pet units you always like to bring, that kind of thing.

Right, but you can kinda say that for everything, 'Oh, a slaughter queen is a chosen martial leader of the arisen blood goddess, she should be able to solo a slaughterpriest no problem,' 'An Abhorrent Archregent is a bloodthirsty monster swollen with unholy power, he should be able to kill 20 clanrats per combat!' Marrying the rules to fit the lore as much as possible is all well and good, but at some point you're just playing playground rules with whatever your pet factions happen to be. Do I think melee foot heroes have historically been a weak spot in AoS? Yes, certainly, I think that's a fair assessment. Do I think the solution to that is to make every random priest or wizard with 'Blood' in its name into Conan the Barbarian? Probably not. Let's see what vampire lords actually look like before jumping to conclusions.

I guess I don't agree with that, even as a khornate warrior-priest, it's a shirtless buff guy trying to fight a dinosaur, that doesn't seem like a battle he should be winning under most circumstances. If various wizards and priests get good melee profiles, it means actual combat heroes will either look lackluster in comparison or have to have heavily inflated melee profiles themselves to compensate. (Which, granted, maybe that would be fine, we haven't seen any frontline hero scrolls yet.) But I'm fine with priests and support heroes being fairly pillowfisted, they've got better things to be doing. The slaughterpriest still hits considerably harder than the average human, which seems about right to me.

I was also never a huge fan of the Diaz daemonettes, though I also don't love the current ones all that much (except I do think there are some quite nice, subtle face sculpts in that kit, just the bodies lack any sort of dynamism.) I would not be surprised to see some sort of daemon kit refresh get wheeled out over the next few years, a lot of those models are just about starting to show their age, particularly when put alongside the newer mortal chaos kits in AoS.

The ridges and ball joint thingy on the haft, and the dangly bits, kinda look like some of the mortal Hedonites stuff, but the top segment seals it as GSC I think, yeah.

They were starting to do that with some of the d6 damage rolls already in 3.0 (Lady Olynder's stare attack and Valkia's spear spring to mind) so I'm not surprised to see it being iterated on here.

New rat leak could be another engineer from the starter set, rather than a weapon team? Though it doesn't look totally like a hero model, it is on its own separate sprue, which is kinda interesting. If we do see any sort of roadmap I'd expect it to be very light, aside from whatever production issues are ongoing, the back half of a new edition year is typically not very heavy on additional releases.

Probably because if the choice is between extra damage or extra defense on a unit which is designed to mostly sit on objectives, you're taking the defensive option every time, if you care about trying to maximise your list. And if you're not that bothered about optimising your list, then being able to build your models however you like is maybe more appealing anyway.

Oh, I do not like the ward save being buried down in the keyword tags like that, at least put it near the save stat or something! I was also hoping that we'd avoid weapon-based special rules, I tend to find them pretty flavourless, sure, both Vanari Sentinels and Blood Sisters are just doing mortals on 6s, but they're doing it through different methods narratively, flattening it all into a detached 'Critical hits (mortal)' or whatever doesn't hit the spot for me. Other than that nothing too crazy, just neatening things up.

When it comes to cross-over stuff from the side games, I can kinda feel the pinch point from GWs perspective, it is neat and cool that you can also use those models in AoS, but it's also unsustainable in a way that (most of the time) their other ranges aren't, keeping every one-off board game model in circulation just cos it has an AoS scroll is going to be impossible sooner or later. If they had a more robust 'legends' system that would probably be perfect for this type of thing, give the side game stuff bonus warscrolls but clearly label them as something intended for limited use.

Also, 3 drops is not that outrageous in a system where 1 drops don't exist unless you can make a functioning army from literally five units, I'd imagine most lists will be looking at 2-3 drops, and that's if they're willing to run light on heroes.

I think they just mean that your command trait is no longer locked to your general, you can slap it on any of your heroes, but you still only get the one. (Though there might still be some way to unlock more as with the current battalions.)

Overall that sounds like quite a clever adjustment to list building, removing the ubiquitous of the one-drop battalions and theoretically making mid-tier hero choices more enticing if they come with interesting units attached. I'm not sure how I feel about losing battleline restrictions entirely, feels like it could lead to new player traps where you load up on shiny elite units with no incentive to grab the basic screens and speedbumps that you really need. Buuut then again most factions in the current system have tonnes of workarounds to avoid boring battleline choices anyway, so I suppose it's not that different really!

I can't see them reintroducing skaven slaves, it always felt a little silly to me to have two super-cheap, bad stats horde units in one faction, only differentiated by one being super-cheapier and bad statsier than the other. But I also find it unlikely they'll put 40 clanrats in there, that's an intimidating amount of basic infantry for new players. Normally they want playable armies for both sides of the starter box, but we also don't know if army composition is changing under the new rules, I suppose.

The masks/armour will be differentiating different model types in warcry, ie. maskless guys will be the cheaper objective grabbers, masked and armoured guys will be better combat pieces, etc. So there might be some alternate weapon options in the kit, but probably not much more than that.

Eh, I always treat these pre-edition articles kinda like press releases, they're mostly fluff with the occasional point of interest mixed in there. They've got ~3 months to fill, they're not gonna rush at it. They could've at least let us peek at a clanrat or something though, mind you.

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.