Lucentia

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?

It is kinda funny to see Shalaxi in the roster, a warscroll ostensibly designed for hunting and killing other characters, I'd say they're likely to wind up dead last without some fudging of the rolls!

The shadow and pain box released at the same time as BR: Morathi, but they weren't really linked much beyond the timing, BR didn't even have the rules for the Ironscale in it, as I recall, nor the updated DoK scrolls from that box.

I feel like a nurgle insect hive would look more gross and drippy than that, probably? So I guess I'm on team sylvaneth for this one.

They're much smaller than gore-gruntas, and they're fewer models than the likes of cavaliers, makes sense that they'd be cheaper.

Ushoran can't take hoarfrost cos he doesn't qualify for being an Andtorian Locus in basically every way, he's stuck with the FEC spells I'm afraid.

I don't think it's quite as clear cut as 'skew lists = win at all costs mindset = bad.' In the previous Cities book you could also run a steam tank spam list, but it was not especially competitive on tournament rankings, so it was more of a novelty that some players enjoyed rolling around with. Granted, perhaps this is crossing wires between skew lists and spam lists, which are not necessarily the same thing. I'm not against experimenting with alternative methods of list construction, certainly, but I do not think that will actually remove skew lists from play, it would just change what a skew list is under the new format, it's not as if WHFB didn't have cheesy lists aplenty! For what it's worth I personally think a rules based approach to disincentivising spam lists is the best option, if Blissbarbs are supposed to be ranged battleline chumps, lower their damage output, if steamtanks are going to be allowed as the core of a list, they probably shouldn't have a 2+ base save, or they will need to cost more, etc.

It looks like Krethusa is on a 50-60mm base to my eye, so, yeah, she's not an enormous centerpiece monster, more of a Sigvald or Warsong Rev, and I'd expect her to be priced similarly.

That's an oft quoted rumour/suspicion, but there's never been any actual evidence in support of it, I don't think. It's one of those things that feels plausible, but I don't know if the actual timeline works out with how far ahead the books have to be printed and such.

I suspect, as this warcry squad is exactly 10 models on identically sized bases as opposed to an odd number at a mixture of sizes, that they will be the main river unit for LRL and will be released separately down the line. So they just need to kick out a wizard and spirit with the next tome to complete the river temple.