Kevlar1972

It's not just their buff bubble. They can run independently and kill things way above their points cost. They are one of the best anti-monster units in the game. And the 3" range means they can dish a ton of attacks from behind a decent sized screen. I think they are a must include. So flexible and can take on many roles while making anything around them better.

Right. That's how games workshop operates. They will leave an obvious open loophole in the rules even though everything else like that has been faq'ed. People will rush out and buy a ton of bestigors and spawn. 6 months later that loophole will be closed in an updated faq and people will cry the blues and have to jump on the next new bandwagon.

It's the buff synergy really and the blood tithe. With gore pilgrims you are forced to run 4 mortal heroes. So its tough to mix daemons into that. It's the models I have too. I don't have 90 bloodletters, if I did I would run a different battalion and focus more on daemons.

Well you can still run them under the beasts of chaos allegiance. Giving them the mark of nurgle would make them immune to a lot of nurgle attacks and give them bonuses or free healing when fighting vs a maggotkin army!

Well you are going to be taking blood secrator and probably some other khorne characters for buffs so the general thing isn't a big deal. There are no casters in the khorne battalion so that's a non-issue. It's perfectly fieldable with realm artifacts if a beast player wants to branch out. I just don't see it adding too much to a khorne army. The cygors could be nice against certain opponents but the battalion tax is probably too heavy to make it workable. I don't think the mark of khorne will buff their shooting but if it can I guess you could make a half assed gunline with cygors and skull cannons. But you could already do that with soul grinders without the battalion tax.

Slaves is a pretty disjointed faction. The heroes aren't that great and command abilities are few and far between. A lot of the units mix well into the god specific factions once you mark them and some are very useful. Knights, marauders, warriors with shields, warshrine, daemon prince are all great units and don't come from allies pool. But they don't fit into the good battalions so they aren't the most competitive choices. Just things you can take to fill out some extra points. Starting from scratch I'd shy away from them and go for a more god centric faction for the awesome allegiance abilities and summoning. You can always add in your favorite units later. Khorne and Tzeentch can't really ally. You can get tzaangors through the beast of chaos faction keyword as allies which does give you access to shaman, enlightened, skyfires, but you are limited to just 400 pts in a 2000 point list. But that only works for khorne. Tzeentch has no way to ally in khorne. Khorne - nurgle are buddies and Tzeentch - slaanesh. You have to run grand alliance chaos if you really want to mix and match.

Means they are always battle line in GA chaos or Disciples of Tzeentch, or where ever else you can field them. But only battle line in beasts of chaos with the shaman general. I think.

I am a bit curious how a setup like this would work vs a grot warboss with his tricksy ability. Would all the attacks turn into 1s and all auto miss?

I'm more psyched about being able to ally in a shaggoth personally. I like gore pilgrims too much and don't think that beast battalion would work too great under the khorne umbrella. No spells, no artifacts, not much synergy. Beasts don't have mortal daemon or bloodbound keywords. I think it would be tough to make work. Its a pretty big tax to pay to just bring in some heavy hitters when we already have plenty.

Awesome! Now I can ally in a dragon ogre shaggoth with the Tail of Judgement into my blades of khorne army! Before this I couldn't ally with thunderscorn.

The colloquial term for this is they've been hit with the nerf bat. Sorry if you spent a few hundred dollars on them and hours upon hours painting them. Time to rip them apart and remodel them as enlightened.

It sounds an awful lot like you are trying to say the sword hits without hitting. That doesn't pass the logic gate.

I've never really done this because most of my characters use actual weapons to attack, but I notice some people suggesting to replace a hero's tail attack or claw and fang attacks with an artefact like the swords of justice. Something like a dragon ogre shaggoth or ogroid thaumaturge gets some fairly strong but few weapon attacks, but get many weak natural attacks. This is legal correct? I know it wouldn't be in older editions where you had to purchase wargear in lieu of your regular weapons, but in the extremely watered down AoS rules this seems to be allowed? Granted very few heroes can take advantage of this and if they actually did model a dragon ogre shaggoth holding a magic sword in his tail it would look hilarious. It just seems wrong to me and a bit gamey.

Are you really trying to rules lawyer a natural 1 being a hit? Shirley you can't be serious.

Maybe they should just give the grand alliances decent artifacts and command abilities/traits. That would go a long way toward balancing out the playing field. No idea why the grand alliance rules are so terrible.