These surveys are such a boon to the community, keep up the outstanding work!

After watching you guys the past 6 months I've decided to get into AoS for the first time. Cheers guys, and keep it going!

I love warhammer weekly but these episodes are my absolute favourites! Presenting the analysis from the surveys is much needed and I am so glad you are doing this to help AOS going forwards in the best direction! Keep 'em coming :)

You know yesterday was National Golden Retriever day! You should have had your doggos on the show more!

Awesome episode guys. Thanks for all the work you put into this, Vince!

Just wanted to say that I really hope you send this to GW, and that they pay attention to it. It struck me while watching your awesome breakdown that it is baffling that GW doesn't do these sorts of surveys themselves - there is so much excellent information here for them about what people like and don't like.

I think a series of videos about some of the fundamental tactics and more advanced tips and playstyles for AoS would be amazing. There's nothing really like that in a clear concise video format on KZfaq at the moment so I think it'd do really well and be a great starting point for people looking to be more competitive.

Thanks for putting in all the work to collect and compile this data. It was enlightening.

Vince, thanks for taking the time to run and analyse this survey. It's a lot of useful data. I personally only really have an NPE when I just get stomped by a superior army (I play Nighthaunt and Sylvaneth, so plenty fit the bill). I don't mind losing, but I'd like to have the feeling that I could have played differently, or have a little more luck, and won the game. But for some games I just sit there and think "there is no universe in which I win this matchup". That just makes me feel like I wasted the 3+ hours spent playing the game.

Again, a great and very informative video. Thank you Vince.

So stoked for the anvil! Going to see how I can rework some Tomb Kings things with it.

Slaanesh player here. I love the models, I love the hobby, I am looking forward to painting new miniatures that are coming soon. I intend to spend money on the figures. But the game itself is... bad. Just bad. I stopped playing until I get the new battle tome and possibly AOS 3.0 and then I might... MIGHT, come back to actual play. I cannot stress enough how much of a bad design current Slaanesh is. You spoke of interactivity and I agree. With this tome I feel like I cannot even interact with my own army, let alone opponent's. It is like the army is playing me and not the other way around. You have one viable list and one way to play it. You maybe have magic, if the Big Magic Cartels let you have it :D Most of the time, it is obvious how the game will go based on the matchup. Playing my army was NPE when it was good, and it remains NPE now that it was nerfed into the ground... It really isn't about winning or loosing. And that is on top of a rule set that is, to be honest, just bad. GW army design philosophy seems to revolve around extremes - meaning that some armies have all of something while having nothing of something else. These kinds of extremes result in some matchups being extremely easy/hard ie NPE. A notion that certain army is seriously favored against the other is just bad design. There was a mention that the shooting is necessary because otherwise skink priests would run amok... Well, some armies just do not have access to any tools that would mitigate this. (Looking forward to those glorious archer models NGL). Additional problem is that AoS is essentially a game of deathtouch tag - things die to easy and too fast. Hence why activation wars are so toxic, you either touch the opponent first or he touches you. Sure, that is not the case if you have a unit of Liberators brawling with a unit of Chaos Warriors, they will stay there locked in melee until T5, but no one plays those. This kind of explosiveness only increases the role of dice in the game (especially the dreaded DT roll). Not to mention how rules encourage certain unit formations. I will die before I deploy my cavalry in a conga line sideways towards the opponent. That is just... NO. To sum up, I don't mind loosing. I play a variety of miniature wargames and I am losing most because I am not the greatest player in the world. I probably have the best win rate in AoS. That does not change the fact that AoS is the most unfun tabletop wargame I have played. I feel like I as a player bring the least to the table in this game. Probably why I win more here than with the other games :D

I love how you take the time and energy to make these surveys. A lot of people have strong opinions about the state of the game, but you back your stuff with numbers. One can only hope that GW does stg similar as well (even if the results are not public) !

In regards to killing heroes too easily with shooting, a couple of things: 1) look out sir should not just be a -1, but also reflect the possibility that a regular soldier may be willing to die for the general/leader. Maybe a 5+ pass along wound or mortal wound. 2) Also the image of a unit of 20 archers all aiming at one guy and hitting him with the same likelihood as a unit of 60 goblins has always stood out to me. Arrows hit each other in the air, there's literally just less surface area to hit etc. At a certain range perhaps, give a debuff of some kind for targeting a single model

I know that this is an older video, but specificially regarding the discussion you had about how to deploy chaff correctly and such - would you know any resource that talks about this in depth? I had seen an AoS Coach Video on the topic, but maybe there are other resources - thanks :)

Awesome show guys

Great show! Gave me ideas for future show suggestions: fixing shooting in AoS. Introduction to strategy in AoS (due to that bit about player experience being influencial)

Great video. Thanks!

Great episode guys. Vince, when you started talking about the player archetype and needing a small dude to take out big dudes I started saying "Knight-Questor" repeatedly to myself as well! :D:D

One more example of a badass. Gavespawn Doombull with the Mutating Gnarlblade. With a couple CP he’ll take down almost anything. I’ve had Archaon re-roll a save roll of 1 into a 6 to only take 17 damage from him. I’ve had him 1 shot a Scar-vet on Carnosaur, do 20 damage to Durthu etc. Even without the artefact I’ve had Doombull win a dual with a Bloodthirster, after he’s chewed through some Skullcrushers. Doombulls are the best

Cool show. Really enjoyed it.

This was a fascinating video. Thanks for putting it together! As a Beast of Chaos player I think NPE doesn't bother me as much for a couple of reasons: 1) My army is an easy 1-drop so I can almost always decide whether I want to be the one rushing across the table or not. 2) Shooting my troops is basically worthless since there are around 200 of them. Shooting at the heroes either doesn't matters because I expect them to die or they are hidden behind the herdstone and are difficulty to actually see. Also shooting heavy armies usually only get 1 turn to fire before I charge their units with garbage and force them to shoot at units that don't matter. 3) My build, at least, is about maximizing summoning points and zoning objectives. I can easily bring a chariot or cockatrice in every turn and since I 1 drop I will usually gum up the field until the game is over. This makes things like Activation Wars or anything that cause my guys to die a horrible death not really matter unless it is very extreme. On a fun note, you can totally make some sweet foot heroes with the Anvil of Apotheosis!

Order fights order, destruction fights order, death fights order, chaos fights all of them weakened oh but then godrakk headbutts archaeon, declares himself a winner and walks off into the sunset... Hmm, familiar.

I think chaff units are boring. When you listed having two layers of chaff just as standard I'm sitting here sad. I didn't choose to play my army so I can spam lines of disposable garbage. I want to play in this epic high fantasy Exalted meets Planescape setting where my hulking golden armoured warriors carrying absurdly oversized weapons smash into giants and demons and horrible bone amalgam creations. If I want to be playing games where screening and skirmishing to control space and delay movement and so forth is the order of the day then I'll be playing a historical game. There are tons of them out there and they are amazing fun. But I'm looking for something different out of AoS. I want to be excited about every unit in my army. And it just becomes a drag on that energy to be required to bring a bunch of stuff that I don't like just to 'be allowed to play' and chaff units fall into that bracket.

Great show, I always love these. Often results which go against expectations. One thing I’d like to see is what abilities people love when they have them. What makes you feel strong or a having a good experience in game. Because some of the ones we see here could also come up there. For example I love playing with magic, and wouldn’t have come back to AoS maybe two years ago because magic as such was so meh. But if I look at what most people play right now, I don’t wonder why magical dominance is high up there as an NPE, same for shooting (both are clearly also representing the interactivity issue though). For most people magic is mostly annoying when it’s strong. But GW might miss out on attracting new players who enjoy certain ways to play. So I think it’s good that there are a few armies which can play like that, but GW should find out a way to increase interactivity for those playstyles, and also keep a core of factions which play mostly in the melee range (which seems what most people are enjoying).

RE: BoC attitude to shooting and alpha strikes.. If your shooting options were Ungor Raiders, Cygors, Skyfires, Chimera and Cockatrices, you'd probably think shooting isnt a big deal either ;) Also, you are right about BoC not caring about alphas due to easy screen access. But the other part of the equation is that BoC are generally pretty happy if people decide to charge into herdstone range turn 1/2. Please, be my guest....

Fascinating as always. Also good to see the top level breakdown of armies played. Doesn't look like my store's meta at all as there are loads of us playing BOC and Slaanesh! :)

I think this is one of your best shows.

Someone! please tell me which episode Tom talks about lumineth being Hashut's worshippers?!

I don't know if anybody has mentioned it yet, but the thing in the rumour engine could also very well be something from the upcoming Kislev range?

Is the issue not more with low Rend rather than high Saves then? Got me thinking though, I wonder if there be an alternative rule to represent models with good armour?

Amazing study! I didn't fill out the survey because I think I'm too new in the hobby most of NPE are me going "oh shit that is what that army does?" And I didn't want to skew data

Question: When you guys are talking about 'vanguard wing' for stormcast being toxic and broken, what exactly are you referring to? Vanguard have been out for ages and raptors/aetherwings are good, but I wouldn't call them broken? I thought the only toxic/broken thing recently for SCE is the battalions for the stormkeeps, specifically the redeploy, which is more about shoving liberators up your opponent's nose rather than anything from Vanguard? Or have I been playing stormcast all this time and missed something completely broken??

Tom: what does Owen Jacksson have that i dont have? Fyreslayers have a strong look that noone likes so pants and less silly hats would make them palatable. Someone must have made a conversion that looks good. And for a combined dwarf faction are we talking the old city ones + fyreslayers via a broken realm or do you think they will ruin the good thing they have with KO folding in the drunken babies, old sculpts and KO into the unified dwarfen front of Duardin? Not having the underworlds warbands playable in Warcry seems like leaving money on the table tbh so i do hope they rectify that going forward

Damn I play Khorne an I’m chill AF. I beat the best of them and lost to the worst of them. Let’s have fun and roll some dice

Vince, your Power Point Kung Fu is impressive! You manage to make slides compelling, informative and not boring. If you know someone in the rules team of GW, you need to send them that, and your other surveys....they should see that as a gold mine! GW if you are looking....listen to Vince!

Great show as always and I forgot to say was nice to see you both in a Warhammer community article, you should have advertised it in one of your shows. Regarding this show, it was a great analysis but I think certain conclusions are a bit too uncertain to be called. The poll was about which army we play and what NPE we experienced while we could select multiple armies we play. So the NPE could have been with one or more of the played armies in case of multiple choices. For example I played LoN at their top and stopped because I couldn’t lose in my local group, had lots of fun with Nighthaunt since then where I did experience NPE, but I also have an FEC army that I play when I want to be more competitive. So my answers would have given points to all those armies where really my NPE comes from my really synergistic heroes being shot down on turn 1/max 2 because I can never choose who starts as my battalions don’t cover enough of the army to do one drop. And they survive longer only if they are in the underworld but then there’s no synergies on the table... And the second point I also wanted to comment on is about alpha strikes. AoS is a game that in average takes 2-3h to play, I shouldn’t lose the match after the first 10-15m because I don’t know how to deploy efficiently. Otherwise let’s call a game of deploy and never roll a dice, no purpose in having 5 rounds if all that counts is what happens before. And to that point the fact that certain armies can almost always decide who starts the first round because of battalions other armies don’t have, creates a great disparity between armies.

This is why I play defenders of lethis, no one complains about my army. It has some really good units (eels, hearthguard) but they don't get turned up to 11 with allegiance abilities.

On the actual topic - NPE is personal, while there are universal threads, people look for different things in games so Tom's flippant point at the beginning is not wrong for Tom but that is not an expectation you can/should have for all players. To me the crux with rules based NPE is it discourages players for putting what they like on the tabletop - from both directions. So it is not just the person with a zero trick army that suffers, but also the player who has spent a year plus beautifully painting an army that happens to offer very negative play for their opponents so they feel bad fielding it. If I personally had to define it, it would be when the opponents rules mean you effectively do get to play a game. I am fine with glass hammers if they are glass, or avoidance if it can only do so for x time then it is lights out. As then the game become who can play into the strengths the best to win the game, and both players cool toys should shine. In some ways core mechanics of AoS don't help, limited variance in stats, dice and action options means certain rules interactions will always create a hard counter. As an aside, the whole melee range thing - change it to no of bases and exclude anything bigger than 40 mm. Also to preface to the next point, I also think the whole micro-movement in combat and piling in frankly just needs go in a game which can have hundreds of models on a table - clever tricks aren't strategy they a rules exploitation (negative conations not intended but it summarises best). It also slows the game down On the point of skill cap design it is a real design minefield especially in a minis game with a high investment. As the army needs to have a base level functionality or a less experience player buys an army that just gets smashed and gets the message they are losing with a great army. However, if that base level is middling the skill cap elements then make it oppressive. Which is a real shame as playing a tech army and unlocking that can be one of the most rewarding experiences in wargaming. In many ways this is where borrowing from bloodbowl for a tier list for armies may be an idea - it sets expectations and allows clear discussion and means you can have skill cap armies but set the base level lower.

The cynic in me tells me the foremost reason we don't have any "mythic archetype" foot heroes is that for the most part that'd be 32-40mm bases and GW would rather not sell you a 15-20 USD model that is 25-30% of your army list when the other option is a 50-100 USD huge monster / deamon / diorama that can bring more money (and more hype)

Great show as always Vince. Some really interesting data. On the NPE Sentiment Factor slide and Seraphon, I am a Seraphon player and have two reasons why I clicked lots of options on that question. First, I often win games but still have an NPE. I don't want to stomp my opponent - I want to win perhaps, but I want to fin a fun and fair game. With Seraphon it is often really easy to accidentally win and have an NPE (because Seraphon have very few bad options). I have only ever played Kroak in tournament-style games because I do not enjoy playing with him most of the time. Second, this survey was over the last two years. Because of where my part of the world has been with Covid since last March, i.e. when the new Seraphon book came out, I have played far more games with the old Seraphon book than with the new in that time. Perhaps I should have ignored all the games my old Seraphon got murdered, but the survey didn't tell me to only think of games since my last battletome release in the last two years, so I did include those NPE games in my answers. In short, my high answer rate on what constitutes an NPE is partly reflecting what I know my opponent and I don't enjoy playing in the new book, and partly all my games with the old, pretty awful book. I hope that helps! :)

Could the rumour engine be the gutplate of a new plastic maneater?

Thanks for looking into this! The NPE analysis is such an interesting segment. As a Sylvaneth player, I find myself agreeing with some things, and not others. Then when I look from my Beastclaw or Maggotkin perspective I agree and disagree with a different set of things. My guess is the things to look for here are the things that are seen as NPE across most or all of the armies. I am looking forward to the GHB2021, as 2020 was a bit disappointing for me. Guessing AoS 3.0 will launch soon though.

Love Vinci’s sound bites. Do you know what you do before you fine tune? You tune..... Here comes Kathy 30:32. You are never going to let him forget it. He needs to embrace it and stop fighting it.

Awesome! This one's going to be a vital resource for the community for a long time. One note on the alpha strike discussion - even if it's mostly an issue for new players, I think it might have merited a bigger share of the discussion since those are the folks the game needs to impress in order to grow. It's not enough to say more players need to learn deployment if there's anything GW design can do about it too. I worry the prevalence of alpha strike hate in this survey indicates a greater issue in the community at large, since the viewership here might skew towards enfranchised/experienced players, who are less likely to have a problem with it.

There were some comments on how armies like IDK and Fyreslayers were seeing NPE at relatively high rates. I think you might want to consider that an IDK list with 40 - 80 Namartii or Fyreslayer lists builds from start collecting box contents have a very different experience than Eel or Hearthguard Spam. This was not a focus on tournament play so a much higher list diversity is to be expected.

In the armies played section. To be fair to OBR it makes sense that there are more Ogre players even though they got a book at the same time because many people already had ogre armies from Fantasy and earlier in AOs

I swear I never get this exited for charts

Gordrak wants a big chunk of the spear of malus so he can find the big worm with the realmgate to the eightpoints

1:12:10 I suspect the high No rate may also be a factor of limited local metas. If you only ever play against 4 or 5 different armies, and your friends/FLGS attendees tend to play fat middle armies... It might be less of a thing than for the local metas that include a deep-pockets Chad who chases the strong stuff?

I started with StD a year before the battletome dropped (having played chaos in warhammer fantasy 5th ed to 8th ed), had some fun but started DoT soon after (old battletome) and had much more fun and success. Had a NPE against FEC and DoK they were just too good against my army at the time. I only really play my tzeentch for tournaments.

Idk don't like multiple fights because they come from things like death frenzy or terrorgiest. So even if you make a good combat and strike first you will still lose your unit because they get a combat anyway.

That moment when you question yourself as to how in fact....diameter works.

could you maybe share links to these decks?

I would love to have a halberd whielding champion in full plate that can actually stand up to a monster. I mean, in a world overflowing with magic, who would argue with that one guys armor being a bit special? also, high but conditional rend values are what we are missing I think.

I was thinking about the Ossiarch data point that showed they had the fewest complaints about NPE. I was thinking that a big selling point of that army's playstyle is the survivability. It's enjoyable to watch the enemy run over and dash themselves against the rocks of your army. The power fantasy is 'you cannot hurt me' and seeing the enemy try again and again and again to hurt you and fail is the actual draw. So many of those types of NPE are in fact positives. You get to fight first? Cool, now I get my little power fantasy rush earlier in the turn! You fight twice? Awesome, now I get my endorphin hit twice as often! Etc.

I wanted to comment on the last pair of slides, with armies based on NPE. I personally find it rather fun because I started WH, because i liked the Skaven models, (anthropomorphic rodents FTW). And I bought the Carrion Empire Box to get me started, which got me into FEC...and those two are the MIDDLEST armies. Then i fell in love with squigs, and out of love of 40 blocks of 25mm models, so started trolls. Then not even a year ago i owned 2 Seraphon SC, and a Serphon Battle Box from a year or two back, then bought my first Seraphon Tome on release. So now I have an army that has 80 skinks, that is no fun for anyone to play(but gets a chance at a tourney in April in MI), so what do i usually end up playing? Trolls, because i know itll be a fair game, no one will complain, and sometimes you just have some insane moments, like Hand o Gorking a Hag, behind a lord of Afflictions, and hitting and wounding on all 6 vomits to one shot him, to my Dankboss SQUISHING a lord Castellant, (go 6 on the die) to the look on the opponent's face when you tell them the 4 saves they failed from the Rockguts is 12 wounds, even with all of that, no one every complains, and a good time is usually had (freaking 2 ties against Stormcast....why, stupid secondary objectives)

I just had my second worst NPE experience in AOS (1st was Slaanesh). Playing against Lumineth who dominated my magic phase (never got a spell off), they dominated their phase (basically auto cast 4 spells per turn and at best I was attempting to dispel 4 spells but he had +2 to to cast rolls. He had loads of shooting to wipe away all my heroes and his units hit like a truck in melee. Finally he has a spell that doubles my command point requirements which basically killed off half of my armies abilities right then and there. While his units melted quickly in combat he still tabled me on turn 4 with ease. The total package was literally stopping me from playing my army and was just terrible to face.

I think the only caveat re slide one, is that people may have some armies just because they have owned them forever. I'd like to see data of "What armies do you own?" "Of these how many have you purchased or added to in last 12 months?" and "Which have you actually played in the last 3 months?"

12:08 Its like God and Jesus. Two stat blocks, one deity.

Also, I missed out on this survey, but I do consider myself a Khorne main. And I have to agree. There are definitely some things in the army that are poorly designed. But the army as a whole is fun to me, and often when I lose I recognize it is my own fault (usually for not screening effectively). Using Blood Tithe really frustrates me because of Use or Lose, but you're right, the reward for losing units feels good, and being able to redeem it for something useful is great.

Here's my crazy prediction: At the end of Broken Realms, Archaon breaks through the Gates of Azyr... and finds it empty.

Can you please create some merch designs with "Is Owen Jackson here?!" on? I've heard (from you) that the man is a legend.

Another very interesting survey and discussion, thanks! I just started playing LRL(Zaitrec) and played my first game against Slaanesh. Even not knowing the game (and my army) that well, I was still like “damn some of my stuff seems OP”.. Needless to say I won 12-3...beginners luck? Lol

Vince - the orruk megaboss on foot is nails

I know I'm a little late on this, but I found the fact that fat middle armies were being played more often than the strongest armies totally unsurprising. I shelved my Disciples of Tzeentch army for a year or so before their newest battletome came out, and I was really excited to play the new rules. Neither my friends or I are hyper competitive but we understand the game and play our typically subpar lists to win. I brought an Eternal Conflagation one drop Changehost list (pre-nerfs) and just had an AWFUL night of games. I won every single match easily, to the point that my opponent was flustered and I was bored. I actually got rather disheartened after that night of games, but thankfully this story has a happy ending. Firstly, Changehost was reigned in a bit - and secondly, I decided to drop the Eternal Conflagation flamer spam and instead make a mixed Mortals/Daemons Guild of Summoners list. It's an absolutely subpar Tzeentch list, but I genuinely have fun playing it! :D

Know what I'm dying to see a study into? How armies played/=1 NPE votes correlate to buy-in price. Because I have a suspicion that stuff like Nighthaunt and SCE are high in armies played because they're cheap too.

I think NPE is bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. If for example enough people say it’s not fun to face Seraphon or that it’s not fun to play BoC then you will feel that before you’ve even rolled a dice

What really puts me off is the pillowfist VS burning rod of Doom-Metal. I always feel like that when playing S2D (I neither use Bela'kor nor Archaon, imo Archaon is a whiny oversized Chaos-Joytoy that used to be a priest of Sigmar...) :D Great show, very nice results! I hope GW listens and we might be spared another LRL/Hedonites Situation. Concerning Idoneth: The thing with idoneth is, that you actually want to play Namarti (the foot sloggers), yet they're just bad and all the mechanics to revive them and so forth don't work because they die in droves and then flee the battle. That is causing quite a lot of frustration with the army - Yet most of these issues were fixed with BR: Morathi which let's me field a well mixed Idoneth force, which is fun for both players, in an effective manner.

I don't play AoS, but I still watched the whole presentation, because game metas are interesting to me, and I see so many of these things echoed in other minis games I have played. The specifics are different, but NPEs definitely exist in other games, and they of the come back to the same point--single models/units getting too much love while others suffer, and the removal of interaction or counterplay. A lot of power pieces can be forgiven if there's a way to play around them; where NPEs come in is when they're unavoidable and you need to just accept that you're playing a worse version of the game you like for a while. A lot of food for thought regardless of the specific game in quesiton.

Vince about war hammer total war having bad ass hero’s that only really happened in the last update. With the last update they got more mass so they wouldn’t get destroyed from a hero on a monster charging them. That would be cool to have really good foot hero’s in AoS but I would still probably run mounted hero’s for mobility and for the fun of it.

why does shooting have such high inherent rend?

A bit late bit some feedback, it would neat to see a chart of the degrees of competitiveness people look for in their game. For example, you could measure if people are playing to win, more casual games but somewhat competitive games, or beer n pretzels throw a cool list together and go. You alluded to this during your talk about Khorne players, but it would be neat to see as a chart. I think it would help give a bit more context as to what decisions players are making in regards to armies played vs percieved npe.

I never played WFB, and stopped paying attention entirely after 4th ed, but I hear tell of Herohammer from the mid 2000s. It seems the hero archetype comes and goes in the crunch, maybe it's time for them to come back into fashion?

This was really good! I was probably your worst survey respondent.

Not surprised that Beasts didn't find too much (except for Spell Dominance) particularly crippling. We are all tricks, no punch.

One rule that always rubs me the wrong way, in ANY game, is when there are just tons of re-rolls everywhere. It's not necessarily a negative play experience, but I'm always annoyed when people are constantly re-rolling everything. Even when it's my own army. It's mostly because I feel it's such a boring rule. I haven't played AoS since before the first General's Handbook. And that first version of the game was nothing but a negative play experience. But these days I rarely have that feeling in any of the games I play. Make us take this survey again in like a year, and I might actually have something meaningful to say instead of just rambling. :P Great episodes far! Only two more hours of data for a game I don't play, but still enjoy following. :D

Also, I think shooting ranks very high because how obsolete low wound heroes are because of it. Also, not enough data yet to realise LRL and Seraphon need the nerfbat right in the teeth! :D

👍🏻👍🏻. Could it b something hanging of the bottom of some sort of ship maybe 🤷‍♂️👍🏻👍🏻

I like 5 point increments because it makes it easier to have lists hit 2000 on the nose :-p

35:50 I think that's GWs thing now, they want centerpiece characters to be centerpiece models. And if they have to be smaller dudes, they make dioramas now like Shrine of St. Katherine or Katakros.

I haven't played AOS yet but am nearly ready to play (just need to assemble 2 more models to at least field an army). The last couple of weeks though had me discouraged about getting into AOS but this show has made me more encouraged to play. The main thing that was discouraging was the announcement of Broken Realms: Teclis and then a few days later showing LRL getting a large number of new units (12?). Having watched battle reports it is an army I think is very broken before the new stuff. I am more encouraged since it is nice to see that the vast majority of players have and play more "fair" armies so it should be easy to have fun games. It is still a little bit discouraging to see that GW doesn't really understand what is and isn't "negative" by releasing all of the new LRL stuff and of course not addressing certain things in the Winter FAQ.

I'm down for destruction in the starter set, but I can't see ironjawz. They've used it to launch new stuff in the past but ironjawz feels like a pretty complete faction overall. Personally i think a new faction is more likely, like an entirely new orruk clan (greenskinz or speed freekz maybe?) Or a new grot tribe like gitmob or scuttlers. Although spiderfang could definitely go in for a model line refresh... Either way if destructions in the box i'll be happy.

I want vampires on foot with that power level. And a very killy Skaven Deathmaster.

Seraphon are in the right place on the chart as the battletome came out when covid hit. Vince's under-costed kroakx300 skink lists that maybe 0.5% of Seraphon players have actually played (on TTS or something) are of course not going to be reflected in the data. Up until that point it was a solid 2 years of ass kickings.

For me, increase Rend (in melee, good call Tom) and reduce mortal wound spam would be two good improvements. It means that my armour that I am paying for and am able to often interact with by using cover or by using spells or that have abilities to reroll 1s or whatever all get to come into play but you as the opponent also get to line up your armour breakers and such. Mortal Wounds bypass that entire part of the game, remove my entire ability to react to it. I either have an 'ignore MWs' ability or I don't.

I agree with the investment of shooting. Like in my beast if I decide to kill a support hero its roughly 60 raiders hoping to make that kill. It's also 480 points shooting. My opinion is 99% of shooting should be 4s 4s no rend 1 dmg. Aka it should be support dmg

Fyreslayers are also low because they are just so expensive to get any of the "good" stuff.

Curse you Vince! I love my Fireslayers, but damn if they aren't heavily modded to look like something completely different! :D

Skaven player here explaining my fear of alpha strikes. About to make a counter-intuative statement as well. I treat rat-men at being a great anvil army. Just chunks of wounds that I dare an opponent to go through. Unlike true anvils however, Skaven can only achieve this with experience. When I roll up to a table, I know my stuff is gonna die, no one model is precious. Blobs of models can be anvils when we control when they die and not how many die. Its a tempo thing. Now alpha strikes completely throw the tempo of losing models off (well duh) but hurts in particular for the vermintide strategy. It was mentioned that skaven suffer from battalion choice as well, and that creates a inescapable scenario of getting hit first against an alpha strike army list. Our strengths also are tempo reliant, shooting and magic and retaliation every players turn isn't gonna happen. Our strengths, along with the rest of the army, have no actual saves and can just get destroyed by a stiff breeze. We've got tricks don't get me wrong but 'dem tricks are squishy.

How to fix magical dominance: stop giving these super powerful wizards big bonuses to unbind as well. Let kroak keep his +4 to cast, but take away his +4 to unbind.

Would be cool if when Teclis and Nagash were in the final duel..... Gotrek throws an axe outta nowhere into gashes shoulder "That's for Felix" haha.

Npe Experience First Turn Alpha should be split in melee and shooting. Because I picked it and I actually mean alpha shooting. Against KO as example... If you screen properly you will be forced to go first and the alpha will be delayed to second turn. If you go aggressive you will be first turn shot. Also the npe does not mean an inexperience in playing against it. It can be negative even if you know how to counter I am fairly experienced btw. With years of play in both 40k and aos

Regarding IDK and having relatively many NPEs: my explanation is that the army is very one dimensional. Thralls are cool, Reapers are cool but it is kind of frustrating that they just fall off against the rest of the army.Might not be the whole truth but I suspect this being part of it. Same goes for sharks and the Eidolon pre-Morathi.

"Seeing a list of keywords and now I have to go check another book (or books) to remember or figure out what these rules are"-- This is EXACTLY what I hate most about Necromunda. It's so tedious and saps enjoyment from playing.

Oof, being a fluffy, sometimes competitive, Seraphon player. That hurts a lot when you were talking about most NPE army.....

Hot Take: AoS 3 will not have wound overflow freeing up design space for high damage heroes that are good at killing monsters but only ok against infantry.

Underworlds is simple etc, true. its also still the best competitive game that GW has produced, theres no reason to move on from it to warcry.

Dulgrim! Get the book!

Even with knowledge of Alpha Striking, (I'v read all battletomes, own 7 armies, and played with 13 of the current 20+ ones) It's almost impossible to avoid Alpha striking SHOOTY armies for many armies, perhaps the statistics in this reflect the combination? not just the lack of knowledge of cannon fodder screens, and castle deployments? When it comes to sniping heroes I deffinetly think we need something more here, maybe increase it to -2 to hit for ranged And 5+ damage swap to nearby unit against mortals (both shooting and spells)