Peter Holland: Which battletome in 3rd was the best in your opinion and which the worst? And why?
Keegan Graves: In terms of quality, I think the worst is definitely Ogors. An argument could be made for overall for them, too. Their book is so boring, and the army is meh. The book is 90% copy-paste.
Roland Rivera: I don’t think most of the 2023 books qualify because they were overcooked on power level.
Hanna Leppänen: Best: Nurgle. They got a huge glowup in style and faction fantasy that speaks with the rules.
Worst: Slaanesh. The faction fantasy is ok, but inner balance and playstyle are really bad/annoying.
Noel Fundora: One of the best has been FEC. They nailed the rules in a thematic sense. More importantly, the book has a good variety of play styles, even with such few warscrolls.
Roland Rivera: I’m biased… but it might be Slaves to Darkness. They had to get points cuts to keep up with the 2023 absurdity, but overall, I think it was a really good and interesting book.
Keegan: Best: S2D. The book was a huge flavor win and had a pretty solid internal balance.
Worst: Ogors. The book was 90% copy paste with horrid internal balance, and it was unimaginative.
Roland: Ogors has some competition in the bottom bracket, IMO.
Keegan: Winrate aside, it’s easily the worst designed book imo.
Roland: Deepkin is still “pick whatever unit scroll you like and spam the daylights out of it”
Vladislav Turusov: Gits and Seraphon are candidates for the worst. Gits released completely broken and underpriced. Seraphons just create tons of negative play experience.
Best i would say Khorne(i’m sure you are not surprised). The book is not very strong at first glance, but it doesn’t have broken units, but it does generate a lot of tactical possibilities due to allegiance abilities.
Roland: Khorne is a contender for best book because of the strong internal balance and interesting play for sure.
Keegan: I could also agree with this.
Roland: I just couldn’t overlook how it made a bunch of other armies get points cuts 😄
Blood Warriors at 190 are the reason Chaos Warriors are 180.
Keegan: S2D and khorne, I think, are close for me for best designed book.
If Daemon Princes had a better warscroll on launch, I would say the S2D book was close to perfect.
Randal Brasher: Ogors was the best Battletome. They nailed a nice moderate rules army that allows for multiple viable archetypes and play styles.
Furthermore, looking at the FAQ/Errata, it’s a single page. Which shows how well written and balanced the base rules of the army are.
Honorable mention: Khorne. Fairly well balanced with interesting mechanics. It’s fun to play and play against. Flips the script on how an army can move in the game without resorting to teleports.
Worst book? OBR, massively and needlessly complex ruleset that decided to throw out core rule systems in favor of recreating the wheel. It is impossible to balance in its current incarnation and easily solved due to just spamming the best unit.
Honorable mention: KO, narrowed an already narrow army into a single gimmick, score battle tactics. It is boring and unfun for both the player and opponent.
Vladislav: The nomination for the most boring book goes to the sons of Behemat(i do not count King Brod’s Stomp).
Roland:Ogors is solid power wise, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that’s the best designed book. It’s the 2e book with a few QOL fixes. I think it’s on the lower end from the design POV tbh.
We have this completely unnecessary rule to make Gutbusters count as 2 when they could have just been 5 Wounds base. Mournfang matrix-dodge their way out of benefiting from most of their allegiance abilities. They still haven’t figured out Thundertusks, and they whiffed badly on maneaters.
Randal: If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. The internal balance of the book is great outside of Thundertusks and associated units.
Roland: But it was broken, and they only fixed part of it.
Vladislav: The book played either from ironblaster spam or from mammoth spam. Plus, Tyrant spam if we count Kragnos.
Roland: There’s a mixed arms Gutbusters list now, but that’s a recent development.
Keegan: I think this is where we disagree. The second edition book was also very bad. GW, make a good BCR unit besides stonehorn, please. Thundertusks have been completely useless for forever, and everything else is pretty bad. Gluttons need depth badly. They just don’t have options.
Colin Klären: Best book: Nurgle. Fun to play and the lore is represented in their rules. Internal balance is great since the book came out. Great job from Gw!
Honorable mention: Khorne! In terms of power and internal balance, great. It’s also fun to play as I can imagine and definitely interesting to play against.
Worst book: Little bit surprised that no one has said Daughters of Khaine yet. Internal balance is awful. Like the ogor book, 90% copy and paste from the second edition and the only mentionable list to play at a high competitive level is Morathi and the bow snakes since the start of the second edition book 😂🤷🏽♂️
Honorable mention: I have to mention Ogors, too, of course. All the 4+ to hit units.. just awful, and I really thought they would change it before the book came out, but nooo 😅.
Luiz Medoza: Uhm, good and interesting question…
I have no clear winner, but here are my two cents
1st Khorne… Has a great internal balance, in units and synergies, even in a season specialized in wizards. The option to summon or use customized enhancements is a great aid and has a big value. Besides, the chance to base your list in Daemons or Mortals is strong.
2nd. Cities… Quite flavored and diverse factions are strong, wide, and effective versus any other faction. The order system is heavy bc helps in strategic decisions even in your opponent’s turn.
Vladislav: The Daughters book is so bad that everyone just forgot about it.
Roland: It’s true, lol
Carson Whitlock: Best book: Khorne. They’ve oddly created one of the techiest and most control focused books in the game, and gave it right to the god of mindless violence. It’s got a ton of super interesting tools, and it plays very differently from so many other books (in a good way). If two experienced players are in a match where khorne is present, it’s much more akin to a game of chess.
Worst book: OBR. From being at the top of the recursion meta, to the top of the anti magic meta, and still existing as a very solid melee castle, GW has had to adjust them constantly and they still don’t feel quite right. On top of this, them essentially playing with everybody else’s toys ability-wise is frustrating, albeit the lore supports it. Nice army-wide retreat and charge, Nighthaunt. I’ll take that! Army wide spell shrug, khorne? Yoink! Hmm, impact mortals? Don’t mind if I do!
… I’m only a little bit salty about it.
Jeremy Lefebvre: The best book should have the most build variety and player expression, which Khorne does not have. No ward blood thrister is in every winning list. SCE has the most variation, but maybe that is due to the vast number of scrolls.
Worse book is seraphon. Nothing is even close. one side is STILL unplayable, the other is a giant NPE mess
Peter: Personally, I find the Orruk Warclans to be the worst. It was a bad idea from the get-go, an almost impossible task to balance four factions within one book. Whatever they do to one always affects BW and vice versa.
Lodivicus: I had Seraphon as my worst (internal balance issues and no real way to separate Coalesced and Starborne for balancing)… with OBR really really close to taking it (pretty much for the reasons Carson described).
I went with Khorne as my best (even tho I think we’ll see them as the ‘big winners’ of this battlescroll period, I think their internal balance is among the best and they should be a benchmark in how books should be written in respects to that).
No one wants to watch their favorite models sit out an edition (looking at you Engine of the Gods) because they were either too good last edition or GW has decided that they couldn’t get them closer to balanced to the other options. So, internal balance is very important to me.
Brett Martin: For me it’s between that and Stormcast – neither book really led the way into the edition, and power crept so badly. The SCE book is just dull. But I loath the Seraphon tome for the same lack of flavour (separation between Starbourne and Coalesced).
Best: Nurgle, such an amazing change in their overall play and solid balance from the early days (still had a clear, most powerful sub faction, unfortunately).
Ben Hall: Not sure on worst, but from my completely unbiased opinion, Slaves is one of the best tomes – it has several good and unique subfactions, plenty of models that have valid usage (lets just not talk about demon princes) and good defined playstyles (sure we see varanguard a lot but theres plenty of castle counterpunch lists and warband lists that do very well competitively and narratively) as well as sitting at a very balanced win rate for the entirety of its release, was never broken nor underpowered, and very sick looking models all across the board. Very simple to play at an entry level so people can pick them up fairly easily, with a high skill ceiling for advanced play.
Madigan Mason: I think I would put Nighthaunt on the bottom? While it’s having power issues rn, I think it has…a lot of internal design flaws. The fact that it’s a “your turn” army makes it hard to play, but I think that’s…. allowed to be part of its identity. However, it has really bad internal issues? It has only four subfactions, three of them which just inherently encourage spam. All its basic troop units are fairly interchangeable and have no specific role – you just take the one for your subfaction. It also has abysmal command traits and awkward battle tactics, and half its units are just completely unplayable?
Top…hm. I feel like there’s a few I’d like to nominate, but they all fall short a bit? khorne is a really cool book with well designed abilities and a wide variety of options, but imo it doesn’t actually feel particularly “khorne.” OBR has pretty good internal balance post-scroll, lots of build options, and plays super flavorfully, but imo has too many one-off ‘silver bullets’ to counter its weaknesses like carrion or aura slaves maybe? they’ve for a bunch of neat playstyles and options, all thematic and cool? they have a little bit of a bloat issue, tho. I wish they’d move a few of the warbands out (give like, slaanesh the unmade and tzeentch the cypher lords y’know).
Peter: We also asked the members of our Discord to vote on their best and worst battletomes:
