We’re back again for another Battlescroll Review… a day late or right on time? As always, I needed a bit of “finking” time (hmmm…. Maybe I should work that into a slogan 😉) to sort of take things in and gauge my feelings about the changes. Also, I had promised the kids I would paint with them this week and I’ve spent most of my spare time today watching and supporting Ironjawz and Sylvaneth get painted up.
So we’ve got a new Battlescroll. On April Fool’s Day? Seriously GW, pull it together. This one’s a bit different too. Rather than punishing the high performing armies… we’ve seen a lot of greens lifting up the options within the books and more greens for the factions who are lower in the winrate tables. Now, is this GW being clever in their balancing or the fact that the new books are mostly sitting right up there at the top and they’ve clearly tried not to change much for them. I’ll try and cover things without going into too much detail as you can all read the pdf and see how the points have changed. I’ll also add in some of the comments from our “Sensei”s from the Woehammer Discord!
Just for reference, here’s what the GT Win Rates look like (which is often the first thing we think of when it comes to stats but it’s probably not the most important stat).
It’s pretty green! At the end of the day we want the armies to be close to the 50% winrate ideally. And honestly, it’s not too far off. I’m personally happy so long as my army is in that green band. We can see then that Cities and Gits need a fair boost to get up to that 50% but everyone else is practically in that sweet spot already. Not to say that GW shouldn’t try to tune the factions closer to that ideal. This of course doesn’t take into account the “internal balance” of the books (how good units within one faction compare with each other) but we see a pretty good effort in this Battlescroll to try and address some of those differences.
General Rules Changes
Well… it’s goodbye to spam lists because of a change to auxiliaries where each auxiliary beyond the first will add more and more points to your list. It’s hard to write out so here’s the actual rule change:
Honestly, I’m a bit sad to see this one go. I really like the idea of “Oops all Doomwheels” for anyone willing to buy build and paint an entire army of them. Funny that GW even used this one as an example of the new list building back on release of 4th ed. People are largely blaming Spawn of Chotec spam for this one but it was really Darren Watson running the Doomwheel spam that had GW take our toys away.
And well, that’s pretty much it. It might have been nice to see other changes mixing things up a little but we are in the last quarter before the new General’s Handbook so not unexpected.
Losers
Flesh Eater Courts – The lists leaning heavily into the dragons/terrorgheists have been doing well for quite a while and they can feel quite oppressive for a number of armies to go into it. They’d had a pretty good long time near the top of the win rate rankings so I don’t think anyone feels like this one is unfair.
EXCEPT! They’re really the only ones to cop a fair amount of reds (point increases) and the rest are really light touches so that’s pretty much it for the Losers.
I don’t want to call the changes for Cities, Fyreslayers, and Gitz “losers” but it does feel like they could have gotten more drops without that being too dangerous.
Bonus Slight Loser: Baleful Lords got a not insignificant rules debuff as now Skarbrand can’t be brought back. He was nice to throw in early to pull bac with that 3d6 charge. I think we’ll still see the AoR played because who doesn’t want to play with a bunch of Bloodthirsters rampaging around the table!
Winners
Lumineth – well, at least they didn’t get any green! But I reckon they’ve been incredibly lucky not to catch some reds already. Will the greens for other armies be enough to match LRL? Probably not, I’m quite sure we’ll be seeing them dominating top tables for a while yet!
Maggotkin of Nurgle – Tallyband not going up is criminal. Oooooh how I dislike that ability! Not that I blame the MoN players, if I had that as an option I’d want to take that too!
I mean look, may as well just say all the new books have done well not to get significant impacts yet. They all look pretty good (even OBRs is alright just maybe a bit boring)
Helsmiths of Hashut – I’m just calling them out there because of the 20 point drop on the Anointed Sentinels making them a pretty juicy unit at 130 points. I like how these changes help you to reflect and look at new options!
Idoneth – some nice points changes to open up some new list options… or just keep taking all sharks 😛
Slaves to Darkness – Plenty of decent units seeing some points drops. This probably isn’t a huge difference though considering that their units aren’t on the cheapside but this looks like it might just give enough flexibility to help Slaves out.
Seraphon – I think the changes will help some of the big monster and cavalry lists we’ve seen running around. On the other hand, they’ll probably have a battletome soon anyway
Stormcast – more options have definitely been opened up for the poster boys…. I can’t keep track of all their units without the app in one hand but I trust all the word on the street that things look good for them.
Destruction overall – I was going to go into detail with the Ironjawz and Sons of Behemat changes but Plastic Craic beat me to it so go make sure and check out their article. Things look pretty good here for the destruction factions this time around (Gitz could have had more points drops imo). Pretty interestingly, they reversed the points hikes on the formations/artefacts/traits for Kruleboyz so I hope they can get closer to a nice 50% win rate again.
Actual Expert Opinions
I mean look, I have a decent grasp on this game and I read way too much about the game but what does the Sensei channel have to say about what they think the impacts will be:
I’ll try and check in with the experts / paid patreons over the next weeks to see how we think things are going and have gone on this GHB.
Talking about experts, Goonhammer have their article out as of this afternoon too. Go and check it out here it’s much more orderly and structured than this good old ramble of an article!
Overall Impression
Honestly, I like these sort of changes where we’ve seen a lot of reduction to help armies out rather than hurting the top performers too much. This means that those with the good toys get to keep them but they’re helping the other armies get closer or match them for power level. Maybe you get to add an extra unit or maybe it’s just changing to other formations / artefacts. Will it be enough to help pick up those sitting with lower winrates? I think we’ll see improvement through this approach over the next couple of months.
This is a nice place to be for most of us. I know we all like to complain a bit about the balancing approach but considering how notoroiously difficult it is to balance a moving system (i.e. introducing new battletomes, rules modifications and changing GHBs), I’m really happy with how GW have been handling things in 4th. This feels like the most balanced we’ve seen AoS and the numbers look like they back that up too.
I know I get a bit of flak sometimes for being too positive but fuck it.
Good job AoS rules dudes! Keep it up!
Go buy yourself a beer or have a nice cuppa to celebrate and thanks for putting the hard work to try and make this funny little wargame we play be fun and fair.
