by the Plastic Craic Team
“What the fuck did I do?”
Jimmy McNulty, The Wire
by Peter Atkinson, Pat Nevan and Tom Oliver
There’s nobody quite like GW for playing favorites and holding grudges when it comes to armies. How else do you explain why some armies are charmed year in, year out (looking at you, Seraphon) while others have a six month run before spending years being beaten like a red-haired step child with “I am not your real son” tattooed on its pasty ginger forehead? (For reference its been about 5 years since peak Slaanesh, and they are still better at shooting than fighting).
For all the complaining about inconsistency, it keeps the whole meta ticking along, and you can always go play chess if you don’t like it. With the hard reset for 4th Edition, your faithful Craichouse scribes have decided to take a break from speculating about new Clanrats arriving on 28mm bases and come up with a few predictions. Specifically:
- Who or what has had it too good for too long, and is going to cop a whack?
- Who or what has been doing it tough and is due for a moment in the sun?
- Who or what is going to either dodge a bullet or eat another spadefull of shit, and stay the same?
We’ve got a joint effort for you today, as the team lets rip on this topic:
- Pete upends his usual blend of Destruction boosterism and Order-baiting by calling for a <gasp> Destro nerf.
- Pat
misunderstands the briefgoes in his own direction by discussing entire factions instead of individual units. - Tom throws novel concepts like “rational analysis” and “big words” into the mix.
Ready? Let’s go.
Peter Atkinson
The one that’s going to cop a whack
Squigs really have proven stubbornly immune to nerfs. When the book dropped I pushed back on some rather breathless claims that this was the most broken Battletome GW have ever released, or that there was no point in even turning up at an event with anything else.
I don’t think that either statement has been borne out by the reality on the tabletop, but that’s only because they were such strong overstatements to begin with. If you said that Gits (especially at launch) was an S-Tier book I’d find it hard to disagree, but what really sets them apart is how much of a slow burn their achievements have been. Here we are well over a year later, with a whole bunch of points hikes in the bag, and they’re still winning events.
Almost every significant 5-0 has been centered around Squigs. First we had 30x Hoppers lists; a big points hike and cap on Rallying moved everyone onto 2x 36 Squig Herd; and a big points hike to them (plus Grinkrak), along with rules changes to their own Squigs Go Wild ability and the core Fights on Death rules kicked the can down the road to Boingrots.
And they’ve been top tier ever since. Boingrots are the ones left dancing when the music stops, and I reckon they’re gonna cop it hard. Unlike the other genres of Squig, they’ve only copped points hikes so far and not rules changes. They do loads of mortals, have access to a great suite of tech and when you kill them, they come back to life. Where do you go from there?
Real ones know they were low-key competitive in late 2nd Edition: I was tearing up trees locally with 2x 15 way back under the White Dwarf band-aid rules while Orkmann was doing the same on TTS, so we’ve had a full cycle of a Destro unit competing at the top end of the game now. That will not be allowed to stand.
The Verdict: Boingrots get smacked back to the stone age.
The one that gets a moment in the sun
Remember when Gordrakk first came out, and he was meant to be God-tier? Literally a fragment of Gork’s knuckle bone in the fluff (hence “The Fist of Gork”), the only way that status was represented in rules was his frankly laughable cost of 700 points.
There was a school of thought at the time that he was worse (and should cost less than) a generic Maw Krusha, and it’s taken 8 long years of drugery for that prophecy to be fulfilled. In the meantime, the best idea GW have had to improve his fortunes on the tabletop is moving him from a 3+ save to a 4+ save.
Hell, I’d settle for a glass hammer like Skarbrand. He’s won more GTs in this one book than Gordrakk has in the entire life cycle of Age of Sigmar. The dev team should have every right to feel embarrassed about his pathetic underperformance: week after week, year after year, Battletome after Battletome, edition after edition, Gordrakk has been dogshit. Sort it the fuck out.
The Verdict: Gordrakk is wonderfully, brilliantly, exquisitely broken at launch. This only lasts for about 6 weeks, then he gets whacked and is shit again for another 9 years.
The one that stays the same
The only focus GW have given to Morathi’s rules over the years is to tighten up any ways she can be killed. Endless Spells could do it for a while with damage outside of turns; Drakkfoot could do it at first because it ignored her ability. Every time it crops up GW’s only instinct is to go back and tighten up her rules and shut down everyone else’s, never once taking a moment to reflect on whether it’s a good thing in a wargame to have a model that is literally unkillable.
While it’s great for small children who can’t win games with a proper army (as well Dark Elf-centric members of the in-crowd at GW), I do wonder if now is the time to have a ground-up rethink of whether Morathi needs to always be so competitive?
Couldn’t she go through a cycle where she’s not an auto-include in most DOK lists? Couldn’t she go through an edition where she can be killed, like every other model in the game?
No chance. GW doesn’t have the balls, nor the imagination.
The Verdict: Morathi was vomited into the Mortal Realms by Slaanesh, and the only thing more cringe than that fluff is GW’s insistence on keeping her completely unkillable. We supposedly flicked over to Indexhammer so that every warscroll could be reimagined from the ground up, but if GW have mustered the courage to make Morathi vulnerable to damage like everyone else in this game, I’ll be as surprised as I am delighted.
Patrick Neven
It’s always a pleasure to go after Pete when we write these group articles as it gives you a real opportunity to shitcan his half baked opinions while he can’t do anything about it. I’m not much for defending the DOK but honesty compels me to put out that Morathi wasn’t actually that great in her original format and only became an auto-include after Broken Realms, even though I’d gladly see her cycling to become crap. Hard agree on the Squigs though, they should go back to being comic relief. Anyways.
The one that’s going to cop a whack
I’d say the Skaven are in for it myself, and given the run they have had in 2nd and 3rd Ed they are probably due for a bit of the bad touch. For some reason despite having excellent faction abilities, an incredible range of warscrolls, strength in every aspect of the game and routine access to the sort of AOS 1 Wild West Jank that has been pretty thoroughly cleansed out of everyone else’s faction, they have managed to hang on to a whacky underdog status that I find galling.
Any time the Rats get given an inch they take more than a mile as anyone who has come up against a Screening Bell list and Skabnik’s Plague Thingies recently will attest, and underdogs don’t score battle tactics by rerolling prayers at +3 on the dice. Nope, fuck them, and fuck the double teleporting Grey Seers, LOS-ignoring Windlaunchers, Death Frenzied PCBs, free Verminlords and regenerating Clanrats they rode in on.
Now those of you who are thinking that Skaven are in the launch box and will certainly be awesome have completely forgotten about the curse of the AOS launch box. Mortal Khorne came out in the first box and they have mostly been garbage Daemon auxiliaries ever since. Nighthaunt in the second box have sucked since release and Kruleboyz? Well if it wasn’t for Big Waaagh, you wouldn’t see a Kruleboyz unit in a competitive list*. The Curse is real.
The Verdict: Skaven. Enjoy your cinematic you filthy Chuds. It’s going to be the last bit of good news you get for the next three years at least.
The one that gets a moment in the sun
Khorne. Now I know what some of you maybe thinking: Khorne are in great shape, if anything they deserve to be nerfed into oblivion. Well I’m not talking about the abomination that is 3rd Ed “Out of Phase Movement for the Board Control God” Khorne (a subject I’ve had a bit to say about). I’m talking about “Blood for the Blood God” Khorne, particularly of the Mortal variety. The one that hasn’t had a half-way workable set of competitive rules since the Gore Pilgrim battalion days of 1st Ed.
They kind of had it right then, with widespread battleshock immunity and rage-infused power ups. They’ve pared it back ever since because apparently the last thing you want to do with a Khorne army is charge a horde of screaming maniacs across the table to either kill or die in a glorious orgy of blood, where every man on your side’s best result is to be the last man standing on a field of headless corpses. A single mention of being able to actually field 8 Khorne heroes in a proper Gorechosen grouping has me convinced that somebody at Gee Dubs has pulled their head out of their ass and I’m very optimistic.
At the very least we can see an end to Operation Board Control, all the Netlisting wannabe hacks that are plaguing the faction can go back to playing Seraphon or Tzeentch and we can slide back into mediocrity with occasional outbursts of brilliance.
The Verdict: Blood for the Blood God, and end to the Reign of Tedium of the Whipthirster General and his 2 x 20 Bloodletter bombs. Bloodreavers in 20s again, let’s get some proper horde on the table.
The one that stays the same
Ogor Mawtribes. As a long term lover of the mighty Guts it pains me to say this, but I don’t see much changing for the most defiantly mid of factions. GW seems to adhere to some Iron Law that Ogors can never have more than one good thing at a time, and even then not for a long time. When the the BCR were a dominant force in AOS 1 Gutbusters didn’t even have allegiance abilities. It’s always forwards-backwards land with the Dad Bods.
The BCR never recovered all they lost in the Mawtribes book. Thundertusks are still trash six years later. Maneaters and Firebellies get rolled into the allegiance but miss the keywords. Gnoblars and Ironblasters got a massive bump in the new book alongside one of the quickest nerfs. They just can’t seem to catch a sustained break.
What will 4th edition bring? Nothing that will do much for Ogors from the look of it. Everyone with wounds gets a version of Might Makes Right now. Everyone gets reach. Having a six man unit does nothing for your coherency. They’ll get some general rule of charge mortals. Reduction in rend will hurt their offence and do nothing for their defence, as you don’t need rend to carve an Ogor anyway.
The humble Dad Bod deserves some bona fide time at the top of the tree with both sides of the goddam book at once, with a variety of builds on offer, but I just don’t see it happening. I can see em plodding along in their same old lane as a mid army with occasional flashes of brilliance until they transition into The Old World but hey, prove me wrong.
The Verdict: Ogor Mawtribes. They deserve a day in the Sun but I don’t see them getting one. The Dad Bods are just going to keep on keeping on till the end.
I reckon if Lebowski played AOS he’d run Ogors, but be competitive. He took bowling pretty seriously
*Well I’d argue that the Monsta Killaz are incredible Allies in a Gloomspite list, but that’s a discussion for another day. ~ Pete
Tom Oliver
The one that’s going to cop a whack
Well here we stand on the precipice of a new edition, where all the gripes and wishlists of every armchair game designer seem destined to come true. As we transition to this next iteration of GW’s coolest game system, I think it’s important to establish a few conceits about how these editions are designed. First and foremost, this edition is not a reaction to where 3rd edition is finishing, so if you have desires for specific balance problems to go away, I hate to break it to you, but that is likely not going to be at the front of the design brief for AOS4. Nor should we expect warscroll design to be knee-jerk rebuilt with the intention of ‘buffing’ or ‘nerfing’ the existing rules set.
How I’d like to approach this discussion surrounding the ideas of ‘Sins of the Past’ is to look at it on a paradigm basis and identify which mechanics have been problematic to balance over the lifespan of AOS3. The unit that I think will see a significant change to their power in-game are going to be the humble Blissbarb Archers. Whilst this unit is a corner case meta-bender, it has absolutely had its moments in the sun (even as recently as the 2024 Australian Masters).
The problem that this unit brings to the table is a fairly uninteractive build that has limited capacity for counterplay for many armies. Where this has really emerged has been in lists that take volume of this unit, often getting as many as 77 Archers into a list. Why this is a problem is that outside of killing these units, there is no real way to shut off output, due to shooting being able to clear itself from engagement in the shooting phase.
I expect that with the loss of being able to shoot while engaged, this unit and others like it (Auralan Sentinels, Grundstock Thunderers, Namarti Reavers) will be less pwoerful at the outset of AOS4. Whilst we see the introduction of an ‘overwatch’ mechanic that does not rely on being charged, the ability to gum up the works will create opportunities for a complete shutdown of builds that focus on pure ranged output:
We are yet to see whether repeat command ability effects are going to be replicated in AOS4 as they currently stand, such as the Pretenders subfaction in Hedonites of Slannesh; I am hoping that we can say good riddance to this particular type of build at the game’s outset as I expect the initial meta for the Edition to be dominated by big numbers in armour, wards, attack profiles and movement (you know, the subtle side of the game). However, this brings threat ranges into a more manageable sphere as the expected average shooting range (18 inches-ish) will be more susceptible to reprisal clapbacks than previously experienced. The hope and expectation is that if they’re in shooting range, they’re in range to be charged.
I will say that the mechanical change to being unable to shoot while engaged and the introduction of an overwatch mechanic will create a totally new dynamic for shooting-focused armies that will wind up a net positive for the game. I will also add that I feel no sympathy if my prediction rings true and shooting weakens overall.
The one that gets a moment in the sun
My wishlist item might not be entirely unbiased, but here we go anyway. I think that this edition is going to see the under-utilised Putrid Blightking come to the fore for the first time since the last Maggotkin of Nurgle Battletome released. Never a truly awful warscroll, but also not a prime choice, I think we are seeing spoilers that provide the unit a new gameplay style that promotes a “large and in charge” ethos.
The single wishlist that I have for this unit is a proportionate points reduction. Unfortunately, currently in the 250-ish points range, a unit has to bring a quality to the table that facilitates really strong play and either scenario presence, output or both. In AOS 3 this unit has been what I would like to refer to as a “B-Hive” (every rule they have is a B-grade), including the 4″ move, the points cost, the melee range and the survivability.
I think a lot of these problems (aside from points) are addressed in structural game changes in 4th Edition, with the introduction of a countercharge mechanic and universal melee ranges. Where this unit has seen value and play at times throughout the edition has been paired with my best friend, the Glottkin*. This match made in expensive heaven gave the slow boys a mechanic that helped shore up their biggest weakness which was the ability to apply pressure to the table. However, whilst I and others experienced success with this build in early 2022, this pairing definitely had a boat anchor feeling when you sacrificed list utility to give the Blightkings a rule that made them… not bad.
Fast forward to AOS 4 and this unit benefits drastically from the introduction of the Counter-Charge command ability, meaning that you won’t need to build lists around making these guys functional. Instead we will possibly be able to leverage our best-looking models as independent modules in lists. This paired with the inclusion of a 3 inch melee range also means that the unit functions beyond just a minimum unit size (goodness gracious Galletian Veterans was good for that unit). The combination of these rules may intrinsically increase the potential value of a unit or two of Blightkings in a list, or could even lead to this unit being a focus of lists without support tax, making my Wargaming Libertarian heart sing**.
Tom’s final thoughts
I will close out my section by emphasising that the changes we have seen so far to core rule mechanics have definitely got me operating under two exciting presumptions:
- This is fundamentally a new pace of game, with positioning feeling like it will be more crucial as the options for reactive counter play will be more prevalent. Or in other words: we are going to have an exciting mess for a while.
- Be ready to kill your darlings. AOS4 is not a modification of AOS3, and there is no use in trying to fit square pegs through round holes so that you can get old lists to work how they used to. Embrace the chaos of the new edition and relearn your approach to the game.
*My introduction to the game was guided by a friend who told me that the Glottkin was the best model to get you past hating double turns, which it did.
**Wargaming Libertarianism: The belief that lists should reflect a free market of value adding, and that spending valuable shared resources on support models is in essence: theft.
Thanks to our Patron Ben Liekefett for suggesting this article.
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