by Calvin Rarie

It’s everyone’s favorite time of year–rules and points updates! A lot of things have changed in this first balance updated for 4th edition, and most of it is pretty awesome! For each Grand Alliance, we’re going jump into what I think are:

• The biggest winners,
• The biggest losers,
• And the truly WTF choices that this update is bringing to the meta

We’ve got one particularly huge update that I think everyone is excited to hear about, so let’s jump in!

Priority Target Change

Winner: Literally Everyone

No more Sentinels shooting things to death from across the table, or Tzaangor Skyfires just will-nilly annihilating things. No more list-building handicaps where you’re trying desperately to avoid putting things in your General’s Regiment to avoid Priority Target. From the get-go, this has been a MASSIVE problem in the meta, because there are certain armies that can really abuse this rule to apply WAY too much damage in the form of shooting units. Now, between the range restriction AND the target restriction, no more do we have to roll our eyes every time someone uses Covering Fire with their Priority Target unit.

Order

Winner: Idoneth Deepkin
Honorable Mention: Sylvaneth

A sea of green for Idoneth! Idoneth–unlike their more bullshit Lumineth cousins–relies entirely on fair strategies in order to win out, which means that generally speaking nothing in the army can take much of a punch. When you are an army of elite raiders looking to pick your enemies apart, you live and die on your points costs, and generally speaking Idoneth units had been priced WAY too high for an army that basically exclusively wounds on a 4+. In building lists, you’d generally find yourself either just a little too over in points, or at an awkward point total where you don’t have enough points left over to fit in an extra unit.

These new points adjustments are going to end up seeing WAY more lists starring blocks of Thralls now, since they have a bargain bin price-point of 110 points backed up by universally cheaper support heroes. For the rockbottom price of 1180 points you can get 60 Thralls and 40 Reavers backed up by a bevvy of support heroes, making it really obnoxious to kill units dead unless you commit a disproportionate amount of resources. Big shout out to both the Leviadon and the Storm Eidolon both going down a collective 30 points to a total of 800, giving you 1200 points of wiggle room to add whatever else you need to your heart’s content

Regarding Sylvaneth, we’ll be having another article later on this army alone because a LOT has changed with them. Between the Vengeful Skullroot being an Awakened Wyldwood, Treesong getting a range buff, Wyldwoods getting a ward and more, there’s a lot of heat to this army now. This is the perfect time to bust the trees out and give them a whirl!

Loser: Lumineth Realm-Lords (But not enough)
Honorable Mention: Kharadron Overlords

As an avowed Aelf hater: get fucked.

But, seriously, pretty much every effective unit in the army got touched. In fact, the army was so good at what it did that it is the prime motivator for a lot of the core changes to Manifestations as well–such as a Calligrave making Banishment rolls pointless by casually resummoning the Manifestation you just got rid of, or triggering a Soulsnare Shackles, then banishing it on your turn, and auto-casting it again for effectively no cost. These were some MUCH needed changes, except for one thing that was missing (more on that in a second).

Meanwhile, KO continues to get the shaft by being a shooting-heavy army that is way, way, way too expensive across the board to be properly functional. This is a faction paying the sins for its 3rd Edition book, which was itself buoyed by incredibly easy-to-accomplish Battle Tactics which ballooned its win percentage (pun intended). With no staying power nor defensive abilities to stand on objectives in the “stand on objectives” game, you’re reliant almost entirely on being able to shoot your opponent to death before they outscore you, and there’s just too many armies that can survive the kind of firepower a KO army throws out these days.

WTF: Hurakan Didn’t Get Touched

Look, I get it. Points changes are pretty good at curtailing runaway factions in the meta, but seriously? Hurakan didn’t get a single change in its rules? The restriction of “those units cannot SHOOT for the rest of the phase” might as well not exist, because the whole point is that people are moving, shooting, and then moving again WITH ZERO PENALTY! Where other armies continue to jump through hoops in order to get relatively minor buffs, the fact that GW just decided that giving the fastest units in the game a second movement phase with no drawback, and then decided after months of testing that it didn’t need a change, is truly bewildering.

Chaos

Winner: Maggotkin of Nurgle
Honorable Mention: Blades of Khorne

It’s not every day that you see a faction get not just a points increase, but also get a whole entire Battle Trait too! Nurgle’s biggest hamstring by far has been the cost of its support pieces–personally, I’m of the opinion that its troop choices are just fine for the most part, since the army really lives and dies by its Battle Trait and denying random Battle Tactics. And guess what? Everything of consequence went down in points! Even the Poxbringer that literally NO ONE is ever going to take!

Rotigus in particular being down 20 is big for an army that casts all their spells on 7s since he has an innate +1 to cast, and now his warscroll spell got WAY better given the new Battle Trait:

So basically, if a Diseased enemy unit dies and you roll that 3+, the party keeps going onto another enemy unit. You can set up some really nasty bombs this way, leveraging the last 2-3 damage from Rotigus’s spell to cause that enemy unit to explode, passing the Disease off to another nearby enemy unit and then doing it again mid resolution! This will probably be something that is pending an FAQ on whether or not the Disease continues to spread while you’re resolving the spell, but holy hell is that a sweet thing that can happen.

Meanwhile, Harbinger is now bargain bin value, all the Maggoth Lords are down 20, and even the Glottkin saw a points drop. Maggotkin are definitely eating this time around, and it’s good food this time instead of the dumpster behind your local McDonalds.

Regarding Khorne, our resident Gore-Pilgrim Pat will have more to say about them in the near future, but basically the whole army got points drops, which means more room for murdering!

Loser: Anything that isn’t a Weapons Team in Skaven

Hey, here’s the deal: Skaven Weapons teams are really fucking good. Like, unbelievably so. For 300 points you get 6 Ratling Guns shooting a paltry 18d6 shots with Crit (2 Hits) potentially on a 3+/3+/-2/1 profile. That’s wild, and we’re not even touching on all the other dumb stuff you can do with reinforced Warpvolt Scourgers (coming to a table near you VERY SOON).

Meanwhile, basically everything else in the army (sans Clanrats) are just way too damned expensive. GW is genuinely trying to tell us that their newest Greater Daemon-Rat in Vizzik is worth 10 more points than Kairos?? How does GW decide these points, is it because Vizzik is taller? Does GW use height-based points assessment? Make it make sense!

Oh yeah, speaking of Kairos…

WTF: Tzeentch Got Better!

I didn’t want to steal the limelight from Nurgle because they deserved it, but Tzeentch technically got stronger as an army (despite key points increases on the Lord of Change and both version of Horrors) for two reasons:

1) Kairos is still 440 points. You know, the best spell caster in the game besides Teclis? The one who gives you a free Tactic whenever you want, with possibly the best warscroll spell? That Kairos? Yeah, no changes at all. Maybe GW is assuming the changes to Manifestations will do, I don’t know, SOMETHING to him but I suspect that we’re not going to see much change there. Also:

2) Burning got categorically buffed, and is now just a flatout better version of Nurgle’s Disease. Compare the following:

• Spreading Nurgle’s Disease requires being in combat range, or a specific spell on one warscroll, or getting shot by a specific unit, or being within 6″ of a Gnarlmaw to spread, or being within 9″ a dying Diseased unit. The last two require a 4+ and a 3+ dice roll to work, by the way. You can also spread it from an enemy unit to each enemy unit within that unit’s combat range but, uh, people can just walk away from that? And most of these happen at the end of turn.
• It can’t go on terrain features or manifestations.
• It also requires a d3 dice roll on a 2+, so 33% of the time it doesn’t do anything.

Burning now does this:

• You do damage to an enemy unit with a Wyrdlfame shooting attack or spell, and it gets the Burning keyword, and you can do this once each shooting phase.
• Manifestations and Terrain features can be affected.
• You just do d3 mortal damage now, no d3 on a 2+ now.

Good job, GW!

Death

Winner: Ossiarch Bonereapers

Nothing in the army of real consequence got any points nerfs, and basically everything of formerly no consequence got points increases. Hooray! OBR is already a really solid army, and unlike its other counterparts in the other armies in Death there was nothing supremely problematic that needed to be touched. Expect to see more boners on tables near you as the meta shifts, because I can see this army really jumping up in both representation and meta percentage soon because it’s just super efficient, elite, and hard to kill.

Loser: Nighthaunt (with a caveat)

And good riddance! We can debate whether it was enough, but everything that was a problem child has now gone up in points, hooray! And now, Dreadblade Harrows can only teleport on your turn, not your opponent’s turn too. Double hooray!

But then we get to the change to Death Stalkers, which is something you’re going to need to talk to your TOs about. Put simply, the way the Warcom Article reads it sounds like an ability that only gets used once per turn:

But instead, they just didn’t bother to add “Once Per Turn” to the ability. If you play the rules as written with this new update, the only thing that changed is you can no longer redeploy and counter-charge (since run and charge passives let you ignore the no run + charge restriction) due to Death Stalkers being your turn only. I STRONGLY suspect this getting re-written soon, because if not, why even bother changing it at all?

WTF: FEC

I own two armies. One is Bonesplitterz, and we all know what’s happening there. I’m well into the “Unsalted Margarine” stage of grief already.

But I am firmly in the “What, Not Butter!” stage of grief regarding FEC. What the hell even are these changes? The army is at the literal bottom of the meta, and requires a 3-Ring Circus amounts of hoops to be functional. Two of the readily-available sources to making the army functional–the Abhorrant Cardinal and the Charnel Throne–both got nerfed! The former by going up 10 points, and the latter by the game-wide rewrite on how “garrisonable” terrain works now:

So basically, you can’t make the model in the terrain piece jump out in the same turn they entered thanks to people abusing the FUCK out of this with the Shrine Luminor, where heroes were jumping in and out of it to get the terrain benefits. The only tiny amount of upside is you can still do the Crypt Flayers’ trick of teleporting the hero out of the chair, giving someone else the chance to get in, but this is basically just another kick in the teeth for a faction that did not need it.

At this point, I think GW just monitors my purchasing history to cause me maximum pain.

Destruction (the best!)

Winner: Ironjawz
Honorable Mention: Monsta-Killas

GREEN IS BEST! And so it is for IJ, who have a sea of points changes to play around with in addition to possibly the biggest Battle Trait buff in 4th edition. The IJ Waaagh used to be Once Per Battle (army), so you only got to use half of your Battle Traits once.

Now? With five heroes (which isn’t out of the realm of possibility for IJ) you can Waaagh for five straight turns, provided you sequence your Waaaghs correctly, since each hero can do it once per game. But still, potentially five rounds of +1 attacks and +1 to charge? Absolutely mental.

The points drops are honestly the icing on the cake, as the army has had some WEIRD points issues, usually coming up short on points for another unit, or coming to some really strange points totals. With these points adjustments, expect so see some really interesting lists opening up soon, focused around blocks of infantry now with MUCH cheaper support options.

As for our Honorable Mention, Monsta-Killas are still 120 somehow. Even though Kruleboyz is an army whose win-rate is suppressed by a punishing player skill floor, this is a DIRT cheap unit that is way more effective than it has any right to be.

Loser: Troggs and Ogors

This was well deserved, as someone who took the Oops All Troggs to Nashcon and went 4-1 out of almost 120 players with it. It’s a ludicrously tanky army with built-in recursion, and it deserved every points increase that it got. That said, I’d expect to still see 12+ Rockgut Troggoths in Gitz armies in the near future because similar to Varanguard in S2D, they are just THAT good, even still at 190 points for three.

That said, Fellwaters don’t deserve to be 190. They don’t even deserve to be 170. They’re so categorically worse than Rockguts that I’m not sure at what price point I would consider taking them, even though their shooting attack is incredible.

Meanwhile, Ogors got probably the most drastic points nerf in the whole game with both the Butcher and Slaughtermaster going up 10 points and Ogor Gluttons going up–and get ready for this–30 points, making them more expensive than Ironguts. Than Ironguts! Absolutely insane points nerfs, which is both warranted and unwarranted give the overall state of the faction pack. Warranted in that Gluttons are just WAY too efficient for what they did at 220, and unwarranted in that the rest of the book is just way too overpriced, even with the points drops that came in this round of updates. Seriously, how does anyone genuinely believe that two Mournfang are worth 200 points??

WTF: Kragnos is 580!

So, before you get too excited, the 3d6 charges are now only in Your Movement Phase, so no 3d6 counter-charges. That will particularly hurt units that have charge triggers, such as Brute Ragerz and their Strike First.

But still, 580 points?! That’s some unbelievable value you’ve got right there–so much so that a Kragnos article is coming some point soon to go over what kind of brain-rot you can do with it now, with some extra spice going on in Ironjawz. Gaining back 100 points on him opens up all kinds of wild possibilities.

For now, behold this, the pinnacle in knuckle-dragging technology: