AoS NEW *rumor*

[Canas]

Excuse me, they are anything, but "lost in astonishing rate". The more you kill them, the more they get back. 1's on Fate Dice, Blur Reality (risky, but very strong) and Emerald Lifeswarm - each of them return lots of horrors every turn, and each one is 4 wounds. And when you kill them, they can place models in any position they like, so they can stretch to tie units, can grab objectives. They are, in my opinion, they are the most broken unit in AoS now.

Let me clarify my definition of "squishy": stuff that can't avoid the damage of succesfull attacks.
Horrors have a 6+ save, pretty much any succesfull attack will succesfully kill one of em. As such decimating the unit is easy. The healing might make it more complicated to keep them from getting back up after being decimated but they remain easy to kill. You just need to kill a metric ton of them.

Aside from that they're basicly just a gimmicky horde with a unit of 10 pink ones secretly just being a unit of 10 pink ones, 20 blue ones and 20 brimstone ones. And yeah, hordes are bulletsponges as there's simply a lot of bodies to stab/shoot, provided they can pass the battleshock test (which horrors can do fairly easily). But a lot of bodies doesn't mean those bodies themselves aren't squishy.

Does that clarify things?

Yes, that's exactly the point of my posts. They can be broken on paper, but on table there are lots and lots of coniditons you have to keep in mind. For example, I thought that Mortek Crawlers would be equal to death to any character on table. In fact, I never losts a character to a MC after 5-6 games against them. Not Kroak, not Slann, not even a skink priests. They ended up being too random, and I could just tie them in combat before they do anything significant.

Not entirely what I mean. The Mortek Crawler being random is fairly obvious when reading the ability. It also only has 1of each special shot. This makes it fairly obvious what it's good at (loads of damage with 1 special attack to the point of 1-shotting stuff), but also fairly obvious what it's weaknesses are (only 1 attempt, not terribly reliable). On the other hand we have say those elven horseman who have multiple strengths (mortal wounds spam which they can improve, bonus on the charge,bonus against 1 or 2 wound unmounted units, very fast) but no super clear weaknesses. They're fairly average if you look at their baseline stats, maybe a bit low on baseline number of attacks but nothing extraordinary (plus, with 3 potential bonus effects for their attacks that's to be expected), and their bonusses aren't super difficult to trigger, or otherwise limited, either. Which leaves you with nothing to counterbalance the relativly impressive bonusses. The best you can say is that they'l be less valuable, though by no means useless thanks to their charge bonus & mortal wounds, against multiwound or mounted models, but that's really only going to matter against mawtribes, since most other lists will contain a good chunk of 1-2 wound unmounted units they can charge into anyway.

Which makes for a rather odd first impressions. Especially when the entire army looks like that.

Same with LRR. Yes, they oppress all the tier 2 and below armies, but they are not suddenly over top tiers. IMO

And this is kind of the main issue I have with it. I don't really care about them being better than the current top tiers persé, I care about them supressing everything that isn't already top tier. Those middle-tier armies tend to be more fun, both to play and to face. I want those to be the balancing goal, not have yet more oppresive nonsense that's "fine" in tournamentplay when facing equally oppresive nonsense but utterly annoying to deal with in a more casual setting.

 

[Canas]

You heard it here first folks. LRR = death of sigmar. Pack up your things, sell your models, it's all over

Obviously i'm just having a bit of fun, but come on dude. This type of sky is falling nonsense is old, boring, and doing no one any favors.

Of course not, it's more that it seems to be a consistent slow shift further and further. The sky falls very very slowly And I've seen it too often to not care when it appears to happen again.

Also it's very important to keep an eye on the sky in case it does fall

 

[Kilvakar]

Don't worry, if the sky ever does fall I'm sure Lord Kroak can put it back again.

 

[LordBaconBane]

If the sky is falling, it was Kroak that brought it down.

 

[Putzfrau]

Of course not, it's more that it seems to be a consistent slow shift further and further. The sky falls very very slowly And I've seen it too often to not care when it appears to happen again.

Also it's very important to keep an eye on the sky in case it does fall

Keep an eye on it? Totally. But we also shouldn't be confusing every passing cloud for a sign of the apocalypse.

You're making repeated, exaggerated claims about the strength of an army that literally none of us have played yet, and then hand waving away a lot of the legitimate criticisms.

I think we can have a rational discussion about the strength and weaknesses of a new book without immediately resorting too "look how broken all of this is, the game is changing for the worse, every rule they get is more broken than the last army, every unit is more powerful, etc etc etc etc"

They are an army with very VERY clear weaknesses and a lot of very cool, unique positives. I think they will be a very interesting army on the battlefield, and I think Teclis is a very interesting character. He's extremely expensive, extremely strong, and can't do anything about getting alpha'd right off the table.

In terms of being oppressive for lower tier armies, it will be no worse or better than how oppressive any strong army is to weaker tier armies. That's just the nature of the beast dude. And it's not as if any random collection of LRR models is going to be oppressive. I genuinely don't understand the argument. In casual games, agree with your LRR opponent that you aren't really looking to play the most tuned game of age of sigmar ever. In tournament games, well you shouldn't really show up with an untuned army and then be heart broken when it gets slapped around by a better one.

For the entirety of our first book i played Fangs of Sotek with 90 saurus. It was not a tuned list. It was not a good list. It was something I enjoyed playing, and when i got slapped around by OBR or DoK or tzeentch or fyreslayers or whatever, i just tried to look at it in context. How'd I play given the restraints of my list? if I wasn't going to win, did I at least minimize my own mistakes?

I dunno man. All we can do is wait and see on it's true power level. Until then, can't we can talk about the mechanics and the combos in a way that doesn't automatically assume every unit in the army is busted?

 

[Krissey]

You know, I think that this is really a positive thing. The designers are pushing the boundaries, they're experimenting with the rules and they're trying new things out. I think that shows the game is progressing and growing. It's moving forward and they're thinking about it.

Dungeons and Dragons 3.0 was a totally different game by the time Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition came out.

Even Pathfinder was a different game by the time Pathfinder 2E came out.

Yes, there was power creep, but the game was being supported, and it was growing and it made for new, awesome characters. Because the thing is what's broken now may become the new norm, and when it comes round to circling back to YOUR battletome, they may push the boundaries even further, or give you what's now the new norm. It will cycle like this, forever, but I think that's honestly okay.

I've only heard legends of the World That Was, but allegedly some armies would languish for years with nothing. Not 1 model, not one rule...they'd just have a book for like 3 Editions with 0 changes. And that's why fantasy died. Nobody cared and it stagnated.

 

[Canas]

In terms of being oppressive for lower tier armies, it will be no worse or better than how oppressive any strong army is to weaker tier armies. That's just the nature of the beast dude.

Yes and no, in an ideal world a strong army would not necesarly be oppresive, even for weaker armies. In an ideal world even a weak army would have some genuine advantages, and a strong army would have some genuine disadvantages both of which can be used to give the weak army a fighting chance. Now those weaknesses are especially important. They need to be specific, natural flaws. And this is were it often goes wrong. Very often the weakness becomes something very general like "just bring the hard-counter" or "just kill them first" or "play for the objective and ignore them" none of which are so much weaknesses that you can take advantage of as much as they are basicly win-conditions.

And it's not as if any random collection of LRR models is going to be oppressive. I genuinely don't understand the argument. In casual games, agree with your LRR opponent that you aren't really looking to play the most tuned game of age of sigmar ever. In tournament games, well you shouldn't really show up with an untuned army and then be heart broken when it gets slapped around by a better one.

Bringing a nonsense list and expecting to win is the other extreme. But it'd be nice if the competitive lists didn't consists of stuff like salamander spam (or generally, any kind of spam list...), cuz honestly those are the kind of lists that should be bad.
Also, the issue is mostly that the competitive side tends to hold more sway over balance. Which can lead to fluffy fun lists not just being uncompetitive but outright terrible, which can be felt even in more casual settings.

I dunno man. All we can do is wait and see on it's true power level. Until then, can't we can talk about the mechanics and the combos in a way that doesn't automatically assume every unit in the army is busted?

I never said everything's busted, some of it is reasonable like the cows and the mages those seem more or less fine. The dawnriders are also more or less fine, but the amount of power stuck in their self-buffs seems excessive. I don't think there's any other unit who can more than double his own output with selfbuffs which is just kinda weird. Just give them a better baseline if you're going to make the buffs that extreme. The rest is various degrees of questionable, or at least have aspects that make me sigh as it does not seem like a fun opponent, just an annoying one.

You know, I think that this is really a positive thing. The designers are pushing the boundaries, they're experimenting with the rules and they're trying new things out. I think that shows the game is progressing and growing. It's moving forward and they're thinking about it.

Evolution is great, but I do wish they'd spread their increments over more factions at once. Instead of giving 1 faction all the love while the rest have to wait and hope that once they do finally get their turn tthe update is actually good. I'd rather see a small update to 3-4 factions at once than a big update to 1. Or at the very least that if you start experimenting a new mechanic you give more than 1-2 factions acces to it. It can't be that hard to introduce a new prayer, spell, or command ability for older factions to be able to keep up. It'd keep the various factions closer together in terms of power.

Because the thing is what's broken now may become the new norm, and when it comes round to circling back to YOUR battletome, they may push the boundaries even further, or give you what's now the new norm. It will cycle like this, forever, but I think that's honestly okay.

Also this I disagree with quite vehemently. Introducing more and more broken stuff tends to lead to an armsrace which rarely ends well. Especially when designers are unwilling to put limits/rules on their designs (e.g. no unit may ever have more than X wounds, no matter how high a point cost he has). Of course those rules can change over time, but any big change to those kind of rules should essentially herald a completly new edition as those are at the core of your game and breaking them will eventually lead to problems.

 

[Putzfrau]

Meh, I think LRR have some genuine disadvantages a good player can leverage. Lack of models, susceptible to alpha strikes, weak against long range shooting, and power that predominantly comes from buffs are all genuine disadvantages. Your list of "just bring the hard counter" etc is not at all what anyone is advocating here.

A weak army being able to take advantage of the genuine disadvantages listed above is up to that army and that army player. An army can have ton of genuine weaknesses, but if a garbage tier army has only garbage models it doesn't matter how genuine those weaknesses are. It's not going to be able to take advantage of anything because it's not an effective army.

I also don't think its necessarily unfair to keep "unique mechanics" isolated to individual armies. IMO armies should feel more different, and unique rules is a cool way to do that.

This conversation has now morphed from "hey aren't these leaked rules strong" to an overarching complaint about GW's design philosophy. If that's your complaint, we might need to back up a little bit and reground ourselves in that.

Either way, appreciate your willingness to articulate the problems you see in spite of some pushback. Didn't mean to come across too 'STOP CRYING YA BIG BABY' because I do think there are genuine things to complain about. I know i've mentioned it before, but I think the archers are a hideously designed unit. 20, even without their buff, are dropping 3ish mortal wounds on anything (in addition to their other damage) with very little drawbacks.

Maybe they work great. Maybe LRR need something like that to offset their expensive costs across the board. But they still just seem... boring? I dunno. They don't seem horrendously overpowered, but they just have no nuance and its boring.

 

[Canas]

Meh, I think LRR have some genuine disadvantages a good player can leverage. Lack of models, susceptible to alpha strikes, weak against long range shooting, and power that predominantly comes from buffs are all genuine disadvantages. Your list of "just bring the hard counter" etc is disingenuous at best and flat out wrong at worst. That's not at all what anyone is advocating here, and not at all what the arguments against your points have been.

With respect to the weaknesses you mention here:
- Lack of models: unless the only lists that'l see play are going to revolve around bringing Teclis, I don't think it'l be particularly pronounced. And even with teclis getting an additional 60 or 70 bodies shouldn't be impossible by any stretch. Teclis + 3 wardens + 3 archers gives you 61 bodies for less than 1500 points so there's room for a hero or 2 and maybe an additional unit or 2 or a battalion. That doesn't seem like you're exactlystruggling for bodies. Yeah it's no hordes of grots, and they're definitly below average in terms of bodies sure, but 60 or 70 should be fine. Most non-horde armies seem to be somewhere around that level.
- Long range shooting: This is probably their most genuine weakness due to their overall slow speed, but they got a lot to make up for it. Their cavalry with it's 14" move and a spell that doubles their speed, their own archers with 30" range, plenty of spells to fling around, several protective buffs, which leaves them in a reasonably good position to deal with incoming fire. They probably won't win a firefight with dedicated long range armies like KO or Tzeentch, but i'm sceptical how easy it is to take advantage of this weakness with anything less than a dedicated ranged army, and I would actually not be surprised if in certain match-ups they end up being the long range threat forcing the enemy to close in on them.
- Buff dependent: sure, but most of those they apply themselves, unlike us there doesn't seem to be much synergy making positioning relativly easy and you can't really snipe their support if they support themselves. And of course, those buffs can fail to proc, or limit them in some way (one of their new mechanics I actually like a lot, shining company limiting movement is a great idea if a bit rough around the edges), but there isn't terribly much an opponent can do about it.

Then more in general:
- Lack of models: I don't think using the ability to hold objectives is a very good mechanic to balance. Of course it is important, and can be used to some extend. But I don't think it should ever be an "important" (dis)advantage as in that case it can fairly easily lead to degenerative gameplay if it becomes the primary (dis)advantage. For example as an advantage it can lead to nonsense like our old skinks flooding the board (but not doing much besides standing on objectives and dying) as a disadvantage it quickly just becomes a cop-out, "yeah this thing is horribly overpowered, but if you just keep it busy and focus on objectives you might win on points, just ignore that it kills half your army singlehandedly while you desperatly scramble for points"
- Alpha-strikes: this literally just boils down to "kill em in the first 1-2 turns", which I dislike as that tends to put too much value on the first 1-2 turns. Also, alpha-strikes are limited to specific lists. Now if alternativly the advice was for "get the charge so you can strike first/strike while empowered/deny their charge bonus" that'd be a whole lot better as any list can attempt that (to greater or lesser extent) and it is something that's relevant throughout the entire game, not just in in turn 1 and maybe 2.

I also don't think its necessarily unfair to keep "unique mechanics" isolated to individual armies. IMO armies should feel more different, and unique rules is a cool way to do that.

Sure, but I don't think any army should have sole dominion over a particular type of mechanic, or have vastly more acces to it/have theirs be vastly more powerfull. Which kind of naturally happens with the way that GW releases rules. For example they've been slowly been experimenting with CC effects, but that means you now got 1-2 factions with fairly bad CC that isn't really used, 1-2 with fairly amazing CC and another 20 with no CC. And you see the same thing happening each time they slowly start experimenting with new mechanics like this (faction terrain, faction endless spells, spell lores, prayers, mount traits etc.). By releasing them faction by faction you end up with (temporary) winners and losers as old factions wait to catch up (and sometimes never do, where are our prayers and mount traits )
Similarly, Lumineth are now one of the few, or maybe only, faction(s) with drawbacks to using certain debuffs beyond "you suffer D3 wounds" with their restricted movement, great that they're experimenting, but maybe an experiment like that shouldn't be limited to 1 faction.

But by all means, feel free to distinguish them by giving them unique advantages. Just make sure it all falls within a certain range. Want to make say a magic focussed army? Go ahead, just don't give it 50 casts when the average army has maybe 3.

This conversation has now morphed from "hey aren't these leaked rules strong" to an overarching complaint about GW's design philosophy. If that's your complaint, we might need to back up a little bit and reground ourselves in that.

I do have the nasty habit to get off-track

It's not necesarly specific to GW though, so I should probably stop before I start complaining about the design philosophy in completly unrelated things

 

[Krissey]

Also this I disagree with quite vehemently. Introducing more and more broken stuff tends to lead to an armsrace which rarely ends well. Especially when designers are unwilling to put limits/rules on their designs (e.g. no unit may ever have more than X wounds, no matter how high a point cost he has). Of course those rules can change over time, but any big change to those kind of rules should essentially herald a completly new edition as those are at the core of your game and breaking them will eventually lead to problems.

On the contrary, if Battletomes looked exactly like they did when AOS 1.0 first dropped I don't think this game would have gotten very far. It was also interesting to watch them evolve, and slowly add battalions, artefacts, mount traits, general traits and more to each factions, including spell lores which were pushing the boundary each time until the GHB updated anyone without a battletome to roughly the same baseline.

I think it's fine if they keep pushing it. They're finding their groove and really settling into the game now I believe. I think it's going in a really good direction. You can track the advancement and progress linearly from like Stormcast 1.0 to the latest battletome and see the developers growth and mastery over their own game as they harness the simple ruleset more.

It feels a lot like the crappy games that come out when a gaming console first launches with terrible optimization to the games right near the end when developers can push the specs to the absolute limit. Just an analogy.

 

[Canas]

On the contrary, if Battletomes looked exactly like they did when AOS 1.0 first dropped I don't think this game would have gotten very far. It was also interesting to watch them evolve, and slowly add battalions, artefacts, mount traits, general traits and more to each factions, including spell lores which were pushing the boundary each time until the GHB updated anyone without a battletome to roughly the same baseline.

I think it's fine if they keep pushing it. They're finding their groove and really settling into the game now I believe. I think it's going in a really good direction. You can track the advancement and progress linearly from like Stormcast 1.0 to the latest battletome and see the developers growth and mastery over their own game as they harness the simple ruleset more.

They can still push the rules and add in new mechanics without necesarly breaking established rules/limits.

You can introduce say mount traits without introducing behemoths with say 30 wounds. You can introduce spell lores without introducing spells that that do 3 times the damage of old spells. And of course when you make up an entirely new mechanic, like endless spells, that's fine as it won't break any established mechanic-rules, you'l just need to add in new limitations for this mechanic.


Also, I just realized that the Lumineth have stolen Tzeentch's old wizard ability. I thought much like Acolytes & horrors their weaker wizards, like the wardens, would be limited to casting just their own buff spell. But they don't have the same limitation on their warscrolls as acolytes and horrors. Which might mean they get to cast spells from their spell lore as well as endless spells. I really hope their spell lores are explicitly limited to their hero wizards, or that this is an oversight and gets F.A.Q.-ed. Both because giving them the lore & endless spells seems extremely powerfull (hell I'm fairly certain tzeentch specificly got nerfed to take that away) but more importantly cuz it would just kind of lame if they literally stole that ability.....

 

[Dread Saurian]

Excuse me, they are anything, but "lost in astonishing rate". The more you kill them, the more they get back. 1's on Fate Dice, Blur Reality (risky, but very strong) and Emerald Lifeswarm - each of them return lots of horrors every turn, and each one is 4 wounds. And when you kill them, they can place models in any position they like, so they can stretch to tie units, can grab objectives. They are, in my opinion, they are the most broken unit in AoS now.

, b

Idk man gotrek is really fucking annoying but those horrors can tarpit the shit out of people hmmm.... User experiences may vary?

 

[Putzfrau]

snip

I tried to sneak in some last minute editing into my post, and looks like i didn't catch it in time.

Either way, all i can say is i guess we'll see. I do think you're exaggerating some of the aspects of the army and when the scale of good to broken is so narrow, even a small exaggeration can make something seem much worse than it is.

I'm also a bit of an apologist. So maybe i've got blinders on /shrug

 

[valentine009]

I have also personally been pushing for access to the realm spells in my games since Seraphon have a ton of casters but relatively weak lores. If every single Lumeneth unit can cast from that list it gets a bit rediculous very quickly.

 

[Xuil]

I have also personally been pushing for access to the realm spells in my games since Seraphon have a ton of casters but relatively weak lores. If every single Lumeneth unit can cast from that list it gets a bit rediculous very quickly.

Our book does suffer a bit from “let’s just keep it simple” games. Realm spells are a big deal, especially if you have the Slann and Kroak.

Similarly, if you play coalesced, terrain rules are a big deal.

 

[Grotpunter]

I have also personally been pushing for access to the realm spells in my games since Seraphon have a ton of casters but relatively weak lores. If every single Lumeneth unit can cast from that list it gets a bit rediculous very quickly.

The article specifically says that the 3 kind of units can unbind or cast Power of Hysh. I havent bothered too much looking into german warscrolls or google translated things, but considering how specific the article is, it makes me believe it is just that - 1 unbind and can attempt to cast it that specific spell once. Note it doesnt say dispelling either, so likely wont be able to dispell our endless spells.

If every unit could cast whatever they wanted, I feel like it would have been mentioned in the podcast that @Putzfrau put in his post. Seems like a rather obvious list to play around with - Loads of endless spells being thrown around from almost any unit in the LRL army.

 

[Canas]

The article specifically says that the 3 kind of units can unbind or cast Power of Hysh. I havent bothered too much looking into german warscrolls or google translated things, but considering how specific the article is, it makes me believe it is just that - 1 unbind and can attempt to cast it that specific spell once. Note it doesnt say dispelling either, so likely wont be able to dispell our endless spells.

If every unit could cast whatever they wanted, I feel like it would have been mentioned in the podcast that @Putzfrau put in his post. Seems like a rather obvious list to play around with - Loads of endless spells being thrown around from almost any unit in the LRL army.

Here you can see the relevant bits from Horrors & from the wardens. As you can see the Horrors explicitly mention that Pink fire is the only spell it can attempt. For wardens it does not say something similar. Now for endless spells the rule is "all wizards in your army know it in addition to what they know on their warscroll". And similarly, for spell lores the rules normally are "All wizards in your army may pick 1 spell from this lore" sometimes limited to a certain keyword, e.g. all mortal wizards, or all Slann for specific lores.
Based on this it seems like the Lumineth units would be able to cast endless spells, realm spells & lore spells.

The podcast probably missed it cuz they're not german and thus can't read the warscrolls. The english warscrolls have only been available for a very short time, and with such a complete leak I doubt anyone has bothered paying much attention to em yet. Though I have seen it mentioned on other online fora.

I hope it's an oversight and gets corrected immeadiatly, not only because it's quite powerfull but also because otherwise the lumineth have literally stolen a mechanic that Tzeentch has lost with his update. And frankly that'd just be increadibly lame and would further accentuate how the Lumineth are being treated with a weird kind of favoritism and seem to be getting a whole lot of mechanics that seem to fit with other factions, especially ones that recently got their own, often somewhat underwhelming, update. And where some of these mechanics would've been much appreciated.

 

[Grotpunter]

View attachment 73938View attachment 73939
Here you can see the relevant bits from Horrors & from the wardens. As you can see the Horrors explicitly mention that Pink fire is the only spell it can attempt. For wardens it does not say something similar. Now for endless spells the rule is "all wizards in your army know it in addition to what they know on their warscroll". And similarly, for spell lores the rules normally are "All wizards in your army may pick 1 spell from this lore" sometimes limited to a certain keyword, e.g. all mortal wizards, or all Slann for specific lores.
Based on this it seems like the Lumineth units would be able to cast endless spells, realm spells & lore spells.

The podcast probably missed it cuz they're not german and thus can't read the warscrolls. The english warscrolls have only been available for a very short time, and with such a complete leak I doubt anyone has bothered paying much attention to em yet. Though I have seen it mentioned on other online fora.

I hope it's an oversight and gets corrected immeadiatly, not only because it's quite powerfull but also because otherwise the lumineth have literally stolen a mechanic that Tzeentch has lost with his update. And frankly that'd just be increadibly lame and would further accentuate how the Lumineth are being treated with a weird kind of favoritism and seem to be getting a whole lot of mechanics that seem to fit with other factions, especially ones that recently got their own, often somewhat underwhelming, update. And where some of these mechanics would've been much appreciated.

At first glance it seems like they indeed can, but I doubt that is the intention at all. Seems like an easy FAQ. The podcast is made up of playtesters - They have had the original english version of the book for months. People thought you could generate 1D3 CCP in Seraphon for each spell due to the wording, but the podcast made it very clear it is only the first spell, which was later FAQ'd. Im fairly certain they are aware of the majority of fixes going into the FAQ.

I dont get this comment of yours about Lumineth and favortism at all. It seems so negatively loaded? It is a new army - Of course it needs new rules. What else did you expect? A mix of copypasted rules from 2 current armies? That would just be plain boring and a stupid way of ruining a new and cool army.

 

[Canas]

At first glance it seems like they indeed can, but I doubt that is the intention at all. Seems like an easy FAQ. The podcast is made up of playtesters - They have had the original english version of the book for months. People thought you could generate 1D3 CCP in Seraphon for each spell due to the wording, but the podcast made it very clear it is only the first spell, which was later FAQ'd. Im fairly certain they are aware of the majority of fixes going into the FAQ.

Sure, I expect this to be an oversight that needs to be F.A.Q.-ed. But I would also expect GW to not make such obvious mistakes.

I dont get this comment of yours about Lumineth and favortism at all. It seems so negatively loaded? It is a new army - Of course it needs new rules. What else did you expect? A mix of copypasted rules from 2 current armies? That would just be plain boring and a stupid way of ruining a new and cool army.

I expect new rules that don't look like they should belong to, or even seem wholesale lifted from, other factions (both fluff & crunch-wise). And I especially expect them to not take those from faction who themselves got an update just before the release of the Lumineth with the Lumineth consistently getting rules/fluff that'd improve the underwhelming bits of those releases. Of course there'l be some overlap between armies that share themes & playstyle. But consistently getting the cool, fluffy or powerfull stuff, especially when compared to recent releases with shared themes, feels like favoritism.

It also doesn't help that it is a fairly well known fact that tomes/codexes/etc. can vary wildly in quality depending on if the faction is the writer's favorite or not.

 

[Grotpunter]

It also doesn't help that it is a fairly well known fact that tomes/codexes/etc. can vary wildly in quality depending on if the faction is the writer's favorite or not.

"Fairly well known fact"?. That is a big yikes right there man.