First, a lot of information is coming from Warseer, Dakka, a German site, Spanish sites, and posted photos of pages from the book and discussions in White Dwarf (including pages you can read with the ability to zoom in with a camera phone or my magnifying jeweler's scopes I use for fine paiinting. What is missing are some of the subtleties and context of the whole book and the fact that some of the posters with access to the book are a bit sloppy or casual readers and may get minor details and miss things.
Second, the fact that we've gotten a pretty good glimpse is evidence that the discussion has devolved from revealing what is in the new army book (points cost changes, rules changes, units, etc.) to more rules debates and the customary whiining and crying over the fact that GW nerfed some crtuch people relied upon in the old book or changed the rules and points costs and magic items forcing you to adjust your army composition and play-style at least a bit. If you were relying on an uber lore of life/death/metal or light slann with loremaster, cupped hands, becalming and focused rumination bunkered in a TG or saurus unit to win games, then you probably needed a good jolt to learn to play with strategy and tactics instead of just bombing (with life) throne of vines, dwellers, and felsh to stone with an occasional earthblood and regrowth and marching forward to roll over the magically depleted (dwellers, purplse sun, trans to gold, or death sniping spells) and poison shooting depleted opposing army.
Third, the point cost changes and magic items and disciplines and a lot of the abilities and special rules new to the new book are largely correct and consistent with the 8th ed army book trends As is the case with all GW army books and rules books in general, because thdy do not play a lot of games and do not play competitive armies in all-comers tournaments and seem averse to that community of players, there are clearly a few headscratching rules additions and changes and aome point costs for models or items that one can take issue with. That being said, I'm very happy Vetok wrote this book and Vetok did play-test the book extenstively (based on his White Dwarf discussion and a few posts from those than have spoken with him,). He really tried to write a fair and balanced book in the context of 8th edition.
I'm no GW defender and, in fact, have blistered them in some posts, especially over their horrible management of the US market (terrible marketing and tick off their indy retailers too often causing large shifts of players out of the WHFB and LOTR games and/or to alt gaming systems) and the new Daemons book (poorly written rules and very bad internal balance and point costing limits the viable army builds for competitive play).
I frankly do not get the jumping off a cliff over the PF rule. It may be that they intended that the Slann be counted as a skink-type model or will address that. Most of my and my son's (a ranked GT player that has won best general in major GTs) combats with my skrox, saurus and TG units are grinding battles where the extra possible attacks can make a big difference over a couple of rounds of combat and with steadfast/stubborn units pursuits are less frequent and generally chosen over retraint anyway. Deploy and set up and pick your battles to deal with PF pursuit issues and you'll be fine. A good LM army should run some MSU skink unit with posion shooting to act as chaff, bait and flee, and clear chaff and wound some monsters anyway. Poeple vastly underestimate the role of a 50 point, 10 skink ranked unit with poisoned javelins to control the flow of battle and wound some tough stuff. That unit lost one pip of LD and gained one pip of armou save.
I got a good long look at it in a store. I know it won't appeal to everyone but I think the new book is just fine. Does it have everything I wanted it to have? No. But does it offer a lot of different builds, themes, and new strats? YUP!
I will just wait until Saturday
