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I must admit it. I've grown to actually like Stormcasts.

At first, I was like anyone else; I thought them to be just fantasy Marines that were way too much build around hammers and oh-so-awsum, and to some extend, I still think that, but just like how I feel about Marines, Stormcasts do have their own feel to them that fits better with the very power-metal-like Age of Sigmar setting.

Here's how I see it; they're the more empathetic, heroic Marines with Hammers and stuff. Their minds aren't what they were before their Forging, but they are still human (or whatever) deep within, and can understand what people around them feel like, unlike Marines. They know what the stakes are, and what they fight to achieve that way. A lot or the lore is written in a stupid, over the top way though, so you need to think outside that preverbial box.

Second; There's so goddamn FEW of them! The Hammers of Sigmar has just around 300 Stormcasts in their Host, with an unknown amount of reserves (propably not many), and with the scale of the celestial, unending realms with absolutely extreme worlds with spans way over what you can imagine, that's just almost NOTHING! They are HUGELY outnumbered, which make them more of a heroic faction!

In combat, they are, as far as I see, not described as being completely infallible. They're skilled, they're huge, their armor is very powerful and weapons too, but they aren't automatically DA BEST like Marines have a tendency to. A Warhammer is a good weapon sure, but it's not described with the stupidity that is Bolter Porn. They're powerful, but reasonably so I feel.

... I don't even know what I'm doing, saying good things about Age of Sigmar... But gotta say, for a power fantasy over the top power-metal holy knights in plate armor faction of heroes and mary sues, it's not particularly gakky is all I'm saying.

I didn't take to them at first myself but grew to like them. The models are a really nice chunky size I find. They lend themselves to any sort of colour scheme you can come up with, though even though they are fairly simple models, I find they take me at least a while to paint. I actually like how consistent they look throughout the range.

You're not alone. I also like the Stormcast Eternals. I see them as total opposites of the emblematic Chaos Warriors. After all, if the Chaos Gods have their own champions fighting for their glory, why the Gods of Order wouldn't have their own? And here they are! Well, sure, they only fight for Sigmar. For now.

Sure, some may say they mostly look the same, but that's the difference between Order and Chaos.

I'm quite glad of what we have until now as troops and heroes - even a big monster now. I hope the next ones will be as nice as well, even if I would understand if there was more love for the other factions in AoS. No, that doesn't mean Khorne.

I think I'd actually like them if they were just the elite troops within a larger fighting force. If they had have been introduced as the Empire's shock infantry or something. Or if they were fighting alongside human auxiliaries, forming the core of an army, but fighting alongside a greater number of humans acting as their ranged support, scouts, and guarding their flanks.

 jonolikespie wrote:
I think I'd actually like them if they were just the elite troops within a larger fighting force. If they had have been introduced as the Empire's shock infantry or something. Or if they were fighting alongside human auxiliaries, forming the core of an army, but fighting alongside a greater number of humans acting as their ranged support, scouts, and guarding their flanks.

I couldn't agree more. That's why I was hoping for a wizard or scouts back when the Extremis Chambers were rumoured.

But yes, the Stormcast are still a very flexible army which is a thing I love about them. You want lots of archers? Sure. How about a glass hammer formation? Go for it. There is so much to do with them it is great. They also look amazing in large amounts which I find.

My headcannon for them is that they're the faceless servants of Order - Daemons of Order if you will. Just as bad as the Daemons of Chaos, in their way, but essential to maintaining the balance given the invasion of Chaos into the Old World.

I like to make fun of Sigmarines but I think they're pretty cool too. They are kind of like the other side of the same coin with Chaos warriors. Mortals that gave up their humanity for glory in the name of their god. Warriors of Order in other words.

I have a medium sized Stormcast army and I dig them. Good fun to play too. As stated only let down by no Wizards, but I have a hunch that will change.

I don't understand why anybody wouldn't like the Stormcasts? They're awesome!

 Sqorgar wrote:
I don't understand why anybody wouldn't like the Stormcasts? They're awesome!

I think the people who don't like them are the ones who don't like AOS. They go hand in hand really.

They've grown on me, too. I'm still not sure if I like their scale (I'd kind of rather they were a more similar size as Warriors of Chaos), and I still maintain that AoS naming conventions in general are just... just not good. But I like the Stormcast background and Black Library authors have done some good thing with them so far! The models themselves have been pretty great, too.

Like many others, though, I *do* wish narrative focus would shift back to mortals, though. I love the idea of these demigods, but they're not who I *care* about, so to speak. The brief vision of the post-apocalyptic humans I've seen in the novels have done more to spark my imagination and draw me into the world(s) of AoS more than the Stormcasts themselves.

For me there's a divide between the Stormcast of the fluff (particularly novels) and the Stormcast of the tabletop. Unfortunately the actual models don't have the same character and personality that they do in the fluff. On the table they seem like one big bland metallic blob to me, but in the story they are quite different. Something I do like particularly is that they will actually lose to better opponents in the fluff, something marines have difficulty with.

I HATE the gold. That is why I can't stand them right now. I saw someone paint them white, and thought they looked really cool.

But GW wants to keep them gold, so it keeps being a big turn off for me.

Gold's just their associated color like the Empire's red and white or space marine's blue. There's other chambers of Stormcast with more creative colorings.

For me, the hallowed knights are the best. Only the faithful!

Davor wrote:
I HATE the gold. That is why I can't stand them right now. I saw someone paint them white, and thought they looked really cool.

But GW wants to keep them gold, so it keeps being a big turn off for me.

Maybe you haven't been made aware yet, but that gold is one of the best things about Age of Sigmar. (I like the Celestial Warbringers)

 Sqorgar wrote:
I don't understand why anybody wouldn't like the Stormcasts? They're awesome!

I really just can't get attached to an army of immortals and don't buy that whole 'they lose part of themselves when they reincarnate' as a legitimate alternative.

I actually look at chaos in the AoS and have a similar problem with them being completely numberless. I just don't at all like the over the top fantasy style of AoS. I don't want anything as gritty and realistic as Game of Thrones but I like my fantasy more grounded in reality, where losing a battle and thousands of soldiers is something that makes you stop and notice.

 jonolikespie wrote:

I really just can't get attached to an army of immortals and don't buy that whole 'they lose part of themselves when they reincarnate' as a legitimate alternative.

I actually look at chaos in the AoS and have a similar problem with them being completely numberless. I just don't at all like the over the top fantasy style of AoS. I don't want anything as gritty and realistic as Game of Thrones but I like my fantasy more grounded in reality, where losing a battle and thousands of soldiers is something that makes you stop and notice.

Complaints about fantasy not being grounded enough have always bewildered me. All fantasy is stupid. To say that one kind of fantasy is less stupid than another feels a bit myopic to me. Personally, I think the Tolkien-esque fantasy tropes have been played out and then some. But to each their own. At the very least, if you prefer your fantasy in that style, you are well taken care of by the past 40 years of fantasy. You could read for another 40 years and still never come close to running out of that grounded fantasy style.

 Sqorgar wrote:

 jonolikespie wrote:

I really just can't get attached to an army of immortals and don't buy that whole 'they lose part of themselves when they reincarnate' as a legitimate alternative.

I actually look at chaos in the AoS and have a similar problem with them being completely numberless. I just don't at all like the over the top fantasy style of AoS. I don't want anything as gritty and realistic as Game of Thrones but I like my fantasy more grounded in reality, where losing a battle and thousands of soldiers is something that makes you stop and notice.

Complaints about fantasy not being grounded enough have always bewildered me. All fantasy is stupid. To say that one kind of fantasy is less stupid than another feels a bit myopic to me. Personally, I think the Tolkien-esque fantasy tropes have been played out and then some. But to each their own. At the very least, if you prefer your fantasy in that style, you are well taken care of by the past 40 years of fantasy. You could read for another 40 years and still never come close to running out of that grounded fantasy style.

Uh.. no? Storytelling has rules and a reader will notice lack of coherence in the world he is reading about. If such lack of coherence reaches a critical level, the suspension of disbelief is broken and the immersion ruined. There is a good or a bad way to write fantasy, like there is a bad or a good way to bake a cake.
Having standards and requiring coherence and relatable characters from the writers is not an absurd request.

Unless, of course, we want to be Perfect Customers (TM) that swallow every crap writers for games and movies paid a dime write in their lunch pause. Thus rewarding the companies that produce such low-quality content for treating us with utter contempt.

Kaiyanwang wrote:

Uh.. no? Storytelling has rules and a reader will notice lack of coherence in the world he is reading about. If such lack of coherence reaches a critical level, the suspension of disbelief is broken and the immersion ruined. There is a good or a bad way to write fantasy, like there is a bad or a good way to bake a cake.
Having standards and requiring coherence and relatable characters from the writers is not an absurd request.

Au contraire mon frère. Storytelling has expectations, not rules. Taking fantasy as an example, you can read a bunch of fantasy written before Tolkien, and even Howard, and find examples like Flash Gordon, Wizard of Oz, Doc Savage, John Carter, the Lost World, From Earth to the Moon, and so on. Many of these works, such as Flash Gordon in which people have sword fights on the wings of their spaceship in deep space, are harder for modern audiences to accept due to increased cynicism, but it doesn't mean that they are wrong. They didn't break any storytelling rules. 'Tis the audience that changed, not the nature of storytelling.

I think it is important to keep an open minded about these things. Putting things in boxes is a good way to end up trapped in one yourself.

Unless, of course, we want to be Perfect Customers (TM) that swallow every crap writers for games and movies paid a dime write in their lunch pause. Thus rewarding the companies that produce such low-quality content for treating us with utter contempt.

Why are you so insecure in your tastes that you feel the need to insult other people for theirs?

From a lore and world building perspective I think they are lacking, but they do have places to go. The entire way GW has set this up sorta amazes me, how little they can say with so many pages.
At the moment I think it's a wargame with nothing to war over.

The art I think is fine, Angels in armour. Not anything new but can be interesting. But they are a bit bland with little charecter, they should have done more with this, if female downcast come with a slight alternative look I think that will at least provide something here. (From the little lore tidbit).

From my own perspective the minis are super avg, good quality but no charecter. A sea of gold with even there stand out minis looking bland.
They come off as half hearted, with even high fantasy I just can't see this universe being something people will remember with them as the poster children of GW.

Apple fox wrote:

From my own perspective the minis are super avg, good quality but no charecter. A sea of gold with even there stand out minis looking bland.
They come off as half hearted, with even high fantasy I just can't see this universe being something people will remember with them as the poster children of GW.

No character? They exude strength. The Stormcast are these giant, hulking men, stooped over carrying massive hammers that look like they feel heavy, standing a full inch taller than mortal figures. Their holy involvement given away by their shining gold armor and angel wings made from rays of light - not to mention the starred halos most of them feature. Their emotionless masks hide their true face, giving them a sense of mystery and power, making their thunderous arrival in the realms awe inspiring, threatening, and unknowable. Everything you need to know about them is in the miniature itself. I disagree. They've got character. You may not like their character, but that's not a problem with the design and implementation of the miniatures themselves.

Stormcast are the fantasy equivalent of space marines. They have the same character as space marines do. They operate pretty much just as space marines do in the novels.

It may not be character to one's liking, but they have character.

That was a complaint at the miniatures themselves, they in there world are ok but GW got a long way to go. If that's all people want from them then guess that's ok, but eh.

I actuly really like this kinda fantasy world... It's why I keep coming back to see where the game goes.

I absolutely disagree that the notion that Fantasy (and any fantastic genre as a whole) is "stupid" by default. Just like with every other fiction genre out there, you can find well written and poorly written Fantasy. Outside of very specific examples GW's Fantasy fluff has never been truly a top-quality material, but at least it had its charm.

The Stormcast however have no charm in my eyes. They're nothing more than a clunky attempt to bring Space Marines to Fantasy, and if you can't see this from a mile away then you have serious sight issues or you're just deluding yourself. To me, they look like oversized chunks of shiny metal, and their fluff reads like "we're super cool, ain't we?" all the time.

They're one of the blandest, laziest concepts ever developed by GW.

Twelve years ago GW had a fantastic diversity of human factions and subcultures in WHFB. You had the "vanilla imperial" look, plus the Cult of Ulric (lovely, lovely SoC models), the several knightly orders, Bretonnia, Mercenaries (great model range, mostly by the Perrys), etc. To see all that flushed down the toiled and replaced by Sigmarines... no words really.

Oh, one thing I dislike; I've gone through so much Stormcast artwork, and up until now, I haven't found a single Stormcast who looks like it's in problems, being overwhelmed, dead, dying or in any way in danger. That is bs, and I hope it changes soon. Like, there's one image of some Stormcasts heraldring victory over piles of fallen warriors, and they're ALL Khorne Mortals! No Stormcasts at all, even though there's only, like, four of them left standing!

 WarbossDakka wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:
I don't understand why anybody wouldn't like the Stormcasts? They're awesome!

I think the people who don't like them are the ones who don't like AOS. They go hand in hand really.

There's definitely a correlation. I think that the sort of person who dislikes AoS is also likely to dislike Stormcasts, for the same reasons.

The Stormcast are definitely the poster boys for AoS, and they personally represent a lot of what I don't like about the game. They're bland. Stormcast armor has even less variation than space marines! They're shallowly developed. The fact that there've been arguments here on Dakka about whether women can even become Stormcasts shows a hilarious disregard for even the basics of worldbuilding. At the same time, what we do know about them is ridiculous. Stormcast are the absolute good guys, full stop. No shade, no nuance, no stakes. They fight and kill all the bad guys, because they're super cool, you guys, and any that die get resurrected to keep fighting. And the "losing humanity upon rebirth" thing is really only an informed problem. We have yet to see it actually cause any issues, apart from some individual angst.

GW has really written themselves into a corner with the Stormcast. As is, they're uninspired. But if they start adding nuance and variation amongst the "chambers," they risk making them even more obviously fantasy space marines.

 Guildsman wrote:
And the "losing humanity upon rebirth" thing is really only an informed problem. We have yet to see it actually cause any issues, apart from some individual angst.

Thostos Bladestorm has been shown to fight with no thought about the well being of his warriors (charging blindly and recklessly into battle), performing acts of brutality against the enemy and cut short a possible parley by burying his sword in the head of an orc leader, without even saying a word. All this can be read in a short (and free) story... provided you can stand the writing style long enough...

 Guildsman wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:
I don't understand why anybody wouldn't like the Stormcasts? They're awesome!

They're shallowly developed. The fact that there've been arguments here on Dakka about whether women can even become Stormcasts shows a hilarious disregard for even the basics of worldbuilding. At the same time, what we do know about them is ridiculous. Stormcast are the absolute good guys, full stop. No shade, no nuance, no stakes. They fight and kill all the bad guys, because they're super cool, you guys, and any that die get resurrected to keep fighting. And the "losing humanity upon rebirth" thing is really only an informed problem. We have yet to see it actually cause any issues, apart from some individual angst.

You have not read the novels.

The Wise Dane wrote:Oh, one thing I dislike; I've gone through so much Stormcast artwork, and up until now, I haven't found a single Stormcast who looks like it's in problems, being overwhelmed, dead, dying or in any way in danger. That is bs, and I hope it changes soon. Like, there's one image of some Stormcasts heraldring victory over piles of fallen warriors, and they're ALL Khorne Mortals! No Stormcasts at all, even though there's only, like, four of them left standing!

They zap back to Sigmar to get reforged when they die; Stormcast don't leave corpses. If there is only four left standing then rest assured there are quite a few who didn't make it that far.

Korinov wrote:and their fluff reads like "we're super cool, ain't we?" all the time.

You have not read the novels.


Now all of that said, I think statements about them being bland and lacking character are very much true when it comes to the models. The models simply do not live up to the fluff, and (to me at least) just give the feeling of a big bland metallic blob.

 Sqorgar wrote:

Au contraire mon frère. Storytelling has expectations, not rules. Taking fantasy as an example, you can read a bunch of fantasy written before Tolkien, and even Howard, and find examples like Flash Gordon, Wizard of Oz, Doc Savage, John Carter, the Lost World, From Earth to the Moon, and so on. Many of these works, such as Flash Gordon in which people have sword fights on the wings of their spaceship in deep space, are harder for modern audiences to accept due to increased cynicism, but it doesn't mean that they are wrong. They didn't break any storytelling rules. 'Tis the audience that changed, not the nature of storytelling.

I think it is important to keep an open minded about these things. Putting things in boxes is a good way to end up trapped in one yourself.

I fear you are completely missing the point. The point is not how much weird is a given world for modern tastes, but how much this world is coherent with itself. If the writer gives or describes "rues" of this world, the reader keeps is immersion (but can or cannot enjoy it, in base of the tastes). But if such rules are dumb and contradictory, the immersion is broken. Sometimes this is played on, like in some kind of parodies (like the movie Spaceballs or the Space Wolves from 5th edition).

How much the universe described itself is well detailed, coherent, immersive, creates (or not) the same effect and this is due to the skill of the writer. Funny how you cite Tolkien: Tolkien created an universe well described (at least in the land focus of the story) up to the languages talked (the trigger was actually the language creation) and this world and its character a good example of something relatable.

So no, I will not lower my standards to be "open minded". Eat crap is not being "open minded".

Why are you so insecure in your tastes that you feel the need to insult other people for theirs?

GW is treating its customers with contempt. I see people eating happily the aforementioned crap. I am not insulting anyone. I am not saying "you are dumb because you eat crap". I am saying "stop eating GW's crap, is time to send them a signal".
If we keep buying their stuff even if the quality is so low, they will keep treating us with contempt. And mind, I am a crap eater also. I realised it these days.

Maybe some people like it and don't feel like they're being treated with contempt.