Eumerin wrote:
Overread wrote:
Which is interesting because the wildlife is often shown to include bits of metal, pistons and such - and yet the humans/orcs and other dominate races (who have also been living and breeding in these realms for generations) are not similarly affected. Indeed when it comes to how a realm affects its population it seems that the only one that really kind of does is the Shadow Realm with the Shadow Aelves in particular - other races (even the Daughters of Khaine who have been there just as long) don't seem to show the influence.
IIRC, Morathi is explicitly messing with the physiology of her followers, so that's probably why they're not showing any elemental influences.
I'm still waiting impatiently for the Shadowelves to *finally* show up...At this point I have to wonder why the long delay, and whether
GW has decided to quietly push them aside and hope players forget about Malerion.
I think its simply a matter of a few elements
1) Originally "armies" for
AoS were in general designed to be much smaller. The game was built on the idea that you'd have 4 everlasting Grand Alliances and within those you'd have dozens of small factions, each with their own visual identity and roster. "Big" factions would come along and likely be represented by a joint element of
GW pushing them (eg stormcast) and simply reacting to sales rates. If the army sold well it would get more; if it sold so-so it would get nothing and might even just be dropped.
2) Once 1.0 and 2.0 came out and it went from boutique models to an actual wargame this caused a big change. A lot of micro-armies were retired/folded into main ones and we started to see
GW establish proper wargame armies. However after the messy launch and they years before in Old World; the game was left with a lot of factions that were tiny; a good number of big factions that had a lot of old models and one or tow that had no real direction (esp Cities of Sigmar).
3)
GW also had a lot of undeveloped major factions - Malarion, Cities of Sigmar, Lumineth, Idoneth and more.
4) At the start
GW released a lot of elf factions. Daughters of Khaine, Idoneth, Lumineth. That's three big chunky armies right out the door, not to mention that Cities of Sigmar basically has the entire Dark Elf army sitting right within it which I still think
GW doesn't actually know what they are going to do with. They kind of teased rebuilding the Dark Elf army of old with a campaign book and having Morathi take over a city that was basically Dark Elf, but since then no focus. I'm still of the opinion that
GW isn't really sure if they want to push that Dark Elf force (with bits of what remains of wood and high) as its own thing within the setting or quietly just have it there and not mention it and hope sales dip enough that they can "retire" it when they release another "Dark elf" army.
So I think Malarion is just stuck behind lots of other armies that need updates and additions; plus the fact that the setting did need a "human" faction before another elf and that there's another elf army kind of sitting there just needing a bit of marketing; a book of its own and a few leader models adding to it to be a fully fledged army. And that's if
GW doesn't try to pull a stunt and have Dark Elves fully rebuild in the next wave of books with Daughters of Khaine going from major faction to a subfaction. Much like how Skaven operate. I could see them doing that potentially, though they also did a lot of focus on the
DoK on their own and they've added to them over the years that I feel like
DoK have just become their own thing for too long and trying to roll them into another army would create a bit of a mess. But who knows, Cities of Sigmar from the start was a rescue faction that only remained because a staffer did the work on their own time and
GW ran with it.
