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The DoK faction focus is out. Makes mention of a Look Out, Sir! mechanic.

Also, not sure if it was mentioned elsewhere but says the past year's Battletomes were designed with second edition in mind, which is reassuring to me.

 Captain Joystick wrote:
The DoK faction focus is out. Makes mention of a Look Out, Sir! mechanic.

Also, not sure if it was mentioned elsewhere but says the past year's Battletomes were designed with second edition in mind, which is reassuring to me.

LOS! is -1 to hit if a hero is within 3'' of a unit with more than 3 models.

And yes, this was mentioned since maggotkin of nurgle.

I really can’t wait to get this new book.

 Captain Joystick wrote:
The DoK faction focus is out. Makes mention of a Look Out, Sir! mechanic.

Yes. Warhammer Community had an article on that subject on Sunday.

So it appears all summoning across the board is now free again based on army mechanics.

The question for me is... which one will be busted? Because thats the one you'll suddenly start seeing a lot of on the table.

auticus wrote:
So it appears all summoning across the board is now free again based on army mechanics.

The question for me is... which one will be busted? Because thats the one you'll suddenly start seeing a lot of on the table.

Ugh, free summoning.
I think neither the current points nor the armies without summoning are balanced for this.
I reserve final judgement for release of course, but this seems like it could be game-breaking.

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2018/05/24/24th-may-rules-preview-summoning-for-freegw-homepage-post-2/

I agree. I am nervous about this coming back because I know my area's AOS players will all jump aboard the free summon train like they did before trying to get 4000 points out of a 2000 point army.

Excited about summoning, hopefully all those cool alliance abilities won't be utterly useless. There are paragraphs describing what i can do that i never get to touch, because who sets aside reinforcement points for them, honestly?

Its definitely an extreme on either end.

No one wants reinforcement points because summoning is supposed to be free extra points, and then they want tto take the free extra points and turn that into double their army size if possible lol.

Waiting on the edge of my seat to try to find the spammable farmable abilities. Or maybe THIS will be the time GW gets it right?

I'll see. Maybe there will be a spell that exiles them from the game or something.

Regardless "opponent gets free units" is just horrible design, even, if you have mini objectives to complete. I'd be more optimistic, if GW wasn't the one handling it. Things tend to scale beyond control in their systems.

It would be interesting to also have some sort of penalties involved, if the summoning army can't fulfill those mini objectives in time.

I'm just glad that my Gryph-Hound flocks now have a purpose.

Summoning could be good if you assume it as a core principle of an army and then you make all of the army with the idea that they will summong more units.

So basically, weaker troops than their equivalents in other armies, but that compensate by the fact that you can keep summoning more as long as you do your specific task to gain summon points (Other tool to add more refination and balance). So you are rewarded by doing what your army is supposed to do, and you are punished if you fail... like every other army of the game.

And some people could say "But what if I don't want to summon?!" then... I don't know. If I don't want to use Chavalry and Monsters I wouldn't play Beastclaw Raiders.

I mean, has anyone here seen a branch wraith in competitive play? The super incredible ability to let you summon 2-12 dryads is, on its surface, an easy way to generate objective holders for spots you aren't worried about the enemy trying to contest, but immediately turns to poison when you realize you're paying for 10 or 20 dryads out of your reinforcement pool to do it.

I don't think you need reinforcement points to be the control that limits summoning, so long as they have -something-.

Well that design paradigm is out the window with the 400+ attack Skeleton fodder choices made.

 Eldarain wrote:
Well that design paradigm is out the window with the 400+ attack Skeleton fodder choices made.

Yeah, GW being GW. You can't properly balance a game when you are changing constantly your ideas for how you want the game to work.

I was singing the "skeletons are very broken now" with the GHB 2017 release giving them a huge point discount on top of their insane blob buffs on top of the hero buffs they can get.

That was shot down with "yeah but they don't win tournaments so they are fine". But the real problem was that they at the time didn't have their own dedicated book and people were waiting for that before jumping on the bone-train (no one wanted to run them until they had a proper book)

Now that bird has come home to roost

Oh man... this sounds awful. Someone WILL find a way to break Summoning as its just too disruptive of a mechanic to have a place in matched play.

Even severely restricted "points-less" summoning could be awful to anyone less than a power-gamer. I've seen plenty of folks bring a mid-tier army like Flesh Eater Courts, and just make a miserable game happen by restoring tons, and tons of Ghouls and Horrors turn after turn.

NewTruthNeomaxim wrote:
Oh man... this sounds awful. Someone WILL find a way to break Summoning as its just too disruptive of a mechanic to have a place in matched play.

Even severely restricted "points-less" summoning could be awful to anyone less than a power-gamer. I've seen plenty of folks bring a mid-tier army like Flesh Eater Courts, and just make a miserable game happen by restoring tons, and tons of Ghouls and Horrors turn after turn.

The Flesh-Eaters are slated to get a revision in General's Handbook 2018.

Very likely it will be something like adding a Command Point cost to the "Muster" abilities.

On one hand, I agree that the reserve points based summoning was generally not that great. Sure, you could have some use out of it, but by and large it wasn't that great. I suspected some kind of overhaul with the Nurgle BT, but I'm not sure every faction having a "mini-game" to get summoning points is going to work out much better, unless the points costs for all armies with summoning in any way are adjusted. Even then, still not sure how it will work out, as I agree there will be more folks trying to go for the 4k in a 2k list.

I think the teasers aren't quite enough to really base anything on, though, so I'll be anti-Dakka and hold judgement until full release. ;P

My orks and ogres won't have any problems with the enemy summoning more models.

Thats just more heads to bash!

(And I won't have any problem if my Khorne models become more expensive because the blood tithe points are super easy to gain and with free summoning, if they don't change them, that can be a big problem)

I'm extremely unhappy about this. The summoning mechanics themselves are pretty cool, but free models just takes us right back to the very worst parts of the dumpster fire that was 7th edition 40k.

I wouldn't even mind if summoned models came at a discounted point value to account for actually having to go through the motions, especially since they're now more developed than just casting a spell. But points are used to emplace a limit on a game. I go into a 2000 point game expecting a certain type and size of encounter, it needs to represent an upper limit. This crap destroys that.

I couldn't disagree more with that.

Summoning in 40k was literally "Take Psykers, take Daemonology, spam summoning". You had nothing to prevent it aside from killing the Psykers.

Here, you have caveats. If I go within 3" of a Feculent Gnarlmaw, I know I can prevent a Maggotkin player from getting an additional D3 Contagion Points. I know I can prevent them from scoring 2 by making sure I have models in both mine and their territories.

 Kanluwen wrote:
I couldn't disagree more with that.

Summoning in 40k was literally "Take Psykers, take Daemonology, spam summoning". You had nothing to prevent it aside from killing the Psykers.

Here, you have caveats. If I go within 3" of a Feculent Gnarlmaw, I know I can prevent a Maggotkin player from getting an additional D3 Contagion Points. I know I can prevent them from scoring 2 by making sure I have models in both mine and their territories.

Agreed. It's nowhere near what it was. Also, surprised no one complained about Daemons of Chaos, as they had Summoning way back in 6th with their Warp Storm roll. The caveat was they only got it on boxcars, but it was a free 2d6 + 3 unit.

So I'm hesitant but relatively relieved. As long as it's like that or has some sort of hindrance, I think it'll be fine.

 Kanluwen wrote:
I couldn't disagree more with that.

Summoning in 40k was literally "Take Psykers, take Daemonology, spam summoning". You had nothing to prevent it aside from killing the Psykers.

Here, you have caveats. If I go within 3" of a Feculent Gnarlmaw, I know I can prevent a Maggotkin player from getting an additional D3 Contagion Points. I know I can prevent them from scoring 2 by making sure I have models in both mine and their territories.

There's tons of issues with this, starting with the fact that putting a unit within 3" of a feculent Gnarlmaw makes them DRAMATICALLY more vulnerable to the shenanigans Nurgle can do, and allows the nurgle player to control where you move. You're going to have to cripple yourself for the sake of stopping nurgle from getting an extra 400pts summoning, not to mention all the other crazy shenanigans the nurgle player will be able to pull to get around anything you try to do to counter.

Realistically, no matter what you do a Maggotkin of nurgle player will end a game with around 2400-2500pts based on their current summoning system. A legion of Nagash player can end up anywhere between 2200- freaking 6k.


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 jreilly89 wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:
I couldn't disagree more with that.

Summoning in 40k was literally "Take Psykers, take Daemonology, spam summoning". You had nothing to prevent it aside from killing the Psykers.

Here, you have caveats. If I go within 3" of a Feculent Gnarlmaw, I know I can prevent a Maggotkin player from getting an additional D3 Contagion Points. I know I can prevent them from scoring 2 by making sure I have models in both mine and their territories.

Agreed. It's nowhere near what it was. Also, surprised no one complained about Daemons of Chaos, as they had Summoning way back in 6th with their Warp Storm roll. The caveat was they only got it on boxcars, but it was a free 2d6 + 3 unit.

So I'm hesitant but relatively relieved. As long as it's like that or has some sort of hindrance, I think it'll be fine.

Like I said in the previous post, we already KNOW two of the systems and Maggotkin WILL be getting 400pts per game(at least) and Legions of Nagash are capable of recycling their entire army several times over the course of a game. Legions of Nagash is a bit easier to neutralize that Maggotkin are, but they can also just baff full units out onto the field. Not to mention the gravesites+deathly invocations. Would you rather kill my ENTIRE unit of graveguard and let me bring the whole thing back or just MOST of my unit of graveguard and let me bring 12-15 back?

Its not gonna be that bad is it? At least for LoN, the General has to be with in 9" of a Gravesite and then there has to not be enemies with in 9" of them.

Growing Nurgle's garden is pretty easy. You run a not terrible chance of being able to throw down over 100 points of models on the first turn, and it just goes up from there.

 Fafnir wrote:
Growing Nurgle's garden is pretty easy. You run a not terrible chance of being able to throw down over 100 points of models on the first turn, and it just goes up from there.

It costs you 7 Contagion Points to put down 5 Plaguebearers(understrength unit), 1 Feculent Gnarlmaw, or a single Nurgling base(understrength unit).

Your statement would require Horticulous Slimux to be present and you counting his "Cultivating the Gardens of Nurgle" ability to trigger before you would add up Contagion Points(both take place "at the start of your Hero Phase"). CTGN requires it to be set up within 3" of Horticulous and 1" away from any other terrain feature(both of which heavily limits your placement opportunities turn 1 unless you're planning for it right off the bat).

So you could hypothetically have:
4 Contagion Points for having a Nurgle unit within your territory(3 normally; +1 for no enemy models in the same territory)
d3 Contagion Points for your Feculent Gnarlmaw having no enemy models within 3" of it.
d3 Contagion Points for your second Gnarlmaw(assuming you think the order of operations for CTGN is before tallying up Contagion Points)

That would cap you out at anywhere from 6 to 10 Contagion Points; giving you access only to the 7 tier of stuff(5 Plaguebearers, 1 Nurgling base, or another Gnarlmaw) for turn 1.
Turn 2 you could maybe get 6 CPs for having a unit in enemy territory via the Drone based stuff, but I just don't see any real way to be giving you crazy amounts of stuff.

Having played with the nurgle book a while and we are narrative and don't use the matched play reserve points mechanic, no you really can't easily spam a bunch of summons with nurgle. I typically get to pull in a unit of drones (3 models), or maybe two units (6 models total) and a feces tree. Thats my average.

 VictorVonTzeentch wrote:
Its not gonna be that bad is it? At least for LoN, the General has to be with in 9" of a Gravesite and then there has to not be enemies with in 9" of them.

Gravesites cover a HUGE amount of the board, considering there are 4 of them. You'll likely be able to pick 2 you can block, the rest will be free game for a competent LoN player. At best, in an even match, you'll be able to force them to pop-up in their deployment zone, but considering dire wolves, hexwraiths, and blackknights are all summonable and fast, that won't account for much. Even if you do manage to stop him from summoning at any of the gravesites, how sustainable is blocking off all 4 really going to be? And you're probably not going to be sniping characters with the new shooting changes and the expanded unbinding range. The biggest limitation the LoN player is going to have to deal with is command points, but considering they benefit the most from the resurrection in the late game and have good, cheap battalions, you could be looking at a turn 2-5 where they just replace everything they lost the previous turn.

It's possible that all they get over the course of the game is a single unit of blackknights...but it's also possibility they get a 10 man unit of hexwraiths, a 30 block of dogs, a 40 brick of skeletons, and a 30 block of graveguard.

As for Maggotkin, you can definitely get a GUO turn 3 with minimal effort on your part, which seems like pretty big deal to me, or failing that force your opponent to be in the area of the board he really doesn't want to be. Of course, even just 20 plaguebearers could be game winning in the later turns.

It seems like a lot of games between summoning and non-summoning armies are going to come down to 'Can you win before the summons go off?' It doesn't help that the armies that benefit the most from summoning also tend to be very high powerlevel already(Maggotkin and Tzeentch are top tier, LoN has had some pretty respectable performances of late)

(Legion of sacrement lists also have 'kill an enemy unit on a gravesite, on a 4+ bring back a unit

ERJAK wrote:

 VictorVonTzeentch wrote:
Its not gonna be that bad is it? At least for LoN, the General has to be with in 9" of a Gravesite and then there has to not be enemies with in 9" of them.

Gravesites cover a HUGE amount of the board, considering there are 4 of them. You'll likely be able to pick 2 you can block, the rest will be free game for a competent LoN player. At best, in an even match, you'll be able to force them to pop-up in their deployment zone, but considering dire wolves, hexwraiths, and blackknights are all summonable and fast, that won't account for much. Even if you do manage to stop him from summoning at any of the gravesites, how sustainable is blocking off all 4 really going to be? And you're probably not going to be sniping characters with the new shooting changes and the expanded unbinding range. The biggest limitation the LoN player is going to have to deal with is command points, but considering they benefit the most from the resurrection in the late game and have good, cheap battalions, you could be looking at a turn 2-5 where they just replace everything they lost the previous turn.

It's possible that all they get over the course of the game is a single unit of blackknights...but it's also possibility they get a 10 man unit of hexwraiths, a 30 block of dogs, a 40 brick of skeletons, and a 30 block of graveguard.

As for Maggotkin, you can definitely get a GUO turn 3 with minimal effort on your part, which seems like pretty big deal to me, or failing that force your opponent to be in the area of the board he really doesn't want to be. Of course, even just 20 plaguebearers could be game winning in the later turns.

It seems like a lot of games between summoning and non-summoning armies are going to come down to 'Can you win before the summons go off?' It doesn't help that the armies that benefit the most from summoning also tend to be very high powerlevel already(Maggotkin and Tzeentch are top tier, LoN has had some pretty respectable performances of late)

(Legion of sacrement lists also have 'kill an enemy unit on a gravesite, on a 4+ bring back a unit

Why block off all 4? Only need to block the one nearest the general until he's sniped out.