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A. They would make money off Aspect Warriors from customers who are put off by resign, and people like me who would love to add or change their army. Sales would be there.

B. While they could definitely add new units because of Ynnari, would there be a need to change current units? The Marine change IMHO is unique, because of scale issues.

C. Making a multi purpose aspect kit makes sense in the long run because it reduces space taken up in a store and it easier on production and packing. They could do 2 kits and have different legs for different units. Torsoes can be the same across the board.

D. But with Primaris models basically being monopose, I have long felt GW is getting away from the conversion/customization aspect of the hobby. At the end of the day, they should just produce non assembly versions of their figures and save us a lot of trouble.

It's way past late on plastic aspect. I think just by looking at GW's 40k stock list, Eldar will get a revamp soon enough. That is, unless there's a specific reason that we don't know about.

With the popularity of the Eldar line, I don't know why GW would not capitalize on new models. Phoenix Lords and Aspects could be completely reimagined and people would drop serious coin on them. New armies would be built with Biel Tan forces in mind, especially if a new Avatar was designed too. People aren't buying aspects now because they're old and no one wants resin. So much potential, I just wonder if they missed their window.
They could still capitalize on the fracture of Biel Tan with a re-release of the Aspects with dual kits.....reapers and spiders, banshees and hawks, dragons and scorpions.

It could easily be done, but as GW continues to pay minimal lip-service to Eldar kits, I fully believe there will be a full Ynnari/Primaris style re-vamp and the old Eldar Craftworld kits will hang around, but will be power-creeped out of existence.

It doesn't take much effort to find some pretty obnoxious instances of GW ignoring the Craftworld armies pretty heavily. In the time since the basic Eldar had a good release, they've released the entire Harlequin range (a tiny army with very few players), and almost the entire Dark Eldar range (outside of handful of characters and one or two units still stuck in Finecast).

-Dire Avengers went from 10 to a box down to 5 fo a box (for the same price)
-The Avatar and Warp Spiders are tied with some of the longest serving miniatures in the line, circa 1993. (Yep, that's 26+ years)
-The Aspect Warriors who have "okay" sculpts are almost entirely in resin.
-When the beautiful new jetbikes were released...they ignored Shining Spears who are an awful plastic/Finecast mixed kit using the old jetbikes...
-The new and nice kits for Eldar are already 10+ years old (with the exception of a few like the Wraithknight and Flyers)
-Guardians had a minor revamp with the added platform and some minor re-tooling but are more or less the same as the 3rd edition released plastics. (again around 15+ years old) - still no Storm Guardian proper kit or options.
-They have some uninspiring psyker kits that are obnoxiously priced for what you get.
-One plastic named character in Eldrad
-Phoenix Lord line is entirely 1994-1995 or so.
-The Falcon, which used to be the primary Eldar tank, is an online-only exclusive from GW.com...and is from 1997.
-The Wave Serpent is still a nice design but as someone who has built nine tanks recently...their base hull molds are really suffering.
-The Fire Prism/Night Spinner received a 50% facelift in the form of a new (ugly) turret ...still based on the same chassic/underpinnings of the 1997 Falcon
-The horrible-in-game and seldom used support weapons have a nice plastic kit...while core units in the game haven't been updated.
-The Vyper is still ancient and ugly and that's a really poor mold nowdays...the quality of the plastic sprues coming in the boxes is declining rapidly.
-Warlocks are still more or less from the early 90's --- the only ones that were discontinued were let go because they were modeled with laspistols (and remember Eldar inexplicably lost all lasguns/laspistols when 3rd or 4th edition hit)
-Scouts still finecast and rather poor.

They have a handful of excellent kits still running. The wraith units are superb, the flyer is fine, the new bikes are excellent, etc. For the most part though if you want to start an Eldar army, you're hosed. $40-50 for Finecast for a handful of aspect warriors? (which sadly are also really poor in-game for the most part). Zero ability to kit-bash almost anything.

It's pretty fething dire. Luckily I prefer 2nd edition metals over most of the current range so it's been do-able via eBay...but I genuinely dissuade people from even trying to start a new army with Eldar models. It's a gak show.

 Elbows wrote:
The Vyper is still ancient and ugly

Someone is asking for their Craftworld to get fractured second time.

aspect warriors? (which sadly are also really poor in-game

They are better than they ever been, except 7th maybe, but 7th was broken. Some, like Banshees, have the best rules they ever had in years.

Agree with the rest though.

Aspect Warriors are competent in a vacuum, but many of them are absolute garbage compared to the stupidly strong units in some other books. Would you ever put a Striking Scorpion squad or Howling Banshee squad against 30 Ork boyz? Nope. How about Tzangors, etc. Basically chaff units with a couple buffs outplay Aspect Warriors in almost every situation. That's a serious problem (very similar to the penalties Space Marines pay for armour and stats...when they're outdone by similar horde/chaff units).

And the Vyper is ugly. Only eldar vehicle I don't like (actually I hate the new war walker as well). But I replaced by Vypers with Hornets and couldn't be happier (they're waaay better to boot!)

PS: Aspect Warriors are legit dangeorus as hell way back in 2nd...they've never approached that level since, really. I'm excluding the Dark Reapers and Shining Spears, two of the "great" units in the codex.

The reason why they've waited so long on updating the line is because the old sculpts were so good

Especially the vehicles and the warlocks. If there's one thing I wouldn't mind having though it's an updated Avatar of Khaine. But that's only because it will inevitably come with bigger and better rules and I'll finally be able to justify getting one of the FW ones with the spear.

 Elbows wrote:
Aspect Warriors are competent in a vacuum, but many of them are absolute garbage compared to the stupidly strong units in some other books. Would you ever put a Striking Scorpion squad or Howling Banshee squad against 30 Ork boyz? .

Of course not.

By design, $$$ Eldar >>> $ Space Marines > $$ Orks (and IG) >> Eldar.

As it should be.

That is, in every edition, stupidly cheap MEQs should usually beat moderately-priced Orks & IG, but completely get their gak pushed in by ruinously expensive Eldar, who get beat by Orks & IG. Basic Rock-Scissors-Paper design at the meta level.

I really thought GW were going to release the new plastic Aspects with 8th edition codex, but I think that their problems with the electrical wiring to the factory being insufficient for increased capacity pushed a lot of their schedule back.

Since then, they've been restocking most of the plastics that were out of stocks, and probably released mostly the minimum for each codex release, while giving priority to "more important stuff" like AoS launches, Epic reboot, Black Stone Fortress, Kill Team, etc.

I'm quite sure however that they'll be done catching up soon-ish (6-12 months) and will then be looking at their list of releases, where Eldar will be in the top third.

It's only wishing of course, but it could very well happen within 24 months.


With regards to sales.... we have a customer who has 50k points of Eldar and has been holding back on Aspects for a while (only has two squads of each except fire dragons, banshees and Dire Avengers) and he's the kind of guy who will just rebuy all if the new models are better - or buy all the current models in metal off ebay if they're worse.

I think that outside of the nostalgic who enjoy the vintage sculpts, most everyone would be happy to buy a ton of insanely detailed and good looking Aspect plastic crack.

Plastic Aspect Warriors...

Please, its been 26 years since the resin ones came out.

Dire Avengers got an update a while back (late 2000's? or was it the 2010's?) so it'd be really nice to get some revamped Scorpions, Banshees, Spiders, Hawks, Spears and Reapers. That's 6 kits that they could sell!

+ another 7 for Phoenix Lords. +1 for a new Avatar of Khaine.


The Autarch models are nice too (the biker is a little meh, but good enough). If we had plastic Aspect kits, it'd be easy enough to swap a spare weapon (that you don't spend on the Exarch) out for an Autarch arm, and we could go back to having actually CUSTOMISABLE Autarchs leading our army!

There have been three generations of Aspect Warriors, more or less.

The original Jes Goodwin models were late Rogue Trader, early 2nd edition and were more or less the best thus far. The Warp Spiders are the only proper remaining example, though obviously now in Finecast vs. metal (a terrible choice in and of itself).

There was a revamp in the early 2000's in GW's dark period (the period where we got...basically some fething awful sculpts across numerous ranges). These were..famously bad. The bizarre and obnoxious Striking Scorpions were the most famous this range:



I'm not sure what the time frame was, but these were so bad that several of the ranges were replaced very fast for GW (which normally is comfortable with a 10-15 year shelf life for an average model, sometimes longer)

Aspect Warriors were re-done with a Jes Goodwin aesthetic (I don't think he did these, but I'm not sure), basically bringing the original sculpts up to date:



These were originally in metal, and oddly not super friggin' expensive (they were available in blisters as well). Sadly these all then became boxed sets of Finecast...and that's when the gak hit the fan more or less. Out of all the races, Eldar were probably second only to Necrons as a race which was illsuited to Finecast (disregarding how gak Finecast is in general) - being slender, etc.

The sculpts themselves are actually fine, and if simply reproduced exactly in plastic would be 100% good to go. The third gen sculpts are nothing to sneeze at. However Finecast sucks, and sadly when they were in metal they were multi-part. I love metal minis...but tiny and slender multi-part metal miniatures is another story - ask anyone who plays Infinity how obnoxious it can be trying to assemble microscopic limb joints....

A proper plastic revamp of Aspect Warriors could actually be amazing, allowing GW to add a couple of more unique weapons. Eldar have one of the longest running wargear continuities in the game. Almost all of the basic Exarch specialty weapons still available were Wargear cards from the 2nd edition Eldar codex - back when Exarchs were bad-ass characters and could take actual wargear cards. They've been pretty faithful, keeping the wargear nearly identical, though they downgraded Exarchs to measly squad commanders instead of the incredible warriors they had been prior (sad face).

I agree that multi-kit would be the smartest and most likely option, but then we're not talking about a ton of kits here - when you consider they've released heaps of plastic kits for games like Necromunda, etc. If they did each box as an individual kit they could do some cool stuff. Add some weapon options (even if just for the Exarchs), All of this being said ...I still think we'll see a complete Eldar re-design based on the silly and rather lame Ynnari. :(

 Elbows wrote:
Would you ever put a Striking Scorpion squad or Howling Banshee squad against 30 Ork boyz?

PS: Aspect Warriors are legit dangeorus as hell way back in 2nd...they've never approached that level since, really. I'm excluding the Dark Reapers and Shining Spears, two of the "great" units in the codex.

Would you put Fire Dragons against Ork boyz? Doesn't make them bad.

2d is ancient and was even more broken than 7th. Asking for those times is same clinging to mythological Eldar as Marine players cling to how Marines are represented in a fluff and want that on the table. Don't be a double monkeigh.

Don't believe in multikits, what are there in 40k? They seem to be very AoS thing for some reason.

I'd have to disagree strongly with your first point... a close combat unit that is pretty awful at close combat...is not a great unit. When you have to use them to do something else (i.e. charging something to tie-up overwatch) you've designed your dedicated close combat units poorly.

Multikits only exist kinda-sorta in 40K. Stuff like the Eldar flyer which can be made two ways, the Wraithguard/Wraithblades kit (though that's just weapon arms), etc. People don't think we'll get single kits because it would mean 7-8 actual kits and that's a lot for any GW style release. Almost too much to tackle...hence why people think they'd pull some witchcraft to make it dual-kits, and why other people think they'll simply can them and go with something Ynnari styled.

TBH, there are other armies that still have ancient mainline troops, (COUGH BOYZ COUGH) but imo there is no denying that the aspects need to be redone.

Take a great close combat unit like Shining Spears, and throw them on something tough with a 3++ which can strike back, like Custodes. See Spears get slaughtered. It doesn't mean they are terrible close combat unit, does it?

When you have to use them to do something else (i.e. charging something to tie-up overwatch) you've designed your dedicated close combat units poorly.

What? Why? It's very unique unit most armies do not have. Drukhari and Harlequins have to take relics to do this stuff. Craftworlds otoh have multiple options including a whole unit dedicated to ruining enemy OW and then moving the rest of assault units into close combat like kings (well, as pretty princesses they are is probably more fitting).

Honestly it is just a banal hordes > elites which is somewhat typical for current edition and doesn't really mean Aspects have bad inherent design to them; it is something which can be fixed with prices alone I think.

 Elbows wrote:
There have been three generations of Aspect Warriors, more or less.

The original Jes Goodwin models were late Rogue Trader, early 2nd edition and were more or less the best thus far. The Warp Spiders are the only proper remaining example, though obviously now in Finecast vs. metal (a terrible choice in and of itself).

There was a revamp in the early 2000's in GW's dark period (the period where we got...basically some fething awful sculpts across numerous ranges). These were..famously bad. The bizarre and obnoxious Striking Scorpions were the most famous this range:

I'm not sure what the time frame was, but these were so bad that several of the ranges were replaced very fast for GW (which normally is comfortable with a 10-15 year shelf life for an average model, sometimes longer)

Aspect Warriors were re-done with a Jes Goodwin aesthetic (I don't think he did these, but I'm not sure), basically bringing the original sculpts up to date:

(Gen1) First generation of Goodwin sculpts was around 1991.
(Gen2) The 3rd edition redesign was 1999-2000. New metals for Fire Dragons, Howling Banshees, Striking Scorpions, Swooping Hawks and Dark Reapers, and a hybrid plastic-metal kit using the then-new guardian sprues for the Dire Avengers, and the introduction of Shining Spears with a hybrid plastic-metal kit using the then-current jetbike.
(Gen3) The 4th edition redesign was 2006. New plastic kit for Dire Avengers, new metals for Fire Dragons, Howling Banshees, Striking Scorpions and Dark Reapers.
Transition to Finecast around 2011 or so.

So, currently Warp Spiders are Gen1, Swooping Hawks and Shining Spears are Gen2, Fire Dragons, Howling Banshees, Striking Scorpions and Dark Reapers are Gen3. Gen2 lasted 6-7 years, pretty short for a GW range (aside from the Hawks and Spears which we still have). Gen 3 is now 13 years and counting. Warp Spiders are 28... And however old they are we've had to put up with finecast (or trawl ebay for metals) for 8 years.

As far as the Gen2 hate goes, I agree that the Dragons and Scorpions are awful, meh on the Reapers, but I like the Banshees and Hawks.

Gen 2

Originals:


I actually prefer the middle reapers (especially that exarch). And the hawks have held up well. But most of those Gen2 sculpts are not good.

You can tell from the sprue layout alone how old the Falcon is! All that wasted space...

Yeah the Gen 2 real nightmares were the Fire Dragons and Scorpions. The Reapers were underwhelming and somewhat bizarrely styled (some bits on them really don't "feel" Eldar). The Banshees were fine if annoying to assemble, and the hawks lasted long enough.

The issue I have the Falcon etc. nowdays is that the casts are simply poor. The actual pieces are occasionally slightly warped and have odd textures that need to be filed smooth, it's just such a fething old sprue. I remember the White Dwarf when it came out, lol. I still think the design is fine, and honestly they could reproduce it nearly identically in new plastic and the design wouldn't suffer...it just needs re-tooling at the minimum (oh and being able to buy it somewhere other than GW would be a nice touch).

Falcon is a pretty tank. Could use some unique rules to give it a role to fill which other units already don't though.

Agreed - I have a couple (magnetized) and it's really really hard to justify taking it over a Fire Prism. They increased the price difference and you get the token 6-man transport space, but it is just a pretty underwhelming unit.

(read: I still take them and then bitch all game...)

Gen 2 still > then Failcast.......

Have Warp Spiders really never been updated since they came out in the early 90s?

They must be one of the oldest models in GWs entire range if true.
And also surprising that they still look so good.

Yep.

It's the 'Eavy Metal which makes them look good though. The actual models are mediocre when compared to what can you do now.

They look really bad when you use them. It's an exarch and four clones. It's very dull.

Kinda bizarre that Warp Spiders got passed over when all the other Aspects have been updated at least twice.
Guess somebody really had it in for them.

 dan2026 wrote:
Kinda bizarre that Warp Spiders got passed over when all the other Aspects have been updated at least twice.
Guess somebody really had it in for them.

Point of order - Shining Spears are also on their first kit, AFAIK.

Why they didn't get updated when the new Jetbikes came out is anyone's guess - as someone pointed out, at worst it is an add-on sprue.

 dan2026 wrote:
Kinda bizarre that Warp Spiders got passed over when all the other Aspects have been updated at least twice.
Guess somebody really had it in for them.

To be fair, the only reason the others were updated twice was because they screwed up the first time.

General Hobbs wrote:
...C. Making a multi purpose aspect kit makes sense in the long run because it reduces space taken up in a store and it easier on production and packing. They could do 2 kits and have different legs for different units. Torsoes can be the same across the board...

What you'd do is do three dual-kits combining units with the same armour (3+ v. 4+) and leg poses. Banshees/Hawks (acrobatic jumpy poses, lighter 4+ armour), Spiders/Scorpions (active/mobile poses, heavier 3+ armour), and Reapers/Dragons (braced shooty poses, heavier 3+ armour). Legs and torsos could be almost entirely interchangeable (if they go with 3 male/2 female per kit as standard the way they did with the DE and do with the newer Stormcast that means you need three extra breastplates in the Banshee/Hawk kit), so you just need alternate weapons, heads, and back decorations/warp packs/wings.

Dire Avengers could do a dual-kit with Guardians (you'd need different right arm/weapon parts, breastplates, heads, and the shoulder camera bit), Shining Spears would be a rider upgrade sprue you'd put in a box with some of the existing Windrider sprues the way they do new Knight kits these days.

I would buy an Eldar army of the Aspects came in plastic.

Eldar always seemed like a relatively strong army(at least since I have been around the game), so I never understood what GW's hesitation would be to update the line. They are a classic army so people will want them just for that aspect alone, but since they are strong in game people who want a good army(with little regard to narrative) would also be interested in buying them.

That seems to me like a strong foundation to justify making new, updated models for the line. I know I cannot be the only person who would buy into Eldar if they got updated.