Rainbows and Kittens

[popisdead]

The book overall makes a win gratefying and down to the wire. Nothing seems really powerful and the synergy of items, characters, units and abilities seems good.

[malisteen]

Strange... I'm also a Vampire player (in fact, for reasons to complex to explain my Wood elf plog is at Carpe Noctem...) and my vamp book has shocking internal balance. For any job or slot there's one obvious you-should-be-using-this-one-you-fool choice that's just far better than everything else. That's why every Vampire army looks the same. Blender Lord and Black Knight bus, Ghouls, Crypt Horrors, Spirit Hosts, double T-bats. Maybe double Mortis Engines if you're one of those free spirits.

That's one more reason why I love the new Wood Elf book, there are not obvious must-haves. I really do not foresee this book birthing anything like the standard netlist that makes every vampire army so boring.

Eh, every book shakes out in the end, and I'd hardly say those are all that obvious (maybe excepting the 'gheist), or that there's all that much space between the front runners and the follow up options. Certainly I recall more debate early on than I've been seeing with the wood elf book so far (boo to trees & dancers, yay to wild riders, waywatchers, etc). My own first impression of the wood elf book and the community's initial reaction to it is that the haves & have nots are much more distinct even from the start, and that there's a much wider gap to it. Certainly, It seems to me that someone running dryads and treekin and wardancers instead of glade guard and rangers and wild riders will have a lot more trouble than someone running zombies and grave guard and hexwraiths instead of ghouls and crypt horrors and black knights. Likewise, it seems to me that a VC player that skips the blender for a dedicated caster lord is giving themselves less of a handicap than a wood elf player who opts for a combat lord over a magic lord, but I could certainly be proven wrong on both counts, it's early.

And also a bit off topic, for a positive thread. GW in general isn't great at internal balance, and I don't at all mean to imply that the WE book is somehow worse than we would generally expect in this regard. And we've had how many years to play with the old stuff? I'm quite happy that, for the most part, the new units and models (treeman perhaps excepted) seem to be pretty good, so that we can have fun playing with our pretty new toys. As a chaos marine player, I can't tell you how disappointing it was back when the current plastic possessed came out to have such a cool new kit for a unit that was so gosh darned terrible. Or to have our new rules come out making bikes and chaos spawn suddenly so good, only to leave us stuck with the rather old and lousy models for them (let alone plagues and oblits, which are yet again our best troops and heavy respectively, still languishing with imo lousy looking finecast models).

I'll take new models that I actually really want to play any day.

Wait, what's not to love about a Vampire surfing an undead walrus into battle? That's metal as all hell!

If he were less scrawny, or better proportioned or posed, or on a suitably dark & atmospheric background instead of a blank white backdrop... Honestly, the Walrus is the least of that image's problems.

[Lumpin Croop]

Good thread! I played and won my first battle today against VC. So right now I love my TMA for being a good all round character and Deepwood Scouts for being very cheap and robust units that have access to fun and deadly arrows.

I think there's a lot to like about the new book, can't wait to try more stuff out!