Ahead of WCW, Games Workshop has released a small update for AoS to tighten things up. Most of these changes are white noise but there are some small changes that may impact how you play your games. Let’s take a look.

Core Rules

Objective Control is now determined in deployment as opposed to at the beginning of the game. I honestly don’t know exactly what this is targeting, but basically this means that any “Start of Turn” abilities can no longer be shuffled into checking for actual objective control at the beginning of the game.

General’s Handbook

You can no longer attempt to banish the same spell more than once per Hero Phase. This is an interesting change and is a nice little buff to manifestations, but there’s not a lot to talk about here.

There’s also a clarification that if weapon abilities don’t have an effect, that includes shoot in combat. This makes sense and is how you should have already been playing it.

Daughters of Khaine

All the manifestations got their weird summon ranges redone. The two fighty manifestations (the swords and big snake) are now set up wholly within 12” and the Heart of Fury can now be set up wholly within 18. This is a big deal especially with the Heart of Fury which effectively doubled its range, but also its weird that these were confined to 9” when they aren’t all that different from any other manifestation.

Kharadron Overlords

Arkanaut Company now use their ability to shoot you in the charge phase instead of movement. This means that you can both fight and shoot with them since both are core abilities. 

Auto-Endrin get cleaned up to target things in combat with it as opposed to just saying they are targeted, allowing abilities that key off being targeted to activate. This is a good change and tightens things up with these weird exploding balloons; keeps the wording more in line with the rest of the game. 

Lastly, they clarified that yes, the Arkanaut Admiral’s “Bring Every Gun to Bear” works on the entire Skyvessel unit, not one model, for the purposes of the reinforced Gunhauler unit. You would think it would be obvious what with it being “Every Gun” but here we are.

Lumineth Realm-Lords

The “Protection of Hysh” spell no longer gives a ward to allies. Good. It shouldn’t have. 

Soulblight Gravelords

The Necromancer’s “Vahel’s Danse Macabre” no longer requires a dice roll to go off. This is actually a pretty significant buff and makes the Necromancer much more interesting.

That’s It, Folks

Overall this is a pretty light update and mostly acts to clean some stuff up. There’s no massive issues in the game that really need addressing so this is somewhat expected. There’s some stuff like a fix for obscuring or a more dramatic buff for armies that are struggling that would’ve been cool to see, but that would’ve been more appropriate for the balance update last month.

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