Lucentia

I could be misremembering how annihilators work, but I believe they have mortal wound impacts on the charge, but their actual melee attacks are just normal damage. But you'd need to set things up so that the only tempting unit to charge is the epitome.

I've only found time to get in a handful of 2k sized games of 3.0, but to me it feels quite restrictive to have the faction centered so heavily around mid/late-game summoning to succeed whilst also having the vast majority of units with paper-thin defenses, you're almost forced into bringing a solid anchor piece (which is pretty much a choice of Glutos, Archaon, or maybe Belakor) or else run the risk of getting your high points, low defense army rolled over before you can get any meaningful swings via summoning. Whilst we've seen a pretty varied selection of lists succeeding recently to my eye it feels like the book forces you to either heavily rely on some sort of anvil character, or else play with absolutely perfect precision in spacing/positioning, and in high-level competitive play the former is likely to become trickier if those sorts of stubborn heroes remain commonplace and lists shift to deal with them, whilst the latter is, obviously, a very difficult tactic to pull off against highly skilled opponents.

Today's rumour engine is looking kinda Khainite. Certainly that's the same drippy blood they used for the DoK endless spells, and the blades are pretty similar to the cauldron avatar. Of course drippy blood and spikes are pretty common across the various ranges, could easily be a new 40k avatar of khaine, or dark eldar, or even Khorne/soulblight, or potentially Malerion stuff if they're sharing design elements with DoK, but khainite is where my mind went first.

Looks cool. I was thinking about either Namarti or BB Wood Elves as a conversion base, but I don't think they look armoured enough for a 4+ save for my taste. Maybe I'll grab some of the BB dark elves and see how those look.

IMO they should have made the Slaangor more equivalent to a bullgor/ogor stat-line, 4w linebreakers with damage 2/3 attacks at either a decent rend or with some mortal wound gimmick, that would have filled a niche better I think, and Slaanesh already has a bit of a bull/minotaur aesthetic sprinkled in. Also whilst the models are nice they're kind of disappointingly small for their price tag, so scaling them up onto 40/50mm bases would've made them more appealing to me.

I did 5 slickblades in one batch, but that took long enough for me, 10 would be an alarming prospect! But whilst we're sharing photos the sun finally stopped microwaving my room long enough for me to put the last touches on everyone's favourite fancy lad:

Cities of Sigmar seems like a likely bet for an underworlds team. Spiderfang grots, Gutbuster ogors, and most Skaven clans also haven't had one yet, as well as (obviously) Kruleboyz and Thunderstrike Stormcast. And then there's outliers like Sons of Behemat or purely demonic chaos warbands which haven't been seen in Underworlds but also might not ever be due to either thematic or practical issues. Presumably they'll also be changing realm again for this 5th season? Seems a little strange to be leaving Ghur as AoS 3.0 kicks off, but it's always nice to see parts of other realms.

I think they might be a little too big to fit comfortably on 32mm bases? But I'd love to hear otherwise, I'm also in the market for suitably swanky armoured bodies I can stick the spare Painbringer arms on. Chaos Warriors seem the obvious shout, but they're not clean enough for my tastes, I think.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the perfect game genre for AoS would be one of those musou/dynasty warriors things, a playable cast of flashy, over the top heroes ploughing through armies over fantastical battlefields seems like an ideal match.

If you want to sneak under 2000 points with the models you have you could swap 5 exalted Seekers for the Daemonettes, which would let you keep the twinsouls in a more effective 10 model unit and put your points total somewhere round 1960 I think. Otherwise grabbing some Hellstriders as Enoby suggests would be a good choice. Personally I'd build the second set of exalted seekers as Slickblades, which are quite fun to zoom around with, but double blissbarbs probably works too.

I think there's another reference to the event somewhere in the core book, possibly in the DoK section? But it's similarly vague.

I don't hate Archaon, at least he's got his whole little rebelling against the whims of the chaos gods angle which can be kinda fun. I haven't read Kragnos, only summaries, so I wasn't sure if I that was a retcon or misinformation on my part. Morathi makes a lot more sense as the one responsible for defeating the twins, both in terms of narrative themes and general importance, shame it doesn't happen that way in the actual book!

I'm always a little surprised at how much love Be'lakor gets, he always struck me as a pretty generic evil demon guy design-wise, with none of the flair of his god-aligned fellows, but fair play if people like his style I suppose! I'd have to convert/find a more Slaaneshi alternative if I was going to run him in a list I think.

Hah, having recently painted one box of Blissbarbs I'm not sure I could suffer the grind of working through another unit, nevermind two more! (But I don't generally like painting more than one of anything in any case.) That said I do think two units of Blissbarbs would make for a pretty solid battleline selection, I've only used them in one game so far but I was fairly impressed by their ranged output, though I do wish they could trigger Euphoric Killers!

Yeah, I think I've mentioned this before but I'm pretty impressed with how GW has spun DoK out into their own realised faction, and bringing them back into a 'dark elves' book would be a little disappointing to me. If I were writing things out the angle I'd probably take would be to have Malerion so deeply infused with shadow magic that it's almost unclear if he really exists, or he has difficulty interacting with things physically (though of course you'd still want some sort of cool war form or avatar model for him!). That way you can push the more established character of Morathi as the more prominent Ulgu-an leader in terms of, like, being visible and doing stuff, without sidelining Malerion as he's handling the more sneaky shadow-god side of things. Plus then you'd have the obvious narrative option of Morathi attempting the same con on Malerion's followers as she did with the Khainites.

The archers are a bit like a Warcry kit, with some very particular part combinations, make sure you're doing thorough dry-fitting before you use any glue. But, yeah, they're very fiddly to paint, every one of those 6+ battleline chumps thinks they're a hero and has the detail to match. For the Seekers the actual mounts are no trouble at all, but a couple of the riders are pretty tricky and, again, you want to make sure to figure out exactly what angle a part is supposed to sit at before gluing.

The references to Morathi replacing icons to Khaine with her own likeness does leave a little wriggle room for a new Morathi-Avatar kit at some point, and certainly I'd love to see that! But if I had to guess I'd say anything like that is more likely to take the form of faction terrain than anything, I don't think we're likely to see a full second DoK expansion range anytime soon.

Teclis gets 1 automatic unbind per turn, but subject to the normal 30" range restriction. But he, and friendly models in his aura, also ignore all hostile spell effects on a 4+ even if not unbound.

Yeah, they'll probably use any yet unseen stormcast and orruk kits as part of the release cycle for their respective battletomes, so we might see previews in the form of community articles leading up to release, but I'm not expecting another full preview show.

I think the kind of mounted troggoth kits are not going to be that huge in terms of size, certainly the one on all fours with the grot howdah seems more like a chariot-sized piece than a big centerpiece. My guess would be the sludge-raker builds serving as the main 'big kit,' for the range, and the vulture thing will be more of a mid-sized monster.

It would be fun to reflavour the subfactions to relate to the six major sins/realms of Slaanesh's domain, so you'd have a Host of Vainglory or a Host of Gluttony, or whatever. Not the I dislike the current trio I suppose, but it would provide a bit more thematic range.

My Hellstriders are all converted, but the older Slaanesh kits give you a decent number of spare bits (Daemonettes, Chariots, Seekers) I just used leftover bits glued to the backs of my icon bearers.

To me whether it's fluffy or not is kind of moot, by skewing the points cost so heavily to account for the powerful summoning you effectively make leaning into the summoning aspect the only way to make (competitive) Hedonite lists. Does summoning make thematic sense in a Slaanesh army? Sure, of course. But does it make sense in every Slaanesh army? Cos right now it's the only viable way to play the game. (Again, looking from a competitive angle.) It just seems a shame to have all these beautiful models available when the actual variety in list building is so limited by the rules design.

It seems to me like it would be possible to leverage summoning to bring a strong late game presence with Hedonites, my concern would be actually surviving into the late game to apply that advantage with a generally low wounds/low defence starting force! Also in AoS 2 you often saw games decided more towards the mid game, but I haven't played enough 3.0 to comment if that's still true. Anyway, I painted a full Hedonites army under the previous book (It was exactly 4k points, now it is mysteriously more than that...) But I've been working on other stuff so I'm only just getting round to cracking into the mortal side of things, these blissbarb archers are wildly fiddly, their detailed as if they're heroes as opposed to mediocre battleline! Is there a particular point when it's best to kill the homonculous rather than another bow, or is it more efficient to keep him alive until the end?

That's true, certainly, and worth noting. I like the Ogors being positioned as the kind of 'smart guys' of Destruction, who do build and fashion things, are more open to trade (to a degree!) etc. etc. But then the mawtribes book almost goes out of its way to diminish that side of things, or that's the impression I got at least, I only read through it a time or two.