December's Battlescroll brings a big update to the battlefields of the Mortal Realms, with points adjustments, a host of new regiment options, updated season rules and the first ever balance update for Spearhead. The Warhammer Age of Sigmar team have been kind enough to unpack some of the headline changes for us.
Spearhead balance updates
As big fans of the format within the studio, we've combed through all of the Spearhead feedback you've sent us, and pored over data from dozens of events around the world. As a result, we've made some tweaks to bring outlier factions into line, mostly focusing on either adding more reinforcement options for those who are struggling or having some units arrive later in the battle for the overperforming ones. We’ve also tweaked ability timing.
Updated season rules
The biggest update for matched play games is the updated season rules. There are two big changes here:
Priority roll: We've tweaked the way that the priority roll interacts with the underdog mechanic so that if you take a 'double turn', your opponent counts as the underdog for the rest of the battle (or until they take a double turn and make you the underdog). This change is designed to help mitigate players going all-in on an early double and then benefitting from the underdog bonus even though they likely have an advantage.
We've also adapted a popular mechanic from Spearhead where you can take a double turn without penalty if you are six or more victory points behind in the game. This means you can still pick a battle tactic, and your opponent doesn't automatically count as the underdog, which helps give you a fighting chance to get back into the battle.
Honour Guard: We've expanded the honour guard system to give you more options, with two brand new honour guard abilities. The first, Field Sergeant, allows you to select an infantry hero as your honour guard, and gives a +2 Move characteristic bonus to all friendly infantry units wholly within 12". This is a huge boost for factions that have powerful but slow infantry such as Ironjawz or Fyreslayers.
Prized Beast, meanwhile, allows you to pick a monster, ignoring the battle damaged ability and earning +1 to hit rolls for all of their weapons (including those with the Companion weapon ability). This can be particularly powerful on some of the larger monsters or even hero monsters that are allowed to join another hero's regiment such as Mega-Gargants or Bloodthirsters.
Finally, the Regimented Forces rule allows you to take full advantage of these new Honour Guard choices. If your army contains more regiments ('drops') than your opponent's, you can pick a second honour guard ability to use on a unit in a regiment not led by your general. This opens up a whole host of new army-building opportunities, and provides a compelling trade-off when considering how many regiments to include in your army.
Faction adjustments
In addition to the updated season rules, every faction has received balance adjustments to level the playing field. These are summarized on the first page of the Battle Profiles & Rules Updates document. There's a lot to dig into here, so we’ve summarised a few key changes:
A number of important heroes that aren't seeing enough play, such as Tahlia Vedra, Lord Kroak, Lord Skreech Verminking or the Beast-smasher Mega-Gargant have received boosts
We've tweaked the battle traits for Kharadron Overlords, Flesh-eater Courts, Blades of Khorne and Hedonites of Slaanesh to help those factions
We've tweaked the regiment options to allow the vast majority of non-Wizard/non-Priest infantry heroes to be allowed to join regiments led by other heroes. We've even extended this privilege to a few monster heroes, including Bloodthirsters, Runeson on Magmadroth and the Tuskboss on Maw-grunta
We really hope you all enjoy the update, and can't wait to see how the meta will shift following these changes. As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts (email aosfaq@gwplc.com), as your feedback is instrumental in helping us to continue to improve the game.
You can download the documents at the link below. Due to technical issues, this update has been slightly delayed on the Warhammer Age of Sigmar App.
