Age of Sigmar: New Edition’s Racial Stats & Weapon Rules Revealed
GW is pulling back the curtain on how they assign stats and weapon rules in the new edition of Age of Sigmar. Take a look.
With the new edition of Age os Sigmar speeding towards us, GW has started to show a little leg on exactly how they are shaking things up. Let’sstart in with the total redo of unit stats.
New AOS Statlines
Here’s how they started in:
“One of the key goals for the new edition was to make sure that the rules really reflect the Mortal Realms. This meant ensuring that characteristics are consistently applied, reflecting the lore and the look of the miniature.”
It is interesting to see them embrace the physicality of the minis themselves. The stats reflect not only the lore, but the physical reality of the minis. So if something looks larger, or more armored that another minis – its stats should reflect that. In the end, that makes for a more intuitive game that makes sense, with a stronger connection between with what your minis look like, and how they perform on the tabletop.
“Each type of creature was assigned a set of characteristics which would serve as a baseline across factions. A basic human hits on 4+ and wounds on 4+; aelves are more accurate but no stronger, so they hit on 3+ and wound on 4+, while orruks are no more accurate, but are stronger, so hit on 4+ and wound on 3+.
Elite warriors and brutes – or ill-trained fighters and weaklings – can modify these baselines, but the archetypes provide a strong and consistent core. A similar approach was taken amongst heroes, helping to differentiate a combat hero from a priest or wizard.
More hard work came when deciding how to clearly represent the Health and Save characteristics. Hundreds of miniatures were lined up to compare, with Health largely defined by their volume, and Save largely defined by the amount of armour worn…”
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New AoS Weapon Abilities
Next, we get into the new edition’s weapons abilities.
“Each faction in Warhammer Age of Sigmar has its own specialties and preferred tactics, but internal balance is also important. Where an army has access to multiple types of infantry or cavalry or war machine, the rules team took pains to help differentiate them – perhaps giving one unit a focus on holding objectives, one unit better positional play, and making another unit better at countering specific threats thanks to a carefully-chosen weapon ability.
As a result of this role-determining process, the way Rend works in weapon profiles has changed. While Rend has been reduced overall, there are many more units with Anti-X abilities, meaning they’ll hit much harder against their preferred targets. Of course, combat in the Age of Sigmar is brutal – so don’t expect all Rend to go away.”
24 New AoS Faction Packs
Finally GW tells us to prepare for the arrival of a full two dozen Faction packs. These are being rolled out in a similar way as hte INdex packs for Warhammer 40K’s 10th Edition launch. They will all be avialable digitally, and in physical form , and drop all at once with the formal release date for the new edition. None of the older Battletomes will be obsolete as of that time.. Here’s some exact GW words:
“The full Faction Packs contain Battle Traits, Battle Formations, Heroic Traits, Artefacts of Power, and various Lores, as well as the Spearhead Battle Traits, Regiment Abilities, Enhancements, and all the warscrolls you’ll need. They will be available to download as free FAQs on or around launch, and to buy as physical card packs shortly afterwards.”
