Sanai said:
It also looks like the various bloodlines are well looked after now, blood dragons can now go cav heavy, strigoi have super-ghouls and flying vampire monsters, lahmians have the coven throne to really say "Im Lahmian!", necromancers have a lord choice....
Btw, the ghoul king is a seperate choice to vampire lords, but it does get access to vampiric powers.
To be fair, I don't really see how the blood dragons can go any heavier cavalry now then they could before - sure there's an additional special cavalry choice, but it doesn't feel especially blood dragony, and besides, we already had an option for special choice cav. Unless there's some new core-choice cavalry I'm unaware of, blood dragons are pretty much in the same place they were in the current book. Then again, blood dragons weren't that poorly represented by the current book, anyway. They suffer more from cavalry in general being debuffed in 8th edition.
Strigoi seem to be big winners, if indeed we're getting a ghoul king lord choice (this is the first I've heard of it, and it isn't on the summary page on warseer, where is that rumor coming from?). If that's true, then they'll have some appropriate character options and new appropriate special choices. Of course, the unnecessary price hike on ghouls, especially since vanhels probably won't be spammable anymore so their best schtick - rerolling poison - won't be nearly so common... well, strigoi themed armies might fit their theme better, but unless the new specials get some very nice rules I'm not at all convinced they'll play as well.
VonCarsteins maintain pretty much everything that made them cool before and get a new upgrade kit and a nice new isabella model, so good for them. However, I heard somewhere that there will no longer be two versions of manfred. If he goes back to being just a lord, then you'll need much larger games before you can field the full cast again. I did like being able to field every notable member of the family in a single army of regular gaming size, and I'll miss that. In general, though,
VC's were well represented before, and they'll still be well represented now.
Lahmia gets the Coven Throne, and Necrarchs get the Mortis engine, I guess, though that looks more like a necromancer then a vampire on that thing to me, though that's a simple conversion. I wonder if you can put a hero on it? Anyway, other then these two options (and the mortis engine is a bit tenuous itself), I'm not sure if these bloodlines really get anything of note out of the new book. Still, they weren't the worst off before. But it would have been nice to get a bit more for them.
The big winner, of course, is necromancers. Assuming the lord-must-be-vampire character restriction is gone, then they've been vaulted back up to full playability with a generic lord choice, and as an added bonus they get an on-theme special character lord with designated side kick, and that mortis engine is arguably even a better fit for necros then for necrarchs. Mortis engine, corpse carts, hordes of skeletons & zombies, wights, necros, kemmler and krell? That sounds like a pretty cool army to me.
Overall, this is looking more or less like I wanted it too, an expansion on rather then repudiation of the design philosophy that went into our current book. Throw everything out there, try and provide on theme options for all of the bloodlines, and let players make themed armies if they want to, rather then try and straight jacket particular army configurations to begin with. Hopefully we do get more of the fluff of the bloodlines, though.
. So both look like really potent options, the coven throne being a huge combat boost to an already powerful vampire lord, and the mortis engine being magically powerful.