Age of Sigmar: Meta Shift Ahead – Balance Battlescroll
Will the Balance Battlescroll actually shift the Meta of Age of Sigmar around? Let’s take a deeper dive into the changes and find out.
In case you missed it, yesterday Games Workshop dropped the Balance Battlescroll on the masses. There were many changes to the points of armies and also quite a few tweaks to the rules for other armies. But will it be enough? That’s what we’re going to get into today!
Battlescroll Rules Tweaks
Beasts of Chaos
The first targeted rules tweak is for the Beasts of Chaos and their Primal Roar monstrous rampage ability. This tweak lowers their primordial call point generation. By itself this is a relatively minor change but it is a laser focused one. It’s also working in conjunction with the points changes.
For an army that’s rocking a 61% win rate (according to GW) their army changes really need to do a lot of work to drop them down by 6% and I don’t know if all the tweaks combined will lower them by that much. Look at what got changed points-wise:
And yes, those two units might have needed a points increase for balance reasons but I still don’t know if that’s going to really drop them by 6% overall. Don’t get me wrong these changes are blanket nerfs and there will be a change. But maybe not a big enough change.
Verdict: Nerfs for sure, but probably not as bad as it could have been for Beasts of Chaos.
Kruleboyz
This change is a great one for Kruleboyz players. Now your Swampcalla Shaman and Pot-grot can still deal with their Spell-slinging duties AND provide buffs with their Poisons and Elixirs. You don’t have to choose to do one or the other and so the value of this unit just jumped.
And speaking of value check out those points changes! For the Kruleboyz specifically they got some pretty big point drops. Both of these updates should push them up the win column. Unfortunately they still need to jump by 5% which is no small ask. I also think this season’s rules are unfavorable for them which is also having a negative impact on their win rate.
Verdict: Probably still needs more buffs.
Gloomspite Gitz
I hope you like Arachnarok Spiders because those just got a lot more interesting. And by interesting I mean they became battleline with a Spiderfang General around!
Personally, I’m a fan of this model as it’s just scary enough to make me do a double take every time. And now you can basically run an entire army of them! So…that might be a thing that pops up. And considering the rest of the points drops, yes, this just might be a big boon for the Gloomspite Gitz — specifically the spider riding kind.
It’s going to be full Spiders ahead for the Gloomspite Gitz. This seems like a very targeted focus on GW’s part for those Spider units in particular. Perhaps they are hoping that particular build will start to prop-up their 45% win rate. They were floating around the bottom so hopefully this does allow them to pick-up some percentages points.
Verdict: Spiders are a comin’ to play.
Other Winners
Just from looking at the points changes you can see some of the other winners. Basically if an army got points drops (are all green in the chart above) then they are a winner. The more units that got point decreases the bigger the winner.
I would call out the Skaven and Stormcasts in particular. Those points changes (according to GW) were targeted to units that didn’t see a lot of play — aka were less popular options. They were hoping that these points decreases would make those units more attractive for players to use. On the flip side, they didn’t really change the popular options in those armies. So if you were running something that was already working you don’t have a reason to swap out. Unless you just want to try something different (and maybe cheaper).
Biggest Losers
The Krondspire got hit with an 80 point increase making it one of the biggest losers out of this update. Not that it wasn’t warranted but that’s a big enough points hits folks are going to have to make some choices. When it’s showing up in 12.2% of all rosters you might have an issue on your hands.
The Seraphon also got hit with some more points increases this go around. That’s not great but it’s also not the worst thing ever for them. Seraphon players will have to rework their lists a bit if they were taking those units — and if you were taking all 5 of them you’re definitely going to have to rework somethings!
The final big loser was the Maggotkin of Nurgle. They got 5 of their units hit with points increases which will sting for them. These changes were targeted to help curb a specific build/sub-faction within the Maggotkin ranks. Again, if you were playing with those units you’ll have to make some adjustments and you might not have quite as many models on the table as you were used to.
Download the Battlescroll Here
What do you think of these changes overall? Did GW hit the mark or will these fall short?
