Battlescroll Shake-Up: When 1000 Points Suddenly Becomes 880
We had one of those very familiar Warhammer mornings: somebody drops a Warhammer Community link, everyone starts scrolling in mild panic, and five minutes later our army lists no longer make sense.
This time the culprit was the new Age of Sigmar battlescroll update and the pre-General’s Handbook cleanup. On paper it is just another balance pass. In practice? It immediately turned list-building into a small crisis.
The first reaction: “great sale”
The mood was captured perfectly by Ender, who summed up the points changes as a “great sale”.
And honestly, fair. The most relatable moment in the whole discussion was this:
“wow, from exactly 1000 I suddenly dropped to 880 points”
That is such a classic army-building problem. You spend time tuning a neat round-number list, feel good about every slot, and then a balance update comes in and suddenly you are staring at a giant points hole wondering whether this is a blessing or a punishment.
List-building after the update: awkward, but maybe useful
In Ender’s case, the silver lining was immediate: with that unexpected discount, there was room to squeeze in another hero basically for free. And suddenly that printed Drekki proxy stopped being a funny side project and started looking like a practical solution for balancing the list again.
That is the kind of thing we actually enjoy in updates like this. Yes, it breaks existing lists. Yes, it means rebuilding from scratch. But it also opens little hobby doors that were closed before:
- a character that was previously just out of reach now fits,
- a proxy or printed model suddenly has a real job,
- a list that felt locked-in gets room to breathe.
For army-building as a category, this is the interesting part. Not just what got cheaper, but what new combinations become possible because of it.
The less fun bit: more things costing points
Michał immediately spotted the line that probably made a lot of players sigh:
Enhancement choices, faction terrain features, spell lores, and manifestations can now cost points
That is one of those changes that may be healthy for the game overall, but as readers and list-builders our first reaction was much less noble: that is a lot to process.
Michał put it very plainly — there is just too much of it to read quickly and keep up with in real time. And that is probably the most honest summary of these update days. Before we even get to testing, before we decide what is good or bad, there is the very real hobby task of simply understanding what changed.
Kharadron Overlords: cheaper list, rougher table?
The Kharadron part of the discussion was especially interesting. Ender’s read was that for Spearhead / SH, the only KO-specific change he noticed was bomb dropping going from D3 damage to D3+1.
That sounds nice in isolation. More reliable damage is always welcome.
But then came the bigger concern: if the new terrain rules include pieces that block shooting, and if KO otherwise stay mostly the same, that could be a real problem. A shooting-heavy army does not need many hostile environmental changes before things start feeling awkward.
So the immediate impression was very mixed:
- points went down,
- one damage profile improved,
- but the broader battlefield context may have become worse.
That is exactly why reading only your faction paragraph is never enough. Army-building is not just internal efficiency — it is also about what kind of table and mission environment your army is walking into.
Rules clarifications we were already half-playing anyway
The conversation then shifted from points to rules details, which is where update days always get a bit forensic.
Michał highlighted a few notable clarifications:
Companion attacks now take negative modifiers
That is the sort of rule tweak that looks small until it matters in an actual game. Any time a previously protected category starts interacting with modifiers more normally, it changes expectations.
Guarded Hero is now explicitly limited beyond 12”
The funny part here was that our reaction was basically: weren’t we already playing it like that?
Still, having it clearly written is always better than relying on table consensus and memory. A lot of rules arguments disappear the moment a vaguely worded interaction becomes explicit.
They also clarified the exact wording we had discussed recently
This might be our favourite kind of errata: not flashy, not dramatic, just finally cleaning up a sentence that everyone had been interpreting slightly differently.
Control vs models: one of those deceptively big wording changes
At the end, Michał noticed another subtle but important point: does the rule now care about control, not the number of models?
That is the kind of wording change that can have a much bigger impact than a points tweak. If an objective, ability, or battle tactic checks control value instead of raw model count, then suddenly:
- elite units may behave differently,
- support abilities that boost control become more valuable,
- list-building priorities can shift away from simple body count.
And that is where we ended up: not with firm conclusions yet, but with a lot of questions that matter for the next round of list-building.
Our takeaway right now
This does not feel like an update we can judge after one skim. Our first impression is a mix of excitement, confusion, and the usual post-balance urge to rebuild everything immediately.
For us, the most tangible effect so far is simple:
- some existing lists just got cheaper,
- those saved points create room for new characters and experiments,
- but the wider rules and terrain context may matter even more than the raw discounts.
So yes, on one level this was a points update.
But from the hobby side, it was also a reminder of why army-building is never just plugging numbers into a list builder. Every change ripples outward: into model choices, proxies, planned purchases, table expectations, and even how we read the missions.
We will probably need a couple of games before we know whether this was a buff, a trap, or both at once.
For now, we are doing what everyone does after a battlescroll drop: reopening lists we thought were finished and pretending we are definitely not about to start another hero.