AoS 5 Rumours, End Times Panic, and Why We’re Still Keeping Our Armies
We had one of those very Warhammer conversations this week: it started with a spicy leak, escalated into apocalyptic speculation, took a detour through rules design, and somehow ended with Bretonnia, Kharadron anxiety, and a freshly finished Lammasu.
So naturally, we decided to turn it into a post.
The rumour that lit the fuse
Michał dropped into chat with a forum leak about Age of Sigmar that, if true, would be absolutely massive. The claim is that GW is supposedly preparing something like another End Times, with AoS 5 acting as a major lore reset.
The version making the rounds is dramatic even by Warhammer standards:
- the Mortal Realms get merged into a single world,
- Sigmar dies,
- Archaon and the Skaven come out on top,
- Slaanesh returns fully,
- a lot of existing setting development gets wiped away,
- and the new setting is called The Last World.
There were also rumours attached about creative disagreements and people leaving, plus the suggestion that AdeptiCon would not be the place where GW says anything concrete yet.
That is a lot. Maybe too much.
And because it is a leak from a forum, our first reaction was not “this is definitely happening,” but rather: okay, let’s all calm down for a second.
Our honest reaction: somewhere between laughter and dread
The funniest part of the whole discussion was how quickly we went from “wow, what if this is true” to “so what, are we supposed to sell our armies already?”
End3r summed up the mood perfectly: he has not even finished assembling his Kharadron Overlords, and now the internet is acting like he should already be listing them on the marketplace because the apocalypse is coming.
That, in miniature, is the classic leak-cycle experience.
One minute you are clipping dwarven sky-pirates off sprues. The next minute someone on a forum says the setting is being folded into a single battle-planet and your hobby brain starts doing emergency calculations.
Our position for now is simple: do not panic-sell anything because of rumours.
AoS is still one of GW’s biggest systems. Whatever happens with future lore, there will still be people playing it, collecting it, and painting it. If you like your army, keep building your army.
If the leak were true, it really would be wild
That said, some of the ideas in the rumour are wild enough that we could not help chewing on them.
The one that really made us stop was the possibility of Stormcast changing in a very dark direction, maybe even ending up entangled with Chaos in some major way. If GW ever actually pulled something like that off, it would flip a lot of assumptions about the setting on their head.
There is a version of this where a huge shake-up could be genuinely interesting. AoS has always had cool visual ideas, and sometimes its setting is at its best when it leans fully into mythic weirdness and goes big.
But there is also a version where a reset just bulldozes years of worldbuilding and replaces it with something flatter, more generic, and less distinct. And that is what makes these rumours feel so charged.
The bigger question: does AoS need a lore reset, a rules reset, or both?
Once we got past the leak itself, the conversation shifted into something more interesting: what exactly do we think AoS needs?
Because even among us, there is a split.
Some of us do not feel especially attached to AoS lore, so the idea of a giant narrative catastrophe does not automatically hurt. Others have a soft spot for parts of the setting, specific factions, and especially the models.
But where we had a lot more agreement was on the game itself.
Michał put it bluntly: compared to systems like Warhammer: The Old World or even Warhammer 40k, AoS often feels mechanically stripped down in ways that remove flavour rather than just complexity.
The complaints in chat were very familiar hobby-complaints, but they were not random grumbling. They all pointed at the same issue: a lot of AoS mechanics can feel too abstract.
Things we bounced around included:
- the double turn,
- fixed hit and wound values,
- limited equipment customisation,
- magic and prayer lores that do not always feel meaningful,
- retreat penalties,
- lack of leadership texture,
- and a general sense that units can lose identity.
Michał’s example was great: if a humble clanrat wounds both a skeleton and Archaon on Dorghar on the same fixed value, something about the fiction starts to wobble.
That does not mean AoS is unplayable or that nobody can enjoy it. It means that, for us, the mechanics sometimes fail to support the fantasy as strongly as they do in other systems.
Why some of us bounced off “big AoS”
We also talked about why Spearhead works much better for us than full-size AoS.
And honestly? Spearhead sounds great exactly because it embraces what AoS is good at:
- quick games,
- low friction,
- small board,
- immediate action,
- balanced entry point.
You can get a game in quickly, throw dice, smash into combat, and have fun in under an hour. That is a real strength.
Where the cracks show more, at least for us, is in what Michał jokingly called “bigmar” — full-size AoS. Once you move into larger games, the system can feel static, seasonal meta can get very sharp, and list variety starts to look thinner than we would like.
Michał mentioned talking to Patryk, who used to play AoS seriously, even at a very high level, and one reason he drifted away was exactly that tournament experience: too many armies converging on the same lists, too many repeated patterns, too little texture between supposedly different choices.
That is not a universal truth for every local scene, of course. But it is a criticism we have heard more than once.
We still think AoS has a place
For all the complaining, this was not actually an anti-AoS rant.
If anything, the conversation landed somewhere more nuanced.
AoS is still, in our view, a very good gateway Warhammer game. It is easier to teach than some older, denser systems. It is visually spectacular. Spearhead is genuinely a smart format. And if someone wants a cleaner, more approachable fantasy battle game, AoS absolutely does something useful.
Stas made a point we liked a lot: yes, AoS was clearly trying to simplify things, but not everyone actually wants more simplification. Sometimes more complicated rules are not a bug — they are part of what makes the game feel rich and narrative.
That is probably the heart of it.
We do not necessarily want AoS to become a clone of The Old World. But we would love to see a version of AoS that can stay accessible if you want it to be, while also offering more depth, more texture, and more flavour if you want more.
Whether that is actually achievable in one system is another question.
Meanwhile, in the real world: hobby first
The best part of the whole exchange was that while the internet was allegedly ending the Mortal Realms, Michał was just… finishing a Lammasu.
Not fully finished-finished, because some basing bits were left at home and the airbrush was forgotten, so a few details will have to wait until after the tournament. But still: progress happened.
And that is probably the healthiest answer to rumour season.
Paint the model. Build the army. Play the game you enjoy. Ignore the apocalypse until it is printed in an actual book.
Our current verdict
So where did we land?
- The leak sounds huge, but also extremely unverified.
- If even half of it were true, it would be one of the biggest AoS changes ever.
- Some kind of rework for AoS would not necessarily be a bad thing.
- A total lore reset could be exciting or terrible, depending on execution.
- Mechanically, we do think AoS has real weaknesses compared to Warhammer: The Old World and Warhammer 40k.
- But it still has strengths, especially as an accessible system and in Spearhead.
- And no, End3r is not selling the Kharadron boxes just yet.
Also, if GW somehow uses all this to announce AoS Bretonnia-but-not-Bretonnia, we reserve the right to laugh, complain, and still look at the models.
Because that is how this hobby works.
Final thought
Leaks are fun to discuss, but they are still leaks. Until GW actually shows something, this is all speculation layered on top of more speculation.
Still, it sparked a good conversation in our group, because underneath the drama there is a real question:
What do we actually want Age of Sigmar to be?
Simple but shallow? Fast but repetitive? Accessible but flavour-light? Or something a bit bolder?
We do not have the answer yet. But apparently we do have opinions. Plenty of them.