Kill Team Dead Silence. Tau vs Space Wolves

[Lord Nord in Gravis Armour]

Wow, that's even more bare-bones than I thought. I figured they'd at least have some Bolt Pistols or Heavy/Special-Issue Bolt Pistols as options for the Hunters along with an alternate weapon for the Gunner, but this kit really does look to have been min-maxed for KillPLASMA!Team and the Era of Free Wargear.

 

RIP choice, M41-M42.

 

Edited Friday at 06:58 PM by Lord Nord in Gravis Armour
Woof woof

[HeadlessCross]

1 hour ago, Lord Nord in Gravis Armour said:

Wow, that's even more bare-bones than I thought. I figured they'd at least have some Bolt Pistols or Heavy/Special-Issue Bolt Pistols as options for the Hunters along with an alternate weapon for the Gunner, but this kit really does look to have been min-maxed for KillPLASMA!Team and the Era of Free Wargear.

 

RIP choice, M41-M42.

 

Them all having Plasma Pistols is hardly an issue to be honest. The gunner only having a Plasma Gun is kinda lame, but the Plasma Pistols on everyone is at least KINDA neat. 

[ShibeKing]

Will definitely pick up the Tau suits when they're a separate release. I think GW did a good job with those.

[Halandaar]

Availability looks iffy again for third parties, Dark Sphere once again got shafted (only got allocated 10% of the amount they requested).

[Halandaar]

11 hours ago, Halandaar said:

Availability looks iffy again for third parties, Dark Sphere once again got shafted (only got allocated 10% of the amount they requested).

 

And following up, Goblin Gaming and Hobby Workshop sold out in under a minute and Warhammer.com was sold out by 10:13 (maybe even earlier, that was when I checked). 

 

Feels like the run up to Christmas is always like this, doesn't make it any less frustrating though. 

[Silvereyes]

I wasn't able to pre-order this in the UK. My FLGS said on their Facebook yesterday that GW gave them so few copies, they were only going to sell them in the store. I didn't have the time to drive up as I start work soon. Guessing the same thing happened with Element Games and Goblin Gaming, as soon as they went live it immediately said they sold out. Tried the official GW website but ofcourse, by 10:02am, all their stock was gone. 

 

Really annoying. I actually wanted to get 2 of them, and split the 2 with the 2 Space Wolves players in my club. Didn't think they'd be so limited. Will just have to wait until the regular release, in, what, 3 or 4 months?

[Fire Golem]

I wouldn’t mind if the separate releases were definitely going to be close, but it’s annoying that seemingly only a handful of people can use these teams until the next KT box comes out. 

[Halandaar]

5 minutes ago, Silvereyes said:

Really annoying. I actually wanted to get 2 of them, and split the 2 with the 2 Space Wolves players in my club. Didn't think they'd be so limited. Will just have to wait until the regular release, in, what, 3 or 4 months?

 

Yep, would also have bought two sets (one to keep all of, one to split with a friend). Had them in cart on Goblin Gaming and by the time I'd got through PayPal checkout they'd sold out. 

 

Thing is GW banks on us being prepared to shell out 4x full price teams later on, but in my case I've gone from someone who would have bought two full Dead Silence sets to someone who will buy one Wolf Scout team at best (and probably years down the line at this point). The bundle discount is the thing making it an attractive product for me.

 

 

[irlLordy]

Could this be the 11th edition starter box squeeze on production impacting other products? Or just GW woefully underestimating demand once again?

Edited Saturday at 02:51 PM by irlLordy

[SgtSharp]

10 hours ago, Halandaar said:

 

And following up, Goblin Gaming and Hobby Workshop sold out in under a minute and Warhammer.com was sold out by 10:13 (maybe even earlier, that was when I checked). 

 

Feels like the run up to Christmas is always like this, doesn't make it any less frustrating though. 

they sold out around 10:03, thats when i tried to order it and got kicked back to cart as i was trying to pay

[ZeroWolf]

5 hours ago, irlLordy said:

Could this be the 11th edition starter box squeeze on production impacting other products? Or just GW woefully underestimating demand once again?

Hard to say as its likely that Dead Silence was printed a few months ago before they started printing 11th

[Armchair Warlord]

6 hours ago, irlLordy said:

Could this be the 11th edition starter box squeeze on production impacting other products? Or just GW woefully underestimating demand once again?

I don't think their underestimating anything. I think this is just now their de facto strategy. And it works for them!

[Halandaar]

47 minutes ago, Armchair Warlord said:

I don't think their underestimating anything. I think this is just now their de facto strategy. And it works for them!

 

There have been six army sets this year (Krieg, Emperors Children and Space Wolves for 40K, Gloomspite Gitz, Soulblight Gravelords and Helsmiths of Hashut for AoS) and every single one was available in substantial numbers from third party stockists - as far as I remember even the other KT sets like Typhon and Tomb World didn't sell out immediately. In a couple of cases, these products are still available even now. Compare that to Dead Silence where stockists are reporting being allocated less than 10% of what they ordered, or in some cases getting so few copies they didn't even list them in their online stores at all. Very different situations. 

 

The perfect level for GW is that they've sold out the run by the end of the preorder period; no stock hanging around in the warehouse, but maximum amount of sales made. Shorting the trade accounts by as much as 90% and still selling out in 3 minutes is a huge amount of money left on the table, and GW love money. Such a massive mismatch between supply and demand suggests either incompetence or design, and while I agree with you that it's probably the latter, it's almost certainly more to do with prioritising production capacity.

 

My suspicion is that after how badly they botched the launch of Cursed City, they have printed a LOT of copies of Darkwater and that's probably used up a lot of the production capacity for this period. 

[Dark Shepherd]

8 hours ago, irlLordy said:

Could this be the 11th edition starter box squeeze on production impacting other products? Or just GW woefully underestimating demand once again?

Quite possibly, they had to know SW and Tau are popular

 

And if 11th box is in bigger numbers than 10th then definitely IMO

[Mandragola]

I’ve reviewed the box for goonhammer, though I’m not sure how useful that is, since you can’t now buy it: https://www.goonhammer.com/kill-team-dead-silence-model-and-campaign-review/

 

Also wrote a review of Wolf scouts: https://www.goonhammer.com/kill-team-dead-silence-wolf-scouts-kill-team-review/

 

And another of our guys did Stealths: https://www.goonhammer.com/kill-team-dead-silence-xv26-stealth-suits-kill-team-review/

 

The general consensus is that Stealths are an awesome bit of design that should be a really fun addition to the game. Wolf scouts seem like a seriously oppressive team that will absolutely dominate melee teams but maybe have some difficulty with shooters… maybe. Almost certainly top tier. 
 

I’ve made a start on the Stealths. Someone else got the wolves but I’ve set about kitbashing some, which I’ll do as Raven Guard. 
 

 

[Moonstalker]

I got my order in today at 12:57 PM local (Eastern US, so the "10 o'clock" for us California time).  I think some of the issue with the pre-orders running out "so fast" is, uh... you guys know you can get in as early as like 5 minutes before?  Search the item's name on the webstore, don't look at new releases or whatever.  It's usually up and you can check out with it early.

 

Not that pre-orders selling out in 8 minutes is much consolation over them selling out in 3, or that there isn't a deeper problem here with GW not making enough stuff to meet demand, but if you really want stuff these days you need to be logged in and typing the kit name into the search bar at T-5 minutes whatever the launch time is.  If the kit doesn't show up in search, refresh and try again.

 

Edit: Screenshot of the confirmation email.

Edited Sunday at 02:11 AM by Moonstalker

[Tastyfish]

3 hours ago, Halandaar said:

 

There have been six army sets this year (Krieg, Emperors Children and Space Wolves for 40K, Gloomspite Gitz, Soulblight Gravelords and Helsmiths of Hashut for AoS) and every single one was available in substantial numbers from third party stockists - as far as I remember even the other KT sets like Typhon and Tomb World didn't sell out immediately. In a couple of cases, these products are still available even now. Compare that to Dead Silence where stockists are reporting being allocated less than 10% of what they ordered, or in some cases getting so few copies they didn't even list them in their online stores at all. Very different situations. 

 

The perfect level for GW is that they've sold out the run by the end of the preorder period; no stock hanging around in the warehouse, but maximum amount of sales made. Shorting the trade accounts by as much as 90% and still selling out in 3 minutes is a huge amount of money left on the table, and GW love money. Such a massive mismatch between supply and demand suggests either incompetence or design, and while I agree with you that it's probably the latter, it's almost certainly more to do with prioritising production capacity.

 

My suspicion is that after how badly they botched the launch of Cursed City, they have printed a LOT of copies of Darkwater and that's probably used up a lot of the production capacity for this period. 

 

Big difference between the army boxes and the Kill Team sets is that the latter generally come with a lot more cards and components.

 

There was talk of them bringing more printing in house, but I think if they're having to go to third parties for the cardboard cutting and printing then that might explain the issues with those sets. There's a much longer lead time with external partners as things need signing off at various QC stages, potentially even involving the shipping of proofs etc (plus legal and finance getting involved to authorise various payments and agreements).

 

You also don't have control over their scheduling, so alongside the extra timelines in getting the product finalised you're also going to have to get that done ahead of another deadline in order to fit in the slot allocated to you. This is also going to have a knock on effect as it means you might be needing to store things for longer than you'd like if you're planning to issue things seasonally, but it's more economical (or only possible for QC reasons) to have the third party printers do you a single run of prints for a whole bunch of different components.

 

They're probably having to estimate how well the boxes vs the teams will sell a year or so in advance, and in this case that's also going to include some potentially high risk things like the edition change.

 

Plus it's a niche product, so whilst failing to sell an extra box they didn't produce is them leaving money on the table in theory, if you just wait a month and spend it on a different GW item then all they've lost is the interest they'd have made on over a few weeks.

[Wispy]

i was pretty disappointed to not get it pre-ordered, literally having it removed from my cart as i completed the transaction and taking money from my paypal. 

 

Despite that pissoff I'm sure the refund will go through in the whatever business days ands I have a Tau friend who secured his preorder and is going to split the Wolf sprue with me, so I'm not terribly hard done by... But this is annoying, disheartening process.

 

Hopefully the high demand encourages GW to release the standalone boxes sooner, before the Christmas break because having it sell out in 30 seconds BEFORE 10'o clock sucks.

[Rusted Boltgun]

The last few weeks have seen 'we have very limited stock' emails from Element Games ahead of pre-orders which would suggest this wasn't Kill Team specific. From memory, they took the Crux Terminatus box in-store only as they had so few.

A real shame for those who wanted this one.

[Halandaar]

16 hours ago, Tastyfish said:

Big difference between the army boxes and the Kill Team sets is that the latter generally come with a lot more cards and components.

 

Army sets come with printed Codexes/Battletomes and card sets too (and in some older cases have had card token sheets too, similar to kill team) so card printing is a consideration for those sets as well. 

 

Aside from that, Crux Terminatus two weeks ago was also heavily restricted to third-party stockists and contained no cardstock whatsoever. 

Edited Sunday at 07:15 PM by Halandaar

[lhg033]

Had my now customary, 'we didnt get given enough stock'
They actually said they only received 10% of what they requested from GW!

At a personal level,...At least in this case it is effectively just two kill teams that were more of a nice to have for me rather than a season starter set etc 

...but it is another straw to add to the pile for me not trusting GW more and spending my hobby budget elsewhere.

 

 

 

[Lord Marshal]

Faction Packs for Tau and Space Wolves now have the Kill Teams, as well as the Munitorum Field Manual update for points.

 

Stealth Suits are locked to 5 as had been feared, though Wolf Scouts can go up to 12 (albeit two of them being the lowercase wolves).

 

Edited 9 hours ago by Lord Marshal

[Nephaston]

5 minutes ago, Lord Marshal said:

Stealth Suits are locked to 5 as had been feared, though Wolf Scouts can go up to 12 (albeit two of them being the lowercase wolves).

 

It's probably 12 because of the wolves.

[Karhedron]

Overcharged Plasma Pistols with +1 to Wound, very tasty!

 

[Karhedron]

105/210 points does not look bad for 5/10 man units. More expensive than Reivers but pack a significantly better punch with all that plasma and can chuck a Haywire mine too which is handy. They also have the SPACE WOLVES keyword which opens up useful interactions with the stratagems and abilities in the SW Detachments.

 

The downside is that there appears to be no rules for the Fangbearer (Apothecary-lite) despite him being pictured on the data card.

20 minutes ago, Lord Marshal said:

Stealth Suits are locked to 5 as had been feared, though Wolf Scouts can go up to 12 (albeit two of them being the lowercase wolves).

 

I see the Wolves as bullet-catchers for heavy weapon shots.