Mmm Yeah I remember when I first talked to a red shirt about AOS they said to me that it really has a heroes of might and magic vibe to it, I didn't REALLY agree at the time, but at least they did use the dwarven magma dragon concepts from heroes 5! Will their be bear riders as well?
This is an interesting image, because it raise a particular question: who hired them for that fight? Clearly not the stormcasts, because if I remember correctly the dead fight on Sigmar's side. Does it mean that the Chaos is actually willing to hire these fire warriors to figth on their side?
I like the idea behind the Stormcast by themselves, but....I just can't shake their look. It just screams "Ok Sigmar is 40k Emperor for reals, and he just basically made the early version of Thunder Warriors." Having armored heroes wouldn't have been bad, just...too akin to the look and too far from what WHFB was a bit.
That is definitely the key problem there, no argument at all. In its effort to switch to a more high fantasy setting, it does seem like they took most Warhammer 40,000 designs and worked their way backwards rather than fully adapting ideas from fantasy. If they really wanted to avoid comparisons, they could have at least dropped the massive pauldrons and made them a little more human in terms of their proportions.
One of the reasons I dislike the Stormcast is that they are literally space marines. The Empire was by far my favourite faction because they were truly unique in a fantasy setting. You can probably count with two hands how many fantasy settings give their human faction a 15th-ish century theme.
