New errata is up...

...and the world is exploding! The relevant part of the document specifies that if a trooper is out of formation, the unit can't be targeted by buffs.

So the doom is laughable, but it is a non-trivial change to how units work. One of the reasons units are so strong in scenario play is that spreading models out all over the place gives you a lot of board presence for the lowest possible cost. Plenty of abilities and spells benefit from lax out-of-formation rules.

Units are still good, but they are harder to leverage in strange, non-intuitive ways. Despite the slightly strange wording of the errata, I think this is actually a positive change in terms of making the rule set more approachable. That was my impression - that PP was doing this to make the game easier to learn, rather than trying to nerf any strategy in particular.

Thoughts? Apathy?

This is a good change.  I am glad the rule states, "targeted", instead of, "affected". It only took pp three years to finally listen to our podcast. The question was once posed, during an episode, "what rule would you like to see changed the most"? There was then a discussion about how they needed to change the unit formation rules for targeting units with spells and abilities.  

Largely agree with Nick, though it is telling that this thread starts with three Cryx players. We don't lean on buffs, so there's not much effect on us. Quite the opposite, actually. Keeping units honest (i.e., more cohesive) makes them more susceptible to some of our tools.

If I played Trollbloods, I'd be miffed, so I get some of the blowback. That said, people need to take a less faction-centric view of the game and then learn to play in the new reality PP has created.

I play trolls and I don't really get all the blow back. I understand that a model being pushed or thrown can now effect buffs, but how common is it that said model lands out of formation? If the unit leader is in the middle of the unit, where a unit leader should be, I honestly think it's a non-issue. Unless I am playing the CMD range stat very wrong. With all the gripes I've seen about making jacks/beasts better against units or more enticing to take them over units, I'm surprised by the blow back. It seems like a step towards what people have been asking for.

Throwing a model out of formation will often kill it anyway.

The problem will be focus-firing the leader and messing up your formation, but that was worth doing before anyway.

I don't like this change. I think it should have been worded in such a way that you can't target an out of formation model, but you can still target the unit if a random grunt happens to be out of formation. The difference is almost negligible though.