Warhammer Fantasy 8th Edition

In case no one knew, I'm a big Warhammer Fantasy buff.  I own over 5k points of both High Elves and Dwarves (probably more Elves now).  The sad part is:  Both armies are sitting in the closet and haven't been played for months now.  The reason?  Warhammer just takes too long to play.  Recently, I've been taking a break from 40K to play Warmachine and the time and speed it takes to setup, play and cleanup is miles ahead of GW's games.  And this is just 40K.  Fantasy takes much more longer to play because the rules are more complicated, there's more models at 2250 (the norm point level) and there's generally just more phases in the game.

Don't get me wrong.. I've played GW for about 10 years now.  I've sat through all the ridiculous price hikes, the book imbalances and the neglection of certain armies, but I think it's time to try a new game.  Now that I'm in the land of Cygnar and Retribution, I've been looking back at my beards and non-beards sitting in the closet.  As most of you know, I'm a die-hard competitive player.  I own enough Elves to build most competitive combinations out there (Star Dragons, Teclis..etc) and Thorek Ironbrow is my best friend.  But 7th Ed. Fantasy just really put me off.  I played a lot at first because the guys at my old club loved it.. and I had fun for some time.  But once VC, DE and DoC gave me problems due to balance issues and not because of generalship, I started to get put off.  It's like any game that I've ever played, be it RTS or FPS.. once something gets too imba, I shy away from the game.  There's no point playing when the metagame turns stale and the battles get predetermined through bad matchups rather than player skill.

Then comes rumors of Fantasy 8th Edition.  I see some good rumors, I see some bad rumors and I see a ton of general BS floating around the webs.  I'm talking about threads on Whineseer, Dakka and other sites worth noting.  When something as game changing as 8th Ed. comes out, I think immediately of my armies and how they are effected while analyzing the current metagame and how it is being effected.  I'm looking at the big 3 right now:  VC, DE and DoC.  How does 8th Ed. solve these power-play armies?  How does it effect my High Elves?  How does it BUFF my Dwarves?  All of these things I have to keep in mind before I decide that 8th Ed. will respark my interest in playing Fantasy.

In the next couple of posts, I will go over my thoughts in a more indepth manner, but for now, this is all I got.