Guide to High elves in Age of Sigmar.
Posted: Fri Dec 07, 2018 10:02 am
Shining a light on the path to the Unicorn Gate.
Age of Sigmar is a treachorous mountain path of rules. Not hard to understand, just hard to find. So I will try and illuminate the path for my fellow commanders, I might not be 100% right, this is the game as far as I have come in it.
Army building
Ok here I need to explain a few things.
Each army has an allegiance, this is the keyword it functions under.
There are four alliances in the game, death chaos order destruction, these also have the same base allegiance within all the factions.
Within an alliance there are different factions. These have their own allegiance keyword on top of the base alliance keyword.
Example, the chaos alliance have the subfactions beasts of chaos and slaves of darkness who have their own keywords. And in the Order alliance you have dispossessed and order draconis.
Having the same keyword in an army gives you access to certain Allegiance Abilities (like commander trait, artefact of power and such).
Each of the Alliances have one set of these.
SOME of the alliance subfactions have their own. THIS IS IMPORTANT.
Taking a breather on a rock overlooking a stream cascading down a gorge.
So when building a high elf army there is something you need to know.
No high elf faction has its own allegiance ability, they are ALL just of the allegiance Order.
This means you can pick and chose any other order unit for your army.
You are free to mix any of the high elf factions when building your army you do not need to use the ally system to add any unit from the Order alliance.
With one caveat, some units are only battleline if you chose that factions allegiance keyword, the drawback is that you now can only ally units from other factions, and you still only get the allegiance abilities from Order.
Also important to note, if you pick a faction as allegiance keyword you become limited in what you may ally with, for example none of the high elf subfactions can ally units from the high elves compendium.
Picking up the backpack and moving on.
Now we come to the meat and bone of age of sigmar.
As with the current version of 40k, age of sigmar is all about the buffs.
First we start units inherent buffs.
Units are basically all the same until you start using their buffs.
Most units that have lots of cheap models have bonuses when you increase the size of the unit.
Looking at high elves, we have spearmen, if they are more than 20 they get 1 extra attack per model.
As they only have 1 attack to begin with this is a gigantic boost as it doubles the amount of attacks the unit has.
Ofcourse building a 20 man unit isn't very smart as one stray arrow removes that buff.
So you need more models so that you dont lose that buff in the first volley of fire.
Go through these buffs, and also learn what each units musician and standardbearer do.
Stopping at a staircase hewn from the mountain with old broken statues guarding its first step.
Leader buffs.
Your leaders are important as hell, these are your melee monsters and buffers. Learn what each do by heart.
There are three kinds of buffs in the game.
Passive
Command abilities
Magic
Passive buffs often come in the form of auras, as we are playing an army of order allegiance we might want to look at the Command trait that gives you leader a fearless bubble, unless you play phoenix guard as they are already more or less immune to battleshock. These often only affect units with specific keywords.
Command abilities. Leaders often have a command ability, this can be activated by spending command points, though you only get 1 command point each turn so you have to chose these with care.
The high elf seawarden has one of the strongest buffs i've encountered. Giving a unit reroll hit, reroll wound and reroll saves. These often only affect units with specific keywords.
Magic, spellcasters are a bit special if you use the base rules of the game. They have two base spells, 1d3 mortal wounds missile spell, or give 1 unit reroll 1's on their save.
Not exactly fantastic, these both have the same targets, mortal wounds are good against heavily armoured units, and reroll 1's are good on heavily armoured units, (also note that elven shields already give reroll 1's so it is pointless on spearmen and silverhelms)
But each caster has one more spell than these two at their disposal.
And as an example the archmage from eldritch council has an 18" aura spell that gives 6+ save against wounds and mortal wounds, basically a feel no pain.
It is not very useful in small games, but the bigger a game gets, the more units you have in that aura the more valuable it becomes.
Remember to also look at the collegiate arcane (human wizards), and the sisters of the thorn from the wanderers. There are useful spells out there. You just need to find them.
Reaching the top of the stairs we now have a view of the unicorn gate.
So where do you find the rules you need?
Core rulebook, in the latest edition they moved the Allegiance abilities for the base Alliances to the core rulebook. So you now need it.
Azyr app, yeah i don't like it, but in order to get the latest updated version of all the warscrolls you need this app or battlescribe. There are warscrolls on gws homepage, but they are both incomplete and not updated. With one exception.
The generals handbook, yes to make things even more complicated the points and limits of a unit are not listed in their warscroll, instead you have to go here.
The high elf compendium. Rejoice a small boon to us old timers, here is a compendium with the basic highelf units warscrolls and at the end, their point costs and limits, and it gets regular updates, get it, use it, love it.
https://www.games-workshop.com/en-WW/WSC-HE-ENG
Now for the rest of the treck down to the gate, we have things i have not personally used yet, like magic from the malign sorcery book, the battle zones of age of sigmar that give you new artefacts and spells. Also the campaign books contain alot of things I havnt touched yet, these things may appear in a future update along with battalions.
Age of Sigmar is a treachorous mountain path of rules. Not hard to understand, just hard to find. So I will try and illuminate the path for my fellow commanders, I might not be 100% right, this is the game as far as I have come in it.
Army building
Ok here I need to explain a few things.
Each army has an allegiance, this is the keyword it functions under.
There are four alliances in the game, death chaos order destruction, these also have the same base allegiance within all the factions.
Within an alliance there are different factions. These have their own allegiance keyword on top of the base alliance keyword.
Example, the chaos alliance have the subfactions beasts of chaos and slaves of darkness who have their own keywords. And in the Order alliance you have dispossessed and order draconis.
Having the same keyword in an army gives you access to certain Allegiance Abilities (like commander trait, artefact of power and such).
Each of the Alliances have one set of these.
SOME of the alliance subfactions have their own. THIS IS IMPORTANT.
Taking a breather on a rock overlooking a stream cascading down a gorge.
So when building a high elf army there is something you need to know.
No high elf faction has its own allegiance ability, they are ALL just of the allegiance Order.
This means you can pick and chose any other order unit for your army.
You are free to mix any of the high elf factions when building your army you do not need to use the ally system to add any unit from the Order alliance.
With one caveat, some units are only battleline if you chose that factions allegiance keyword, the drawback is that you now can only ally units from other factions, and you still only get the allegiance abilities from Order.
Also important to note, if you pick a faction as allegiance keyword you become limited in what you may ally with, for example none of the high elf subfactions can ally units from the high elves compendium.
Picking up the backpack and moving on.
Now we come to the meat and bone of age of sigmar.
As with the current version of 40k, age of sigmar is all about the buffs.
First we start units inherent buffs.
Units are basically all the same until you start using their buffs.
Most units that have lots of cheap models have bonuses when you increase the size of the unit.
Looking at high elves, we have spearmen, if they are more than 20 they get 1 extra attack per model.
As they only have 1 attack to begin with this is a gigantic boost as it doubles the amount of attacks the unit has.
Ofcourse building a 20 man unit isn't very smart as one stray arrow removes that buff.
So you need more models so that you dont lose that buff in the first volley of fire.
Go through these buffs, and also learn what each units musician and standardbearer do.
Stopping at a staircase hewn from the mountain with old broken statues guarding its first step.
Leader buffs.
Your leaders are important as hell, these are your melee monsters and buffers. Learn what each do by heart.
There are three kinds of buffs in the game.
Passive
Command abilities
Magic
Passive buffs often come in the form of auras, as we are playing an army of order allegiance we might want to look at the Command trait that gives you leader a fearless bubble, unless you play phoenix guard as they are already more or less immune to battleshock. These often only affect units with specific keywords.
Command abilities. Leaders often have a command ability, this can be activated by spending command points, though you only get 1 command point each turn so you have to chose these with care.
The high elf seawarden has one of the strongest buffs i've encountered. Giving a unit reroll hit, reroll wound and reroll saves. These often only affect units with specific keywords.
Magic, spellcasters are a bit special if you use the base rules of the game. They have two base spells, 1d3 mortal wounds missile spell, or give 1 unit reroll 1's on their save.
Not exactly fantastic, these both have the same targets, mortal wounds are good against heavily armoured units, and reroll 1's are good on heavily armoured units, (also note that elven shields already give reroll 1's so it is pointless on spearmen and silverhelms)
But each caster has one more spell than these two at their disposal.
And as an example the archmage from eldritch council has an 18" aura spell that gives 6+ save against wounds and mortal wounds, basically a feel no pain.
It is not very useful in small games, but the bigger a game gets, the more units you have in that aura the more valuable it becomes.
Remember to also look at the collegiate arcane (human wizards), and the sisters of the thorn from the wanderers. There are useful spells out there. You just need to find them.
Reaching the top of the stairs we now have a view of the unicorn gate.
So where do you find the rules you need?
Core rulebook, in the latest edition they moved the Allegiance abilities for the base Alliances to the core rulebook. So you now need it.
Azyr app, yeah i don't like it, but in order to get the latest updated version of all the warscrolls you need this app or battlescribe. There are warscrolls on gws homepage, but they are both incomplete and not updated. With one exception.
The generals handbook, yes to make things even more complicated the points and limits of a unit are not listed in their warscroll, instead you have to go here.
The high elf compendium. Rejoice a small boon to us old timers, here is a compendium with the basic highelf units warscrolls and at the end, their point costs and limits, and it gets regular updates, get it, use it, love it.
https://www.games-workshop.com/en-WW/WSC-HE-ENG
Now for the rest of the treck down to the gate, we have things i have not personally used yet, like magic from the malign sorcery book, the battle zones of age of sigmar that give you new artefacts and spells. Also the campaign books contain alot of things I havnt touched yet, these things may appear in a future update along with battalions.