Re: Tethlis' Army Blog: vs Brets, updated 5/21
Posted: Sun Jun 02, 2013 4:06 am
Just a quick update, played another half dozen games or so that I haven't done full reports for. So far, the shooting has continued to please.
Thanks for the response - sounds sensible - I might have to switch over to shadows and see how it works. I only get 1 game/week so I'm way behind the curve on actually experiencing the new book play, and I want to stick with my loremaster to start with for the shenannigens. I also want to try High Lv4 before I switch over to BRB lores, so it'll be a while before I catch up, but good to know old faithful (shadows) still works.Tethlis wrote:Ferny wrote:Oops, yes - withering. I always get those two muddled .
Yes, fair points RE: shadow, it is an excellent lore. Some more questions, albeit a bit hypothetical.
I can see why and how shadow works. I don't think it's an optimal use of the book but who cares, it's shadow. But Magic has such a big impact on the game lore choice can change the whole dynamic of the army. You seem comfortable with shadow, but if you were forced to ditch it, do you think your army would work as well (or indeed, similarly) with a different lore, or with the loremaster? I know you experimented with him early on - is shadow too much of a draw? Or did you just miss the Lv4 dispel too much in your area?
I'm particularly thinking about big gribblies and regen here - would your shooting and bolt throwers still pack a hard enough punch without shadow? This seems to be a big part of your game.
I'm still trying to work out how you get those things to work for you. I know they're meant to control board space, threaten DPs and MC etc...but I really don't see it happening, except in your reports it does. Even with two, they hit half the time and wound half the time doing just D3 wounds (pre ward/regen if sisters didn't do their thing) - it just seems to slow and, crucially, unreliable.
I think the list can remain pretty much as is, even with a different Lore. Using a Loremaster for example, I would lose out on Withering but gain advantages in other areas. For example, a big Spirit Leech, Shem's Burning Gaze or Searing Doom can achieve similar destructive results at range that I currently get from Withering. I'll do fewer wounds via shooting, but more wounds via Magic, helping to balance things out.
The major problem picking another lore though is that Shadow has the dual role of making Phoenix Guard hit hard, and making arrows dangerous. Those are pretty fundamental staples of this list. A Loremaster can make Phoenix Guard a bit more survivable with various hexes, and Wildform can make them hit a bit harder, but not in the same way, and not with the same redundancy, that Withering / Mindrazor can. Shadow takes everything in the list and generally makes it more potent, while still being able to debuff damage and possessing a good self-contained direct damage spell that can pull a Scroll early on. Other lores don't really do that for the units I'm suing. I think the Loremaster's spell variety could fill these gaps partially, but I don't think he does it better, and ultimately you end up paying more for a Loremaster than you do for a Level 4, for reduced magic effectiveness. +2 versus +4 is major, both for casting and dispel.
That being said, I often can't rely on Withering to make my shooting work. An opponent will often Dispel it, or perhaps I won't generate it. When that happens, the focus becomes on Generalship to try and disrupt enemy threats so that I can focus-fire my shooting on one monster at a time, before they reach combat. The nice thing is that, on average dice, 10 Maiden Guard and 2 short-range RBTs kill a Chimera without needing Withering at all. If I roll badly, I have the Reaver Bow and miscellaneous Strength 3 arrows to help. Magic just lets me annihilate one using even fewer shots, so I can get a head-start on grinding down a different threat sooner.
That being said, building a strong shooting phase starts before Turn 1. Sometimes this comes from out-deploying the enemy, forcing him to spend an extra turn maneuvering his monsters, during which I can shoot and kill one per turn. Sometimes I can intimidate a threat like a Daemon Prince or Terrorgheist, forcing my opponent to hide one or more monsters so that I can create breathing room for my troops and get enough of a lead in VP that I can afford to lose something if my shooting doesn't kill it. Lastly, if something does live and makes it into combat, it helps to have good positioning so that your squishy troops can't be reached easily, and durable/Stubborn combat threats that don't roll over and die because they eat one Chimera charge. This is also where Shadow + Iceshard Blizzard are great. If I throw a moderate amount of dice at Withering, and it's dispelled, then I can use the rest of my magic phase to buff up my troops and make them scary if my opponent decides to commit to combat. Alternately, if it's a low-Initiative monster, perhaps Pit of Shades will get the job done and I can follow up with that. Sometimes you can even get creative, using things like Panic. Just today, in a game I won't write up as a report, I knew I probably couldn't kill a Chimera with shooting that had LoS to it, but I was able to kill a nearby unit of Hounds. My opponent stopped Withering, stopped Pit, but was forced to let through Iceshard, making that Chimera a lousy Leadership 4 because his general was flying around somewhere else. I killed the hounds, the Chimera panicked, easy money. It's not just about picking a target and shooting it with lucky dice, sometimes improvisation is important to keep those big nasties away from you. You have to deploy well, not advance forward more than necessary, give yourself space so that the opponent has to cross open areas of the table to reach you, and kill / redirect those warmachine hunters so your bolt throwers have as many turns as possible to try and hit the rolls they need.
Agree here. Faced a lot of shooting in my last game and simply hid my Glade Riders. When the enemy light troops advanced the Riders came out and countered them.Tethlis wrote: I didn't feel like there was a lot of focus with how those Reavers were used, and there's no reason they should die until they're ready to be committed to block an enemy charge. With 18 inches of Movement, it's easy to safely hide them behind your own lines until they're necessary.
Hey, that's great. Another clubmate grew up in Redding, and we've stayed there on our way up to gaming events in Seattle on a couple of occasions. I don't know the dates for the next Bay Area Open or QCR, but any chance to meet other gamers and save a buck isn't a bad thing.Malossar Dragonborne wrote:Not to be creepy but if you're interested in traveling to some Bay Area Tournaments we could always spilt a hotel room! I live 3 and a half hours north of the bay in Redding, CA so when we manage to drive down I'm almost always looking to spilt the bill!
I've just switched from 9 Silver Helms with st and mus to 2x5 no command. It's almost a straight swap points wise but I think it'll give me more flexibility. I think they can perform their roles just as effectively as a single, larger unit, but offer much more flexibility in terms of targeting, drops, flank-charges, resiliance to searing doom. Is that something you've tried/would consider? I've not been that impressed with them (9-man unit) but as you say they have freed up the rest of the list to perform.Tethlis wrote: @Ferny
The Silver Helms don't do a lot, to be perfectly honest, but they're great at letting everything else in the list do something. As fragile as they are, and as bleh as Strength 5 Attacks are, they're still very mobile and hit reasonably hard. They can clear away all but the heaviest chariots, kill warmachines, flank units, and even bait out charges in the opening turns. They're also good for drawing spells and warmachine fire, killing wounded monsters, absorbing charges from crap that doesn't have a lot of static Combat Resolution, and chasing down late-game Victory Points. The important thing is to manage your expectations and help identify a different role for them every game, depending on who you're fighting against. Unlike Phoenix Guard, who will always want to be wading into combat with something nasty, or Sisters, who want to be shooting at Regen stuff or Ethereals, the gameplan for Silver Helms changes a lot. Their mobility and durability is a useful flexible asset though.
Forget the lore attribute - most bound items don't have anything so useful so just treat it for what it is - mobile chaff clearance. As a bonus it gives you a pip of ward. As it happens I have been running this in my pheonix guard as default because it is quite a short range spell so I need it in a unit which is moving forwards and this makes most sense to take advantage of the attribute for a turn or two (despite what I just said). I made the mistake of lumping both my casters in the BotWD lions once, which got locked in combat and I lost access to all my magic missiles so its nice to have the backup mage in a different unit just in case. I also intend to jump him out of the unit in advance of any charges if possible...but if he does get stuck (and killed) in combat he is partially expendable; if he's burnt his scroll, burnt some chaff, and maybe cast a spell or two then he's done a lot of his job already. I don't know where you'd get the points from, but c'mon, it's cheap as chips if you wanna give it a go. I think it would support your shooting phase really well. Only down side is that shadow is PD heavy, but again, it's only 1 dice and it is enough of a threat that it could draw a DD.For the Level 1, the bound Ring is tempting, but the Lore attribute largely goes to waste. If I had it, I feel I'd be tempted to try and run him in the Phoenix Guard or something equally crazy to juice up the Ward Save, and I just know I'd regret it . Having a bit more ranged punch in the magic phase wouldn't hurt though.
Cool - keep us posted on how this pans out for you. It's fun seeing armies like this one evolveDragon Armor and Enchanted Shield would be great, but it comes down (in part) to a points thing on the one hand and a killing power thing on the other hand. My hope with this setup is that the stand-and-shoot with Reaver Bow, followed by the three Strength 5, could critically hurt or kill anything that made it to the backline. Since I regularly see Pegasus Knights, Chimeras and some of those other backline threats, having Strength 5 versus Strength 4 makes a big difference. Overall, I think your suggestion is a really good one that I will playtest in the near future.
Tethlis wrote:Hey, that's great. Another clubmate grew up in Redding, and we've stayed there on our way up to gaming events in Seattle on a couple of occasions. I don't know the dates for the next Bay Area Open or QCR, but any chance to meet other gamers and save a buck isn't a bad thing.Malossar Dragonborne wrote:Not to be creepy but if you're interested in traveling to some Bay Area Tournaments we could always spilt a hotel room! I live 3 and a half hours north of the bay in Redding, CA so when we manage to drive down I'm almost always looking to spilt the bill!
Good questions. I've actually been contemplating them a bit in the last couple of days, when the idea came up in your RBT thread. I think the real appeal of Phoenix Guard over White Lions is that the Phoenix Guard don't really need to be baby sat, and can take on so much without needing help. The ability to eat Impact Hits, breath weapons, Thunderstomps (natural enemies of White Lions) and still keep going is great insurance. If I were to go with only one block though, I think it would be the Lions for BotWD and hitting power. If you run a Helm Bus, and the Helm Bus gets bogged down, then having something like Lions that can flatten enemy Monstrous Cav, regular Cav and Monsters pretty quickly could be useful for you. I think Phoenix Guard could do just fine on their own, but I would worry that a list focused around Helms/PG would lack enough high Strength attacks to handle all the threats that the game is leaning towards these days.Ptolemy wrote:- Mal/Tethlis - If you guys ever decide to give the NE gaming scene a shout let me know. Quite a few awesome tournaments here with large turnouts. Expect comp though.
@ tethlis- awesome reports. Ive been lurking the thread. Question. If you had to drop the WLs or PG, which would it be? Also, if you were running PG as your lone infantry block ( say with a helm bus) would you go World Dragon or Razor Standard? I can see arguments for both.
-Jay
Nothing actually.teep wrote:Thanks for this, very insightful - I like that the new DE seem strong, though not unbalanced, and quite fun to play!
I know, it's still early stages, but how would you asses the strength of this book and how do you think our cousins new toolkit will affect your HE list design/play style?
This right here. Without 3-4x RBT on the DE side, with Shades and Dark Riders with RXB, you might as well just hand them an easy win. With no Regen on either monster, both die before they get to swing vs. High Elves. Not so the case with the Frost Phoenix who can ride shotgun with our cav buses, and like our cavalry, we out-range and out-fight theirs without any issues.I've actually been giving more thought to the Cav Bus playstyle myself, because I think its speed, hitting power and general resilience is going to be a pretty strong challenge for Dark Elves. I still need to playtest my own HE list versus DE, and get in more games with the DE themselves, but so far I've been pleased with the power level of their book (about middling, comparable to HE in many ways but different.)
I haven't seen him for a while. I seem to remember him saying him and his wife were expecting their first child a while back...Tethlis wrote:If he finds his way back to the boards, you should chat up Ptolemy on his thoughts