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Old Impatient High Elf player looking for beginner advice!


Furiyen

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Hi All,

Suffering from some 8th ED 40k overload at the moment, so looking to startup some AoS fun.

I was waiting until the 'Aelves' finally got a proper battletome before jumping into AoS, as High Elves were my preferred army back in the day. Still, I know that they may be as much as 6 months away still, and the longer I put it off thr longer I'll miss out on some good ol' Fantasy fun.

So, I just wanted some guidance on putting some kind of 'old school' High Elf army together that would fit the rulings.

Please bear in mind I'm sat in a caravan on holiday right now, and have never read any of the Grand Alliance books or the Generals handbook so I have *no* idea how any of the faction stuff works. I have read the core rules online, read through the High Elf compendium on GW site and played around with the Warcroll builder. I'm not too clear on if the following is even legal, or competitive, but it seems like a good starting point considering the Spire of Dawn boxset floating around right now.

DrakeSeer - 340pts
20x Spireguard - 240pts
10x Swordmasters - 200pts
10x Swordmasters - 200pts

Alith Anar (General) - 120pts
10x Shadow Warriors - 200pts
10x Shadow Warriors - 200pts

5x Reavers - 160pts
5x Reavers - 160pts
5x Reavers - 160pts

= 2000pts

I figure that's plenty of shooting to whittle away the enemy before grinding what's left on my core of Spireguard / Swordmasters and the Shadow Warriors / Reavers harry from the flanks. DrakeSeer gives me some fun magic in Flames of the Pheonix as well as giving me something to distract the enemy with (its a Dragon after all...).

It should also be very convenient to put together with two Spire of Dawn boxsets, a High Elf Dragon and a couple of boxes of Shadow Warriors, with a few ebay extras to fill the missing models.

Please, critique away, give me some advice on the army and suggest what actual books I will need to play as I'm about a million miles away from the nearest GW shop right now!

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 Well, since you are an elf player the Spire of Dawn should give you a lot of hope. That is one of the first expansion of an old Warhammer faction that brought back old models and they are good. I would recommend trying to field the battalion from the box set. It is called Guardians of the Dawnspire. Take a look in the Age of Sigmar app under Switfthawk Agents. It lets you move or shoot for free once a turn. This is great for your hero to cap or to get the Reavers free shots. It also let's you give the swordsman and archmage Swifthawk keywords.

In the next two weeks, this will matter because you will be able to take your allies in your army, like the drakseer, and still use Spireguard and swordsman as battleline. Then you can get the 15 Reavers into a single unit who can shoot their 60 shots every hero phase and shooting.

I have used this battalion to back up my Freeguild and it has been great. It adds speed and shooting to my army. 

Hope that helps!

Edit: The shadow warriors are also battleline if units and will do well with the new ally rules. You should be able to get this whole army street legal and ready to go. 

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59 minutes ago, Furiyen said:

I figure that's plenty of shooting to whittle away the enemy before grinding what's left on my core of Spireguard / Swordmasters and the Shadow Warriors / Reavers harry from the flanks. DrakeSeer gives me some fun magic in Flames of the Pheonix as well as giving me something to distract the enemy with (its a Dragon after all...).

I have a small high aelf army.  Sadly the spire guard are not very good.  

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So, despite the Spireguard adding yet more shots to the base strategy of the army, they're not really that great a performer?

If I wanted to keep it strictly 'High Elf' in theme, what should I replace them with? Would 30x spearmen be better?

I'd like to have something in my battle line that is numerous enough to warrant attention away from the real danger in my army - all the shooting!

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Right now is not necessarily the best time to be figuring out an army, as things will change a bit over a week from now. For the most part, your army should be fine (and is likely to come down in points more than anything).

 

That being said, the Spire of Dawn set is most likely a good start to a High Aelf army at the moment. They seem to be the faction that has the most options out of all the High Aelven ones, as you've got infantry (Spire Guard, Shadow Warriors), Cavalry (Reavers), and then the odd stuff (Chariots, Skycutters). They're a very shooting heavy faction though (everyone has a bow!).

The Swordmasters hence, are a good addition as they'll give you some fighting infantry to the force. If you use the Guardians of the Dawnspire Battalion, they'll even count as Swifthawk Agents so you can use any command abilities/bonuses from that force on them as well (Mainly the one from the Skywardens banner).

 

So if you wanted to kickstart right now, grab a Spire of Dawn set and start with that. In a weeks time, you'll have a better idea of what things will look like, and you'll be able to tune the rest of your purchases to fit. But overall, what you've got there looks like a pretty fun and balanced list, but it certainly doesn't really have any powerful tricks to use (Other than blasting people with a Dragon).

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17 hours ago, Furiyen said:

So, despite the Spireguard adding yet more shots to the base strategy of the army, they're not really that great a performer?

If I wanted to keep it strictly 'High Elf' in theme, what should I replace them with? Would 30x spearmen be better?

I'd like to have something in my battle line that is numerous enough to warrant attention away from the real danger in my army - all the shooting!

I love the look of the spireguard (except the  horn which I replaced with a less nautical one) but you really need 20 of them I think since then they get the re-roll hit roll of 1 bonus.   Personally I think the Glade Guard work better than the spireguard for archers since they get the one time use of -3 rend.  You could paint the Glade Guard to look like high elves.

I love the swordmasters, with a mystic shield they can dish out damage and last awhile.  

For my small high elf army I added a dragon/drakeseer, another unit of reavers, and a loremaster.  This gets me to about 1500 points which is what we usually play at.   The Dragon,  High Warden provide a quick punch and can be buffed by the LoreMaster/Archmage/Drakeseer.  The Reavers tend to trail behind and focus fire on things attacking one of the two big guys, while the spireguard and swordmasters hold objectives, etc.

The narrative I created is that the Collegiate arcane sent out the three wizards to relocate magical artifacts lost in the time of chaos, with their body guards.

 

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While Spireguard aren't great, I've found for their points they are adequate. Shadow Warriors on the other hand, I find are extremely expensive for what they actually bring to the table. I would personally cut them, or at least trim back to a single unit and give yourself 200 more points to work with. 

 

Edit: I realized the Shadow Warriors may be in there to take advantage of Alith Anar's synergy - when the warscroll was updated for the app that synergy was removed. Now to my knowledge it's still legal to run an older warscroll, but I would probably make your opponents aware of that fact (if anyone would even be familiar with it). 

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13 hours ago, Freejack02 said:

While Spireguard aren't great, I've found for their points they are adequate. Shadow Warriors on the other hand, I find are extremely expensive for what they actually bring to the table. I would personally cut them, or at least trim back to a single unit and give yourself 200 more points to work with. 

 

Edit: I realized the Shadow Warriors may be in there to take advantage of Alith Anar's synergy - when the warscroll was updated for the app that synergy was removed. Now to my knowledge it's still legal to run an older warscroll, but I would probably make your opponents aware of that fact (if anyone would even be familiar with it). 

 

Ohh, that puts a big spin on things. I was thinking that with Alith, a 2 Shots per turn/2 Attacks per model unit would come in handy for volume of dice, and I really, really love the models. 

I shall have a rethink about, as I would actually prefer to move with the times and use updated Warscrolls and not depend on 'older' rules. Is the App considered the best source for up to date Warscrolls? Is there a PDF/printed version of the updated Warscoll elsewhere with the synergy removed?

I guess getting the Grand Alliance: Order book and the GHB2017 will answer these questions as well?

Also - a big thank you to everyone that's commented back, all the advice so far has been stonking and much appreciated :)

 

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On 19/08/2017 at 8:38 PM, Furiyen said:

 

Ohh, that puts a big spin on things. I was thinking that with Alith, a 2 Shots per turn/2 Attacks per model unit would come in handy for volume of dice, and I really, really love the models. 

I shall have a rethink about, as I would actually prefer to move with the times and use updated Warscrolls and not depend on 'older' rules. Is the App considered the best source for up to date Warscrolls? Is there a PDF/printed version of the updated Warscoll elsewhere with the synergy removed?

I guess getting the Grand Alliance: Order book and the GHB2017 will answer these questions as well?

Also - a big thank you to everyone that's commented back, all the advice so far has been stonking and much appreciated :)

 

Hi mate,

You can also check out the Warscrolls on the App or the Website. The website I believe definitely has the most up to date scrolls, while the App 99% of the time does and I basically treat it as a source of truth (There are only a couple of scrolls that aren't, but yeah, 99%).

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