Mortal Wound Output

[Vextol]

Simple question:

How many mortal wounds do you think a 2000 point army needs to be able to put out to be viable in most situations. 

My question came up when I battled a stardrake with staunch defender on an objective while being buffed by a lord castellant I couldn't get to.  Turns out (after some fancy math) any number of units with 1 rend and 2 damage (or 2 rend and one damage) cannot kill this model.   Statistically impossible (for real, I can prove it if pushed).  Turns out, you've got to get up to 3 damage at 3 rend to have really any hope in taking this model out, and you'd have to HIT it 14 times.  Not roll at it, actual hits through.  I know there are more and more "Ignore Saves" guys, but they are lilmited as of now.

That's not the point though...what my point is, I needed MORE mortal wounds to handle this situation and I didn't have enough.  So...what does everyone think? 

How much mortal wound output do you think you should come equipped with?

 

[KnightFire]

I think it depends a lot on the objective of your army is. Mortal wounds are more expensive (in terms of points per wound) than normal wounds, so armies that put out large numbers of mortal wounds are great at taking out elite armies, and suffer horribly when faced with hordes.

My tzeentch list puts out about 30 mortal wounds per turn, but that is all it does, it has no other mechanism to deal any real damage, and if someone kills my wizards I have no other strategies available to me. Conversely my ironjawz do very few mortal wounds (the only real source of mortal wounds being the mawcrusha charge) but I care very little if you kill all my characters with an alpha strike.

 

So I think the answer is very much "however much you want to be equipped with, given the pros and cons of spending points on ways to cause mortal wounds vs spending point on causing normal wounds".  

You should also bear in mind that there is an alternative to trying to battle the stardrake with staunch defender on it - just ignore it! - its a tank that's main purpose is to trick you into trying to fight it instead of the rest of the army, feed it some chaff and and try and keep it irrelevant to the game while you focus on objectives.

[PJetski]

You don't necessarily need mortal wounds, but you do need a plan to deal with "wall" units like Bastiladon, Stardrake, and Treelord Ancient. 

There are ways to win without killing these units.

[Vextol]

That would work if we weren't playing a kill wounds scenario, gather a treasure chest scenario or any number of other scenarios where he can park his a** on a spot and twinkle comet bits on me.

And you can't completely ignore a stardrake.  He can hit your heroes anywhere on the board and can potentially kill every 5 wound hero in your army by the end of turn two. 

 

[PJetski]

18 minutes ago, Vextol said:

That would work if we weren't playing a kill wounds scenario, gather a treasure chest scenario or any number of other scenarios where he can park his a** on a spot and twinkle comet bits on me.

And you can't completely ignore a stardrake.  He can hit your heroes anywhere on the board and can potentially kill every 5 wound hero in your army by the end of turn two. 

Don't you think that complaining about game balance in scenarios intended for open play is kinda silly?

[Carnelian]

57 minutes ago, Vextol said:

Simple question:

How many mortal wounds do you think a 2000 point army needs to be able to put out to be viable in most situations. 

My question came up when I battled a stardrake with staunch defender on an objective while being buffed by a lord castellant I couldn't get to.  Turns out (after some fancy math) any number of units with 1 rend and 2 damage (or 2 rend and one damage) cannot kill this model.   Statistically impossible (for real, I can prove it if pushed).  Turns out, you've got to get up to 3 damage at 3 rend to have really any hope in taking this model out, and you'd have to HIT it 14 times.  Not roll at it, actual hits through.  I know there are more and more "Ignore Saves" guys, but they are lilmited as of now.

That's not the point though...what my point is, I needed MORE mortal wounds to handle this situation and I didn't have enough.  So...what does everyone think? 

How much mortal wound output do you think you should come equipped with?

 

Enough mortal wounds to kill the Castellant 

[KnightFire]

30 minutes ago, Vextol said:

 

And you can't completely ignore a stardrake.  He can hit your heroes anywhere on the board and can potentially kill every 5 wound hero in your army by the end of turn two. 

 

It is what I have done every time I have ever faced a stardrake, and its worked more often than not. In fact the general advice in all situations where there is a massive tank on the field (stardrake, treelord ancient, allarielle, GuO) is just to ignore if if you cant nuke it in one turn.  That advice comes from and is practiced by most tournament players, so is tried and tested.

 

[Vextol]

12 minutes ago, PJetski said:

Don't you think that complaining about game balance in scenarios intended for open play is kinda silly?

Ah..my favorite kind of post.  Curious, in a tournament setting, what kind of games do they play?  Are they open or matched?  And do they slog it out or do they play scenarios? Because I always thought tournaments had points associated with them and I was pretty sure they were usually scenarios. 

Given that, one could extrapolate that a similar situation could occur where a very difficult to kill model was sitting on, or blocking, a point of contention.

And I wasn't complaining, I was just explaining the situation. 

Regardless, the question was how many mortal wounds do people usually come equipped with?  I know it's open ended, I was just curious if people had a number in their head, like, I want to be able to deal at least 3d3 if necessary or I need one unit (like bloodletters) that can pump out mortals on a particularly difficult opposing unit.

[Vextol]

5 minutes ago, KnightFire said:

It is what I have done every time I have ever faced a stardrake, and its worked more often than not. In fact the general advice in all situations where there is a massive tank on the field (stardrake, treelord ancient, allarielle, GuO) is just to ignore if if you cant nuke it in one turn.  That advice comes from and is practiced by most tournament players, so is tried and tested.

 

Fair enough I guess.  I just find it hard to ignore a unit that can move as fast as he does and kill heroes with such efficiency.  I know tournament winners don't include stardrake, so obviously he's not broken (and I will almost never use the term broken because I hat it), but always playing 'power armies' isn't really viable for a lot of players. 

[KnightFire]

2 minutes ago, Vextol said:

Fair enough I guess.  I just find it hard to ignore a unit that can move as fast as he does and kill heroes with such efficiency.  I know tournament winners don't include stardrake, so obviously he's not broken (and I will almost never use the term broken because I hat it), but always playing 'power armies' isn't really viable for a lot of players. 

Its definately hard to ignore it, its a great big dragon that keeps killing your stuff. In general though, if all it does is pick off some of your heroes, its not going to earn its points back or do its job, especially if you have dismantled the rest of your opponents army. If it presented no threat, the choice to ignore it would be an easy one, and no one would take them. The reason tank units work is because they offer just enough of a threat to make you unsure whether you should deal with them or not (and there will be some situations where you really need to). Knowing which decisions to make when is one of the hard bits of AoS, and what makes the best players better than the rest of us (their dice are just as un-cooperative). 

[RuneBrush]

I don't think there's a hard and fast rule on how much mortal wound output you should or shouldn't have because each army outputs them in different ways.  Ranged mortal wounds is nearly always going to trump melee mortal wounds but generally you're looking at single models doing the damage (which are then snipeable).  Melee mortal wounds has the benefit that you normally have them on a unit so takes more damage to put them down.

What army are you playing and how are you building your lists?  (points, wounds, models etc)

[Vextol]

1 minute ago, KnightFire said:

Its definately hard to ignore it, its a great big dragon that keeps killing your stuff. In general though, if all it does is pick off some of your heroes, its not going to earn its points back or do its job, especially if you have dismantled the rest of your opponents army. If it presented no threat, the choice to ignore it would be an easy one, and no one would take them. The reason tank units work is because they offer just enough of a threat to make you unsure whether you should deal with them or not (and there will be some situations where you really need to). Knowing which decisions to make when is one of the hard bits of AoS, and what makes the best players better than the rest of us (their dice are just as un-cooperative). 

Cool.  That does make sense.  I am a little embittered at the bubble of unkillability that staunch defender grants the stormcast gunlines.

I know mortal wounds are important but last night I could not make any headway against a stardrake surrounded by dracothians launching mortal wounds at me and claiming objectives with blocks of liberators. 

I had big blocks of guys of various sorts but they walled up and I wasn't able to break through with anything.  That's what lead me to ask how many mortal wounds people think you need to be ready to tackle any situation.

[Vextol]

1 minute ago, RuneBrush said:

I don't think there's a hard and fast rule on how much mortal wound output you should or shouldn't have because each army outputs them in different ways.  Ranged mortal wounds is nearly always going to trump melee mortal wounds but generally you're looking at single models doing the damage (which are then snipeable).  Melee mortal wounds has the benefit that you normally have them on a unit so takes more damage to put them down.

What army are you playing and how are you building your lists?  (points, wounds, models etc)

2000 points.  I play everything pretty much but last night I was playing nurgle.  I didn't realize they had removed the mortal on 6s on blot flies when I made my list and the pusgoyl guys can't kill much of anything in that list.  Plague bearers held their own but couldn't do any damage.  The only person I had that could really do anything was an exaulted greater demon and had my opponent focused on him (instead of the blot flies-he had bad memories of them) he would have physically removed my ability to kill, really anything.

[KnightFire]

7 minutes ago, Vextol said:

2000 points.  I play everything pretty much but last night I was playing nurgle.  I didn't realize they had removed the mortal on 6s on blot flies when I made my list and the pusgoyl guys can't kill much of anything in that list.  Plague bearers held their own but couldn't do any damage.  The only person I had that could really do anything was an exaulted greater demon and had my opponent focused on him (instead of the blot flies-he had bad memories of them) he would have physically removed my ability to kill, really anything.

Nurgle vs Stormcast (with liberators and a stardrake) is an interesting match up, two tank armies against each other so its very much going to come down to objectives, as once an army has one its going to be hard to shift it. Nurgle has a lot of speed since the new book, so I would start by formulating a plan to try and get you onto the objectives early. There are also some nice nurgle combos with spells and abilities that let you dish out quite a few mortal wounds, if you feel that is what you need.

If its his liberators holding the objectives and his castellant is on the stardrake, your PBs should be able to outgrind his liberators, so get the PBs onto the objectives and make him work to take them off. If he puts his mortal wounds onto the PBs (who are pretty resilient to mortal wounds) that leaves the rest of your army free to do its thing, and if he focusses on the rest of your army, your PBs are going to win you the game.

[generalchaos34]

After encountering the unkillable treelord I certainly feel you! I was playing a very low output mortal wound  1k SCE list at the time, and my only mortals would have come from Retributors, who would have, in turn, been flattened by said treelord in close combat.  I lost pretty hard because of that and Kurnoth hunters splatting all my heroes. 

On a related note, the obvious combo with Star Drakes is with Lord Castellants, but how well do they pair with Relictors and Jade Wizards?  Im wondering if the utility of Blessed Weapons or Lightning Chariot can overcome the tankyness of the Jade Wizards lifesurge spell?  

[Vextol]

Healers blow....

Obviously I'm just being coy, but they always drop the ball when you need them or you get double turned when it's most important.  The power of castellant comes from the instant healing EVERY turn.  More damage you try to put on stardrake, the more he heals.  Jade wizard doesn't stack up the same way.

 

[Burf]

13 hours ago, Vextol said:

That would work if we weren't playing a kill wounds scenario, gather a treasure chest scenario or any number of other scenarios where he can park his a** on a spot and twinkle comet bits on me.

And you can't completely ignore a stardrake.  He can hit your heroes anywhere on the board and can potentially kill every 5 wound hero in your army by the end of turn two. 

 

You can't COMPLETELY ignore it, but you can pin it down for the whole game. Take any model with 6+ wounds and a 2+ save (or equivalent damage mitigation) and just pin it down the whole game. Stardrakes suck at killing tough single models.

[Burf]

11 hours ago, Vextol said:

Healers blow....

Obviously I'm just being coy, but they always drop the ball when you need them or you get double turned when it's most important.  The power of castellant comes from the instant healing EVERY turn.  More damage you try to put on stardrake, the more he heals.  Jade wizard doesn't stack up the same way.

 

He doesn't get the healing unless he rolls a 7. So if he has StchDef and the Castellant buff a -1 rend can only be healed on 6s and -2s can't be healed. He also can't heal until AFTER he takes damage the first time, since he has to apply healing first then the damage.

[DantePQ]

Mortal Wounds aren't that important as there are other ways to do a lot of damage :

- a lot of attacks 

- high rend attacks 

Sure some targets will be easier to kill with mortal wounds but it's not like you need them - KO armies don't have many mortal wounds and they can wreck both Sylvaneth and Changehost easily. 

[Sigwarus]

In a tournament list you need ways to make mortal wounds or high rend attacks otherwise you can't win against some armies. As for the Stardrake or things like Nagash the biggest mistake you can make is to waste time and effort to kill them. Pick of easier targets first and feed them your weaker units. After the castellant is gone and the liberators are diminished you can start hitting the dragon. 

[Charles]

My Khorne Blood Bound  puts out D3 Mortal Wounds to itself every turn, by being unworthy!

My Slaughterpriest has never successfully prayed (4 games in).

 

[Vextol]

12 hours ago, Burf said:

He doesn't get the healing unless he rolls a 7. So if he has StchDef and the Castellant buff a -1 rend can only be healed on 6s and -2s can't be healed. He also can't heal until AFTER he takes damage the first time, since he has to apply healing first then the damage.

True but bulk -2 rend is hard to come by and at -1 he gets two shots at those 6s.   Your pretty unlikely to do enough damage (essentially impossible) to kill him outright with -1 rend.  So any damage you DO manage to deal will be healed next time you attack.

I think avoiding as long as possible is the best solution. 

[Lucio]

On 31/01/2018 at 3:54 PM, Carnelian said:

Enough mortal wounds to kill the Castellant 

A slightly glib way of putting it, but yes any combo like this, always take out the weakest member first.

[Richelieu]

13 hours ago, Burf said:

You can't COMPLETELY ignore it, but you can pin it down for the whole game. Take any model with 6+ wounds and a 2+ save (or equivalent damage mitigation) and just pin it down the whole game. Stardrakes suck at killing tough single models.

Nor should you be able to completely ignore it.  Your opponent did spend over 1/4 of their points on it after all.  But by ignoring it, or pinning it down you force them to work for every point of that investment, rather than handing it to them on a platter by sinking attacks into the Stardrake that could've been spent removing things that are actually dangerous.