Competitive Death - Where do we sit?

[deynon]

6 hours ago, AverageBoss said:

High end tournaments are the best way to measure the average strength of an army over time. They attract the best players who know their and their opponents armies inside and out. Death as a whole has struggled to break top 20 at major events since GHB2017 dropped, and only did really well with TKs and Mourngul lists before that.

FEC healing is not even anywhere close to what LoN can do. The Courtiers that can do so, roll 6 dice. 2+ heals ghouls and ghouls only. The bigger courtiers can heal specific special units on a 5+. None of those courtiers bring as much to the table as our Necromancers or Vampires (not anywhere close). And a Necromancer is capable of as much healing as a courtier (if he targets two units). A Vampire can heal 9 wounds on units. Gravesites just exist, and there is nothing your opponent can do to stop their healing.

Your opponent can race you to all 4 gravesites as fast as he can and camp them the whole game to prevent summoning. But then he is probably wasting more resources babysitting than you are holding in reserve.

And Hexwraiths did not gain "some". They gained quite a few things. Summonable means they can be healed and resurrected. They can also be targeted by things that target summonable units, such as Vanhels dance. They gained Frightful Touch in melee. Their ride over attack increased from a 6+ to a 5+.

High end tournaments, best players? Like they are non playing usually in other places? I would have some doubts about that "best players" anyway. 

If best players means knowing own and opponent armies...it's not only about going on tournaments eh.

Fec Healing is also about Horrors and crypt flyers and heal much better than the black knights and hex wraiths, and also the DZ adn TG do it by themselves.

Also the "standard" for the ghouls or the out healing of the units exists and the opponent can't do anything to prevent them.

He doesnt' need to block 4 gravesistes,  and it only needs a model to block one of them and if you wantt to do that super unit summoning it can block everything with a single unit though.

It's maybe the only unit that gained really something. But it's not like it's enogugh compared on what other units lost.

 

I simply am not hot blooded thinking about this book. Maybe I had too big expectations frm thins battleotme.

What I can do with it now I was able to do also before. Now I have anyway to be more strict in doing things. Sincerly this battleotme seems named characters oriented and it's something that I never liked.

Anyway more players will play Death better will be, maybe we will receive some adding (real one maybe with miniatures).

[Gaz Taylor]

35 minutes ago, deynon said:

What I can do with it now I was able to do also before.

Just wondering what you could do before? I'm curious as the new Battletome sounds amazing and there seems to be plenty of options in there for Death Players wherever you are competitive or not. GW seem to have done a great job by tweaking the army that makes them feel like how they used to play in the old editions and introduced lots of flexibility into it. What sort of list did you used to run?

 

[deynon]

4 minutes ago, Gaz Taylor said:

Just wondering what you could do before? I'm curious as the new Battletome sounds amazing and there seems to be plenty of options in there for Death Players wherever you are competitive or not. GW seem to have done a great job by tweaking the army that makes them feel like how they used to play in the old editions and introduced lots of flexibility into it. What sort of list did you used to run?

 

Ambushing, stalling  assaulting, controlling.  all things I was able to do previously anyway.

I simply find that every option is said I was yet ablet to do. Not so amazing in that way. And warscroll battalions are even worse than before .

I used to play mass with elite units to assault and reserve points to summon unit to adapt to the enemies able to conquer objectives or add impact or other things.. 

Nothing special. 

The only really new thing I find in this battletome is the spells, but they are not so reliable to depend on, except if you play LoS and with Arkahan... toh, or Nagash, but it means have to use named characters and I don't value so high to need to use named characters to do something.

[smucreo]

You are right, you could heal before with your skeletons, d6 each turn. Now you can "only" heal d3 for each gravesite they are close to, d3 for every hero and you have ways to reroll the heal roll. Most games I've played most of my summonable units heal 3d3 with rerolls minimum each turn. You tell me what's better. 

You could "ambush" before by summoning, which btw wasn't even guaranteed and depended on spells that: 1) could be dispelled 2) usually had a high casting value requirement unless you were summoning things like skellies, which also came in units of ten. Now you have gravesites, you have legion of night ambushes, and both of those 1) can't be dispelled and 2) bring units at max capacity if you so desire. Oh and the best thing? With legion of night ambushes you don't even have to be close with your hero which gives you less reliance on them for your army to function and allows you to put units truly were you want to.

Stalling comes back to my first point of the massive ammounts of healing available.

I find your critique of magic funny. No spell lores are worse than 2 spell lores, even if the spells happened to be ****** (which they are not, overwhelming dread, amethystine pinions, amarathyne orb, fading vigour and even soul harvest on the right lists are all very powerful) and unreliable (although some have high costs they generally go through 54% of the time, and that is not counting the buffs to cast you can get from a corpse cart, or a mortis engine, or the legions of sacrament allegiance, or some of the artifacts you can put on your heroes). 

If you want to play the old Death the allegiance is still there. Enjoy having only a 6++ save while the rest of the book gives you that AND so much more. I do think you had your expectations set sky high, and that you need to take a more realistic approach to army balance in this game. We don't need a new Disciples of Tzeentch. We need balance and this is a very good step in that direction. With this book we now have variety that is almost unprecedented in AoS while not giving up cool bonuses from allegiances like we used to. This is GA:Death 2.0.

[deynon]

48 minutes ago, smucreo said:

You are right, you could heal before with your skeletons, d6 each turn. Now you can "only" heal d3 for each gravesite they are close to, d3 for every hero and you have ways to reroll the heal roll. Most games I've played most of my summonable units heal 3d3 with rerolls minimum each turn. You tell me what's better. 

You could "ambush" before by summoning, which btw wasn't even guaranteed and depended on spells that: 1) could be dispelled 2) usually had a high casting value requirement unless you were summoning things like skellies, which also came in units of ten. Now you have gravesites, you have legion of night ambushes, and both of those 1) can't be dispelled and 2) bring units at max capacity if you so desire. Oh and the best thing? With legion of night ambushes you don't even have to be close with your hero which gives you less reliance on them for your army to function and allows you to put units truly were you want to.

Stalling comes back to my first point of the massive ammounts of healing available.

I find your critique of magic funny. No spell lores are worse than 2 spell lores, even if the spells happened to be ****** (which they are not, overwhelming dread, amethystine pinions, amarathyne orb, fading vigour and even soul harvest on the right lists are all very powerful) and unreliable (although some have high costs they generally go through 54% of the time, and that is not counting the buffs to cast you can get from a corpse cart, or a mortis engine, or the legions of sacrament allegiance, or some of the artifacts you can put on your heroes). 

If you want to play the old Death the allegiance is still there. Enjoy having only a 6++ save while the rest of the book gives you that AND so much more. I do think you had your expectations set sky high, and that you need to take a more realistic approach to army balance in this game. We don't need a new Disciples of Tzeentch. We need balance and this is a very good step in that direction. With this book we now have variety that is almost unprecedented in AoS while not giving up cool bonuses from allegiances like we used to. This is GA:Death 2.0.

You make a mittake. Before 1 d6, now you need 2 d3 to do the same, You have to be close to the gravesites or to  heroes to do it. And gravesites are appliavble to 1 single unit. Not every unit around.

So it's better before. The ones that gain something are the Grave guards. But blakc knights and Hex require a 3+ to come back and spirit hosts a 5+ so not so sure thing.

Summoning coul be done from abilities and from artifact and the opponent was not able to dispel them.

The max dimension? If you have the space and a hero around, again you depend on your heroes jumping around to support your basic units. Abilities let you make enter models without being around...FEC taught you something or not?

You gain the Blood Knights as not before summonable units or some hero ok...not so great if you think that you risk not to charge anyway. And you don't have flexibility in choosing wwhat make enter.

 

Previously you had also the WK with the standard...guess what was more reliable as stalling...Now healing?  You have to be close. The massive units has to be related to your heroes and gravesites, if you go away from them you lose your healing and anyway you need 2 of them to put on the same amount of healing.... not so great as you try to say.

And gravesites are limited to one use to each turn. You can use on a single unit, you forget always about sch important detail.

 

You seem to forget that you can use only 1 spell witht the same name each magic turn.  You chose them beforehand ok, but you have to have those spells in the right position. TO be applied. To have such a buffs you need two units to pump them up, so I could tell you that before hand you had also the Morghasts to do such a thing... and you need to be able to cast them and the opponent not to dispel them. How suddenly to cast these spell is easy and instead casting summoning previously with the same bonuses so difficult?

You are trying to twisting the magic usage. And you are still depending on everything about the LoS, if you use the arefact of the legion of Night you keep the model wehere it is and you don't have the LoS bonus to cast.

 

GA:D has been really worsen. The unholy sowrd has changed in worse. Losing the Wight King with standard the protection sah decreased dramatically. You can't even no more summon TG or DZ. And the healing too. GA:D is really much lower than before.

 

I didn't need a new Disciple of Tzeench battletome. I needed something hopingly addind some new unit. And adding options, not clearing them.

The best part of the rules are about to make units come back to fight again and we have to pay points to do such a thing.

We lost impact losing the Blood knights ability to return.

I find this maximum a 1.5 GA:D surely not a 2.0.

 

Variety unprecedented? They are the same as before. Adding only magicmaybe and deleting other things. If you think now is variety before you had too, simply too dull to see them maybe from your side. 

[alexmcgee123]

On 25/02/2018 at 11:27 PM, Krieger said:

Well in a 14 person tournament where one Death player usually does well we just had Death take 1st, 2nd and 3rd.  Even Tzeentch never pulled this off.

I honestly think that giving Death +3 to cast and +3 to unbind for Arkhan and Nagash is VERY VERY BAD for the competitive scene.

This creates way to many games where Death is almost guaranteed to get every buff or debuff off while simultaneously removing the possibility of your opponent getting off a single spell.

Because of limited spell range and Arkhan/Nagash being able to fly while still being extremely durable, being outside of unbind range is rarley an option.

KO can still shoot either off in 1 turn!

[smucreo]

1 d6 = roll of 1-6. Average 3'5. 2 d3 = roll of 2-6. Average 4. 2d3 is better. I'm not forgetting anything I assure you. Gravesites may only be able to heal one unit, but run a single big unit of 40 skellies and 2 of direwolves and there won't be much need for gravesites to target multiple units unless the opponent is focusing your battleline down, which is a good thing anyways since it takes pressure away from your elites.

Wight king banner? I say Ossific Diadem. And you can put it in way better units than Wight Kings too. Where's the problem? 

Summoning? I managed to summon a unit of skellies upfront each single game I've played since the book came out. Again, as with healing, you need to be smart with gravesite placement. And the ambush thing? Okay, let the opponent split up to try and block my gravesites + my ambushers, good luck doing that and also being able to protect themselves from the threats infront of them.

Magic? They are not always reliable, but again having the basic magic our heroes had + the new lores is still better than having nothing. There's no way you can argue that. Even if you still can only cast one spell per turn. 

Oh and what about the battalions? We have the old battalions plus new ones. 

There is so much more. Morghast Harbingers got a buff with the ability to carry Halberds, Archai are still viable in a First Cohort list, as is Nagash, Necros now can do more than just VanHels skellies! I could literally go on. I've built tons of lists already for tons of different occasions and sceneries. Try looking at it positively, and maybe you can do it too. The only thing I'm not arguing is the Blood Knight nerf (which admittedly was a nerf), but even then you can still run them in a Legion of Blood list. 

PS: I think I now understand how @Killax felt a couple of weeks ago when arguing with people about the competitiveness of LoN haha

[Sception]

Healing really is bdtter than before for everything except blood knights (which, yeah, got nerfed hard), black knights (which more than made up the difference offensively, though I'm still skeptical of as a unit), and tomb king chariots and necroknights, which still have their old healing, but cannot be accessed in legion lists.

I was skeptical, to put it lightly, of this system when it was first leaked too, but gravesites really do make up the difference.  Opponents in general will concentrate offense, so several d3 to one unit, with a few d3 to scatter around remaining units is absolutely better than before.

Neither helps against enemies with enough offensive power to wipe entire units off the board at a time, but at least for melee opponents we have strong debuffs, and against ranged opponents there's LoN outflanking, which is just better than old summoning, or gravesite deployment, which is only mostly better than old summoning.  Yeah, it can be disrupted, but it can't be be dispelled, and it allows for full unit deployment.

You have to manage your own gravesites.  You place them, you deploy on top of two of them.  Good placement, having a plan for them, protecting that plan from the opponent, that's all on you, and it's probably the most narratively and mechanically engaging aspect of playing with undead units in Age of Sigmar so far.

[Sception]

As for fow competitive death is overall, well all non-legion death armies are wprse than they were under gh17, yeah.  FEC lose allied necromancers, though at least for the next few months they can still use mounted necromancers from the compendium, since I don't think their spell was updated yet.  Same with tomb kings.

Pure Nighthaunt suffers from worse ethereal & morngul, and doesn't gain much from summonable keyword, especially as they can't ally in necromancers.  Hexwraiths are a little better, and the KoS is a nice addition, though I don't think it makes the difference.  I still think we're getting a Nighthaunt battletome this year, so maybe they'll get fixed up then.

Pure Soulblight's new formation, spells, and special character don't make up for the blood knight nerfs and loss of battleline vargheists, imo.

And generic death loses summoning spells, loses the summoning sword, doesn't gain new spells, and struggles with the new healing system without gravesites to prop it up.

If you don't play the legions, there is nothing to be happy about here, and considering this tome is essentially a replacement for GA:D I can certainly see being upset about that.

But the Legions themselves are fantastic.  Maybe not the strongest Death has ever been.  GH16 mixed death with reasonably priced settra and unreasonably cheap necroknights plus necromancer was a nightmare on a level that I'm not convinced LoN can or even should be able to match.  But still strong, offensively and defensively, and very tactically and thematically engaging.

[deynon]

7 minutes ago, smucreo said:

1 d6 = roll of 1-6. Average 3'5. 2 d3 = roll of 2-6. Average 4. 2d3 is better. I'm not forgetting anything I assure you. Gravesites may only be able to heal one unit, but run a single big unit of 40 skellies and 2 of direwolves and there won't be much need for gravesites to target multiple units unless the opponent is focusing your battleline down, which is a good thing anyways since it takes pressure away from your elites.

Wight king banner? I say Ossific Diadem. And you can put it in way better units than Wight Kings too. Where's the problem? 

Summoning? I managed to summon a unit of skellies upfront each single game I've played since the book came out. Again, as with healing, you need to be smart with gravesite placement. And the ambush thing? Okay, let the opponent split up to try and block my gravesites + my ambushers, good luck doing that and also being able to protect themselves from the threats infront of them.

Magic? They are not always reliable, but again having the basic magic our heroes had + the new lores is still better than having nothing. There's no way you can argue that. Even if you still can only cast one spell per turn. 

Oh and what about the battalions? We have the old battalions plus new ones. 

There is so much more. Morghast Harbingers got a buff with the ability to carry Halberds, Archai are still viable in a First Cohort list, as is Nagash, Necros now can do more than just VanHels skellies! I could literally go on. I've built tons of lists already for tons of different occasions and sceneries. Try looking at it positively, and maybe you can do it too. The only thing I'm not arguing is the Blood Knight nerf (which admittedly was a nerf), but even then you can still run them in a Legion of Blood list. 

PS: I think I now understand how @Killax felt a couple of weeks ago when arguing with people about the competitiveness of LoN haha

Ehm... you confirm that the average si the same. 2 d3 tecnichally  should be 1,5*2 if you want to be precise, so it would be 3 (not 4), so 3 against 3,5... So less than previously.

Now you decrease the units that you use to justify...ok, you are trying to do fantawarhammer but bad example, relaly bad at your hand.

What change? Change the fact that ossific diadem is only one. Whight kings could be more than one so cover a better surface of the field. And with a range arriving to 18".

If you want to make the opponent scatter to rpevent the grravesites... they have to be scattered on te battlefield itself, it means not so guood in supporting your healing as you claim.

I said too that magic is a food adding, but doesn't  mean that it's the everything changing.

Waht otehr battlaions? You don't have old warscroll battlaions.You had only the old deathmarch version and I give you a detail... you can't use it with the LoN battletome Legions. Why? Cause only the warscroll and warscroll batalions from the Battletome gain the legions keyword and that one can't. So what warscroll battalions are you talking about?

And Deathmarch has even been cut by the FAQ

First cohort require named character... and can only be used in a Grand Host of Nagash about th new legions...do you really want to argue using named characters as an improving?

Morghasts habringers with alabards has been quite a good surprise, but anyway not so great to more thn the one about the bonuses to Black knights and Hexwraiths.

 

I yet have a lot of lists to try out, it's not that the problem. But they are not something new.

Legion of Blood at elast give 2 A to Blood knights (è1A to the rider and +1 to the horse) but losing their healing is quite a big impact.

 

I understand your entusiasm, but the new FAQ quite cooled me. I play Death cause I love them. So, even if they would be a mess I would still play them. But Seeing now how they are made me quite cold to the changings.

 

@Sception: I agree with you. It's only that sincerly I really didn't miss to depend on characters to be ablet to do something. I played years with old gravesites from Strom of Chaos Silvanya. It's not a problem at all using them. Simply they are not better unless you can concentrate everything on a single unit. If you could have used the usages for deathly invocation on the same unit I would have immediately said we gained... but the limits are really obvious to see.

[smucreo]

Sception is basically saying what I'm trying to convey, so if you agree with him I'm happy and will leave it at that. I'm honestly having some trouble understanding some of your points, and maybe we are not communicating properly, so I won't keep it going.

I'll only add, as Sception said we are definitely not GH16 levels of broken, but that's a good thing in my mind. And while other allegiances that are not Legions may not be better off than before, I expect new things to keep coming this year.

[Arael]

45 minutes ago, deynon said:

Ehm... you confirm that the average si the same. 2 d3 tecnichally  should be 1,5*2 if you want to be precise, so it would be 3 (not 4), so 3 against 3,5... So less than previously.

Don't want to comment on all the theories you  have thrown in this post arguing basically that no battletome is better then this battletome, other users have already answered , but at least let me correct your math:

The media of a d3 is 2 not 1.5 , to have a media u have to sum the highest and the lowest possible number and divide them by 2, so 2d3 have a media of 4 against a media of 3.5 of a d6.

 

[deynon]

28 minutes ago, Arael said:

Don't want to comment on all the theories you  have thrown in this post arguing basically that no battletome is better then this battletome, other users have already answered , but at least let me correct your math:

The media of a d3 is 2 not 1.5 , to have a media u have to sum the highest and the lowest possible number and divide them by 2, so 2d3 have a media of 4 against a media of 3.5 of a d6.

 

You simply don't pich the medium result on a die.

The problem with your analysis is that you almost for sure think that you gain 2 wounds back each time. 

It's anyway not dissimilar as results. But remember that you have two sources to make you heal the d3 ones, the unititself healf without needing external sources. 

[Arael]

4 minutes ago, deynon said:

Themaximum result that you can gain it's 3, so it's 1.5, not 2. If you consider on a d6 a 3.5.  You simply don't pich the medium result on a die. It's anyway not dissimilar as results. But remember that you have two sources to make you heal the d3 ones, the unititself healf without needing external sources. 

From wiki math :

The mean is the average of the numbers.

It is easy to calculate: add up all the numbers, then divide by how many numbers there are.

 

So in the case of a d4 (1+2+3 )/3=2

d6=( 1+2+3+4+5+6)/6=3.5

This is not something we can discuss on it's math .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[RuneBrush]

6 minutes ago, deynon said:

Themaximum result that you can gain it's 3, so it's 1.5, not 2. If you consider on a d6 a 3.5.  You simply don't pich the medium result on a die. It's anyway not dissimilar as results. But remember that you have two sources to make you heal the d3 ones, the unititself healf without needing external sources. 

Going to have to agree with @Arael here, the average (& median) of a d3 is going to be 2.

[deynon]

you're right, my mistake about it; it's what happens when you have a baby banshee screaming in your ears for hours.

I'm almost thinking to save the audio and use it as a weapon against opponents...

 

Anyway it's only a little better as healing only if you have to use 2 babysitters to do such a thing on your units.  

And the range is problematic too cause if you necromancers or Whight kings you have only a 6" range and only 2 units. With vampires is a bit better with 12" and 3 units. But it's really uncomfortable to depends on such units.Gravesites are fixed on the field, so they can't follow the flow of the battle itself.

 

 

 

[Sception]

d3 average looks a bit weird compared to usual die results because there are an odd number of sides.  With fair, consecutively numbered dice mean = median.  For dice with odd numbers of results, the median is the actual number in the middle, ie 2 for d3 or 3 for d5 or 4 for d7 or 5 for d9, eg for a hypothetical d5: 1-2-**3**-4-5.  Confirmed by doing the equation for mean: (1+2+3+4+5)/5 = 3.

For even numbered die, there is no number in the middle, so the median becomes the average of the two middle-most numbers.  eg for d6: 1-2-3-**?**-4-5-6.  Since even numbers split evenly, there is no singluar number in the middle.  So you take the average of the two middle-most numbers (3+4)/2 = 3.5, and that's the same as the mean for the entire die, (1+2+3+4+5+6)/6 = 3.5.

Long, roundabout way of saying average for 2d3 is .5 better than for d6.  d6 is more likely to produce a result of 6 (1/6 instead of (1/3)*(1/3) = 9, but in exchange you'll literally never roll a one, and rolls of 2 are also less likely (again 1/6 for d6 vs. 1/9 for 2d3).

Basically, for any single wound unit that rolled 1d6 before, the new healing will be better as  soon as you get to 2d3, which is very easy to do between characters and gravesites.  In my admittedly limited experience so far, its relatively easy to hit 4d6 or more on a single unit, with 2d3 on 2 to 3 side units.  It's not as automatic as before, you do have to concern yourself with hero placement & protection and especially with gravesite placement.  If a canny opponent can snipe your heroes AND force you to play away from your gravesites then obviously the new system is worse, but it's very difficult to stop gravesite healing in particular, especially as you generally get to see objectives & deployment zones before placing them.  Again, it's up to you to manage that stuff, and actually doing so in game is very engaging.

 

Death without gravesites, is, imo, dead in the water right now.  I'd be grumpy if I exclusively played TK, FEC, NH, or Soulblight, though at least soulblight transitions pretty easily into a legion list with the additions of a few relatively in-theme dire wolves.  Even then, I'd be grumpy about the current state of blood knights.  Hopefully they see a significant discount in the next general's handbook.  And I certainly share complaints about our lack of non-special-character battalions.  IMO there should be at the very least a nighthaunt battalion (though again I expect a separate nighthaunt book sooner rather than later, so we may see some remedy there) and maybe a zombies/corspe cart/necromancer battalion, maybe something with bats, I don't know.  Our general lack of battalions outside of mixed bag special character retinues, combined with the egregious and unwarranted nerf to death march, is rather discouraging.

But the Legions themselves play great, even without the handful of abilities that are clearly designed for narrative rather than matched play.  It's rather frustrating that one of the Legion of Sacrament main abilities is such a narrative only affair, but sacrament players have one of the two best special character battalions, both of the best shooty-protection artifacts, and a very strong second benefit in +1 to cast all round, so I don't exactly expect sacrament will be hurting overall.

It remains to be seen how the legions will do on the actual tourney scene.  but I personally think they'll do alright.

[Throderick]

I am finding it amusing that now that death has finally been given something, anything even faintly tricky and interesting, people are already whinging about models being overpowered less than a month in.

[Red]

I think Death is competitive until GH2018 comes out and skeletons and dire wolves double in points. I think if you are using zombies and bats instead, you're in for a rough time.

How are people using gravesite summoning? It seems really hampered if you don't go first: if you deploy the markers forward, your opponent just stands on/near them and you can't drop your 40-strong block of skeletons, and if you deploy them back, your basically just deploying them where you could have in the deployment phase, but you're losing out on your chaff protecting your characters for turn 1.

[AverageBoss]

Also worth noting Deathlords is completely dead as an allegiance now and Morghasts lost their battleline status for that allegiance. So people that only collected Deathlords are going to be very upset.

[Sception]

5 minutes ago, Red said:

I think Death is competitive until GH2018 comes out and skeletons and dire wolves double in points. I think if you are using zombies and bats instead, you're in for a rough time.

How are people using gravesite summoning? It seems really hampered if you don't go first: if you deploy the markers forward, your opponent just stands on/near them and you can't drop your 40-strong block of skeletons, and if you deploy them back, your basically just deploying them where you could have in the deployment phase, but you're losing out on your chaff protecting your characters for turn 1.

I'm splitting chaff between deployed & summoned so I'll at least have melee screens & something to bump necromancer wounds to before summoning.  I've been placing gravesites relatively centrally, two towards the front of my deployment & two  towards the middle of the board, or near objectives, & that's been going well.  If I go first (and I usually do if I'm not running a first cohort), then I can run up faster or mounted heroes and summon stuff up before the opponent goes, while a necromancer climbs a balewind to start throwing debuffs.

The fact that forward summoning of large units is so very easy if you go before your opponent can put said opponent in a real tough spot in terms of whether they make you go first and end up ceding huge areas of the board & multiple objectives to gravesite summoning or take the first turn themselves to try and stamp on your forward gravesites, only to have your units appear from your rear gravesites, still typically around where you could have walked to from the first turn anyway, and risk granting you a double turn at the same time.  The danger of forcing first turn on an undead legions opponent is particularly grim for LoN lists that can augment that threat with outflanking harbingers.

[Sception]

4 minutes ago, AverageBoss said:

Also worth noting Deathlords is completely dead as an allegiance now and Morghasts lost their battleline status for that allegiance. So people that only collected Deathlords are going to be very upset.

Somewhat maybe, but I doubt 'very'.  Nagash+morghast battleline is still legal and better than before imo.  Arkhan+morghast battleline+summoning is dead, but both arkhan and morghasts have gained enough in exchange that I doubt too many players will be bitter about it.

[AverageBoss]

19 minutes ago, Red said:

I think Death is competitive until GH2018 comes out and skeletons and dire wolves double in points. I think if you are using zombies and bats instead, you're in for a rough time.

How are people using gravesite summoning? It seems really hampered if you don't go first: if you deploy the markers forward, your opponent just stands on/near them and you can't drop your 40-strong block of skeletons, and if you deploy them back, your basically just deploying them where you could have in the deployment phase, but you're losing out on your chaff protecting your characters for turn 1.

That very much depends on where your territory is, and how fast your opponents army is.

I tend to place the two gravesites in my territory fully forward and 18" apart. The two remaining sites will depend on mission and deployment.

But in addition to the gavesites, it important to bring other threats. In my list a page or two back, the opponents has to deal with a TG, a VLoZD, Morghasts and Hexwraiths as fast moving threats in addition to blocking gravesites. It is going to be hard for most armies to control all of that fully all at once.

[smucreo]

There's no +1 to hit for our units across the entire book right? Apart from the Knight of Shrouds.

[deynon]

22 minutes ago, AverageBoss said:

Also worth noting Deathlords is completely dead as an allegiance now and Morghasts lost their battleline status for that allegiance. So people that only collected Deathlords are going to be very upset.

Beh, tecnically you have 4 Allegiances for oyur deathlords... cause they are tailored perfectly for Nagash and the mOrtarchs, so the Warscroll Battlaions.

2 minutes ago, smucreo said:

There's no +1 to hit for our units across the entire book right? Apart from the Knight of Shrouds.

There are to wounds if you want like the Spiritcage.

Anyway you have also the "vial of the pure blood" from the Legion of Night

The saccarine goblet from the Soulblight

Now I don't rememeber other than these