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AoS 2 - Sylvaneth Discussion


Chris Tomlin

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I have to say, I still think Allariele is relevant here. She has 3 casts, give here throne of vines and she can definitively pump out one of the move buff endless spells.  Plus with her solid combat ability and some combat buffs (winterleaf, archie, etc.) she can still be an amazing center piece!

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11 hours ago, IRifter said:

I thought about that interaction with winterleaf and drycha too. IMO there are only 2 ways this would work :

A: you get 1 mortal wound on a 6 and roll another wound roll for the extra attack
B: you get 2 mortals wounds for each 6

While B sounds much better i guess A is more likely but we cant be sure untiil its FAQ'd

It's option B. 

At least that's how it works with the Daughter's Blood Sister's Crystal Touch and the 'Catachism of Murder' Prayer

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11 minutes ago, Xil said:

It's option B. 

At least that's how it works with the Daughter's Blood Sister's Crystal Touch and the 'Catachism of Murder' Prayer

Q: Sometimes a dice roll will trigger an effect. For example, a weapon might have a rule that says a hit roll of 6 causes two hits on the target instead of 1. What happens if another effect applies to the same roll? For example, the weapon from the previous example might have a rule that says it inflicts D6 mortal wounds on a hit roll of 6 and the attack sequence ends – would I get to inflict two hits that each inflicted D6 mortal wounds?

A: When a dice roll triggers more than one effect, each effect is triggered once. For this example, this means that the hit roll would cause two hits, but only one of the hits would inflict D6 mortal wounds (you would carry out the rest of the attack procedure for the other hit normally).

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12 minutes ago, armisael said:

Q: Sometimes a dice roll will trigger an effect. For example, a weapon might have a rule that says a hit roll of 6 causes two hits on the target instead of 1. What happens if another effect applies to the same roll? For example, the weapon from the previous example might have a rule that says it inflicts D6 mortal wounds on a hit roll of 6 and the attack sequence ends – would I get to inflict two hits that each inflicted D6 mortal wounds?

A: When a dice roll triggers more than one effect, each effect is triggered once. For this example, this means that the hit roll would cause two hits, but only one of the hits would inflict D6 mortal wounds (you would carry out the rest of the attack procedure for the other hit normally).

Somewhere I have read quite the opposite... 

Maybe it's because Crystal Touch always I inflicts MW, not just on 6s.

Edited by Xil
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21 minutes ago, jake3991 said:

I have to say, I still think Allariele is relevant here. She has 3 casts, give here throne of vines and she can definitively pump out one of the move buff endless spells.  Plus with her solid combat ability and some combat buffs (winterleaf, archie, etc.) she can still be an amazing center piece!

I'm absolutely with you on this one!

I just think that - if you play a Glade - you want to also play a batallion, because the list of artifacts we can choose from is just amazing, especially for something like Gnarlroot.

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2 hours ago, Austin said:

I am pretty bummed that Tree-Revs didn't get some sort of buff.  Hopefully as I think about it, a way to use large numbers of them will become more apparent. 

They did, they can jump anywhere on the table now! That's a huge buff

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6 hours ago, IRifter said:

I didn't know about the specific artefacts for skyvessels from the KO.  What you said about the mounts is completely right. Although these traits are with one or two exceptions not that great(jsut nice additions) and are by far not comparable to a true artefact.


Going by the example you posted and looking up how exactly it works and where it is written in the SCE book it should be palced above the specific artefact tableand tell you how and why you get additional artefacts. This is not the case with the leaked sylvaneth pictures. I dont think its hidden on another page or something like that. We pretty much got all the important stuff from allegiance abilities all the way to pitched battle profiles.

Doesn't one of the new Fireslayer Lodges state that 3 heroes can have an artefact as part  of the  Lodge traits?  GW seem to be introducing slight variants to the standard rules from time to time, so this could be one of those times.

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1 hour ago, Xil said:

Somewhere I have read quite the opposite... 

Maybe it's because Crystal Touch always I inflicts MW, not just on 6s.

It's because of the weapon always dealing MW.  When you score extra hits, they are "diceless" hits. Any extra hit generated as such is not counted as a 6, just as a hit, and that's why Crystal Touch generates extra MWs, because that's the weapon's profile for its hits.

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I hink people are being overly optimists about gnarlroot etc. I am not saying the new battletome is going to be bad, but most of the strengths of Sylvaneth was that despite being an old battletome, it had top notch battallions so it could be played in a variety of ways that were interesting and clearly distinct. None of the new rules that substitute for some of those battallions. I mean dreadwood withouth the strats is no longer the dreadwood we knew. Gnarlroot withouth extra casts isn't the gnarlroot we knew(i don't know why its bonus wasn't +1 to cast or something like that, instead of rerolls...).

I am sure the book will have viable builds, but it will be more streamlined than before.

But the thing that annoys me is the nerf to the wyldwoods. I already hated that they changed the deadly terrain rule to being irrelevant.

 

Edited by Kairos Tejedestinos
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8 hours ago, Mirage8112 said:

This is a good question.

this is just speculation, but we haven’t seen what teh rules for giving artifacts to models are. I know KO and Stormcast are able to give artifacts to sky ships and monsters respectively.

Woudlnt it be cool if we could give an artifact to treelords AND a Hero?

 

Well treelord would be crazy good with bonus artefacts for 200 points which is why I doubt this.. Even though I'd like it.

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4 hours ago, jake3991 said:

I have to say, I still think Allariele is relevant here. She has 3 casts, give here throne of vines and she can definitively pump out one of the move buff endless spells.  Plus with her solid combat ability and some combat buffs (winterleaf, archie, etc.) she can still be an amazing center piece!

I think alarielle can be relevant. Rather easily in a winterleaf glade but other wise she's not a brainless auto include and need a solid build centered around her (not a bad thing).

Personally I think magic isn't that strong in AoS and her combat stats aren't that much better than a Durthu.

 

I'll probably be starting my build with units that got points decreases.

- Durthu

- Treelord

- spites

-- either 3x min size and go to town with treelords (maybe lords)and hunters

-- or a unit of 20 spites for offence next to 30 dryads for defense and 5 tree revs for screening and teleporting

 

I'll compare that to an alarielle build.

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6 hours ago, Aryann said:

In the allegiance section regarding Glades there is a mention that you can create your own Glade. Is this just for narrative play or is there a table of CA, artefacts, skills we can choose from to create one? 

 

6 hours ago, Craze said:

It is narrative only. For matched play you can only use the ones already listed.

@Craze Um. I don’t get that at all from that text.

It says you “can” choose on of the glade below. Or you can create your own. If you make your own glade you get to choose your artifacts and command abilities and you can apply the glade keyword (that you make up your self) to your units. The keyword doesn’t do anything, but it does mean you get to pick your command traits +artifacts  

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3 minutes ago, Mirage8112 said:

 

@Craze Um. I don’t get that at all from that text.

It says you “can” choose on of the glade below. Or you can create your own. If you make your own glade you get to choose your artifacts and command abilities and you can apply the glade keyword (that you make up your self) to your units. The keyword doesn’t do anything, but it does mean you get to pick your command traits +artifacts  

It is basically like Stormcast without the Stormhost. With some of our items there's probably a way to make that work...

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I've been digesting all of these changes for a bit now, and I'm coming down on the side of @Kairos Tejedestinos, at least for top level competitive play. I think the book seems really well rounded and there are some nice buffs and combos in it. There are real problems though that people aren't focusing on.

There are two huge, huge nerfs that aren't getting nearly enough attention. The first major issue is the interaction between wyldwoods and unit buffs. Keeping things like the Dryad buff and Durthu's buff active while also fighting over an objective will be much more dicey now and will entirely rely on dropping futher wyldwoods close to objectives. Given that competitive Sylvaneth lists currently rely on the defensive efficiency of Dryads supported by the Frostheart Phoenix debuff aura (which is no longer an option), I think this is a pretty significant change.

More important, however, are the battalion changes. Limiting drops is probably the single most important factor in competitive list construction. The main reason Sylvaneth was able to stay tier 2 was that it was super easy for any Sylvaneth army to be one drop. Now that isn't possible, and it's actually pretty difficult to be low drop at all. You can take care of your battleline with Outcasts or Forest Folk but that's about it. Any other battalion is going to require at least 3 further drops. I think it's going to be difficult to make a good Sylvaneth list in anything less than 5 drops, and even then that's a pretty big stretch. You could maybe do 4 if you are comfortable with your eggs in one basket. It's possible that the turn choice or battalion rules will change at some point, but until they do this is really going to hold Sylvaneth back.

There are certainly some cool and powerful things that Sylvaneth can do. The Alpha Strike potential is strong. The availability of unlimited teleportation abilities and huge bonuses to charge gives you the ability to strike fast in a lot of different places. A lot of options for this have already been mentioned, but I'll also bring up the possibility of dropping 12 Kurnoths with the Dreadwood teleport, or a unit of 30 Tree-revs either with +2 attacks in Harvestboon or the suite of bonuses from Winterleaf. The damage potential of both of these combos is massive. But how is it better than Deepkin eel spam?

The new treelord stomp ability is also really powerful, although it's not effective against Gristlegore (during their turn they get to fight first before you can stomp). So you could build around a big grove of trees and aim to disrupt combat order. But can't Slaanesh just do the same thing but far more effectively?

You could try to lean on the increased efficiency of some of the new warscrolls (Drycha, Durthu, Spite Revenants), but Skaven and DoK are just that much more efficient. Your efficiency is on a similar level to Beasts of Chaos, but they can easily go under you on drops now. 

So far when I look at this battletome I see a decent amount of cool stuff and it'll certainly be good enough for casual-competitive play, but I see nothing that it can do that other tomes can't do better, and I really don't see how it competes with DoK, Skaven, FEC and the like.

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2 hours ago, Kairos Tejedestinos said:

I hink people are being overly optimists about gnarlroot etc. I am not saying the new battletome is going to be bad, but most of the strengths of Sylvaneth was that despite being an old battletome, it had top notch battallions so it could be played in a variety of ways that were interesting and clearly distinct. None of the new rules that substitute for some of those battallions. I mean dreadwood withouth the strats is no longer the dreadwood we knew. Gnarlroot withouth extra casts isn't the gnarlroot we knew(i don't know why its bonus wasn't +1 to cast or something like that, instead of rerolls...).

I am sure the book will have viable builds, but it will be more streamlined than before.

But the thing that annoys me is the nerf to the wyldwoods. I already hated that they changed the deadly terrain rule to being irrelevant.

 


After spending a night with the book and reading over how things work I think I have a handle on the designers intentions and why the battalions are set-up like they are.  I get that people are upset about the changes to the core battalions. And yes, they’ve drastically changed. But I think there’s good reason.

Firstly, one of the problems with our old book was it was totally rock/scissors/paper. Gnarlroot for a long time was hands-down the strongest casting army on the table for AoS. Then Disciples of TZ dropped. then Nagash came on the table. Then blades of Khorne forcing RR of successful casting and a bunch of cheap units that could unbind spells. Then then they increased unbinding from 18”-30”.  

After that wave of books, Gnarlroot was still super powerful, provided you weren’t facing one of those armies. But you happened to draw one say in a tournament match-up you we’re pretty much f-d. Same goes for thinks like winterleaf if you managed to draw and army that was good at clearing hordes. I played dreadwood almost exclusively in competitive games. The D3 roll at the beginning was the biggest problem at 180 Pts, you could roll 3 starts and it was amazing and totally worth it. Roll 1 and you couldn’t do very much with it.  

Our units were like that too. Take scythes on your hunters? Awesome if you come up against stormcast; sucks if you came up against Nighthaunt. Drycha’s Squirmlings/flitterfuries? Squirmlings were murder if you came up against hordes, and were useless if you came up across multiwound models in an MSU list. with our old book, we either rolled over our opponents or we had a brutal uphit slog where we were hoping to eek out a minor win or a draw, because our opponent’s list shut down our wargroves “gimmick”.

This book is radically different. They’ve basically taken our 3 main playstyles and spread them out across the army through a combination of items/traits/warscroll/points adjustments. 

There is no way to build the army to play as old gnarlroot/dreadwood/winterleaf  anymore. This is a good thing, because those playstyles only works 2/3 of the time. Gnarlroot +the right artifacts, can’t attempt to cast 7 spells per turn anymore. What they can do is pretty much guarantee that they can get off critical spells off at the right time. Now, it’s very possible to bring 2 hunters back from the dead and heal them to full health without too much fear of failing the casting roll or having it unbound. Build the list right, you can easily cast 5 spells per turn, probably getting 3-4 off without too much fear of having it shut down. PLUS you get extra damage RR’ing 1’s to hit, extra healing on top of core spells and extra points from not having to pay for the battalion anymore (230 pts). I don’t care how sad you are about losing that 1 casting attempt; thats a huge buff. 

I keep saying it’s going to take time to put all this together, but the synergy of this book is bonkers. You just need to put your old lazy list building strats to bed and break out some new ideas. There’s going to be more ways to play this army than ever before.

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10 minutes ago, swarmofseals said:

So far when I look at this battletome I see a decent amount of cool stuff and it'll certainly be good enough for casual-competitive play, but I see nothing that it can do that other tomes can't do better, and I really don't see how it competes with DoK, Skaven, FEC and the like.

Top FEC list was all terrorgiests and 2 units of 10 ghouls + cogs. 

To that I say, Harvestboon Durthu with the Doppelganger cloak and Harvestboon Command trait.  

Durthu can easily charge any of those terrorgiests and not have to worry about them first turn attacking him, sicne he cant be selected as a target till he attacks. If he doesn’t kill them on the charge (and he probably will), he just moves 6” out of range. They wont be able to attack him back because they aren't in combat anymore. If they charged, they have to pile in toward the nearest enemy unit, no reason not to have a group of t-revs or something nearby to force him to pile in toward them, but honestly after 6 guardian sword attacks i doubt they will be much of a threat anymore.

Theres all kinds of stuff like this in the book. 

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12 minutes ago, Mirage8112 said:


After spending a night with the book and reading over how things work I think I have a handle on the designers intentions and why the battalions are set-up like they are.  I get that people are upset about the changes to the core battalions. And yes, they’ve drastically changed. But I think there’s good reason.

Firstly, one of the problems with our old book was it was totally rock/scissors/paper. Gnarlroot for a long time was hands-down the strongest casting army on the table for AoS. Then Disciples of TZ dropped. then Nagash came on the table. Then blades of Khorne forcing RR of successful casting and a bunch of cheap units that could unbind spells. Then then they increased unbinding from 18”-30”.  

After that wave of books, Gnarlroot was still super powerful, provided you weren’t facing one of those armies. But you happened to draw one say in a tournament match-up you we’re pretty much f-d. Same goes for thinks like winterleaf if you managed to draw and army that was good at clearing hordes. I played dreadwood almost exclusively in competitive games. The D3 roll at the beginning was the biggest problem at 180 Pts, you could roll 3 starts and it was amazing and totally worth it. Roll 1 and you couldn’t do very much with it.  

Our units were like that too. Take scythes on your hunters? Awesome if you come up against stormcast; sucks if you came up against Nighthaunt. Drycha’s Squirmlings/flitterfuries? Squirmlings were murder if you came up against hordes, and were useless if you came up across multiwound models in an MSU list. with our old book, we either rolled over our opponents or we had a brutal uphit slog where we were hoping to eek out a minor win or a draw, because our opponent’s list shut down our wargroves “gimmick”.

This book is radically different. They’ve basically taken our 3 main playstyles and spread them out across the army through a combination of items/traits/warscroll/points adjustments. 

There is no way to build the army to play as old gnarlroot/dreadwood/winterleaf  anymore. This is a good thing, because those playstyles only works 2/3 of the time. Gnarlroot +the right artifacts, can’t attempt to cast 7 spells per turn anymore. What they can do is pretty much guarantee that they can get off critical spells off at the right time. Now, it’s very possible to bring 2 hunters back from the dead and heal them to full health without too much fear of failing the casting roll or having it unbound. Build the list right, you can easily cast 5 spells per turn, probably getting 3-4 off without too much fear of having it shut down. PLUS you get extra damage RR’ing 1’s to hit, extra healing on top of core spells and extra points from not having to pay for the battalion anymore (230 pts). I don’t care how sad you are about losing that 1 casting attempt; thats a huge buff. 

I keep saying it’s going to take time to put all this together, but the synergy of this book is bonkers. You just need to put your old lazy list building strats to bed and break out some new ideas. There’s going to be more ways to play this army than ever before.

100% agreed.  I already have about 3-4 list ideas (probably more) floating around in my head right now.

 

Also you mentioned reviving 2 hunters per turn, I’m aware of the spell that gives you 1, what’s the second way?  I must have missed it my first time through. 

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As an experienced player only now coming to Sylvaneth, I can say this book seems good. Units are generally costed at a level where they seem competitive when compared to similar units in other armies, magic isn't incredible but is decent and there are multiple options for buffing it, a couple of glades are very strong. I don't see anything meta breaking, but I see no reason for Sylvaneth to be worse off.

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I've got no idea about lists or anything.  As a casual player I'm just a bit baffled by how different a lot of things are.  My favorite model (Drycha) has barely recognisable rules, and my favorite way to play (Gnarlroot and loads of magic) has gone away, but I'm not shouting at clouds yet.  I'm sure there will be fun stuff in there.

 

My genuine complaint with the book though is that they didn't fix the bloody wildwood problem.  If anything, they made it worse!  They've replaced an awkward to use, expensive to buy, and nightmare to transport terrain piece that was pivotal to our army with a different awkward to use, even worse to transport terrain piece that is still just as pivotal but much harder to deploy and not as effective.  And if we want the slight ease of use (for our opponents more than ourselves) advantages of the new kit we have to buy new expensive models.  I thought wildwoods were "100% going away" - what happened?

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19 minutes ago, swarmofseals said:

More important, however, are the battalion changes. Limiting drops is probably the single most important factor in competitive list construction. The main reason Sylvaneth was able to stay tier 2 was that it was super easy for any Sylvaneth army to be one drop. Now that isn't possible, and it's actually pretty difficult to be low drop at all. You can take care of your battleline with Outcasts or Forest Folk but that's about it. Any other battalion is going to require at least 3 further drops. I think it's going to be difficult to make a good Sylvaneth list in anything less than 5 drops, and even then that's a pretty big stretch. You could maybe do 4 if you are comfortable with your eggs in one basket. It's possible that the turn choice or battalion rules will change at some point, but until they do this is really going to hold Sylvaneth back.
...

You could try to lean on the increased efficiency of some of the new warscrolls (Drycha, Durthu, Spite Revenants), but Skaven and DoK are just that much more efficient. Your efficiency is on a similar level to Beasts of Chaos, but they can easily go under you on drops now. 

I understand what you’re saying here. But I disagree. 

With our current book, getting first turn was an absolutely priority. Why? Dryads are why. Currently, dryads are the backbone of our army and I don’t think players have realized that they are far from mandatory now.  Previously, we had to get woods out onto objectives, mostly because dryads were mostly useless outside of the woods. We needed the space and we had to get at least 2 woods down so we could maintain our dryad bunkers, teleporting and whatnot.

The problem with this strategy is that in the current incarnation of AoS, you don’t want first turn. I know that runs counter to everything we’ve been talking up to this point, but double turns have always been murder on us using any of our core playstyles. Gnarlroot depended on healing wounded hunters up to full strength and then bringing a dead hunters back, ideally undoing whatever damage was done to them in the previous turn. If you caught a double turn, your opponent likely brought in another CC unit and took 3 hunters off the board over 4 combat phases before you could do anything about it. Dreadwood alpha strike was always a very high-risk high-reward way to play, and was extremely vulnerable to double turns. Winterleaf a little less so thanks to shear body count, but winterleaf was the most average across the board in terms of balance.  

We don’t need as many woods on the board anymore, because they don't confer the same benefits. Previously we wanted our opponent to charge into the woods and hopefully lose models to the dangerous terrain test. Now we want them to move into the woods, and have us charge them. 

Yes. We can’t drop our woods directly on objectives anymore.  This is a clear nerf and (although I hate to say it) it is a fair one. The fact that we can’t drop our woods in the enemy deployment zone anymore is actually a buff, since we now know what side of the table we’ll be on before dropping the wood. I cant tell you how many times I dropped a wood in a great spot and had my opponent win the roll off and switch sides on me. 

Getting out woods out is also much much easier now.  It’s fully possible to get 4 woods out in the first turn if you really wanted to. 1 free drop, 1 regrowth, 1 silent communion, 1 acorn. That means you can literally blanket half the table with woods and shield your entire army from shooting in the first turn without worrying about getting double turned. 

I dont know if anybody has noticed, but the wording on Forest sprits is interesting:

 

 904C489A-370C-4511-9DA6-139382E0A0DF.jpeg.d9a56f11db6c8d36a9fe1792d0f1a099.jpeg

 
Does anybody else see that? For every unit you set up on the battlefield, you can set one up off the board. RAW, that to me says we can drop two units at a time as long as one is off the board, effectively cutting your drops in half. If the intention was, “you can’t have more models off the board then on the board” they could have worded it like that. But they didn’t. A list that has 3 units in a battalion, and a further say, 5 units, could mean when you drop the battalion for each unit you drop on the board, you can drop 3 units off the board. That means your first drop is actually 6 units,  And you’re next drop is 2 units. That’s an 8 unit army (fairly big for Sylvaneth) in 2 drops. 

 

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1 hour ago, Mirage8112 said:


After spending a night with the book and reading over how things work I think I have a handle on the designers intentions and why the battalions are set-up like they are.  I get that people are upset about the changes to the core battalions. And yes, they’ve drastically changed. But I think there’s good reason.
 

Sry i deleted most of the content in your post. Most of it comes down to if sylvaneth will be good or better competitively speaking. That wasn't the point i was conveying, but gameplay wise it loses some thematic flavour and coherence that the new book won't achieve in the same vein. Will they be fun to play ? I am sure they will. Will they be competitive ? That will take time to decide since they don't have obvious crazy mechanics like Slaneesh summoning, DoK's output, FEC terrorgheists, etc.

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5 hours ago, jake3991 said:

I have to say, I still think Allariele is relevant here. She has 3 casts, give here throne of vines and she can definitively pump out one of the move buff endless spells.  Plus with her solid combat ability and some combat buffs (winterleaf, archie, etc.) she can still be an amazing center piece!

Can someone explain to me why the Arch-Revenant keeps getting a mentioned as a major alarielle buff when the majority of her damage (her mount) cannot be affected?

55 minutes ago, Mirage8112 said:

After spending a night with the book and reading over how things work I think I have a handle on the designers intentions and why the battalions are set-up like they are.  I get that people are upset about the changes to the core battalions. And yes, they’ve drastically changed. But I think there’s good reason.

\Our units were like that too. Take scythes on your hunters? Awesome if you come up against stormcast; sucks if you came up against Nighthaunt. Drycha’s Squirmlings/flitterfuries? Squirmlings were murder if you came up against hordes, and were useless if you came up across multiwound models in an MSU list. with our old book, we either rolled over our opponents or we had a brutal uphit slog where we were hoping to eek out a minor win or a draw, because our opponent’s list shut down our wargroves “gimmick”.

This book is radically different. They’ve basically taken our 3 main playstyles and spread them out across the army through a combination of items/traits/warscroll/points adjustments. 
 

I thought squirmlings were almost never useless because generally even elite armies would bring at least SOMETHING for objective control.  Wouldn't even 10-mans would suffer 5 instant wounds easy? Didn't this kill her niche role on the battlefield?  It seems like she does "okay" ranged damage to everyone equally now and just "okay" melee damage.  To me that seems a little dull, but I don't really know how I feel about the battletome as a whole yet.

45 minutes ago, Mirage8112 said:

Top FEC list was all terrorgiests and 2 units of 10 ghouls + cogs. 

To that I say, Harvestboon Durthu with the Doppelganger cloak and Harvestboon Command trait.  
 

Isn't this sort of rock paper scissors in a way again anyway?  Terrorgheist can't touch durthu, non-cloak/non-harvest durthu can't beat terror?

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3 minutes ago, Mirage8112 said:

I understand what you’re saying here. But I disagree. 

With our current book, getting first turn was an absolutely priority. Why? Dryads are why. Currently, dryads are the backbone of our army and I don’t think players have realized that they are far from mandatory now.  Previously, we had to get woods out onto objectives, mostly because dryads were mostly useless outside of the woods. We needed the space and we had to get at least 2 woods down so we could maintain our dryad bunkers, teleporting and whatnot.

The problem with this strategy is that in the current incarnation of AoS, you don’t want first turn. I know that runs counter to everything we’ve been talking up to this point, but double turns have always been murder on us using any of our core playstyles. Gnarlroot depended on healing wounded hunters up to full strength and then bringing a dead hunters back, ideally undoing whatever damage was done to them in the previous turn. If you caught a double turn, your opponent likely brought in another CC unit and took 3 hunters off the board over 4 combat phases before you could do anything about it. Dreadwood alpha strike was always a very high-risk high-reward way to play, and was extremely vulnerable to double turns. Winterleaf a little less so thanks to shear body count, but winterleaf was the most average across the board in terms of balance.  

We don’t need as many woods on the board anymore, because they don't confer the same benefits. Previously we wanted our opponent to charge into the woods and hopefully lose models to the dangerous terrain test. Now we want them to move into the woods, and have us charge them. 

Yes. We can’t drop our woods directly on objectives anymore.  This is a clear nerf and (although I hate to say it) it is a fair one. The fact that we can’t drop our woods in the enemy deployment zone anymore is actually a buff, since we now know what side of the table we’ll be on before dropping the wood. I cant tell you how many times I dropped a wood in a great spot and had my opponent win the roll off and switch sides on me. 

Getting out woods out is also much much easier now.  It’s fully possible to get 4 woods out in the first turn if you really wanted to. 1 free drop, 1 regrowth, 1 silent communion, 1 acorn. That means you can literally blanket half the table with woods and shield your entire army from shooting in the first turn without worrying about getting double turned. 

I dont know if anybody has noticed, but the wording on Forest sprits is interesting:

 

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Does anybody else see that? For every unit you set up on the battlefield, you can set one up off the board. RAW, that to me says we can drop two units at a time as long as one is off the board, effectively cutting your drops in half. If the intention was, “you can’t have more models off the board then on the board” they could have worded it like that. But they didn’t. A list that has 3 units in a battalion, and a further say, 5 units, could mean when you drop the battalion for each unit you drop on the board, you can drop 3 units off the board. That means your first drop is actually 6 units,  And you’re next drop is 2 units. That’s an 8 unit army (fairly big for Sylvaneth) in 2 drops. 

 

That's not how it works. The restriction on how many units you can place in reserves is given by how many you have already placed. The point is, that you need a unit already in the table to be able to deploy something in reserve. For example it is typical to first place your reserves to avoid placing units in the table before your opponent has deployed some of his units. This stops you from it, and also gives you a restriction on how many units you can stay in reserves (and for how long).

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12 minutes ago, Kairos Tejedestinos said:

That's not how it works. The restriction on how many units you can place in reserves is given by how many you have already placed. The point is, that you need a unit already in the table to be able to deploy something in reserve. For example it is typical to first place your reserves to avoid placing units in the table before your opponent has deployed some of his units. This stops you from it, and also gives you a restriction on how many units you can stay in reserves (and for how long).

I get thats how you read it, but that’s not what it says. It says, “you can set up one unit in reserves, for every unit you set-up on the table”. The wording is one-for-one. It doesn’t say “you can never have more units set up in reserves than you’ve set up on the table,” it doesn’t say “before you set a unit up in reserves, you must set a unit up on the field.” I’d like to see an FAQ on this, because RAW it can be read either way. 

 

Edited by Mirage8112
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