Breaking Down the Stardrake and Why it's Bad.

[Nos]

6 hours ago, Primes said:

To give the topic an even more positive spin:

For someone like me, who owns a Stardrake and is less than impressed with our current battletome: How would you maximise the benefit of our beautiful celestial behemoth with a proper list build around him?

I think the essentials are:

• LCoSD
• Lord Castellant
• Lord Arcanum on Gryph Charger (for his Heals and the Casting Synergy)

leaving us with 1.100 Points to play with. What would you take?

I hope the question is not off-topic as looking at a Warscroll in the whole context of an armies options seems to make more sense then analysing an individual warscroll and points.

Best Regards

Chris

 

My 2000 point list for when I try a SD list is:

LA on Gryph Steed with Azyrite Halo

KI with Thundershock 

Castellant

Relictor, Divine Light

Templar on Stardrake with Tempest Axe and smouldering Helm

2  x 5 Judicators

1 x 10 Sequitors

10 Evocators (One unit or split depending on line up) 

 

First Turn, all things going to plan-good chance you deploy first due to model count

Sequitors and unit of Evocators in heaven, or one unit of 5 on the table if you want more bodies to begin with. Judicators hold objectives and plink away at stuff. Stardrake flys into the middle and shouts at everyone who fancies it to have a square go. He gets buffed by SD and Castellant so has a 2+ save and with Smouldering Helm he inflicts a MW on a save of 4+. He shoots at stuff and makes himself annoying, kills a few things. His annoying-ness is compounded by the fact that he reduces pile-ins by 2 inches to models 3 inches around him, which will be most things because he’s in the middle and massive. The KI initially casts Spirit Storm, now on a pretty reliable 6 due to SD buff, reducing enemy movement of a lot of units (18 inches) and also getting a few further MW paper cuts.  LA casts Arcane Bolt on a 4 and does D6 Damage on a 9. Can reliably make a hero scatter or kill an elite model. Priest casts Divine Light on SD ensuring even less damage to him. Evocators, if on the table, can cast whatever they have on a 4, probably Empower, probably on the Stardrake. 

After this point, you have a better than average chance of making multiple units be at -1 to hit and your main focus -2 with Thundershock and Lightening Storm, multiple chances of healing the Stardrake a lot of wounds, a very solid base for holding objectives, a very high chance of being able to empower either Evocators or Sequitors and ensuring they do massive damage when they show up.  It’s really all about using them to clear up the back line or push them off the objectives.

But the Stardrake with easily cast buffs/debuffs in the major fights makes for a ridiculous anchor, and the tempest axe means if you leave heroes right by him it’s very difficult to reach them if you just dance around him. It’s also a really cool mental image, this storm of elite entropy whirling and swirling underneath the bastion of a Stardrakes Wings. If you’re objectives are threatened and it’s at a stage where it’s more important to hold objectives than the centre then retreat to said objective and use your massive base and Tempest Axe to form a spiky perimeter. 

Not claiming it’s perfect or a fool poof strategy but it is for me the definition of a Problem army, i.e you’re setting the enemy a puzzle and making them react and giving you initiative.

The Stardrake is of course prone to MW’s without Ignax’s scales but Divine Light removes the issue of natural 6’s at least. And he still has enough wounds that it’s rare he can be brought down in one turn. And if he even has 3 or 4 wounds remaining he can reliably be healed back up to 10 again with Castellant, LA and Priest keeping him company. If it does actually die use Cycle of the Storm to bring it back to life and get it involved in the biggest fight available. Smouldering Helm will ensure that even beyond the grave it can mess stuff up.

Against fast units that can ignore the Stardrake this obviously wont work particularly well, probably. Never happened to me though so not my problem. And actuallly even in that situation if you just deploy your Scion units  centrally I think you could still make a fight of it. The thing that makes this army work is not really the Stardrake, it’s that everything including the Stardrake has a purpose that it is good at. It’s built around simple synergy, easy to cast relatively universal buffs and pound for pound value in combat. There’s no real trick that it hinges on. It’s just a versatile list that reliably outpunches a lot of stuff and makes the most of Stormcast  capacity to field combined arms.