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AoS 2 - Hedonites of Slaanesh Discussion


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Hi guys, short question: I have the Slaanesh half of the Shadow and Pain Box here and was thinking if this + the new Battleforce together would be a solid start for Hedonites. I also have access to some S2D Models. But what makes me wonder: Are the 10 "small" Mortal Riders of Slaanesh any good today? Their Warscrolls look very...weak? 

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18 minutes ago, Charleston said:

Hi guys, short question: I have the Slaanesh half of the Shadow and Pain Box here and was thinking if this + the new Battleforce together would be a solid start for Hedonites. I also have access to some S2D Models. But what makes me wonder: Are the 10 "small" Mortal Riders of Slaanesh any good today? Their Warscrolls look very...weak? 

well I have good news and bad news, the warscrolls do look weak, they are our most efficient unit and probably our best all rounder units. HoS unfortunatly has alot of un-flashy units thats gimicks are "hit slightly harder than you would expect" (painbringers) or "slightly more tanky thany ou expect" (hellstriders + exalted seeker cav) but never enough to be obviously outstanding like say sentinels for lumineth, or varanguard in std. Your units outside of sigvald/glutos/twins are pretty straightforwards in being fast + do extra stuff on 6s, usually mortals or more hits.

Hellstriders are our cheapest battle line option being 10 wounds for 135 and whips making them a little tougher to shift, usually you want them to just gum up the opponent, being tankier they can also spare a few hits to take depravity and not instantly die or become inefficient at their role.

S+P and this are a very good start actually, the chariot is solid, especially if kit builds exalted, lord of pain is good and makes the 2 elite units of the battleforce battleline, 10 daemonettes are good but you will probably wanna upgrade to have 30 of them around. 

With what you have id magnetise the painbringers so they can swap between twinsouls or painbringers, run force as 

Leaders

lord of pain(general)

shardspeaker

bladebringer exalted chariot 

Battleline

11xblissbarbs

10xtwinsouls/painbringers

5 hellscourge hellstriders

5 hellscourge hellstriders

 

with a small daemonette unit to summon, brings you pretty close to 1500 points, with main focus being trying to get twinsouls fully buffed up and do damage and yolo in the chariot. This army also works nice as core to build off as you have alot of battle line options to build into either blissbarb heavy, myrmidesh blocks, cav army.

Edited by MothmanDraws
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Casual play should work perfectly fine with just LOP, sigvald will slot in fine aswell. No daemons is tricky as the reason or stuff is either weaker or overpriced is to accommodate for its ability to generate daemon summons. If your casual group is fine with it I think offering slaanesh 20% more points in return it doesn't summon is fair comp in casual games (though I still think you would want 30% more). The only bad unit in force are the Slaangor the other options in there are your "must have" units for mortals.

You wont need a ton of daemons but I think getting access to 30 daemonettes, 1 chariot, 5 seekers and maybe a keeper eventually is solid enough for daemons, the masque + contorted are also good

For ppl picking up both or either sets id recommend these further purchases

Sigvald or Glutos or Twins (usually they dictate what you want from your army) Sigvald slots into most armies fine as he is just a missile, either take him and send him off on his own or build into supporting him with a keeper

1 extra set of blissbarbs or 2nd unit of Exalted seekers 

1 start collecting daemons (gets the ball rolling for some summons)

 

My view atm for a rounded roster that can build multiple lists a nice core is

10 painbrigners/twinsouls

22 blissabarb archers

5-10 hellstriders

2 exalted cav

30 daemonettes

Though all of this is based on if the winter balance sheet doesnt change anything, though if it does im expecting the units in the battleforce will only go up in value

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A Lord of Pain is mandatory if you're using Myrmidesh/Twinsouls, especially given being Invaders means he can be a supplementary general and still unlock them as Battleline.

The Enrapturess is arguably one of our best heroes right now for double-whammy Depravity generation (park her at the Fane, cop a mortal, shoot, profit) and her huge anti-casting aura.

After those two it's really a matter of taste. Running Slaves? Get a Chaos Lord or Sorcerer Lord. Running Brayherd Beasts? Get a Bray-Shaman. Any kind of cheap hero can be worth it for for sitting at the Fane and holding the Rod of Misrule. It's hard to go wrong with a Shardspeaker provided you have some good melee units.  

I prefer to summon Keepers and Exalted Bladebringers nowadays, but those are a matter of taste, and not running any named characters might affect that choice. 

To more directly answer your question, I think an Enrapturess, a Lord of Pain (if running mortals) and a Keeper (with the Amulet of Destiny preferably) is a good all-rounder cast of heroes to start with at 2000 points. 

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1 hour ago, Jaskier said:

To more directly answer your question, I think an Enrapturess, a Lord of Pain (if running mortals) and a Keeper (with the Amulet of Destiny preferably) is a good all-rounder cast of heroes to start with at 2000 points. 

Precisely what I needed to hear. Ta muchly! I've got a bunch of Chaos Warriors and a Warshrine painted up, so I'll probably throw a Sorcerer Lord into the mix too. 

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20 minutes ago, zombiepiratexxx said:

Imagine if GW have done a 200 IQ play and they know that Slaangors are about to be the new hotness when they release the next update and the warscroll is changed!!! I don't expect it (and will hopefully have a copy of the box under the Christmas tree from Santa) but it would be hilarious. 

I would be interested to see what they could change slaangor to be, personally I think we could do with them having absurd natural rend and be our tin openers. Give them rend 3-4 and dexcessas attack build up ability but keep them fairly fragile. ATM they feel they are kitted for fighting large blocks of weaker troops but we have no issue dealing with them using Daemon locus to try to lock large units down, blissbarbs shoot well into low armour + twinsouls and chariots. Really I want them re tooled to be anti elite/heavy armour which we lack answers for outside of fishing for mortal wounds. Have them be inaccurate, lots of attacks, high damage high rend but no defence, rest of lesser mortals should be trying to bubble wrap them to let slaangor go nuts (also lore fitting with how they are supposed to be revered ).

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So we had a 1 day event at our local shop and 3 hedonites list out of 20 players we were the highest representation at the event! Best of us went 1 win and 2 loss. He won against another Slaanesh players. I faced Host arcanum Tzeentch, Sob 4 mega with white dwarf battallions and ko.

The winter faq cannot come soon enough! We really need help for the faction to be more  competitive

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It's really quite depressing when you read pretty much any social media about Slaanesh - so many people (like 9/10 posts on non-Warhammer official posts) have said "Slaanesh box is lovely, too bad the army is in such a poor state that it's not worth it." 

It just seems like at this point there's no way the Warhammer team as a whole haven't realised that a lot of people have been turned off because of the rules. If Slaanesh has sold badly, I don't think it's the lore or the models (both of which have been positively received), but the very poor marketing decisions and incredibly poor reaction to the rules. 

Imagine, in some parallel dimension, just how many more people would play Slaanesh should things have gone well - if our warscrolls were considered more interesting, and if the marketing and hype weren't very mismanaged. Seems like a disappointingly wasted opportunity that may never come around again. 

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55 minutes ago, Enoby said:

Imagine, in some parallel dimension, just how many more people would play Slaanesh should things have gone well - if our warscrolls were considered more interesting, and if the marketing and hype weren't very mismanaged. Seems like a disappointingly wasted opportunity that may never come around again. 

Another take on this could be they are letting all the diehard Slaanesh fans get their pre-order in on the box before dropping us some half decent points reductions and a warscroll update on Slaangor and Shalaxi! 

Pretty unlikely I know but the optimist in me is hoping! they can't mess us up 3 times in a row right?

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8 hours ago, Overread said:

I wonder if they can keep messing it up as far as February so I might have a chance at two boxes :P

I have a two day event in Jan and I'd like to take my slaanesh for a change. I'd compromise and allow slaangor to remain trash to not make the box too appealing!! 

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Pre-ordered my box through an online retailer so it's almost 50% saving for me (if they get the stock they say they are). Will he happy if I do get it as it's all the mortals I don't own but would give me the core of the army I feel I need to be able to put on the table so I can then use the 3500pts of pure Daemons that I own lol. 

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On 12/4/2021 at 9:59 PM, Enoby said:

It's really quite depressing when you read pretty much any social media about Slaanesh - so many people (like 9/10 posts on non-Warhammer official posts) have said "Slaanesh box is lovely, too bad the army is in such a poor state that it's not worth it." 

It just seems like at this point there's no way the Warhammer team as a whole haven't realised that a lot of people have been turned off because of the rules. If Slaanesh has sold badly, I don't think it's the lore or the models (both of which have been positively received), but the very poor marketing decisions and incredibly poor reaction to the rules. 

Imagine, in some parallel dimension, just how many more people would play Slaanesh should things have gone well - if our warscrolls were considered more interesting, and if the marketing and hype weren't very mismanaged. Seems like a disappointingly wasted opportunity that may never come around again. 

This is what actually bothers me.

When our mortal release happened, so many people online and in person spoke highly of new Hedonite models. Five people at my local meta expressed strong desire to buy Hedonite miniatures because they were simply beautiful. They wanted to start playing them and then the rules dropped. Then Lumineth and Soulblight releases came and people jumped ship to those factions, whose rules are far more competitive.

I hope that Hedonites sold well, if not, this will have some major consequences for Slaanesh in all GW ranges.

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4 hours ago, Sorrow said:

This is what actually bothers me.

When our mortal release happened, so many people online and in person spoke highly of new Hedonite models. Five people at my local meta expressed strong desire to buy Hedonite miniatures because they were simply beautiful. They wanted to start playing them and then the rules dropped. Then Lumineth and Soulblight releases came and people jumped ship to those factions, whose rules are far more competitive.

I hope that Hedonites sold well, if not, this will have some major consequences for Slaanesh in all GW ranges.

Yeah, this is my worry too. I know there is a very large proportion of 'silent players' who will never voice their concerns online or get involved in local games stores (they'll just buy to paint or have private friendly games with friends once a month), but the internet noise is hard to ignore, and if the internet noise is representative of the true opinion of the community then their sales would be much lower than they could have been at the least. 

It's more frustrating as, like you said, it was all lining up great until it kind of collapsed in on itself, spurred by a few things which were all avoidable:

- Poor marketing in that they had a single rules preview at the end of the week which told people hardly anything and wasn't very exciting 

- Poor timing in that, a small time before Slaanesh's release, they previewed Soulblight Gravelords which took a massive chunk of the attention from HoS and loads of people saying "would have gone for Slaanesh, but vampires are cooler"

- The first previews of the rules, as well as battle reports, were very negative of the rules, which wasn't helped due to the very lackluster way they hyped the rules leading up to the release 

The reason this is a bit frustrating is that, should it affect GW's view of the financial viability of Slaanesh for things like Emperor's Children, I fully believe they have brought the poor sales on themselves through poor decisions.

As people likely know, I like Slaanesh's rules well enough (just not the points or Slaangors/Shalaxi) but I can't ignore the fact that the internet in general only bemoans them. I was hoping that this release would have been the big break Slaanesh would need to become a more mainstream faction, but because of a series of poor marketing decisions and questionable rules writing, I think it may have not made the cut. 

I say poor marketing decisions as that's my professional background, and it's usually a really bad idea to have two similar products competing with one another in a short space of time before one of them can gather steam - it usually just ends up with one cannibalising sales. Not to mention the fact that the previews for Slaanesh were incredibly sparse.  

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As an anecdote to support all your points, when Slaanesh got its proper AoS tome I grabbed a couple of start collecting sets, Fiends, Daemonettes, enough to get a good start on the army. Slaanesh has always been my favourite Chaos power and I used to play pure Slaanesh in Fantasy battle (sold off when GW was at its darkest point). So, when the new book came out with new models I was all over it. I didn't get to play during the 2.0 hey day but painted a unit of Daemonettes quicker than anything I'd ever painted before or since. Then the new book came out and so I grabbed it, even though the previews were kind of sucky but the models were amazing. All I got that initial weekend was the book, cards and dice. I never bought any of the new mortals. The rules seemed so lackluster, the nerfs too far and too deep, the points increases were insane and Daemons seemed relegated to summoning, so I'd need to put a lot of money into the mortals side to feel like I wouldn't just get curbstomped every game. I don't care too much about winning but the best games are the ones where either side can, I just wanted to be able to have good games where my opponent and I both feel like we have a chance. 

So, rather than spend a lot of money in getting the mortals I would have liked (not to mention the tricky part of actually building a list that felt like it had teeth) I actually used the money I would have needed to buy mortal stuff and picked up 2k of Daughters of Khaine (another army I have always liked as Witch Elves were my favourite unit in OG Dark Elves which I also played in WHFB). 

Therefore, that book and the decision made completely stopped me from spending money. It's all coming OK in the end as I've ordered the Christmas battlebox, but that's because it's an almost 50% discount on buying the stuff separately and contains just what I'd be buying if I had the choice. 

I'm buying it for a love of the models, army, lore and aesthetic, rather than the fact I expect them to win. I doubt that many others are as taken with the faction as I am and are willing to put their hard earned disposable income into it. I find the irony quite delicious that Slaanesh players tend to be passionate about the faction and stick loyally to their obsessions lol. 

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Jumping in to contribute with another anecdote.

Me and one of my friends talk from time to time how Slaanesh would be a cool army to start, but we always give up when we see what we would need to get to make a simple list. I don't know if a no-summoning list as been found since the release, but summoning been a central focus of the army is what turn us away most of the time. Needing a couple of extra models to play make most of the other options more interesting, as you can end with a basic list + other options to try other lists within the same price range you make a slaanesh + summon list.

Mortals is what attracted a lot of the attention, but they rules are quiet lackluster (most have 1 ability on their warscroll) and are quiet overpriced to account for the summoning. When I saw the rules of the new tome I understood why they didn't promote more the tome before it release with rules. There wasn't much to show other than "hey you can summon a bunch of demons and 6 to hit generate extra hits". Cool models need interesting rules too, otherwise you just wait for the next batch of cool model to come.

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The positive reception of mortal Slaanesh probably hasn't gone unnoticed. I expect the next iteration to have much less focus on daemons summoning. An easy fix meanwhile is a points overhaul + nerfing the summoning table to compensate. The exciting part here is that it is a small enough of a fix to fit the format of an AoS dataslate update. All they'd need to to is errata points and summoning cost.

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I personally hope they do not nerf our summoning. It s a mechanic that is well under  control with the current sets of rules in place for it ( only 1 unit a turn, limited amount of depravity generated, depravity is acquired at the end of turn while summoning happens at the end of the Slaanesh player movement phase, no more heroes and a smashed fane mean no summoning)

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50 minutes ago, azdimy said:

I personally hope they do not nerf our summoning. It s a mechanic that is well under  control with the current sets of rules in place for it ( only 1 unit a turn, limited amount of depravity generated, depravity is acquired at the end of turn while summoning happens at the end of the Slaanesh player movement phase, no more heroes and a smashed fane mean no summoning)

I'd personally like to see a Host/subhost without summoning but with something to make up for it, like an ability that'd give the units a boost for depravity instead. Or just have these boosts available for everyone and they can pick and choose between summoning and buffs. It'd be nice if summoning wasn't essential to the faction's playstyle.  

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