AoS 2 - Hedonites of Slaanesh Discussion

[Rock Lobster]

15 minutes ago, Saiken said:

To be fair, it's more a question of "what time are you wanting to put into this". Most minis with super smooth transition and blends are display pieces or painted for competition. It takes a long time, unless you're using an airbrush. 

Though , to get super smooth blend it's basically a mix of techniques such as wet blending, void blending, and again a lot of time and layers.
Vince Venturella explains it very well in this video.  Also It can be interesting to check his minis for inspiration because he plays slaanesh.

Thanks man, I'll check them out

[Rock Lobster]

6 minutes ago, CB42 said:

My WIP Fulgrim that will be a Keeper of Secrets proxy. I used the new Abaddon model’s upper half (with the back of the helm cut off) with baby Morathi’s hair. Arms are Drachnyen and the Talon of Horus from Abaddon, Morathi’s spear, and a claw from a Fiend. Lots of green stuff was necessary to close gaps to get the back of the model to fit.

Wow that is a great conversion

[Enoby]

Anyone thought of any use for mercenaries? Just trying to think of what we lack  that other  warscrolls could give us; shooting, maybe?

[CB42]

3 minutes ago, Enoby said:

Anyone thought of any use for mercenaries? Just trying to think of what we lack  that other  warscrolls could give us; shooting, maybe?

An Abhorrant Archregent in an Invaders army with rod of misrule wouldn’t be terrible for access to summoning anywhere on the board, forcing opponents to screen their own back line or lose their objectives... but for 200 points and 2 CP I’d rather have an Epitome and two fight twice activations.

15 Hearthguard Berzerkers and the endless spell Lauchon the Soulseeker would be legit in any army, but I’d rather take 30 Bestigors and Cogs and 1cp.

I think the mercenary system so far is best for armies that have extra CP but are weak in terms of summoning or damage output. While we can get extra CP, we already are pretty good at whatever the current mercenaries do.

If we really need ranged allies, I’d currently look towards Ungor Raiders - 40 of them are great at screening and solid at shooting - 40 shots at 4s and 4s but rerolling 1s and 2s to hit is decent.

[Rock Lobster]

1 hour ago, CB42 said:

An Abhorrant Archregent in an Invaders army with rod of misrule wouldn’t be terrible for access to summoning anywhere on the board, forcing opponents to screen their own back line or lose their objectives... but for 200 points and 2 CP I’d rather have an Epitome and two fight twice activations.

15 Hearthguard Berzerkers and the endless spell Lauchon the Soulseeker would be legit in any army, but I’d rather take 30 Bestigors and Cogs and 1cp.

I think the mercenary system so far is best for armies that have extra CP but are weak in terms of summoning or damage output. While we can get extra CP, we already are pretty good at whatever the current mercenaries do.

If we really need ranged allies, I’d currently look towards Ungor Raiders - 40 of them are great at screening and solid at shooting - 40 shots at 4s and 4s but rerolling 1s and 2s to hit is decent.

I think this is better for weaker armies, slaanesh benefits from more slaanesh. Bigger excitement will be from any drops in other armies in the GHB that can be marked slaanesh like slaves to darkness.

[Rock Lobster]

One funky interaction with the mercenaries would be the marauders, if they are still slaves to darkness. If they are you could still mark them slaanesh and then with Sayle teleport them 9" away from the enemy in the backfield and since it is a setup their ability allows them to move D6" to close the distance on the enemy for a teleport and charge.

[Carnith]

That's probably not the in scope of what they intended. Probably mean their first set up they can make a scout move. But I don't really care about some marauders flying up the board to charge me, they are usually so weak that you will just push them over. Or the thing you do is you throw them in front of a fast enemy without fly and just have them be a road block.

[Rock Lobster]

17 minutes ago, carnith said:

That's probably not the in scope of what they intended. Probably mean their first set up they can make a scout move. But I don't really care about some marauders flying up the board to charge me, they are usually so weak that you will just push them over. Or the thing you do is you throw them in front of a fast enemy without fly and just have them be a road block.

I wouldn't really use them to fly up the board and charge the strong stuff, its more for getting around the screens and charging grey seers and warp lightning cannons hiding behinds those screens.

[Rock Lobster]

So I am wondering if the mercenaries clears up  why we have the silly wording on some abilities that affect ‘chaos slaanesh’ units. It’s silly since all slaanesh units are by their nature chaos.

However if the mercenary keyword replaces the grand alliance keyword,  then slaanesh marauders would become ‘mercenary slaanesh’ and hence would not be affected by those same abilities.

[Enoby]

1 hour ago, Rock Lobster said:

So I am wondering if the mercenaries clears up  why we have the silly wording on some abilities that affect ‘chaos slaanesh’ units. It’s silly since all slaanesh units are by their nature chaos.

However if the mercenary keyword replaces the grand alliance keyword,  then slaanesh marauders would become ‘mercenary slaanesh’ and hence would not be affected by those same abilities.

That would be an interesting change; if it were the case, I wonder if it would have an effect on things that do extra damage on Chaos or whatever. 

[Kasper]

How do you guys deal with Seraphon? I have loads of issues with this matchup. He runs 1 Engine of the Gods, 2 Bastilladons, 1 bearer and 4 Razordons, Slaan and then screens of Skinks. He also used Shackles to lock down units while they got pinned and shot off the table.

I ran with 1 Keeper, 2 Exalted Chariots, 1 Epitome, then 2x 30 Daemonettes and 1x 20 Daemonettes.

I can't ever get to the Slaan and the Bearer, they just chill all game. It didn't help he got 2 arcane terrains right next to each other. Each round of shooting the Bastilladons wipe out 1 unit of 30 Daemonettes quite easily. 4 Razordons took out my Keeper in 1 round too etc.

I think I approach the matchup all wrong, but I have always had issues with this list and can't ever break the wall. It's especially bad when he gets a double turn with the 2 Bastilladons. 

[Magnus The Blue]

2 minutes ago, Kasper said:

How do you guys deal with Seraphon? I have loads of issues with this matchup. He runs 1 Engine of the Gods, 2 Bastilladons, 1 bearer and 4 Razordons, Slaan and then screens of Skinks. He also used Shackles to lock down units while they got pinned and shot off the table.

I ran with 1 Keeper, 2 Exalted Chariots, 1 Epitome, then 2x 30 Daemonettes and 1x 20 Daemonettes.

I can't ever get to the Slaan and the Bearer, they just chill all game. It didn't help he got 2 arcane terrains right next to each other. Each round of shooting the Bastilladons wipe out 1 unit of 30 Daemonettes quite easily. 4 Razordons took out my Keeper in 1 round too etc.

I think I approach the matchup all wrong, but I have always had issues with this list and can't ever break the wall. It's especially bad when he gets a double turn with the 2 Bastilladons. 

I think shooting heavy armies (with good screens) are always going to be our worst matchups, but your not doing yourself any favours with all those Daemonettes. Annoyingly Daemonettes are just really bad, they are expensive, squishy, don't hit particularly hard and worse of all, they are relatively slow. Those 820 points could be

-40 Helstriders: much faster, better save and aren't daemons (so less effected by anti-chaos stuff).  Or

-a Beast Battalion, Bray Shaman and  120 Ungor (30 points more including the battalion),: faster, harder to kill, better at screening, come with a caster, less drops and comparable damage output. Or go for minimum Ungors and some Beastigors to break people's faces.

-60 Marauders and 460 points to spend on other stuff.

Since out armies tend to spend a lot of points on heros, who are always easier to kill than the same points of units, you need to make sure the non-hero part of your list can pull it's weight and control the board, so you can pin enemies into a part of the board.

Annoyingly we are in the position where we have one decent battleline (Helstriders) unless you add in some Beasts or Slaves to Darkness. Against lists who can shoot down our heros, you need to have some tough and hard hitting backup to support them. Against lots of armies it's a non-issue because your heros do all the heavy lifting and the army feels powerful.

If your stuck for models you can change up your artefacts to help: Gryph Feather charm on an exalted chariot makes it -2 to hit from shooting once a unit is near by, making it near immune to regular shooting (and an extra point of movement is no harm).

 

[Enoby]

It's strange, daemonettes seem to have gone from close to overpowered to just okay without many actual rules changes.   

[Kramer]

1 hour ago, Kasper said:

How do you guys deal with Seraphon? I have loads of issues with this matchup. He runs 1 Engine of the Gods, 2 Bastilladons, 1 bearer and 4 Razordons, Slaan and then screens of Skinks. He also used Shackles to lock down units while they got pinned and shot off the table.

I ran with 1 Keeper, 2 Exalted Chariots, 1 Epitome, then 2x 30 Daemonettes and 1x 20 Daemonettes.

I can't ever get to the Slaan and the Bearer, they just chill all game. It didn't help he got 2 arcane terrains right next to each other. Each round of shooting the Bastilladons wipe out 1 unit of 30 Daemonettes quite easily. 4 Razordons took out my Keeper in 1 round too etc.

I think I approach the matchup all wrong, but I have always had issues with this list and can't ever break the wall. It's especially bad when he gets a double turn with the 2 Bastilladons. 

what about seekers? their speed should at least force your opponent to better protect the slann if not you should be able to reach it. With a bit of luck 10 should be able to kill it.

[Kasper]

2 hours ago, Kramer said:

what about seekers? their speed should at least force your opponent to better protect the slann if not you should be able to reach it. With a bit of luck 10 should be able to kill it.

To be fair we just took a table someone else played prior to us, and they had put up an absurd amount of terrain pieces I think we had around 10 sizable pieces on a normal sized table, which is obviously a huge advantage to him, since it is so easy to create road blocks.

[Kasper]

3 hours ago, Magnus The Blue said:

I think shooting heavy armies (with good screens) are always going to be our worst matchups, but your not doing yourself any favours with all those Daemonettes. Annoyingly Daemonettes are just really bad, they are expensive, squishy, don't hit particularly hard and worse of all, they are relatively slow. Those 820 points could be

-40 Helstriders: much faster, better save and aren't daemons (so less effected by anti-chaos stuff).  Or

-a Beast Battalion, Bray Shaman and  120 Ungor (30 points more including the battalion),: faster, harder to kill, better at screening, come with a caster, less drops and comparable damage output. Or go for minimum Ungors and some Beastigors to break people's faces.

-60 Marauders and 460 points to spend on other stuff.

Since out armies tend to spend a lot of points on heros, who are always easier to kill than the same points of units, you need to make sure the non-hero part of your list can pull it's weight and control the board, so you can pin enemies into a part of the board.

Annoyingly we are in the position where we have one decent battleline (Helstriders) unless you add in some Beasts or Slaves to Darkness. Against lists who can shoot down our heros, you need to have some tough and hard hitting backup to support them. Against lots of armies it's a non-issue because your heros do all the heavy lifting and the army feels powerful.

If your stuck for models you can change up your artefacts to help: Gryph Feather charm on an exalted chariot makes it -2 to hit from shooting once a unit is near by, making it near immune to regular shooting (and an extra point of movement is no harm).

 

I have thought about trying Ungors, since I already have some Beastmen. However I was never fan of mass Ungor spam, so I primarily got Bullgors and Tzaangors/Enlightened etc. My plan was to focus on "normal" Slaanesh units. My list was certainly not optimized. Looking back I would have gone for Thermal Rider's Cloak on the KoS. Against shooting armies, having 2 KoS might be superior too as it divides his attention.

[Kramer]

14 minutes ago, Kasper said:

To be fair we just took a table someone else played prior to us, and they had put up an absurd amount of terrain pieces I think we had around 10 sizable pieces on a normal sized table, which is obviously a huge advantage to him, since it is so easy to create road blocks.

Hahaha yeeeeahhhh.... that’s an absurd amount.... i ehh I ehh never would go that full 🙈

[swarmofseals]

5 hours ago, Kasper said:

Each round of shooting the Bastilladons wipe out 1 unit of 30 Daemonettes quite easily

2 Solar Engines should kill 11.67 daemonettes per round of shooting on average. If your opponent was regularly killing 30 in one go then he got very, very lucky.

[Poryague]

45 minutes ago, swarmofseals said:

2 Solar Engines should kill 11.67 daemonettes per round of shooting on average. If your opponent was regularly killing 30 in one go then he got very, very lucky.

Is this taking in consideration he reroll hits and and wound rolls.  Because damage seems low considering average 7 shots each.

[jackmcmahon]

41 minutes ago, swarmofseals said:

2 Solar Engines should kill 11.67 daemonettes per round of shooting on average. If your opponent was regularly killing 30 in one go then he got very, very lucky.

Looks like he MAY have had thunderquake battalion? Rerolls can up that to 17.5 on 7 attacks each.  Anything with random attack amounts can swing a lot more than average since it isn't just pass/fail of hits and wounds.  

[Benkei]

So any ideas about the mercenary companies? Maybe some seduced Dwarven warmachines to get some shooting? Or it is not really needed given our speed? 

[Rock Lobster]

14 minutes ago, Benkei said:

So any ideas about the mercenary companies? Maybe some seduced Dwarven warmachines to get some shooting? Or it is not really needed given our speed? 

I think our army is structured in a way where any point invested in slaanesh heroes is very valuable. Since you need to pay the core tax anyway any points spent on mercenaries comes directly out of those valuable character points. As such the mercenaries would need to bring something spectacular to overcome this - also cp is very valuable to us and mercs eat it.

The most valuable additions would probably be the dwarf organ guns or the flesh eater arch regents. The issues are that while the archregents give you a handy deepstrike summon they consume the 1 cp first turn and their abilities consume 2 more which is no good for us. With the organ guns that is a much smaller investment of the 1cp first turn, but 3 organ guns is a keeper of secrets... that is missing out on a great spell, high combat power, a 2+ locus and 13 built in depravity points plus any points generated. I dont see how you can make that trade work efficiently.

Gloomspite however will love those options, they have no real worries about trading out their own stuff for mercs and have a bucket of command points.

[Carnith]

I think mercenaries are not a thing for us. We rely too much on our heroes that taking heroes away from us or points for better heroes will cost us too much

[swarmofseals]

7 hours ago, Poryague said:

Is this taking in consideration he reroll hits and and wound rolls.  Because damage seems low considering average 7 shots each.

No, you are correct. I was just going by the baseline stats. With rerolls to hit and wound they will kill 23 daemonettes on average. With rerolls to wound only it's 15.5 and 17.5 with hit only.

7 hours ago, jackmcmahon said:

Looks like he MAY have had thunderquake battalion? Rerolls can up that to 17.5 on 7 attacks each.  Anything with random attack amounts can swing a lot more than average since it isn't just pass/fail of hits and wounds.  

Sure, I'm not suggesting that two Bastiladons can't kill 30 Daemonettes in one go. They clearly can. 

I see a lot of posts (not just here, but in every Warhammer group that I've visited) that take the form of "X opponent totally stomped me, how can I possibly beat this list?" and more often than not when the person actually described what happened in the game it's clear that their opponent rolled really well.

It's foolish to generalize from "I lost this game in a dramatic fashion" to "I can't ever beat this list" in pretty much any situation, but it's particularly foolish if you already have clear evidence that the results of that one game are driven at least in significant part by luck.

__________

@Kasper  -- back to the original question of how to beat that list. I agree with others here insofar as a list like this is going to be a difficult matchup for most Slaanesh armies simply because the Bastiladon shooting is very good against our daemons, and we are very daemon focused and we lack ranged to clear out those screens or pick off the key support units. There are a couple of things that this Seraphon list is weak to. Let's look at how it functions. The base list you described has 1700 points tied up in the Slann Starmaster, Astrolith Bearer, 2 Bastiladon, 4 Razordons, 1 unit of Skink Handlers, the Engine of the Gods, and 3x10 skinks. There might be more skinks than that, of course, but there isn't much room in the list for anything else major.

• All of the offensive punch is tied up in the shooting, and that shooting really needs to stay close to both the EoTG and the Astrolith Bearer. Without the rerolls to hit and wound the list just doesn't do enough damage to be a serious threat. The Razordons also only have a short range of 12" and the EoTG range is not that icnredible at 20". 
• The list is 6 drops at an absolute minimum, meaning you should be able to get the choice of first turn. 
• Basically everything in the list is defensively inefficient except the Skinks. Bastiladons are OK against regular damage if they get the reroll save buff. Otherwise their defensive efficiency is horrible. The EoTG is OK with rerolls to save but horrible without.
• Combatwise, the list is most vulnerable on the first turn if you are going first. If you can make a legitimate alpha strike, you can get one turn of combat in before they get to enable their reroll saves. 
• Aside from that, the list is very vulnerable to any opponent that is prepared to play the objectives. They have to keep the vast majority of their resources in the same place, and their offensive output is not very impressive. Therefore if you can get to the objectives and have enough defensive efficiency they can't really hope to win. Even if you let their Slann summon all game long they won't amass enough to dislodge you until the late game and by then you will be too far ahead. 

Given this analysis, I think you can make the matchup favorable in two ways. One is to go for a full on horde approach and just put as many bodies as you can on the board. Non daemons are preferable, but even daemons are fine if you put enough of them on the board. 

The other (and imo better) approach is to focus on a Depraved Drove list. For one, this is probably the best way to flood the board win non-daemons. Marauders and Hellstriders are nice, but they can't compete with Ungors, Bestigors, Centigors, Bullgors etc.

You also get a very legitimate shot at presenting a serious T1 threat. Ungor Raiders can get into range very easily and clear out the Skink screens, giving a big unit of Bullgors or Bestigors the chance to take a boat ride courtesy of Lauchon. The 12" boat plus a 6" move and run+charge should be plenty to get a T1 charge off unless your opponent deploys way back in a corner. If they do that, they are basically conceding anyway as you can take over the board instead of alpha-striking and they will never deal damage quickly enough to dislodge you in time. Depending on what you get access to, 30 charging Bestigors has a very good chance of killing 2 out of the 3 behemoths on turn 1, which will be game over. Even if you only kill one of them it's probably game-over, especially if it's the EoTG.

 

[jackmcmahon]

I played one game vs thunderquake at 1750 I think.  I just kept charging in exalted seeker chariots to stop them from shooting other stuff while I had objectives.  His t1 he popped 24 dnettes so figured I'd just try to have the majority for three turns.  Lord of chaos was in there, too.  His turning into spawn means even if a shooting unit kills him in one turn, they still have another unit holding them down for another turn.