Early Impressions: Is Hallowheart too good compared to the other cities?

[Double Misfire]

I've recently finished a review of the new Cities of Sigmar battletome, and while it's very early doors with CoS having been out for less than a week, writing it got me thinking about Hallowheart, and how much better its allegiance abilities, and even battalion seem compared to the other six cities' on a competitive scale. I've got Greywater Fastness and Tempest's Eye armies, and have started writing lists for both, only for it to dawn on me that the same lists would be much better off with the stronghold tab on the Azyr app switched to Hallowheart.

One set of "chapter traits" available to an army outshining the others is not a new phenomena (remember when champions of Khorne got a suit of Chaos armour and double attacks for free, and Slaaneshi ones were given... immune to psychology), and has become a pretty much accepted reality of having cool, characterful rules that allow you theme your force. In my opinion Hallowheart's rules feel like they work as well as they do thanks to CoS, whether by accident or design already being a very magic focused army by default, for the following reasons:

• Enhanced endless spells, presumably to compensate not having boutique ones of our own, not taking at least a couple feels like you're under utilising the army
• Cheap, plentiful wizards
• Sorceresses, who are going to be casting at +2 most of the time
• Sisters of the Thorn, inexpensive wizards and objective grabbers who don't take up a leader slot and can even be run as battleline

Even lists comprised of mostly of duardin are going to be thinking about slipping a cheeky wizard in to get Chronomantic Cogs or Soulcream Bridge off! Cities of Sigmar feel like they should, before a Stronghold's been picked, be an army that's rather average at everything, with your choice of city making them good at one or two different types of gameplay. However, in reality they're an army that's average at everything, bar magic, which they're already pretty good at, with Hallowheart making them so excellent at it  Tzeentch would blush.

Hallowheart's allegiance abilities are so good, with being able to cast two spells effectively doubling the value of a Sorceress or Battlemage (you weren't taking them to whack things with their staves),  and allowing even armies going light on magic to save points by only needing to take half the wizards they would have; and Arcane Channeling's risk to the the target character easily offset by Ignax's Scales and Sear Wounds, that anything else offered by the other cities pales in comparison. 

Do you agree on Hallowheart's perceived power disparity,  or am I overreacting, having decided the sky's falling way too early? How would you fix Hallowheart (or tune up the other cities)? I'm very interested to know if anyone else has been writing lists for their chosen city and thought "Boy, I sure could save points on the wizards I'm taking anyway and unleash some endless spell hell if I moved my army over to Hallowheart"? Very interested to know what everyone else thinks.  

 

Disclaimer: I've created this thread to talk about Hallowheart's allegiance abilities being better than the other cities', not Anvilgard's being worse. Please keep Anvilgard backchat to a minimum. 😜

Edited October 11, 2019 by Double Misfire

[JackStreicher]

I think Hallowheart is good but for the models I have (and like) I figured that most of the other cities are really good as well since they offer agility and powerful passive buffs.

[dekay]

Hallowheart seems very good, but not much better than Living City and Tempest's Eye that can do some crazy things as well. It might be the most obvious to use, but I'm not yet convinced it's straight up better than at least these other two.
 

22 minutes ago, Double Misfire said:

 (remember when champions of Khorne got a suit of Chaos armour and double attacks for free, and Slaaneshi ones were given... immune to psychology)

Is that the time in 5th edition when Tzeentch got 1 dice re-roll for the entire game? If so, Slaanesh was arguably better ; )

[Gwendar]

22 minutes ago, Double Misfire said:

Tzeentch would blush.

Just think about how they're going to look with their update... I hate to think about it.

Hallowheart is strong, but overall I think it's very mid-high tier book and I think it will take a couple tournaments to see whats working. A lot of people are putting stock into maxing out their Wizards and I really think that's a trap that you shouldn't fall into.. like you said, it works exceptionally well having other units in to supplement the strong magic. 3-4 Wizards is generally enough and fill the rest up to your hearts content.. but I think other cities emphasize other, more specific playstyles and lists while Hallowheart just kinda works for everything. You can still get a Sorceress + a Bridge and put your -insert strong shooting unit here- right in your opponents face and that isn't dependent on HH.

Some FAQ's definitely need to hit (like, I fully expect you to not be able to shrug off those MW's from the CA to get the cast bonus) and overall we just need more time to see what everyone comes up with. I'd rather see other Cities tuned up than down... but I'm a bit stuck on thinking of how. Other cities can already do some pretty nutty things, just in their own right.

[stratigo]

Tempest Eye and Phonecium I warrant have stronger builds, but it is also a question of the meta.

 

Hallowheart will absolutely mash armies that rely too heavily on support combos. Hallowheart has too many ways to put d3 mortal wounds out on a pile of models, and if your combo is relying in 2 5 wounds models and a 12 wounder, you're gonna be kinda sad when hallowheart nukes it. 

 

They absolutely ruin tzeentch super hard, and I think CoS when built competitively is a strong counter to Hedonites in general which ever competitive city you build in towards. 

 

Hallowheart are the new kings of the magic phase, more than nagash even. But the magic phase is largely focused on sniping with mortal wounds. There's only one spell that is really good against a horde that hallowheart, and it has a very short range and the wording makes me question if it can be cast through a spell portal. Hallowheart has to rely a lot on the interacts of buffs and debuffs to make it work.

 

Tempest's eye reigns supreme as the shooting list, and you think hallowheart is scary? Tempest's eye can and will blow a trio of keepers off the board in a turn with just basic average rolling. You want to be playing a very resilient army to beat tempest's eye, or you will get shot off the table.

 

What all cities lack is that combat unit that breaks the game. Like keepers, or buffed daughters. The closest you get is phoenecium, but I think they tinge a bit more towards resilience and just abusing how good phoenixes are. Phoenixes are crazy amazing. I'm not sure if people have got it fully yet. Making phoenixes is better is just solid strategy. They're hard to kill, have access to specialized traits and artifacts in phonecium, and poop out mortal wound. A bubble of frost and fire phoenixes are gonna be real hard to pull down even if they can't pull out the crazy damage that a keeper does.

[CB42]

I think I can make strong tournament competitive lists for all 7 cities.

 

I think Hallowheart is the most obviously strong allegiance at first glance but, aside from Ignite Weapons, Mystic shield, or warscroll spells, there isn’t a lot of buffing of other units going on. Hallowheart is amazing at spells, but that’s really most of what it does. Other cities can take large numbers of units and give them more or better bonuses than Hallowheart (Tempest’s Eye and +1 to wound for shooting AND +1 melee attacks, Hammerhal and demigryphs/Griffon, Greywater Fastness and artillery) or they have their own cool tricks (Living City and Phoenicium come to mind) or their own gamechanging spells (Anvilgard), or they can do cool combos with other allegiances (Living City and Tempest’s Eye), or they can participate in the Fight First activation wars (Living City and Tempest’s Eye). The point is, what other cities do isn’t as obviously flashy, but each of them is tournament viable.

Honestly, Tempest’s Eye and Living City are the two biggest standouts to me, much more so than hallowheart. And I’m planning on taking Anvilgard to tournaments once I’ve finished assembling my new army because I think it can win tournaments.

[Rivener]

3 hours ago, stratigo said:

Phoenixes are crazy amazing. I'm not sure if people have got it fully yet. Making phoenixes is better is just solid strategy. They're hard to kill, have access to specialized traits and artifacts in phonecium, and poop out mortal wound. A bubble of frost and fire phoenixes are gonna be real hard to pull down even if they can't pull out the crazy damage that a keeper does.

How are they pooping out mortal wounds? Best Flamespyre can do is 5 a turn, but then they can’t fight. Or if they do fight then they aren’t doing their mortals anymore.

[Gwendar]

19 minutes ago, Rivener said:

How are they pooping out mortal wounds? Best Flamespyre can do is 5 a turn, but then they can’t fight. Or if they do fight then they aren’t doing their mortals anymore.

You have options; you use it when engaging a unit, flying over to hit them (or a support hero behind them) and then charging in. You can also just use it for this purpose and retreat out of that combat to kill another support hero if needed. Best thing about this guy is you have a 50% chance for it to come back, at full wounds when it dies.. it's pretty solid honestly.

[mmimzie]

Hallow heart is definitly good, and lots of folks like to compare the casting bonuses to that of nagash list  where you could get curse of years and hand of dust. Powerful spells that make a huge difference. 

As @stratigo says hollow heart is amazing at taking out combo pieces as they can find and pick off character easily. 

They like all the cities can also take some pretty great shooting and very easily get them into distance to hit most any targets, with little opponent recourse. 

That said melee punch is lacking and your ability to buff shooting/melee is limited to +1 to wound and maybe +1 to hit (from huricanum that is not hollow heart specific). This means that in the melee parts of the game which still is the heart of AoS Hallow Heart gets a bit hallow and loses a bit of heart. 

Tempest eye and living city can bring much more powerful shooting and melee options to bare with verious tricks and abilities to buff and get units into  fighting range. 

Hallow Heart is quite good and i'd put it up there, but looking at built out list it's missing a key piece or prospective to make it really pop. 

[NinthMusketeer]

Yup, absolutely. The combination of ignoring spells, all wizards getting an extra spell (holy ******), and a command ability that grants an aoe bubble of +d6 to casting every turn* puts it well above the other cities. I believe it is thoroughly overpowered and we will see that represented in tourney lists.

*In theory the model using it suffers d6 MWs. In reality that model will have ignax scales to ignore those on a 4+ then have another wizard cast the heal d6s wounds spell on them using said bonus.

[overtninja]

Hallowheart is extremely counter-meta at the moment, where you never want to get into melee with the really filthy armies because of ASF and double pile-ins. Hallowheart also doesn't care at all how magical you are because of how strong their unbinds and casts are, and have the oomph to magic most things off the table.

I think Hallowheart will be in a similar place to Shootcast - you're going to obliterate many meta armies, but others will be able to run over and mangle your fragile line - pretty much anything that infiltrates should do well, because they present no targets until they are dealing lots of damage.

[angrycontra]

My problem with hallowheart is same as my problem with nagash: it's not that they're necessarily op but they are simply incredibly unfun to play against. Your magic is carbage against them and you can't do ****** against their magic. There is literally no real interaction when it's their hero phase, you just watch as magic flies and kills anyone with no magic/mortal wound protection. 

[Smooth criminal]

Yes, absolutely. However it is also true in relation to other factions, one-two options are always much better than the rest.

[Dr Ben]

3 hours ago, overtninja said:

Hallowheart is extremely counter-meta at the moment, where you never want to get into melee with the really filthy armies because of ASF and double pile-ins. Hallowheart also doesn't care at all how magical you are because of how strong their unbinds and casts are, and have the oomph to magic most things off the table.

I think Hallowheart will be in a similar place to Shootcast - you're going to obliterate many meta armies, but others will be able to run over and mangle your fragile line - pretty much anything that infiltrates should do well, because they present no targets until they are dealing lots of damage.

I agree. Hallowheart us undoubtedly very good. But if you want to include all the wizards and a couple of hundred points of endless spells then you will probably have to run a pretty low wound/model count army. There are important differences with the tzeentch endless spell list which has seen some success. The tzeentch list has  mobility from change host, low drops so they can go first and block the board with spells before their opponents first turn, and then summons a lot of wounds worth of blues and brimstones. Hallowheart turns the casting up to 11 but it doesn't do those other things as well. 

We'll have to see, but low drop alpha strike lists will probably counter most Hallowheart lists pretty well. As should armies with a lot of mortal wound protection (including other Co's lists) and khorne with endless prayers.

[Kamose]

I've played a couple of games with Hallowheart and their MW output is pretty nuts. Against Fyreslayers I dealt 20+ MW in a single Hero Phase! This was in a Meeting Engagements game so that was some serious damage.

Unfortunately I lost that game so that proves Hallowheart is trash, GW sucks, and I burned my army.

Next thread! 😎

[JackStreicher]

3 hours ago, Smooth criminal said:

 However it is also true in relation to other factions, one-two options are always much better than the rest.

Yes, sadly that‘s usually the case with GW, I haven‘t had that issue with other Warhames yet. One can think of that what one will, yet it surely is no testament to good Gamedesign. 😌

Edited October 12, 2019 by JackStreicher
Typo due to autocorrect

[NinthMusketeer]

Hallowheart vs Hallowheart; where the two armies glare at each other and ignore MWs the whole game.

[swarmofseals]

I've been thinking about this a great deal and voted undecided in the poll. I think that Hallowheart magic is the single most obviously powerful/gamebreaking thing in the book, but I don't think the allegiance overall is clearly the most powerful. As others have suggested I think it depends a lot on the meta/matchup.

Against melee heavy armies, I think Hallowheart is very, very strong assuming you are taking a ton of endless spells to clog up the board. Hallowheart can do an impressive amount of damage and make it quite annoying for the opponent to get stuck it.

That being said, piling up the endless spells is expensive and even with them Hallowheart magic is not exactly super cost effective in terms of actual damage output. 20 mortal wounds in a hero phase is nice, but if you are spending a third to a half of your points to do that then you really could do a lot better.

True gunline builds can bet set up to output 100-150 before-save damage per turn, and for several of the builds a good chunk of that damage is mortal and/or with substantial rend. Most of the best gunline builds are Tempest Eye, although a Handgunners based build can be any city. 

I think the wizard build has clear counters. A deploy-off-the-table alpha strike or a first turn low drop alpha strike army will probably be very good against many wizardstar type builds. Real gunlines will also be very good against wizards. 

I'm much less confident that there is anything out there right now that can counter the true gunline builds.

[Tankman]

Hallowheart is great until you try and cast all those spells vs hexgor skulls and blow up your army.

I do think Hallowheart is strong but it's biggest weakness in my mind is, while you will have plenty of magic output, you will lack physical bodies for board presence and all of your key pieces are going to be grouped together in a giant ball.

[Frowny]

It certainly is obvious and strong but I'm not sure overpowered. I think a big reason tzeentch spell spam is good is because with the battalion they have the mobility to drop them t1 and the low drops to guarantee the best turn. Hallowheart has better raw casting, true, but with all the little wizards is almost never getting optimal turn, and doesn't have the mobility to drop in more than a few long range spells. Or you have to spend even more In support.

Eventually I think the strongest hallowheart builds will combine it with something else. All the wizards at base are pretty cheap for what you get leaving plenty for room for a 1500 point gunline for example. 

I played a bonesplitterz arm last week. He had 270 wounds on the board. My mortal wounds annilhiated his key characters and high value targets. Then he had 250 wounds left and murdered me with strong melee bodies that made my mortal wounds feel pathetic.

[JackStreicher]

1 hour ago, Frowny said:

I played a bonesplitterz arm last week. He had 270 wounds on the board. My mortal wounds annilhiated his key characters and high value targets. Then he had 250 wounds left and murdered me with strong melee bodies that made my mortal wounds feel pathetic.

no matter what you compare to Orcs it will simply be worse due to Orcs being OP af 🤣

Edited October 13, 2019 by JackStreicher

[StarJackel]

Hallowheart strikes me as being a bit of a one trick pony. If somebody can counter your magic or limit it’s effect on the game, then you are in trouble. For that reason, I don’t think it is necessarily the most powerful city in the book. Possibly it just has the most obvious combinations to make a competitive army.

I also think that some of the other cities will perform far better on the table then they do on paper currently and that in 6 months time this may well be a very different conversation.

[NinthMusketeer]

What would be some ways for an opposing army to counter Hallowheart magic?

[stratigo]

2 minutes ago, NinthMusketeer said:

What would be some ways for an opposing army to counter Hallowheart magic?

First turn alpha lists I think have a good chance of cleaning up hallowheart through overwhelming its screens before the buffs and debuffs come out and then subsequently killing its key pieces since even with debuffs and buffs, a wizard is quite squishy. Even the big wizards are. 

 

I think armies that combo fast hard hitting units with large numbers of bodies can also outplay the objective game. Hallowheart only has one really good horde clearing spell and point for point, CoS units aren't melee powerhouses mostly.

[mmimzie]

i don't know 40 dark shards split split between 2 or 3 units makes screen that can keep you safe a for a turn against most stuff.  Depending on what kind of punch you have behind that you can. 

That said it would be tough. After all the wizards it tough to bring melee or shooting forces that can hit hard enough to matter, while also having screen that can keep you safe. Putting you in situations where during list building you end up needing to build your shooting units as a screen. 

Folks i think look at the army list it's nagash, but you have to consider nagash was also super hard to kill for his points along with great screen, and spells powerful enough to possibly instantly kill a model or whole unit. Where as the hollow heart wizards are throwing around buffed versions of the old arcane bolt and giving units +1 to wound.  

There are change host comparisons but change host can 1 drop, and then summon a wall that can stop armies from moving accross the table. While also summoning several new units up the table for free at the start of the game.  Now flying units, unbinds, and other low drop armies can counter this quickly and easily. Hallow heart has no 1 drop option, at best your at 4 drops. Meaning you can't pick when to go against most armies that care enough to get small enough.

I don't think hallow heart is bad. I just think folks just like equating the army to nagash with out understanding why nagash is good. Or comparing it to change host with out understanding why change host is good. I think there is good stuff to hallow heart and ways that they can rock top 10 and maybe take a few tournaments with good match ups, a nice list, and skilled play.  But i could say the same for deepkin, nurgle, and dok??? in the current meta, and i think maybe hallow heart is abit worse than those other 3.