Is Death the WORST faction in AoS?

[Sception]

That said, even if I think OBR is pretty good, actually, that's still only one solid faction out of only four factions in the alliance, and that's not exactly a great showing.  Legions of Nagash is an aging and ramshackle book in need of significant renovations that probably aren't coming since the narrative has left them behind.

Nighthaunt have an overall fantastic range but lots of mechanical problems -  including how much of their range is co-opted by the Legions with their radically different faction rules, making it difficult to give those units rules and points costs that are balanced in both books; several conceptually redundant units in the 'semi-elite melee ghost infantry' category. too much reliance on too fragile heroes, deep strike and double charge rules both combining to make the faction far too reliant on long bomb charge rolls, the factions basic core hoard infantry chaff being ludicrously expensive to purchase, etc.  The line is great, but the faction needs a serious rethink.

And then there's FEC, which is like the inverse of Nighthaunt, with rules that ahttps://navinet.navimedix.com/sign-in?ReturnUrl=/re somewhat fun and functional in practice, at least after several rounds of errata, but a range that simply is not up to the task of supporting an entire faction.  FEC also have a fantastic narrative theme in being disgusting cannibal monsters who see themselves as courtly royals and noble knights, but that theme isn't at all conveyed in the models.  The horrid monsters bit is there, but not the delusions,  since the range are oldhammer holdovers that predate that characterization.  they need new models & new units to convey the theme - horrors pretending to ride toy horses made from head horses heads on pikes, courtiers carrying tattered banners of scrap cloth, ghoul kings with magnificent robes of flayed flesh and resplendent crowns cobbled together from bits of broken bone and broken glass.  The faction desperately needs more units to 'flesh' out their range, but the units they already have don't convey their cool theme either, so it's really just a lot of unmet potential, no matter how workable their rules are regardless.  And even their rules and play on the tabletop, the saving grace of the FEC currently, involves dealing with the hassle of a big pile of errata.  FEC also have almost zero narrative presence in the overall game lore and even in within the death alliance, in part due to a lack of named characters.

 

I think both Nighthaunt and FEC could be spectacular factions, but Nighthaunt needs a new book and in particular needs many of their warscrolls to be significantly rethought and rewritten from the ground up which GW almost never bothers to do, and even on top of that the chainrasps need a significant price reduction, which GW *never* does, so while they have the model range of a great faction I don't expect they have any chance of becoming one any time soon.  FEC *could* be a truely great faction with just one big push.  Give us like 3 to new units with new model kits to round out the rage, actual plastic kits for the courtiers, actually work the delusions / think they're noble knights theme into the models themselves, and give them a new book that adds this new stuff while keeping what's great about the existing rules & incorporating the errata, and FEC could be one of the most fun, cool, and interesting factions in the game.  But it needs that big release wave to get there, and looking at other non-stormcast AoS factions and their follow up books with few to no new models to speak of, including FEC themselves, that just doesn't seem likely either.

LoN, well...  I've got another thread going for where I think they *could* go, and there have been some promising rumour engines, but I don't want to get my hopes up, because outright squatting the entire faction is still a distinct possibility.

 

So yeah, even thinking OBR is good, things still don't look great for Death as a whole.

[Nasrod]

4 hours ago, Sception said:

2020 dropped stalkers and morghasts by the same amount of points - which happens to be about the most points that they adjust things by at a time, which is about the best that could be hoped for when they're functionally working blind thanks to COVID knocking out the competitive scene at the time.

Otherwise, I find OBR to be a particularly *well* written tome when compared to other new AoS factions from Games Workshop.  Yeah there are some dud units - morghasts, vokmortian, reaper, immortis - but near about every other unit has seen at least some competitive play, and that's remarkably strong internal balance for a brand new GW faction.  Idoneth or Nighthaunt would kill for OBR's internal balance.  The faction is strong enough to have a regular competitive presence - not relative duds like Nighthaunt, Sylvaneth, Stormcast, or Beastmen - but also without being an OP nightmare out of the gate like Daughters or FEC or Slaanesh were.  Subfaction balance was terrible and remains not great, sure, but that's par for the course in AoS, and not great is still a dramatic improvement over terrible.  As it stands, Praetoreans, Post-Nerf Petrifex, and Stalliarch all making strong cases for themselves, and even Null Myriad looking somewhat playable between Tzeentch and Kroak and Teclis.  I didn't like the nerf they chose for Petrifex, but I can't say it didn't significantly improve things.

Katakros is great and commonly used, but at 500 points is absolutely not a must take and competitive lists support that, even post petrifex nerf.  You see plenty of lists both with and without him, which is exactly where you would want the big important faction boss to be.  He's certainly way better in that regard than Alarielle, who's just a terrible disappointment to everyone, or the Loon King who hasn't had a single day off to spend with his family since his book was released because goblins basically /never/ take the field without him.

And yeah, morteks and crawlers are pretty ubiquitous, but given how few units we have I don't see that as a problem.  Honestly, if anything is going to be over-represented in OBR lists, wouldn't you want it to be the cool, elite, and surprisingly affordable (by GW standards anyway) core infantry and our big dramatic artillery centerpiece?  Those are the two units that most clearly define OBR as a distinct faction within Grand Alliance Death.

So yeah, from where I'm sitting "OBR is bad, actually" is an unpopular opinion because it's just wrong  😋.  At least when it comes to the rules writing.  There are definitely some kinks, some rules that weren't fully thought  out, some points costs that needed a bit more play testing, and it would be nice if kav based armies could work rather than just being a good support unit for infantry mortek armies, and options for alternate battleline units somewhere in the book would have been a good call, and it's sad and frustrating to see Morghasts copy-pasted forward with the same bad rules from the old vamp count compendium yet again.  But overall I'd still call this one of GW's best efforts in AoS to date. 

I like the army. I specifically really dislike the book because it drives players toward a very specific playstyle which also makes Crawlers feel very mandatory. It's disingenuous to say "Our book is better than Nighthaunt and Deepkin, so two thumbs up!"

Lumineth is an incredible comparison here. They have woeful unit variety in sculpts but they have 3 solid playstyles and almost no bad units. So you end up with, somehow, more army builds here. Teclis magic control. Shooting Wardens. Ymmetrica tankiness. They're all strong in their own way and feel consistent. 

Bonereapers? Okay well, 2 groups of 20 Mortek Guard. The entire army is slow and needs an incentive to make enemies come to you... our only range weapon is highly volatile and rng dependent. 2 Crawlers fixes the unreliability issue. We also need something that can run ahead and a 3rd battleline, so let's do 5 Kavalos deathriders. The army operates off relentless discipline so we need either a Liege Kavalos or Katakros for the RD as well as the attack up command.

And suddenly oh ******, 1300-1600 of our points are accounted for depending on which HQ we chose. How do we differentiate? Well, Stalkers and Morghast are the same role. Harvester is admittedly fantastic but further encourages spamming Mortek Guard. Maybe fill out the Kavalos Deathriders to make them a tarpit? Maybe, but it doesn't fix the fact our army is 4 models...

I have posted a few times with lists involving 4 x Morghast Archai in Aegis Immortal ferrying Arkhan around, etc. But the loss of PE save makes those units so fragile that even the points cost reduction of 80 points can't justify it. The line between WAAC toxicity and overcosted, ineffecient garbage is almost entirely correlated with how cool I think the models are. Naturally I'm gonna be salty. 

But yeah, this was legit an unpopular opinion. The army isn't bad. It is definitively a gatekeeper army. I still enjoy it. But enjoying it was due largely in part to PE allowing me to explore army builfs. I could justify some of the weaker units. "Well hey, at least Vokmortian is a 4+ save, that's pretty durable for a caster. At least these Morghast are a 3+ save, they fly and can really tarpit things, or the Archai can bodyguard Arkhan." Instead, people took blocks of unkillable battleline and 2+ Nagash, made the game miserable for a third of battletomes, and deservedly we got smacked. Except we still curbstomp those matchups, we're just weaker to the Seraphon/Cities/Lumineth/KO/Tzeentch PEWPEW.list and as such are encouraged to build lists to mitigate against them...which just so happen to be the offending meta lists that made people hate us in the first place!

Tl;dr This is why I can't have nice things.

[Sception]

Vokmortian has the praetorean keyword.  He could never gain the petrifex bonus to begin with.

[Scurvydog]

I went all in on Bonereapers but still have boxes laying about I have not even put together yet, the army mostly collecting dust due to uninteresting choices. Katakros is the best thing about the army, but also a problem, especially now without PE using Katakros is the goto all the time for any competetive list at least.

Mortek guard without 3+ saves are very uninteresting for their points, easily outdone by Phoenix guards in the durable 1 wound infantry categori at around the same points cost. Deathriders are ok, but not very interesting either. Harvesters is an interesting idea but ends up encouraging boring gameplay, with blobs wrapping around the monster so it does not even get into combat much.

As a result many list end up becoming rather boring and plain, internal balance is rather bad and uninspired as well. FeC is a much better book in that regard, you actually get some vastly different playstyles if you want and can go with a rapidly redeploying flying cirkus army, or a meatgrinder horde with a lot of sustainability/healing. A lot of OBR sub factions are just sort of there and does nothing interesting. If we had some changes to available battlelines at least with interesting battle traits that could really have opened up more fun builds, perhaps with some factions making stalkers, immortis guard or morghasts battleline. Although poor internal balance favor stalkers with 1 aspect all the time, the person who did those stalker stances really did not calculate anything I am certain...

I love my Katakros model as a collector piece, but other than that my army is mostly just collecting dust now with little motivation to do anything with it, which is a shame. Sure Katakros + Arkhan in a MP army with 2x20 morteks is strong, but it gets old fast and people also dont really enjoy playing against this grindy setup.

Hoping a new book in a couple of years will save the faction and make it more interesting to play.

[Nasrod]

12 hours ago, Sception said:

Vokmortian has the praetorean keyword.  He could never gain the petrifex bonus to begin with.

Cheers for this one. Despite my whinging, I genuinely appreciate learning things like this. 

 

Edit: Scurvy has the nail on the head. I feel like building lists and experimenting with the weaker options was thanks to Petrifex. Without it, Katakros soaks up 500 points to return to that same level of durability. And keeping Katakros in good shape means screening...so lists now just kind of build themselves.

Still actively painting my Bonereapers and loving it, but the tome at this point needs an overhaul to encourage using half of the model range when it previously did not. 

Edited October 9, 2020 by Nasrod

[Honk]

7 hours ago, Scurvydog said:

the army mostly collecting dust due to uninteresting choices.

I‘m so scared regarding LoNagash and the upcoming new book... LoN was so much fun and has do many options, even when they are not in the meta anymore. FEC has options for waac to funky with only like 6 models, so there is technically hope

[Malakithe]

On 10/5/2020 at 5:08 PM, Nasrod said:

Unpopular opinion: Bonereapers is a bad battletome. Petrifex Elite in the same book where Vokmortian is 180 points. Null Myriad and Ivory Host are some of the worst faction designs I've ever seen. Null Myriad is so eye roll inducing; in any world it becomes necessary, you have fundamentally overpushed magic. In any world where it isn't, you're merely griefing your friend who likes Tzeentch. Which sounds hilarious until you push him into becoming part of the problem and joining the meta list of "Horrors and Flamers shoot all the things."

Ivory Host is just...yikes.

GHB 2020 decided Necropolis Stalkers deserved a larger points reduction than Morghast.

Vokmortian is still 180 points. 

The way you fix Bonereapers is allowing very mutable battleline unlocks between subfactions and General choice. Until they do, there isn't enough points to encourage players to diversify outside the established core of 2 Guard blobs + 2 Crawlers. 

Katakros becoming the new way to grant +1 save is only further cementing the problem regarding low list diversity. It won't go away at this point until the book gets rewritten, or if a points adjustment does something to make a unit more effecient than Mortek Guard. 

Love the models. Love the concept. Just wish I could have a chance at claiming objectices without tying up about 1200 points of every list I make to the same core units...

Ive been saying this since they were released. One trick pony and all the units cost too many points to have any kind of varied builds

[Malakithe]

Just give me a full updated Vampire army already. Getting tired of ghosts and bones that dont do anything now

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

I think if we want to answer whether or not we think Death is the worst GA, we should first make clear what we mean by that. I think it's natural to assume that if you talk about a GA being better of worse than another, you are talking competitively, because that's the easiest to quantify. Personally, I think in games where there are lot of options, like in AoS with list building, the way to decide how good something is is to look at the best build that is available. The best build acts as the floor for the army: Competitively, the army as a whole will never be worse than it's best build, but it can be better if there are multiple good builds that all have to be taken into account if you play against the army. Having only one good build is not really a weakness competitively (it is boring and indicative of bad design, but that's a different discussion). If you only do one thing, but that thing is really strong, you are overall really strong.

So what are the best builds in the four Death armies?

For Ossiarch Bonereapers, it seems like Mortis Praetorians with Katakros and Crawlers is the current go-to. I would say that build is overall strong. Definitely competitive.

But the other armies have problems.

´For LoN, I could not even tell you what the strongest build would be. It's definitely not Nagash, since he's better in OBR and even there he's not the strongest build. What can LoN do that OBR does not just do better, really? Deathmarch? Some Vampire-heavy Legion of Blood thing? Legion of Grief soup?

Nighthaunt have their relatively new White Dwarf stuff. I think cavalry focus might be their best build. Fighting in the charge phase is definitely their best trick, I think.

As for Flesh Eater Courts, someone will have to fill me in. I don't know enough about them. They seem reasonably competitive, though, even though from what I hear Gristlegore is really swingy.

 

For both LoN and Nighthaunt I am kind of at a loss for builds I would call strong. I think if you compare that to the other contender for worst GA, Destruction, the difference becomes really apparent. I know there are definitely strong Orruk Warclans and Ogor Mawtribes builds. Jaws of Mork seems like it could have legs for Gloomspite. And Sons of Behemat is looking kinda legit as well. So if we judge the overall strength of a GA by each individual allegiance in it having a competitive list, I think we'd have to conclude that Death is the worst at the moment.

[Honk]

6 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

As for Flesh Eater Courts, someone will have to fill me in. I don't know enough about them. They seem reasonably competitive, though, even though from what I hear Gristlegore is really swingy.

The king on terrorgheist is just a beast, gristlegore or not... feeding frenzy is a strong ability in itself and the summoning mechanic is a nice trick to grab some objectives or just start with 300 points more. So horde, fast flayers, abattoir movement or full hard on monsters are all valid options.

(For a skilled person 🥳👍)
 

GA Death in itself is not in a bad shape, maybe not as strong as Order in total, but for casual games we have all the options.

I personally think due to the „Double turn“, even stronger factions can get defeated with an unlucky dice roll. and the objective play is kinda open for all... 
faction strengths are not that set in stone like in 40k

[Lucky Snake Eyes]

At this point I feel LoN is a write off. It was a bandaid to hold a lot of death together until a more diverse idemtity for deaths armies could be made. We'll probably have a Soulblight book for the vampires and some sort of deadwalkers or necromantic horde book for the regular skeletons and zombies maybe with some new flesh golems thrown in.

As for nighthaunt I can't say much about them as i don't play them and only run into them at tournaments where most of what i see are spirit host blobs, bladegheists, reapers and reiknor with harrows and chainwrasp filler. Fight on the charge is good but it's pretty hard to get off and some of their other mechanics are definitely hampered by the amount of bravery 10 in the game. They probably mainly need warscroll rewrites and maybe throw in the mortis engine as a buff piece as I don't see them taking their other behemoths very often and don't seem to have many casting buffs outside of reiknor.

FEC are in a good spot IMO. My only complaint is their limited roster. They have really solid sub factions and locally I see a good variety between monster mash and flayer swarms to ghoul and ghast hordes. My one request for them would be a named character to give them more story presence and more variety in abhorrent choices.

As for OBR I have a lot of love and criticism for them after playing them for about a year now. As already stated list building is extremely limited with 1000-1400pts taken up by auto includes if you want to be competitive. To solve this issue they need another option for a ranged threat, mortek bowmen or a smaller unit of elite living artillery like walking ballista constructs or a stalker/immortis variant that threw baleflame. On the topic of immortis/stalkers they could be made more viable by making them conditional battleline with Katakros or the soulmason. Immortis themselves just need their fight twice ability to affect both of their weapons and not just their shields and they'll be a decent bodyguard and deterrent. Stalkers should also be tankier but inmproving their base save would make them invincible in a praetorians list with rerolls so maybe a hit penalty for targetting them would work as they're the ambush hunters of the army. Katakros is honestly perfect as is not being an auto include but still a solid choice which is more than can be said for vokmortian and zandtos. It's not that Zandtos is bad it's that deathrider lists are better in stalliarch where zandtos is less effective. Volkmortian is hot trash and even if he was 120 points he'd still struggle to find a place in my lists.

The legion choices deserve their own section here as there's a lot to be said about them. Praetorians is the popular vote as everyone is still living in the glory days of OP petrifex and I can't blame them as it's a well rounded sub faction. Petrifex needed the fix but they missed the mark by making the reroll 1s melee only, we already have enough melee rerolls in the army what we lacked was any help against shooting so making that reroll universal would be perfect. Stalliarch is a real sleeper hit as they solve all our mobility issues and some great movement tech with retreat and charge. Ivory host is trash as we have easy access to +1 to hit auras and no one wants a sub faction that makes our "elite" 4+ saves worse. Replacing it with +1 to wound and no penalty, maybe make the command ability reroll 1s to wound and you now have a sub faction that addresses the mediocre wound rolls of our battleline. Null myriad is good IMO, ignoring spells is hit or miss but not every legion trait needs to be always useful as long as theirs good command trait and artefact to make up for it and null myriad does with a weapon artefact that ignores saves. Only downside is the lack of good heroes to put it on but still 4 unsaveable attacks from a liege is nice. Crematorians definitely encourage mono guard builds with harvesters and shapers and honestly that's the only way it could have gone. It's alright if not a little boring and tedious to play.

Lastly we should address how nagash feels out of place in his own grand alliance. He's the god of death and one of the big 4 wizards of AoS but dies quicker than any other hero that's 450+ pts. Losing petrifex and the ability to stack after saves hurt him hard considering deaths universal 6+ and his built in 4+ no longer stack plus any other defensive spells are conditionally a waste. There's too much rending and/or mortal shooting in the meta and while he can face kroak or kairos in a magic battle, Teclis rigging his dice is a hard matchup. Honestly best way to fix him is take away his healing ability and make him 20 wounds minimum, then let him join any death army and give him the spell list and a thematic rule for being in that army. For LoN or it's equivalent replacement make him use his current healing ability but for 5 units. For OBR give him a better heal that can revive our 4 wound elites but with less units total say 3. For flesh eaters make hime give a hit bonus or save bonus aura as his overwhelming presence brings the courts delusions in line with his will. For nighhaunt make it a bravery debuff aura that treats all units near him as bravery 6 to circumvent all the bravery 10 going around. If soulblight ever happens let him refill blood chalices once per game as a "reward" for their loyalty or give a +1 attacks buff to make up for the model count issue of soulblight likely being an elite army. 

[El Antiguo Guardián]

I made this video about the metawatch analysis that we had seen on GW store.

As you see on the table, even fec are on the ruin today.