Jump to content

What's your opinion? - OBR Pros and Cons


Major

Recommended Posts

Hi All!

I've played a LOT of OBR lately and I've noted most people tend to either really like OBR or really don't. It's interesting to hear peoples reasoning behind their opinions but also educational.

What do you like most about OBR and why?

What do you dislike the most about OBR and why?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My only real dislike at present isn't really a dislike its just that they are small army at present in terms of model diversity and choices. I think that like a lot of smaller armies in the range they can feel less interesting and also have a less well established visual identity. However give them small additions over time or a big second wave and things can change dramatically

A great AoS example is Lumineth. Last year they were "so so" in popularity and hype; this year its far more hype and far more interest as the second wave is fast approaching and we've seen a new selection of models. Increased model variety gives the army more visual options and more tactical options which pleases both creative and tactical players. I think it helps armies branch out from using a few spammed units and instead gives them new tricks and tools and ideas to work with. 

 

 

I think Ossiarchs are just in that trap of being well made, working well, but not being as exciting. They also got some hate I think because they are such a new concept for AoS. They are a totally new idea that isn't really something GW has done before in terms of lore nor sculpt style. I think that more models, more variety and more creative freedom will really let them shine. 

 

 

 

Right now I love them for their differences ;for their bone-machine-animal style of construction of their war engines. I really want to see GW let loose with designs for some bigger monsters not just the catapult; as well as new troop types (the archer and axe unit in the new Underworld set suggest heavily that we'll at least have the hope of seeing archer infantry in the future). I think that coupled with some slightly lower points would help. Right now they are expensive in points which actually makes them one of the cheapest armies to collect; however it also means that they have fewer options to put on the table. Right now that is perfectly fine because they are elite and because they don't have vast numbers of options so often as not you're repeating options. However I think just as Morgahsts find it hard to slot into the force right now; there's going to be issues with other new things fitting in if the points remain as high as they are - as there simply won't be point room to fit things in. And I'm ok with Ossiarchs losing some of that elite status as the range increases and being able to fit more models on the table. 

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I really like the lore and idea behind the Ossiarch. The idea of this ancient elite force of bone constructs hidden away and created by the god of death to serve him unconditionally. 

It was the model design that killed it for me. 95% of the line just comes off as too cartoonish and does not feel intimidating, dreadful, or elite at all, just... goofy. 

Now that new fella from the new Underworlds warband... damn... just, damn!PyQhdxExvIz2qhmH.jpg.4d8dca2f5c60d6443b5a3be3fc0bfc7c.jpg.d87ebdc9d1399d9007fe3cd9c83c8b81.jpg

If THIS had been the design direction I'd of been all over them. This guy OOZES all of those earlier stated attributes for me. 

I feel like Gdubs really missed the mark to make a truly unique death army.

If these had been the basic infantry, these 10' foot tall, several soul filled, bone construct, executioners of the god of death, they would have stood out as truly different and elite. 

Instead we get just a goofier version of basic skellies with some better rules. 

Just this guys opinion. 

  • Like 2
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

There's a lot I like about the faction.  Others have discussed the narrative, thematic, conceptual stuff, as well as Katakros being cool.  But I'm going to be a bit contrary and say that I really love the models, and I love them for exactly the reason so many others dislike them.  They're very cartoony, kind of goofy, with tons of personality.  There's a very "80's cartoon villains" feel to them, which I personally find very fun.  The word I'm reaching for here is 'toyetic'.  The obr models are very openly and unselfconsciously toys.  Because that's what warhammer models are.  They're toys.  We're all a bunch of big kids playing with overpriced plastic toys.  Different warhammer lines have embraced that fact or distanced themselves from it to various degrees, but none have embraced it so fully as the bonereapers, and I love it, even if I can absolutely understand where other, more 'serious gamer' types might find them to be an embarrassing reminder of the frivolity of the hobby as a whole.

Even moving past the overall toyetic and fun style, there's lots of neat little details.  Like the way the 'bodies' of the ossiarchs, particularly the more humanoid mortek guard, are made from bone armor that is fit overtop of an underlying humanoid skeleton.  Even their 'faces' are actually animated masks made of shaped or sculpted bone and fit overtop the front of the underlying structure's skull, which is shown in the way the front of the head overlaps the back of the skull.  There's lots of fun little details throughout the range, from the crewman in the wheel on the crawler to winch the arm back to the hands running up the side of the harvester to pass bones up to the basket, with one rejecting a sigmarine helmet along the way and another snatching back a bone stolen by a carrion bird.  They're just neat and weird and fun in general.

Again, I can understand wanting a more serious business looking army, and I'm glad the other undead ranges cater more to folks who want that, it's good to have options.  That said, there are ways to make the ossiarch models look more serious and threatening:
 

Spoiler

 

the most simple of which is to paint them black or dark charcoal grey, and either skip the bright boney white or save it for the trim.  eg:

The Cambridge Warlords: Path to Glory 2020: The Noctis Elite - The  Encroaching Darkness

Age of Sigmar: Ossiarch Bonereaper Sub-Faction Rules Revealed - Bell of  Lost Souls

Ossiarch Bonereapers: Crematorians sub-faction : ageofsigmar

From the Mind of Mengel: Mortek Guard II - Warhammer Community

Mortisan Soulreaper - Millennium Games

 

Alternatively, you can try a more weathered / textured / painterly style, even with lighter colored bones.  The games work shop style with its smooth flat tones and clean edge highlights on everything is both very time consuming and very cartoony, which significantly exaggerates the already very cartoonish style of the models.  Other painting styles by contrast can diminish that effect, eg:

57_13ae5434-34ab-4e68-8fd6-ffb9d653a6a4_2400x.jpg?v=1613624305

I don't have as many examples for this, but I've seen it work a few times.


 

...

As for dislikes, the only think I dislike about the army at the moment is that it kind of builds itself without too much variety.  Warhammer is a game you win by claiming objectives.  You need dudes to claim objectives.  Mortek Guard are the only unit in the army with a dudes-per-point ratio high enough to do that, so you've gotta take some mortek guard.  But even though mortek guard are the cheapest and most numerous unit in the army, they're still relatively expensive and elite, so taking enough of them to claim objectives is going to burn a lot of your points.  Because of that, you can't /just/ take mortek guard to claim objectives, they /also/ have to be doing real work for you on the table beyond that, actually fighting and killing enemies.  Which means you're going to end up taking /even more/ mortek guard, and since they make heavy use of discipline points to be effective (a single unit can easily soak up four or more RDP in just one game round), you also need to sink a lot of points into heroes to generate those discipline points and further buff those morteks, and even if you have a lot of RDP you still won't get to spend much of it on the cool but less critical abilities of any other units you might take.  And since you're spending a ton of points on mortek guard, and a bunch more on heroes to power them, you don't end up with very many points left on all the other cool units in the army.  And what few disposible points you do have for side units is heavily pushed towards the big mortek crawler catapults, not because they're so much better than harvesters or stalkers or immortis or morghasts on their own, but rather because the support they offer happens to perfectly match the gaps in the abilities of your mortek guard (crawlers are great vs. cheap hoard tar pits, speed bumps, campers, fast light skirmishers, and 5 wound buff aura heroes).

OBR don't have that much variety in available units to begin with, but even what little they have they don't really get that much use out of, not because the internal balance of the units is so bad - in terms of individual unit points efficiency, unique niches, ability to perform their jobs, OBR are overall a lot better than most new AoS factions have been on their first release.  The problem imo is entirely down to the need to build everything around the mortek guard, because they're the only reasonable backbone unit capable of claiming and holding objectives in this objective-based game.  OBR doesn't (and imo shouldn't) have the speed necessary to alpha rush an enemy off the table and pick up objectives after, so what we need is alternative objective grabbers, preferably ones that aren't as RDP thirsty as mortek guard.  And this is a pretty obvious problem at this point, so I'm confident that we'll actually see a solution to it the next time OBR get a new update / release wave.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 5 months later...

I fell in love about Ossisarch Bonereapeers when I readabout the crematorians. What stopped me was the prices of the models, really high. 

But when I saw the releasing of:

 

I decided to buy it and slowly assemblong, magnetizing and paint it (i'm still preparing the videos about. And yes, even if I know that they should be stalliark related, myriad are the better, I still fell in love for Crematorians^^ (and I have enough models of the other undead armies  that I could rival Nagash itself in summoning^^ so I decided to have totally fun with them and make every idea I have avalaible^^ (it only neeeds time^^) 

I'm having quite a lot og fun about them and I like the dethriders... I've made even a song about Kavalos...

 

Also as @Vasshpit showed, that model it's simply amazing. And I'm really thinking about buying that unit to use it as one of my army pieces, maybe making it not him as it is, but as a substitute for something else  (soulmansion?).

I love also the gohthizzard, one really carismatic model.

What I'd change it's only the heads of the mortek guard, I really don't like them. LUckyly I have quite a few of skeleton head waiting them if I'll gain some of those models.

And the little leegs of the crawler (only th e legs, the model itself I find it really awesome.

 

Anywya I don't think it0s about being too much contricted as army. There are a lot of ways to personalize them. 

If you read novel like Ossiarch Bonerepaers and oters you can find that  they make a lot of contructs in a lot of different ways. Think even simply to Broken Realm Teclis where they fuse mortek guard together to create a suspended bridge or the statues defending the valley. So not a single problem abou personalizing them eventually.

 

Still I agree with some more units avalaible to increase the chouise.

Based on the underworld one Mir, to accompany him there are special morteks, and it seems soon there willl be avalaible the archer ones, while one of them can be associated to a Liege on foot.

So I think that more choices will be avalaible with the next battletome (even before knowing GW). Think about Necrons from Warhammer 0k. They spent decades with a really small amount of models and when tey renewd them they amplyfies quite a lot. The same about the Nighthaunt army.

I'm waitingfor many more models for Ossiarch Bonereapers and Flesh eater courts (and Flesh eater courts are the suplime about creating different units with the fewer sets avalaible(.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The prices of ~most of~ the models in the army are quite high, but so are the points costs, which means the price of the ~overall army~ isn't that bad.  And the overall army price is brought down further by the one exception to the 'high priced' trend - mortek guard.  While mortek spam is less of a thing in 3e than it was in 2e (points cost up, no max unit discount, max unit down, reinforcements restricted, smaller unit sizes in the game in general making 5 man kavalos units a more attractive battle line option than they were in 2e, new CA restrictions make it harder to stack buffs like morteks used to like to do which further skews attention towards the less RDP hungry kavalos), most OBR armies are still going to have Morteks taking up a larger portion of the overall points value of the army than anything else, and compared to other equivalent units Mortarks are surprisingly cheap.  Fully half the price per model of the equivalent lumineth core battleline units, and not appreciably less elite than they are in points cost or tabletop effectiveness.  Mortek Guard could have been the same price for 10 models instead of 20 and people wouldn't have griped any more about them than any other elite infantry kit in the game.

As is, they're cheaper per model than some hoardy chaff units in other armies.  They're the same price per model as deathrattle skeletons, only barely more than deadwalker zombies, and significantly cheaper than chainrasp hordes, and this goes a long way towards making the cost of collecting an OBR army much more manageable than it might at first appear, even without a start collecting set.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 9/22/2021 at 2:02 PM, Sception said:

The prices of ~most of~ the models in the army are quite high, but so are the points costs, which means the price of the ~overall army~ isn't that bad.  And the overall army price is brought down further by the one exception to the 'high priced' trend - mortek guard.  While mortek spam is less of a thing in 3e than it was in 2e (points cost up, no max unit discount, max unit down, reinforcements restricted, smaller unit sizes in the game in general making 5 man kavalos units a more attractive battle line option than they were in 2e, new CA restrictions make it harder to stack buffs like morteks used to like to do which further skews attention towards the less RDP hungry kavalos), most OBR armies are still going to have Morteks taking up a larger portion of the overall points value of the army than anything else, and compared to other equivalent units Mortarks are surprisingly cheap.  Fully half the price per model of the equivalent lumineth core battleline units, and not appreciably less elite than they are in points cost or tabletop effectiveness.  Mortek Guard could have been the same price for 10 models instead of 20 and people wouldn't have griped any more about them than any other elite infantry kit in the game.

As is, they're cheaper per model than some hoardy chaff units in other armies.  They're the same price per model as deathrattle skeletons, only barely more than deadwalker zombies, and significantly cheaper than chainrasp hordes, and this goes a long way towards making the cost of collecting an OBR army much more manageable than it might at first appear, even without a start collecting set.

I agree about the prices, but at ghe same time it's missimg a collector box. The broken realm one has been a welcome wntry, but at the same time not enough. And fesst of bones has disappeared even before seeing it.

Chainrasp armies had the setbox and mortal realm releasing (not in my country  Mortal realms sigh...).

 

About points I care relatevely, the balance shift often.

 

The improvements of the abilities anout the relentless points helped a lot .

And compared to the deathrattle they have the bonuses thanks to the champion and avoid battleshock tests.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Most start collecting boxes aren't that great.  If the eventual OBR start collecting box looks like our half of feast of bones, I wouldn't really recommend bothering with it.  Maybe get one if you like all the units, but you'll never want more than one of the special character, even the one is purely for display shelf reasons as he's terrible in game right now, and the rest?  1 box morghasts, 1 box stalkers, and half a box of morteks?  Again, one set might be worth while, but you're probably not going to build an effective army out of multiples of that.

The broken realms box, if you can get it, is absolutely worth picking up one of for a new player, much more than the obr half of feast of bones, but even that you don't need multiples of it because you don't need multiple lieges, and once you have the one the BR box doesn't really save you anything vs. just buying the kav units separately, not unless you think you can sell the spare liege on the secondary market.

I have a hard time imagining an OBR start collecting box that GW would be inclined to put out that would also be an effective way of building up armies.  Even if it were something like 10-20 morteks, 5 kavalos, and a hero, we just don't have any heroes we want to run multiples of, yet they're all expensive enough that they would eat up the discount of a start collecting box, so once you had the hero getting more of the box wouldn't save you much vs. just buying the units separately, especially with how aggressively morteks are already priced.  And that's an ideal situation, you could easily end up with something like the Soulblight SC, which, I mean, it's ok if you need the graveguard, but an awful lot of soulblight players are going to have a hard time making use of one of those boxes, let alone multiple.

Things might change with new units, but yeah.  As is, I just don't see a start collecting box doing much to change the landscape for new OBR players.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...