Stormcast Eternals 3.0 - There is no "a" in Vindictors

[lare2]

That's true. There's a list of leaked updated points doing the rounds though and Stormdrake are on it. Time will tell i suppose. 

[frenk_castle]

12 hours ago, OkayestDM said:

Vigilors are such an interesting unit, but I agree that they aren't worth the price you pay for them, given how their power and utility is split. Still they are a very functional unit, they just need a points adjustment to make them worth taking.

Vanquishers on the other hand need a total overhaul. The intended design is interesting, but in practice it doesn't work and isn't worth investing in (which is a crying shame, because the models are fantastic and it would be really great to have a dedicated killy battleline unit.)

My current favorite idea for a rewrite is to remove the adjustable attacks profile entirely and have them put at a flat 3 attacks with 2" range. This makes them decent in combat and encourages you to bring them in units of 10, which further increases their deadliness and synergies with their 5+ rally rule.

Vanquishers in a unit of 5 make barely more damage than 5 Liberators with shields and one special weapon. Dual weapon Liberators outperform Vanquishers damage wise. And being 10 points more currently further damages their case. Even if they were 115 points like Liberators I would argue Liberators are better.

It is really weird to me that they decided to make them "dedicated" melee unit but the sprue only gives you "special" option on 10 man squad while weapons reach is 1'' which completely negates additional models.

[PJetski]

The Stormkeep #14 How to Counter Everything - Be'lakor is live now!

We take an indepth look at the typical units in a LOTFP army, how they are used, their strengths & weaknesses, and what kinds of Stormcast units to include in your army that could be useful against this list.

 

[Doko]

That new points are fake 100%, have some names bad written and also drakes got allready the nerf of this faq some weeks ago,it was this next faq  nerf but they only showed us the drakes early.

So they wont change the points now

[boyadventurer]

I can't imagine they'd break precedent to actually put out an article specifically to give everyone a heads up about what the points change will be in the FAQ, then make the points change just be something else instead.

Like, I know it's easy to be pessimistic and assume GW is going to go with the dumbest option, but this just seems nuts. And all for a measly extra 30 points? I doubt it.

[Celestantpants]

I also find a further points hike to be unlikely.  It would be crazy to tack on another points bump when they already told us what their points were going to be in the winter faq preview for them.

Edited December 15, 2021 by Celestantpants

[Alpidur]

Guys I have a question. The new stormdrake guard is better with spears or with blade ? I think about a list with all dragon (love it from warhammer, it’s a dream!) maybe with lord celestant on stardrake, knight draconis and than stormdrake guard but I don’t know how to bike my stormdrake. What’s your opinion?

[OkayestDM]

47 minutes ago, Alpidur said:

Guys I have a question. The new stormdrake guard is better with spears or with blade ? I think about a list with all dragon (love it from warhammer, it’s a dream!) maybe with lord celestant on stardrake, knight draconis and than stormdrake guard but I don’t know how to bike my stormdrake. What’s your opinion?

Both have their value. Spears are deadly on the charge, and are a great option if you're building an alpha-strike list or want to cripple a high-save target, but they have to be played aggressively to get the most out of them. If you get charged instead, they won't perform as effectively.

Swords are more reliable all around, but have lower rend than the lances do on the charge.

It comes down to your play intended style. If you want to play aggressively with them, lances. If you intend to be more cautious, swords.

Edited December 15, 2021 by OkayestDM

[PJetski]

Lance drakes do 20% more on the charge, but 20% less off the charge

In my experience this unit is charging almost every turn because they are fast and flying. Even if you get stuck in combat you can:

• translocate them out of combat then use their hero phase movement to get back in
• if its a small enough unit you can use the drakes shoot the thing you are in combat with, wipe it out, and then free yourself up for charges later that turn
• use other shooting units (stormcast have many) to shoot the thing fighting the drakes and let them charge later
• use thunderbolt volley to shoot something in the hero phase and then you can move freely

Lances are stronger on the charge and you can reliably charge almost every turn, so it seems like a no-brainer

[CommissarRotke]

I'm so torn between the weapon options I'll probably end up making the SDG the first models I magnetize... they both look amazing too

[feadair]

Here are the damage profiles for two Drakeriders, ignoring the extra attack for Primes:

Save	SDG lances charge	SDG warblades	SDG lances melee
2+	2.67	1.78	0.89
3+	3.56	2.67	1.33
4+	4.44	3.56	1.78
5+	5.33	4.44	2.22
6+	5.33	5.33	2.67
-	5.33	5.33	2.67

Given the big drop if lances get stuck in melee, I am leaning towards swords for a single ‘generalist’ unit. Yes, you do get charges off, but things like double turns happen, and I am also not as optimistic about disengaging as PJetski - shooting may be needed elsewhere, Translocation has a range and so on. If building multiple units, it might be an idea to go for one unit of swords for the anvil and one of lances for the hammer.

Edit: But the correct answer is probably to magnetize (I have not yet assembled the models so am not sure how easy this is).

Edited December 16, 2021 by feadair

[KarrWolves]

Also the swords are more efficient against Coalesced Seraphon armies and Gotrek.

[NauticalSoup]

5 minutes ago, KarrWolves said:

Also the swords are more efficient against Coalesced Seraphon armies and Gotrek.

Although charging dragons directly into Gotrek seems like doing his work for him

[annarborhawk]

10 hours ago, feadair said:

Here are the damage profiles for two Drakeriders, ignoring the extra attack for Primes:

Save	SDG lances charge	SDG warblades	SDG lances melee
2+	2.67	1.78	0.89
3+	3.56	2.67	1.33
4+	4.44	3.56	1.78
5+	5.33	4.44	2.22
6+	5.33	5.33	2.67
-	5.33	5.33	2.67

Given the big drop if lances get stuck in melee, I am leaning towards swords for a single ‘generalist’ unit. Yes, you do get charges off, but things like double turns happen, and I am also not as optimistic about disengaging as PJetski - shooting may be needed elsewhere, Translocation has a range and so on. If building multiple units, it might be an idea to go for one unit of swords for the anvil and one of lances for the hammer.

Edit: But the correct answer is probably to magnetize (I have not yet assembled the models so am not sure how easy this is).

Regarding magnetization: It's a bit weird. One model has one right arm where the weapon attaches at the wrist. So you have a sword with a right hand already attached and a lance with a right hand already attached.  So that model must be magnetized  by drilling a small hole in the wrist of each part.  

The other model had the weapon attached to the whole arm already. So you can magnetize at the shoulder. This is also the true for the flaming sword option.  (And of course the shield, if you like is easy to magnetize.

The one thing I'm not bothering with is magnetizing the armor plate on the dragon's face. I think the way to go with this would be just to somehow magnetize the whole head, and swap heads. But that looked tricky to me. 

Edited December 16, 2021 by annarborhawk

[JackStreicher]

For anyone interested: you can easily build a female Knight Draconis! (Image follows in a few minutes)

[JackStreicher]

Edited December 16, 2021 by JackStreicher

[readercolin]

1 hour ago, annarborhawk said:

Regarding magnetization: It's a bit weird. One model has one right arm where the weapon attaches at the wrist. So you have a sword with a right hand already attached and a lance with a right hand already attached.  So that model must be magnetized  by drilling a small hole in the wrist of each part.  

The other model had the weapon attached to the whole arm already. So you can magnetize at the shoulder. This is also the true for the flaming sword option.  (And of course the shield, if you like is easy to magnetize.

The one thing I'm not bothering with is magnetizing the armor plate on the dragon's face. I think the way to go with this would be just to somehow magnetize the whole head, and swap heads. But that looked tricky to me. 

Something to be aware of there is that there are 5 arms for each box.  There is a single arm that has a hand swappable at the wrist, which lets you change between sword, lance, or flaming sword.  Then there are 2 arms with lances and 2 arms with swords, and you can magnetize those at the shoulder.  This means that magnetizing lances/swords for just Stormdrake Guard can be fairly trivial, but trying to magnetize a model to be either Stormdrake Guard OR Knight-Draconis is going to be a bit more painful.  You can do so by magnetizing the Knight-Draconis arm at the shoulder as well, instead of worrying about messing around at the wrist.  However, the biggest issue with magnetizing the Knight-Draconis is probably figuring out how to swap the cloak out, and keep in mind that you will also need to magnetize the shield (though that at least is fairly trivial).

Overall, after spending 10 minutes looking things over, I decided not to bother with magnetizing between stormdrake guard/knight-draconis, mostly due to not being able to figure out how to make the cloak swappable.

I also didn't bother magnetizing between swords and lances, because I am looking to run mine as a fast anvil, not really as a unit that can reliably charge every turn.  I know @PJetski is of the opinion that getting them to charge every turn isn't particularly difficult, but there are enough tarpits in the game that I don't want to have to be devoting resources to extracting the guard every turn just to allow them to charge.  If you are running Guard as your only melee hammer, it might be worth it... but at the same time, if I want a melee hammer, I would rather run Annihilators or Fulminators, which can get the job done better than guard can.

[CommissarRotke]

7 minutes ago, readercolin said:

Something to be aware of there is that there are 5 arms for each box.  There is a single arm that has a hand swappable at the wrist, which lets you change between sword, lance, or flaming sword.  Then there are 2 arms with lances and 2 arms with swords, and you can magnetize those at the shoulder.  This means that magnetizing lances/swords for just Stormdrake Guard can be fairly trivial, but trying to magnetize a model to be either Stormdrake Guard OR Knight-Draconis is going to be a bit more painful.  You can do so by magnetizing the Knight-Draconis arm at the shoulder as well, instead of worrying about messing around at the wrist.  However, the biggest issue with magnetizing the Knight-Draconis is probably figuring out how to swap the cloak out, and keep in mind that you will also need to magnetize the shield (though that at least is fairly trivial).

 

In that case I'll probably just do a sword guard + Draconis then. the single guard doesn't seem worth giving a lance, and I am not dropping 200 USD just to have a full pair.

[PJetski]

The lances look cooler 

[OkayestDM]

43 minutes ago, PJetski said:

The lances look cooler 

I mean, you're not wrong.

[JackStreicher]

1 hour ago, PJetski said:

The lances look cooler 

I disagree ^^
(they look to short for my taste) ^^

[Freejack02]

8 minutes ago, JackStreicher said:

I disagree ^^
(they look to short for my taste) ^^

They didn't want to embarrass the dragon necks any further. 

[Celestantpants]

Bah!  The only true answer is swords are cooler.  Swords are always cooler.   

[NauticalSoup]

26 minutes ago, Celestantpants said:

Bah!  The only true answer is swords are cooler.  Swords are always cooler.   

Normally I'd agree, swords are very cool- but a dragon knight with a lance is simply too iconic. And it seems like it would be hard to actually hit anything with a sword from dragonback.

[Celestantpants]

59 minutes ago, NauticalSoup said:

Normally I'd agree, swords are very cool- but a dragon knight with a lance is simply too iconic. And it seems like it would be hard to actually hit anything with a sword from dragonback.

Very true.  You make a good case.  However, I still think the knight draconis with his flaming sword is the coolest model SCE have, even if he isn't very practical.    Although building the SDG with lances DOES help him to stand out more...