Soulblight Gravelords Discussion - 3rd edition.

[TechnoVampire]

@Leshoyadut I like your second list (LOB with vengorian lord). I’m similarly attached to blood knights, despite the fact they’re not considered overly competitive and run 5 in my list. I find them versatile and pretty tanky. 
 
My list is similar to yours but still using VLOZD. This is what I’m going to try out post points increases:

Army Faction: Soulblight Gravelords
    - Army Type: Legion of Blood
    - Grand Strategy: Lust for Domination
    - Triumphs: Inspired

LEADER

1 x Neferata (400)
    - Spells: Waste Away

1 x Vampire Lord (140)*
    - Spells: Hoarfrost

1 x Vampire Lord on Zombie Dragon (460)*
    - General
    - Command Traits: Doomed Minions
    - Deathlance
    - Artefacts: Cloak of Mists and Shadows
    - Spells: Vile Transference

BATTLELINE

20 x Deadwalker Zombies (120)*

10 x Deathrattle Skeletons (100)*
    - Skeleton Champion
    - Standard Bearer

10 x Dire Wolves (140)*
    - Doom Wolf

OTHER

5 x Blood Knights (230)*
    - Kastellan
    - Standard Bearer
    - Templar Lance

20 x Grave Guard (150)*
    - Seneschal
    - 2 x Standard Bearer
    - 2 x Hornblower
    - Great Wight Blade

CORE BATTALIONS:

*Battle Regiment

TOTAL POINTS: (1890/2000)

I think the points add up.

I also might try switching out the zombies for a second unit of dire wolves. 

[RocketPropelledGrenade]

On 9/18/2023 at 7:38 PM, TechnoVampire said:

I feel like part of the issue with our book is how easy our book tactics are to achieve. They pretty much guarantee 2 VP every turn on top of our healing and resurrecting, which makes our attrition game even stronger. Personally I dislike book tactics. They seem to make the game harder to balance and have too much impact on overall performance. The fact that GW uses them as a balancing method, giving out easy to achieve tactics to struggling factions, I think just perpetuates the problem. Conversely I think having points increased on warscrolls to balance overly strong tactics feels backwards and not great.

100% agreed with all of this.

[JackStreicher]

I just had a look at Woehammer's top three Lists played at Tournaments - It’s spam nonsense like this that results in nerfs that hit the entire faction only because some people couldn’t help themselves and GW refuses to put a cap on the amount of Zombies one can field.

 

Army Faction: Soulblight Gravelords
– Army Type: Vyrkos
– Grand Strategy: Empire of Corpses

LEADER
1 x Necromancer (100)*
– Spells: Merciless Blizzard
1 x Vampire Lord (140)*
– Spells: Hoarfrost
1 x Lauka Vai (300)**
– Spells: Vile Transference
1 x Belladamma Volga (200)**
– Spells: Spirit Gale
1 x Gorslav the Gravekeeper (120)***
– General
– Command Traits: Spoor Trackers
– Artefacts: Ulfenkarni Phylactery

BATTLELINE
10 x Dire Wolves (140)**
– Doom Wolf
20 x Deadwalker Zombies (120)**
40 x Deadwalker Zombies (120)**
40 x Deadwalker Zombies (120)**
20 x Deadwalker Zombies (120)***
20 x Deadwalker Zombies (120)***

OTHER
1 x Corpse Cart (80)**
– Unholy Lodestone
– Corpse Lash
1 x Corpse Cart (80)***
– Unholy Lodestone
– Corpse Lash

CORE BATTALIONS:
*Andtorian Acolytes
**Battle Regiment
***Battle Regiment

TOTAL POINTS: (2000/2000)

 

 

Edited September 26, 2023 by JackStreicher

[El Syf]

Wow, that doesn’t even seem like a fun list for the player to use. Just trying to fit all those models on the board sounds like a headache!

[JackStreicher]

18 hours ago, El Syf said:

Wow, that doesn’t even seem like a fun list for the player to use. Just trying to fit all those models on the board sounds like a headache!

It’s the most cheese one can squeeze 

into a list.

Must make for a fun game, not

[The Other Shrek]

I'm considering doing a Vampire army, but I'm getting hung up on leaders.

I'm running Volga (got a whole spectral wolf thing going) and I like skeletons (honestly tempted to go full Barrow Weight, but vampire knights are cool), but I haven't played enough AoS to have a feel for what leaders/support to do.

It seems like the army will end up split into a Wolf Wave (with basically just Volga to buff them) and a skeleton wave (with a Vampire Lord on foot or a Wight King, maybe a Necromancer). I could use Halgrim to speed them up, or am I underestimating the speed and utility of grave sites? If I just pop the skeletons out of graves, how do I get the non-summonable necromancer and vampire buffs to them?

[Leshoyadut]

On 10/13/2023 at 11:02 PM, The Other Shrek said:

It seems like the army will end up split into a Wolf Wave (with basically just Volga to buff them) and a skeleton wave (with a Vampire Lord on foot or a Wight King, maybe a Necromancer). I could use Halgrim to speed them up, or am I underestimating the speed and utility of grave sites? If I just pop the skeletons out of graves, how do I get the non-summonable necromancer and vampire buffs to them?

I don't think you need Halgrim at all. I tend to play skeleton/grave guard heavy lists and don't really have problems with their mobility. Popping out of a grave site will get them plenty close enough to the objective that they can threaten it or take it, and running with a single unit of skeletons is fine. Dire wolves move plenty fast enough on their own, as well, so they shouldn't need the extra movement. The 100 points you save by not taking Halgrim can be better spent on other things, like an endless spell or two or put toward Torgillius or something.

As for buffs when you pop them out of the grave? Well...you don't buff them that turn, at least not with hero phase stuff. A unit of 20 or 30 skeletons will be able to survive fine without spell buffs, and you don't really need them to do a ton of damage (not that they really do much even with buffs) the turn they pop up. The skeletons are there to stay for a while, you'll have time to put buffs on them later.

Edited October 15, 2023 by Leshoyadut

[Leshoyadut]

Well, Soulblight seems to be in a pretty healthy place winrate-wise now at a nice, fat middle 51%.

Oh, wait, what's that? You want to look at subfactions?

Ahhh...yeah...cool. That's a 17 percentage point difference between Legion of Night and Legion of Blood. Vyrkos doesn't have enough results to show up, but it's probably somewhere in between there. So our 51% winrate isn't at all because the army is actually balanced, it's because the Good Subfaction is so powerful that it balances out against all of the rest combined.

Honestly, as much as I prefer to be at least somewhat competitive when I play and try to keep an eye on the meta as part of that, I feel like I just need to stop looking at winrates solely because it's making me increasingly annoyed with GW's balancing. Some of the early nerfs were definitely needed (zombie MWs, Neferata's repositioning ability, Endless Legions, the first round or two of points changes), but it feels bad being punished across the entire army for the sins of Legion of Night.

[JackStreicher]

1 hour ago, Leshoyadut said:

Honestly, as much as I prefer to be at least somewhat competitive when I play and try to keep an eye on the meta as part of that, I feel like I just need to stop looking at winrates solely because it's making me increasingly annoyed with GW's balancing. Some of the early nerfs were definitely needed (zombie MWs, Neferata's repositioning ability, Endless Legions, the first round or two of points changes), but it feels bad being punished across the entire army for the sins of Legion of Night.

That’s exactly what annoys me. All they do is nerf an entire faction without buffing weak Subfactions. It’s really just PR at this point.

Also: Leave the comp. side behind, come to the narrative side! We have epic battles and cookies.

 

 

Edited November 6, 2023 by JackStreicher

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

2 hours ago, Leshoyadut said:

Well, Soulblight seems to be in a pretty healthy place winrate-wise now at a nice, fat middle 51%.

Oh, wait, what's that? You want to look at subfactions?

Ahhh...yeah...cool. That's a 17 percentage point difference between Legion of Night and Legion of Blood. Vyrkos doesn't have enough results to show up, but it's probably somewhere in between there. So our 51% winrate isn't at all because the army is actually balanced, it's because the Good Subfaction is so powerful that it balances out against all of the rest combined.

Honestly, as much as I prefer to be at least somewhat competitive when I play and try to keep an eye on the meta as part of that, I feel like I just need to stop looking at winrates solely because it's making me increasingly annoyed with GW's balancing. Some of the early nerfs were definitely needed (zombie MWs, Neferata's repositioning ability, Endless Legions, the first round or two of points changes), but it feels bad being punished across the entire army for the sins of Legion of Night.

Do you (or does anybody) know the current Legion of Night tech? What makes them so much better than Blood? On my initial read of the book, Night seemed good but a bit unfocused. I am surprised that it's now near the top.

[Craze]

3 hours ago, Leshoyadut said:

Honestly, as much as I prefer to be at least somewhat competitive when I play and try to keep an eye on the meta as part of that, I feel like I just need to stop looking at winrates solely because it's making me increasingly annoyed with GW's balancing. Some of the early nerfs were definitely needed (zombie MWs, Neferata's repositioning ability, Endless Legions, the first round or two of points changes), but it feels bad being punished across the entire army for the sins of Legion of Night.

But I think it is safe to say that the army was not punished for the "sins of Legion of Night" but for the Vyrkos Zombie nonsense, which was the dominant, cheesy build before the nerfs...

 

1 hour ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

Do you (or does anybody) know the current Legion of Night tech? What makes them so much better than Blood? On my initial read of the book, Night seemed good but a bit unfocused. I am surprised that it's now near the top.

From my experience (not a really competitive player, but had some games lately with LoN), there are a couple of points:

- "The Bait" really makes alpha striking enemy armies reconsider crashing into your walls of undead flesh turn 1

- "Morbhegs Claw" is just really good at helping you cast Hoarfrost and/or Merciless Blizzard

- The whole mobility gained through "Swift Form" gives you a variety of options, from getting a VL into buff range for "Crimson Feast" to teleporting out of unbind range for an easy and safe completion of "Magical Dominance"

- Mannfred is just a beast. The dual chance to get off countercharges, once through Reposition and second through real countercharge - especially on a "Hoarfrost" buffed Manny - is really scary. 

- The combined possibilities of several of these points generate the potential for REALLY scary turns, e.g.: Buff Manny or Grave Guard with "Hoarfrost", get your VL in the perfect spot for "Crimson Feast", charge with Manny, kill 1 model with Gheistvor, then attack with your hoarfrosted, crimson feasted & Gheistvor-powered blob of 20 Grave Guard = delete whatever they touch. You don't even need to calculate what 81 attacks at 2+/3+/-1/2 with Mortals on wound rolls of 6+ do to any unit.

Edit:

This is the list I played lately:

- Army Faction: Soulblight Gravelords
	 - Army Type: Legion of Night
	 - Grand Strategy: Lust for Domination
	 - Triumph: Bloodthirsty
LEADERS
Mannfred Von Carstein (400)*
	 - Spells: Waste Away
Wight King on Skeletal Steed (170)*
	 - General
	 - Command Traits: The Bait
Necromancer (100)**
	 - Spells: Merciless Blizzard
Vampire Lord (150)**
	 - Artefacts of Power: Morbheg’s Claw
	 - Spells: Hoarfrost
BATTLELINE
Deathrattle Skeletons (330)*
	 - Skeleton Champion
	 - 3 x Standard Bearer
Grave Guard (320)*
	 - Seneschal
	 - Wight Blade and Crypt Shield
	 - 2 x Standard Bearer
	 - 2 x Hornblower
Deadwalker Zombies (150)*
Fell Bats (90)*
OTHER
Black Knights (260)*
	 - Hellknight
	 - 2 x Standard Bearer
	 - 2 x Hornblower
CORE BATTALIONS
*Battle Regiment
**Andtorian Acolytes
TOTAL POINTS: 1970/2000

Edited November 6, 2023 by Craze

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

12 minutes ago, Craze said:

But I think it is safe to say that the army was not punished for the "sins of Legion of Night" but for the Vyrkos Zombie nonsense, which was the dominant, cheesy build before the nerfs...

 

From my experience (not a really competitive player, but had some games lately with LoN), there are a couple of points:

- "The Bait" really makes alpha striking enemy armies reconsider crashing into your walls of undead flesh turn 1

- "Morbhegs Claw" is just really good at helping you cast Hoarfrost and/or Merciless Blizzard

- The whole mobility gained through "Swift Form" gives you a variety of options, from getting a VL into buff range for "Crimson Feast" to teleporting out of unbind range for an easy and safe completion of "Magical Dominance"

- Mannfred is just a beast. The dual chance to get off countercharges, once through Reposition and second through real countercharge - especially on a "Hoarfrost" buffed Manny - is really scary. 

- The combined possibilities of several of these points generate the potential for REALLY scary turns, e.g.: Buff Manny or Grave Guard with "Hoarfrost", get your VL in the perfect spot for "Crimson Feast", charge with Manny, kill 1 model with Gheistvor, then attack with your hoarfrosted, crimson feasted & Gheistvor-powered blob of 20 Grave Guard = delete whatever they touch. You don't even need to calculate what 81 attacks at 2+/3+/-1/2 with Mortals on wound rolls of 6+ do to any unit.

Thanks! I always forget about Hoarfrost and Blizzard because I kind of wish they didn't exist, haha.

[Leshoyadut]

1 hour ago, Craze said:

But I think it is safe to say that the army was not punished for the "sins of Legion of Night" but for the Vyrkos Zombie nonsense, which was the dominant, cheesy build before the nerfs...

I would agree with that if LoN wasn't both more played and had a higher winrate than Vyrkos did before the nerfs.

Vyrkos was absolutely a problem, and zombies needed nerfing along with their support pieces in the subfaction. But we didn't need more stuff like how hard Spirit Gale got hit (needed something, but 3 targets is rough), or the additional points changes to units like Neferata and the VLOZD, let alone Vengorian Lords getting side-swiped for some reason. Saying it was just for the sins of LoN was an oversimplification, maybe, but the army needed deadwalker and LoN nerfs, not army-wide hits, at least as far as I was seeing.

Edited November 6, 2023 by Leshoyadut

[JackStreicher]

We are back Babeeeeeeee-ey

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2023/12/18/the-fang-of-nulahmia-meet-neferatas-chief-lieutenant/

 

 

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

14 minutes ago, JackStreicher said:

We are back Babeeeeeeee-ey

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2023/12/18/the-fang-of-nulahmia-meet-neferatas-chief-lieutenant/

I like her. I might pick up this box, I don't have any Fell Bats yet.

We might get another guy for Manfred as well, plus maybe a new Underworlds warband soon. Exciting.

[Sception]

I like her a lot, but I've always been a sucker for tall silly hats.

[Leshoyadut]

Once again, I absolutely love the model. And once again, I am slightly annoyed by us getting yet one more foot vampire model.

Still a truly wonderful model and I'm probably picking her up, though.

[Tonhel]

It's an amazing mini. I always resisted starting a Soulblight army. I did buy the Cursed City set, but with this mini it's impossible to resist. I also like the rule snippets. What would be a fluffly army build centered around her? Ofcourse it will be Legion of Blood, but what units would make a immersive armylist true to the background? No Vyrkos mini's is a given.

[Sception]

5 hours ago, Tonhel said:

It's an amazing mini. I always resisted starting a Soulblight army. I did buy the Cursed City set, but with this mini it's impossible to resist. I also like the rule snippets. What would be a fluffly army build centered around her? Ofcourse it will be Legion of Blood, but what units would make a immersive armylist true to the background? No Vyrkos mini's is a given.

hard to say without getting her full write up.  At the moment she's the leader of a diplomatic delegation to Summercourt, so in theory if you want an immersive army representing what she's up to *right now*, you take her in whatever her regiment of renown is and add that to a Flesh Eater Courts army with Ushoran.

more generally, though, she seems to be Neferata's right hand, so Legion of blood with neferata, some bats & wolves since she seems to like those, maybe a coven throne or blood palanquin since they have a lamianesque feel, or maybe instead a vamp lord on zombie dragon, but converted with a lady vamp rider?  Fill out battleline with some black knights & skeleton regiments?

Unfortunately the current skeletons feel much more vyrkos or legion of the night than lahmian.  if you can get your hands on some of the previous vamp counts skeletons with spears and give them some tomb kings shields, those might fit the desired aesthetic better.

[Tonhel]

@Sception

Great advice! Thank you

[RocketPropelledGrenade]

I'm hoping she's a little beefier than our current foot heroes. Use the snake and the larger base as justification to make her like 7-9 wounds (not 10. Please not 10)--then she could avoid getting AoE nuked as easily by armies that do that and make some actual use of her defensive rule if she gets into combat (which I wish didn't exist in the form it did, but oh well).

As a Legion of Blood diehard, I am definitely interested, but I also don't need the other box contents, so I'll just wait and see what becomes of this.

[JackStreicher]

I've just finished "The Hollow King":

Really good book! The first AoS Book (apart from Gotrek) I've enjoyed that much.

[Leshoyadut]

That one was probably the next AoS book I was planning to read. I liked the Annandale books about Neferata, and the one book about the Avengorii, plus a couple non-Soulblight books, so I'm excited to get to this one. He sounds like a cool character, so I'm excited to read his book.

Edited January 1 by Leshoyadut

[Sception]

I didn't much care for the Avengori book myself.  Which was frustrating, because the premise and set up were actually really good. The city was set up well, its cool mythic fantasy premise, the class stuff, the arrogant belief that they could literally rise above the brutality of Ghur, the Avengori as a literal and metaphorical opposite embracing the monstrosity of ghur while digging into the ground to live in caverns beneath the surface. The set up of the beastmen was lacking, they're not characters at all, just a list of kits you can buy at your local hobby store.  But everything else really felt like it was going somewhere, and then it just kind of didn't in the end.

Especially the subplot of avengori turning members of the absolute dregs of the city's society - the people even the underclass look down on, those without even the false desperate hope of social advancement, the used up and abandoned. That subplot probably had the very most potential out of anything in the book, and also most clearly differentiated Avengori from other bloodlines who are usually depicted as infiltrating decadent noble classes. Avengori starting from the bottom up instead, forcing forcing a society to confront its sins by giving its lost and forgotten the power to tear down their oppressors was a neat idea - going to those that the rest of society refuses to even acknowledge as human and saying 'if they won't let you be human, you might as well join us and be monsters'.

The seeds of an amazing book are there, but they're stamped to pieces in an ending that just degenerates into a bunch of arbitrary battle scenes without any real tension or meaning, while the twist the beginning and middle of the book felt like they were setting up just never materializes, and it all descends into the worst sort of gw novel pandering - this is the avengorii book, so they beat up everybody else without even trying, and it kills the stakes and it renders all the more interesting themes it touches on meaningless since none of it mattered anyway.

...

On the other hand, I was a huge fan of Undying King.  Nice taste of Nagash, his human worshippers, Neferata, Arkhan, flesh eaters, wights, etc.  Kind of wish they'd bring back the main character of that book, though I'm not sure there's really any story left to tell with her.

[RocketPropelledGrenade]

Undying King was amazing. Haven't read many other Death books yet, but that one was great.