Spears

The rules for spectral summons state that you remove a unit from the battlefield and set it up wholly within 12 of your general.

I use paper but after every event I tell myself I'm going to take some scissors to the books. Why GW insist on putting path to glory etc in amongst the more commonly required rules baffles me.

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I think it was the terrain piece, katakros and the drain vitality spell. Amusingly I had a spirit torment in range so it was a case of rerolling 1s 2s and 6s , missing on 3s and 4s but hitting on 5s or 6s on the second roll.

Got my first game in against the new boney boys yesterday, lost as Nighthaunt. Few thoughts from the game: I hadn't heard much about the debuffs, at one point my bladegheists were at -2 to hit having to reroll 6s to hit and then reroll 6s to save. Only one of the abilites was a spell. It seems like this would be hugely effective against any army with one big deathstar blob. Only one of these being a spell meant its super reliable too. The healing is great, just dumping unconditional flat 3 wound heals at 24 inch range seemed really reliable. The catapult is scary as hell but susceptible to being shut down. Obr don't really have the bodies to screen if they also want to get out into the field. Katakros shutting down the aetherquartz brooch in the enemy turn feels pretty potent. Rd points felt fairly generous, it certainly didn't feel like any of the available buffs werent being used to conserve them. The lack of the charge re roll is absolutely going to cost Obr players some games though. Overall I felt massively outgunned, almost all of the OBR abilities and attacks going off were considerably more potent than the NH ones. That said my opponent was playing a hero and cav heavy list, so I did feel that with better placement I could have been in the game on objectives. I think a swarm of mortek guard would have just completely shut me out of the game. Straight up battle shock immunity contributes to this, it feels like gw are aware that infantry swarms seem to outweigh other choices as evidenced in the mawtribes scoring ability, but at the same time completely negate one of the few downsides to running infantry bricks. As a faction they seemed super strong but in part that's looking through the lens of a faction with a number of similar but worse design elements, decent saves, healing without summoning. That said playing against them also felt like an honest game of warhammer, there was magic, shooting and cc but very little of it broke the core rules or felt uninteractive.

Honestly I think that was the right call. Having to jump through hoops to get a limited edition warscroll for the birthday GOS was a farce. If it had been just an alt sculpt for a general release warscroll I think that would be okay though.

Oh yeah, i've been painting mine so long I forgot they got a points drop. I'm not sure I could stomach that detail on 15 of them, good luck.

Cripes do you play many 2500 point games?

It would be nice to keep the risk element of demon blades, but the rewards need to be higher and it would be good to move them to the actual hit roll rather than adding an extra dice rolling step. Something like 1 self mortal on a 1 or 3 mortals to target on a 6.

The Crawlers cauldron states "equal to or greater than the unmodified bravery characteristic of the target unit" Chainrasp horde have a bravery characteristic of 6, however the unit has a bravery characteristic of 10 while it includes a dreadwarden. Does the dreadwarden bravery 10 count as a modifier?

I think we might be reading this rule differently. You don't total up the rolls and compare them to the units bravery, you compare each individual roll to the units bravery. So varanguard and stormcast are completely immune to it, however it can absolutely decimate units of grots.

It's perhaps worth pointing out that the Nighthaunt multi part kits offer no posing, no loadouts and almost no bits. Having assembled a full army the only benefit I have over pushfit is that I could leave a few masks of the bladegheists. Perhaps this in part is because they have positioned nighthaunt as an entry army, if so it seems feasible that they might be doing something similar with some of the chaos range. A box full of chunky spikey lads that can be pushed together seems like it would appeal to both kids dragging parents around the store as well as those who value ease of assembly over customisation. Edit: This wasn't intended as a complaint more to point out multipart doesn't inherently bring benefits, despite being a nearly entirely monopose army I dont think you would actually notice on the tabletop. Hexwraiths buck the trend of the rest of the army but are also from an earlier period.

What are you putting the sword on?

It seems like there are some quality of life issues with Nighthaunt if you embrace the core concept of the army as being around deepstriking: The very small buff ranges make managing these whilst charging from underworlds very difficult. Playing against more modern armies really highlights how many hoops you need to jump through just to get a subpar version of buffs available elsewhere. The NH book definitely feels like they were trying to cut down on stringing lines of people back to a banner, but its clear from the different versions of the buff ranges in the book and soulwars that the ranges were finalised quite late and perhaps arent quite right. Either extending the ranges or removing wholly within for a number of buffs and spells would make everything feel a lot smoother. Without cogs successfully charging from deep strike is risky. You also end up having to make wierd shapes to give the characters room to charge into within the main unit whilst mainting buff range if the character fails the charge. An inherent charge bonus on the turn we deepstrike that doesnt interact with WOT would go a long way to making them feel like an army with a purpose rather than the gamblers choice. I think both of these could be fixed relatively safely without a whole new book. It doesn't solve the real power problem with the faction though. Nighthaunt have to fight, their shooting and offensive magic is abysmal. With no way to interact with a buff piece that isnt out in the open the army eventually has to charge your opponent, but once they do they arent good enough in the combat phase to actually go toe to toe with other fighting armies. So you fight, die and then dont have the recursion available to Legions of Nagash. Even in victories I find myself normally on the way to getting tabled, I dont think there is an easy fix for this though.

So if you take the sons of the lichemaster mercenaries and park the skeleton blobs in with your guard and harvesters you could convert skeletons into guard. This has perhaps a few too many moving parts to be viable but funny nonetheless.

Without being facetious what price rises? Is this comparing the cost of new kits to old or was there a global price rise of models.

Without the book how does the command point cost of mercenarys actually effect bonereapers?

The spears on the cav explode on 5+ rather than 6+ if you charged.

I think whether or not this is a downside depends on the individual. Its clear from this thread that actually being able to keep on top of your hobby backlog is a key purchasing factor for a number of people. Having easier to put together models can help significantly reduce the time investment needed to to build a box of models, and it is whilst the box is in its unbuilt stage that it stops me buying more.

Personally I think two of the special characters is just about right. Anything less and I find I have too many models contributing to brain drain and generally being a bit of a hassle. Eidt: For battleforces hopefully they use the opportunity to put in the Gos with mortality glass warscroll. Maybe even a matched play legal battalion to up the reliability of kurdoss.

Hey I'd recommend working out how you want to buy into Nighthaunt first. If you are splitting a soul wars box that probably defines the core of your army. Or it looks like you could pick up a could of the old box that had hexwraiths and hosts in if you want to stick with the above list.

On the subject of using the Gt as an indicator I did qualify using NightHaunt and planned to attend with NH but in the end I had a nice lie in instead. The prospect of two days uphill struggle was definitely a contributor to this. All that said I actually think we have reasonable tools to participate in the activation wars, wave of terror and soul cage both give us some answer to Slaanesh etc. Unfortunately the core army mechanics all seem to be slightly worse than equivalents elsewhere, whether this is the range of our abilities or our subpar healing. Adding units from NH to LON has created an awkward balancing situation between the two factions which they then doubled down on with Grief. Ideally Gw wont repeat this with the bonereapers release.

Is the guy on the mortarch base holding an undead carrier pigeon?

Lets hope they are only allies to legions rather than bundling them in like Nighthaunt were.