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No, only one unit has the 5+++ or 6+++. Every unit that is in proximity to the general, which will be every unit that isn't currently killing you or camping an objective will be 5+ 5++ or 5+ 6++. The -1 to hit being shooting only is correct. Typically, the unit most dangerous to your sequitors, and most likely to target them is going to be the one with all the buffs. on it. This does leave the other units vulnerable(they'll still have hag buffs and the cauldron shield and either the -1 to hit in shooting or the 5++) but you're still staring down the barrel of a unit that can guarantee a 12" move with reroll charges and absolutely CANNOT be allowed to charge your sequitors. If you get your sequitors into THEM, even their absolute most heavily buffed state will be hurtin for certain. It's all about charge priority between these two, unless you can get the hags for cheap. If you can get the hags for cheap, you still don't want them charging you but it's nowhere near as bad.

You have an optimistic view of things, that's nice, but it makes me nervous. Being positive about things that are negative is how problems go unnoticed and unfixed. There are bad units, not everything has a place, some things are obsolete. That said, now that I actually have the book and some tournament data, I'm more interested in what's good than what's bad anyway. (Veritant's still bad) The 5+ comes from bloodshield, the +++s comes from a prayer, the 5++ comes from proximity to the general, there's nothing you can really do about the -1. Targeting down the Cauldron is the most immediate counter tactic, but they'll be expecting that, Considering Longstrikes do their mortal wounds on unmodified 6s now(I believe) and HagQueens are made of paper, picking out the hags is a possibilty, even through a -2. If you can get the hags, Witch aelves are only bravery 7 or 8 AND they lose their rerolls to wound. Also, because the +++ reroll can only be cast once per turn, anything that can make the decision of who gets it complicated will be very helpful. Against an army like Murderhost and their impossibly fast bloodletters, I'd suggest an 'end around' . Put the other battleline out front, essentially as sacrifices, and put the evocators in the sky. Most murderhosts will bumrush you first turn and crash into your line of sacrifices. If they take the bait, then you drop your big units behind them targeting out their buff characters and battleshock protections while your sequitors obliterate them on the counter charge. Dealing with their big monsters after will be a bit touch and go, but if you can shred through their bloodletter core you can essentially ignore them and just play objectives. Nurgle is all about stopping mortal wounds and applying pressure . Your sequitors will be more resilient AND more damaging than their plague bearers, which they will absolutely not expect. You're still going to lose a grind-y match against 90 plaguebearers unsupported, but it will take long enough that you should be able to deal with THEIR support and then lend an assist. Plague-drones are an issue, as are any consistent sources of non-spell mortal wounds. Spell mortal wounds can be almost entirely negated between an incantor, the Lord Arcanum, and Refractor lens. With Seraphon...who even knows with Seraphon. With all the wackadoo stuff going on with them they could be a completely different army in a few weeks. I think the proposed list (like 2 pages ago now?) could be tailored to do well in just about any meta. Sequitors make an excellent foundation to build off of. They have excellent offense and defense and a clear weakness(lack of speed) that can be planned for both in how you're going to mitigate that weakness and how to take advantage of it making your opponent more predictable as he tries(and hopefully fails) to exploit something you're already more than aware of.

Usually they'll be at either 5+ 5++ 5+++ or 5+6++6+++ -1 to hit and they are 100% immune to morale at all times until all of their hag queens are dead., clearing off units that would be dangerous to the sequitor squad is good option, as even with their surprising amount of resilience, units like these can lose effectiveness relatively quickly and can become more manageable at smaller numbers. Having an additional, faster threat unit would help take attention off the sequitors and let them get to where they need to be going unmolested. Maybe shuffling some points around to pump up a unit of evocators to 10 and have them dive bomb something on the flanks would give them the breathing room they need to be able to really dish out the damage. A unit of sequitors that gets charge initiative is in a position to sweep the entire board with smart CP use. It's about facilitating them hitting combat when YOU want them too, rather than your opponent.

Because before, he was the only thing in the army that could unbind, now he isn't. His only role is performed better by MULTIPLE other units in the book. I guess I should have added 'relative to the rest of the army'. The gryph hound is irrelevant. Everything can get a 9" drop. If the gryph hound charges a necromancer it's still probably going to die in combat or have to retreat out, if it even has somewhere to retreat to. Also that's a 28% chance of succeeding the charge, if you even can charge, but that's never going to happen because, like you said, screens. If the gryph hound dies, that's 120pts on a single unboosted unbind every turn. The relictors warscroll prayer is amazingly powerful, it's at least as powerful the table prayers, where the veritant has just his unboosted unbind. The extra wound and CC profile aren't very helpful, they add nothing significant to him being able to perform his actual function. If you're in a position where how well he fights CQC is important to the state of the game, there's a pretty high chance you're already on your way. He does biff all damage and dies pretty much whenever your opponent feels like it. For 20pts you get unhelpful bonuses to combat, an unhelpful gryph hound, an unbind that would be much better from an Incantor, and a prayer. He's a 120pt hail mary suicide bomb you're using to stop 1 spell...maybe.

It IS the most incredibly offensive unit in the game, it is also a very commonly played unit. It's not impossible to play DoK several times per event and each time is likely to have 2 units of buffed witch aelves. Having a strategy ready for it is just good business. Besides, other commonly used units like bloodletters or even some of the new nighthaunt stuff can do similar things to witch aelves, and sequitors damage being focused on its grandhammers, combined with the new rules for coherency, mean that if your opponent can use their speed to get around you they can lay their offense into where your counter attack will be weakest and can force you to pull away models that would have been able to fight if you want to keep the greatmaces around. Remember, it's SUPER risky now to take a model away from the center of a unit, one bad measurement and whoop! half the unit's gone. Gavriel or Cogs are almost mandatory just to function, using a heraldor is a good solution, but it still leaves you between a rock and a hard place if you need to get somewhere where there isn't a unit to charge, like covering an objective.

Ew, refractor lens(it's powerful but it's so stupid, all of the realm rules are stupid)...anyway, I don't think doubling down on tankiness is the correct answer. Personally I'm working on an idea around using one foot based group of 20 and one sky based group of 20 to kind of 'hammer and anvil' the enemy, though for that I prefer Celestial Vindicators as that allows me to buff the skydrop unit as it lands. If you can figure out a way to mitigate the slow speed of the sequitors you're going to have a very, very powerful list on your hands. (Oh and just for funsies, a unit of 30 bravery 8 witch aelves(they get+1 for their cauldron) with mindrazor and witchbrew will do 30 wounds to a 3+ rerollable save.)

Grand Convocation is 130pts and requires 140pts of the incredibly poor lord exorcist for a mediocre bonus. He should just take the stardrake. He's already at a 72% chance with just that. How are you dealing with being hit first? With how incredibly slow sequitors are, you're almost never going to be getting charge initiative, and even with 3+ rerollable saves, most armies will still be able to shred a unit of 20 down a good amount. A unit of Witch aelves with Mindrazor, for example, will absolutely kill a unit of 20 sequitors through their reroll and castellant buff, in a single combat phase.

No. That'd be a waste of a relic anyway, but he DOESN'T get an extra unbind with spellshield(only wizards get an extra one) and he'll probably never be at +3 to dispel. Getting a specific gryph hound that close to an enemy wizard and having it survive both the combat phase AND wizards not within 6" of the gryph hound killing it is unrealistically difficult. In fact, the Veritant is actually worse than he was for the most part. The Incantor is a better spell stopper while also being a strong caster, the army isn't hurting for unbinds anymore, the Relictor is still better at being a priest. He, along with the Lord Exorcist, seem totally lost in this book.

I know you weren't replying to me but I disagree strongly soo...here we go. They add nothing but bookkeeping with a dash of balance issues. If they're powerful enough to be casted over whatever warscroll/battletome/endless spell you have, they're probably OP. If they're not powerful enough to be casted over whatever warscroll/battletome/endless spell you have, they're pointless book-keeping. They also heavily favor more magically capable armies and units. Ironjaws with their 1 maybe 2 weird boys don't get anywhere near the boost Arkhan and his battalion do, for example. And so long as Umbral spellportal exists, there runs the potential of things getting completely out of hand. They give armies new options...that again heavily favor whichever force is best capable of taking advantage of them, creating more balance issues. Having both armies take the same spells actually makes this problem far worse. The probability of both sides getting the same value out of the same additional spell options is astronomically small. Relics are even worse. They're either better than every single other option available to you, or they're not taken. With battalions becoming much more rare you're only seeing one relic per list most of the time. And usually those relics are ethereal or refracting lens. 84 relics and only maybe 5 or 6 will see any use in matched play. Relics add less to matched play than any other aspect of allegiance abilities. Most armies only get 1 at a time, and most factions only end up really having 4-5 to choose from. Stormcast have access to something like 120+ relics and only maybe 10 see any play. Heck, with Stormhosts having mandatory relics associated with them, they'll only ever use maybe 3. DoK, even WITH access to the tables STILL choose the prayer relic or shadowstone most of the time. The only meaningful thing a new neutral relic is capable of doing is taking a strong hero and making it bonkers, as is the case with ethereal and refracting lens. 'But non-battletome armies?' Most non-battletome armies are never going to be able to utilize these spells and relics as well as battletome armies. Who do you think gets more out of having an extra powerful spell to cast, Nagash or an Archmage? It gives them new options, sure, but it also widens the gap between them and the armies that have the tools to use these new options better. The army that MIGHT be able to do something massive with the spells and relics is mixed order, and mixed order was already one of the better armies in the game. They get more help than any other non-battletome army, despite needing it the least. For matched play, with spells all that happens is you see the power level of whatever magic users are best capable of utilizing them go up, and the power of factions/units who can't utilize them go down. Relics are the same, only on a tinier scale. You'd get exactly the same result by throwing darts labeled "+20pts, +40pts, -20pts, -40pts" at the GHB.

The relics might(but hopefully won't) see some play (ethereal Stardrake/Mawcrusha/VLoZD/GUO yay...), same with the one spell you get for selecting that realm. The rest of the spells likely won't and the full realm rules will absolutely not. I can't even imagine trying to play a tournament in Ghur or Ulgu with how goofy those rules are.

What they're referring to are things like the Stormcasts new 'Anvils of Heldenhammer' CA or their 'Celestial Vindicators' CA. Anvils of Heldenhammer can coneivably allow a unit of 12 Longstrikes to shoot 14ish times in the first turn and Celestial Vindicators allows you to Deepstrike a unit of 20 Sequitors(or paladins or evocators) and give them +4 or +5 attacks so that they can string themselves out and blast away a massive chunk of your army in one shot. Other armies have similar abilities that, stacked one on top of the other, can lead to an absolutely brutal hammer blow to your opponent. Some of the CAs haven't been FAQed to only work once per unit. The thing that makes CA spam so strong is that it kinda doesn't matter if they have weaknesses elsewhere, the investment in CAs results in so much damage done to the opponent that having few bodies or w/e isn't really relevant. An anvils of heldenhammer Hurricane Crossbow/Longstrike group or a Celestial Vindicators Sequitors squad are both capable of killing basically all of your foot troops at once under ideal circumstances. The fact that it's not unbeatable doesn't mean that it might not be a bit out of line. But, like everything else with the edition we kinda have to wait and see. If the next big Sigmar event is 5 summoning armies and 5 CA spam armies in the top ten, it might need some tweaks.

DoK ended out slightly above where they were before. The generic Command abilities and Chronomatic cogs were quite big for them and helped mitigate their battalions becoming overly expensive. Maggotkin are similarly right around the same powerlevel, gaining summoning in place of plaguetouched warband. I believe Idoneth actually ended up slightly above where they were, and Ironjawz out of destruction got some fairly significant buffs, though probably not enough to be on the same level as the tippity top of the armies out there.

You wouldn't bring in Tempestors with Scions, that's the whole point of 10" move, being able to use them as one of your 'on table' deployments. If you were going to teleport them in, there are far better units for that, also they do more 'maybe a liberator if you're lucky' damage in shooting. The 12" range isn't good because it's against SHOOTING unit only. The targeted abiltiy was the same range but affected melee too. If you're within 12" of a shooting unit, you're most likely in position to eliminate it from the game, or tie it up. If the tempestors had enough damage output to reliably kill the unit, it might make them decent for hunting down skyfires and the like, but they don't, so they aren't. Being able to pick your opponents scariest unit and seriously hamper it's effectiveness was very powerful. Maybe useless was too strong, but making your opponents shooting units move slightly to the left before they shoot isn't as good, or as tactically interesting as the previous ability. You're also not accounting for the fact that during your opponents turn the palladors do quite significantly more damage than tempestors. 'Completely balanced for their points' is only relative to the value of other cavalry units, I don't think any of the cavalry are where they should be for what they can do. Internal balance seems to be A. only really something that affects cavalry units, and B. being based around somewhere below where these units were before. Considering that even Fulminators, which were the best of the bunch, were beginning to struggle mightily towards the end of AoS1 and are now more vulnerable than ever due to magic becoming more prevalent, that's probably not very good. They also appear noticeably weaker than other available strategies, most specifically CA spam lists. And finally, I said Tempestors are weak and the cavalry don't seem to be benefiting much from the new book, and that I'm not impressed by our anti horde options, not that the army as a whole wouldn't be competitive. With how expensive these units are and the fact that staunch defender is going to be much harder to take advantage of, Dracoths and Dracolines are likely going to simply be too many points in too fragile of a container. Their incredible resilience against convential damage is nice, but your opponents only have to invest 5 mortal wounds in killing 100+pts of your army. Palladors dodge this somewhat due to their speed and their cheaper wound/point ratio but it's still a pretty massive issue for units that just don't have the DPS necessary to win engagements decisively. If you could grind it out over 2-3 turns they'd be fine, but you can't really afford such an expensive unit sitting still that long with all the Endless Spells flying around. The issue with the Crossbow Judicators and Vanguard Hurricanes being used for anti-horde is that their range is incredibly short and that they're designed to shave off a few models at a time, which isn't something that can really be done against the hordes that actually see table time. The most common hordes in the game are: Blood Letters, Sisters of Slaughter, Witch Aelves, Plaguebearers, Horrors, Skeletons, Chainwrasp hordes(soon), Grots, Longgunners, and Sequitors(soon). Bloodletters, SoS, WA, and Sequitors can close down 18" in a single turn, one way or another, at which point neither Stormcast unit will survive even a single combat phase(bonus points for DoK units access to a -1 to hit in shooting ability). Horrors can outshoot you simply because of the difference in resilience and Longguners are both better shooting units AND have a longer range. Skeletons and Chainwrasp hordes will out regenerate the damage you deal and plaguebearers take very little damage from shooting AND can out regenerate the damage you deal with a couple of lucky morale rolls. Grots are just so numerous and cheap that they'd probably just let you keep plinking away. And yes, you could invest more and more resources into buffs and morale bombs, and reroll auras and CAs, but you can do that with every unit, only investing in buffing sequitors or Evocators, or even Celestar ballista doesn't leave you in a position where your opponent could lock you up for an entire game with basically any unit with a 3+ rerolling 1 save or better. Oh, also the extremely low wound count of the units means that any return ranged damage would wipe them out quite quickly. TL: DR DOWN HERE: The army will most likely be fine, you're not suddenly post GHB 2017 beastclaw raiders, but if you want to take Stormcasts to major events and have a good chance at winning you have to be harsh. You also have to be getting every last drop of efficiency out of the army you can. Since I play basically 0 'for fun' games, that's how I look at units. Calling something 'useless' isn't a personal attack, it's the quickest way to express 'This unit/ability is not efficient enough at it's intended role to be expected to fulfill said role against the most powerful competition it is likely to face.' Some stuff just isn't good enough, the world sucks like that.

Our 'most impressive horde killers' barely being able to kill 5 skeletons or Witch aelves per turn is a MASSIVE red flag to me.

Calvary in general isn't great now(it really feels like the army was designed around deepstriking sequitors and the rest of it is mostly just there to fill pages) so it's not like it's going to be a huge big decision to make, but here's the math on it. Shooting damage is 2 for both, melee damage is 3.77 against a 4+ save for the Dracoths and rider damage is 5ish for concussors and 5.333 on the charge for Fulminators and 1.78 for the rider. That means a Concussor unit is doing 8.8ish damage in melee and 2 in shooting and a Fulminator unit is doing 9ish damage on the charge and 7.113 damage not on the charge and 2 in shooting. That equals out to about .034 damage per point for concussors(not including shooting) and .0375 damage per point on the charge and .03 damage per point(also not including shooting). Basically if you can get a charge off 2 out of the 3 turns Dracoths are usually alive for, Fulminators will be better thanks to their slightly higher damage output on the charge and their increased resilience. If not, Concussors will be better.

The part about Tempestors is actually wrong, their shooting does nothing and losing the good breath attack for the terrible one means that they actually just can't do any damage anymore. Combine that with their -1 to hit ability being made completely useless(only works on shooting units in a time where shootings been heavily nerfed AND only has a 12" range) and unless tempestors went down to about 140pts I can't see any situation where they hit the table. Tempestors shooting(including mortal wounds) and their melee put together do 4.33 damage to a 4+ save before the dracoths. The dracoths will add 3.777 damage. That means for the same cost of 5 retributors you get a unit that does 8 damage every other turn and has a completely useless debuff aura instead of the awesome targeted debuff they used to have. That means they only do 4.3 damage to a 4+ save in melee. They're really not very good anymore.