ShepHammer

Please reread the example I gave. I was including the mount trait 'pride leader' (pg. 125 of Stormcast Battletome) in that calculation.

I'm happy to provide some constructive criticism on this list, and I will make sure to maintain a narrative perspective. And I won't suggest that you dump almost everything for the sacrosanct army. I'll suggest some stuff for you to start thinking about spending your Christmas money on though. As I mentioned before, the lord-arcanum on dracoline is a good thing to think about in the future, but the lord-aquilor does hit just as hard, his mount is just a little less of a bruiser, and you trade the impressive flasks for an unimpressive gun. But I get it, you are running a vanguard force that is supported by a sacrosanct chamber, not the other way around. I like your choice of mount trait since you will be fighting when it is wise to do so. The knight-incantor and the comet are a big risk, even in narrative games. With no bonuses to cast, and only a single 5-wound model that is eligible to cast the comet, you might spend three turns trying to cast it, then lose your wizard before it ever goes off. I would highly suggest cutting the comet for a third ballista and changing the knight-incantor into a lord-ordinator. That cluster of units has been incredibly effective for me and many other players at all levels of competition. For the purposes of fluff, you can imagine that your lord-aquilor has arranged for the ordinator and his equipment to arrive on his signal, once the target has been located. The battleline looks fine to me, go get objectives and murder the enemy objective holders. Regarding the vanguard-palladors: In the context of this list, I'd love to see something that hits a lot harder. I like what they offer in a vacuum, but you've got so much shooting and hyper-maneuverability with scions of the storm and astral compasses, I think they just provide more of the high-cost, high-speed, low-output that you are full of already. This might be why you feel like you are missing some punch. Speaking of punch, I love this 10-strong unit of evocators. I'm sure it is your MVP in nearly every game you play. The heraldor helps to deliver them and also pluck them out of combats they don't want to be in. Love it! I think you'll see more success if you replaced the palladors with either a couple units of sequitors or more evocators. Imagine that your lord-aquilor has been encountering stiff resistance, and has requested more hard-hitting support for his hunting mission. Lastly, I really want to strongly recommend a lord-castellant in place of your knight-azyros. Your 400 point evocator unit is the most crucial unit in your whole force. It could do with some more support. The lord-castellant can deploy on the table with them, and with the lord and his hound, the evocators, and the heraldor, that will allow the ordinator and his toys to deploy in the sky. The lord aquilor and palladors (or whatever you replace them with) can start on the table when you want to compass your hunters. With the castellant/heraldor/evocator block, you have a good outlet for your CP (and bonus Tempest Lords CP). You'll really want to have 1 CP on-hand at all times for inspiring presence, you'll actually want 'at the double' since you can chain runs into charges, and rerolling charges with 'forward to victory' will come up a lot. If you don't manage to cast empower, you may even feel that 'rousing oratory' is worth using on the evocators. Once you invest in more melee punch from sequitors and evocators, you'll immediately feel an improvement. You don't have to run out and buy 50 sequitors and Gavriel, but a gradual inclusion of more of those units will ramp up your punch while preserving your theme. Hopefully that was helpful!

Command abilities have the potential to drastically impact games of AOS. This is not true of every command ability though. The CAs with the most potential for abuse often can stack, or they trigger an effect with more impact than simply dice-fixing. The tempest lords caught my eye because their battle trait has significant potential in comparison to the other stormhosts. But unfortunately, the command abilities with the most potential for abuse are limited to Hammers of Sigmar, Anvils of the Heldenhammer, and even Celestial Warbringers. For your vanguard chamber units, lords of the azyrite hurricane can't be 'spammed', and vanguard units are typically fielded in small units that prefer to shoot rather than charge. This means that inspiring presence, at the double, and forward to victory are all next to useless. Tempest lords provide almost no help to Vanguard units. The story is better for sacrosanct units. There is one particular unit combination that would be effective with tempest lords. Take a lord-arcanum on dracoline, and run him near a unit of evocators on dracolines, take the pride leader mount trait on the lord arcanum. If that hero is within 6" of any of your units, he will have +1 to hit and +1 to wound on all of his attacks. Hitting and wounding on 2s with 7 multi-damage attacks is fantastic, and don't forget to break your spirit flasks on the turn you charge. I just recently man-handled a 20-strong unit of grimghast reapers with a lord-arcanum on dracoline charge. This lord arcanum has a great outlet for all of those extra tempest lord command points. If you can keep your formation tight enough, you can "spam" pack alpha, giving you as many additional dracoline attacks for the evocators as you have CPs. As to whether or not you should 'give up' on tempest lords.... it depends. If you have painted your models in tempest lords colors and it is important to you that your model colors match their stormhost, you should keep going with tempest lords. Embrace their character as noble lords and peerless battlefield commanders. Lean in to their strengths, which are leveraging the most powerful generic command abilities and having an extra hard-hitting warlord. If you painted your models in a generic scheme, or it doesn't matter to you if the colors match the stormhost, then experiment with the others. My personal opinion is that staunch defender has lost a lot of its AOS1.0 luster. Having played many games using Hammers of Sigmar and Anvils of the Heldenhammer stormhosts, it became apparent that it wasn't as necessary as it first seemed. In my meta, my stormcast armies are not winning many attrition battles. My success against maggotkin, daughters of khaine, and sylvaneth has been achieved by surrendering early victory points, appearing in aggressive locations, delivering a crippling attack, then keeping the pressure up until I table (or essentially table) my opponent. Bonds of noble duty would be welcome help for that strategy. Long live the Blue-Blooded!

That's some well-illustrated calculating there Hammer! In the spirit of that helpful contribution, I wanted to answer the question that came up a couple of times a page ago regarding the Lord-Ordinator. From a purely mathematical efficiency standpoint, The Lord-Ordinator is inefficient for 1-2 ballistas, and becomes more valuable than the fourth ballista when he is surrounded by 3. Just to illustrate how that works. One ballista hitting on 5s hits 1.333 times (before those hits explode into more hits) One ballista near an ordinator hits 2 times. That leaves us a difference of 0.667. So for each ballista added, we add another 0.667. The ordinator has the same impact as a third ballista, but he is 140% of the cost, so that isn't quite efficient. At 3 ballistas, adding a lord-ordinator accounts for 2 extra hits. That is more efficient than the 4th ballista even if you account for the points cost increase (by multiplying the hits of a fourth ballista by 1.4). More important than pure mathematical efficiency are the practical applications. Here are some important things to remember: Although more efficient, deploying three ballistas wholly within 9" of a lord-ordinator restricts your placement options, and makes counterplay much easier for your opponent. If you are playing Anvils of the Heldenhammer, then you'll need a hero in the exact same distance as the lord-ordinator to use heroes from another age, so the ordinator gains more value, even with only two ballistas. Giving the ordinator one of your "throwaway" artefacts allows him to be a scoring unit in places of arcane power. Sometimes, you just really need 40 more points. So to answer the infamous question of "Should I Ordinator?" You have to look at more than pure output efficiency.

Disclaimer: The advice I'll give assumes you are looking to win the tournament. If the tournament is just for fun or has soft-scores, then that might change the advice. I wonder how big the table is for this size of a tournament. Are you all going to be fighting on 4x4'? Or is this going to be played on a standard 4x6'? Those evocators are going to have to cover a LOT of ground if its a full sized table. You've invested a significant amount of points (33%) into the big evocator unit, but your list doesn't have any single-target buffs that I can see. What is the downside to splitting up the evocators into 2x5? Aside from the tactical flexibility, thats one more dispel attempt for you for free. Right now I'm pretty stuck on either having a heraldor or Gavriel in all of my lists. I want to be able to charge as early as possible and to be able to choose to fight first as much as possible. You'll probably get some feedback around choosing Vandus as a general when you could have run him as a generic lord Celestant on Dracoth and then use the points savings plus your extra command point bid to include Gavriel. I'm assuming that you are more interested in building a list around Vandus so I'll keep my feedback related to that. I have a hard time with single ballistas due to their swingy performance consistency. I love 3 with an ordinator and I often feel "let down" by a single unit. Cutting that ballista gives you enough points to add a "lord level" hero to your army. You can make that hero the general and pick up the command trait and drop the god-forged blade on him/her.

1. A Lord-Arcanum if you want sequitor battleline, anyone else if you don't care. You must select the Hammers of Sigmar stormhost rules if you want Gavriel's command ability to work on evocators. This means that you are forced to take a specific command trait and artifact. 2. That's an incredibly complicated multi-variable question. I don't think anyone will be able to give you a clean answer. 3. See answer 2 :). The short and vague answer is... As early as possible to maximize the value of their arrival. The later you drop down the more table area your opponent can deny through model spacing, and the more models they will have swarming objectives. 4. By far the most common build I have seen on the internet is one unit of 10 and one unit of 5. I have seen two units of 10, but the least common configuration is three units of 5. I plan to try that version because I like the flexibility it provides (but have no play experience to support that idea). I think a lot has to do with the rules for scions of the storm. You will only have so many units that you can hold back to drop in. Sometimes you might need to combine two 5-man units just so that they can arrive together. 5. Good instinct on those 16 models not feeling like quite enough to interact successfully with objectives. The prevailing wisdom is to supplement that with two or more units of skinks. Skinks count as a deployed unit for scions of the storm so those 60 points allow for one more important SCE unit to drop in. Also they are movement 8" and bravery 10 for some ridiculous reason. They are extremely well-suited to covering the weaknesses of the half of your army that will be starting on the table. I hope that some of the more experienced Gav-bomb players will come in and add to this explanation. Most of what I know I have learned through discussion with other players and through my own limited games.

You've got lots of questions here. I think I can help a little bit. Question 1: Yes. The most frequently referenced well-performing list archetype for SCE has been what is known as the Gav-bomb. At its core it is Gavriel Sureheart, between 10-20 evocators and a knight-vexillor. I'm sure you'll be able to figure out what it does by reading all of their rules. I'm obliged to say that this isn't the only way to win (many will come and say they use a different strategy), but this seems to be the emergent 'strongest build'. Your battleline problem: I'd like to point something out regarding the lord-arcanum. You have probably noticed this fact, but I just want to highlight it. You mentioned that you don't like to put him in the positions that your other staunch defender generals occupy in your lines, but I'm curious as to why. His survivability is comparable to all of our other heroes, and his kit has been designed to function best mid-table. He isn't a collegiate arcane fragile target in my opinion. If you just flatly don't like him, that is totally fine actually. I have observed that many Gav-bomb lists are designed with Lord-Arcanum and sequitor backup, and just as many are designed with a liberator/judicator mix. It doesn't appear that using sequitors as battleline is as important as using Gavriel or cogs. Question on lord-ordinator and ballistas: In case you haven't done the math, once you take three ballistas, that is when the ordinator bubble is worth more than a fourth ballista, which is why you will most lists doing the 3 ballista 1 ordinator combo. In my own games, and in the experiences of some forum posters, it is proving to be extremely good. Its performance is tempered by the fact that it is only 4 models in a game where the number of models in a zone is how we win, so you need to couple this combination with high model count mobile units (skinks are the best choice here). Tips: I should call this tip "How I learned to stop worrying and love the Gav-bomb." In matched play, one of the first issues I ran into with SCE was that we are full of 5-man units that cost 50-60% more than some comparable 10 man units. If the games were decided in a way that valued multi-wound models equally to single-wound models, then this wouldn't even be a discussion point. Our units survive well and kill well enough. When you face an opponent that simply floods objectives with summoned skeletons/blue horrors/skinks you aren't engaging in a fair and honorable duel. I don't think it matters if you take sequitors or liberator/judicator combos as your battleline, because the real effectiveness of your list is going to be based on how well you counter objective flooding. Gav-bombing has been effective for me. Hopefully some other posters will share what tools they have used to counteract this fundamental disadvantage our faction has.

I'm seeing a lot of you are getting some tournament table-time and some success with our evocators! I have a question about evocator weapon options. Most of your lists aren't showing the weapon option mix selected. 40 pages ago on this thread, the collective wisdom was just to take all grandstaves in every unit. Is that still the way to go? Does anyone mix weapons in their units?

I know that you mentioned that this was a rough draft of a list, but I was hoping to get your reasoning for a couple of the units included. Can you talk a bit about the relictor and the prosecutors? For the relictor, which prayer would you be taking and what would be his role in this list. For the prosecutors, what is their primary responsibility?

I certainly agree with this position, both from a theoretical point of view and through play experience with sequitors, but I feel that this statement begs the question regarding liberators. Are liberators more effective at 10 models than at 5 as well? I have always run my liberators as 5-man squads, and the value they bring is limited to fulfilling a battleline requirement, with marginal extra value in being 5 models instead of one. All of us can think of at least one unit costing 100 points in our battletome that has more value. I suppose this discussion could turn into the old "how invested should you be in your battleline?" argument, but I would love to hear some thoughts from this community about liberator value. I noticed that when people were asked if they would take non-battleline sequitors the consensus was 'no thanks', to me this shows that an additional investment in sequitors beyond 5 has some value, even though they are a "only if battleline" option. Should we keep paying 100 points for 10 medium-armored wounds and expect nothing else from them? Does anyone run 10 man liberators squads? Can you please share your experiences?

This is a fantastic thread! Thanks to everyone sharing their experiences so far. I am struggling with the 20-man sequitor unit. I have played two games with it and I have found that getting the entire set of buffs on them all at once was daunting. It essentially clumped the half of my army together in one spot (940 points). For reference I was attempting to keep the unit under: Staunch Defender - 9" wholly within Soul Energy - 9" wholly within Warding lantern - 18" wholly within Empower - 12" wholly within I have a hunch that the 20-man version of the sequitor unit is probably better served without every single buff on it. I'd like to try thinning down the sequitors to 10-man. I could go 5-wide with the entire front row using the upgraded weapons, and it would move around a lot better than the maxed unit. I have also struggled to reposition the unit using the heraldor because the evocators, lord-arcanum, and lord-castellan are blocking them in from behind. Could anyone share their successes with the big unit? Did you give them every buff you had? Or did you let their 40 wounds and built-in re-rolls do the work?