crkhobbit

Astral Templars CA gives +1 wound for a unit against a hero. Knights Excelsior and Tempest Lords give re-roll 1s to wound. Which you probably aren't taking, and probably shouldn't be buffing generic battleline unit if you are. I put the numbers into my spreadsheet today. Hammers and swords are dead even on actual wounds assigned vs something with sv4+. Rerolling 1s doesn't change that. If I remember correctly, +1 to hit for a unit of 4 liberators creates a difference in average wounds that get through saves from 1.67 for sword/shield and 1.76 for hammers. 0.09 damage dealt. That's not a difference that will ever matter on the tabletop. With a -1 hit debuff, hammers do about 0.11 damage less. It really couldn't matter much less. Use what you think looks cooler. I went with swords because I feel like the better hit stat will make them more consistent. Can't make your wound rolls if you can't make your hit rolls. In reality, swords and hammers are both going to do about 1 point of damage per round. Sometimes, they'll do 2 damage. And rarely, they might do more than that. But that extra 0.09 will never show up because you can't roll 0.09.

Most of us play Liberators to meet the battleline requirement. They're fine. Judicators: same answer. They do a thing, and you have to take at least some of them. Retributors are not popular because Evocators out-class them by a bit. But honestly, the damage output per the amount of points spent makes them a pretty close second to Evocators, so I'd say they're pretty great. If you're going with a big melee unit like Retributors, I'd try to get a Knight Heraldor so you can run the Retributors and still charge. They're weak point is their speed, so that helps. How you fill out that 1000 points is going to matter a lot on what you like, and how you end up preferring to play. Most Stormcast units are worthy of being put on the table for non-competitive games.

I'd drop it because I apparently can't roll higher than a 4 to cast spells.

First of all, his warscroll abilities aren't prayers. They just function similarly. Secondly, even if they were - this is covered in the faq: "Q: If a Priest knows more than one prayer, can it attempt to chant each of them? A: Yes, as long as no other restrictions apply." https://www.warhammer-community.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/age_of_sigmar_core_rules_designers_commentary_en-1.pdf Page 9

I brought 15 Evocators with Grand Staves to a game for lulz, and it was pretty great. Protectors having 3" reach might be viable.

Dealing 7 wounds then taking 13 back is about the same amount of depravity as one-shotting the KoS. Except they still have half a KoS, and you still need to finish it off. Meaning they're going to have all the points for you killing that KoS, and all the points they got for damaging your multiwound models that they would not have been able to get had you one-shot it with shooting.

I can certainly see an argument for stopping attacking Seekers when they almost have enough to summon another, putting them off one more turn. Then hopefully you can kill the remaining heroes in a single turn. But as a best practice, finishing a Seeker is much better than not. Because the longer it's alive, the longer it can farm depravity off of our multi-wound models, and potentially heal and double-up on depravity from damage taken.

Maybe I'm reading that wrong, but it sounds like you're willing to pay 20 extra points for a Relictor. Relictor is actually 20 points cheaper than a Vexillor.

The Arch Regent went up for 40 points, also.

Flesh Eater Courts have an allegiance called Gristlegore where the general gets to fight first. It has been that they can just fight first, but today's errata says they only get to fight first if they charged that turn. So before today, if we charged them, they would still get to fight before us and might kill our unit that charged them. Now if we charge them, we at least get to attack before the dragon.

I'm surprised by no Slaanesh changes at all. Especially since the files were last updated today, but they're from May. Maybe they uploaded the old files on accident? Warp lightning change is a big deal.

Yeah, just read that. FEC general can only fight first if it charged that turn. So we can charge it now. Warp lightning vortex is range 13" instead of 26" now, too. Slaanesh says it was updated today, but it wasn't. Link goes to japanese version, but change the jp to en in the url and it goes to a doc dated May.

Heraldor is awesome. I'd consider it a requirement if you're taking a big unit of Evocators either on foot, or especially on Dracolines. I made a 27" charge in a tournament using dracs and a heraldor (12" move, 6"run, 9" charge roll). Which I needed because I needed to deploy out of range of Thunderquake shooting, but also needed to kill the Thunderquake castle. His shooting phase ability is icing as far as I'm concerned, but there always seems to be heroes and/or units clumped around terrain in the games I've played because they're trying to get the bonuses from terrain. New terrain rules should mean more terrain on the board, because the old recommendation is something like at least 1 piece of terrain for every 2' square on the board; and that seems to be taken as just 1 piece. So most boards I've played on have 6-7 pieces of terrain. Faction terrain places are great targets for the Heraldor. Vexillor, I'm still in the air about. Most games, he doesn't do much. But occasionally he does something clutch.

Hitting on 3s mainly references Astral Templars and shooting monsters. Knight-Azyros is a pretty great buff as well.

One ballista in Rapid Fire, converting each hit to d6 hits. Not averaging the results to 3.5 each. This tracks and equally weights each possible result instead because I knew the distribution was weird, and wanted to visualize it. The average when hitting on 4s might be 7. But 6 is a more likely result. I think it's helpful to know that because people often expect the "average". This chart is hits only. Wounds and saves is a much more linear calculation, so averages work pretty okay for that. But averages don't work very well for Ballista's hits due to the extra die to determine the number of hits.

Because I was curious about a lot of things pertaining to ballista output. Mainly the variance, what the most common results are, and how unlikely are spikes. Interesting to see how bad that chance to do nothing is without an Ordinator. And how heavily favored 6 is as a result. I don't think I would take one without an Ordinator. Also not sure the AT bonus versus a limited range of targets is good enough to justify that Stormhost for me.

The core is Gavriel and whatever you want to charge with. You might also want a Vexillor for the free charge re-rolls, and because you could teleport something that didn't deepstrike into Gav's bubble. That's a module by itself, and nothing else really contributes to the Gav-bomb portion of the list. You probably want a ranged module to complement the melee aspect of your list. And you might want 1-2 Incantors for magic defense. The Heraldor is nice for the retreat+charge in case your opponent tries to tie up your hammer unit with chaff. He is sometimes hard to get into position, in my experience.

I wrote the wrong points value for the 3 ballistas. It's correct now.

There are three units of birds already.

The next list I want to test: 100 Azyros, Soulthief 140 Incantor, General 140 Incantor 140 Ordinator 100 Relictor 440 Ballista x3 300 Liberators, min, x3 150 Aetherwings, x3 510 Longstrikes x9 60 Geminids 1970 points Should be enough control to sufficiently slowdown melee based armies with birds, Geminids, and Liberators. And enough ranged output to really take huge chunks out of the enemy army. This is basically PJetski's list with Evocators swapped out for Ballistas. Evocators are disgusting of course. But the Ballistas are technically easier to get to your desired target. What do you think?

All this to say that you can do well with Stormcast. You just might have to work harder to get there. Which is more rewarding in the end. <says the guitarist with short fingers> Edit: And the faceroll armies like Gristlegore are going to have to work hard to keep up when the next round of balance comes around.

The Slaanesh match-up is pretty futile right now for SCE.

Looks potentially very good. I'd like to see a heraldor and maybe a vexillor with that much invested in cav, but you don't really have the points for it.

List looks good to me. Stardrake fits at 1250. Add a castellant and some battleline, and you'll have 350ish points to play with.

Yeah, they are obsolete. The statement was that Stormcast are not competitive. Not that they never were.