Sobakaa

You're right, i've been looking at stronger effects, the ordinary ones seemed like typical fluff text at first glance.

From my initial look at the book StD don't have any amazingly powerful units but my god do they ****** over fireslayers with all the movement debuffs. Funnily enough Syll's host doesn't really benefit from new StD book all that much. Battalions are garbage, the whole point of this Host is to take strong heroes with many wounds and try to generate a lot of depravity. The only way i see it being run competitively is with Archaon who will benefit from ASL and 3 activations. He alone is still not enough to punch through buffed fenixes or berzerkers, though. More "normal" hosts, however, have potential - you just take mortal heroes in Sybarites. That'll give you 4 drops which is a lot by slaanesh standards but still good overall. Take a slab of 30 chaos warriors, some marauders, all buffed by their wizards and hero, finish off with a keeper, epitome, etc. Maybe even allied chaos shrine of nurgle/tzeench, since slaaneshi one is ******. Not to forget decently good endless spells you can also bring with any StD sorcerers. Even pretenders which are kinda dead may be useful if you pimp not a keeper but a Chaos Lord on Karkadrak. Essentially trading depravity generation for staying power which tbh is something i'm missing more and more with all the slayers, fenixes and bonereapers around. All that assumes that i'm not missing something crucial in all my excitement, so please correct me if i'm wrong. EDIT: Unfortunately warshrine still cannot affect units with a different mark than he has, i misread that. That Nurgle buff would've been amazing on chaos warriors. EDIT2: Then again, why even bother with chaos warriors when you can just take bestigors who'll have more attacks on charge and better to-hit and you'll be able to take 60 for the price of 30 chaos warriors. Any battalion/shaman savings would be negated by 40+40 discount from Gors compared to a normal 100pts troop choice we otherwise take. And while lord on karkadrak or sorcerer lord offer impressive damage output, they aren't hedonites so you can't make them fight twice, unless they're also in a 12" aura of a fairly slow chaos lord on foot.

If you want to take daemonettes in your list then battalion is probably the only thing that makes them better. That, and screening them carefully and giving them all re-roll 1s you can get. Personally i don't use them as part of the initial list but summon them later a lot (esp. in syll'esske host where i have more depravity than i can spend). I thought of maybe including him into syll'esske host army at 1k since he's cheaper than a big chariot so you can fit another self-damaging endless but with just 8 wounds he might not survive the self-harming phase.

That's not the issue of just Slaanesh however. Current slaanesh army can't beat Hallowheart with 60 phoenixes or fireslayers on 55 berzerkers if the mission isn't favorable and the opponent doesn't make some fairy important mistakes. That is more of an issue of AoS in general - you can't just straight up nerf a tier-1 army like slaanesh since there might be tier-0 expensive and under-represented armies like slayers or hallowheart (or skaven). Perfect solution would be to not just nerf, but to rebalance slaanesh. For example - move some of the keeper's utility to other units while making it cheaper. That way other armies would've been able to snipe or otherwise disable those key pieces and slaanesh would still keep their battering ram monster intact. But sadly that's not how GW balances books. In my play against orks at the last tournament (where i took the self-harm list) i was able to summon 5 keepers simultaneously. Almost ran out of models. I feel that orks are a perfect match for us in any host - they deal a lot of wounds but those usually don't have rend and even when they ignore save-after-save it doesn't affect slaanesh at all. And sadly there isn't much orc player can do about that - he just provides more depravity to slaanesh whatever he does in a very one-sided game.

However, he's the only "battering-ram" in the faction with a low amount of high power attacks. If he has no re-rolls he might deal insufficient damage as a result. If something doesn't die to his 2 activations (phoenixes, buffed berzerkers) - you're in a lot of trouble.

A straight up nerf would do nothing to make the book more interesting, i fear. The toughest matches we have are against shooting, tough 1w armies and mortal wounds that are dealt in a way that bypasses the normal fighting sequence.Basically, anything that we cannot control by locus or reduce the damage potential of by hitting it first multiple times is a problem. An obvious nerf would be to increase the summoning costs of certain units but it would just reduce the amount of summoning we'll be able to muster. Another possibility is toning down the CP farm - we sure have more that we'll ever need with some hosts. But that, again, will do nothing to make you take different units. People aren't discussing the faction not because the True Way™ of playing is overshadowing the rest. We already have at least 3 distinct styles - goats, herohammer and self-harm approach and some variance in those. I think the problem is there's just not much to the book besides locus, good battalions and summoning and Slaanesh isn't the most popular faction/god overall.

Took masochists of slaanesh to a tournament: Syll'esske Host Syll Keeper w/ Eatherquartz broche Shalaxi Bladebringer Herald Epitome w/ Luminary rod 4xHellstriders Cogs Suffocating Gravetide Wheels of Excruciation 2 endless spells and the rod provide enough self-damage to get 50-60 depravity before moving on turn 1, i'm not sacrificing combat effectiveness since my heroes are what i'd take anyway in other hosts and i'm only loosing CP generation mostly (which broche helps with a bit). Also charging on 7 after summon is more than doable. Only lost to Hallowheart with 80 phoenix guards, 20 crossbowmen, frost phoenix, 3 mages, spellportal, purple sun and geminids. I'm not sure any other slaanesh list would do better against it with their 5+ ignore of spells, mass 3+ 4+ fnp battleline and -1 to hit and to wound on your best pieces.

My apologies, the game yesterday got cancelled so i had to postpone a test one day. Played this list against the daughters of khaine unoptimized list (so i won't mention the actual combat results): Keeper Enrapturess (taken for her small base) Herald (can cast spells and has small base) Exalted Chariot hero Exalted Chariot hero Syll 5x5 mortal horseys Opponent gave me first turn. I somehow managed to fit all of that in 9" line for the rod during deployment, rolled average of 2 mortal wounds per character, 11 -> 22. Then the wheels generated a ton, i lost the herald and the enrapturess to them but in the end i had 64 depravity turn one even before my move phase. Healed some damage with spells, but not much. Moved, summoned 2 keepers and ended up turn 1 with +720pts of fresh models on the table, ensuring it all was in 12" bubble (learned from previous mistake). So yeah, the maths holds true. The problem is, you bank it all on that casting roll. If you fail to cast that endless spell or it is dispelled you just spent 140 points (additional mortal horses and a spell) on the models that probably won't do anything, not to mention a non-optimal setup of heroes. I would love to add an epitome there but that's minus 10 depravity on average due to her mortal wounds save. Oh, and you don't get the crazy CP generation of other hosts so you're always short on it, need to pick who would fight twice a bit smarter.

I will go with this list though: Allegiance: Slaanesh - Host: Syll'Esskan Host Mortal Realm: Ghur Keeper of Secrets (360) - Ritual Knife The Contorted Epitome (200) Herald (120) Syll'Esske, the Vengeful Allegiance (200) Bladebringer, Herald on Exalted Chariot (220) Bladebringer, Herald on Exalted Chariot (220) 5 x Hellstriders with Claw-spears (100) 5 x Hellstriders with Claw-spears (100) 5 x Hellstriders with Claw-spears (100) 5 x Hellstriders with Claw-spears (100) 5 x Hellstriders with Claw-spears (100) Seeker Cavalcade (140) Wheels of Excruciation (40) Total: 2000 / 2000 I feel like it'll be rather hard to put all the chariots into 9" straight line. Plus, considering how crucial it is to cast wheels i'd feel more comfortable with the Epitome. On a second though, though, the epitome has 2+ save from mortal wounds so you'll lose some output from the wheels... I wonder how impactful it'll be.

Another issue will be that you need all your dudes in a straight line for the rod to hit all of them. I don't think you can fit all those chariots and the keeper into 9".

That's assuming you get first turn, which is rather hard with 7 drops, and that spells actually go off, which is also not guaranteed. Not to mention you may end up killing something unintentionally or not generating enough depravity for that to matter. If the stars don't align perfectly you'll end up with a bunch of wounded weak heroes. I'll try it out today.

What about this list for Syll's host: Keeper Shalaxi Exalted Chariot Epitome Syll 4x5 Hellshriders Mesmerizing Mirror Cogs What i found is that it's hard to do a decent charge with your keepers and still be within 12" of Syll's double depravity bubble even if you use CP to guarantee he moves 14 just as the non-flying ones. In case double turn procs for your opponent you might as well lose most of the keepers while they're out of range of that ability. Cogs should help with that a bit and mirror is in general a great spell to deal with weak buffing heroes. Plus when i take 3 keepers i'm always missing the amount of attacks the big chariot has. 3rd Keeper is only better vs tough single targets like bloodthirsters and in a sense that he doesn't die as easily but double depravity should help with that by providing enough depravity to re-summon keeper as soon as he dies.

I feel like the book doesn't offer too much variety - combos were all discussed on first 20 pages and now there's not much to passionately talk about. Look at Daughters of Khaine - one of the most performing armies as well and it only has 59 pages of discussions, since the obvious combos were all found already and the faction itself doesn't have an influx of new players who'd keep asking the same stuff over and over boosting the page count. Mini battle report with a new Host - played CB42's list against lizardmen on 4 shooty monsters, took 1st turn since i noticed a juicy 6" pile in opportunity. Got carried away with pile ins on keepers and ended up more than 12" from Syll. Shooty stuff ended up locked with hellstriders for a turn so it was fine but then the opponent took a double and i lost 2 keepers out of 3. Combined with the fact that he stuffed every objective with a bunch of skinks and i was only sitting on ~37 depravity i decided to concede. Shameful performance, really, since the whole point was to test that double depravity and i ended up not using it due to a misplay. On the bright side i had enough cp for the first turn so i guess lack of Sybarites isn't that huge.

The other issue with the new Host is how the hell do i generate enough cp for all the keepers and shalaxi to fight twice... Assuming CB42's list or similar we start with 4cp average and with no sybarites it's just +1 per turn on subsequent turns I'm so used to 2+ per turn from all the artifacts and sybarites.

Just have to tank it hoping that either syll's death will allow keepers to advance or keepers will die generating tons of depravity, i guess.