Lengthster

Evocators lost their reroll 1's against shooting, empower is now just +1 to wound, lost their spell lore, and Grandstaves are 1" range meaning it's harder to run a block of 10. Ballistae went up in points and down in damage, although as pointed out before in this thread they're very versatile now and a lot more consistent. Their rapid fire isn't really any better than the longshot, but the longshot is now pretty damn good and changes how the ballista is used. Before you'd drop 3 or 4 with Ordinator down in cover within 18" but now you can kinda do whatever with them, and they don't rely so much on the Lord Ordinator now to be decent. I think the book is pretty decent, a lot of things got way better, but I don't think Sacrosanct stuff got better. It's nice that you don't have to take a Lord-Arcanum general now but Sequitors also went up by 15pts. But gut instinct is that Sacrosanct is worse off. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Anyway for my first list I was thinking Knights Excelsior - Scions of the Storm - 1975pts Command Ability - Unleash Thy Hatred Lord Relictor 145 - General - High Priest, Translocation - Arcane Tome, Thundershock Lord Imperatant 175 - Mirrorshield Yndrasta 320 Protectors 225 Protectors 225 (not sure whether to run 2x5 protectors or 1x10) Annihilators w/ Shield 200 Annilators w/ Grandhammers 240 Celestar Ballista 140 Celestar Ballista 140 Praetors 165 My thought process Ballistae sit on backfield objectives chucking their new and improved longshots down the board, Relictor shuffles our pieces around. Get protectors in the middle turn 1. From there on, use annihilators where needed, Relictor can Translocate protectors again to wherever else they might need to go, or to pluck annihilators out so they can charge again. Yndrasta helps to revive and keep main body battleshock free and deal with monsters, Praetors provide defense against all types of damage so they guard the Relictor. The Imperatant just gets the Mirrorshield, he has enough wounds to not die to something with 6 or d6 damage, he also has a ranged attack of his own which helps if you need to keep him out of melee. I was also thinking about swapping the Annihilators w/ shield for 2x3/1x6 Castigators for some more shooting power. Maybe help a bit more on the backfield objectives, possibly a threat to charge with unleash hell. Maybe I could swap the protectors for retributors for +damage -survivability. I've got the pts to do so. Also if I'm running 2 units of 5 the range won't be an issue. Lemme know what you guys think.

What makes the ballistae so good? They went up in points and do less damage than before.

Most of my army is Sacrosanct stuff and they weren't improved all that much. In fact a lot of it is nerfed it seems, LA on tauralon has 1 less cast, evocators lost their unique spell lore. Ballistae are worse . Someone point me towards the good stuff Edit: They're supposedly the wizard chamber but 1 cast/unbind across the board and no casting buffs. Big sad

Castigators at d3 attacks, prime has +1 attack, for 105pts, maybe they're decent now.

They also said that the Knight-Judicator unlocks Vigilors as battleline right? I think a lot of his value will come from that, similar to how the LAoGC did the same for Sequitors

GW's scheme for the Anvils would be way better if they painted the shoulder pads red too IMO. There are good ways to incorporate your colours into most SC models. My scheme is basically anvils but white instead of black, composition-wise my army is consistently red around the shoulders and shield. Then plumes, robes, capes etc are red too. Black and white can be pretty dull on their own and I find that my models look more 'complete' when I add the other colours. Leaving them with white shoulder pads just looks unfinished for some reason.

WarCom Facebook lies or is just plain wrong sometimes.

I'm so glad they gave us some juicy crumbs haha Also chariot can choose between a spear and bow, is that new info or did I miss/forget that?

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/08/23/we-rate-gryphs-a-guide-to-the-cutest-and-most-ferocious-stormcast-eternal-companions !!!

2 damage would be cool, but I don't fancy the idea of completely halved damage against coalesced Seraphon

Some general comments - Passive and deployment are unclear and need a rewrite for better clarity. I like the spell that moves and buffs the caster, but I feel like the selection needs a defensive spell. Things like Azyrite Halo or Thundershock It's hard to gauge how good anything is without points costs You haven't labelled what the weapon options are, leaving me to guess to what they're supposed to be I do really like the concept of a lot of units changing to a minimum size of 3, helps with the elite feel. But that raises many problems as it doesn't mesh with existing composition or what comes in a box. For example, Sequitors are 3-6-9 and Evocators 3-6. Sequitors come in boxes of 10 and Evocators 5. Then it becomes confusing with allocation of special weapons. Sequitor's unit leader can have a greatmace, and 2/5 normal sequitors can too. Possibly also problems with number of leaders that you can build from a box. Some unit sizes are 3-5-8, this also doesn't always match what comes in the box, and doesn't follow reinforcement conventions. Some 'Designer Notes' would be helpful, as they would help to explain your decisions to make it easier to follow along with your vision and intent behind the rework. I'm not quite able to sift through all of this (Stormcast have so many warscrolls lol and I'm not familiar with all the units), but a lot of this comes off looking like a nerf and some odd changes that go against the flavour of the unit. I'll talk more specifically here - Sequitors - A very versatile battleline, they can be decently killy, or tanky depending on the circumstance with their original ability to choose between rerolling hits or a 5+ ward in the combat phase. That's gone and replaced with a spell ignore on a 6+ which doesn't seem like a good deal. Also the weapon options are strange. I'm guessing that the 2" range weapon is the greatmace and the other is for sword/mace and shield. The greatmaces aren't that killy, and the shields aren't that tanky. The leader gets an amalgamation of both weapons with the damage, wound and reach of the greatmace, and the rend and attacks of the hand weapon. Normally the leader just gets the same weapon but an extra attack, makes things simple, especially if you run these guys in MSU of 3, you have to roll 2 separate attack types for each one which kind of beats the point of equipping them all with the same weapon Evocators - Both weapon options have 2" range and same attacks, I'm guessing option 2 is grandstaves, they wound less but deal double the damage, doing the maths, the grandstaves are better in all cases, except for anything that reduces damage by 1 (which isn't common). Also their ability is way less exciting and harder to use. Evocators current role is to quickly delete something and not stay in prolonged combat as they don't have any defensive abilities, save for a decent save and 3W. The only defense they have is rerolling 1s to save against shooting, which helps them keep their numbers up for when they get into combat, as their chain lightning damage scales with the number of evocators left in the unit. They are also very good on their own without support and I find them really fun, I run a block of 10, 5 sword and stave in front, 5 grandstaves in the back. After attacking you get to roll a fat load of dice and deal a bunch of mortal wounds. Annihilators - Ruleswise, I like that annihilators are tankier making them more of an anvil, but flavourwise, annihilators are supposed to drop down like a meteor and charge something with great force. Praetors - You've made their unit size 5 but you get 3 of them in Dominion. They're supposed to be elite so I don't understand why you've mismatched the unit number and worsened their save. Also I'm not sure about making their ability 100% consistent and usable on anybody and then giving them a general 5+ FNP. Praetors weakness is to target them first and this kind of circumvents that by just letting them ignore anything on a 5+. It also mitigates the Stormcast weakness to Mortal Wounds a bit, whether that's a good or bad idea, I don't know. Ballista - maybe it's better, but it's certainly less flavourful without the d6 hits ability. Castigators - Lots of room for improvement over the original rules here, cool models and flavour but they're so bad (the original rules). They shoot vials filled with dracoth breath from these massive crossbows, I don't think 3 attacks quite fits, and I don't quite understand why the 2 profiles so vastly differ from one another, they feel like entirely different weapons. I reckon they should have the every hit = d6 hits ability too, to symbolise the exploding projectiles. Heroes - so many have downgraded save stats, can you explain your reasoning behind that? Is it to match the type of armour they're in? I get that, but it does make our heroes very squishy. Especially things like the LA on Tauralon, 4+ save is poor for something that can't benefit from Look out Sir or Cover, and 6+ ward doesn't do much. The -1 to hit for units mounted on gryph chargers is pretty neat and flavourful I do like that the weapon profiles are very diverse, so often GW defaults to good combat unit = having 3+ hit/wound -1 rend, then damage and number of attacks vary with unit type. The wizards being able to easily attempt to dispel endless spells seems pretty oppressive, I haven't played against them much, but it seems too easy to get rid of them with these abilities. Lord Imperatant losing their grpyh-hound buddy is pretty sad. Him having the same weapon profile as a sequitor is also pretty sad. Lord Commander, this is the leader of an entire Stormhost and they've got a 4+ save, also the same ability as the Imperatant to duplicate commands. Speaking of which, valid target would cause some issues, things like All-Out Attack and All-Out Defence require the unit to be picked to fight, or targeted by attacks. It is pretty cool to be able to circumvent the once per phase limit on a command ability. Perhaps it might be a good idea to pick a small subset of units at a time and focus on that? Like rework first forging stuff and get the fundamentals down, then add the vanguard chamber, then sacrosanct, then Thunderstrike. This is a big project due to the sheer number of units. Hope all of this helps and I don't come off as rude or anything it was supposed to be a quick comment but I had fun sifting through it all and thinking about the game design, so my writing is probably really patchy but it's all meant constructively. Really cool to see fan stuff like this, it gets you thinking, and I'd love to see how you iterate upon this.

Yeah that's how I've been playing it, just feels weird. I like that arcane bolt is now a lot better for combat wizards, but it's funny how a Stormcast wizard that specialises in shooting arcane bolts doesn't get any bonuses for being in combat range.

Man I forgave the barebones FAQ - Translocation broken, Yndrasta + Praetors interaction not cleared up, Lord Arcanum's prime electrids also broken, no clarification on Blaze of Glory, no meaningful points changes - thinking that the new tome was right around the corner, but no, things have been broken for months now and the tome is still weeks away. It's just been really annoying. I can't paint anything for my army or put effort into listbuilding knowing it could all be for naught. On the optimistic side, I'm really excited to see how the rules for the knight judicator and vigilor turn out. Knight Judicator general, Vigilor batteline, castigators, lord-ordinator and ballistae, I can't wait to lose all my friends. I also really wanna see how Gryph-Hounds end up because I love those little buggers.

How hard is it to just show us some stuff from the battle tomes? It's not like their articles are carefully crafted or well-written.

They don't need to because it says they can cast 1 spell. The rule says nothing about allowing them to cast additional spells. "Each EVOCATORS unit in your army can know and attempt to cast 1 spell from the Lore of Invigoration." It's worded badly but it doesn't circumvent the 1 cast limit.

What's the controversy? It literally says above the highlighted part that Evocators are a wizard that can cast and unbind 1 spell. 1 spell. They can choose to either cast empower, or the other spell they know. Evocator warscroll says they can't cast any spells other than empower, the lore of invigoration is an exception to that, I mean it would suck for your Evocators to know a spell but not be able to cast it.

I think he's awesome, if I were to describe him with a quote it'd be "walk softly, and carry a big gun(hammer in this case)". He's got that cold confidence and is approaching slowly like Mr X from resident evil or something. I'm just sad that I don't run Hammers of Sigmar, hopefully there is a generic version of him I could use.

Sequitors are my backbone and are really versatile even in MSU, they can be tanky if you need them to live, or pump a bit of extra power into them. Their attacks are alright on their own, so I usually default to their ward save, unless I need them to kill something immediately and they won't be killed first. 4+ save that can easily be brought to 3+ with a 5+ ward is great, not to mention that they can actually hit back. I haven't been playing for long but I tend to win my casual games (80% winrate across 15 games). Even did well in some small tournaments (still sorta casual), 2-1 in a 1k tournament (my first 3 games ever) and 3-1 in a 2k tournament, losses were against Tzeentch and Lumineth. I run a lot of Sacrosanct stuff plus heroes like the Castellant, Veritant sometimes etc, slowly testing some Dominion stuff out. In comparison, the other Stormcast player here runs a lot of first forging stuff, I'm not sure on his record overall but both times I've played him (during the tournaments), I've won. I'm just one data point but I like Seccies

All these weird things are fun for us to do, Yndrasta with praetors, Lord Arcanum stacking for maximum explosions, moving after translocation, but they're too strong and I don't think they're intended. Yeah you can play with them, but don't expect to be making any friends if you do. It's one thing to lose to an army with a strong book, but it feels worse when people scramble for cheese like that.

You can also set them to guard someone with a big enough base so that they don't actually have to get into combat. The best way for someone to deal with a hero guarded by praetors is to kill the praetors first. Example is mounted heroes on oval bases, Stardrakes or Tauralons. They're all a lot faster, but since the praetors won't be charging they can run to keep up. For on-foot heroes, a lot of them seem to have the same amount of fightiness, but I reckon the imperatant is a pretty good choice, even the Gryph-Hound can slightly extend the Imperatant's "base size" to help the praetors stick to him.

So with all the emphasis on Monsters in GHB2021, what's the best way of going about it? I feel like Yndrasta is an auto-include, but I'm wondering whether we skip monsters to deny some tactics/strategies or try and make use of the realm spell with wizards? I'm also wondering if we'll get a new monster or if we'll have to settle for Stardrakes and Tauralons. With all the monster stuff, do you guys think Tauralon is good now? Maybe Praetors can help keep it alive.

They're made by the community so it might take some time. From what I can tell, most are made from the 3D rotating view on the GW site, which is basically like 3D scanning, you gotta get the model then prepare it for textures and stuff it seems pretty involved.

Sucks to not be able to reroll 1s to save on Sequitors outside of combat phase. Every little bit helps against shooting armies.

Did 40k have these going into 9th? Were they as bad?