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Cambyses

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Everything posted by Cambyses

  1. Hey all, anyone have much experience into the new Seraphon tome? Just had a super rough game into them and was wondering if anyone has managed to unpick the matchup. Not sure exactly what the combination of traits are, but in my game the entire Seraphon army had -1 dmg and +1 hit / +1 wound on the charge passively. This both seriously blunts our alpha strike (archers and slickblades do ok still but most other units bounce off hard), and basically totally bypasses the first tier of Depravity bonuses such that the enemy crack back loses no effectiveness. Their superior ranged and magic presence is expected, but means that I can't afford to sit back and leverage my own ranged presence. Granted I only had 22 archers and 5 mounted archers, but considering their dino guns blow up archer units with ease I'm not sure more archers is the right answer. All in all it seemed like I was trading down for the entire game no matter where I select the engagement. Any suggestions or tips are appreciated!
  2. I think Slaangors just don't really have a good role unfortunately. They deal good damage for their cost and are buffable by LoP, but lack in both speed and durability to compete with out other units. For a dedicated damage dealer, I would rather invest the extra points into fiends or Slickblades as you can control your engagements a lot better with their speed. For disruption I would rather invest into Seekers for speed or Daemonettes for the larger unit footprint. For centerline anchoring and screening I would rather invest into Myrmidesh for the added durability.
  3. I don't think it's bad, but maybe just not efficient enough for a truly cut-throat competitive list. It has 16w with a 5+ Ward and -1 to be hit both ranged and melee, and it can mystic shield itself and heal via heroic action, which is honestly pretty damned good by any standard. And ofc the damage output is great with Strength of Godhood. The only issue is that a lot of a lot of efficiencies with Pretenders relies on you keeping that one model alive, and your opponent knows this. If you run into a meta shooting list and roll bad or get doubled, your opponent will have a good chance of taking it down early, which will set you back a lot more than just a 400pt melee dude.
  4. Had my first game over the weekend with the new book, and I am very happy with the power & flavor in general. Some takeaways/thoughts in no particular order: - Going first is generally advantageous with this army, since it will give you the opportunity to hit the first tier of Depravity right away. An alpha strike with the Masque, Slickblades, Seekers, or even Daemonettes, plus aggressively offering Temptation dice in the shooting phase, should get you to 12 no problem. - Archers of both types are very strong, especially when coupled a Lord of Pain. If you use your CP to auto-run the LoP you should be able to trigger his buff aura on top of 1 and get all your archers to 2+/3+ with that stupidly big bubble. Alternatively, if you're pretenders, the triple All Out Attack is nearly as effective. -As a corollary to this, your opponent will be looking to kill your LoP ASAP. Screen him well. Luckily he's quite tough for a foot hero and the mortal wound bounce-back is a nice little trick as well. - The additional CP generation and triple command from Pretenders is very good - I consistently floated CP each turn just due to the efficiency. The corollary is that you lose a lot when you lose your General. Luckily in my game (vs. Ironjawz), there wasn't a good way for my opponent to pick out my general at range, but it's something to watch out for. A Keeper was my general this game and the extra damage output from Strength of Godhood was very good to have, but it may be worth considering a Mirror or Shardspeaker instead if you're looking to preserve the CP train till late game. - Fiends are strong! They are one of my favourite units aesthetically speaking and I am glad they feel good to field again. A -2 to hit to cancel out all-out and -1 to wound means that they stick around longer than their stats would suggest, and the change to flat d3 on their claws means they do a shocking amount of damage. Run in units of 3 for disruption and flank control.
  5. I would also like to bring an army to an event without feeling like I'm actively shooting myself in the foot. But I think it's about time I bowed out of this forum and the game for a while. While Slaanesh will always be my faction, the changes to the faction and to the game in general in recent months have put me in a bad head space to properly enjoy AoS for the time being, and I don't believe I'm contributing much value to the discussions here. For those that still enjoy the faction and the game, more power to you and keep trucking on.
  6. 35% win rate is not even close to what I call reasonably viable, it's literally the 3rd worst result in the game. And before you comment on play rates, there's a reason why people who want to win tournaments aren't picking the faction. I'm all for finding solutions and positivity but let's not overstate things either.
  7. I think the prevalence of 3+ save ignoring -1 rend (this is achievable literally with any 4+ save unit in the game) means that going forward this will be the standard defensive profile of the game, and most competitive lists will be built to bypass this.
  8. Damn that's too bad. I need to read more carefully. Back to the drawing board then.
  9. After some ruminating, and frankly getting past some salt for the state of the faction, I've come up with the following list to try out for my next few games: Allegiance: Slaanesh- Host: Invaders Host- Grand Strategy: Prized Sorcery- Triumphs:LeadersChaos Lord on Karkadrak (225)- General- Command Trait: Skin-taker- Artefact: Amulet of Destiny (Universal Artefact)Chaos Sorcerer Lord (115)- Artefact: The Rod of Misrule- Host Option: GeneralGlutos Orscollion, Lord of Gluttony (475)- Lore of Pain and Pleasure: Battle RaptureSigvald, Prince of Slaanesh (265)- Host Option: GeneralBattleline11 x Blissbarb Archers (180)5 x Hellstriders with Claw-spears (135)5 x Hellstriders with Claw-spears (135)Units10 x Symbaresh Twinsouls (370)- Reinforced x 1Endless Spells & InvocationsDreadful Visage (90)Core BattalionsBattle RegimentWarlordTotal: 1990 / 2000Reinforced Units: 1 / 4Allies: 0 / 400Wounds: 89 The Karkadrak Lord and Sorcerer Lord combo is an old favorite of mine from 2E which should still be effective in the new edition. I sacrifice some potential output on the Karkadrak to make him a tanky SOB with stacked oracular visions and mystic shield (plus all-out defense if needed), 5+ ward, and healing from Skin-Taker. This will be a front-liner to contest the mid-field that is also capable of dealing with fragile or unsupported units with Daemonic Power up. Sorcerer lord holds the Rod (giggity) and is a buff bot for the Karkadrak lord. Glutos and Sigvald are the only two cost-efficient models in-faction IMO, so they're here. Glutos for utility and Sigvald for damage. Twinsouls to front line and screen for the sorcerer lord. High volume of attacks may be able to get around the 3+ ignore -1 rend saves now common in the game. No LoP to grant rerolls to hit on demand, but they're tough enough with all out defense to survive a couple of rounds of combat hopefully, so I'm thinking I can get away with it until their nativel rerolls turn on. Hellstriders to screen or cap side objectives as needed, archers for depravity pts. Visage is a flex slot for endless spells, I'll try a few different ones but visage seems best to me right now. This list will be weak to massed mortal wounds both at melee and at range, but to be frank nothing in faction solves that. Also probably weak to Archaeon or Nagash lists barring Gluto's control spell, but if those types of lists turn out to be popular I'll probably just start running Archaeon myself. Any comments or ideas are welcome.
  10. I guess that's the crux of it. I play against a lot of armies that like to put pressure on the table with a general advance of fast, decently tough units (think Lauka Vai + terrogheist lord pals, big units of goregruntas and ardboyz, 12 varanguard lists, etc.), and so far I haven't found any good solutions. It's easy to get people to over-extend or pull units out of position with Slaanesh, but nothing actually does enough damage to take advantage of that. I've used fiends to decent results, but they also tend to trade out about evenly or slightly down, which means I can deal with the first wave of threats, but fold to the second or third. Glutos is good but he's also just 1 model, and savvy opponents know he'll be chewing on the same unit for the entire game if they throw some wounds with decent saves his way. Summoning to control the board is fine in theory, but if you're losing on board control in the first place then all you're doing is stopping the bleeding. Perhaps there will be some post from the think-tank here that can illuminate me, but I think I may have reached a dead end here.
  11. Fair enough. I'm not expecting them to one-shot a terrorgheist or anything, but running the math here they need to pop Finest Hour to assassinate a 5-wound hero through All Out Defense or clear out a unit of 10 summoned dryads on average. This to me is kinda treading the line between finesse and incompetent. YMMV though.
  12. I feel like I'm missing something with Dexcessa - she has ok defensive tech and some bells and whistles, sure, but at the end of the day she still just maxes out at 12 damage (barring any exploding 6s), which is hardly earth-shattering.
  13. My experience with the Keeper lines up with this unfortunately. I ran the double heal setup in Invaders along with Amulet of 5+++ and Flaming Weapons, but it felt pretty anemic for its cost. No double attack means that you're reliant on the Flaming Weapons cast, but any opponent worth his salt will save an unbind for it, which means it is quite unreliable, meaning you're fishing for 6s to do meaningful damage. On the durability front, 3+/5+++ is nice, but will die to dedicated aggression from any buffed units (in one game a 280pt unit of Varanguard with reroll hits was able to easily take it out in one round). For a 420pt unit, there's rarely a situation where it will kill its points worth before being folded like a omelette. The third point is utility. The Keeper doesn't have other utility outside of the cmd ability, which means to make a return on the points you invest in it, it needs to get kills. So you're forced to commit to combat at some point unlike a Lord of Change or even a Great Unclean One with the bell setup, which can make its points back by offering DPS or consistent buffs at range.
  14. I don't think we'll see significant power creep in Battletomes 1-3, but beyond that I think there's a very good chance of power creep. If we examine what happened in 40k for the last 3 editions (7e to 9e), there's always a dial-back of power level at the beginning of the edition and the first 2-3 codices follow this pattern. Then power ramps up as books release, sometimes progressively and sometimes in a mid-edition paradigm shift, and by the end of the edition the first books are considered significantly underpowered barring any supplements late into the edition. I think this is likely intentional as it allows for them to hype up releases and sell more armies, so I would be shocked if AoS 3 didn't follow the same pattern.
  15. Does anyone have any experience with Syll'Esske in the new edition? I thought they were quite mediocre in the previous edition but they didn't go up much in pts and gained in both damage output and durability, which could be the push for them to be actually quite efficient. I'm envisioning them as second wave utility piece that sits fairly close to the screening units to provide buffs through casts & command abilities, which can reposition decently quickly to go after soft targets or counter-punch as needed.
  16. Nothing new in the faction article but that's to be expected. I do find it funny that they called out Myrmidesh and Symbaresh in the articles though, as even currently I don't think there's actually anything wrong with those units rules-wise, they're just straight up over-costed, which may or may not change in the new edition. However, most of the new rules previews do seem to benefit Hedonites - more MSUs on the table (more depravity), ways to buff our shooting, and the fact that most of our damage output is on hero models could all be interesting shakeups in the list-building phase. Everything depends on points costs though, as even currently I think there's not much wrong with the book other than being overcosted, which may or may not be still true in the new edition - worst case scenario they could see our summoning as a problematic mechanic and just smack the whole faction with another points hike to play it conservatively.
  17. By way of introduction, here are some of my recent Slaanesh painting works
  18. Long time Slaanesh player (since the first GHB) but first time poster here - hello to the wider Hedonites community. Really comprehensive post & I do agree on most accounts, however I do feel the need to discuss this last point a bit. Having a difficult or high skill floor faction is fine, and in fact should be expected from something like Slaanesh, but the faction should also have a high skill ceiling payoff to match, which I don't think is quite there when compared to other factions with similar levels of skill expression. I have a buddy who plays Blades of Khorne who is probably the best player in our groups has expressed similar frustrations before, where he would have to work much harder and be more meticulous with positional plays just to get the same pay-off as a easier or better faction, and while I don't think Hedonites are nearly as bad as BoK, I do get somewhat similar vibes.
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