[Stormcast Eternals 3.0 - There is no "a" in Vindictors]

Tiny tweak that I might suggest is switching Celestial Blades onto the Knight Incantor and Thundershock onto the Lord Imperatant just because the extra range is much more valuable on an area of effect spell cast by a model that effectively has a larger base. Unless you were primarily wanting the Imperatant to be using Mystic Shield, making it more reliable with Master of Magic, in which case I would probably keep Celestial Blades on him because you're gonna want Thundershock more often I think.

[Multiple of one Holy command, Thunderbolt Volley etc.]

Oh dang I'm slapping my forehead over that one.

I noticed a while back that there's nothing specifying that you can't take more than one but was sure it wasn't really supposed to work that way. Yeah, they straight up say you can use it once per battle. Without that clause I'm not sure there's anything stopping you, although some in my local group have taken the term "unique enhancements" to mean you can only take each one once (whereas I understood "unique" in that sense to mean that they were a unique type of enhancement, unlike artefacts/spells/etc which work the same among multiple factions).

So yeah, seems pretty cut and dry that yes you could take multiples of the same one if you really wanted but you would be wasting your enhancements because it's once per battle.

[Stormcast Eternals 3.0 - There is no "a" in Vindictors]

Yeah you can to be fair, and any other Hammers-locked characters you happen to bring. You're just not getting the full benefit of being able to command anyone on the board from anywhere once for free.

[Stormcast Eternals 3.0 - There is no "a" in Vindictors]

Interesting is, unfortunately, about where it stops with the stormhost-locked named characters. I'd say the majority of them have no real reason to take outside of their locked stormhost since they're usually built around a specific keyword based ability. Bastian is a maybe since he at least has no unnamed equivalent to give you the same core stats but you're probably overpaying for him without the free command and move. The only named character I can think is an obvious pick over the generic outside of their stormhost is Neave because she is significantly better than the generic Zephyros for the same points.

[Stormcast Eternals 3.0 - There is no "a" in Vindictors]

It's one hit, wound, or save roll, i.e. one die.

And no, nothing stopping you bringing a character with a baked in stormhost in a different stormhost army. They don't get the benefits of either host though.

[Stormcast Eternals 3.0 - There is no "a" in Vindictors]

7 hours ago, PJetski said:

Rerolls are good, but even rerolling a 2+ is less average damage than exploding 6s, and less potential maximum damage. 

Higher standard deviation on exploding 6s though. Depends on what you're running. For fewer high quality attacks I'd prefer the reliability of rerolls.

[Stormcast Eternals 3.0 - There is no "a" in Vindictors]

2 hours ago, macrake said:

Vindicators will do nothing on the opponents turn, whereas warbringers will at the very least let you reroll a save in the shooting and combat phase.

Vindicators does last until your next hero phase, so providing you got a charge off and didn't wipe the target or get wiped in return then you may still get something out of it.

But yeah I'm really warming up to Celestial Warbringers, especially if you're bringing low quantity high value attacks which seem to be popular. Compare with Celestial Vindicators ability which is more useful for high quantity low value attacks, but the units that do that aren't really in favour right now (evocators seem the obvious one).

[Stormcast Eternals 3.0 - There is no "a" in Vindictors]

Ack misremembered the rule. I went to look it up before posting and forgot what I was looking for so I assumed I was checking the range. Makes sense.

[Stormcast Eternals 3.0 - There is no "a" in Vindictors]

18 hours ago, feadair said:

 

This means you cannot use it to get your Vanguard-Raptors or Judicators to a good shooting position for a turn one Thunderbolt Volley. Granted, you might not need it especially given the long range that the Raptors have, but if the enemy is able to hide behind terrain, this becomes really important.
 

How useful is translocating for a thunderbolt volley anyway given you can only translocate the shooting unit and they need to end wholly within 18" of a lord?

[The role of the Lord Relictor post Translocation nerf]

31 minutes ago, macrake said:

Curse just seems useless. Outside of a doubleturn, no opponent is gonna let a relictor with curse get within 9". He'll either be killed or be out of range.

So it has a use to deny a 9" radius bubble provided the Relictor has a good screen? Good to know. Seems very useful for point defense.

[Age of Warcry - best of both worlds]

To fully switch to alternating activations, I think a larger overhaul than might be obvious is required.

In many other games with alternating activations, activation control becomes incredibly important if sides don't have exactly the same number of units. Early Guild Ball is a fantastic example of this. One player was essentially mandatory for competitive play because they gave you a single extra activation, and being able to go last uncontested is incredibly powerful. In a game like AoS where the sides are not so strictly similar sizes, such a problem could easily be magnified and lead to silly race to the bottom lists where players spam the cheapest chaff they have in an attempt to be able to act uncontested with their strongest units.

[The role of the Lord Relictor post Translocation nerf]

Does anyone have any thoughts about things other than whether translocation is still useful?

[The role of the Lord Relictor post Translocation nerf]

There is definitely still some use there. It's just under a 50/50 to get a 9" charge off with a reroll. So not entirely out of the question, but still a gamble.

[The role of the Lord Relictor post Translocation nerf]

I get the feeling that people may start ditching their Lords Relictor now that the one extremely obvious strong use is no longer around. I wanted to start a discussion of ways that people have used the Relictor without doing a pure translocation alpha strike, and ideas to try. The way I see it is that Stormcasts have some decent spells, but relying on them can be a crapshoot because of how few cast bonuses there are in the faction, and how expensive the models that the best ones are attached to are, not to mention that Thundershock and Starfall, despite being nice effects, also have further rolls to see if they do anything making them even more unreliable. Prayers on the other hand have very little counterplay beyond killing the priest and a handful of models that interact with them. With the Relictor, the odds are much better of getting a successful prayer off (50/50 at absolute worst, usually much better than this), and SCE prayers are also fairly decent.

So here's a list of thoughts, ideas, and things I have tried. However I have a fairly limited selection of models and time to play so I haven't had the chance to test everything here in depth. I am hoping that we can together put the Lord Relictor through his paces and find out exactly what he's capable of.

Generic Prayers
One of the nice things about the Relictor is that he has four prayers inbuilt before you even have to pick your enhancement. I can't say that the two generic prayers are something I have used yet. Smite is already very situational but I think it might be occasionally useful against say, Khorne, where you can help snipe a pesky Slaughterpriest with it, with a doubled chance of doing d3 MWs due to the Relictor's +1 to pray. I doubt it will get much use at all, but it's not an option you have to choose to take, so it's worth bearing in mind for those extremely niche cases. Bless on the other hand is I think pretty decent. A 6+ ward on a 3+ roll. The issue is that it is again overshadowed by other ward options such as Gardus or Hammers of Sigmar's stormhost ability, so it's not worth taking him for it if that's what you're building around. But again, it at least means that the Lord Relictor will always have something to try in the Hero Phase, even if it's not hugely impactful or likely to come up often. If you are running multiple Lords Relictor I think it becomes a more common prayer to chant, but I don't know how often you will be running more than one (this is something to test!). For what it's worth, a 6+ ward is a bit less valuable than a +1 to save, with the biggest difference being about 10 percentage points at the most extreme (a 2+ save vs a 3+ with a 6++). But then as the save gets lower, the ward gets comparatively more valuable until it is straight up better at both ends (at the extremes of rend where the +1 isn't enough to give it a save, and where the +1 is overkill as you already have >+1 to the save). Of course, they are better combined. So it's not worth totally dismissing, just not worth taking a Relictor entirely for the ward.

Warscroll Prayers
Healing Storm seems very straightforward. Use it on a nice tough friendly when they're hurt to heal them. Works especially nicely on heroes with a ward. I imagine the best use for this is to combine with a hero with an inbuilt ward, use other prayers by default, but then when they get low, use this + heroic recovery to top them back off. Something like a Stardrake with the Amulet of Destiny would be ideal for this I think.

Lightning Storm is great, and is a useful control tool. -1 to hit is a nice cut to damage potential, but is fairly easy to overcome with All Out Attack. However, in doing so you're forcing your opponent to spend a command point (per phase if the target can shoot as well as fight) and the ability to drop any other commands on that unit that phase. Would it be nicer if the opponent didn't have a choice? Undoubtedly. This is I would say my favourite prayer to be using as a default (of the ones I've had a chance to test). It's better and more reliable than the core damage spells, which isn't saying much but the -1 to hit is the main reason you take it. The major downside is the 12" range which unfortunately firmly puts this into a defensive role. Dropping the LR forwards with Scions just to do a prayer is giving your opponent at least a whole turn to respond before you can even do the prayer -- by the time it comes back to you, do you even want that same prayer anymore?

Stormcast Prayer Scripture
Translocate. The obvious one. Well, unfortunately no movement after teleporting anymore. What other uses are there? Well, I can think of some hypotheticals that I have not yet tested. I would love feedback based on real play from these. The straightforward uses are simply use it like a Scions of the Storm deepstrike but in Stormkeep. And yeah, that seems pretty decent still. Translocate and then one other cheap unit that can teleport or move very quickly is an easy Savage Spearhead. The other use that I can see is still to support alpha strikes, but less as a delivery mechanism and more as a support mechanism. Double up on Lords Relictor, use one to teleport the other close to the enemy to support a charge of say, Fulminators, keeping the Relictor safe until you need them. You could even take Translocate on both Lords and once you've taken out your first target, use the forward priest to teleport the Fulminators over to another important part of the battlefield (or even out of combat if you wanted to risk a long charge). The final use I can see is still using it to facilitate an alpha strike, but a hero-based alpha strike. Use the Luckstone with Translocate to guarantee the 9" charge on a hero the turn you teleport them in. I can't say this seems all that good on paper, since the Celestant Prime is right there and the Relictor is almost half his point cost. But assuming that you want to do it... probably a Stardrake to maximise impact? There aren't really that many non-named heroes that make really strong fighters. Perhaps it has a little use on say, a Knight Questor to pick off a weedy but important hero? But then I think there are better less costly ways of doing that in Stormcasts, and I think using a Lord Relictor to Translocate is a lot of the time just not worth it when you could just run Scions of the Storm. The one real unique benefit it has is the ability to pre-buff the unit before teleporting, and for the unit to use any Hero Phase abilities once it's teleported. I'm definitely interested in using it to ferry a support hero up the board, but time will tell if that's useful. The other combo would be using it + Stormdrake Guard's hero phase movement + charge.

Divine Light. Reroll 1s to hit on an enemy. Given that the vast majority of attacks in the book are on a 3+ to hit or better, this is a great buff that works well in conjunction with all out attack, giving most units almost zero chance to miss any significant portion of attacks. 18" range gives it decent coverage, although it won't facilitate snipes unless you have other tricks up your sleeve. But for dealing defensively with a big enemy, this seems like a very strong option, and certainly the old Knight Azyros was a good pick solely because of this effect (although admittedly his was far wider reaching). A few well-performing lists have been going around lately with Celestial Warbringers as the Stormhost. They mostly rely on few, high value shooting attacks so avoiding the bad luck of a 1 to hit or wound on a single attack is very valuable. This prayer has its limitations but in any list that has few high value attacks it really seems worthwhile taking it, even in conjunction with Celestial Warbringers as you can then use the reroll on a wound roll, further increasing your chance to deal out the damage.

Bless Weapons. 6s to hit for one friendly become 2 hits. This is a nice buff, and I want to say it has a niche for use in shooting, but most shooting units already have a 6s to hit effect or a 1 hit becomes 2 hits effect, meaning the only shooting units that benefit really are Castigators (most of the time), the Ballista, and various heroes. Heroes don't tend to have enough shots for a 6 to be likely, but if you want to gamble this could be huge on something like a Knight Judicator. Shooting needs experimentation, and Celestial Vindicators do the same thing on one unit a turn for melee only. On a 2+ to hit this averages out to about 100% hit rate while rerolling 1s averages to about 97%, but exploding 6s is swingier. The significant upside of Bless Weapons is that you only need to be wholly within 18" of the attacking unit during the Hero Phase, while Divine Light needs you to be within 18" of the target. A safe Lord Relictor is a happy Lord Relictor. I'm interested to see comparisons between the two. My gut tells me that Divine Light will win out just because everyone benefits from it vs one target, and it's a less exclusive effect, but I'd like to hear tales of both!

Universal Prayer Scripture
Heal is probably useless as it duplicates Healing Storm. It's almost certainly not worth taking except in exceptional circumstances. It goes off on a 2 rather than a 3, and it can affect non-Stormcast units. Maybe if you want to use a Lord Relictor to babysit Gotrek to really irritate everyone?

Guidance seems neat, with the +1 to chant it's a 50/50 chance to get an extra CP. But I'm also not convinced it's worth using your prayer pick on. If it was a generic prayer that every priest knows or if it was built into the warscroll I can see myself using it. Do let me know if you have used this one and whether it was worth it. I'd like it to be good, but it really seems lacklustre compared to some of the other options.

Curse is what I think might be a hidden gem. 9" range, AV4 (so 3+ for our friend Lord Relictor), targeting an enemy, 6s to hit that enemy do 1 mortal and attack sequence continues. The 9" range is a shame. It means that you can't combine it with two priests, one translocating the other to drop this on someone to then shoot them to death from safety (since Translocate is more than 9" away). That said, once the Relictor is in range this seems like a great way to help take down big scary monsters that are charging your own objectives. It's just under a 90% chance to go off with a reroll, so it's pretty reliable once you're in range. Any of the cheap shooting options seem decent combined with this. Castigators, Vanguard Hunters, anything with fairly high volume of weak shots would benefit. It won't take down a mega-gargant on its own by any means but it will give a nice boost to chaff you are keeping around to hold points. And there's nothing stopping you from running your Lord Relictor ahead with some Fulminators or such to give them a little extra damage boost, although it would be difficult for him to keep up. I want to try this prayer out quite a lot now. Has anyone used it before? What were your experiences? The short range is a major downside and I can see it relegating this prayer to nice in theory but useless in practice.

 

Conclusion
I have a lot of ideas for tricks with the Lord Relictor and not enough time to try them all! What have you tried already? What are you planning on trying? Is there anything super obvious I've missed? What would the best combos be with these prayers and uses? Questions abound!

[Unpopular opinion thread]

2 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

 or even let it ignore armor saves entirely.

Out of interest, what's the difference between a mortal wound and damage that ignores saves entirely?

[Stormcast Eternals 3.0 - There is no "a" in Vindictors]

6 minutes ago, KarrWolves said:

Is Cycle of the Storm a ward now? Meaning it doesn't work if you already tried to negate a wound, with the Hammers of Sigmar ability for instance? (then it would be useless for Aventis)

No. Only the wording on the app changed, which is either a mistake or a bizarre way to roll out an update to everyone.

But even if you go by the wording in the app, it's just choose to negate a wound. A ward is specifically a die roll with a chance of negating a wound.

[Unpopular opinion thread]

7 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

If we end up with Chaos Sigmarines instead of expanding the narrative focus on all the cool potential antagonists we already have, I swear on me mum...

Stormcast are cool, but that's largely because they are not like Space Marines, where they are both the most represented army on the "good" and "bad" side.

FWIW I think doing Chaos Sigmarines would be the absolute worst way of handling this.

I think that there is room for an extremist Stormcast splinter faction to exist in the narrative alongside Chaos. Canonically, at least one Stormhost (Hallwoed Knights?) has already done some major purges that went just a little bit too far. I think you could definitely get a contrast between ideologies that would make it interesting.

[Unpopular opinion thread]

Not so much an unpopular opinion as a hot take but I have a feeling that the next Big Bad will be a Stormcast Eternals splinter faction who decides that the only way to keep order is to exterminate basically everyone else. It feels very hinted at in the new tome, a lot of mentions of the reforging flaw getting worse, the art looking a bit darker, the emphasis on how inhuman the Stormcasts really are. Plus it makes a nice pattern in the editions' antagonists: 1e had the Realmgate Wars which had Chaos as the antagonist 2e had the Soul Wars which was Death as the antagonist, now in 3e season 1 we've got Kragnos who is Destruction. It feels like they're going to complete the set and have Order be the next evil folks. Stormcasts make the most sense to me, and I think narratively would be neat given that SCE are the poster boys for the game.

 

Also, a real unpopular opinion: the community seems to run tournaments as the main type of event, but I think that the majority of the playerbase seems to actively dislike competitive play and would be better served by just running for fun games days instead.

[Stuff that all happens "at the start of the hero phase" - sequencing rule doesn't seem to cover declaring abilities, only resolving them?]

3 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

So are you saying that 1.6.2 applies not only to resolving the effects, but also stating that you're doing the thing? So the player whose turn it is does not have to state an intention to use any "start of the hero phase" abilities until the player whose turn it is has done everything they intend to do at the start of the hero phase? 

Yes. Choosing to use an optional effect is part of resolving it.

Take for example an ability that says "In the hero phase, this unit can make a normal move"

Rather than thinking of making a choice between whether you resolve it or not, instead imagine that you are resolving it every turn and simply declining to use the effects sometimes. Rather than being an action that you explicitly choose to trigger, this ability is triggered "in the hero phase", so it happens then. The effect is to give you the choice of whether to make a normal move or not. If you choose not to, you are still resolving the effects. For simplicity's sake and to save time, people generally do not go through and actively state that they are choosing not to do optional things, but this is the principle at play.

[Stuff that all happens "at the start of the hero phase" - sequencing rule doesn't seem to cover declaring abilities, only resolving them?]

The effect that you are resolving is that you are choosing a battle tactic/heroic action. There is no precedent in the rest of the rulebook for "declaring" an effect or ability to be any different or somehow separate from the first part of resolving that ability.

Thus you choose the battle tactics in the order prescribed by the rulebook: active player does all of theirs in whichever order they like first, then other player does all of theirs in whichever order they like. Then you move from start of hero phase to during hero phase and do the same.

EDIT: It's worth remembering that as per 1.6.2 Simultaneous Effects, the active player only chooses the order of their effects, then the other player resolves all of theirs in the order of their choice. This eliminates a problem that I think you are seeing where the other player can dictate the order by only revealing what they are doing in the specific order they would like to do it in.

[Stormcast Eternals 3.0 - There is no "a" in Vindictors]

2 hours ago, lare2 said:

I see it a lot on the Internet but I'm yet to meet anyone in my local area who's bothered. It's ridiculous that tournies are house ruling it out though. 

hot take but it honestly makes the competitive scene look like a joke that major tournaments are house ruling translocate immediately after the book came out despite it having worked like this since the 3rd ed FAQ.

[Stormcast Eternals 3.0 - There is no "a" in Vindictors]

On 10/14/2021 at 7:42 PM, Stormblood said:

Been lurking for a few days reading this thread, interesting stuff, returning to AOS from about 1.5 years of 40k.  SCE is all Ive played in 1st and 2nd ed.  Since I haven't seen anyone mention them, curious to why no one is mentioning the Ballistae anymore, they were everywhere last I played (I have 2).  Not worth taking these days?  

The ballista got hosed with the new book. It has a couple of upsides compared to other shooting units but they are upsides that don't make a huge amount of sense and sort of work against each other. One upside is the extra range, but to use the 36" range you have to use the weaker attack profile. The other upside is that it has more wounds than similar ranged units and doesn't lose effectiveness when damaged because it's a single model, which again is counterintuitive with the long range which should mean safety, and it is not that much more durable: if it gets charged by something decent in combat it's still going to die.

Looking at the attacks one by one, the long range attack looks appealing at first. -3 rend, d6 damage. But if you think about it, it's still so underwhelming. Let's say you have a +1 to hit because that's not too difficult, so you're on 2+ hit 2+ wound. That means that even before the save, 1/3 of the time your shot will do absolutely nothing. Say then that the rend is good enough that you completely deny your opponent a save, so you do d6 damage. That's only a bit over 2 damage on average when you factor in missed shots, and that's in a very favourable situation, the only way it could get better is rerolling 1s to hit or wound. It's just so, so unreliable.

The rapid fire attack is, if I remember correctly, more damage in every case than the long range shot so you really ideally want to be using that. Except it's about 2/3 effective as the old version. Again assuming a +1 to hit, the old version would average two hits, becoming 2d6 hits. The new version only gets 2d6 attacks total, on a 3+ to hit you then lose a third of those attacks. The profiles are the same from there.

And to add insult to injury, it went up 20 points.

What to add instead? Vanguard-Raptors with Longstrikes do the long same job better in nearly every way, and that's accounting for points cost. 2 Ballistae match up unfavourably against a unit of 3 Longstrikes.

If you only have a few points spare and were going to just throw one in to use up your last points, you could take Judicators, both flavours of which putclass the Ballista. If you had enough points, or if you were really on a strict budget, you can pick up 3 Castigators for 25 points less than a Ballista as a total throwaway unit and they will do more damage. Or if you want the longrange pings of damage on a strict budget, you could even just bring a Knight Incantor with Lightning Blast, have them sit at the back and ping off d3 mortals each turn. Then you also get to roll unbinding rolls, cast Mystic Shield if you need it, and the once per game unbind.

[What's the difference between Model wound characteristic vs Unit wound characteristic]

From the FAQ:

Q: Some abilities refer to the Move, Wounds, Save or Bravery  
characteristic of a unit. What is this?
A: It is the Move, Wounds, Save or Bravery characteristic of the  
models that make up the unit

[AoS 3 - Nighthaunt Discussion]

16 hours ago, EnixLHQ said:

They probably meant Midnight Tome? Allowing the universal artefact Arcane Tome to grant a NH spell lore is outside the rules.

 

Is it? Interested to hear the reasoning behind this. From what I understand, the Arcane Tome gives the WIZARD keyword to a model, which allows them to pick a spell from any spell lore they have access to (and Lore of the Underworlds is NIGHTHAUNT WIZARDS only, which the unit is because they have the tome).

[Stormcast Eternals 3.0 - There is no "a" in Vindictors]

5 hours ago, frostfire said:

If I read correctly, you can "retreat" out of combat with the ability that allows you to make a normal move in the hero phase. Is that correct?

It's a little unclear but I believe you can't.

8.0 Movement Phase says

Quote

In your movement phase, you can pick 1 friendly unit that is more than 3" from all enemy units and declare that it will make a normal move

And then in 8.1 Normal Move which says in full:

Quote

When you pick a unit to make a normal move, you can move each model in that unit a distance in inches equal to or less than the Move characteristic shown on the unit's warscroll. Units cannot move within 3" of enemy units when making a normal move.

The reasoning I suspect is based on the wording of 8.0 - because it only restricts you to picking a unit outside of 3" from an enemy to make a normal move in the movement phase, the logic goes that if allowed to make a normal move by means other than just the fact you're in the movement phase, then you don't have to follow that restriction and can pick a unit within 3" of an enemy. That part is perfectly compelling.

Where I think it falls down is the final sentence of 8.1 Normal Move, which states "Units cannot move within 3" of enemy units when making a normal move." This boils down to not being allowed to make a normal move at all if any point of the unit's path comes within 3" of an enemy unit. And because you start within 3" of an enemy, even though there is no restriction on picking that unit to move (because it is not the movement phase), there is an inability to actually resolve the move at all because there is no way in which you can move a unit that starts within 3" of an enemy such that it never passes within 3" of an enemy.

That is of course just my reading of the situation.