ianob

What are we talking about that's rerolling all misses?

6 hosts with a Lantern is 7 mortals and 3.5 rend 0 hits on average. Let’s not get hyperbolic now

Spirit of Durthu is a one hit wonder. He will kill less than his points before you kill him back. Expect him hitting you and have a plan to hit him back. Also look at his degredation table and how unkind it is to him. Look at where he gets his bonus attacks and try to minimise. Oh, and he hates ethereal saves more than you hate him. Dont get psyched out, you have al of the tools to deal with Durthu and more.

Like I said above - Dogs are definitely not *wrong* but in a low body count list like Court of Nulahmia the Chainrasps are just optimal because of the attacks, wounds and bodies. Speed is less relevant than those things when the rest of your army is Dragons (maybe counterintuitively) - you don’t need the rasps to keep up, you need them to be independent and keep you in the game whilst the dragons kill stuff. As to general screening, ill just echo what @Honk said above and quantify it further with the fact that 30 rasps or 20 dogs is not going to screen your army in every case. It simply isn’t enough stuff. We have a podcast episode that goes into screening in depth that is worth a listen for more general advice.

I think you’ll probably find that those choices are fine for local tournaments but for high level competitive games you’ll get torn up bits without a way to protect your dragons - local level players are susceptible to “OMG dragons” paralysis (which is probably contributors to why you’d be able to win events with this in v1 when it was not a very good list, not to take anything away from your victories!) but good players less so. That’s why the artifacts are so important. Cloak in particular is SO good you’d be insane to leave home without it. Pinions is there for the same reason; you won’t need it vs middling players but the ability to get around/over a screen is critical vs better players who are screening, or the ability for your dragon to deploy defensively and still have the speed to charge can be important also. Dogs certainly aren’t the “wrong” choice here but your board presence is bad. Chainrasps have double the attacks over 5 dogs and a better save, plus they get models back on a 1 where wolves don’t. Losing the move sucks but being fast doesn’t mean anything if you can’t take/hold an objective. In the 2018 mission set you *must* be able to leave small combat capable units in various places on the field and dogs don’t cut it without support, which they won’t be getting as your other units will be tied up. And in any case if the rasps need to reach a far obj, you can use a gravesite. I know rasps vs dogs is counterintuitive for a lot of people who’ve been dog fans for a long time, but as units like spite revenants, liberators, and even namarti thralls become objective sitters nowadays, dogs just can’t cut it.

1000 points is a whole different ball game. I'd probably drop a hero for another 10 Grimghasts myself (KoS probably) but that looks fine to me!

Getting 20 models in with an 8" fly is not a huge deal even with 1" reach. The problem with running 10 or 15 is that they wont hurt what they kill very much, which means they'll get hit back harder, and your unit is smaller to start with = less models left to keep on fighting, and/or not enough models left to take advantage of retreat+charge next turn into a juicy easy pickings unit. Also getting the last 5 for almost half points makes taking 15 hella inefficient. I think a unit of 10 is probably playable for flank objectives if you want to fill the battalion cheaply and/or need somewhere to shave points, but outside of the battalion 10 Grimghasts would do that job better. I wouldnt want to be putting 10 of them into a main line of battle.

It's the best artifact for anything big that wants to get into a fight. It's borderline broken. Dont dread the Order Draconis list, its not that scary in reality, but it is upsetting theat their list is undercosted by like 250 points whilst we have to pay 320 for a Bloodseeker Palanquin and 400 for Neferata Chainrasps are tougher, have double the number of attacks, and they get models back on a 1 on a Deathly D3 whereas dogs dont. You dont need speed in this list, you need to eke out every bit of survivability and fightiness that you can from your crappy amounts of battleline because they have to carry a lot of weight on their shoulders. You certainly wouldn't be horribly wrong running dogs instead though. I've considered dropping one unit of rasps to dogs to almost guarantee the triumph for T1. If you run 20 Dogs instead of 30 Rasps, make sure to run them 10/5/5 though (not 5/5/5/5) as 5 drops count would be too high.

I'm just going to leave this here because I'm never going to get round to testing it properly (or using a non-proxy Palanquin and Neferata), but maybe someone else can take it and run with it Neferata - Overwhelming Dread VLoZD - Doppelganger Cloak, Vile Transference VLoZD - Miasmatic Blade, Amethystine Pinions Bloodseeker Palanquin - Amaranthine Orb 3*10 Chainrasps Court of Nulahmia +1 CP This list is really good. It might be the best Death list after Nagash (grand claim).

I'm assuming/hoping that the "awaiting player name" is me, Ritchie McAlley booked that as a +1. Otherwise I'm going to be sad!

You can DS all of your army that matters if you build your army properly. Reikenor will start on the board (for cogs), so will Chainrasps (screen/objective holder) as well as other bits (a midfield unit of Grims, another support hero, a Dreadblade harrow, Glaivewraiths in Death Stalker, etc). You should be popping 3-4 units up in most army builds. Also, they're not the only unit that can success in a T1 charge. Many new missions are 18" deployment distance, which means 8" move + a 10" charge (8 with cogs) on T1 to charge. Not reliable, but easily doable and happens a lot (especially if you do it with multiple units). I've had good T1s with Glaivewraiths wiping 10 man objective sitters and so on. I guess what I'm getting at is that there are better ways to play than taking "bad" units to get around a problem that you should be able to solve in list building.

Battlefoam Magnarack 720. Keeps the Grimghasts from forming some sort of scythe-based Voltron. If only it stopped them doing it during your movement and pileins The question you have to ask yourself, is "is getting these units into combat easily actually worth it if they dont do enough whilst they're there?" and unfortunately the answer is no. Hexwraiths are just overcosted for what they do. If this was your army's only way of getting a T1 charge I'd be right there with you. But it isn't, your whole army can deepstrike and charge on a 7 with cogs, so deepstrike some better units instead!

Shroudguard is one of the best battalions in the book. Deathriders is awful, because Hexwraiths are awful and the Black Coach is so-so. Battalions are only really as good as the models they contain unless they do something outlandish. None of the NH bats do anything outlandish, so your first point of call for assessing them is "do I want these models in my army". Don't get suckered in by cool battalion abilities bolted on to bad models.

Gavriel Sureheart is not old, SCE and Nighthaunt's new ability to deepstrike everything is not old, Idoneth Deepkin aren't old, Cogs aren't old. In fact, we're seeing MORE new army releases with a deepstrike mechanic and a way to circumvent the 9" charge right now than ever before. This is the alpha strike meta. Luckily LoN are quite good at taking a charge on the chin, so it's not a big deal for us, but it's a big deal for all of those other armies that aren't quite as good at it and are being pushed out of the meta already! Our latest podcast is up now which has a good "state of the meta" discussion as well as a chunk of discussion on Nighthaunt specifically: http://podcast.justplaygames.uk/state-of-the-meta-010818-why-nighthaunt-missed-the-mark-and-final-blackout-prep

Nothing special, just that trying for 9s doesn't win games. They've cleverly cut back on almost all of the things that break the "9 to charge" rule to cut down on alpha strikes, but as it turns out that's just meant that armies with the best access to other ways to do it are now better and Nighthaunt get the slightly short end of the stick.

It’s nothing to do with hitting a 10, that’s only ever a nice random bonus. It’s just to give you higher chances of actually getting into combat.

I won it with Grimghasts, Nagash is just a support piece Im not even kidding. Grimghasts are life. Ironically.

Heroes do not win games, units win games. Especially at 1k where you haven’t hit critical mass of units on the board, heroes are how you lose. Id suggest dropping to the minimum number of heroes you can run in whatever 1k ruleset you’re using. Reikenor alone is a good bet. Add Cogs, because it is 100% needed for Nighthaunt to charge from the underworld, and spend the rest on more models in your units, or more units. Preferably fighty ones, you have enough points invested into filler (Chainrasps) already.

Time to tool Nagash up with Soulstealer and get stuck in, I think! If only I wasn’t so bad at successfully rolling.... anything in melee with Nagash.

I hate power creep too. I had my 30gg painted literally a couple of months ago. Now they’ll never see the table. We can hope for ancost cut in 2019 but they’re not a popular unit, not a unit people will be vocal about, not “sexy”, and I alsocget the impression there are no playtester advocates for Death either, so they’ll probably be quietly relegated to “****** forever”. Sigh.

I'm pretty sure Chainrasps will be in a box in the next few releases.

By “Nagash list” I mean the man himself, yeah

Big post there so I’ll just reply quickly: Dont think of the lens as something you need to cover your army with. My current Nagash list has a Vampire with a Lens; he takes objectives in PoAP and Dualty. He doesn’t caddy it for the army any more than he uses it selfishly; it’s a tool. In the current Wizardy meta, a hero with mortal spell near immunity is very valuable hence putting it on a dragon is very valuable (and I recommend considering it). Very much an “actual gameplay vs theorycraft” point to be made here - missions often don’t allow your heroes to ball up with auras. None of the armies you mentioned are close to as defensive as LoN. The only one that really does come close is Hammers of Sigmar Cleansing Phalanx (which you’ll see a lot of starting in the next week or so) when they hit their command ability 5+. Nothing comes close to rezzing whole units or 15+ models a turn per unit, combined with death debuffs on top, 4+ ethereals, and deathless minions. Our longevity is insane. We also get on objectives faster than many armies (thanks to 8” Grimghasts, and gravesites) As far as higky defensive armies go; yes, we can absolutely blow through them. Weight of attacks is a thing. Dispelling buffs is a thing. Sniping support heroes is a thing. Having more models than them is a thing. Nagash is good at killing high armour targets. We have the tools to deal with all of this stuff as much as anyone does. Defensive armies pay a price in offence and low offence armies have a bad time vs us. Notably there are reasons why I run Skellies and Grims plus VHD in every Nagash list beyond simply model count. Those units have savage damage output for their points, and whilst low damage output armies can win games they don’t win events due to KO tiebreakers. I’ve tables everything I’ve played so far including other Death with 8 gravesites, Nurgle, and Stormcast; so i don’t see this being a common issue. I think your competitive categorisation is too narrow. Middling players may make armies that fit into those niches, good players run armies that will do more than one of those whilst also having mission-winning setups, models, etc. Again theorycraft va real games I think. Sorry I can’t reply in a more structured way, I’m on a phone and that reply is too long for me to multiquote well plus I have RSI and a baby climbing on me

@swarmofseals I was never a fan of Vhordrai in 1.0 for the same reason I’m not a fan of him in 2.0; no artifact, as you mention. I don’t believe the builds that run multiple zombie Dragons and Vhordrai etc to be tier 1, and none of my builds that use a VLoZD want Vhordrai because I want the VLoZD to run Lens, or Doppelcloak, etc, which pushes them above Vhordrai in terms of board presence generally. I guess to answer your question more accurately though I’d need to know in which army you’re debating either of the two. Vhordrai definitely does some powerful stuff and is significantly better than an unnamed VLoZD for the points, its just the lack of artifact that I don’t like. As far as Vhordrai goes with Nagash, I don’t believe that build to be tier 1 viable; it has problems in too many missions, not enough units on the board and you give up too much to squeeze the prince into the list. My round 3 opponent was running Nagash/Vhordrai at the weekend and he was seriously disadvantaged from the outset of the game against my build I think, and he agreed that Vhordrai didn’t seem great anymore (and he played him in v1 more than I did - he’s a good player) So I guess in summary my answer is “it depends” with a healthy dose of “I’m still not sure what builds Vhordrai actually fits in”. If his command ability could target himself, it would be a whole different ball game!

Any comp for command point stacking and other common issues yet to be FAQ’d planned in lieu of a GW faq before the event?