swarmofseals

@Uziel I strongly recommend taking Doko's comments with a huge grain of salt. His arguments are entirely based on his impression of recent tournament results, which are a pretty flawed source IMO given that corona has tremendously depressed tournament participation. He also vastly overstates the homogeneity of the metagame.

The above point is really important and rarely gets talked about. Many shooting armies fear getting double turned as much as they covet getting the double turn.

OK, so you're saying that cities is definitely getting squatted because: Old dark elf models are getting up to date packaging with the release of a new city that is focused on the older dark elf kits There are new rules for including all Cities of Sigmar units in Stormcast Eternals armies That certainly seems conclusive to me.

I tip my cap to you, sir!

Evidence please. And I mean actual evidence, not just conjecture based on lore developments.

I haven't gotten any further games in with Hallowheart since last posting but should have much more time to test starting late this week. In the meantime, at least in theory I like my matchup against new Idoneth. I'm fairly confident that their new tools -- while good in the meta -- are not very good against my build. I'm very much not sure about DoK though. I suspect classic DoK is favored against me, but new melee snake builds I think I probably have a favorable matchup against. Morathi Blood Stalker builds are probably going to be a horrible matchup, but I would be surprised if that doesn't end up getting nerfed.

@InSaint yep, you've come to the same conclusion I have. I'll need to test it to confirm, but I think the Khailebron 20 Stalkers + Morathi list is going to be quite broken -- and I say that as someone who very rarely thinks something is OP before getting a chance to thoroughly test it. EDIT: I'm not rating The Withering that highly because the 18" range won't reach most of the time on turn 1 and I don't think the list can afford to spend 70 points on Umbral Spellportal.

If you search my post history I imagine you can find it somewhere. It's pretty back of the envelope, but in the math I weighted 5+ and 4+ saves with a value of 3, 3+ and 6+ with a value of 2, and 2+ and - saves with a value of 1. I very much doubt that it's exactly precise (nor could it be given that the most common save values in the metagame will shift from time to time), but I think it's pretty reasonable and it's a lot easier to compare a single number rather than to tease out the expected damage per point against every save level individually.

I suspect that Morathi will count as 2 DoK units given that she has two separate pitched battle profiles and two separate point costs. She's two different drops even though they must be taken together, much like any of the Underworlds warbands. Sadly if this is the case then it will be tough to benefit from the city prayer and Morathi given that this would require 12 drops total with 2 of them costing 600 points! From a competitive perspective I'd be surprised if Morathi is better in a Har Kuron shell than she is just playing DoK.

Crystal touch is a lot worse now for sure, but with all of the +1A bonuses that Melusai are getting it would have been completely insane if it had stayed as it was before. It really should be 3" though and not 1". I think Blood Stalkers are quite legit now even with the increased cost to 140. I think the comparison to Vanari Sentinels (which I think everyone agrees are a good unit) is instructive. Using my WDR formula (which I've explained at length elsewhere, but suffice to say it's a measure of damage efficiency that compares damage per points across all rend and armor values scaled for the estimated frequency of those armor values), Blood Sisters (unbuffed) now sit at .0574. Compare that to the following: Sentinels (lofted, no power of hysh) - .0339 Sentinels (lofted, power of hysh) - .0516 Sentinels (aimed, no power of hysh) - .0445 Sentinels (aimed, power of hysh) - .0605 Sentinels have a bit more range and can ignore line of sight, but are also a bit slower and *much* less damage efficient if they fail to resolve power of hysh. Overall I think that Blood Stalkers are a bit different from Sentinels in terms of usage. They aren't quite as good at assassinating small heroes but are still OK at that role, and they are much better than Sentinels at damaging units/monsters. They also benefit from some nice buffs. Even just the rr1s to hit on turn 3 and after will help quite a bit, and reroll all hits in Hagg Narr will be sick. Needless to say the combo with Morathi is excellent, and I even wonder if Shadowhammer Compact might be worth a look. Blood Stalkers being reasonable also opens up Temple Nest as a legitimate battalion choice now. The battalion ability is really quite good. Morathi herself is pretty incredible now, providing damage, survivability, and utility all in one package.

I may be in the minority here but I really love the Dryad kit. It's one of the best kits for conversions and unorthodox builds that I've ever worked with, particularly for someone who is only a novice with greenstuff. Totally with you on Seraphon though. Saurus Knights are the worst.

Personally I prefer max number of gore choppas, boss klaw and brute smasha, and the rest dual choppas. I also prefer that loadout with units of 10, although I think a case can be made for gore-hackas there. I've found that against a large unit getting a wide front of 7-8 models in isn't hard, against a small unit 10 brutes are going to massively overkill anything even if they can't get everyone in range, and choppas hold up better as the unit takes casualties.

Empire was about my least favorite aesthetic from WHFB, so whenever I used former empire models in my cities I'm heavily converting!

@ProbablyBalthus19 they hit pretty hard on the charge particularly with empower up. It's a shame they can only cast empower as they'd be really sweet in Hallowheart without that restriction. I probably wouldn't use them in builds that are intended to be at the top of the competitive spectrum but they're far from bad!

Not keen on sharing the details quite yet but suffice to say I've been playing around with builds that are very different from the "classic" Hallowheart lists. No bridge here!

@Doko I'm playing against serious competitive players from around the world. Not just local club games. And your assertion that "nobody cares low lvl games" is plainly not true. The vast majority of people who play this game aren't top table GT level players. You may not care about anything but those results, but you don't speak for the entire community. Furthermore, the major tournament scene is a mess right now. There just isn't that much data for high level tournament results since the pandemic started. There are fewer events drawing fewer players. Hallowheart may not be making top 10s because fewer players are playing Hallowheart. That could be because people see the army as not good enough or it could be that other armies are just more in fashion. Even super high level players don't just pick the faction that they think is most OP. Many top tournament players also choose the factions that they like. They also will frequently move on to a new faction if they are bored with the one they have been playing. Even when Hallowheart was doing really well it didn't see a whole lot of play, and that certainly wasn't because it wasn't good enough at the time. If your only metric for what lists are worth trying/playing is the lists that have already gone 5-0 at a GT, then you're basically only ever going to be copying a very narrow subset of other peoples lists until the end of time. I'm not interested in doing that (although I'm not above doing to sometimes either, I like a balance personally!) As an aside, I think the whole "4-1" list concept is largely a myth. In my opinion there are two kinds of "5-0" lists: Obviously broken lists that managed to make it to publication "4-1" lists that either get lucky or are piloted by a highly skilled player To me there is absolutely no point in the former category unless you will still want to play that faction when it gets nerfed, because it will get nerfed. If you are lucky you will be left with a "4-1" army, and if you are unlucky your former broken OP top dog list will be unplayable. I don't know about you but it takes me a while to build, paint and practice with a list. It's not worth the investment for at best 6 months of tournament advantage if I'm not going to want to play the army once it gets nerfed. So that leaves with the latter category: play a good list, accept that it has bad matchups, and focus on developing your skill. You can 5-0 by being better than your opponents, getting lucky with the dice or getting lucky in drawing favorable matchups. Similarly, you can bomb by making mistakes, rolling poorly, or drawing bad matchups. There really is no way around this problem. There are no lists that will make up for a lack of skill at the top tables of a GT, and no lists that are immune to poor matchup/dice luck.

I don't really rate the boxed set battalion rules as that important personally. The Ironscale ability is pretty interesting. She'll need to activate before the Melusai and successfully kill something, but +1 attack is a pretty juicy payoff if it works. Melusai scale really well with extra attacks.

Another game in last night against Changehost on shifting objectives. He was running LoC, 6 flamers, 2x3 flamers, 2x10 pinks, changeling, blue scribes, herald, and geminids. Eternal Conflagration. Ended with a convincing victory for Hallowheart. Rolls were pretty even with each of us getting our fair share of bad and good. Again, shouldn't make too much of one game but I do think that it at least provides evidence against the notion that this matchup is somehow an "auto loss".

A few more game results -- Against gore pilgrims Khorne on Forcing the Hand: very lopsided in Hallowheart's favor. Not going to make much of this. Against 2x Mortek Crawler Mortis Praetorians OBR on Battle for the Pass: also lopsided in Hallowheart's favor, although some of this was a result of poor rolling from my opponent early in the game. I'm definitely not going to claim that the OBR matchup is easy based on the results of that game, but again I think it validated my impressions that the matchup is very winnable. I honestly never felt like my heroes were all that threatened. I'm sure he could have splattered my Sorceress but I could have lived with that.

Very nice pricing on these kits. Most of the boxes are equivalent discounts to SC boxes and Shadow and Pain is looking to be approximately 55-60% of retail even after you discount the contained kits for their start collecting box values. At full MSRP its like 50% off.

I find it notable that none of the folks who frequently post about how GW is an inch from squatting Cities have eaten their hats upon seeing new rules for cities in the very first Broken Realms book.

Just wanted to post a quick update. I've gotten three games in using three different (but relatively similar) Hallowheart builds. One was vs. Legion of Chaos ascendant and two were against Fangs of Sotek Kroak lists. The game against LoCA felt like a very favorable matchup. I did have solid luck managing to shrug two 6mw spells on my Incantor, but even if I had failed I think the game would have been in my favor. I lost both games against Kroak, but I left with the sense that the matchup is very winnable. Throughout both matches basically everything that could go wrong did. In both matches I made major deployment errors. In the first one I was mistaken about the opponent's drop count (he told me the wrong number) and deployed with the idea of having the turn choice when in fact I didn't. I also could have had the drop choice by choosing to drop first (which I of course would have done had I realized we had the same drop count instead of him being at +1). In the second match he got to take the board edge with the Realmshaper Engine but I of course promptly forgot what the damn thing does and then remembered part way through deployment. I had to either leave a large unit vulnerable to battleshock or allow him to hit basically all of my heroes with the engine because there was a huge terrain feature in my deployment zone. If I hadn't been so dumb about this I'd have been starting from a better position. Across both games combined I managed to fail every single spell shrug against Stellar Tempest and rolled over 2 only one time for my command ability, and even that time I only got +3. I also consistently rolled poorly on key spells. I only got spell portal off on a good roll once, and my opponent rolled an unmodified 11 to unbind it XD. I also lost all turn priority rolls in both games except the final roll of the second game, and by that point I was already conceding as I didn't have time to continue and the game while not completely out of reach was a long shot for me. In that game I had just had a unit of two salamanders take out my Luminark (with Agloraxi Prism!) that was at 10/11 after shooting it and then nailing the 9" charge. Overall though despite the bad rolling my general predictions were accurate. I never felt like my heroes were threatened on turn 1, and I only lost the Luminark on turn 2 that one game because I was aggressive with it and got unlucky. Kroak was only threatening because of Stellar Tempest, and that went about as badly as it could have for me. The one time I was in range to auto-unbind it I confused myself into unbinding the wrong spell, and like I said before I failed all my spell shrugs. And twice it dealt 20 mortal wounds when an average roll was 13. I was able to screen my heroes effectively against shooting on turn 1, and by the time turn 2 rolled around I had been able to dish out enough hit maluses/kill enough support heroes that the Skink blocks were not really much of a threat to my heroes. The main problem was that those Stellar Tempests and the lack of my resolving any cyclones meant that I was getting out bodied pretty quickly. But that could have easily gone the other way, or been more even and in either case I think I would probably have been ahead especially if I hadn't compounded my poor luck with loads of mistakes. 2 games is still a tiny sample, but I feel slightly more confident now that the matchup vs Kroak is very winnable.

@Doko I think this is a huge exaggeration and I'll provide evidence below. @spenson that's way too few games to draw firm conclusions. I'm not saying you are wrong, but just that we don't have nearly enough experience to know yet and I'm certainly not discouraged from trying. I haven't gotten any games with Hallowheart vs LRL, Seraphon or KO yet but I hope to get some in soon. That said, I have played these matchups some with armies that are even more vulnerable to this kind of opponent than Hallowheart. I have a bunch of games with a Tempest Eye 3-4 runelord Ironbreaker lists against LRL and some games with OWC 3-4 wardokk lists against LRL and other similar opponents. Each of those two lists relies heavily on 3-4 5 wound heroes with minimal defense against mortal wounds (a 6+ after save at best), and although I generally lost these matches I was able to keep the games fairly close. Hallowheart has a bunch of advantages vs these other lists. Even one or two casters can still get a lot of work done, and you can protect your general with honored retinue for at least a little while. You've got the 6+ shrug from the Luminark and you also have the 5+ spell ignore. Those two things makes it much less likely for your heroes to get wiped out in one (or even two) turns. Teclis is a tough problem for sure, but the worst thing he can really do on turn 1 is Storm of Searing White Light. He can only send one spell through spellportal, so it's going to be tough for him to really stack damage up until later turns. Between the 6+ shrug and 5+ spell ignore, SoSWL will only do a little more than 1 wound on average to each hero. Kroak is a similar situation. He just can't do that much to you on turn 1 if you deploy properly unless the dice go horribly against you. You should be able to zone the Skinks and Salamanders off your heroes for at least a turn. OBR catapults are a bit of a different animal. They will kill Sorceresses and Battlemages in one go pretty easily (assuming 4 attacks they will average 6.17 wounds). They will also do the same amount of average damage against Sisters of the Thorn, which is not enough to reduce the unit to non-wizard status. Against the Knight-Incantor they will only do an average of 2.47 wounds. The average against the luminark is 5.55 wounds. And of course you can cut the numbers in half against the general (assuming it's a foot wizard). Agloraxi Prism can help as well. All of these numbers assume no cover either. After the first turn their shooting gets MUCH worse because of the sheer number of hit maluses that you can dish out. Even if they take 4 crawlers they are going to have a hard time killing all of your heroes on turn 1, and if you want to nudge this matchup in your favor you can err more on the side of taking SCE wizards. Regardless though even if they do kill your heroes in the first couple of turns a quad crawler build is going to have a lot less killing power against stuff like Phoenix Guard, so you may still be able to win on points. Sentinel spam lists will undoubtedly be hard to crack. I'm not going to deny that. But I suspect such lists will have real problems with parts of the meta and I'm not sure that we will be seeing them that often. Shootcast seems to me like it will play out a lot like the OBR matchup but I'm not certain. Anyway, this is all theorycraft and I'll need to get a lot of games in before I really settle on any firm conclusions. I'll also note that some of the lists I've drawn up are substantially different from yours (and from each-other), and I could see some of the changes materially impacting these matchups.

Just out of curiosity how many games have you put in against these opponents?

The game is something of a different animal at 2k than it is at 1k (meeting engagements), so your experiences at 1k may not really map to 2k exactly. I can give a rundown of my impressions of the warscrolls if that would be helpful: Darkshards can be pretty good really, particularly against light armor. They need to be buffed to get the most out of them. Their advantage over the other CoS shooting options is their mobility. They are among the few CoS shooting units that can move and still shoot at full effectiveness. Personally I like them in blocks of 30. Dreadspears/Bleakswords - I'm not a fan, really. I often take a unit of 10 as sac fodder for a Sorceress but wouldn't really take more than that. That said in max sized units they can sit on objectives and out-body the opponent pretty well. They will just die in droves and won't do much damage. You'll definitely need a plan for making them immune to battleshock. Blackguard can dish out damage pretty reasonably and their defensive efficiency is OK. At small unit sizes though they get dominated by the other elite infantry options as their 2" range isn't helping you. I'd take them in 30s or not at all. Dark Riders these guys are a pretty confused unit. They are fast but don't really do anything well. Personally I'd avoid them. Shadow Warriors are a much better way to spend 110. Scourgerunner Chariots are pretty solid, although best in units of 3 now. Sorceress is a great warscroll and I include it in tons of builds Celestar Ballista is just not a good choice in Cities, I think. You'd be better off proxying as a Hellstorm Rocket Battery or Hellblaster Volley Gun but both of those are pretty mediocre too. It relies too much on SCE allegiance abilities to function the way you would want it to. Corsairs + Fleetmaster are pretty niche, although I think they are a bit underrated. They can really blend soft targets and have reasonable defensive efficiency. Drakespawn Knights just don't hit hard enough to have a real role. Shadow Warriors are great. They don't do a ton of damage or anything but being able to put them down anywhere is great for the objective game and allows you to fix mistakes in your deployment. Assassins aren't really able to do what they are supposed to do and I can't really think of a situation where I'd include one. Executioners are an interesting unit. I had written them off mostly as inferior to Freeguild Greatswords but I could potentially see them used as a hammer in Tempest Eye. The fact that they can run and charge and get that 9" first turn move makes them a bit interesting. Again I'd err toward larger blocks though as they really need to completely kill whatever they hit. Overall I think the two cities which lend themselves to a heavily Dark Elf force the best are Hallowheart and Tempest Eye (also the "best" two cities generally speaking, although I think Hammerhal and Living City are both decent). For Hallowheart you'll just need to pick up some more wizards. A luminark/hurricanum, a knight-incantor or two and a battlemage or two should suffice and then you can just fill out the rest however you want. For Tempest Eye you can build around lots of Darkshards and Executioners with some chariots in support.