whispersofblood

I find lifetakers are quite powerful when it comes to the objective and activation game. But I have my own theory as to where DoK need to go currently.

I think GW may finally realised that a lot of the units people complain about actually need warscroll changes. I wouldn't take Lotann if he was a 20 pt upgrade on thralls, not because of his stats but because he doesn't do anything. Same with the Allopex it just doesn't offer enough to really consider. Not because of what it does, but because of what it fundamentally is. With infantry or infantry analogs points can do a lot. But I'm not sure the designers know what the players are looking for out of units like the Allopex, fiends or a gunhauler. And that shows up in the warscroll not the points. As always the models are amazing and AoS is making great progress. I just wish internally a bit more critical as to the function of units in the narrative and how that would translate into how the game is played by that faction.

The game at the moment is about these 3 things. Low drops: a lot of the b+/a- tier need to choose first or second. If you give that choice away with a high drop count you are starting the game on the back foot. Chaff: taking away board space from the opponent, and just not letting them play. You can do this with cheap units, fast units, endless spells or judgments but again if you aren't competing in this space you will likely lose that majority of your games. Hitting power: there is only one sort that matters. The kind of hitting power that is reliable, it's lows are high and it spikes higher. Fast and can bypass screens at least. You can bypass screens however you'd like (dbl pile-in, long activation ranges, fly, high ranged dmg) If your list doesn't do these things it's just not going to reliably win games, it might not even be in the game more often then not. Now unfortunately the BoK is very bloated and there is a lot of fairly priced units that just serve no function in the game at the moment. Khorne does have one very strong mechanic and that is out of phase or order fighting and movement.

The present problem of them not doing anything remains.

Its so you can't avoid taking the artefact by first taking any other artefact.

Lunchbox doesn't prevent a unit from moving afterwards.

This would be my suggested Khorne list if you wanted to be mostly Daemon based. Bloodlords Blood Hunt WoKBT (general) w/ either Gryphfeather charm, or Blade of Symmetry 1x Bloodmaster 1x Bloodmaster w/ Halo of Blood 1x Slaughter priest w/ Killing Frenzy Tzaangor Shaman 4x 5 Flesh Hounds 6 Bloodcrushers 3 Bloodcrushers Karanak Endless Spells Wildfire Taurus Judgements Hexgorgers The general idea here is to use the flesh hounds, to control the movement phase, and the wildfire taurus to control priority rolls. Bloodstokers are key to make sure that when you create the right gaps and mismatches your units will have the movement and reliablity to actually get there consistently. Wildfire Taurus lets you play in the activation wars and is key in making your opponent seriously consider his turn rather than just taking the double and running through you.

I think you probably should start with your intent, and then rank your objectives. 16-20 isn't a bad result at all if your intent is to play a good game regardless of how you feel the game went. Winning is often devising ways to make the match as uncompetitive as possible which you may not desire. I suspect we have conflicting views on how to play the game so I'm not sure I can help you with your list too much. Do you mind posting it so I can quote it? Also blood tithe is structurally different than summoning. It's primary function is the table, and secondary function is summoning which it does less effeciently than Slaanesh, but it's probably better than Nurgle, and has a far more options than Tzeentch.

There is a thing in sports called Game state, usually it refers to score affects. The team that has scored has a higher chance to score the next goal. If you have looked for battle reports there are lots of games where the HoS player was too aggressive, got dbl turned and never had a chance to summon reinforcements. This is especially true against factions with retreat and charge or long pile-in rules. At the moment we are seeing a lot of swingy results because the book is new and people aren't exactly sure how best to manage the threats. Take LoN for example once people learned to manage gravesites a lot changed. I think Slaanesh will be the last straw that brings shooting back into the meta, as you can't leave our heroes in the back field as spawning locus, and you need the bracket the KoS. I think a lot of the lists people are complaining about are exploiting a gap in the meta rather than being exceptionally good at the game.

Personally I've gone through the phases of mourning and now I'm just waiting for GHB19 so I can being work on figuring out what to do with my army.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply you personally were bad. It is more of a useful fiction for maximising the tome, if you assume you are the problem and question your own thoughts when building your list it should work out that you get more imaginative results and sometimes those results are very good. I think SCE like Space Marines where the fluff sometimes covers up what is actually happening in the story, and fluff for good or for ill colours how people perceive rules. In almost every action SCE are fighting some sort of desperate battle against the odds, where they don't have as many resources as they would like, but are individually so capable that it always gives them a chance at victory. Usually this is at great personal cost, as the reforging fluff demonstrates to great affect. Translated that to game play and to me I see the units much different that other people people perhaps do. Individual stormcasts, and retinues will die without a doubt, the questions is will they achieve the objective before they go up in lightning. So how do we look at the game through that lens? -To win the game you generally need to score the majority of objectives 3 of 5 turns, but for stormcasts you should look at it as the opponent can control the majority of objectives for 2 turns. To be clear you can't control 0 objectives in multi objective games, just don't need a majority. - Everything is disposable, the army doesn't function as a preserve the force style set up, its too easy in AoS2.0 for factions to focus their killing power into a fine point and delete a unit, especially combat units. Even units of 20 sequitors can be removed in a single go, I've done it personally with IDK, DoK, HoS, and MK. That isn't a fault of SCE, or a bug in the game its a feature. So you need to question if that is a good use of your very limited resources, if your unmovable object just isn't unmovable in the face of general unstoppable forces available to factions. - From this perspective I love the liberator, they cover more space than 5 models have any business doing, they take dedicated effort to remove in one go, are battleline, and pretty cheap as far as modern battleline go. The most interesting thing about them is that more is not necessarily better, and frequently it is worse. Personally I think it is probably about time for the majority of the wisdom in this thread to burn and for a new philosophy to come through that might open up the book a bit. I will say that is is quite clear that a lot of the original SCE content is just not mechanically appropriate for AoS2 anymore, and the book is showing its lineage a bit, similar to Khorne. On the other hand most factions if we are talking about competition really only skim the top 10% of their content as well, its just that SCE have SO much that it looks shocking in comparison I do agree with @PJetski that there are probably 4-5 meta dependant builds in the book that are sitting beneath the global meta builds.

@Mark Williams If you are really struggling with SCE I think it's time to do some very sober thinking and deal with some hard truths. 1. Do you want to play SCE? Forget what you have painted or spent money on. If you could choose to play SCE at events today would you? You really need to decide this because it will have a massive affect on what you can do to get better results. 2. Yeah you want to play SCE. Forget almost everything you know about the faction. Like most people who do one thing for a long time we get entrenched in thought patterns, and miss new or tangential avenues of thought. SCE are not a bottom tier faction, but they aren't near the top of the standard grouping either. 3. The top of the curve can usually just take their best stuff for the most part and make some sacrifices on volume. SCE cannot do this, that means you are making sacrifices on quality. For example anvilstrike takes its highest quality shooting but sacrifices sequitors for liberators because you can't get it all. Especially in an elite army in a game still mostly about model numbers for objectives. 4. Accept some personal hard truths. You may not be as good as you think, and in fact until you can prove to yourself otherwise it's probably better to assume you are terrible then to put too much responsibility for results on the tools at hand. 5. If you want to hang with the top 10% at some point, without chasing a strong book every 6 months. You need to goal set, and play lots of games not even necessarily AoS just strategy games in general. Maybe target 3-2 at your next event and do everything in your power before the event to assure yourself you can do it. It's a competitive game you still might not but you will eventually. 5. Maybe you spend the next 2-3 days really considering the these things, start fresh and throw yourself into it with a new energy and goal. In test games really put your army through the ringer. Come up with theories and then stress test them. Charge that drakesworn into a unit it might be able to deal with and when things go wrong in practice games practice getting something out of the game. Turn a loss to a minor, or practice getting secondaries. This mindset has work for me for since my football coach really instilled it in me. And it's helped me get over some crushing nerfs to my armies in 6th/7th/8th a AoS and recently the new standard of faction strength in AoS 2.0. For tournaments it is imperative that you play the package. Know what missions are coming, know what secondaries pair well with the mission at hand and be prepared with a general idea of how you want the battleplan to go. This will change when you see your opposition, but generally when I lose a game it is because I got distracted and forgot to play my game.

Oh tell me more?

Think about the best units in the game. Then consider what about them technically makes them the best. Lots of units deal dmg, but the best units can consistently deal dmg from the smallest of vectors. Knights are relatively cheap but they need a ton of surface area to apply their dmg, and the 4+ to hit really makes them vulnerable to smart play.

Yeah this is pretty much the most stable pretenders archtype. It's basically a more flexible DoK from the get go, trades the defence on the Monster (KoS v Morathi) for the ability to summon. In pretenders Epicurean revellers is essentially because it gives you units with significant threat besides the KoS general.

The problem with Chaos Knights is that they take up a lot of space and their dmg per inch is not high at all. Meaning when you need the dmg the unit can apply most it will also be very easy to mitigate their ability to apply it. They are one of those units that seem amazing when you are winning. They are probably the toughest unit HoS have at hand however so they might have a place once people start learning how to mitigate depravity generation in a month or two. Bestigors are our best infantry unit in terms of raw damage output. They are paper and you will lose the unit unless you break the opponent's ability to do dmg as soon as a you get them stuck in. But they out damage the Knights considerably. One of the things I'm loving most about HoC is that I can't figure out their final evolution. I can see a few builds based on where the meta is likely to go, but something is still not quite clear to me.

I've started preping for ghb19 in my mind, and working out new strategies based on what I think might survive. Not been too pleased with what I've come up with yet. Basically a completely different faction.

They don't have weapon options they essentially come with all their options, scimitars and crossbows.

It could mean that. Or a thousand other things that such a superficial level of analysis would miss. I would list all the externalities in such a "test" but it take all day, and be mostly boring. The only fact here is that there is a global win ratio, but that is basically useless for any level of consistent interpretation of book stregth for many reasons but the most obvious is there are no controls in testing for bias samples. I would barely trust uncontrolled win percentage inside a single store meta to show me the strongest local faction.

Mate you are banging on a drum no one wants to hear. I've been trying to tell people that bumping the cost of hags and witches will just force more Hagg Narr but no one wants to hear that, everyone wants their pound of flesh for DoK.

The problem is you aren't even certain to cast mindrazor when you need it.

If that is response to me I don't think that is what I've said. But, the reality is at this point in AoS2 there are two types archetypes. Alpha dmg dealers, or grindy game state management. IDK have some of the tools for both, but Morrsarr let us put enough damage in the right places to pull of the first 60% of the time I would say. Sometimes we just get out dropped at the opposition gets their turn to set their buffs up and even Morrsarr don't work. We do have some decent objective management especially with allies. But too many parts of the book don't work harmoniously at the moment. Take the Leviadon, it doesn't affect, itself, or the apolex, it doesn't affect low tide. It doesn't affect chargers, which is basically the cavalry, and its even difficult to keep in range of chargers because of the nature or wholly within/charge/pile-in, unless you can pull off the double turn. It can try to provide an alternative play style, focus on infantry, eels as objective runners. But its so expensive you can't get the balance between numbers and benefits to balance out. It is best in a game where the speed is much slower, where games are decided in turns 4 or 5. When in reality games are often decided by key moments in turns 2 and 3. Its why the King build has faded in top table tournament play, its just too slow to implement its strengths. I think that the limited number of playstyles in the book, would ultimately have had IDK settle in to a comfortable upper middle tier over time even without any point changes. With just a small amount of familiarity IDK are so predictable.

That isn't the same thing though. The ORGANISATION says what can be taken in the WSB, the text is abilities that it confers on the units in the WSB. Try doing a quick google for Idoneth Royal Council or DoK Cauldron Guard to see the difference.

The WSB does not have it bolded in my digital edition. Do you have a pic in the hardcopy?

I've seen that people have insisted on the KoSoES as being an option in the Shroud guard battalion what is there reasoning here? There are more clear examples against than for as far as I can see. And, the neither FAQ or commentary mentions it at all.