I opted to start the series with Death because I think it is the most user friendly of all the chants but at the same time has a bunch of special rules that benefit from more analysis. I find death to be very user friendly in that all of the benefits it provides just kind of work. They aren't as situation dependent as the other two primary cult chants. Unlike famine you don't need to be making charges and unlike war you don't need to do much predicting of your opponents target selection. If you are in combat all the benefits of death just kind of work.
Tier 1: +1 Clash
Exactly what it says on the tin this gives the regiment +1 clash. For as simple as this is it is a very potent first benefit. In addition to stacking with Inspired this also effects impact attacks which is relatively unusual. The ability to get virtually any chanting unit to clash 4 through inspire + clash or a charge + clash turn is hard to underrate as it turns almost all of our units up to pretty elite accuracy. The ability to fairly cheaply threaten a significant volume of hits even on our units that lack cleave makes running at ranged units or objective holders a much more risky proposition.
Examples
1) An Inspire + clash action from a 3 stand unit of hunters nets an average of 8 hits with no chant. Against our standardized Defense 3 Resolve 4 opponent that we've used previously that comes out to about 4 wounds + an additional missed resolve or two for 5 to 6 wounds and probably lifting a stand. With Death one we jump up to 12 hits now expecting about 6 wounds and an additional 2 from resolve netting 8 wounds. This puts us close to a situation where we can destroy 2 stands of some enemies and potentially breaking small units. Death is a surprisingly good "defensive" chant on ranged units and objective holders because of the risk of losing multiple stands when just running at a W'adrhun unit.
2) A charge + clash action with a 3 stand group of Warbred. Warbred let us double down on this benefit through also picking up the benefit on their impacts. With no chant you'd expect to hit twice from impacts netting you 1 wound and then another 8 from their basic attacks and we will give them 1 bonus hit from Relentless for 9. Our opponent is looking at 7 to 8 wounds here with cleave 2 and probably another 2 or 3 from Resolve. We should be looking at 10 to 12ish wounds expected. With Death because of that bonus to impacts we are looking more at 3 initial hits with 1 to 2 wounds through and possibly another from resolve. We'll just call this 2 wounds expected. Jumping up to 12 expected hits from making to to clash 4 on our melee attacks should net something like 14 after relentless and 12 expected wounds plus another 4 from resolve. We go from 10 to 12ish wounds to something more like 16 to 18 wounds and breaking if not destroying many opposing regiments outright. This also threatens to outright destroy a variety of monsters including our own Apex Predator
The second example shows where the early chant from Death can amplify quality attacks to a large degree. In this example we actually net more expected wounds from Death 1 than we would from Famine 1 although at the cost of charge distance. Burnout would also stack with Death 1 getting us to clash 4 on those impacts and clash 4 + reroll 6s on the clash attacks.
Tier 2: Flawless Strikes
Flawless strikes cause hit rolls of "1" to count your opponents defense as 0 for that attack basically forcing them to rely on their evasion. Combined with the extra accuracy and potential rerolls we start to be a bit more threatening to a high defense unit especially with many of our unit not really bringing a lot of cleave. This benefit is substantially greater for units that output a high volume of attacks at low cleave than it is for our cleave 2 choices but even they will benefit against anything with 4 or more Defense letting you threaten very bulky units a little bit more.
Examples
For these examples we will give our standard opponent Evasion 1. Let's start with maybe the poster child for high output relatively low quality attacks...the humble Blooded. A minimum regiment of Blooded pours in 19 attacks for a mere 135 pts but do so at clash 2 and no cleave Death lets us fix the quality of issues of these attacks in a hurry. Against our standard opponent with an Inspire + Clash action we have 19 attacks resulting in 9 to 10 hits and generously 5 wounds plus 1 or 2 more from resolve. Certainly able to threaten a stand but unlikely to pick up more than 1 of most targets. Chanting Death 2 pulls us up to an expected 12 to 13 hits from the first tier and likely having a pair or "1"s on the dice. Those will be saved at our opponent s evasion 1 and likely both wound. The other 10 to 11 hits will add another 5 or so wounds resulting in 7 wounds + another 2 expected from resolve.
We go from expecting 6 to 8 wounds to 9 to 10 making us much more threatening to a second stand. That 2 or so extra wounds isn't just a 25%+ increase in output its important to consider the impact on opponents output. The changes in v2 to infantry resulting in no degradation until you remove an actual stand makes the ability to threaten multiple stands much more important.
Tier 3: Deadly Blades AND Untouchable
Tier 3 gets us our final offensive output boost and our first and only defensive buff from the Cult of Death. Deadly Blades just adds even more output on top of what we were already doing. Let's go ahead and jump back to our tier 2 example and look at those 13 hits we were doing with deadly blades on top. Because our opponent has evasion they actually have to roll those flawless strike attacks which actually makes this slightly more dangerous for them than if they were evasion 0 and they just automatically wounded. 13 save attempts is likely to see 2 "6"s rolled resulting in 2 extra wounds so our 7 expected wounds jumps to 9 and our opponent is likely to fail an additional resolve test at this point pushing us up to 12 wounds expected. Definitely in the realm of removing 2 stands even of elite targets and probably earning their points back from one activation.
I'm going to jump to a different example for Untouchable because I think the best highlight for the potential of this rule is how well in synergizes with Chosen of Death. Chosen of Death have a very unusual evasion 3 base. They on average just save half of the incoming attacks regardless of cleave making them oddly one of the most durable choices we have but also at a huge 230 points they probably should have some survivability.
In this example we are going to look at what another elite unit actually should expect to do to them in combat. I'm going to use the Dweghom Dragonslayers regiment because they are a fairly elite hitting unit. Dragonslayers are clash 4 base so will inspire to get some rerolls and a minimum regiment outputs 19 attacks at cleave 3 for a surprisingly reasonable 200 pts flat. 19 attacks should be about 13 hits and 2 "6"s to reroll lets give them both hits to make it 15. We don't have any defense for them to cleave but we get our evasion 3 giving us 7 to 8 saves. We will go with 7 saves and assume that of our 8 "4"s, "5"s, and "6"s we will get 3 rerolls making 2 for a total of 6 wounds through. We are only resolve 3 so we will take another 3 wounds netting "only" 9 damage.
The expected output here is more like 8 to 10 but the realities of not being consistently likely to kill that second stand of Chosen of Death with other elite units can be a real issue. Chosen of Death hit very hard given the opportunity to swing back and as mentioned in the tier 2 discussion the change to infantry degradation makes it much worse in v2 to leave a stand on a wound or 2. W'adrhun having 5 wounds per stand as the norm leads to some potentially challenging decisions when trying to decide where to put attacks and how much to devote to removing a single regiment especially when we can potentially amplify the bulk of high value targets.
Comparison of Cleave 1 vs Flawless Strikes
I wanted to look at this just as an idea of how much difference there is between the two and how to look at something like Flawless Strikes or Relentless Blows in general. While Flawless Strikes gives comparable outcomes to Cleave 1 (we'll get there bear with me) and Relentless blows works out similarly to just having +1 clash it's worth pointing out that the reliability, or lack there of, of the special rules is likely to create much more swingy outcomes. Over the course of thousands of rolls there wont be a lot of difference but in a single activation you could easily roll several "1"s or zero.
To do some math lets just grab that example fight from tier 2. We had 12 hits likely netting us 2 "easy" wounds from flawless and another 5 or so from our cleaveless attacks for an expected 7ish before resolve. Cleave 1 pushes our opponent down to saving on 1s and 2s for all 12 attacks netting us about 8 wounds. The more attacks you make the more cleave becomes beneficial vs the special rule and as stated cleave 1 should be more consistent over the course of a game although it is also effected by other special rules such as Hardened that Flawless Strike ignores.
If you wanted a very quick and dirty look at output estimates you could probably subtract 1 defense and then drop your expectations a wound or 2 as a placeholder for trying to math out the effect of Flawless Strikes. In general when working with expected outputs I tend to always lean towards my models doing less work and my opponents doing more. Preparing my rounds that way has a tendency for me to add redundancy to my plans and over the long term has been beneficial to not having a single bad activation change the course of games.
Planning like this in W'adrhun is also a little easier as our units tend to be pretty mobile. It's much easier to still get value out of later activations if things have gone well early in a round if your regiments have the pace to reach out to multiple targets or threaten to take an relatively distant objective. Target flexibility when your plans change is also a side efficiency of ranged units and as mentioned about a thousand times already in this blog I currently regard all of our ranged options quite highly.
Conclusion
To wrap this up I find Death to be the most user friendly chant as the majority of the benefits are straight-forward and apply to most combat situations in the game. The sneaky tier 3 defensive bonus synergizes very well with the Chosen of Death unit and can be useful on a handful of other units such as Raptor Riders with their Evasion 2 and maybe Braves or Veterans with their slightly better Defense 3. It would be my choice for learning the chant system when starting W'adrhun but also offers enough upside to use as a primary cult choice for a wide variety of lists especially when adding in a couple of sources of Conquest tokens to provide coverage.
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