August 2023 Musings, Ponderings, and Hypotheses

 Now that I'm back to writing some content while my work schedule isn't quite so hectic I wanted to do a longer freeform post just detailing some thoughts I've had while interacting with other community members on various platforms.  This is unlikely to be a particularly regular thing but I think some interesting ideas came up that I'd like to explore a little more.

Topic 1: Why do Veterans feel like a mediocre upgrade compared to Chosen of Conquest

    So now that both units are available and have gotten some table time Chosen of Conquest feel very powerful and a good upgrade over the more basic units like Blooded while Veterans even with their point reduction just feel sort of meh.  Not to say that they are actively bad just not exciting.  I think for me the answer to this is that Veterans don't offer anything that Blooded can't do they just offer a slight discount while doing it.

    What I mean by that is the primary special rule for Veterans - Forged in Battle - basically offers you a free tier 1 chant bonus which is quite nice.  Otherwise nothing else they do is a particularly substantial improvement over Blooded.  From an Output perspective 5 stands of Blooded (215 pts) slightly outperform 3 stands of Veterans + the Chief upgrade (205 pts) and from a Defensive perspective the Veterans are higher defense on account of their shields but the Blooded will have better resolve from unit size, more wounds (25 vs 18) and require more wounds to break (15 vs 12). 

    The primary advantage for the Veterans is that you get the tier 1 every round without having to expend resources.  It's quire a good special rule but less exciting in that Blooded could do the same thing if you are willing to spend the tokens and are more available.  For me I feel like Veterans just don't do anything exciting enough to account for being 180 points base cost and being restricted to basically just a Chieftain.  The only time I'd currently feel like reaching for them in a more "serious" build is if I really wanted a Chieftain with Tontorr Rider and I think for the most part the Thunder Chieftain just offers more.  It really pushes Veterans to the back of the line for me.

    Chosen of Conquest on the other hand are 15 pts more than 5 stands of Blooded but offer a couple of more difficult to replicate advantages.  Firstly they have impacts and innate cleave 1 allowing them to actually do more damage than the 5 stands of Blooded especially into higher defense targets.  From a bulk perspective you do still give up 4 wounds total (21 for chosen vs 25 for Blooded) but only give up a single wound in break threshold (14 vs 15) and will still have +1 defense (this time not conditional on shield) and equal resolve with the Chosen's base resolve 4.  

    Lastly Chosen are innate Fanatics with cult of conquest allowing them to chant more and get better benefits from doing so.  In particular this makes Chosen of Conquest one of the few regiments in the game that can be consistently taking a third action that is only restricted by normal action rules.  This means that Chosen of Conquest have surprising mobility being able to march 8, charge, and then still clash leveraging all of their rules.

    To me this is the sort of upgrade that makes for an exciting elite option vs just a maybe slightly more efficient version of the basic unit.  It is actually possible to make Blooded Fanatic Conquest as well but it takes a lot of resources and a character staying in the regiment to do so.  Chosen are expensive but they feel worth it for the capabilities they bring.  It is worth pointing out the Chosen do give up some of the flexibility of chants for this potential power spike but that drawback with Fanatic in general feels reasonable and not crippling.

Topic 2: Is the Tontorr actually that good or are we better off just playing more Thunder Riders

    So this one needs some explanation.  This is assuming you are using the Thunder Chieftain and the warband consists of an minimum unit of Thunder Riders for him to join.  The thought here is it's better to take a 4 stand regiment of Thunder Riders as your second regiment vs taking a Tontorr as your second regiment.  

    The four stand regiment of Thunder Riders costs 20 pts more than the Tontorr at a whopping 330 but it is quite good.  As far as output goes the Thunder Riders will substantially outperform the Tontorr if they can spread out and will slightly outperform the Tontorr if they are in a 2x2 formation to conserve space.  They are also much more flexible as far as chants go as they aren't restricted to conquest, have similar wound totals (24 vs 26), similar base defenses (r4 vs r3 oblivious isn't a massive difference), don't take up a restricted slot leaving a few more options, and won't take up your free reinforcement on Turn 3 as they already have Flank.

    The downside to doing this is losing out on Monster advantages namely not degrading through wounds.  Losing stands of the Thunder Riders will absolutely change the equation on output while the Tontorr fights at full strength on 26 wounds and on 1 wound.  You do avoid being punished by fiend hunter regiments with the Riders for a little bit of a bonus.  There are a few more niche considerations here such as the Thunder Riders being better base clash and not necessarily needing the Chieftain's supremacy as much as it feels like the Tontorr probably does.  Otherwise they end up being pretty similar with the Riders offering additional options.

    I'd love to hear more opinons on this as I feel like the Thunder Riders are likely to just be better. They are also notably cheaper to purchase with 2 boxes of riders (6 stands) being about 75% the cost of the Tontorr at the time of this writing.  I can certainly understand playing the Tontorr because Big Dino is awesome but in a strict list building sense I'm struggle to see where it is super compelling comparatively outside of the lack of degrading profile.

The above image is a monster stand vs 2x2 cav stands.  I put that in there because the mobility advantage of monsters and terrain is not insignificant.  The stand isn't that much smaller than the narrow Cav formation.  This is also why I looked at running the Thunder Riders in a 2x2.

Here are the output comparisons into a variety of targets.  The targets are mostly chosen at random but I think its fairly representative of a wide array of profiles.

That's all I've got for today.  If there is a topic you are curious about and would like me to explore let me know.  As always thanks for reading

-K

Rules Focus: Fanatic

    The Fanatic special rule is one of more powerful tools available to W'adrhun as it opens up the potential power spike that is the tier 3 chant.  However, the rule itself is somewhat obtuse in how it interacts with chanting in general.  The goal of this article is to break down the three parts of the Fanatic rule and how the relate to chanting as well as provide some examples.

First let's review the requirements to chant each tier

• Tier 1 - 2 markers
• Tier 2 - 3 markers
• Tier 3 - 3 markers AND the Fanatic rule

Now let's look at the Fanatic rule-

Fanatic: When a regiment with this special rule chooses a Tier bonus due to Chant the Battle Cry, it always counts as having discarded from the Sequence one additional Chant Marker belonging to their* Cult (to a maximum of three), but may only choose their own Cult's bonus.

    There are three distinct important parts to the special rule as it relates to chanting.  The first is just having Fanatic.  In order to choose a Tier 3 bonus the regiment must have the special rule.  The second part is that you basically get a free bonus token when a fanatic regiment chants.  These two clauses are different.  Chanting tier 3 does not necessarily require your bonus token, however, your bonus token would count toward one of the three required tokens.  The third part of the rule is the limitation.  A unit with Fanatic may only ever get the bonus from its cult.  Effectively this means you trade some of the flexibility of chanting for a potential power spike.

Lets look at some examples.  We'll use Chosen of Conquest for these as they are currently the only released models to have this special rule natively (for a refresher on how conquest tokens and chanting the cult of conquest works check the link to the general chanting write up below):

• We have zero tokens in our pool.  We flip our Chosen of Conquest and add a conquest token to our pool.  We really need that extra movement so we decide to chant the battle cry.  Because fanatic counts as having discarded and extra token we have 2 tokens and so are able to choose the Tier 1 benefit.
• We have a War token in our pool.  We flip our Chosen of Conquest and add a conquest token to our pool.  We decide to Chant the Battle Cry.  The fanatic special rule makes us count as having discarded 3 tokens and we are a regiment with Fanatic so we are able to choose the Tier 3 bonus netting us that extra mobility, evasion, AND a third action
• We have zero tokens in our pool. We flip a Scion of Conquest and add a conquest token to our pool.  With our Scion's action we decide to cast Crescendo using it to add a second conquest token to our pool and drawing our Chosen of Conquest.  We again decide to chant the battle cry immediately and because we have the fanatic rule we count as having discarded a third token and are allegeable for the Tier 3 bonus.
• We have 2 Death tokens in our pool.  We flip our Chosen of Conquest and add a conquest token to our pool.  We MUST chant as we have activated a regiment able to chant and have three tokens in our pool.  We Chant the Battle Cry, because the bonus from fanatic can never count as using more than 3 tokens to chant we don't add an extra token.  However, since we had three tokens when we chanted and are still a Fanatic regiment we again qualify for the Tier 3 bonus.

You'll notice in none of these scenarios do we ever take the Tier 2 bonus.  This is because the only difference in taking Tier 2 vs being able to take Tier 3 is the presence of the Fanatic special rule.  Functionally a Fanatic regiment will never chant Tier 2.  You could opt to take Tier 2 instead of Tier 3 but there is no benefit to doing so.

    Now that we've reviewed the rule and looked at some examples...Is the Fanatic Special rule good?

I think the answer to that is undoubtedly yes.  The loss of a little flexibility to pull a Tier 1 bonus from another cult is actually a pretty significant draw back as all four cults have very good Tier 1 buffs, however, not only do you get the often huge buff Tier 3 provides but fanatic is also offering you free tokens functionally increasing how often you can Chant.  

    Those Tier 3 buffs are also huge.  Tier 3 Conquest is a full third action (normal rules apply) allowing something like Chosen of Conquest to be shockingly mobile.  Tier 3 War provides Blessed which might be the best single rule in the game and Tier 3 of both Death and Famine offer large potential damage swings.

    So how do we get Fanatic?  All of the "Chosen of" options in the Scion's warband come with this rule base.  Of those four only Chosen of Conquest are currently available.  The Matriarch Queen's supremacy ability allows her to choose a single Infantry regiment to gain the fanatic rule.  This is now quite limited and while ok probably not the best available supremacy in W'adrhun, but that is another article.  Finally a character with the Mantle of the Devoted artifact grants the Fanatic rule to the regiment they join.  Importantly that does include a monster if you opt to give it to any of the Rider options.  The Mantle isn't cheap at 30 pts but it is good enough to almost always be worth it's points.

There is a link to my general write up of chanting HERE

Hopefully this helps answer questions about the Fanatic rule and actually getting to the Tier 3 bonus.  As always thanks for reading

-K

* When a cult of conquest regiment with fanatic chants the additional token they are considered to have discarded is a conquest token and will be replaced by a token from another cult during step 1 of "Chant the Battlecry"

How should I kit out my Thunder Riders?

     With the impending release of the ceratops riding, hat wearing Thunder Riders it seemed like a good idea to examine ways to kit them out.  At a whooping 250 pts per min regiment and the thunder chieftain costing at least an additional 160 before add-ons the cost is high enough that you'll want to ensure you are setting up some buffs to maximize their value.   You could run the thunder riders as a restricted regiment option with a foot chieftain, however, this article is going to focus on the assumption that you have a mounted chieftain with your thunder riders.*

    So we have the thunder chieftain riding this massive ceratops (seriously this model is huge) there are primarily two artifacts that help us maximize value for the regiment.  The Mantle of the Devoted to give them fanatic* and the Elder Brontoskalps to give a regiment hardened (1). I'm of the opinion the Mantle is better virtually all the time when it is available but the Elder Brontoskalps is a good shout to take as a second artifact with the long lineage mastery should you choose to go all in as we'll see a little later.  The Mantle of the Devoted is an artifact that should broadly be in every list.  I know no one likes auto takes but this is more of the one option you have to unlock the top end power spike the chant rules where ever you might need it to be. That top end power spike is also huge on something like Thunder Riders.

    From a perspective of choosing cults I'd really be choosing between War and Famine. Death is certainly not bad this is one of those cases where the other two options lets you get to a point of almost silliness with this particular regiment especially if you've opted to give the Thunder Chieftain the mantle to gain access to tier 3 bonuses.  Famine tier 3 makes these things one of the most devastating hammers available in the game often just wiping out normally durable regiments and not even needing the clash action to pick up lighter regiments.  

    The big draw of this is that putting a Fanatic Famine regiment of Thunder Riders on the table you sort of warp the table space around them as your opponent can't avoid responding either though always having some sacrificial piece in front of their valuable targets or by trying to keep targets away from the Thunder Riders.  That sort of table pressure has pretty substantial value even if you never get the high value charge you are looking for off.  It also isn't particularly easy to get away from them.  The +2" charge distance you pick up from famine tier 1 combined with having unstoppable built in gives you good odds to hit 11" or 12" charges if you should need to.

    If this sounds awesome it almost certainly is but there is a pretty big drawback to it which has me relegating Famine to the second choice option currently and that is the lack of staying power and durability.  A fanatic regiment of thunder riders is minimum 440 pts spent.  Nearly a quarter of your army.  That hammer might remove whatever is in front of it but then it is sitting there at defense 3/resolve 4 and only 18 wounds.  It's a prime target for a counter charge unit to clean up resulting in what is likely to be a points positive trade for your opponent.  Opting to instead go Cult of War turns that idea on its head quite a bit.

    Cult of War is one of the less user friendly cults because of the stack pressures it puts on you as the Wadrhun player and often isn't used frequently because the buffs don't make a big enough difference to be worth the headache.  The more elite units like Thunder Riders is where this starts to shift.  Getting to tier 3 War makes your thunder riders go from just an elite hammer to a unit that still has exceptional output but now also has real staying power.  The defensive buffs on display in this case force your opponent to put real quality into them to start to whittle down the unit and also gives you a rare Wadrhun unit that can potential stay in sustained combat for multiple rounds.

    At tier 3 Cult of War turns your defensive stats to defense 4/resolve 5 and blessed (which you should almost always save for defense) combined with there base 6 wounds you have a very similar unit to the 100k's Ashen Dawn that can be very very challenging to remove.  Low quality high volume attackers are heavily offset by Blessed letting you reroll fails so it largely forces your opponent to bring their better quality attackers to the Thunder Riders whom are also gaining Cleave 1 on their clash attacks with this Chant.  This is also where you could use Long Lineage to take a second artifact and snag the Elder Brontoskalps to give the unit Hardened (1).  Hardened serves to basically decrease the quality of the attacks coming in and if you've ever faced off with a late game T3 Fallen Divine you might be fully aware of how difficult it can be to deal with Hardened and Blessed in combination. Its very expensive bringing the regiment cost up to an incredible 480 pts but it provides an regiment that so long as you are putting it early enough in your stack to get the buffs up can fill most rolls and likely dominate an area of the table. 

    While you don't hit as hard and can't march charge nearly as well as Famine Thunder Riders you actually get more out of the clash phase offsetting some of the lost damage. I've attached a chart with estimated damage output from both set ups and while Famine is frankly silly with how many wounds it can do War is still doing real damage to even the most durable opponents like the aforementioned Ashen Dawn and Steel Forged. The combination of having both excellent defenses and still hitting like a runaway train is primarily why I would put it as the best option for Thunder Riders.  It also works a little bit better with multiple units.  If you opt to bring a second regiment of Thunder Riders they won't be able to get Blessed but will still be able to get the defense and resolve boosts while with Famine a second unit can't ever get the extra impacts or glorious charge that make it so brutal.

* It's probably worth a little refresher on how chanting with Fanatic works.  The fanatic special rule provides 2 distinct bonuses.  First just having it enables you to get to tier 3.  Second it lets you count as having discarded an additional token.  This means that you can get to your tier 3 with a single token in your pool prior to drawing your fanatic regiment or use a Scion of Conquest and it's crescendo ability to go from no tokens prior to drawing the Scion directly into your tier 3 chant.  In the first scenario you have 1, the regiment gives you the second, fanatic lets you count as having discarded the third so you'll have discarded 3 tokens and have the special rule.  In the second scenario your Scion plays the first token, crescendo adds the second, the regiment doesn't add a token because crescendo sates it will not but can still chant so fanatic still counts as your third.  The downside of all of this is that you are locked to the cult you've chosen but the tier 3 benefits are quite substantial.

As always thanks for reading

-K 

PS If you are one of those people that doesn't like the Thudner Rider hats you are just wrong...sorry not sorry :)

Should I get a Tontorr or a Drum Beast?

This question has been popping up a lot with the upcoming release of these two fantastic but also quite expensive kits. If the goal is to only get one of the two initially how should we look at which one is the right choice for what we want?

Firstly we should look at the differences.  It doesn't seem like all that much - the Tontorr gets a few extra attacks and has relentless blows while the Drum Beast has the Sound of the Drums drums special rule and costs 20 more points.  The extra attacks for the Tontorr end up being pretty easy to quantify.  In most situations you'll get about 20% extra output from the Tontorr at a slightly cheaper price.  The crux of the evaluation then rests on how much is the Sound of the Drums rule worth to how you play.

Sound of the Drums gives your entire army the ability to not chant when you have 3 tokens in your pool.  Under normal circumstances drawing a regiment that is eligible to chant when you have 3 tokens already or are placing your third token forces you to chant even if you wouldn't want to.  The option to hold that can be quite valuable as it makes your turn much more consistent.  Lists that utilize large numbers of smaller units and therefore generate lots of tokens can find very good value there, however, the cost of the Drum Beast itself (currently a whopping 330 points) is likely to push you into a more elite build anyway.

For this reason I think the Tontorr is the likely to see more play.  It provides much more consistent output regardless of the list around it.  The Drum Beast likely has a role in a list designed to generate a ton of tokens that could use the additional flexibility but recommending it for what might be a niche use is a little more difficult than just saying slam in a Tontorr.

The other consideration is of course which model you prefer aesthetically. I think the Drum Beast is fantastic in this regard and would consider designing a niche list just for full rule of cool reasons but that's probably another argument entirely.

As always thanks for reading 

-K