8th Ed. 2400 pts, first attempt at 8th edition

[erians]

Hello everyone ! When 8th ed first came I didn't have the time to pick it up, but my gaming friends started to play so I started to really get into it. I'm a WH veteran, been playing competitively for 4-5 years, but a lot seems to have changed in 8th and I don't really feel like I know how to build a proper list. Anyway, here comes my first attempt at 8th edition, using "my" old redundancy theory!

Lords and Heroes

Slann Mage-Priest
BSB, Mystery, Rumination, Cogitation
Standard of Discipline, Cupped Hands, DPoP

Generic part slann. All the super powered Disciplines, miscast protected, cannon protected, LD 10 general and BSB, anything within 12" will pretty much never ever break unless they loose really big. Scar vets aren't what they used to be, and my Saurus block has more than enough killing power already. Chiefs and Priests are pretty much a joke now, especially as steg mounted chars are extremely vulnerable to cannons and templates now.

Core

30 Saurus Warriors
Full Command

12 Skink Skirmishers
Brave

12 Skink Skirmishers
Brave

12 Skink Skirmishers
Brave


10 Skinks
Musician

10 Skinks
Musician

A big chunk of Saurus to have a super solid combat specialist / anvil. Sknk skirmishers slightly better now with an effective range of 24", and they were always ridiculously cost effective. 2 Cohorts to redirect, throw a few spears and just provide board control and possibly take out ranks by flanking.

With war machines being more prevalent on the battle field more people are probably going for different flying heroes, a Brave adds much needed protection against anything that can be challanged. Some extra BS doesn't hurt either and I had some pts to spare. I'm not convinced of how useful they will prove to be, but in theory they should be a valuable asset and there isn't much else I can spend 18 pts on.

Special

10 Chameleon Skinks

10 Chameleon Skinks

3 Terradon Riders

3 Terradon Riders

1 Stegadon

Cammo skinks were a favourite of mine back in 7th, they're even better now with an effective range of 24" and still get to benefit from poison when they double shoot. With the huge buff to artillery, and template weapons in general, in 8th people are gonna field a ton of war machines, 20 cammo skinks should take out 1-2 war machine per turn easy. Terradons are are harassers and war machine / mage hunters, and provide much needed board control.

Rare

1 Ancient Stegadon

3 Salamander Hunting Packs
11 Skink Handlers

Both salamanders and Stegadons are amazing now. With stubborn tests being taken on the Generals LD Stegs are infinitely better anvils than before, while still being great hammers (even if they don't negate ranks any longer). Salamanders also went from great to mind blowing with the new 8th ed rules. The
salamanders are in 1 big units since most tournaments have a "no double rare" restriction.

Shooting: 138+4D6 poisonous shots per turn if I get to double shoot (56x2 + 26).
Magic: Loremaster + Rumination + Cogitation. I can dish out 4-6 spells per turn with +4 to cast and got complete protection from enemy IFs.
Models in army: 129



Redundancy:
Harassers: 9. Most of the list are harassing units, so redundancy is clearly achieved.
Shooting: 8. Complete redundancy for everything except maybe template shooting.
Anvils: 3. 3 Anvils are more than enough to have redundancy, especially with such resilient anvils.
Hammers: 2. Both Hammers have great survivability, making 2 enough to achieve redundancy.
Fighters: 1. While I don't achieve redundancy in number of units, the one fighter unit is increadibly durable and pretty big, so I'm not really worried, especially with the board control this list has.

Thoughts?

 

[1968yearofmetall]

slann goes alone? without higher state of... he will be pretty easy to kill for pretty must anyone.
either put him with saurus, or give him the higher state... dicipline.
what lore are you planning to use? life to keep those number? metall to pick out characters? heavens to just mess around? with slann as loremaster, have fun!
hope I helped!

ps. I dont wanna keep saying this, but reffer to strewarts gide on not posting individual point values.
http://lustria-online.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1920

my best!

 

[Hiv0r]

Hey there,

Having just come back from the SCGT I found that my ancient stegadon almost went down every single game as they generally had something for taking out a big monster.

Now there are 2 ways you could take this, firstly its good to give them something to put all there fire onto instead of your important blocks. Secondly it could mean that your loosing 275 points that could be useful somewhere else.

I would actually choose something in the middle though. I think at 2400 points a stegadon is not a bad choice but I would keep it a naked baby stegadon, meaning its likely to attract the same firepower and pretty much be as hard to take down while retaining enough points to field something more useful.

I found I really wanted a skink priest with a dispel scroll, the signature heavens spell isn't too bad and sometimes you just NEED a dispel scroll definately a change I will be making next time.

 

[Hiv0r]

Oh and sorry to post again, another thing I found is my Saurus blocks NEVER EVER died, I was using a block of 25 with hand weapons and shields and off the back of the 6 games at the tournament I think I can afford to drop 5 of them as the worst cast senario I got to about 12 Saurus, who can still pretty much take everything.

I would drop it to atleast 25 if your taking any lore other than life, if your taking life you could try and squeeze the list and drop to 20-25.

Again if your taking life the best unit in the game is Skrox because the toughness is the only thing they lack and you can give that to them. otherwise stick with your core skink skirmishers and saurus.

 

[erians]

Having just come back from the SCGT I found that my ancient stegadon almost went down every single game as they generally had something for taking out a big monster.

What exactly killed your stegs? Did you have good war machine hunters? With this list I have ridiculously good war machine hunters, so unless I'm up against 5+ cannons I'm not really worried at all, especially with the lore of life to just heal any stegadon that doesn't get insta-gibbed.

I found I really wanted a skink priest with a dispel scroll, the signature heavens spell isn't too bad and sometimes you just NEED a dispel scroll definately a change I will be making next time.

I used to play lone slanns all the time in 7th and with Cogitation I pretty much never needed any scrolls, but they are obviously useful. As Lore of Life already has a built-in miscast protection spell I might drop the Cupped Hands for a scroll, but with miscasts and IFs being the same thing I cupped hands becomes extremely strong, potentially getting an IF Dwellers + caster kill in one go. A Priest is a big point sink and even if I roll 12 PDs the Slann can easily use them all in a very effective manner, so I don't see myself ever wasting PDs on Iceshards, and 90 pts for a scroll is a bit steep.

Oh and sorry to post again, another thing I found is my Saurus blocks NEVER EVER died, I was using a block of 25 with hand weapons and shields and off the back of the 6 games at the tournament I think I can afford to drop 5 of them as the worst cast senario I got to about 12 Saurus, who can still pretty much take everything.

That's pretty interesting, I'll definitely play around with the saurus unit size then. I was thinking 30 Saurus and getting them in a Horde formation, so dropping them down to 20-25 would loose a lot of hitting power, but their main purpose is of course tanking rather than damage dealing, and if they can fill that role with a ~100 pts cheaper unit then its definitely worth looking into.

slann goes alone? without higher state of... he will be pretty easy to kill for pretty must anyone.
either put him with saurus, or give him the higher state... dicipline.
what lore are you planning to use? life to keep those number? metall to pick out characters? heavens to just mess around? with slann as loremaster, have fun!

Yeah I knew I had forgotten something on the Slann.... been out of the game for too long... I'll be taking Lore of Life, thought I had written that but apparently not. Since a 1 die cast would score an average of 11 most spells are safe to 1 die cast, 2 to be 100% safe. The number of dices used will obviously depend on how many PDs I get and how many spells that are useful to cast in that particular turn, but this is more or less the casting order:

- 1-2 dice Throne to boost other spells and protect against miscasts
- 1-2 dice cast any other useful spell
- Rest of the dice into Dwellers on big units, preferably with lots of characters in it

Thanks for the feedback! If I drop 10 saurus, drop the ancient down to a vanilla steg I have a 150 pts to play around with, I'll have to play test a lot to see where they are best spent (or left where they are ofc). I'll edit out the point values, used to be less strict.

 

[Hiv0r]

What killed my stegs? ha... just about everything, who cares if you have good warmachine hunters a decent player will NEVER let you use them properly.

Talk about blocking his warmachine with their chaff and worst of all deploying perfectly so they cannot flank with scouts making sure they had a unit within 12" of the very corner of the board on both ends.

The good players think about this sort of thing and protect their war machines VERY well and its not even that hard.

Also in terms of the dispel scroll again I found the good players who knew lizardmen would bunker there level 4 outside of the 24" zone for becalming..

I guess for casual or non-tournament play you dont need to think about this stuff.

 

[erians]

What killed my stegs? ha... just about everything, who cares if you have good warmachine hunters a decent player will NEVER let you use them properly.

Talk about blocking his warmachine with their chaff and worst of all deploying perfectly so they cannot flank with scouts making sure they had a unit within 12" of the very corner of the board on both ends.

The good players think about this sort of thing and protect their war machines VERY well and its not even that hard.

Also in terms of the dispel scroll again I found the good players who knew lizardmen would bunker there level 4 outside of the 24" zone for becalming..

I guess for casual or non-tournament play you dont need to think about this stuff.

Whats with the hostility and wrongful assumptions? I've been playing tournaments competitively for several years. Warhammer is too complex to discuss over forums in more than general terms. Saying stuff like "If you do X then they'll just do Y" (like their chaff blocks their war machines, therefore their war machines cannot be touched, or I don't ever have to worry about war machines cause my hunters will just kill them) is oversimplifying the game, its all gonna come down to who plays better. Either way I will take your ideas about stegadons into consideration when play testing.

 

[Juhaaha]

Banner of swiftenss is pretty musthave for solo slann.

Drop 1 terradon unit, take 3rd unit of chamos. That would be the only major change I would do.

 

[Viarca]

The usual caveat before I begin: the metagame in your area and personal experience/preference are more important considerations than any amount of advice people on the boards can give you. The nice thing about Warhammer is there are a lot of ways to win and it’s rare to see identical lists, so it should come down to what you enjoy playing, whether it is competitively or purely for fun.

As someone who plays Warhammer in a very competitive environment, I recently did a lot of playtesting to add a new Lizardmen Army to my collection (I already had VC, HE, DoC, WoC and Skaven, and regularly play all but the DoC).

In trying out different things, I found that a lone Slann, even with Higher State of Consciousness to make him ethereal, often died to magic and shooting in the first few turns. Placing the Slann behind units and/or terrain can help with BS-based shooting (which is still a concern with items like the HE Amulet of Light and the Enchanted Blades spell for ethereal Slann), but it also limits his range with Becalming Cogitation and some of the offensive spells in the early turns. The extended effective ranges with boosted spells and true LoS can also be an issue and make the Slann very susceptible to magic damage.

Likewise, I never had very much luck with Stegadons. They are very vulnerable to cannon fire and some magic, and given their point cost, including them didn’t end up making much sense to me. Even when the Stegadon survived to get into combat, they often got tar-pitted in cheap hordes benefitting from Steadfast. With 6’s always wounding now, you may find that even shooting blocks can ruin your day despite the Stegadon AS.

Playing in an environment where I face a lot of shooty armies, Terradons were never a successful unit for me either. They tended to get picked off very quickly.

While I ultimately decided not to run the lone Slann or include Steagdons and Terradons, it is important to give them credit for being early game distractions. If you have enough of them, then they become more effective in that role, since an opponent can only deal with so many things at once and will have to prioritize.

Horde deployments seemed to be all the rage when 8th first came out. They have slowly died down a lot though in favor of bus deployments to benefit from steadfast. While I usually start my Saurus blocks 5 or 6 wide, if I am in a favorable combat that lasts more than 1 round, I will often use a reform after winning to change them to a horde for the extra attacks to break through a tarpit.

What did work extremely well for me, were Chameleon Skinks. Granted, top-tier opponents playing in an open roster setting are going to do everything they can to keep you from getting behind their lines and/or deploying them advantageously, but a good player can still identify useful spots and make them a threat. With 6’s always wounding, high T things without an AS like warmachines go down very quickly to their poisoned shooting.

Salamanders are another unit that works amazingly well. While tournament composition scores often prevent you duplicating rares as you mentioned, when you can, I would recommend separating them and always taking the extra handler. In my experience, they are as big a distraction for shooting as Stegadons and cost less than a third of the points.

Saurus are another valuable unit that I have been very successful with. Their high T and 2 attacks make them an enviable core choice with a reasonable point cost. The biggest consideration with them is the low I with so many spells that force initiative tests. Because of this, Lore of Light tended to be a lot more successful for me as the choice for my Slann. While it lacks the potential to cause devastation with a single spell like Dwellers/Pit of Shades/Purple Sun/Final Transmutation, it makes up for this in my opinion be working so well to compensate for the Lizardmen Army’s weaknesses (low I for Saurus, and low WS on Skinks). These spells can also be boosted to have bubble effects to benefit multiple units, and can provide protection against shooting and panic in isolated units. Light also boasts two nice magic missile spells and a hex that can really hamper your opponent (I like to use the Net spell on a unit with the opponent’s main caster and make them take a test each time they want to use a spell). Life remains popular with many, and while it can work very well, there are just too many people running Shadow magic for me to feel comfortable with all of my I1 Saurus on the board.

I’d still encourage you to try your initial list and see how it works for you and let us know.

 

[Hiv0r]

Whats with the hostility and wrongful assumptions? I've been playing tournaments competitively for several years. Warhammer is too complex to discuss over forums in more than general terms. Saying stuff like "If you do X then they'll just do Y" (like their chaff blocks their war machines, therefore their war machines cannot be touched, or I don't ever have to worry about war machines cause my hunters will just kill them) is oversimplifying the game, its all gonna come down to who plays better. Either way I will take your ideas about stegadons into consideration when play testing.

Negative on the hostilaty front. More a case of getting fustrated by the theory of camo skinks = anti warmachine etc as i'm finding against good players im not getting an inch on warmachines atm which is why I have switched to terradons lately.