8th Ed. Did Khaine change anything?

[Scalenex]

Obviously the Elves will be harder to beat if they can cherry pick the best units of the High Elves, Dark Elves, and Wood Elves codexes, but are they fundamentally changed? I am going to issue the opinion that an army list tailored to fight specific Elf armies would look very similar to each other and to a list to find an ET mega-Elf army.

All three elf armies have fairly ordinary spearmen with minor special abilities.

All three elf armies have Core shooters that hit fairly often at a fairly low strength. They all have a scouting archer variant. Two out of three of the Elf armies have an elite harder hitting archer variant. Two out of three of the Elves have identical cheap bolt throwers. Wood Elves get the consolation prize of crazy useful enchanted arrows.

Two of the armies have Eagles, one has harpies which do the mostly the same thing.

All three elf armies have elite great weapon troops for Special with a fluffy special ability.

All three elf armies have at least nine lores to choose from and some way to boost their magic slightly above the norm.

Two out of three of them have heavy hitting knight options (though the WEs are glass cannons). All three have light fast cavalry options. Two out of three of them have weird bound spell using cavalry with Ward saves. Two out of three of them have medium hitting flyers.

Dark Elves get Hydras and Hydra-esque monsters, High Elves Phoenixes, and Wood Elves get entish support troops.


So I'm not sure what the magic formula for beating elves is, but does anyone want to contest my generalization that an army that can beat Wood Elves should be able to beat High Elves, Dark Elves, or an Elven host about as well?

 

[Skinquisitor]

Well, what I would build from these combined armies, is a flying circus. These can field 3 pretty hard hitting pegasus riding characters, aided by phoenixes, 2 eagles, eagle claw charriots just for fun, and Id field reavers and silver helms from core. That would be a very mobile army, able to hit anywhere they want.
There was recently a competition, 2 person teams were fighting each other. With the current rules (mainly magic dice splitting) the helf-delf pair was weaker then the khaine combined army, yet won the event.
This list can hunt down chaff as easily as tough characters, warmachines... Id vote for woc that can stop this with its 1+ 3+ characters on disks.
I can imagine a similar army with the flyers, but with may bolt throwers, welf archers. What comes close, you counter-charge with the flyers, the rest is shot by the rest of the army.

 

[Man0waR]

You are not taking into acount that they can repeat more than twice or thrice the same kind of unit as they are not the same.

Also what an army pays for special, the other pays it for core. So in the mixture you get what you want and how you want.

What you can face in a host.

HE Prince on Star dragon
Lvl4 of the most cheapest caster.

DE noble on pegasus
DE noble on pegasus
DE noble on pegasus

Bunch and lots of Fast Cavalry some with 4+ WS and casting spells.

2 units of archers with poison (dealing warmachines & monsters)
2 units of NO AS archers

BotWD heavy cavalry bus. with BSB here.


That is the meta in HE also WE & DE with no BotWD heavy cavalry. So you keep the best of them

HE
+ Star Dragon
+ Silver Helm BotWD bus w/ BSB

DE
+ Cheap as hell 1+ flying characters with awesome accuracy. (ASF reroll to hit, reroll 1's to wound)
+ Core Fast Cavalry.

WE
+ insane archers to deal with chaff and light supports, also warmachines
+ Hard hitting Fast Cavalry.


So yes, its pretty unbalanced.

Although you can field 120 skinks in diferent cohorts and do a Meat Wall around your BSB & General. But this is more Skavenish tactica than LM. But when your play style is overwhelmed, sometimes you must react

 

[KingCheops]

In general yes you are correct. The elves don't actually synergize together anywhere near as well as say Undead Legions. Most of the units are just copy/paste with slight tint changes.

 

[discomute]

Was hoping we'd land dwarves as an ally

What have those stunted stinking obnoxious crybabies got against majestic honourable lizardman anyway?

 

[Overlord of Serpents]

As far as the Elves are concerned, the first thing to take into account is which elven army are you talking to? The Aestyrion Host? The Phoenix King's Host? Or the Eternity King's Host?

As far the "Final form" (Eternity King) Elven army is concerned, they are NOTABLY more powerful than their individual armies due to one major change.

All Elves, whether they be High, Dark, or Wood gain access to Murderous Prowess and Martial Prowess. That means EVERY DAMN UNIT fights in an additional rank and re-rolls 1's to wound while often re-rolling hits as well. If Malekith comes onto the table he makes the army ridiculous by letting them fight in yet ANOTHER rank and they re-roll all failed to wound rolls. The Wood elves getting access to these abilities outside of forests was a nice bonus to them and they get Forest Strider to cover the other part of their old rules but that stays unique to WE.

Overall I think the Khaine elven army is pretty fun and to my understanding the only thing it doesn't have access to is a small list of special characters from every army: Teclis, Tyrion, Korhil, DE Squidface, Morathi, Orion, etc.

Where you'll see these new abilities shine though is with the crazy dangerous units that will really benefit from an extra rank like Executioners, Wild Riders, and Black Guard. Also units with the rerolls one 1's to wound like White Lion, Wild Riders, and Swordmasters.


As for the Lizards, teeming up with Dwarfs would be kinda silly. The don't hate us, sure, but we're a short-ranged army with big monsters and good balance between light/shooty and heavy/combat. Dwarfs fluffwise also would probably mistake us for daemons so...yeah.