AoS Fixing Serephon

[Canas]

For the troglodon; give the priest/starpriest something extra besides being on top of a giant dinosaur. A different spell/ritual, some bonus to casting. Just something to distinguish it from the versions on foot besides "it's sitting on a dinosaur". If they don't have a distinctive advantage it'l probably be ignored in favor of a carno + foot hero combo as long as people have the points to spare.

Oldblood: Give him some love offensivly. He isn't terrible, but will struggle to actually kill much on his own. Also what do you exactly mean with forced march. Roll 2 dice when running? Be able to move twice?

Slann: have guarded by magic on by default. It makes him just sturdy enough to allow him to actually fight on occasion which is at least an improvement.
Why the additional 4+ requirement on his spell?

 

[Erta Wanderer]

troglodon: ill work on him he needs a lot to work right

the old blood as i have him now compares well against most khorn foot heroes with damage and can take more punishment. from what i can see you don't use foot slogers for damage (sigh) and our sun blood does really well for a strait marshal beat stick. the mane draw for this guy is the re-rolls for wounds rolls of 1 and the ability to throw your warriors 15". run twice means 2 dies normally and 10" instead of 5 for warriors and 14" instead of 7 for knights

slann you don't want your slann to fight ever it's not in his nature and all of our lore has the entire faction dying to the last man to not let foes get to him. i have it as a gradient because he is one heck of a work force for our army and i wan't our opponents to have the ability to interact with him and a chance of killing him. i i had it a 4+ strait out we could very easily make him a save 2+ rerolling -1 to hit with a 4+shrug that's way to much every one hates dealing with unkillable models and one who does this much beyond just taking damage is worse. this promotes spell casting kind of like frost hearts and gives rise to wizard duels and pore choices they might waist a unbind hear when they really need it elsewhere.
i didn't meen to i copied text from elsewhere and left it in its fixed now

 

[Canas]

Most of those khorne heroes have stuff like "on a hitroll of 6+ do mortal wounds" though. Though it does seem minor heroes on foot are depressingly low on damage when compared to mounted heroes or horde units.

For the slann, I simply meant giving him the 6+ default, so without the minimum requirement of 1 spell, improving with spellcasting. It'd give him just enough sturdyness to allow him to at least be near the frontline and take advantage of azure lightning's 3" range without immeadiatly being horribly wounded if an opponent manages to sneak through. I'm not expecting him to be a frontline fighter, he's far too valuable for that. But with that ward-save it might be just enough to encourage people to keep him vaguely near the fighting as opposed to as far away as humanly possible.

 

[Erta Wanderer]

Most of those khorne heroes have stuff like "on a hitroll of 6+ do mortal wounds" though. Though it does seem minor heroes on foot are depressingly low on damage when compared to mounted heroes or horde units.

For the slann, I simply meant giving him the 6+ default, so without the minimum requirement of 1 spell, improving with spellcasting. It'd give him just enough sturdyness to allow him to at least be near the frontline and take advantage of azure lightning's 3" range without immeadiatly being horribly wounded if an opponent manages to sneak through. I'm not expecting him to be a frontline fighter, he's far too valuable for that. But with that ward-save it might be just enough to encourage people to keep him vaguely near the fighting as opposed to as far away as humanly possible.

right and we have a 6+ shrug and rend 1 resistance i think it's a much better idea to have a survivable hero then a not as bad killy one. even as it is now he is a champion among his kind being the match of 8 to 10 other saurus

ahh that's what you meant i see that's a much better idea for the slann

 

[Barbossal]

Thanks for making this thread - had a few ideas on my mind lately!

New Warscrollls for Existing Kits:
New Warscroll for Skink Alpha on Stegadon: Skinks need a fighty HQ with command abilities, I'd love to see this guy get more time in the sun. Give this guy the ability to make Skinks more deadly. Perhaps something like auto-wounding on 6s like the old games.

Master of Skies: Give us back a Terradon/Ripper HQ please! This guy lets you take Terradons as Battleline. Maybe Rippers too but I feel like thats too deadly.

Split Ark of Sotek & Solar Engine to two Warscrolls: These two are never going to hit at the same weightclass, why keep them as the same cost? Split them up and let people run the Ark for cheaper.


About Rend...
By Sotek we lack Rend badly. Reassess all the Saurus & Behemoths and apply a -2/-1 rend in various places - I'm looking at your Carnosaur Bites! It's hard enough to reliably land hits as Seraphon, why double punish by having low rend?

Sacred Hosts
Bring back god-aligned Sacred Hosts and allow us to choose subfaction variants based on the list. A lot of factions are getting this, so building into our core roster makes a ton of sense.

 

[Canas]

Survivability is good, but he'l only be putting out 1-2 hits per turn. Which isn't exactly threatening to anything but the squishiest of heroes. Even a mere 4 or 5+ save is enough to regularly get through a round unscathed against only 1 or 2 hits.

I would expect him to be more similar in terms of damage to say the mighty lord of khorne who has the following:
axe: 1" 3/3+/3+/-1/D3
Hound: 1" 4/3+/4+/-/1

reality splitting axe: any model wounded by the axe, but not killed, roll a dice at the end of the combat phase on a 5+ he just dies.
Which makes him a usefull threat against multi-wound models as even a single hit with his axe can potentially slay them.
On top of that he simply gets in significantly more hits so opponents are far less likely to remain completly unscathed.

Also, to come back to his command ability. 2 dice for running might not be as good as you'd expect at first glance thanks to our drums. The average of 2 dicemight be more than the 5 the drums give. But it can also give significantly less. I'm not sure the trade-off in reliability owuld be worth it.

 

[Erta Wanderer]

Thanks for making this thread - had a few ideas on my mind lately!

New Warscrollls for Existing Kits:
New Warscroll for Skink Alpha on Stegadon: Skinks need a fighty HQ with command abilities, I'd love to see this guy get more time in the sun. Give this guy the ability to make Skinks more deadly. Perhaps something like auto-wounding on 6s like the old games.

Master of Skies: Give us back a Terradon/Ripper HQ please! This guy lets you take Terradons as Battleline. Maybe Rippers too but I feel like thats too deadly.

Split Ark of Sotek & Solar Engine to two Warscrolls: These two are never going to hit at the same weightclass, why keep them as the same cost? Split them up and let people run the Ark for cheaper.


About Rend...
By Sotek we lack Rend badly. Reassess all the Saurus & Behemoths and apply a -2/-1 rend in various places - I'm looking at your Carnosaur Bites! It's hard enough to reliably land hits as Seraphon, why double punish by having low rend?

Sacred Hosts
Bring back god-aligned Sacred Hosts and allow us to choose subfaction variants based on the list. A lot of factions are getting this, so building into our core roster makes a ton of sense.

thanks for hopping in feel free to make suggestions i'll be hitting all the mane warscrolls we have

im going to work on the alpha and your suggestion is a good one
im not experienced enough to make war scrolls from scratch sorry
maby? the thing is that the ark can hit really hard in the right circumstances we don't have to break them up just make it a lot easear to get the ark into combat.
Rend thats what ive been doing

 

[Erta Wanderer]

Survivability is good, but he'l only be putting out 1-2 hits per turn. Which isn't exactly threatening to anything but the squishiest of heroes. Even a mere 4 or 5+ save is enough to regularly get through a round unscathed against only 1 or 2 hits.

I would expect him to be more similar in terms of damage to say the mighty lord of khorne who has the following:
axe: 1" 3/3+/3+/-1/D3
Hound: 1" 4/3+/4+/-/1

thats our sun maul and teeth with 2 less teeth attacks but a 3/3 instead about .5 damage difference

reality splitting axe: any model wounded by the axe, but not killed, roll a dice at the end of the combat phase on a 5+ he just dies.
Which makes him a usefull threat against multi-wound models as even a single hit with his axe can potentially slay them.
On top of that he simply gets in significantly more hits so opponents are far less likely to remain completly unscathed.

yes this is nasty 1/3 of the time but he has no support power so it's a traid off of whether you want damage (so the sun blood) or stronger troops
aslo he only has 2 more attacks if you use the sun maul or no more attacks if you use the war blade

Also, to come back to his command ability. 2 dice for running might not be as good as you'd expect at first glance thanks to our drums. The average of 2 dicemight be more than the 5 the drums give. But it can also give significantly less. I'm not sure the trade-off in reliability owuld be worth it.

no i think you misunderstand me if the unit doesn't have drums you get 2 dice if they do you double the bonus drums give or triple the movement.

 

[Canas]

yes this is nasty 1/3 of the time but he has no support power so it's a traid off of whether you want damage (so the sun blood) or stronger troops
aslo he only has 2 more attacks if you use the sun maul or no more attacks if you use the war blade

Those 2 extra attacks mean an extra hit/round. Which at 1-2 hits is nearly a rather significant increase in hits.
Also the maul is the single best one in terms of raw damage (ignoring potential artifacts and such).

He has a similar movement focused command ability. And he brings an unbind instead of wrath of the seraphon. I don't think he's significantly weaker in terms of "support". The only real trade-off seems to be he's a tad more expensive, but that's probably worth it to have insta-kill potential against even the likes of Nagash or Archeon.

Also, the important bit here is not that he does X more damage. It's that he has the potential to efficiently defeat a certain type of unit (namely multi-wound models) thanks to his insta-kill mechanic. This makes him a credible threat against heroes & elite units. And your opponent will have to work around this threat. Your Oldblood on the other hand isn't really a credible threat towards anything. He's very sturdy, but against a lot of opponents he'l struggle to actually kill them in a timely fashion.
Because of that the lord of khorne can be tarpitted with some cannonfodder. But enemy heroes & other more elite units better avoid the lord of khorne lest they get annihilated. The oldblood on the other hand can be tarpitted by basicly anything. As an example, even a starpriest is quite likely to survive multiple rounds of combat against the oldblood and can easily risk 1 turn of combat with it. Especially if it throws a mystic shield on itself. But risking even a single round against the lord of khorne's axe comes with a 50% chance of dying. As such, you can relativly safely use your starpriest to slow down the oldblood, but trying to fight the lord of khorne is tantamount to suicide.

And for clarity, the starpriest obviously isn't going to beat the oldblood in melee. But he'l last long enough to be a nuisance and keep the oldblood busy for a turn or two.

In short; the lord of khorne is a dangerous opponent you need to account for the oldblood is relativly harmless and can just be tarpitted with basicly anything only to otherwise be ignored.

no i think you misunderstand me if the unit doesn't have drums you get 2 dice if they do you double the bonus drums give or triple the movement.

That was not clear. But cool. Not sure if it's better than the current ability though. It gives more movement, but only when running. Whereas the current one can give movement without needing to run & can potentially be used to retreat from a fight while still allowing you to charge.

 

[Erta Wanderer]

In short; the lord of khorne is a dangerous opponent you need to account for the oldblood is relativly harmless and can just be tarpitted with basicly anything only to otherwise be ignored.


That was not clear. But cool. Not sure if it's better than the current ability though. It gives more movement, but only when running. Whereas the current one can give movement without needing to run & can potentially be used to retreat from a fight while still allowing you to charge.

you can't tarpit seraphon it's one of our things but in that case how killy do you wan't me to make him and every one else in are army? do you wan't every one to have a instakill ability? your comparing to one guy with a good ability and im comparing to all of them and we do fairly well not every one has to be equal to the best fighter Khorn can field. he is already 2 times stronger then he was.

yes i could have worded that better it also frees up our teleport we only have 1 or 2 of them and this meens it's that much easier to get out foot slogers on where they need to be. there are a few good uses for the old one but i think they tend to be very situational and it was never useful enuf to take him before
all sead and done how would you fix him?

 

[LizardWizard]

I am still under the opinion that the army needs minimal unit rework and most of the issues can be fixed via allegiance abilities.

I like your addition of a 6+ ward saves across the army. Perhaps the Slann and priest should have a 4+ save vs magic and not standard damage. Something like Thickly Scaled Hides for a 6+ wound and MW save on the Saurus. I also like that you have given the Skink Heroes access to Wary Fighter.

Prayers would be fantastic. Having more reasons to bring priest is always great. I like the prayers you have created.

I also like many of the changes you have suggested to the army's spell lore. Just changing Claws of Glory to reroll wound rolls of 1 instead of hit rolls of 1 is a massive step in the right direction.

There are three major additions that I feel Seraphon need. The army needs more access to rend. All our big Dinos should have rend -2 on their bite/horns and rend -1 on their feet, claws, ect. Additionally the army needs more resilient Saurus battleline. Giving all Saurus 1 extra wound or a 4+ would also make them usable on the table. I don't think they needs both of these, and I lean toward +1 to wound characteristics. Especially if Seraphon get an army wide 6+ ward. Those are the only warscroll changes that I think are merited. Thirdly, there needs to be a reason to take more than just a Slann as the General.

Perhaps instead of changing the Slann GW could make the divide between Saurus, Skink, and Slann generals more pronounced. Similiar to the treatment they gave Beast of Chaos and/or Skaven. For instance, if a Slann is your General then you get all the CCP summoning stuff that is currently implemented. If a Saurus is your General then all Saurus units get a 5+ save after save instead of a 6+ and improved rend. I could also see Saurus Generals getting an ability that allows them to participate in the the current activation war meta. If a Skink is your general then all Skink units run an automatic 6" and can move as though they have the fly keyword when retreating or using Wary Fighter.

Edit: Maybe also give Skinks +1 to hit and wound rolls when within 8" of the unit they are attack with ranged weapons if a Skink is the general.

 

[Erta Wanderer]

I am still under the opinion that the army needs minimal unit rework and most of the issues can be fixed via allegiance abilities.

I like your addition of a 6+ ward saves across the army. Perhaps the Slann and priest should have a 4+ save vs magic and not standard damage. Something like Thickly Scaled Hides for a 6+ wound and MW save on the Saurus. I also like that you have given the Skink Heroes access to Wary Fighter.

Prayers would be fantastic. Having more reasons to bring priest is always great. I like the prayers you have created.

I also like many of the changes you have suggested to the army's spell lore. Just changing Claws of Glory to reroll wound rolls of 1 instead of hit rolls of 1 is a massive step in the right direction.

There are three major additions that I feel Seraphon need. The army needs more access to rend. All our big Dinos should have rend -2 on their bite/horns and rend -1 on their feet, claws, ect. Additionally the army needs more resilient Saurus battleline. Giving all Saurus 1 extra wound or a 4+ would also make them usable on the table. I don't think they need both of these. Especially if Seraphon get an army wide 6+ ward. Those are the only warscroll changes that I think are merited. Thirdly, there needs to be a reason to take more than just a Slann as the General.

Perhaps instead of changing the Slann GW could make the divide between Saurus, Skink, and Slann generals more pronounced. Similiar to the treatment they gave Beast of Chaos and/or Skaven. For instance, if a Slann is your General then you get all the CCP summoning stuff that is currently implemented. If a Saurus is your General then all Saurus units get a 5+ save after save instead of a 6+ and improved their rend. I could also see Saurus Generals getting an ability that allows them to participate in the the current activation war meta. If a Skink is your general then all Skink units run an automatic 6" and can move as though they have the fly keyword when retreating or using Wary Fighter.

i agree but think our problems are a bit more pronounced then that the fact that i can add a 6+ ward to everything and we still need help means we have fallen very far behind the curve. every unit we field is ether under powered or just useless so much of our army is made of card board and as you sead before we don't wan't to play horde. with our hoard bonuses we do fine damage wise but without them we are worse then >80% of whats out there and skinks are worse then grots.

thank you for your kind words about spells and prayers. im happy with how they turned out. funny thing is it's soooo easy to make our spells good they just didn't

rend is my go to to fix tings it's a good starting spot

that's a good compromise with the slanns save i was worried that it was to strong your idea would help.

 

[LizardWizard]

• Mystical Unforging

CV8, pick 1 visible enemy Hero with an artefact of power within 12". They take D3 mortal wounds and on casting roll of 10 their artefact no longer has any effect.

I like that putting resources into buffing casting rolls increased the likelihood of breaking their artifact!

 

[Erta Wanderer]

I like that putting resources into buffing casting rolls increased the likelihood of breaking their artifact!

that was the gole at the moment it's just to unreliable to be worth a CV8 this way it starts out the same but can drop down to a 7 on the die and gets to be very dangerous.

 

[Canas]

you can't tarpit seraphon it's one of our things

We can be tarpitted, we have an easier time avoiding it, and repositioning if we get stuck, compared to other factions. But we can still be tarpitted.

you can't tarpit seraphon it's one of our things

but in that case how killy do you wan't me to make him and every one else in are army? do you wan't every one to have a instakill ability? your comparing to one guy with a good ability and im comparing to all of them and we do fairly well not every one has to be equal to the best fighter Khorn can field. he is already 2 times stronger then he was.[/QUOTE]

For decent melee heroes I'd say that unsupported (so without allies, artifacts etc. just what's on their own warscroll) it needs to be a scary threat to something. Be it hordes, heroes, behemoths, objective grabbers whatever. Something should run in fear from it. This means that it realisticly needs to be able to kill that (or at least severly maim it). They don't necesarly need to be a threat against everything. As such they don't need to output say 10 damage on average. They just need to realisticly be able to defeat, or badly hurt, a particular type of opponent.

For a couple of good examples:

• The SCE lord-veritant. It's melee profile is a simple 4/3+/3+/-1/2. Alongside this it has a sanction ability, which gives it some free damage against wizards. Combined this means that most wizards will have to run from him as he's realisicly capable of killing them in a single turn. However, his average damage output against non-wizards isn't particularly different from your oldblood.
• Aforementioned lord of Khorne. Again it's average damage isn't super exciting. But multi-wound models with even a 2+ save have a good chance (about a 10% chance/round of combat) of getting oneshotted, so you'd want to send in fodder.
• Lord of plaques only has 3/3+/3+/-1/D3 which isn't very exciting. But on a hitroll of 6+ he gets in D6 hits. It's not reliable, but without a -1 to hit to protect yourself with he gets very scary very quickly.
  
• An SCE lord-ordinator has a 3/3+/3+/-1/2 or a 6/4+/3+/-/1 neither of which is impressive. But he also fairly realiably gets in a couple of mortal wounds, so unless you overwhelm him quickly before he can retaliate he'l be a costly target.

All of these have situations in which they're scary and in which you'd either want to flee from, or send in someone specific to deal with them. I think that our saurus heroes need to have that too as saurus are supposed to be amazing combatants.

you can't tarpit seraphon it's one of our things

​

yes i could have worded that better it also frees up our teleport we only have 1 or 2 of them and this meens it's that much easier to get out foot slogers on where they need to be. there are a few good uses for the old one but i think they tend to be very situational and it was never useful enuf to take him before
all sead and done how would you fix him?[/QUOTE]

Move 5"
bravery 10
wounds 7
save 4+
celestite war-blade 5 attacks 1" 3/3/-1/1 (not in the mood to make more weapons, this is here for a ballpark figure )
Fearsome jaws and shield 2 attacks 1" 3/3/-/1

Abiliyies
Star drake shield: 6+ shrug
Wrath of the seraphon
Command ability: move a unit 3", needs to keep the 3" distance from enemies. The repositioning is actually brilliant. It's just the weird pivot thing that makes it so awkward to use currently.

Instinctual supremacy: an oldblood can easily tell when he's faced with an inferiour foe. Knowing it is safe he forgoes defense and quickly and aggresivly finish this foe so he can move on to other more important targets. Add 1 to the oldblood's attack characteristics of every melee weapon for every remaining wound he has more than his opponent. When facing a multimodel unit compare him to 1 model. (so at full health vs a skink priest he'd get +3 attacks, vs a unit of skinks he'd get +6).

This makes him an absolute terror when dealing with chaff or finishing off wounded heroes. However, against an equal opponent, or when he gets badly wounded himself, he'l have to be carefull and take his time or rely on support.

Some minor caveats; he shouldn't get a multidamage weapon with this, that'd probably be broken. And I haven't checked for synergies with certain artifacts and such. But as a basic idea I rather like this.

 

[Erta Wanderer]

Instinctual supremacy: an oldblood can easily tell when he's faced with an inferiour foe. Knowing it is safe he forgoes defense and quickly and aggresivly finish this foe so he can move on to other more important targets. Add 1 to the oldblood's attack characteristics of every melee weapon for every remaining wound he has more than his opponent. When facing a multimodel unit compare him to 1 model. (so at full health vs a skink priest he'd get +3 attacks, vs a unit of skinks he'd get +6).

This makes him an absolute terror when dealing with chaff or finishing off wounded heroes. However, against an equal opponent, or when he gets badly wounded himself, he'l have to be carefull and take his time or rely on support.

Some minor caveats; he shouldn't get a multidamage weapon with this, that'd probably be broken. And I haven't checked for synergies with certain artifacts and such. But as a basic idea I rather like this.

so just this then you would have to strip him of two of his current weapons to make that work and even then we have much better chaff clearers. and anything thats not a 1 wound model would be basically unaffected. the thing is if you try to make him dangerous to a type of unit the you need to make him as good or better then the units we already have he is the same price as a 3 man razordon groop and they do a lot more then that. foot heroes aren't meant for front line combat they pail in comparison to almost any non hero unit there job is elsewhere even the khorn guy you mentioned only has a 1/3 chance of being dangerous.
and the command ability is meh there are quite a few that just let you move in the hero phase just make it do that

 

[Canas]

The point is not to make him the best at something. The point is to ensure that he is capable of doing his job well enough to be useable for interesting things. E.g. with this particular suggestion he could go around capturing objectives relativly easily as he's sturdy enough to survive and easily clears out the chaff guarding them. He'd also be good for hunting down wounded heroes or weak combat heroes like the starpriest. His support abilities allows him to babysit a couple of saurus units while providing some decent supportive attacks and intercepting and tanking certain more powerfull foes as he's sturdier than the regular troops. And lastly he'd be usefull as either a distraction or to force your opponent to pick between the lesser of two evils in certain situations. As he's now scary enough to be a priority. Razordons might be better at decimating the chaff in general, but with what I suggested he'd have 11 3+/3+/-1/1 and 8 3+/3+/-/1 attacks against that chaff, that's (on average) comperable to 2-2.5 razordons of the top of my head (and more reliable). That's quite decent.

If you stick with what you suggested the only role he really has is being a babysitter providing to intercept more powerfull foes and tank them. But lacking significant damage he'l then struggle to actually fight back against most.

As for the multidamage weapons, you could potentially keep em by tweaking the numbers and the mechanic slightly. For example if you make it a fixed number (say +3 attacks whenever he has more wounds left than his target) it'd be doable. But I personally like the +1attack/wound so I'd rather just have 1-wound weapons. Might still be necesary to make that change to account for certain artifacts and other synergies though.

Also, a 1/3 chance of instantly killing a big multiwound model is absolutly amazing. It makes him extremely scary to approach with your fancy heroes & behemoths cuz god forbid he actually takes them down. Again, the point is not that he's going to go around murdering behemoths left and right. The point is that he's scary enough that an opponent will think twice about letting him get near a behemoth allowing you to do interesting things like making him hunt said behemoths or have him look scary while standing on an objective denying the behemoth acces to it.

As for the more general idea that foot heroes aren't meant for front line combat. I'd disagree with that (or at the very least find it quite lame) And yeah, the oldblood definitly isn't the only one I find to be weirdly weak for what's supposed to be an absolutly amazing fighter. In our case it's just even more pronounced as we have no real combat heroes that aren't mounted on a giant dinosaur whatsoever.

 

[Erta Wanderer]

wait he gets it for his bights to? that makes him stronger then most non behemoth cavalry heroes that's more than a little excessive. and thats before you add in the fact that we have a crap lode of buffs we can throw around the carnasaurs alone would make him horrifying. and I've been adding more! he would have a 2/2 rerolling, attacks that procked more hits on 6, and acses to tons of extra attacks and then there is the grix blade and the sword of judgement, and the sword that gives -3 rend he would be able to one turn kill most things in the game. on turn 2 i could get him doing 30ish damage quite easily.
he would tie the vermin lord for the highest attack stat in the game with this buff.
he has a small base and we have healing so the down side of having to keep him healthy isn't much of one

 

[Erta Wanderer]

ok to fix the exploit i found above the following changes need to happen
the skink star priests serpents staff now only gives double damage on a natural 6 not 6+
the scar veterans command ability has the same change

im going to have to go back over the stuff i've put down as is we can very easily make heroes and even units that can't fail hit and wound rolls i'll get back to writing war-scrolls when I've fixed it.

 

[Erta Wanderer]

ok erly fixes i replaced
stars edge: the +1 to wound prayer with. memory of legion: pick a unit that has a base unit size of 5 or more within 8" add d3 models to that unit.
and i have toned down the slanns spell now for the number crunching