How's our healing is not great? We have apotheosis, healing prayer, eotg and bound lifeswarm we can heal up to 4d3 per hero phase. And while bastiladon indeed loses his safe, we have even more ways to play around it - either stack saves from different sources to easily keep him in 1+ (easy until the last bracket) or use Ghur CA to ignore damage table.
The prayer I had simply forgotten since it's new. As for the others.
Apotheosis is underwhelming as it needs a high casting roll to be an average healing effect, plus it takes up a casting slot for your slann (though with the new "enhancements" this might be less of an issue in 3.0)
Using the EoTG for healing conflicts with its ability to actually deal damage, and generally speaking people are fishing for those mortal wounds. Which means it has a significant oppertunity cost.
Lifeswarm is fine.
Anyway, let me rephrase. If we build specificly to heal the bastiladon, then yes we can pump out quite a decent amount. But that comes at the cost of a specific list & a large investement into this one aspect at the cost of not taking care of other aspects. The average Seraphon list, or at least the usual AoS 2.0 lists, tended to be fairly underwhelming where it concerns healing or comes at the fairly high oppertunity cost of dedicating half your list to it.
As for the save stacking, that's again relativly new thanks for all-out-defense and mystic shields, up till recently this was impossible and it takes a while to adjust to the new rules. Same story for the Ghur CA of course.
both very very big positives
why are to trying to anvil with a MSU? thats a terrible idea. no this is ment to be used on a block of 20-30 making them both a serious threat and tanky
At 20-30 they're no longer all that much cheaper than other options. If you want them to be as tanky and as offensively powerfull as other options the price difference becomes negliceable. Especially as it means it's now eating into your limited reinforcement points. Leaving only body-count. Which has its value, but, especially in 3.0, with monsters now counting for 5 and MSU's generally being more common that's no longer the massive advantage it once was.
it actually doesn't since reinforcement can be used as well as other CAs and you are limited to 1 heroic action so you would be missing out. AND on top of that our stegadons are really really bad at heroic recovery.
And similarly CA's are limited by the amount of heroes, CP etc The oppertunity cost is fairly similar..
Also, can't you use a heroic action per hero? Or am I misremembering things?
no no difference at all just better control, higher wound count, bigger foot print, bravery debuffing, better target for buffing, better charges, provide look out sir, and can bubble wrap our less durable units while still fighting well .... no difference at all.
Bravery debuffing is available to other units. Other units are easily as buffable (e.g. knights and their general synergy with starpriest venom), all our saurus have the charge buff, we've got a metric ton of units to provide look out sir. Bubble-wrapping is considerably more tedious with a large unit nowadays (and again, we got loads of options for bubble wrapping...) etc.
There's only 1 thing that's special about saurus warriors and that's that they're the only option that's sturdier than skinks while still providing the same bodycount. Which is an significant advantage, sure. But it doesn't help them much with being an anvil.
In short; are they a decent unit with advantages over other units in our army? Sure. Are they a better anvil than others? Not unless you are specifically looking for an anvil with a large footprint. If you're simply looking for an anvil that can take some damage and survive they're neither the best, nor even unique, as most of their defensive power comes from generic buffs that can target everything we have.
