So the Gravetide is the new Purple Sun, Purple sun is much weaker, the Quicksilver Swords can still hit a single unit pretty hard and can't be negated, interesting.
Ravenak's and Pendulum got a lot worse, and Burning Head is a one-shot spell now?
Don't forget, that now all spells are controlled and you move them twice per round. While Sun is worse against large blobs of multi-wound models and cannot deal as much damage with a lucky 6, its damage is way more consistent. It can easily one-shot a 5 wounds support hero without even a chance of being dispelled. Going wild may be a problem though.
Quicksilver is now the most expensive spell. And I don't think that no negation is worth it. You still need to high-roll to deal any actual damage. If it was like 40 points less expensive, I'd say, it is good. But you may spend 90 pts and easily do nothing.
How are we feeling about skink priests? On first glance they look like they have been buffed along with all the other priests, however the command ability is kinda nerfed because all out attack and +1 to save just isn't as strong anymore.
One good thing about the priests command ability is that it goes off in the hero phase so you can issue another order during shooting/combat phase.
While I can easily justify running one I don't think you can run two like before.
Any list with blob of 30 skinks and/or skink monsters can start with 2 priests. They are godly in terms of how many different things they bring up to army.
First of all, save stacking is not gone anywhere. It is only worse against no rend attacks. If you stack 2 +1 save modifiers, you gain +1 save and reduce incoming rend by 1. Consider now that most of the rend which we meet in the game is 1. Quite a few strong units have rend 2 and rend 3 is a rarity.
So the +1 save is still strong no matter where it comes from. But, actually, the strong part of skinks ability is run+charge. Since we lost thunderquake battalion. it is even more important now.
Also priest gives additional healing, 6+ ward and may curse an enemy which comes too close. They also can unbind endless spells. Not as important for us, but still a nice thing to have. Finally, priests are squishy, so you want to have some redundancy.
+1 to-hit from priest has a special feature - it lasts until next hero phase. This means, that in shooting/combat you can stack different CAs on buffed units. Like, give +1 to-hit on bastiladon from priests and then double-tap it in the shooting phase. And you also can have multiple units under +1 to-hit in the same shooting phase, which is nice.
I think having 2-3 priests is more than justified in any skink list.
