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8th Ed. Spears or sheild and one handed weapon?

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ChadwickGS

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Basically im fairly new to Lizardmen, and Fantasy in General. I would like to kow whne its better to use spears or one handed weapons with a shield?
 
Welcome to the Forum!

In my opinion, I do not use spears at all. I think I have used them in maybe 2 games total. I prefer to have the added armor and the parry save offered by the hand weapon and shield.
 
Spears are one handed, you don't lose the extra ermour, only the parry. Right?
 
i always take the shield! there are a lot of high str now out there so the pary save might change the course of a fight!
 
i use spears only in two situations: when the saurus unit is made by 25+ models or when i play life. Toughness 8 and regrowth make the parry save almost useless if compared to 5 bonus attacks
 
I only use spears because I put my models together before the parry save even existed and I like them to be WYSIWYG ...

Putting them together today, I would do hand weapon and shield. Although spears are better in some cases, it's not worth paying extra points for it since in a lot of cases they aren't better.
 
This is a common question and the general consensus is that both builds have their uses, although HW & shield seems to be slightly more popular.

But everything may change when the new army book comes out in a month or two. So if you are new, I'd wait a while before investing heavily in anything.
 
This was all very helpful. I feel te pary save would be much more useful, but I feel with my slow moving lizards I could be getting charged often. Either way ill probably build half and half, considering the units can be proxied either way.
 
I have 30 of each, and use both units in most games I play (though not always at full strength)

Spears are only worth taking if you have 4+ ranks on the unit or 5+ ranks in horde formation (does anyone really horde Saurus?), when the enemy starts taking away your 3rd rank (or 4th horde rank) spears lose their effectiveness, so 30 bodies is the point where I would think about adding spears, and smaller than that you don't really have the numbers to make good use of them.

The parry save is not really all that, its a nice free bonus but it isn't going to save your hide very often, losing it is not really a concern, esp on a T4, 4+AS unit.

I would say that paying 1pt/model for an additional rank of S4 is worth the points cost, but its also true that keeping your unit cheap is sometimes more beneficial. Also being so slow, Saurus are almost always on the receiving end of a charge which means they get more use out of them than other units.
 
Until recently I used to play pure hand weapons and shields because of the parry save but on a recent battalion purchase decided to try out shields. One game so far and not disappointed, I think I will be probably build up 30 of each so that I have a bit of flexibility.
 
Yea I usually run a unit of 30 saurus of each in my favorite list, and its only ever lost 3 of its games. Although that being said I have an unopened box of saurus that I refuse to do anything with until the new book comes out. If I am only running one unit of saurus, then I usually go with one block of 40 with hand weapon shield combo.
 
The new book might shake up saurus.. first of which is the predatory fighters rule. It might be that you want the extra attacks with spears because more attacks means more chances at bonus attacks. We also might see points changes, perhaps spears will be a free upgrade.
 
With Predatory Fighter, I might actually mix things up a bit and run one unit with each (20 S+HW for tanking, 24-30 with Spears).

I think its worth us all baring in mind, though, that PF is only 1/6. Which means you need to add an additional 6 Saurus for each bonus attack.
 
Um you mean additionl attacks...
(Saurus still have 2 attacks)

Hmmm...
(some mental math hammer later)
predatory fighter would add around 8 attack to a horde of spear saurus....
- but with heavens reroll 1's spell you could double it for an extra 16 attacks.
 
Spears.
Parry is for weenies.

I run blocks of 24, 6 wide with spears. The extra 6 attacks is nice.
With the new rules coming out, it will average another bonus attack from predatory hunter too.

With hand weapons, your looking at 18 attacks, +3 bonus attacks.
With spears, you're looking at 24 attacks, +4 bonus attacks.

It's 21 attacks with a parry, vs 28 attacks.
I'll take the attacks.

With lore of beast on skinks, those could be S5 attacks, and those saurus could have T5 for defense.
If only we had a way to get hatred.
 
n810 said:
Um you mean additionl attacks...
(Saurus still have 2 attacks)

Hmmm...
(some mental math hammer later)
predatory fighter would add around 8 attack to a horde of spear saurus....
- but with heavens reroll 1's spell you could double it for an extra 16 attacks.
Click to expand...

Personally, I look forward to the rare times when you roll a ridiculous number of 6's and dish out a crapton of damage. It'll make for some cool stories, but most times you'll probably only see a minor benefit.

I wonder if the additional attacks generated by Predatory Fighters will be able to benefit from the same rule, so if you kept rolling 6's you'd keep on attacking? Let's say you generate 3 additional attacks, then when you roll those 3, one of them comes up a 6, could you then roll another attack?
 
That would break the general BRB rule that you can't reroll a reroll. :artist:
 
I don't see the PF extra attacks as re-rolls though. A re-roll takes a value and replaces it with a new value. PF is adding additional values (dice rolls), so is not, technically, a re-roll.
 
See my above example of a spear hords...
say you are right and you can do it again...
it would add ... 1.2 attacks statisticaly.
 
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