Having trouble getting excited about Forces of Order

[Pyriel]

@kafrique:
yes, you cant buy wards, only 4+regen on his unit and/or make him toughness 7, and/or use one of your "dispel-oriented arcane item platform" minor mages as shadow to switch positions. its not easy to kill such a character. but i see that you're right in that when fighting daemons, you knew you were in huge trouble. when fighting elves, you ask "is the guy a douche WAAC guy? or a TRULY competitive guy(=wants to win immensely, but wants to win by his choices, not single broken combo)? if the latter, you are not screwed, while with daemons it was sure.

[eron12]

a horde of swordmasters with toughness 7
(h*ly crap...)

in your ranks, and their dozens of str 5 attacks with rerolls will wipe out your army.

to realise what such a thing can do... a friend once bilt a deathstar unit of 40 chosen plus characters(about 1400 pts). we played 10 proxy battles. in 7 of them, the chosen were killed in the first turn. in 1, they were killed later. only 2 did they win.

Do you mean killed is in defeated, or killed as in to a man?A horde of Swordmasters should only get 41 attacks. That is truely amazing luck for 41 attacks to result in 40 kills.

[Pyriel]

defeated by resolution/hunting-down. an no, 41 str 5 attacks by toughness-7 soldiers is no mystery why they win

the fact they can get magical items banner of swiftness and amulet of light in the unit realy hurts too . they are nasty, but when they are toughness 7 and movement 6... and cant be stopped by ethereals...

[Von Wibble]

no, they really don't, considering they have ASF for every unit INCLUDING great weapons, which goes against the basic rules of ASF and GW.

High Elves: the new "7th Ed. Daemons" army of 8th Ed.

Not true at all. High elves get to strike first and kill some models, then the enemy kills nearly as many of you back thanks to stepping up and your T3. He then holds due to steadfast, and in a couople of rounds time you run out of men due to having smaller units with those high points costs.

ASF only has an effect if you like MSU tactics, and small units of ogres, minotaurs and the like. It is not that good against impact hits and large units.

With low to mid magic, high elves are one of the weakest armies in the game. With magic they are middle tier (assuming no special characters and book of hoeth not used). With book of hoeth or teclis they are upper middle.

As an aside, no army is as overpowered as daemons were last edition, the closest things imo would be skaven and lizardmen.

[Pyriel]

...with book of hoeth/teclis they are top-tier. dont kid yourself, "book of hoeth and flesh to stone/regrowth on offense-oriented supposedly glass cannon specials" is a broken combo.

and ASF does have a huge effect because taking 20-25% magic and 40%-50% in specials means 2 units of 30+ special infantry models, and HE specials are all very good. i AGREE on low-magic and no-book assessment though (either low tiered with low magic or mid-tiered with no-book good magic)

[Jack of Blades]

Swordmasters are probably the worst infantry unit that HE can horde. Drop like flies, two attacks are useless in supporting ranks, cost a lot more than Spearmen and just like Spearmen are at their peak when buffed. I see no reason why you'd horde SMs instead of Spearmen, especially as the latter also fills out your Core requirement

Yes a horde of SMs will butcher your unit if you frontally charge it but that's not all there is to the horde. Especially not if you've got plenty of mooks to take the blows and still strike back at his expensive, frail bodies - then you don't even need to flank charge him.

[Pyriel]

why do ppl insist that the Uber variant(Life teclis with horde swordmasters) is fragile?... the swordmasters have toughness 7 and regrowth. perma.undispellable.not with dispel dice. not with dispel scroll.toughness 7 with regrowth. strike back all you want; you're not killing nearly anything , hence you will flee.

we have all agreed that the "without Life teclis" version is mid-low tier and plays/should play differently, why we spam white lions/phoenix guard/other choices instead. stop repeating it.


all that said. what about spearelves? what makes you think that , buffed with ANYTHING other than okkam's mindrazor(which, without BoH/teclis, will always be getting dispelled), they will kill anything? these guys suck. 30-50 attacks at...str 3?... wow... OK, that should kill 5-10 models... now what do i do when the other guy kills 20-25 of them when he strikes back?hope for a double 1 on my morale test?

[eron12]

why do ppl insist that the Uber variant(Life teclis with horde swordmasters) is fragile?... the swordmasters have toughness 7 and regrowth. perma.undispellable.not with dispel dice. not with dispel scroll.toughness 7 with regrowth. strike back all you want; you're not killing nearly anything , hence you will flee.

we have all agreed that the "without Life teclis" version is mid-low tier and plays/should play differently, why we spam white lions/phoenix guard/other choices instead. stop repeating it.


all that said. what about spearelves? what makes you think that , buffed with ANYTHING other than okkam's mindrazor(which, without BoH/teclis, will always be getting dispelled), they will kill anything? these guys suck. 30-50 attacks at...str 3?... wow... OK, that should kill 5-10 models... now what do i do when the other guy kills 20-25 of them when he strikes back?hope for a double 1 on my morale test?

You're a person of extremes, aren't you? If Tecis is taken every spell will always go off an you will seemingly always have enough powerdice to get the spells you need off. But if you don't him it you will never get Okkam's Mindrazor off.

I think the game has a litle mroe flexibilty than you give it credit for. Warhammer isn't constantly one thing or the other.

[Pyriel]

well, granted in a teclis list one has the normal 2d6 plus 2d3 dice, i'll say he can gather lots.
and teclis will always cast 1-2 spells per turn- throne of vines, (and only recast it if you dispel it) and flesh to stone. maybe, maybe 1-2 times per game a dwellers below. 2d6+2d3(teclis+sorcery banner) are enough dice for that, granted IF on doubles.

so yes, EVERY one of these so few spells will always go off. the guy introducing me to HE is the same guy nobody plays with for that reason, and the reason why i try to nearly never take teclis or book of hoeth.

and okkam's mindrazor was an example as the only way to make spearmen kill anything, assuming an average enemy toughness 4 and save.

good chance i am saying this because i play nearly exclusively vs Chaos Warriors, Brettonians and Vampire Counts, of course, since fantasy is only months old in the playgroup and lizardmen player just started, and o skaven/orcs player etc. but for me it always seemed like 50 spermen could never kill more than 15-20 guys the whole game, and were superbly lucky if they managed that.

[Gliderrider]

Firstly, Id like to give the OP my thoughts on Wood elves being ambivolent, think ents in LOTR, Fook with the Forest and your getting a can of hurt coming down on you, leave the forest alone, and we'll leave you alone.

Anyway, that aside I play HE with Life & High magic, seems a pretty sweet combination. I dont feel they are sufering being an older book than Orks or Skaven, its down to ballance. OK, always strikes first, with most specials having great weapons, and/or 2 attacks is pretty sweet, but next time I play I might come up against a player using something I cant hurt, for example etherial.

At the moment some armies suffer for not being as new as others, so learn to play around the weekness, in a year or so you will have a brand new army book, and the players that are nerfing you now will complain that you are coverered in cheese and that you are un beatable with their "Old" book.

[Pyriel]

dont worry about etherial. get amulet of light on swordmasters/white lions so that their attacks count as magical. presto.

[NTJ2010]

Here's the problem with the Glass cannons+Lore of Life+Book of Hoeth/Teclis...

With the book of Hoeth by itself you don't have the ability (like +D3 PD like Teclis has) to reliably add more dice so if you spend a lot of dice on Throne of Vines then you don't have much for anything else (and you can't get doubles all the time without throwing a lot of dice). Meaning you'll only get a few dice for spells and again without doubles those spells will be shot down fast.
With Teclis you mitigate most of those problems with the +D3 dice and what not, but you gain a T6 main caster who will be in one of 3 spots.
1. In the unit you are trying to keep buffed and fighting, in which case every attack they have will target him, even if he's T6. That's a great way to get him killed since he's a model with a bulls eye so big on his head there isn't a face to be seen.
2. In a seperate bunker unit then, even behind the main lines, they will send their fliers or whatever fast units they have back there to get him if they can and most likely then he won't have a ton of defenses like flesh to stone and with T2 even wimpy models can get him down without a ton of effort.
3. By himself....yeah he will get targeted by whatever the opponent has that can hurt him (cannons, basic missile fire, eagles, bats...you get it). This won't happen unless the terrain really sets up nice ways to hide him (or the opponent has nothing that can hurt him out there).

I'm not saying that strategy is bad, heck is a darn fine strategy, one of the better ones; I'm just saying that it's one of those things that can be countered without tailoring a list. Last edition daemons, if you have two average players playing standard (non ard boyz) armies one playing daemons one playing pretty much anything else, everyone knows who to bet on.

I'll admit Teclis is good but he's far from an I win button.