Strategic Arms Limitation Talks?? No mega Nuclear spells

[Maoriboy007]

[QUOTE=Lord Solar Plexus;6236697]What exactly is a Swiss formation supposed to be?

Listen to Urgat, that's all your fault for making lists that actually depend on having units in them! Only ever take stuff that you could fight without. Ignore the pressing question why you would take such units to start with...

An army without any units? my opponant would certainly never expect it....

Very few models are autokilled even by the biggest and baddest spells. I think Gateway and 13th do that, both are not the BRB baddies which seem to cause the most shaking of heads. Otherwise, models that are autokilled would fare no better in combat (warmachines vs ini tests for example).

Generally autokill is an abbreviation of the term the ëntire model is removed regardless"of wounds toughness with no save of any kind". Its as appropriate a term as any and much quicker to say. These spells bypass any natural defenses the model might have paid for outside of the relevent stat being tested, which might not reflect the models cost, and kills it dead on one defensive throw of the die.

Not all #6 spells disallow saves. In fact, very few really do that, at least the PoS is high risk, and I get a 6+ AS against Mindrazored Spearelves.

Number 6# doesn't nessesarily mean autokill. PoS is number 4 or 5? Indeed there are only a few spells that äutokill as such , but they cause far more trouble in the game than they should. So why not just fix these few spells . allowing ward saves and making them multi wound attacks instead just for the betterment of the game in general, it certainly wouldn't make the game worse. Agreed, the saving grace of Mindrazor is that it does at least allow saves.

On the flip side, not all close combat attacks allow saves. Granted, it's a bit hard to deny ward saves en masse but there's probably a lot more that completely cancels armour and/or regeneration.

Even the nearest combat equivanent , killing blow, allows ward saves , and you at least have to roll a 6 to wound against everybody. I wouldn't mind both autokill spells and killing blow being multi-wound attacks instead.

I once got my entire army flee because one unit was destroyed. We should remove psychology, it's obviously a stupid, overpowered rule..

If it happened once then that is hardly any kind of trend, thats luck, we're seing these uberspell shennanegens all the time. If it was due to some Ld bomb cheapnes then yes that crap needs to be (and probably will be) fixed.
You should at least get to pad the results of panic wth inspiring presence and Stand your ground, you also get to rally, having to simply remove the model regardless of your defences is pretty permanent in most cases (raising spells being a magic dependant possibility)

There are a lot of things that are unfair, will be superpowerful against your army while it seems it does nothing to your opponent. Pretty much everything seems like that to my gobs. I should cry myself a river because the world is so unfair, heh? !.

please , if there is a game imbalance , then yes we should do everything in our power to fix it, leaving imbalances as they are just lead to an eventual degrading of the game, as evidenced from 6th ed to 7th.

There's a mage that flanks me and then he nukes me! It's unfair! There is absolutely nothing I can do to prevent him from doing so! Mummy!.

Its entirely for a flying mage to end up on a flank with a nuke spell, some don't even need to do that and nuke you from the front, or from behind thier lines. Its the spells and the problems they cause that are the problem. I lost a game to such an event, I wasn't annoyed that I was outplayed or that I made mistakes, there simply wasn't anything I could realistically do about it and the game was basically over. Even my opponant agreed with me.

[Mercules]

If it happened once then that is hardly any kind of trend, thats luck, we're seing these uberspell shennanegens all the time. If it was due to some Ld bomb cheapnes then yes that crap needs to be (and probably will be) fixed

Do we really see these uberspell shenanigans all the time though? I see a lot of people throw dice at spells hoping for it to go off, and sometimes achieving IF and having it go off, but the number of times it was ~the~ contributing factor to them winning the game I can count on 1 hand. I think we hear a lot of anecdotal accounts that are memorable, but I am not sure we can utilize the phrase, "all the time".

[Lord Solar Plexus]

These spells bypass any natural defenses the model might have paid for outside of the relevent stat being tested, which might not reflect the models cost, and kills it dead on one defensive throw of the die.

Yes, I get that, but it really is no different from dying from close combat. Dead model is a dead model, and, fully realizing that this is just another anecdote like the rest of the thread but my units get much more often deleted by combat than by magic and shooting combined. Or by magically enhanced combat.

PoS is number 4 or 5? Indeed there are only a few spells that äutokill as such , but they cause far more trouble in the game than they should. So why not just fix these few spells . allowing ward saves and making them multi wound attacks instead just for the betterment of the game in general, it certainly wouldn't make the game worse.

Oh, go for it! There's nothing at all wrong with houserules between consenting adults. That's exactly the reason why I found some people's scything remarks about "whiners" and it all being "the player's fault" so arrogantly silly, especially when they are posted before anyone has started to whine. I assume they often only post to provoke, and sometimes I make the mistake of rising to the bait...but I digress! I still say that big spells are rarely seen in my group, so we don't especially need to address them, and in any case I can only speak for myself. If you feel they are too strong, feel free to change them.

[Haravikk]

Yes, I get that, but it really is no different from dying from close combat. Dead model is a dead model, and, fully realizing that this is just another anecdote like the rest of the thread but my units get much more often deleted by combat than by magic and shooting combined. Or by magically enhanced combat.

The damage the spells can do is still highly disproportionate when compared to combat. For example, Dweller's Below targets Strength, yet the basic Strength of a Skavenslave and a Dwarf Warrior are the same, but the Dwarf warrior costs four times as many points (more typically five times as much), so the spell is just as able to halve a unit of expensive Dwarfs as it is to do-so against easily replaced skavenslaves. Purple Sun meanwhile goes for Initiative, but armies such as Dwarfs and Ogres have almost uniformly low Initiative, so they're looking at 2/3rds of their models being sucked up by a purple vortex with no defence of any kind.

In close combat there are at least other factors involved; so regardless of their having the same Strength a Dwarf is going to do pretty well against a skavenslave thanks to Toughness and Weapon Skill 4, typically having Great Weapons and Heavy Armour, basic Leadership 9 etc. None of these things mean squat against Dweller's Below, and that includes units that have paid points to gain Magic Resistance! Likewise in combat a Dwarf or Ogre's low Initiative doesn't mean they're automatically going to lose 2/3rds of all of their models, as Dwarfs should have enough numbers to guarantee some return attacks of their own, while Ogres have multiple Wounds to soak some of the damage. The latter of which is also ignored by Dweller's Below, funnily enough.

I don't believe that mega spells should be eliminated entirely; their threat does have some impact on unit sizes, but their implementation is just dreadful. For one thing, another (of many) house-rules I like to play has Magic Resistance as a separate roll (not a saving throw) that allows a unit to ignore the effects of magic. Against spells like dwellers etc. this is effectively the same as a save, but cannot be ignored, plus it also gives a measure of protection against hex spells since the unit can make a single roll to ignore the effect (but in my house-rule it also applies to Augments; you don't get to choose what magic you resist). Multiple Wounds D3 allowing Ward Saves is ample for the mega spells as well.

[Fear Ghoul]

The point is that Nukes kill knights just as easily as spearmen. But knights cost 5 times as much as the spearman, and most of that is for the armour that they wear and protects them from most attacks.

In any hypothetical scenario in which a knight is as easy to kill as a spearman, then there is a greater incentive to reduce the size of knight units to mitigate against points lost. If knights cost 5 times the points of spearmen, then you should have 5 times less knights as spearmen, and thus lose the same amount of points regardless of unit targetted. The problem many people seem to have is that they create knight deathstars or analogues which get cut in half by magic thus losing them hundreds of points, so they complain that the problem was obviously that magic is too good, not that they made a prime target unit worth lots of points and put it in range of a wizard with a nuke spell.

As for undead, a good purple sun can wreck your day. Last game with my VC I had baited some chaos knights with a death sorcerer with unit of 70 or so zombies, enough to hold them for a turn. One purple sun later, a good 60 zombies died, plus half a unit of ghouls to boot, and my opponent had 12 dice back for a boosted soulblight. Critically my zombie roadblock was then massacred leaving the knights to reform to face my flank. Nasty.

How many knights were there? If there was more than 7 there's a fairly decent chance your zombies would have been massacred anyway. I'm also not sure why, knowing that the death wizard had purple sun, you left your zombie unit and ghoul unit positioned perfectly to allow the template to roll through both of them. I mean if you're that concerned about purple sun ruining your day why not deploy your units further apart?

Ha! Never seen it? I saw a 3000 point ogre army basically destroyed entirely at the Ard Boyz final by a single purple sun. Flying caster to one flank, IF, max range hit essentially the entire army. 2/3 of the army just disappeared. Typically a VC or Daemon trick as they can get cheap flying death casters and guarantee the spell (although VC have a tougher time of it now). Sure, a bit of luck is needed to get the psun to move that far but with good placement you can throw a sun through at least one unit and more is gravy.

Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal. Did the victim of this purple sun not protect his flanks? In which case surely the loss is his/her own fault?

As for guaranteeing purple sun, Vampire Counts can't do that anymore in any normal sized game.

That doesn't mean you should have elements in the game that with a bit of luck can obliterate an enemy army. Of course you can lose to bad luck, but something that can cripple an entire army and win a game outright needs to be pretty damn improbable. 6-dicing psun and rolling a reasonable range is not that improbable.

Neither is it particularly likely, and thus not a viable repeatable tactic. IF only has a probability of approx. 25% with 6 dice, and everything else can be dispelled. So the real viability of purple sun boils down to:

probability of getting 6 dice + probability of having purple sun + (probability of IF + ability to be in range of target + probability of not misfiring)OR(probability of casting + (probability of not dispelling)OR (ability to not be dispel scrolled) + ability to be in range of target + probability of not misfiring) + ability to face army vulnerable to purple sun

Considering the odds of some of the above are not necessarily great this is not exactly a vote of confidence for purple sun.

Chosenstar doesn't care about any of those spells. S test? S5 (warshrine), so only fails on a 6. I test? Only fails on a 6. Even Tranmutation is on a 5+. The only spells that wrecks chosen reliably is 13th and that doesn't work on the mounted chosenstar variant. There's not much point arguing about the Chosenstar as it's not going to be in the game long, but for the record the "nuke" spells don't even slow it down. In any case I would wager quite a bit that the big spells were not designed with chosenstar in mind. (The chosenstar only became popular after 8th was released).

Chosenstar are more resistant than most to the nuke spells, but considering their points cost even losing a third of their unit to Final Transmutation is a massive incentive to not deathstar them. But hardly anybody takes the lore of metal so Chosenstar manage to avoid lots of potential hurt because everybody is so fixated on shadow, death, and life.

The argument that the uberspells even out is flawed. Firstly, you pick your lore beforehand, so it brings the game down to a big paper/rock/scissors if you have the enemy that your spell will affect.

Therefore casual players should pick a lore that is not tailored against their opponent and tournament players will have the utility of their lore averaged out against all their various opponents.

That's why everyone loads up on those magic res items, right?

What are you smoking? Magic Res only works against those spells that inflict strength hits and they are very rarely used. Out of the Lore of Shadow, only Pendulum actually inflicts hits (and Pendulum is typically considered a weak spell for that reason). Magic missiles are used, no doubt, but for clearing chaff or redirector units. No one attacks main units with simple damage spells when augments and hexes change the game!

Magic res being close to useless is one of the major complaints of the magic phase in 8th.

No one took magic resistance items before anyway. They are just as useless now as they have ever been. Why give a unit a banner that gives magic resistance 6+ when you can give it +1 combat resolution which is better? Why give your lord 3+ magic resistance when you can give them a 4+ ward which is better?

Same is true of many of the "big" spells in the army books. I much prefer it to the overdone spells in the rulebook but it seems they may have gone too far in the other direction.

The big spells in the army books are exactly what people asked for and now nobody uses them. This alone is proof that they are subpar. This is despite the fact that 8th edition army books seem to be trying to force your main wizard to take the army lore. Meanwhile not everyone uses the big nuke spells, as testified on this very thread many times, suggesting they are not as broken as many suggest. Many of the anecdotes relating to their effectiveness seem to involve poor generalmanship and list building as much as overpowered magic.

So what would upping their power levels do to these units that are already points in your opponants pocket? Just to ,apparantly , be able to additionaly wipe out the units your opponant can normally keep relativly safe? What we are establishing is that these uberspells already do massive damage, just not nessesarily to deathstars, justifying them as "deathstar killers"doesn't really hold water.

My understanding of a deathstar is the concentration of points into a single unit such that said unit should be expected to bludgeon through or tarpit everything it encounters. The uber spells can mitigate against this by threatening to wipe out lots of points in one casting. I am not aware of any deathstar which should not fear or respect one of final transmutation, purple sun, or dwellers beneath. This is precisely because these spells allow no saves of any kind. It doesn't matter how armoured or magically endowed you are. If you don't want to lose lots of points to these spells then don't put lots of points in the same unit. Rather than one unit of 50 Saurus Warriors why not have two units of 25? Rather than one unit of 12 Ogres why not two units of 6? Having 200 zombies in one unit is just asking for trouble.

Vampires are fairly durable which reflects thier value to the army and the consequences when you lose him, a smart player usually starts off with a shadow nerf followed by a uberspell. At least sniper spells do hits and allow saves.

My hero Vampires and Necromancers typically don't get ward saves, and so they die to the character sniping spells if the opponent is persistent enough with them.

Dweelers is not readily available to many armies, purple sun and pit are, which makes low initiative units easy game at the moment

And despite this Ogres and Lizardmen are generally regarded as being two of the better armies out there. Further proof that purple sun isn't really all that.

Chaos and most Elves are moe resistant to the majority of uberspells. Elves are no more vulnerable

Elves are still quite vulnerable to Dwellers, and since they generally cost more they will suffer. Chaos is mixed.

[Gaargod]

On a slightly off-topic note, I hate this thread. It's wonderful excuse to just trawl around on the web when I should be revising for my Cold War exam.

Latin in my case. But I do feel for you!


The choice of 'pick your lore before the game' was, frankly, stupid. Yes, I can see it making some sense in the fluff ("There's no way this lowly Empire wizard would understand all those spells from different lores!") but the point is that every game is meant to be with a separate army! Otherwise you'd have casualties, experience, etc, to consider - exactly what some campaigns do. Restrict magic lores there, not for basic armies. It's an important tactical tool to pick lores and would add some goddamn variety.
They should definitely allow you to pick your lore and roll spells before deployment starts. This would mean some of the more rarely seen lores (e.g. metal) would get more use, instead of always going for utility lores. Further, rolling the same spell twice should never have meant 'pick your spell'. Personally, I disagree with no spell duplicates (which would remove cross contamination problems between wizards), but even if you hadn't, you absolutely shouldn't be able to pick your spell. The odds of not rolling any double on 4 dice are low (I hate 4 dimensional probability, so I'm not calculating them anytime soon, but I'm going to guess <20%) - and if you have a second wizard with the same lore, you can get the odds to precisely 0 of not having the spell you want, on the wizard you want. Make doubles into keep rolling until you get a new spell, and that at least makes there a possibility of failing to roll uberspells. That doesn't even bring loremaster into account, but that's at least not for everyone.


An argument can be made that actually, the odds of an uberspell going off once per game are pretty high, if you're trying to do that (dispel scrolls only work once, and you only need one lucky turn...). But let's ignore that. Let's say it was a really remote chance - how about using the odds of Infernal Gateway going all super-killy - let's say, once per 6 games (1/12 chance of insta-death, and that's assuming it goes off unstopped 2 times a game, which is hardly unlikely as it's 15+ to cast and Tzeentch lv4s have +5 to cast!).
So, we're on once per every 6 games it's really destructive. Surely that's not that big a deal - that's not even once a tournament on average!

Except it is. It might only go off in a big way once per 6 games, but that is basically an auto-win for 1/6 games. I'm not joking either. Consider the following: Tournaments games can easily be very closely balanced, as people bring the best that they can and play to the best of their ability. If you delete an important unit (either because of its simply expense, or because the opponent's battle plan currently relies upon it - even a 70pts unit of skinks may be the most crucial target on the battlefield if they're just about to block that all-important charge), that will quite likely tip the balance. Assuming average luck etc (the only thing we can reasonably assume, remember), you've just changed a close game into a solid victory, or more.
And remember, that's a low-end estimate. It's pretty easy for an uberspell to delete half the opponent's army (in terms of victory points), and/or utterly wreck their battle plan, and change a close game into a massacre. And it can do that without anything the opponent can do about it. One might say a boasted Soulblight can win games, and it can (and personally, I'd argue it's probably on the strong side itself, but meh), but it won't by itself. You at least have to get in

Nothing should be that automatic. It simply should not be that automatic.

[Lord Inquisitor]

In any hypothetical scenario in which a knight is as easy to kill as a spearman, then there is a greater incentive to reduce the size of knight units to mitigate against points lost. If knights cost 5 times the points of spearmen, then you should have 5 times less knights as spearmen, and thus lose the same amount of points regardless of unit targetted. The problem many people seem to have is that they create knight deathstars or analogues which get cut in half by magic thus losing them hundreds of points, so they complain that the problem was obviously that magic is too good, not that they made a prime target unit worth lots of points and put it in range of a wizard with a nuke spell.

You have a good point, which is to say you'll lose half of a 300 point knight unit just as you'll lose half of a 300 point halberdier unit. However, this is only because they happen to have the same initiative value. I showed a few pages back that regular S hits tend to scale to the cost of the unit, while initiative tests do not.

How many knights were there? If there was more than 7 there's a fairly decent chance your zombies would have been massacred anyway. I'm also not sure why, knowing that the death wizard had purple sun, you left your zombie unit and ghoul unit positioned perfectly to allow the template to roll through both of them. I mean if you're that concerned about purple sun ruining your day why not deploy your units further apart?

Yes, I'll keep my battle-line with 30" between units to be on the safe side?

You play undead, of course your units get jammed together because you've got the mortis engine bubble, the corpse cart bubble and the gaggle of spellcasters each with their own bubble, plus the general's march bubble. Playing VC is all about the bubbles and spreading out the troops isn't going to work well. This is something that seems to be trend with the new books. They all seem to rely on static effects, which result in the necessity of keeping your main units centralised. Ogres and Orcs need the Ld bubble of the general to stay in the fight, the TK have several different bubbles to contend with and Empire take it to a new level with their wizardmobiles and buffing characters.

In any case, in this example, yes of course the zombies were dead in the long run, but all they really needed to do was hold him up for a turn so I could get my spellcasters to raise more and keep him busy. And a good purple sun can really wreck an undead army. I about totalled a TK army with a single purple sun and a resonable range on one memorable occasion.

Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal. Did the victim of this purple sun not protect his flanks? In which case surely the loss is his/her own fault?

Would you care to explain how an Ogre player (particularly with the old book) is supposed to protect his flanks against multiple flying lone death casters? It really was a case of fly up, IF purple sun, game over. Bear in mind, this is Ard Boyz final, everyone there had placed in the top three of a prelim 3-game tournament and then in the top three of a semi-finals to get there, so by this point all the newbie players had definitively been weeded out. I don't know much of the details beyond that (I had my own game to play, I came over to see what the commotion was about), but the player is a regular over on the Stronghold (and took it with extremely good grace I might add, far better than I would have done!).

Now, I've seen a few screwy game-overs at Ard Boyz due to freak luck (a couple of years ago there was an Empire vs Vampire Counts lead by Mannfred and it was Blood And Glory. First turn, first shot with a cannon hit Mannfred, failed his look out sir, dead. Due to a lack of banners - old VC book - game over!), but I've seen rather more due to crazy spell effects than anything else. It might be noted that I regularly run a flying loremaster Death herald so I'm quite familiar with the old "6-dice purple sun" approach.

As for guaranteeing purple sun, Vampire Counts can't do that anymore in any normal sized game.

Sure you can. All you need to do is take a total of 6 levels of Lore of Death wizards to guarantee it. That may not be a great use of points and it might not be on the wizard you want. But, for example, 3 level 2 wizards all on hellsteeds will do the job. One of them will get purple sun, and the other two will get some useful spells for flying lone wizards.

Neither is it particularly likely, and thus not a viable repeatable tactic. IF only has a probability of approx. 25%, and everything else can be dispelled. So the real viability of purple sun boils down to:

probability of getting 6 dice + probability of having purple sun + (probability of IF + ability to be in range of target + probability of not misfiring)OR(probability of casting + (probability of not dispelling)OR (ability to not be dispel scrolled) + ability to be in range of target + probability of not misfiring) + ability to face army vulnerable to purple sun

Considering the odds of some of the above are not necessarily great this is not exactly a vote of confidence for purple sun.

Understood. I will not say that even with a flying loremaster, I 6-diced purple sun every turn. It did not go off every time I tried it. No one is saying it is that gamebreaking. But with 6 turns to the game and keeping my flyer in a good position every turn, the potential of just wreaking an entire enemy army is there, depending on the matchup. Against a low-I army, 5 or 6-dicing psun at the end of every magic phase is pretty demoralising as I'll have a couple of just horrible low casting spells to throw first (e.g. Phantasmagoria or Acquiescence) and round the magic phase off with a psun. They know it's coming and they either have to let the nastly little Ld-bomb hexes get off or let the psun through.

No one took magic resistance items before anyway. They are just as useless now as they have ever been. Why give a unit a banner that gives magic resistance 6+ when you can give it +1 combat resolution which is better? Why give your lord 3+ magic resistance when you can give them a 4+ ward which is better?

If magic resistance 3 gave me a 4+ ward against purple sun or pit of shades or against enemy hexes, yes I would take it on my ogres and daemons. But that's really another topic.

The big spells in the army books are exactly what people asked for and now nobody uses them.

This is true up to a point but that's more a case of the classic GW pendulum. Something's too good! Hit it with the nerf stick until it stops moving! Ooops, we killed it. If the Maw scattered D6 inches and didn't have a chance of hitting your best unit instead, I would happily use the spell.

This is true of many things GW. They over-react. 2nd edition 40K - transports are deathtraps! 3rd edition 40K - transports are great, every unit in a transport! 4th edition 40K - transports are deathtraps! 5th edition 40K - transports are great, every unit in a transport! They just can't seem to find that happy medium.

The big spells should be not as game-breaking as Purple sun, but not as potentially self-lethal as the Maw.

This alone is proof that they are subpar. This is despite the fact that 8th edition army books seem to be trying to force your main wizard to take the army lore. Meanwhile not everyone uses the big nuke spells, as testified on this very thread many times, suggesting they are not as broken as many suggest. Many of the anecdotes relating to their effectiveness seem to involve poor generalmanship and list building as much as overpowered magic.

I disagree. I've turned around many a game where my opponent has outplayed me by going "well, what have I got to lose?" and throwing 6-dice at uberspell of choice (usually purple sun, as noted that's my usual) and getting IF and turning the game around. I don't find that these spells add a lot to the tactics of the game whereas many others are a lot more subtle.

My understanding of a deathstar is the concentration of points into a single unit such that said unit should be expected to bludgeon through or tarpit everything it encounters. The uber spells can mitigate against this by threatening to wipe out lots of points in one casting. I am not aware of any deathstar which should not fear or respect one of final transmutation, purple sun, or dwellers beneath. This is precisely because these spells allow no saves of any kind. It doesn't matter how armoured or magically endowed you are. If you don't want to lose lots of points to these spells then don't put lots of points in the same unit. Rather than one unit of 50 Saurus Warriors why not have two units of 25? Rather than one unit of 12 Ogres why not two units of 6? Having 200 zombies in one unit is just asking for trouble.

I regularly run a gutstar with my ogres. They don't care about your uberspells. Assuming I don't have the Rune Maw banner up, assuming I haven't made the brains of your wizards leak out of their ears with the hellheart and assuming I can't dispel your spell, none of them actually really bother my deathstar. Purple sun or Pit? My characters are pretty safe with Look Out Sir rolls. You'll kill 2/3 of the unit, so what? Most of the points are safe. Final transmutation or Dwellers kills less and the characters are pretty safe only affected on a 6 usually. The point here is that my characters will make it through, shame about the rest of the unit. Typically - from experience - my deathstar can take two purple suns before my characters are really in danger. Worst comes to worst, my characters can always bail to another unit.

The funny thing is, my deathstar is actually less in danger from purple sun than if I took multiple units. A flying death caster can run a psun across my entire line, if I spread the points I would be spending on characters in three units, and I lose 600 points of ogres lets say. If you hit my deathstar, I lose maybe 200.

And despite this Ogres and Lizardmen are generally regarded as being two of the better armies out there. Further proof that purple sun isn't really all that.

Ogres have some of the best magic defence in the form of hellheart and the rune maw. You bring a death caster close enough for a guaranteed hit with a psun against my deathstar, I'll blow his brains out and steal your power dice with the hellheart. Lizardmen throw your "6s" away, meaning that you can't get that IF off against them and greatly reduce the chance of casting it at all - and reducing the effect of uberspells against them.

Low-initiative armies have their ways of dealing with psun or they just wouldn't work. That doesn't mean psun isn't a stupidly unbalanced spell. Seen many units of trolls around? Chaos trolls? Neither have I, they're just too vulnerable to these kinds of spells. They'd be pretty decent otherwise. You see the occasional Throgg army. I've talked to a few players who run such armies and tournaments for them seem to go along the lines of good game, good game, HIDEOUS PURPLE SUN INCIDENT. Psun makes defences like Hellheart or Becalming Cognition must haves or a single death caster can ruin your day. Which, although it kind of works, isn't a good kind of balance.

[Haravikk]

The choice of 'pick your lore before the game' was, frankly, stupid.

I don't agree. The choice of which lore(s) your wizard(s) will be using is fundamentally linked to how your army is built. If lores can trivially be chosen before deployment then an army could easily choose whichever spells will most easily exploit the enemy's stat lines. Up against Dwarfs or Ogres? Pick some Initiative test mega spells!
Up against elves? Go with Dweller's Below; you don't want to go around wasting purple suns after all!

It'd be legitimising list-tailoring; having to choose when you make your list means people need to pick lores that have synergy with their list, either by complementing it or by overcoming some weakness. The great thing about Warhammer fantasy is that you're not as able to predict what you'll be up against (unless 40k where half the armies are marines), so you need to come up with armies that can deal with anything.

[IcedCrow]

I agree. Choosing lore as part of your list is something I agree with heavily.

[Malorian]

+1 to picking lore before the game.

[The Low King]

I agree. Choosing lore as part of your list is something I agree with heavily.

Agreed........

[Urgat]

+1 to picking lore before the game.

+2
Why should you be able to choose your lore at the start of the battle? Can chaos wizards morph from tzeentch to slaanesh at will? Can my gob shaman turn into an orc shaman because he's more handy for that particular face-off? I'd even advocate that lores should be paid as upgrades, and that they don't cost exactly the same so that you have to work the lore in your list. There

[Lord Inquisitor]

The Empire book has gone somewhat in that direction given that options available to the wizards vary depending on lore taken. Altering points values would have been interesting though. Shadow is a no-brainer for Empire these days.

[Malorian]

Altering points values would have been interesting though. Shadow is a no-brainer for Empire these days.

That would be interesting but hard to balance as it can heavily depend on the rest of the force.

I also don't think an empire player would shy away from the lore they want even if it cost 40 (or whatever) points more.

[Lord Solar Plexus]

The damage the spells can do is still highly disproportionate when compared to combat. For example, Dweller's Below targets Strength, yet the basic Strength of a Skavenslave and a Dwarf Warrior are the same, but the Dwarf warrior costs four times as many points (more typically five times as much), so the spell is just as able to halve a unit of expensive Dwarfs as it is to do-so against easily replaced skavenslaves.

The same can be said for combat. S6 is going to wound both units and cut through armour with the same ease. It's likely going to kill many more points in Dwarfs than in Slaves. Or WS 5 - no difference whether it faces 2 or 12 point models.

Magic might halve a unit, combat might delete it. Magic doesn't get to overrun for example. The Big Spells are scary, so is many an elite combat unit. There are ways to deal with one or the other, and sometimes it won't work. If people in some playing group or the other therefore want to limit big spells and huge units at the same time, I see no reason why they shouldn't.

Latin in my case. But I do feel for you!

Audacior sis, Gaargod: Post tenebras lux.

[Lord Inquisitor]

The difference is that expensive units that pay a premium for their durability - trolls, plaguebearers, steam tank, big monsters, etc - typically have a correspondingly low initiative. These units can take a serious amount of S6 combat pummeling and come back for more, but a psun bypasses all that. Sure, running them down is even more effective but you need to actually beat them in combat, taking their toughness saves and Ld into account to get to that point. With psun, initiative is all that matters rather than all these things that heavily influence the value of a unit.

[Urgat]

That would be interesting but hard to balance as it can heavily depend on the rest of the force.

I also don't think an empire player would shy away from the lore they want even if it cost 40 (or whatever) points more.

That would mean that a wizard with the wanted lore at 40pts more would still be a good choice. Ergo, they're underpriced, right?

[Memnos]

I have played scores of games in the new edition and I don't hate the large unit killers.

Don't take gigantic deathstars and you won't lose the game to a single spell.

If your argument is, "Even if you do go smaller units, a death spell can wipe out those smaller units. 6 eggs in one basket and 6 eggs in the other - All things being equal, if he takes out one of your eggs with a death spell, he has the advantage" then my counterargument is "That's painfully obvious. He spent four hundred points and a Lord choice on his egg. If that egg was incapable of taking out another egg, then it would be a pretty bad egg to... Buy. It would be like a rotten... egg... Look, I don't know how to extend the metaphor in this case. You get what I'm saying. Eggs."

[Valaraukar]

So.... you're saying we should make an omelette out of their Level 4 if they take the nuke spells?

[Lord Solar Plexus]

The difference is that expensive units that pay a premium for their durability - trolls, plaguebearers, steam tank, big monsters, etc - typically have a correspondingly low initiative. These units can take a serious amount of S6 combat pummeling and come back for more, but a psun bypasses all that. Sure, running them down is even more effective but you need to actually beat them in combat, taking their toughness saves and Ld into account to get to that point. With psun, initiative is all that matters rather than all these things that heavily influence the value of a unit.

Hmm. Taking the lore, getting the spell, being in range, having enough dice, rolling the casting value, not being dispelled...not all of those are equally difficult but it seems to me that there's a lot more than just an ini roll with magic. Anyway, the point is rather that there are some combat units that can delete Trolls, Plaguebearers, STanks (or anything else)...and there are some spells that can delete Trolls [insert same list]. Sure, wards are an exception but sometimes magic (dis)allows armour or regeneration, sometimes combat does, and having run Knights w/ BotEF for the last two years as well as STank and Greatswords, I can safely say that in my neck of the woods it happens decidedly more often in combat. Which doesn't mean that it isn't reversed somewhere else of course, I just don't think one or the other must be preeminent a priori.