Whats so bad about wood elves?

[MikeyB]

Alright awesome cheers guys. Just found out today I missed out on a 4000 point welf army for just £95

[TornadoCreator]

Alright awesome cheers guys. Just found out today I missed out on a 4000 point welf army for just £95

Damn, it'd cost 3-4 times that to buy that kind of army from GW at least. Wonder who the lucky person was who got it.

[Veshnakar]

I would like to know how you deal with mounsterous cav with youre wood elves tom, ive watched youre youtube vids and you seem to know what you are doing

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Unfortunatly the only answer to high armor and toughness for wood elves is with magic. My friend takes a level 4 of life and of beasts and does well coping with these things. It stinks to have to rely on magic, believe me, I play tomb kings, but that's the card were dealt.

[RaShondala]

A friend of mine played woodies. Magic was his answer to the things he couldn't take on.

Though Hail of Doom Arrow is good.

And Arcane Bodkins against armoured targets.

[MikeyB]

My main opponent is Dark Elves. Any tips? Or should i ask this in tactics now?

[Haravikk]

Well, the changes to Fear and the Skirmish rules hit Dryads the worst; they can't auto-break an enemy any more by doing plenty of damage, and if a single round doesn't go their way then they're in danger of fleeing. They do however still pack a hell of a punch as a unit, but they need something to hold the front. Unfortunately this is where Wood Elves have the problem at the moment as while I like Eternal Guard, they're not great for the points, and while Treekin are one of the best monstrous infantry out there, anything flaming (particularly magical fire) will destroy them, same goes for Treemen which can be really nasty otherwise.
Investing in strong anti-magic can help keep the Treekin and Treemen alive, but it can get costly to do…

Glade Guard aren't that cheap either, but they're still very effective while moving so you can get the most out of their Strength 4 at half range quite easily, which will really hurt the enemy. Trouble is keeping them safe at that distance, as they've no defence whatsoever so any return shooting just mows them down. Hiding in forests only does so much; personally I'm hoping they'll either become skirmishers as standard, or it'll be a basic option in future, as it would at least give them some defence. Magical saves and other buffs really help in this regard though, so if the enemy does have shooting you'll want to use them to give your Glade Guard a chance to deal with it, or get stuck into other targets.

I mean, it's not like Wood Elves can't do anything, it's just that you have to work pretty hard to make a list work. I mean, Wood Elves should be a mobile list that shuns direct combat, but they could do with better tools to do that, especially when core units like Dryads have been so heavily crippled by 8th edition; even 7th didn't do them many favours really.

[pointyteeth]

Just my 2 cents, but wood elves arenot a bad army if you are able to get into the proper mindset to play. You have to play them completely different than you would with any other army. At the last tournament I attended the overall winner was a Wood Elf player that won 5 straight with no spellcaster and no BSB in his list. His battleplan was to avoid combat with everything except Treekin and Treemen, redirect everything, and kill 100 more points of stuff than his opponent.

[Phazael]

Dryads are prefectly fine at their cost. They pretty much outfight anything else core in the same point range, with the possible exception of Saurus. Most of the Tree Spirits are actually competitively priced, with the possible exception of the Treeman being a tad overcosted. If they gave these guys Daemon style all the time ward saves, every issue forest spirits have would be solved. I actually expect that to happen in the next book.

Its the elves that are vastly overpriced in the book and the characters having very strict limitations on how they can be fielded in units that hampers the book. The other main issue is the inability of L2 casters to take anything other than Lore of Athel Loren, which was the worst lore in the game before the last Beastmen book came out. If you play with special characters, then a couple of them are overcosted too, particularly Orion. I generally play forest spirit heavy armies, which while challenging are fun (unlike playing the current Beast Book), but its really hard for me to get commands on the table, unless I want to do the boorish spam ten packs of archers thing.

[popisdead]

For the cost of a caster lord they are 25 points less than a Slann. That is just so over costed it's not even funny.

Wood Elves have NO access to bonus power dice during the magic phase. This makes them slightly weaker when relying on the magic phase to cast. And to get the +1 Dispel dice it costs 90 points on a character that can be killed easily enough and even if made into a mage will not really add anything to the army for the points cost vs say,.. just 10 more Glade Guard.

The big item, to re-roll dispell dice is Arcane so you would have to take a support caster to get a Dispel scroll. While some people think having a re-roll on every dispel attempt is broken or cheesy the reliability of a dispel scroll outweighs the randomness of dice.

The Caster lords only have access to two lores. While they are fine lores there is little synergy between them. With Beastmen it's easy to get a deathstar down to Init 1 then cast purple sun through th line. You get no combo spells like that. Also the 6th spell in both lores aren't as good for Wood Elves. With no mechanism to re-roll To-Hits, Transformation of Kadon isn't as good, and you have to cast Throne of Vines before you attempt Dwellers Below meaning no other magic that phase and you need some good dice to make it work.

The hero casters only have access to Lore of Athel Loren which while it was an amazing lore in 7th, is a mildy okay augmentive lore now. Has the last magical charge of the game which can make Wardancers fun still (I'll take 33 S4 attacks from 8 WS 6 Init 6 guys) your opponent can stop it fairly easily too. I would say half the spells are okay but nothing to deal with a Horde.

High and Dark elves have good shooting as well and access to the Lore of Shadow spell that reduces toughness (as well as access to Lore of fire for +1 to wound and Lore of Metal for +1 to hit). This makes their shooting pretty good and ours still fairly good but not as scary as it was in 7th edition.

The be effective in 8th ed as a combat threat you need a mechanism to re-roll To-Hit, either through Hatred or ASF. Wardancers can get ASF but suffer to get it, and have no defense for what could be almost the most expensive infantry in the game.

While Treeman are great at taking out Grey Seer's and Treekin are pretty resiliant they rely entirely on dice rolls. Flub a round and your Treekin are dead. It's as simple as that. Plus with the Flaming banner, Bestigors, Executioners, White Lions will tear through Treemen/Treekin very fast. Even a core unit like Gors or Halbrediers with a buff will tear apart Treekin.

Eternal Guard cost 12 PPM. Goblins cost 3. Who cares goblins only hit on 5s, they are 4 times as many and the same Str/T.

That is just off the top of my head.

[DragonArmy]

Wood elves feel like the only army where you are constantly trying to win by a small margin; you'll trade 150pts to shoot down 300pts.

In my opinion, competitively, w-l-d tournament scoring makes wood elves manageable, where 20-0 scoring is near impossible to win. It's very hard to play a smart opponent and cream them with a WE army.....except my DE have been creamed at 1500pts by WE.

And if I was GW, I would make sure shooty armies are not top tier--no one wants to run there army up to a WE army, get shot to death, and never reach close combat, feeling like they never had a chance.

And even if you loose with wood elves, you usually controlled the game. You usually set up last, allow your opponent to come to you, and knowingly leave charges open for him.


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[HurrDurr]

Comparing our slightly above human level casters cost to a slann puts a lot into perspective.

@dragon, toptier is top tier, doesnt matter what phase it's in, I don't want them holding back on the Wood Elf shootyness because people want to throw stones at that phase with prejudice.