I remember them so well that the very act of paying for a charge is still foreign to me. So strange, in fact, that the Skorne player they got for their MK3 battlebox game in No Quarter seemingly used one (or he walked and called it a charge?). In the MK3 Skorne insider, the upside to us losing free charges was focused on (great attempt, but damned if the forums and facebook groups didn't turn to shit as soon as someone read that line).
"...Beast Handlers remain a premier warbeast support unit. Beast Manipulations are gone. Instead, each Handler has three special actions that he can use to influence the beasts in the army. These include Condition (which now adds or removes only 1 fury point), Enrage (which is now a flat +2 STR bonus without dictating the action the beast has to take during its activation)..."But that's neither here nor there... Here, we're going to talk about JUST how much the loss of free charges changes the game for Skorne.
Shit Sucks, Volume 2: Enrage
Loss of free charges, on the surface just means that to get an extra 3" of movement we have to pre-buy a boosted damage roll. If this was the extent of it, though, it wouldn't be that big of a deal. Unfortunately, most of the time an enraged Skorne heavy doesn't want to boost damage. At the low end, any attack bought by one of our heavies under enrage is pow 16 (Aradus Sentinel), making it a smart bet to buy attacks against anything with armor 19 or under. A titan of the weakest variety will be swinging pow 18s, which makes charging worse against armor 21 or lower, add in any other buffs and suddenly we want to walk up to a colossal. Unless you're fielding a bunch of Rhinodons or playing against... I have no idea what, but something with REALLY high arm, charging is going to be a sub-par option save for the extra distance, where before we could get an extra d6 of damage so long as our targets were 3" away.
"So we lost d6 of damage against targets further than 3 inches away and closer than our walk threat, big deal!" You might say, imaginary person created for literary convenience. But this has some pretty big implications for play style overall. Morghoul 1, for example, used to be fantastic at flinging models across the board, dealing high-damage alpha strikes. His feat was fantastic at denying retribution, as well. He could abuse a beast or two, pop feat, and charge forward fairly safely. Then, even if his beasts were out of his control, they could charge in to safety and beat the crap out of a hardened target, without losing any efficiency in doing so. Now, I find myself using his feat more defensively than ever before. Top it off, I often use abuse to walk into combat now, rather than charging. Speed buffs wind up being far less alpha inducing abilities for my armies, and more a counter-punch spell. I don't know why I keep playing like this, but I'm pretty sure it is usually suboptimal? Still, losing damage efficiency when we play an alpha list is a pretty big deal. Charging all in can be way, way worse, when you might cap out against multiple targets and leave your beasts to die to a counter attack.
But wait, there's more!
So lets say you charge a target where you don't NEED a free charge to kill it. You go in on your opponents heavy, and 4 bought attacks later it lays wrecked. Great, right? Of course it isn't, this isn't a "things aren't so bad" post. That beast is now no longer a valid transfer target. Any beast that charges into combat in MK 3 and winds up full, but having accomplished their goal, would have been a valid transfer target back in MK2. This, probably above all other circumstances, is the scariest part to me. Not just the times when I fail to kill a target, but when my gladiator is sitting on 3 fury with a "mostly" dead jack in front of him. Do I buy the 4th attack, or hope I didn't really need to kill that jack? More often than not, if it still has a cortex I can't risk it getting loaded up and throwing my gladiator at me, or getting in a knockdown to remove LOS blocking, so I now lose a potential transfer target (this is, I think, one of the biggest reasons to take a bronzeback... I still take a ton of frenzy checks when I run a titan brick, but at least I'm not stuck swinging in the breeze with no transfers).
Okay, so we've lost damage output, and now have to question whether the alpha is worth it. We might not kill an enemy, and some of the time doing so we'll cap out our beasts, leaving us vulnerable to assassination. But, again, counterpunch, right?
WRONG! In this world of ranged jacklines, the counterpunch just... doesn't work. Our biggest tech piece for it is the Agonizer, who doesn't do jack against shooting, and is incredibly vulnerable to sprays now that we can't shield guard them. We do have a few feats that work well here, but 2 of them also want to be used offensively (Rasheth, Naaresh), 1 of which doesn't work against ranged attacks, while the other only helps beasts. Arguably, the best is Xekaar, as his feat is incredibly powerful and only defensive, but apart from light spam lists I haven't had him really survive if he feats far enough up to do anything. I have greatly enjoyed doing a run/jam with heavies under Morghoul 1's feat, but it is, again, wasting the +2 str part of abuse if all you do is jam with it, and loses the assassination portion of his feat against Hordes. So 3 of the 4 waste the offensive part of their feats, and the 4th just dies. So enrage discourages us from getting the alpha, our expensive and shitty counter-punch tech piece dies easily and doesn't do anything against range, and we have 4 casters that waste part of their kits, or in one case just die, to feat and hopefully make us deal a counter punch that isn't a glorified death rattle, all but 1 of which don't work against ranged armies anyway (Xekaar needs to be super far up to stop his army from being shot).
Now, I know what you're thinking, because the person I'm having this conversation with is a figment of my imagination. "You haven't even mentioned the fury reduction!". You're right, I haven't, because I was saving that for this paragraph. Okay, so we have... is it 6 models? The Bronzeback, Sentries, Cannoneer, Rhinodon, Archidon and Molik Karn. Molik Karn is complete trash in Mark 3 anyway, so we'll ignore him. 5 models lost a point of fury, but at least one of them was garbage to begin with. So 4 places where it really hits us. The cannoneer used to be able to beat a khador heavy to death with some buffing. Sentries have 1 token shield-bash attack more than the cannoneer, but he's a reach heavy who now has 1 less fury and doesn't really want to charge anymore :(. The Bronzeback was our only Fury 5 warbeast, being nothing but an awesome beater. And the Archidon is now also total garbage, so screw him anyway. So no free charges discourages us from charging, our heaviest hitter is no longer our heaviest hitter, and our two multi-use titans are now more single-use than ever. Losing 2 attacks from a bronzeback is a huge deal, as it takes him from an unstoppable force to a decently stoppable force, and the cannoneer and Sentry are now more locked into their roles than ever. This would be fine, if we were the sort of faction that could lean on that type of tech. But, again, our defensive feats are also offensive.
We have speed increases all over our faction. The only counter-punching tech we have for our beasts only works against melee, is expensive, easy to remove, and very short ranged. Maybe if we could still buff armor against shooting (more on this here), we could pull more of a damned-if-you-do for gunlines, forcing them to engage or continue to shoot into arm bricks while we position for the alpha, but we can't. We have area defense buffs versus ranged all over the place, but our heavies don't have defense worth buffing. And without our heavies, we can't handle jacks and beasts anyway. We're forced to take more beasts, by the game and by the meta, but we can't deliver them effectively anymore. This seems to be on purpose, but we also were not given the tools to effectively survive an alpha anyway. Our alpha game was gutted, our delivery game was gutted, and we were left with tool-boxes to still try and do those things. We're half-alpha, half-counterpunch, half-assed.
Edit: I forgot about Mordikaar. He's still super legit, as he can jam with a few infantry models with ultra-high defense and position to actually take the alpha, through buildings. That is all.
No comments:
Post a Comment