astro_nomicon wrote:I'm only really looking to get off one Summoning a turn. Incursion (read: Plague Drones) is nice, but I'm perfectly happy with summoning 5 hounds or 10 daemonettes a turn.
From someone who has spent a lot of time playing Screamerstar and Screamerstar/
FMC hybrid lists, I think you'll quickly find that this is a fundamental problem for your army. One Summoning a turn will equate to effectively nothing over the course of the game.
You've got to consider how your army presents itself to your opponent: assuming a successful Grimoire and Cursed Earth, your army is as follows:
An unkillable Screamerstar
An effectively unkillable 3+ armor/2+ cover/4+ invul Flying Nurgle Prince, potentially with further Biomancy/Telepathy buffs
A trio of very-hard-to-kill Flyrants, potentially with
FNP
Tyranid support units hiding in the backfield (Zoeys/Venom)
Scattered Troops, hiding and/or in reserve
Basically, at any given moment, everything in your army is either not worth shooting at (in the case of the Screamerstar and
FMCs), unable to be shot at (in the case of the Troops and Tyranid support units), or already dead. The entire enemy army's worth of shooting has no effective targets on the board--that sort of denial is exactly the concept Screamerstar lists are built around in the first place.
...and then 10 Daemonettes drop out of the sky.
There are very few conceivable circumstances wherein those Daemonettes survive to accomplish anything on the following turn. They're already the sort of unit that is easily dealt with by extraneous chaff shooting (Rapid Firing Troops, etc) but now you've put them in front of an army that essentially
has nothing better to do but kill them.
For some armies (say, Orks) that would be a small victory in and of itself, but not in an army like this. It's not a
"well at least they're not shooting at Unit X" situation, because anywhere else those shots would have gone, they would have been wasted. There's nothing for them to kill in the first place--you're essentially just expending Warp Charge to provide the enemy with target dummies, until you reach a certain critical mass of summoned wounds per turn to overcome their ability to easily remove them at no real tactical cost. One cast of Primaris Summoning is nowhere near that point.
astro_nomicon wrote:As for the assessment that it's trimmed down, what do Horrors really do but generate Warp Charges anyway?
Horrors are, generally, the best conduits for Daemonology powers due to being effectively immune to Perils by means of not caring when a 9-point model dies. They also have a wider selection of meaningful powers (as Possession is a useful option for them in certain matchups) and can self-cannibalize for Sacrifice as necessary. Their main drawback is their positioning being garbage, but that's less relevant for things like Flesh Hounds, and works just fine for flooding your own backfield with Daemonettes.
Currently, you're banking on doing all of your summoning with four wounds worth of Heralds, one of which is carrying your Grimoire. This isn't a two-Perils problem; it's often a one-Perils problem, because after you've lost that first wound, you've suddenly got to be really careful about risking the second one. The most efficient Warp Charge cost for WC3 powers is 7 dice, and you'll Perils 33% of the time at that number.
In a standard Screamerstar, you don't always roll your Heralds on Daemonology, but even when I do, I am always very wary of throwing off WC3 powers on them. It is a dangerous prospect for relatively important models.
astro_nomicon wrote:As far as Fateweaver goes, I know, I know. He makes sure the Grimoire goes off, but that's about it. I'm not that worried about perils. The Warp Storm table is MUCH less than people make it out to be. We'll see but I find him to be a 300 pt Grimoire tax that doesn't contribute a whole lot beyond that.
Unfortunately, theories such as "I'm not that worried about Perils" and "Warp Storm isn't a real problem" are exactly why this list would bomb at a large tournament. You
will lose Heralds to Perils on Summoning powers--frequently. Warp Storm
will cost you games--frequently. Maybe you can look at those two things and say that neither of them
should happen within the confines of any singular game (though I'm not sure I'd agree), but I can tell you they
will happen over the course of five or six games at a
GT.
The combined odds of the "negative" Warp Storm results--2,3,4--are one in six. That means, on average, you'll have to deal with one of them
every game. Any of those results can
easily cost you a game. Against skilled opponents with hard lists, where you're not just cruising to a win, they
will cost you games.
I have always told people--if you're playing Daemons without Fateweaver, you are choosing to let the Warp Storm table decide whether or not you win games. If someone comes up to me and says "I lost because of Warp Storm," I ask them if they're playing Fateweaver. No? Then you didn't lose due to some random whim of the dice gods. You lost because you took the risk of allowing Warp Storm to control your games. He is a 300 point insurance policy against that nonsense and he is worth every bit of it.
As far as not contributing beyond that--I suppose that's a matter of personal preference, but I'd certainly disagree. That was certainly his role in 6th Edition (and was still worth it, solely as Grimoire/Warp Storm insurance) but following the changes to Witchfire targeting and the huge buff to Beam powers, I never find Fateweaver lacking for contributions offensively. He's basically a flying psychic machine gun. It's obviously anecdotal, but my personal best Psychic phase out of Fateweaver involved him single-handedly removing five entire units.
astro_nomicon wrote:The list is still in the theory stage at the moment, so if you have any changes to recommend I'd be glad to hear them. Yes, I'd love a bastion or a VSG, but what to sacrifice to get it? Yes I'd love a couple more screamers, but from where?
The only obvious solution is to drop back to two Flyrants. Swapping the
DP for Fateweaver and dropping some Troops or a Zoey would allow you to scrounge enough points for a Fortification, but I'm not sure that alone would solve the problems.
As-is, it seems like you're trying to have your cake and eat it too, by having a triple Flyrant list
and a Daemon/Tyranid synergy list simultaneously, but you've more or less ripped up the foundation in the process. No Fortification leaves you incredibly vulnerable, and barebones Daemons means you aren't even getting the synergy you'd be aiming for in the first place. Honestly, as a Daemon player, my first thought when seeing the list was "this would be better as straight-Tyranids." The Daemons as designed just aren't going to contribute enough to warrant their cost.
