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Hey guys so I've been looking over the Legion armybook and I expected to see what i've been told about them. That they are a glass cannon. Please help me see how that can possibly be, at least for their warbeasts, as warbeast heavy seems to be a common tactic for Legion.

I can see they do more damage in assault than most other hordes armies along with fire sprays on their beasts. But they also sport decent defense, and just as high Arm as any other race. Combined with the spiny growth and try to tell me that Legion is a glass cannon. Even the amount of wounds of their warbeasts are no less than any other faction.

What am I missing?

Thanks.

From what I've experienced with Legion, they're fast, hit really hard, but fold after a few blows. The tactic I've seen every Legion player use that I've gone up against, was to hit me first, real hard, so that I couldn't recover from the hit. Granted, that's a pretty standard tactic, but when playing Skorne, getting smacked first can be a given, but not being able to retaliate from those first few blows is uncommon.

edit:
Not sure if that helped or not, but maybe it can get the ball rolling for a discussion.

Marquis Vaulkhere wrote:Even the amount of wounds of their warbeasts are no less than any other faction.

That is true of the Carnivean chassi (Carnivean, Ravagore, Scythean), but the rest of the Legion heavies (Angelius, Seraph, Typhon) have fewer hit points than most other heavies in the game.

Marquis Vaulkhere wrote:But they also sport decent defense, and just as high Arm as any other race.

The Carnivean chassis have Def 11 and Arm 18, which is lower than the heavies of all the other factions in Hordes. The titans of Skorne have def/arm 12/19, Trollboood dires have 12/18, Circle stone guys have either 10/19 or 9/20, Gator wrastlers have 12/19, War hogs have 12/18.

So put simply, no, they don't have as good defensive stats as the other races.
In addition to that most of their warlocks have pretty bad defensive stats.

They may seem that way, but when you consider pathfinder (or fly) + eyeless sight, they can be quite hard to kill in their own right. It means they can sit in woods and not be seen and then charge out as they please. That is sure to catch people unawares the first time or two they encounter it.

Legion is really good at "mugging". As long as there is a nice dark alley to drag you into and beat on your ribs for a bit, Legion does well.

Going toe to toe with Skorne or Trollbloods in a brawl though will generally have Legion coming up short, especially if it is with their "movement" heavies like Seraph and Angelius.

Typhon can be a bit better especially with thagrosh and the healing synergies, but you still don't want to get involved in a multiple round brawl. One or two points of lower arm really starts to add up, especially with a high fury opponent beating on you.

Sprays and persistent AoE's make up for alot as well. Jack/Beast walling makes no difference when Typhon (*Insert Honey Badger joke about Typhon here*) and a Carnivean come calling with covering blasts from a Ravagore. The amount of sprays and nasty feats off eThags, eLylyth, Vayl, and Abby means that while you may or may not survive that strike, you're crippled either way.

So, it doesn't really matter against a well played Legion army if they are squishy or not. The question is if you can weather the alpha-strike turn.

You also have to look at Legion Beast point costs.

If you run the very, very typical combo of Carnivean, Scythean, Ravagore, you just spent 30 points on 3 warbeasts with Def11/ARM18/30 boxes each. Generally anything that can get B2B with them can kill them in a turn.

You lose a single warbeast, and you're down 25% of your total list. You lose two, then it better be because their warcaster/warlock has no fury within charging distance of your Ravagore/Warlock because you're sure not winning the attrition fight at that point.

Now, there are some other beast brick lists that concentrate their points into a very small battlegroup like what Legion typically runs; Trolls for example can bring 3 heavies in 35 pts totaling 31 pts. The difference is those heavies tend to be ARM22-23, hidden behind a wall, and Fury5 / P&S20+ once all the troll buff-stacking is taken into consideration.

Falkman wrote:The Carnivean chassis have Def 11 and Arm 18, which is lower than the heavies of all the other factions in Hordes. The titans of Skorne have def/arm 12/19, Trollboood dires have 12/18, Circle stone guys have either 10/19 or 9/20, Gator wrastlers have 12/19, War hogs have 12/18.

Just a slight correction: Circle heavies are actually really poor to compare to really anything, as they have in effect no bloody pattern whatsoever to their stuff, with statlines of non-characters going about 9/20, 10/18, 13/17, 12/18, 14/16, and 14/17. Circle living beasts tend to be Satyrs (13/17 or 12/18, wiht 24 and 26 wounds), Warpwolves (14/16 or 14/17, with 25-28 wounds) and Constructs (9/20, 10/18, and 10/19 only on Megalith).

That being said, 11/18 and 30 wounds really isn't the best spot. It's lower than most all the rest of the Hordes Factions on DEF/ARM by at least one, and they don't tend to naturally regenerate. Compared to most Warmachine stuff, they're faster, but have poorer stats than Cygnar, Retribution, or some Cryx warjacks in that department, though do do better than Khador and the Protectorate.

But outside of these, things pretty much go south, with lots of beasts with heavy cost, but light wounds (Angelius and Seraph), or softer stats (Typhon). And none of their lights or lessers really have much in the way of staying power, nor much of their infantry.

(As a note also to Falkman, I clicked something and I don't know what it was here on the forum in case you get a message. I use high contrast and so have to kind of poke at Dakka Dakka via remembering where buttons were.)

And stuff.

Just remember the golden rule - generally warjack / warcaster defenses will total up to 30 between defense and armor. The high is 32, low is generally around 28. 'Squishy' factions will be lucky to see 30 total, while tougher factions might be balanced, but will generally hover around 30 with a few going above.

The real issue is that the extremes tend to do better than the averages. 10/20 is considered hard to crack armor, but 12/18 is generally seen as fairly squishy because it doesn't really push you up over the 50% hit on a 7 mark. 13/17 is arguable (Cryx jacks can be dodgy, but combined with their low boxes they tend to explode into a shower of parts when you do connect - they don't have the durability to encourage people to swing away with a double boost give you better results) and 14/17 is considered good due to the fact that you generally have to boost to have a chance to hit and you can't cripple a Warpwolf via a lucky column 5 roll of 15 damage total.

As people have said, Legion tends to be on the squishy side (sub 30 totals for defensive stats) but the big beasties have a bit of durability so they don't suffer for it quite as much.

Legion heavies being not super-tough is kinda compensated by their abilty to rip things apart. I think the way to describe them I have liked has been the term "glass shotgun". If you break the opponent's army's back, you can generally not worry about things killing them.

And stuff.

Okay all this input gave me a much better understanding of Legion's shortcomings, and I don't feel as worried to play against them.

Thanks

I've been playing Legion for awhile now and they are anything but unkillable. There are ways in our faction to buff some but in general our faction lives and dies based on piece exchange and hitting hard swiftly and accurately. Most times people see how sturdy a heavy is for legion because after the alpha strike, their heavy hitters are either crippled or destroyed/not in position to oppose, and ARM 18 vs. lower POW seems godly.

Eyeless sight helps mitigate our weak defensive stat line by letting us hide before striking, and our speed helps pull off Alpha strikes. So hopefully our assault is so devistating that the battle becomes one sided at that point.

As a side note, recently I've been playing pThagrosh and if played right you can spam Spiny Growth and with his Death Shroud ability, you're fielding effective ARM 22 heavies

This is obviously an exception to the "Squishy" rule.

As a side note, recently I've been playing pThagrosh and if played right you can spam Spiny Growth and with his Death Shroud ability, you're fielding effective ARM 22 heavies

My friend is planning on running eThagrosh with beasts such as Typhon and Carniveans. How do you fight against that kind of army? I play Skorne.

As Skorne you need to use your beast handlers to get that +2S. That S 14 can do some amazing things. That's a 7" throw from a gladiator. Bronzebacks are beastl,y (pun HAR) 5 fury to beat the snot out of anything. Cataphract Arcturaii are good at opening charge lanes and you can combine fire to make sure to wound a heavy to make sure you drag it on down. Agonizers are a must, it will mess up his day and put the hurt on warmachine as well.

Skorne are a heavy hitting faction. As Surtur says, beast handlers will be very useful, especially on a titan. Add in a spell(or feat) buff to strength and your opponents ARM doesn't matter one bit.

just one thing to note drag only works on same size bases and smaller. So the Cataphract Arcuarii can't move large bases :(

eThagrosh is different from pThagrosh in play style. pThags is considered Legions Attrition caster along with Kallus. His gig is all about High ARM beasts who can all hit hard and once you finally do kill one he can bring it back thus piece exchange should be going your way.

eThagrosh can be played a number of ways. The most common and some percieve it as the most effective, is shredder spam. Manifest destiny, his feat, and his style of play all really synergize well. It has some really terrible matchups but if you haven't seen it done, it will take you by surprise. The way I play him (which probably isn't optimal) is heavies than lessers and a dedicated Infintry Tarpit. I still have shredders, but only 4-6 rather than 8-12 lol. They are great for taking down support solos and I use them as my delivery system for my bigger beasties who take advantage of manifest destiny, then I pop feat to get those big guys in there. I also run Legos + UA with Dragon's blood making them an extremely effective tarpit.

How to beat eThags: Well he's a large base, so its generally difficult to keep him hidden and his defense is kinda meh. Problem is he is very aggressive so its hard to focus on him. I'd say jam his forces up as much as possible and any caster who is denial will cause him fits. He's not immune to range at all so high pow weapons will force transfers and will weaken his beasts but his arm is nearly as high and is as high with Tenacity so it might be better to focus fire and kill his heavy hitters. Once those are gone, shredders are easy enough to kill and Legos, although resillient, aren't a huge threat.

It's also going to be hard to deal with eThags since you will likely have three or four spray templates with a ton of little threats so it's going to eat an infantry swarm alive. It's also going to be hard to get shots on him or charges since one he starts killing in HtH, you're going to be covering the field in clouds. So you're looking at def 15/16 on him at range (if he has tenacity up).

Marquis Vaulkhere wrote:

As a side note, recently I've been playing pThagrosh and if played right you can spam Spiny Growth and with his Death Shroud ability, you're fielding effective ARM 22 heavies

My friend is planning on running eThagrosh with beasts such as Typhon and Carniveans. How do you fight against that kind of army? I play Skorne.

You should actually have relatively little problem running up against eThags with Skorne, matchup-wise. Aside from the feat, Skorne speed buffs out-threat most of what eThags can bring. The Cyclopse Brute's animus makes you immune to knockdown, which avoids one of eThags' big threats, which is a spell martyred Scourge (knockdown spell), then pumping you full of Typhon/Carnivean sprays and feated Shredderswarm attacks.

eMakeda+Molik Karn has no trouble versus eThags, as MK can charge in and hack apart 1-2 Legion heavies, or typewriter his way across the Shredder lines.

Xerxis and the Xerxis brick is hard enough that you can shrug off a charge from a heavy or two and out-attrition the Shredders.

The Titan Sentry with Locker up simply shuts down Shredder swarm as well.

I agree, Scorne will be easy to match up against eThags. He doesn't have many answers to the problems Scorne will give him.

Marquis Vaulkhere wrote:

As a side note, recently I've been playing pThagrosh and if played right you can spam Spiny Growth and with his Death Shroud ability, you're fielding effective ARM 22 heavies

My friend is planning on running eThagrosh with beasts such as Typhon and Carniveans. How do you fight against that kind of army? I play Skorne.

Do you have a Bronzeback? Do you have a Gladiator? Because you see, when a Mommy Titan and a Daddy Titan love each other very much...everything dies around them.

Do you have a Bronzeback? Do you have a Gladiator? Because you see, when a Mommy Titan and a Daddy Titan love each other very much...everything dies around them.

Hahaha I'll have to try that combo out. For my Warlocks I only have Morgoul and Rasheth, I assume the Bronzeback and Glad would prefer to be with Morg, but what would I want to use playing with the Dominar?

Bronzeback and Gladiator work pretty well with damn near everyone.

Marquis Vaulkhere wrote:

Do you have a Bronzeback? Do you have a Gladiator? Because you see, when a Mommy Titan and a Daddy Titan love each other very much...everything dies around them.

Hahaha I'll have to try that combo out. For my Warlocks I only have Morgoul and Rasheth, I assume the Bronzeback and Glad would prefer to be with Morg, but what would I want to use playing with the Dominar?

Rasheth's tier list also makes Titans one point less each. Sentry at 8 points, Bronzeback at 9 points? Yum

Rasheth+Sentry+Glad+Bronzeback would be a pretty potent combo against eThags. Locker would make it very, very difficult for Shredders to get in against him and a Carnivore-d Bronzeback has no problem reaching out and touching anything on the Legion side of the table.

Rasheth's feat in conjunction with an Agonizer would do a very good job at hosing Legion's damage output since even MD Shredders will barely scratch a Skorne Heavy at P&S6.

Legion assets aren't in the defense department but, they're a tool box army. The Casters are balls out to say the least and frankly the units are really untility driven. See Hex Hunters for details. The most protection you'll get with Legion is using EThagrosh to cast dragon blood on a Carn. 22 Armor with some return damage.

Marquis Vaulkhere wrote:

Do you have a Bronzeback? Do you have a Gladiator? Because you see, when a Mommy Titan and a Daddy Titan love each other very much...everything dies around them.

Hahaha I'll have to try that combo out. For my Warlocks I only have Morgoul and Rasheth, I assume the Bronzeback and Glad would prefer to be with Morg, but what would I want to use playing with the Dominar?

Dominar wants titans. LOTS of titans.

I don't even have Thagrosh, I mostly play eLylyth and Rhyas. So either gunline with a few smackdowns at the end of line, or pure alpha strike with quite a bit of infantry.

eThags can do higher arm for one beast, but pThags can spam Spiny growth on several big beasties. Keep pThags close and his Death Shroud lowers enemies STR by 2, providing effective ARM 22s.

Pick up a Succubus when it drops for another free animus and you're talking ARM 22 beasts walking down the field. Its fantastic.

Oh and fog of war is concealment for all! WHEE! He also has draconic blessing dmg buff, and can bring back a dead beast, so yeah, I feel pThags is better at the attrition game. eThags is better for offense, which is also fantastic.