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changemod wrote:

Halfpast_Yellow wrote:

 skoffs wrote:

Dew wrote:

changemod wrote:
Thinking of Anrakyr, yeah he can't transport but my will be done and his own benefit work pretty well with tesla immortals in keeping with his old phyrrian eternals concept.

How so would he benefit the Immortals over say, pairing him up with Lychguard or some other assault unit?
Just curious, I WANT him to be a good pair for the Immortals. I like his old Phyrrian idea

Nono, it's still his old squad! They just got promoted from Immortals to Lychguard!
#SoProud #Phyrria4LifeEternity

(though, seriously, you really want to have him with big groups of CC guys to maximize that extra attack he gives out)

He's still useful to have with just good old Immortals and Warriors though.

8th ed does fundamentally change how Warriors and Immortals interact with Close combat.

* No more low Initative, chargers go first.
* No restrictions on charging after firing Heavy/Rapid Fire weapons.
* Universal hit modifiers - Warriors and Immortals always hit on 3+
* They're S4 which has an easier time with T6 and T7 now.
* The more damage you do the more they lose with the new morale and vehicle degradation.
* No target restriction on charging.

You should be able to take some charges when you can to max out your damage, and doubling up Warrior/Immortal attacks is useful.

I'm simply saying that my will be done stacked with his own buff means a tesla immortal unit can hit on twos, tesla on fives, then get a bonus to charge range, then hit twice each on a 2+.

Hardly the same close combat output as Lychguard, but still a fairly large buff to single turn damage output if you do it where virtually guaranteed to kill the target unit before they can strike back.

And no, don't take this as some optimal super-combo, just a note that he can still make his prior fluff unit happen.

Seems like the biggest drawback of Anraykr is his slow speed and the fact he has to footslog it with a unit of Lychguard or some CC unit. So it could actually make a little sense to pair him with Immortals sometimes to benefit from their 24" shooting range.
Might not be able to reach the enemy in combat but at least they will be able to shoot them and draw them into cc.
Not the best case but I see some of the benefits now.

Sure wish we had the VoD back though

 skoffs wrote:
I was going for their full "codex" names, but I guess their more commonly known ones wouldn't be bad.

Ah, okay, that makes more sense.

 skoffs wrote:
Only issue for me is, some people call certain special characters by their title instead of their name, eg. "Nemesor" instead of "Zahndrekh". Not normally a problem at the moment, but if they start releasing other Nemesor characters, ie. Nemesor Azderon, that's gonna start confusing people (... really it's more of a personal pet peeve)

If they're anything like me, they use 'Nemesor' because they can remember how to spell it.


With regard to FOs vs Wraiths:

I think my main concern with FOs is their lack of mobility. 5" is terrible movement speed for melee infantry.

The pocket dimension thing seems like a dubious plan. If you bring them in early, then you'll be out of range of most/all your support units. If you bring them in late, then your opponent will have the opportunity to attack your army piecemeal.

What's more, if you bring them in and then fail the charge (which is pretty likely), your opponent can just move away from them and you're right back to having a melee unit with 5" movement.

 vipoid wrote:

With regard to FOs vs Wraiths:

I think my main concern with FOs is their lack of mobility. 5" is terrible movement speed for melee infantry.

The pocket dimension thing seems like a dubious plan. If you bring them in early, then you'll be out of range of most/all your support units. If you bring them in late, then your opponent will have the opportunity to attack your army piecemeal.

What's more, if you bring them in and then fail the charge (which is pretty likely), your opponent can just move away from them and you're right back to having a melee unit with 5" movement.

Yeah, that's always the downside. However, you are in essence dictating the movement of your opponents. Now that they don't need to scatter, you can reliably throw them as close to objectives as possible and force the opponent to commit heavily to shooting you off. If they don't, they have to engage you. They're a bit expensive for an objective grabber, but objectives win games.

If I'm needing a counter charge or charge blocker unit then I can't see how FOs can compete with the movement and durability of the wraiths.

As a straight up attacker I can see their use though.

Here's the big question we need to be asking ourselves...

If a Pox Walker kills a Necron Warrior, and thus gains a Pox Walker, then the next turn the Necron player rolls RP and gets the Warrior back...

Rules as written, both will happen... but it sure is screwy to think about... or how a Pox Walker would rise from a metallic Necron Warrior in the first place!

 buddha wrote:
If I'm needing a counter charge or charge blocker unit then I can't see how FOs can compete with the movement and durability of the wraiths.

How do Scarabs compare, as far as points to damage/durability ratio go?

 SHADOWSTRIKE1 wrote:
Here's the big question we need to be asking ourselves...

If a Pox Walker kills a Necron Warrior, and thus gains a Pox Walker, then the next turn the Necron player rolls RP and gets the Warrior back...

Rules as written, both will happen... but it sure is screwy to think about... or how a Pox Walker would rise from a metallic Necron Warrior in the first place!

I think...you just created a time paradox
Yeah, that's an odd rules interaction. Maybe that should go into the FAQ list.

2) Not sure I understand? The hull means the entire thing - it's quite easy to get within 1" of a Monolith. You can't model for advantage to raise it higher than that - you count it as the height it should be if modeled normally.

I guess I always thought the monolith had a flying base, it has the little circle on the bottom where I could attach one. Looking at the kit again I don't see it so that makes a lot more sense.

 skoffs wrote:

 buddha wrote:
If I'm needing a counter charge or charge blocker unit then I can't see how FOs can compete with the movement and durability of the wraiths.

How do Scarabs compare, as far as points to damage/durability ratio go?

17 Scarabs is 221, so comparable points.

51 Attacks, 34 hits, 11.33 Wounds against anything T4 or higher (don't really care about T3, all options will shred them in combat).

Against 2+, 1.88 wounds.
Against 3+, 3.77 wounds.
Against 4+, 5.66 wounds.

Around the same damage output as Wraiths in most cases, worse than Flayed Ones against anything T7 or lower, better than them against T8.

Durability is... interesting. 5+ sucks and you can't get anything better since they're not Infantry. But it's 51 wounds, putting both units to shame, making them super duper annoying against D1 weapons.

They have to walk across the table, and are 2" slower than Wraiths. But, for the price of 18 Wraiths (again, probably the most you'll spend on melee units), you can get 52~53 of the little buggers, meaning even with lascannons shooting at your 13 point models, you'll generally get across with enough to start the tarpit.

That's actually hilarious. I don't particularly enjoy the idea of a mass Scarab list, but if you take an Outrider Detachment you can comfortably fit 36 bases. Now, even bolters will make damage stick to them, but you'll need a lot of bullets to put them down. And even D2 weapons aren't preferable, because every other one that gets through will overkill and "waste" damage. So yeah I have to agree that these guys are our premier board clogs. I can already see Khorne armies tearing out their hair trying to charge our important models through 5+ units of speedbump Scarabs.

Edit:

I wonder how many bases I have at my place. I know I have at least ~20? Could likely make more with little extra bases and a few Scarab bits? Time to hit the bit store I guess haha.

This is a hilarious idea.
Where can you order just the scarabs if I ever decide to be a total jackass and try this?

Dew wrote:
This is a hilarious idea.
Where can you order just the scarabs if I ever decide to be a total jackass and try this?

You can reliably get them from a Bit store. The "official" way to build it to put 4 Scarabs per 40mm base, but you can easily just get some extra bases and put 2 or 3 Scarabs for base to get more mileage out of them.

Or if you're feeling extra lazy/cheesy, you can go for Spruecrons:

File this under why you shouldn't trust intuition, by every check I can think of wraiths are still one of, if not the, toughest unit per point. I updated the defense spreadsheet to take into account crpytek buffs, repair protocols and living metal, with similar outputs to the damage sheet. Also C'tan are surprisingly resilient , even without hiding behind a unit. here is the link to the updated defense sheet:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1kJB9wnpPRdyBy6tckVUJQzNlISKL_MpmOa4FfHMl2Gc

Well, we can fit 158 Scarabs into a non-battle-forged 2000pt army, take no command points, and just flood the table and eat everything on 5+ (and just hope for no fliers). How about that?

Also when they get shot and withered down, you of course pull bases from the back, thus not slowing down their inevitable charge

At 39 points for 3 bases, they're definitely worth considering for a "control" unit.
So many uses!
- Deny deep strike areas.
- Bubble wrap.
- Assault speed bumps.
- Quickly grab objectives.
- Distraction/harassment.
- Actually throwing the odd wound on big stuff.

As was pointed out earlier, because they don't have RP there's no worry about maxing out units. Spam minimum units of them to maximize potential.
Are your opponents going to waste shots which could have gone into your good stuff to get rid of an obviously disposable unit, or are they going to let them freely run around and annoy their army?

Dew wrote:
This is a hilarious idea.
Where can you order just the scarabs if I ever decide to be a total jackass and try this?

No way to order Scarabs directly. You make make 4 or so from the Obelisk/Tesseract box and the Warrior box contains 3 of them.
How about alternative models?

 SHADOWSTRIKE1 wrote:
Well, we can fit 158 Scarabs into a non-battle-forged 2000pt army, take no command points, and just flood the table and eat everything on 5+ (and just hope for no fliers). How about that?

You could drop a few bases and throw in some cheap HQ to make a bunch of Outrider detachments, thus giving you some command points?

3 Outrider detachments is easy and lets you bring up to 18 min units, gives the same command points as a Battalion. Good times.

 wuestenfux wrote:

Dew wrote:
This is a hilarious idea.
Where can you order just the scarabs if I ever decide to be a total jackass and try this?

No way to order Scarabs directly. You make make 4 or so from the Obelisk/Tesseract box and the Warrior box contains 3 of them.
How about alternative models?

You can be an absolute cheapskate and stick one Scarab on each base (make some new basses for them out of cardstock)

Alternatively, you can use greenstuff to make a mold and stick tons of them on a base, so it really looks like a swarm (with debris and painted up, they look pretty decent).

 skoffs wrote:

 wuestenfux wrote:

Dew wrote:
This is a hilarious idea.
Where can you order just the scarabs if I ever decide to be a total jackass and try this?

No way to order Scarabs directly. You make make 4 or so from the Obelisk/Tesseract box and the Warrior box contains 3 of them.
How about alternative models?

You can be an absolute cheapskate and stick one Scarab on each base (make some new basses for them out of cardstock)

Alternatively, you can use greenstuff to make a mold and stick tons of them on a base, so it really looks like a swarm (with debris and painted up, they look pretty decent).

Spoiler:

Ooooh that's clever. I need to try that.
So you just stick a blob of GS into the mold?

 skoffs wrote:

 wuestenfux wrote:

Dew wrote:
This is a hilarious idea.
Where can you order just the scarabs if I ever decide to be a total jackass and try this?

No way to order Scarabs directly. You make make 4 or so from the Obelisk/Tesseract box and the Warrior box contains 3 of them.
How about alternative models?

You can be an absolute cheapskate and stick one Scarab on each base (make some new basses for them out of cardstock)

Alternatively, you can use greenstuff to make a mold and stick tons of them on a base, so it really looks like a swarm (with debris and painted up, they look pretty decent).

Spoiler:

Those look great.

Once you have the mold, do you use more greenstuff to fill it and make the scarabs?

 vipoid wrote:
Once you have the mold, do you use more greenstuff to fill it and make the scarabs?

Actually, "Instamold" is apparently the stuff to use... but this guy figured out a way to do it with hot glue sticks and hot water? (see link for how this guy did it)-
http://www.imgrum.org/media/904699597925474357_1540849695

Make a small pile of the molded ones and a single real one on the top with his peg, so it looks like he's jumping out from the swarm.

 skoffs wrote:

 vipoid wrote:
Once you have the mold, do you use more greenstuff to fill it and make the scarabs?

Actually, "Instamold" is apparently the stuff to use... but this guy figured out a way to do it with hot glue sticks and hot water? (see link for how this guy did it)-
http://www.imgrum.org/media/904699597925474357_1540849695

Make a small pile of the molded ones and a single real one on the top with his peg, so it looks like he's jumping out from the swarm.

Ok, so to be clear, the mold is made out of greenstuff or not? And do you fill the mold with greenstuff? Those scarabs looked like they were made out of greenstuff.

I have slightly over 50 scarab bases. I could try it.

Dunno if I could find an opponent before official release in my area though, my local store is a GW.

File another lesson under don't do math while tired. fixed a few glitches in the sheet.

So I finally got around to doing the math for consecutive rounds of regen while under fire from the original weapons, turns out that a ten man tac squad with bolters can't kill a ten man warrior squad, not with average rolls anyway. Same for a 5 man dev squad with las cannons. Those are both without a cryptek, or a barge.

The takeaway is that when It comes to the 20 man warrior blob a cryptek is overkill. Few things do enough damage quickly enough to overwhelm repair protocols for that large of a group, and those that do will be doing additional damage via battle shock. Without a cryptek it takes a sustained 7 dead warriors per round to be able to wipe them out, and that's after 7 rounds of shooting, assuming you pass all of your battle shock test. with battle shock it's probably 5 or 6 rounds ish. At those levels of casualties adding a cryptek is not going to offset further increase from battle shock. Crypteks are useful for Ghost arks, but can't keep up, they are also dead useful for small tough units like destroyers, but can't keep up. Even Illuminor Szeras is too slow to keep up with the units that would benefit most from him. Gonna have to think on that one.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

Ok, so to be clear, the mold is made out of greenstuff or not? And do you fill the mold with greenstuff? Those scarabs looked like they were made out of greenstuff.

I use a substance called Instamold to make my copies. It works wonders.

Here are some praetorians I've been copying with that thing:



But I think it would work great for scarabs. I haven't used it for mine and did a proper silicone mold for resin casts because it yields more scarabs per cast, but these are the results I got:

I really believe that instamolds would yield just as great results.

Greenstuff molds as you are suggestiung can work, but quickly degrade after a few casts.


Back on topic. This edition is looking like a great edition for Necrons. I'm just sad that our flyers aren't as good as they used to because they must drop a unit a time. I wish they could bring a unit + 1 character at least, that seems like a poorly thought out rule IMHO.

An idea I used on a few of my scarab bases is to use spare wraith heads. The size is about right and they look pretty interesting as scarabs!

I have yet to run my crons in 8th but they will be my go to for sure. Personally though after looking over the images online I think I will use more ten man warrior with ghostark approach. The mid field is gonna be easy to lock down and its not a matter of surviving but more getting there. Maybe 2x 10 man warriors in GA and a 20 man to play escort for characters.

 Grimgold wrote:
File another lesson under don't do math while tired. fixed a few glitches in the sheet.

So I finally got around to doing the math for consecutive rounds of regen while under fire from the original weapons, turns out that a ten man tac squad with bolters can't kill a ten man warrior squad, not with average rolls anyway. Same for a 5 man dev squad with las cannons. Those are both without a cryptek, or a barge.

The takeaway is that when It comes to the 20 man warrior blob a cryptek is overkill. Few things do enough damage quickly enough to overwhelm repair protocols for that large of a group, and those that do will be doing additional damage via battle shock. Without a cryptek it takes a sustained 7 dead warriors per round to be able to wipe them out, and that's after 7 rounds of shooting, assuming you pass all of your battle shock test. with battle shock it's probably 5 or 6 rounds ish. At those levels of casualties adding a cryptek is not going to offset further increase from battle shock. Crypteks are useful for Ghost arks, but can't keep up, they are also dead useful for small tough units like destroyers, but can't keep up. Even Illuminor Szeras is too slow to keep up with the units that would benefit most from him. Gonna have to think on that one.

Bot sure I really understand how you're calculating that. Just based off Tacs with Bolters?

Crypteks are worthwhile for Warriors because they give 5++, and if the opponent focuses more fire than just some S4 nothing guns, you'll want the RP boost.

Are doom scythes considered bad. I know they are a decent amount of points but I have the urge to run 2 of them and shoot stuff with that s10 ray

I believe some thought should given to how to avoid needing to fall back and losing a turn of shooting when we face dedicated assault units. We can use a screening unit such as Scarabs, but I'm curious if a deployment strategy could help. I'm thinking with a blob of 20 Warriors it might be best to deploy them in a counter-charge formation against assault armies that would look something like this:

..........W.....W......W......W

..............W..............W

..........W W W W W W W
..........W W W W W W W


The first two ranks are spread out to maximum distance and the third rank is another 2" behind the second rank. The third and fourth ranks are bunched up together. The idea here is that Pile In moves and Consolidation moves are optional and I would choose not to move the back ranks. Hopefully that will mean my opponent can only engage a small part of the Warrior unit, and if they're getting charged, then it's likely by a unit that can kill 6ish Warriors in a single phase. Also, I can keep my first two ranks intact until the charge since I can remove casualties from anywhere in the unit. The entire point is that my opponent won't be able to consolidate within 1" of the third rank meaning the Warrior unit is no longer engaged. Then I won't have to spend a turn falling back in order to get to shoot. Against horde units, the first two ranks would probably need more Warriors to create an effective screen, but not too many as to survive the assault.

Also, since I'm running Orikan, I would have the option to choose to use the 5+ invulnerable save in order to increase my chances of the first two ranks of Warriors dying.

I should be getting in some games this weekend against a Tyranids player to test this formation. If he's playing deepstrike units, then I might have to modify this a bit into a spider-like formation, but keep the core premise alive.

This might have too large of a footprint to be practical, but that might be useful in objective games, and I just want to try as many things as I can before heading into a tournament setting.