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With the horrible outcomes for mages and mis-casts in 8th, do you think we'll see a trend of suicide mages?

I imagine you can create a rather cheap mage-type with the sole purpose of using as many dice as possible for the mis-cast.

Maybe not the most cost effiecient use of a mage/character - but does that mean it's any less effective?

I can see it happening.

However in tournies i see it being a cheesy trick that will get you comp hit.

Even if you throw 6 dice at a spell, you're hurling the rest of your magic phase into the garbage and a miscast is by no means guaranteed (or even likely).

It'd be a very unreliable one hit wonder, probably not worth it when you could actually have a magic phase other than your one spell.

ive done it as a 'if youre gonna die, at least take em with ya' kind of thing.

i think its a totally viable strategy. take a comp hit? youve gotta be kidding me. if i were a wizard that got overran into and was about to get killed, id call upon every ounce of magic i could to try and bail me out of it.

just make sure you can cast one of your spells in close combat...

I could see a couple Lvl1 Warlock Engineers suicide bombers combined with a Skitterleap Greyseer.

I have tried this method to great effect, a lvl 1-2 battle mage (or equivelant), power scroll and lore of shadows.

So you pray for the steed of shadows, use a power scroll, so any double counts as a irresitable force. So because the spell does its effects before you roll to miscast you either 1:charge a unit or 2:fly near a unit, then roll on the miscast table.

Squig wrote: any double counts as a irresitable force.

friendly reminder, you only miscast if you roll 2 or more 6's ;p

not if you use the new power item, as he mentioned

I was considering 6 goblin mages on wolves. They could charge into combat or just march within 1" of some expensive figures. 4 of them would have spells which you could cast into combat (I think) and the other 2 would have to march close. On 4 turns, one of them could charge into combat throw all your dice hoping for an IF and a miscast. Each would cost 67 points plus one could have a brimstone bauble for even more silliness. Just who would you target to make the suicide worthwhile? or is this just for giggles?

ok, but remember that

1) not every result on the miscast table slaps everything around you, so you might just roll the "you're not a wizard any more" sort of result. anticlimax.

2) In fact, the wrong result could just get all your wizards slapped with a s6.

3) as mentioned, it's not really all that likely to get a miscast

Give one that new common magic item which makes miscast+IF on any double
100 or so points? for suicide gobbo lol. still pretty cheap with potential to kill.

But yeah, i wouldn't really expect it to be fantastic

Infernal Puppet makes this very viable for WoC. The downside is that WoC mages are way too expensive to be used as suicide bombers from the outset of the game. I absolutely have gone for miscasts when I know my mage is a dead man however.

anewbre wrote:I was considering 6 goblin mages on wolves. They could charge into combat or just march within 1" of some expensive figures. 4 of them would have spells which you could cast into combat (I think) and the other 2 would have to march close. On 4 turns, one of them could charge into combat throw all your dice hoping for an IF and a miscast. Each would cost 67 points plus one could have a brimstone bauble for even more silliness. Just who would you target to make the suicide worthwhile? or is this just for giggles?

The brimstone bauble can be a bit of a laugh, i've seen this done before. You take a cheap goblin bigboss with a brimstone bauble and just charge him into a bit scary unit, boom! D6 s6 hits! Its probably not best used alone as a goblin bigboss with a great weapon could inflit D6 S6 hits in his lifetime without killing himself, so take other stuff too.

The best tactic for suicide mages is simply use the lore of shadow and use it's lore attribute. Basically after a spell is cast you can swap places with another character. You could use this to move somewhere where you will cause less damage or somewhere where you'll blow up the enemy. Its especially effective if you swap with an enemy character that's hunting alone, like a DE assasin, so you won't blow up some of your troops as well.

Definitely would never use the
"throw all dice at Steed of Shadows and fly towards enemy"
method.

You have to stop 1" away from enemy, meaning small blast template won't hurt many at all.

Results 2, 3, 4 it works as planned and big explosion.
Results 5, 6 your wizard gets hurt and maybe 1-3 enemies. Your wizard costs more and it's a bad idea.
Results 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 your wizard gets hurt but no enemies. Terrible waste of points.

You lose like 120 points for a 27% chance to accomplish a little with your death.
3 out of 4 times the lvl.1 powerstone mage just failed.

That's not even counting the times when you don't get a miscast using your power stone and all your magic dice.

I think taken to an extreme, this strategy is a bit of a gimmick and not likely to work. You might not get the spell you want, or you might not miscast/IF when you want to.

However, the idea of going for broke on spell casting will be an integral part of the game now. It's also going to factor in to whether, if you're taking a single lore on your mages, you try to get the big spell on your main caster, or on the smaller/back-up caster (i.e., whose spells do you generate first, and do you drop the big spell if you get it for the wrong one, etc).

Overall, I don't see this being a main tactic at all. However, in desperate / backed-into-a-corner situations, it's like a soldier pulling the pin on a grenade- there's no way out, so take as many with you as you can...

I could see me doing something like that to pull of a spell at a key moment. Black Horror, or a Word of pain before a key combat.