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It appears to me that this spell is quite broken.

It's a good spell no doubt, but I believe it's far from broken. Elves in particular just shrug it off and it's not definately going to get through. Unless you get IF most people will throw all their dispel dice at it, and chances are you threw a lot of dice to cast it, meaning only tiny spells get through.

Also due to the high casting value there is a big chance it will be cast on a lot of dice, potentially owning the wizard who cast it...

Also there is a 1/6 chance of it misfireing and toasting the wizard, and then it possibly scattering into your own units...

Its a devastating spell when it goes off without a hitch, however, i have also seen the thing destroy about 700 points worth of my opponents units on a misfire.

Didn't Matt Ward write the rulebook? Nuff Said.

It's only really cheesy against dwarves and lizardmen, and dwarves should be crippling their opponent's magic phase short of a lot of IFs(I haven't been feeling much sympathy toward Lizardmen and their ****ing Slann these days).

Yeah, against non heavy magic defense armies slanns are like a fat kid in a candy store...

ShivanAngel wrote:Yeah, against non heavy magic defense armies slanns are like a fat kid in a candy store...

I assume by heavy defense you mean O&G with the Staff of Sneaky Stealin' and Mork's Spirit Totem or Dwarfs and their ton of dispell dice?

Nothing else stands a chance against The Focused Rumination.

Tzeentchling9 wrote:

ShivanAngel wrote:Yeah, against non heavy magic defense armies slanns are like a fat kid in a candy store...

I assume by heavy defense you mean O&G with the Staff of Sneaky Stealin' and Mork's Spirit Totem or Dwarfs and their ton of dispell dice?

Nothing else stands a chance against The Focused Rumination.

I agree completely, most normal armies, even with level 4 casters are out of dispell dice after the slann cast 2 spells.

ShivanAngel wrote:

Tzeentchling9 wrote:

ShivanAngel wrote:Yeah, against non heavy magic defense armies slanns are like a fat kid in a candy store...

I assume by heavy defense you mean O&G with the Staff of Sneaky Stealin' and Mork's Spirit Totem or Dwarfs and their ton of dispell dice?

Nothing else stands a chance against The Focused Rumination.

I agree completely, most normal armies, even with level 4 casters are out of dispell dice after the slann cast 2 spells.

Indeed, my last opponent was whining and complaining that he only rolled 2,2 for his winds of magic for 3 turns in a row. I was very close to screaming at him why he was complaining, since he could still cast 3 spells easily and I would be lucky to dispell one of them.

Yeah 3/3,2/2, and 4/4 are pretty sick for slanns. You run out of dispell dice on one spell, and more then likely i have enough dice to cast 2 more...

I got a 6/6 the other day, cast all 7 spells of the lore, one got dispelled.... Completely wasted his army.

Wow! I haven't faced a slann yet, but it does seem to be top dawg in this edition.

Ah well, that's what makes it fun (sometimes) and the other times, I just remind myself it's toy soldiers .

At least they're dependent on the winds of magic now, instead of having for-sure magical domination as in 7th!

Purple Sun can be nasty against O&G and Ogres, you should have included them in the list with Lizardmen and Dwarves. Both are also I2, but unlike Undead they lack the capability to replace the casualties (And for Ogres, it can reduce a significant number of points / cast). O&G especially don't like it since - when not running Elite armies - they tend to be crammed in like sardines after about 2500pts.

Here I though it was Jaws of the Wolf World (40K) that "broke the game".

Its the same as any other rule that hurts bad. Play using tatics, predict your opponet and do your best to minimize the damage.

There is always one spell that will be over the top, there is always one charcter that will be over the top, there is always one shooting unit that will be over the top there will always be one (fill in the blank) that will be over the top.

Its not simply because is over the top, but becuase we look for the powerful and the weakest in things. Just as we are prone to look for a begining and an end, a stratigist's mindset demands that we must.

hyperviper6 wrote:Here I though it was Jaws of the Wolf World (40K) that "broke the game"

Well, JotWW is not the greatest comparison since no one in Fantasy can spend 35 points for a metal box to protect them from Purple Sun.

I know OnG and Ogres(especially Ogres) are really hurt by purple sun, but I was kind of looking at lists with mostly I1.

It kills all war machines outright.

We're playing a 1vs1vs1vs1 game at 1500pts.

My wood elves vs my Dark elves controlled by my brother (its his first game ever) vs friends high elves vs skaven! (over 150+ models)

pretty much my brother went for death and got purple sun.
Casted it every turn it wasent up scattering into people.
although most of the models on the table are Iniative 5. its just been shooting around murdering everyone.

We have a purple sun sitting in the middle of a Huge combined melee.
20 corsairs vs 50 clanrats and a doomwheel and flanked by aother 50 clanrats who got flanked by the phoenix guard.

I think the spell is pretty funny. as it wiped out the unit the sorceress was in when it misfired.

But all it has really done to me is kill 3 treekin :(
sucks to be anyone with bad iniative armies.

I wouldn't have the heart to use the Purple Sun of Xerxes against my friend's Ogres.

I'm not as worried as I could be about this. Since you pick a lore during army construction, it ends up slightly less of a problem than in 7th, where someone would pick the ideal lore each game.

Add to that the very high casting cost for the up-ticked version, and it's actually feasible to fail to cast this, even with a level 4. And then once cast, the artillery dice can misfire or roll low and the spell loses some of it's impact.

It's powerful, for sure, but I didn't find it to be as game breaking against my Dwarves as it appeared on paper- even with a worst case scenario of an early IF casting going through my most important block.

RZ

It's actually quite possible to get IF though if you are prepared to take a misfire. Just load up on a power scroll, pray for 6 power dice and you are good to go.

My brother threw 8 power dice into it and didnt get IF.
No one could dispell it though so was extremely lucky

Max dice is 6 unless you are DE or have some sort of weird magical ability.

But as Red_Zeke pointed out, miscasts are part of the parcel, as is taking a misfire result on the artillery dice and placing the template over your wizards head.

Now Shadow magic is generally not as damaging as Death magic, but equally offensive. You have the chance to mitigate the miscast with "smoke and mirrors" and you generally dominate the magic phase. Why? Because each remains in play spell you cast that gets through potentially makes your opponent use power dice in their magic phase.

For me, personally, If I'm not trying to get Purple Sun on my level 4 shadow wins out every time.

Lukus83 wrote: and you generally dominate the magic phase. Why? Because each remains in play spell you cast that gets through potentially makes your opponent use power dice in their magic phase.

Shadow does not have any RiP spells. Hexes FTW!

IIRC there are 2. One that reduces S, another that reduces T. There may be more but I can't recall at the moment.

Unless you mean death? But that has 2 also.

Red_Zeke wrote:I'm not as worried as I could be about this. Since you pick a lore during army construction, it ends up slightly less of a problem than in 7th, where someone would pick the ideal lore each game.

This is one of the "balance" problems in Fantasy with the new edition.

As a concept, picking your lore during army construction means that you cannot reliably select a Lore which will be most effective vs. your opponent, since you don't know what army you are facing.

As a practical matter, not all of us play games (at a store, league, whatever) where we don't know what our opponent's list will be, nor do we face opponents who have the resources to field multiple lists. My gaming group, for example, consists of Empire, Bretonnian, Tomb King, Dwarf, Chaos Mortals and two Skaven players. We generally have to schedule games between two people. If the Empire player knows he's facing Chaos Mortals (with a good number of Warriors and Knights) and Dwarfs, why wouldn't he pick the lore of Metal to cause easy wounds and deny armor saves?

It's not a deal-breaking problem or anything, but it's very frustrating that an aspect of the rules design specifically written to prevent you from tailoring your magic selection to the enemy army fails to do so in a great deal of (entirely predictable) situations.

In addition, given that only some armies have access to all of the Lores, the rules help perpetuate a kind of rock/paper/scissors situation where armies who CAN select certain lores perform much better against the armies vulnerable to that Lore.

An ideal solution would have been to create a series of spell Lores which were all equally useful against all armies. That would have been ideal, of course, but the current system, where certain lores are devastating against certain types of troops and useless or almost useless against others, makes no apparent attempt to even head towards that ideal.

Red_Zeke wrote:I'm not as worried as I could be about this. Since you pick a lore during army construction, it ends up slightly less of a problem than in 7th, where someone would pick the ideal lore each game.

It is not hard to have 8 army lists written up with the same army, but different wizard lores.

Crimson Devil wrote:It is not hard to have 8 army lists written up with the same army, but different wizard lores.

If someone is willing to write up multiple lists to use their preferred lore against a given opponent then you're very likely to have much bigger problems...

Hell, there's nothing stopping someone writing up multiple lists to pick out when they find out their opponent's army, what stops that happening is that most of us aren't complete nobs.

I don't see how it's really a problem. If you are in a tournament environment everyone is likely to take the most useful lore for an allcomers list. If you play with a group of friends they aren't likely to tailor. It's really only in pick up games where this might be an issue and you can easily choose not to disclose armies until the lores are decided.

Tzeentchling9 wrote:It's only really cheesy against dwarves and lizardmen, and dwarves should be crippling their opponent's magic phase short of a lot of IFs(I haven't been feeling much sympathy toward Lizardmen and their ****ing Slann these days).

clearly you have never met I2 ogres

the really broken thing is that the Lore of Death gives you a Dispell dice for ever wound caused by a LoD spell.

Lukus83 wrote:IIRC there are 2. One that reduces S, another that reduces T. There may be more but I can't recall at the moment.

Unless you mean death? But that has 2 also.

I goofed. I thought those spells lasted until the casters next turn.

clearly you have never met I2 ogres

I play them actually. I was just thinking of armies with a majority of I1.

the really broken thing is that the Lore of Death gives you a Dispell dice for ever wound caused by a LoD spell.

Interestingly enough, I think this is the overlooked straw that breaks the camel's back. You lose a bunch of models, and then your opponent has a good chance of getting enough dice to do something else nasty(like cast another purple sun, or 3, if they are VC with several Forbidden Lores . Looking at you, Generalian )

Tzeentchling: Ogres are I2. They have three wounds apiece. Standard formation now is 3x2. That's an average of 12 wounds in a single casting, or +4 PD, for each Ogre unit hit. Oh, and about 140+ points each successful casting.

Also, to my knowledge nothing in the Dwarf army list is I1. I2, yes, possibly moreso than O&G, but not very many units have I1 (I'm thinking Zombies, Trolls, and Saurus).