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I think I may look into taking a Cygor via a scroll of binding for SoM. With all the extra wizards, plus costing him a little closer to realistic (still wish he was ws 3), he may actually be worth it.

Maybe Hatred on Force of Order and rerolls hits and wound on Wood Elves.

@Steamdragon: I figured the 5+ scaly skin save would be there mostly as insurance against stupid deaths, like death by Skinks/Gutter Runners. A group of soldiers with great swords probably should be able to kill a giant, given a little time.

Enh, 5+ means that for every 3 shots that wound, you're taking 2 of those wounds. That's at S3. It means even a decent short bow volley will still drag your monster under pretty quickly.

Arachnarok has W8, I believe, and Scaly 5+. Of course, with Strider he's better at leaping cover than say, a Giant that might fall over and hurt itself.

The HPA is only W5 but has Regen. (Not to mention the "Too Horrible to Die!" chart...)

A Dragon Ogre Shaggoth is scaly 4+, but also immune to lightning. (GG lore of heavens!)

A Hydra is brok-... 4+ scaly with Regen. (Bad basis for comparison, I know, but I include it for completeness sake.)

The Stegadon is 4+ scaly or 3+ scaly depending on model.

The Treeman is 3+ scaly (granted, it's Flammable...)

Basically I just don't think 5+ scaly is tough? good? enough for a monster. I mean, most Lizardman are scaly 5+, aren't they? It should also be noted that most (if not all) of those monsters have considerably better special rules than the Beastmen rare choices (outside the Giant, I mean, which is identical across what... 3 armies?).

(apologies, my brain sorta died while typing out my post so I may have slightly lost my train of thought XD )

It is almost meaningless, but it's a means to help resist throwing a jillion fodder at a monster and laughing. Monsters aren't crazy underpowered now and we're talking about rules for all of them.

I'd actually be okay with like a 6+ regen for everyone, which makes a bit of thematic sense with villagers getting their torches and monsters, pretty much in general, eating everything. If you already got a regen higher, you get nothing.

Thought I'd add this in:

played a game last night with a friend and we let him house rule his ghorgons (two of them) to have 4+ scaly skin and regeneration.

I was playing dark elves and still had little trouble bringing down the baddies but it seemed that for 275pts the two extra abilities really helped keep the ghorgon alive!

I understand that a 5+ save isn't great, but I'm talking about Giants, A-bombs, and Jabberslythes here. They're not covered in plates of chiton or scales or armour. Just thick skin and fat and muscle.
Where Toughness ends and Scaly Skin begins is a tough call; I'm just saying that monsters should be tough enough to get a little of both, simply because they're so big.

On average, the 5+ save won't do much for you. But it gives you a chance. As it is, a Giant can be taken down by Skinks worth 60% of his points in a single volley of darts, with basically zero chance to do anything about it.

Stubborn would also go a long way in protecting monsters, I think. Sure, the Hydra would be even better than he is now. But he's comically over-powered anyway (Hatred? Scaly Skin and Regen? For 175pts?).

A 6+ Regen save would sorta' help, but it makes no sense. Giants don't regenerate.

Regen is just a word. Regen is a ward save that doesn't work on fire. That's all.

Um...no. Regeneration involves the, ya' know, regeneration of flesh, blood, and bone.

Rules are written. Using words. Words matter.

Ward saves cover everything from a magic field (talisman of _____) to just being really freakin fast (see: 4++ ward for skaven assassins dodging...). Don't see why Regen should be all that different; whether it's wounds actually closing or wounds that just end up being superficial and negligible.

Warpsolution wrote:Um...no. Regeneration involves the, ya' know, regeneration of flesh, blood, and bone.

Rules are written. Using words. Words matter.

It's the game mechanic that matters. What you're talking about is the fluff section of a game mechanic and it was never meant to be either all-encompassing or limiting. The words are irrelevant and mutable.

Necrotechts have a Stone Shaper rule. STONE. Regeneration (6+) for Animated Constructs. So, you know, all those stone statues are super scared of fire. Which makes no sense whatsoever and it certainly doesn't involve any flesh/blood/bone. They could have written that it was a Ward(6+) save that didn't work against fire and in the round a fire attack happened it was down. But...you know, you just might as well call it Regen and save some confusion. That rule exists and it's clear, so why rewrite it?

It's part of making your own fluff. If you made a character with an Always Strikes First ability, you could say it was because he was a spellcaster and was actually slowing down the entire world, not speeding himself up. The end result is exactly the same. Or that he had a hypnotic aura.

Fly can be because of wings or a magic carpet or a broom or a gyrocopter blades. It doesn't matter, that's just fluff. The mechanic for them all is exactly the same.

You can do it for pretty much every rule. Do ALL models have Always Strikes Last for the exact same reason? No, of course not. It could be they're really slow. Or using a big huge weapon. Or they're lazy. Or their minds are stuck in the Realm of Chaos, etc etc etc.

The fluff around the rules are generic so they can be used by armies ranging from Daemons to Dwarfs to Beastmen, which have almost nothing in common.


Why would Giants regen? The balance answer is to give them a weak ward save that has a shortcoming. The fluff reason...? I don't know, because they periodically eat people that are full of vitamins.

Ah yes, the constructs. Well, the Tomb Kings regenerate their stone flesh and bone, then.

I mean, don't get me wrong, here. Words are flexible. That's half of why they're useful.

Game mechanics matter, it is true. And the one and only way you can communicate game mechanics is through language. Ward saves are a versatile, catch-all type of rule. Always Strikes First is less so--regardless of the why (training or magic or drugs), he's faster than you. Fly isn't at all--you get off the ground and move through the air.

Game systems--reality simulators--should be as realistic as they can manage. I expect my Beastmen and my Dwarfs to be subject to gravity, to both be vulnerable to psychological effects such as fear, to be burned by fire, to have hearts that pump blood, etc.
When things step away from that (like the Realm of Chaos), we're told "this place is pretty weird", so I don't expect that any more.

You can try to justify this or that, but not all of those justifications will be good ones in the eyes of a writer, or even someone with a decent eye for reason.

But here's the real point to my argument as to why Giants shouldn't have a Regen save: not only is it a big ol' stretch as far as logic goes, but it barely helps them at all. A 1 in 6 chance to save them from a non-dwarf cannon isn't worth that kind of transparent logic.

It's the same logic as Necrotechts. The ONLY reason it's Regen and not Ward isn't because of recombining them, it's because if you're fighting TK you got flaming and they wanted the same weakness to carry over to their constructs. Period. The End. The fluff was written to support that game balance.

Exactly, it wouldn't help them much at all. I don't think monsters need lots of help or they'd be too powerful. Cannons are a direct counter to monsters. The greater concern is masses of skinks and such. In those cases it would help more.

We all regen, even us little humans. Scrape your knee and in a week you won't even see where. It's not out of the question that something that large would heal correspondingly faster. Regen(3) is reknitting in front of your eyes. Regen(6) could simply be faster healing. That's hardly a stretch.

Was that why they made those rules so? I don't know, and I doubt anyone here does.

If all we're looking at is a way to protect our monsters from 1,000 S3 shots, why not go with a Scaly Skin save, as I've been saying? That's not a stretch at all.

Regeneration doesn't actually make much sense in Warhammer. A troll has a 50% chance to "instantly heal" a wound, whether that wound is a sword-cut or a cannon-ball-based obliteration. A giant with a 6+ Regen would instantly re-grow half his body 1 in 6 times. Like it only kicks in when it feels like it. Not the best representation, on an individual level, but since this is a war game, no one really seems to mind.

Also...big things don't heal faster. Bigger does not equal faster. It equals, ya' know, bigger. I find that, of all things, to be a tremendous stretch.

Really, I just don't see why people would bother to come up with weird interpretations for ill-fitting rules when perfectly good ones are already in place. I'm tellin' ya; a 5+ Scaly Skin save should be on every monster's profile, unless a better one is already there.

Was that why they made those rules so? I don't know, and I doubt anyone here does.

I do. I just told you.

Yes, trolls only heal when they feel like it too. And Daemons only ignore mortal weapons when they feel like it too. Welcome to balance within a game context.

Fantasy big things do whatever the hell we want them to, which is the whole point of this thread. A real life Giant would be useless, as its own weight would make it nearly immobile (look up dinosaur biomechanics). But even a 5 foot gash in an elephant will be healed when it would likely cripple a human for life. Simply because it's a smaller % of their mass. And while most of that is Toughness Wounds it isn't always represented like that in the game.

GW bends the special rules for whatever situation it wants all the time. As Steamdragon said. It's simply fluff. Why can't you use Regen AND Ward? A Nurgle Daemon is still a Daemon. It's simply for balance reasons, it makes no fluff sense at all. I even pointed out the TK regen--ON ROCK STATUES, yet they are somehow vulnerable to fire. Hell, my brick fireplace makes those magic-infused constructs look like wusses.

But if we want to get anal about this, the entry says "whilst the type of regeneration described above is the most common form, some creatures do have a lesser or greater chance to regenerate." And the section above describes the wholesale reknitting of bodies 50% of the time leaving no trace.