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Thanks for the answer, obviously everyones opinion is welcomed. I will aproach 8th with an open mind and form my own opinion especialy that I haven't played previous editions, I'm just curious though what is considered a low point of a current ruleset. It helps analysing rules when reading and playing.

Magic is a low spot for sure. It could have been better and has problems with some of the spells being a tad too powerful.

But compared to how things were before, and the rest of 8th edition as a whole, I would say its a forgivable shortcoming.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Magic is a low spot for sure. It could have been better and has problems with some of the spells being a tad too powerful.

But compared to how things were before, and the rest of 8th edition as a whole, I would say its a forgivable shortcoming.

Exalted

Pretty good, short yet valid opinion about 8th.

Short answer, 4th ed. I have not played since 5th but single spells won a few games although more often a single magic phase with a bum hand of cards did it.

Of the top of my head I recall being involved in the following.

3k game. Conflagaration of doom panicing >1500k of elves off the board (horrible luck with LD test more than a magic issue)

IF purple sun across HE army on turn two, all 4 reapers gone 2 units of archers and a large unit of spears crippled and the bsb dead. Pretty nasty in 1500pts.

Bridge of shadows any number of times turned battles, If you remember it I probably don't need to explain.



More often than not however when magic turned a game it was a powerful mage left unchecked by the loss of his opposing number spamming magic unopposed (5+ to dispel) that would turn a game rather than a single casting.

As I stated in a post a week ago magic is not overpowered. Dwellers is only good against low strength units and if they're low strength then they're probably not your best unit on the board. I cast it 3times into a unit of temple gaurd with a slaan. The slaan was ethereal so it was the only thing I had that could kill him. The slaan and 5 temple gaurd lived and charged my 40 halberds with a priest captain and wizard. In 3 turns of combat I killed 4 temple gaurd while my unit was decimated. I should mention he used beasts and buffed his temple like crazy

Jayo'r wrote:
As I stated in a post a week ago magic is not overpowered. Dwellers is only good against low strength units and if they're low strength then they're probably not your best unit on the board. I cast it 3times into a unit of temple gaurd with a slaan. The slaan was ethereal so it was the only thing I had that could kill him. The slaan and 5 temple gaurd lived and charged my 40 halberds with a priest captain and wizard. In 3 turns of combat I killed 4 temple gaurd while my unit was decimated. I should mention he used beasts and buffed his temple like crazy

Uhm, against the average S of 3, Dwellers kill 50% of the unit. That's not weak...

 Sigvatr wrote:
Uhm, against the average S of 3, Dwellers kill 50% of the unit. That's not weak...

Against one unit. And it has a casting value of absurdly high for the default range. And to make the range semi decent the casting value goes up to abdsurdly high-er.

You keep using dwellers as an example of how magic is OP. Yet it is a decent spell in a subpar lore. If an army has access to life, it would normally have access to a better lore. The exception being wood elves.

 Sigvatr wrote:

Jayo'r wrote:
As I stated in a post a week ago magic is not overpowered. Dwellers is only good against low strength units and if they're low strength then they're probably not your best unit on the board. I cast it 3times into a unit of temple gaurd with a slaan. The slaan was ethereal so it was the only thing I had that could kill him. The slaan and 5 temple gaurd lived and charged my 40 halberds with a priest captain and wizard. In 3 turns of combat I killed 4 temple gaurd while my unit was decimated. I should mention he used beasts and buffed his temple like crazy

Uhm, against the average S of 3, Dwellers kill 50% of the unit. That's not weak...

Apparently you didn't really read my post. Like I said if the unit is strength 3 you probably don't care if it dies. And the range is awful with average rolling your wizard it will be combat next turn

Jayo'r wrote:

 Sigvatr wrote:

Jayo'r wrote:
As I stated in a post a week ago magic is not overpowered. Dwellers is only good against low strength units and if they're low strength then they're probably not your best unit on the board. I cast it 3times into a unit of temple gaurd with a slaan. The slaan was ethereal so it was the only thing I had that could kill him. The slaan and 5 temple gaurd lived and charged my 40 halberds with a priest captain and wizard. In 3 turns of combat I killed 4 temple gaurd while my unit was decimated. I should mention he used beasts and buffed his temple like crazy

Uhm, against the average S of 3, Dwellers kill 50% of the unit. That's not weak...

Apparently you didn't really read my post. Like I said if the unit is strength 3 you probably don't care if it dies. And the range is awful with average rolling your wizard it will be combat next turn

Sword Masters of Hoeth, Crossbowmen, basically most normal troops. Pretty sure I'd care about those units. Sure, you will likely be in combat. Against a unit that lost ~50% of its members. I know who I'll bet my money on.

Keep in mind that you can just spam dice on Dwellers due to ToV.

With the exception of Dwellers, LoL is a balanced lore. It's Dwellers that breaks it.

 Sigvatr wrote:
With the exception of Dwellers, LoL is a balanced lore. It's Dwellers that breaks it.

No. Dwellers is a mediocre spell at best. It is one of the two decent spells in the entire lore. The other being Throne of Vines. When Compared to a lore like Shadows which has Mindrazor, Withering, Enfeebling Foe, Pit of Shades and Miasma so that you don't rely on two spells to make the lore effective.

I think life's syngery is based on your army. I love it with my daemons, even without dweller T7 Horrors don't die easy. and using regrowth and lore attribute on a Great Unclean One, that's 1k points that just doesn't die.

A few years back I won round 2 of "ard boyz with Infernal Gateway. My opponent foolishly stacked Archaen in a unit of 18ish Chaos knights. His only other unit was a block of like 20 trolls with the troll king. He charged across the board with his knights and on round 2 I rolled the magic "11"" and sent his General, BSB and only unit with a sttndard to the Chaos Wastes. One spell, with one roll of the dice netted me a 3000 point army from GW. But Tzeentch is fickle and I haven't repeated that since.

When I used to play Empire, I managed to roll 7x 6's after casting Transmutation to Lead spell from the Lore of Metal on an Ogre Bull Horde. Turned his BSB, Slaughtermaster, and 5x Ogres into gold in one shot right before my 30x IC Knight Horde charged in and wiped them all out. Besides that, nothing really too amazing as most of my magic when I had my Empire was to buff my units before combat and let all of my War-Machines do the damage and thin out my opponents.

However since I started playing Dwarfs, I am liking the feel of not having to worry about casting any magic, and out of the 8x games I have played with them, I have yet to have a big spell that changed the game cast on me as no one has been able to hit me with a big spell yet. Big reason why I love my Dwarfs so much, they shut down the magic phase very well and recently I have noticed that mnay opponents dont even bother taking to much magic against me now because of it =D.

 bigyounk wrote:
A few years back I won round 2 of "ard boyz with Infernal Gateway. My opponent foolishly stacked Archaen in a unit of 18ish Chaos knights. His only other unit was a block of like 20 trolls with the troll king. He charged across the board with his knights and on round 2 I rolled the magic "11"" and sent his General, BSB and only unit with a sttndard to the Chaos Wastes. One spell, with one roll of the dice netted me a 3000 point army from GW. But Tzeentch is fickle and I haven't repeated that since.

That's another good example, though, how magic should work: the enemy had a pretty deathstar-ish unit that could kill most enemies in melee with ease. He put all eggs in one basket and dropped it

The problem is that the (hell yeah!) old Gateway was effective against everything due to it still dealing high S hits to any enemy units. It was a no-brainer spell.

A good example of a good 6th spell, imo, would be the 6th Little Waaagh! spell. In its basic form, you still get a test-or-wound spell, but if you're unlucky, you get High Elves to test on I. The stronger form lets you choose and makes it very effective, but on the other hand, it almost forces you to suffer a miscast.

 Sigvatr wrote:

A good example of a good 6th spell, imo, would be the 6th Little Waaagh! spell.

How about the 6th spell in Lore of Vampires? Wind of Death, strong effect but can be really random movement and can blow back on your own guys.

A virulent Plague spell from a Grey Seer sadly took most of my chaos warriors and most of the knights unit next to it. I thought that the BSB carrying exalted hero in that unit would not fluff the panic test, but I rolled a 10, the re-roll was also a 10. Sadly it was the scenario where you count the banners to assess the breaking point of the army. Since my only banner fled off the map, things weren't going too well.
The moral of the story was to bring a dispel scroll for those moments when you haven't got enough spell dice. This means in a 1000pt army, don't bring the hero sorceror since you can't buy him the dispel scroll.
Anyway, better luck next time - maybe I get to mince his Seer first.

I was playing against empire and turned a fifty man horde into a priest and a banner bearer with one plague spell.

As a VC player, I constantly struggle to find ways to either shut down a High Elf magic phase or get a good phase of my own against them. It's rough, man. Maybe VC isn't so magic-dependent now as they used to be, but its weird coming from an older edition when they seemed more dominant in the phase because they had to be.

That's how all 8th and balanced codices work - magic has been toned down in the army books to a reasonable level and often works as a supportive tool.

I fully expect High Elves to (of course) get Teclis nerfed to oblivion (hopefully making him completely useless), get a nerf to the W3 casting dice banner (removed / only +1d), no more +1 on dispelling etc.

I can't say much about VC as I rarely get to play against them, but from the times I did, they seemed like another well-balanced 8th army. They no longer fully dominate the magic phase, but on the other hand, rely less on it. There's some cheese stuff, but overall, it fits right into the line of the really good 8th codices. Playstyles change

1000 pts. game, old gateway kills off my saurus block with the BSB turn 1.



As for 8th ed books, i love them they're very well balanced against each other and i can't wait ti'll my lizards get one too. Screw cheese hands of the old ones and fire lizard spam gimme some new and balanced toys.

Yeah. I feel that most hate towards 8th books comes from people who...aim at winning at all costs. Yes, some army books have flaws such as Marauders now being too expensive resulting in dropping out of WoC armies or Skarsnik now being *ridiculously* expensive and no longer being a viable pick, but overall, the books are damn well balanced.

Yes, they are still far away from FoW levels, but seriously...I'm picking up FoW right now and GODDAMN it's so hard to learn...so many rules... :/

Really? I found FoW to be surprisingly simple.

It appears complicated but in reality the basic mechanics are quite simple.

When I got my friends to play 40k, I could just have the minis ready and tell them the rules by playing at the same time - doesn't seem that simple with FoW. that's not a negative point, I love the ruleset because on the one hand I think "What? Another exception to the rule?", but on the other hand, at the same time, I think "Yeah, makes sense, I would not want to sit on a rolling time bomb (aka flame tank) either!".

It's a very different approach, also in regard to the business strategy. 40k / WHFB aim at the casual crowd and are rulesets that were designed with a beer&pretzels mentality in mind but FoW tries to be as realistic as possible (e.g. the wound allocation rules: on a battlefield, you just don't have to carefully think about what target to shoot thus you aim for those at close distance first).

No need to get this thread sidetracked though, did not intend to, sorry :=)

I've seen a couple of examples, not many though: pit of shades cast on my death star unit with my vamp lord in and somehow getting through. The next one birona's timewarp with a full artillery empire army. It won't win them the game but it will be hard as hell to recover from!


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Vanhel's dans macabre used to get me last addition occasionally as well...

Automatically Appended Next Post:
Vanhel's dans macabre used to get me last addition occasionally as well...

Occasionally?! You were doing pretty well then! It was one of the things I hated most about the last vamp book. Oh, look, you're going to spam Vanhel's till you get your magic charge off...

Single spells win games fairly often. But they're not often the point and click 'make unit disappear now' spells people complain about. I've seen more games won with the clever use of Buff and Hex spells than Dwellers or that other spells like that.

Jayo'r wrote:
Apparently you didn't really read my post. Like I said if the unit is strength 3 you probably don't care if it dies. And the range is awful with average rolling your wizard it will be combat next turn

What? You're an Empire player. That's means other than ICK all your troops are Str 3, which means unless you've banked everything on knights, then your core units will be Str 3. And even if they are Str 4, then that means 1/3 rather than a 1/2 will die to the spell, which is still really bad.

Now, I think the impact of Dwellers is overstated, because the range is somewhat limited (meaning there's generally only one cast before you can get into the sweet, sweet protection of combat), and with IF being unlikely there's always the protection of the dispel scroll, and if he does roll IF his miscast can be as big a problem as the spell itself... but none of that means we just pretend the spell can't trash valuable units, because that happens.

With Dwellers, I guess another reason for people (including me) considering it being stronger than it looks on paper is the lore it belongs to. LoL allows you to cast the 6th without a proper risk of rolling on the miscast chart and also contains several good buff spells - it's very versatilemand Dweller seems like a slapped on "Here, you get one of these too!" spell.

 bigyounk wrote:
A few years back I won round 2 of "ard boyz with Infernal Gateway. My opponent foolishly stacked Archaen in a unit of 18ish Chaos knights. His only other unit was a block of like 20 trolls with the troll king. He charged across the board with his knights and on round 2 I rolled the magic "11"" and sent his General, BSB and only unit with a sttndard to the Chaos Wastes. One spell, with one roll of the dice netted me a 3000 point army from GW. But Tzeentch is fickle and I haven't repeated that since.

I wouldn't say I foolishly stacked him in a bunker of 18 chaos knights. That list when through 5 lists, to include 2 high elves Teclis list that were heavy on the magic, and it wasn't easy. Not much i could do, you IF the spell on 4 dice and got off the 11 on the unit. Its a risk people take with all those points in one unit. Id say it was foolish for you to pull your wizard out of his bunker into my knight bus' front arc and hope that spell wiped that unit, at risk of losing your Lvl4. Or id say you were foolish for running around the store hooting and hollering about how a "balanced list" won that game, when it was just classic gateway spam.

I have no issues losing that game, just your poor sportsmanship about it was really the only downside to the game. Just don't knock my list for losing to something i couldn't stop. And please don't confuse your gateway spam for good tactics, because those days are over. Ive been winning alot of games using the same tactics from before with this new book. Hope you can say the same.

That being said i had a good time at that tourney, and to be honest, i rather you win it then the Bretonians guy who was cheating or the skaven dude with a cardboard tower (fedex roll) and 100 ballpoint pen windows drawn on it. He had a pile of skaven bits glued in a huge pile of cotton calling it a block of 100 slaves. when it was just a pile of cotton, glue and bits with no form that he couldn't pull apart. If i could trampoline you past them then it was a win for me.

I've had it happen with my Tomb Kings vs DE (I think it was during 6th ed)
I used my casket, The DE player fluffed his dispel (1,1) and watched as every unit in the DE army (which was MSU with lone sorceress characters) take loads of wounds.
This killed every character in the army, and forced panic tests on the units which almost universally failed.
This happened in turn one.
I killed 2/3 of the army in the first magic phase.
You can't come back from that.

well I can't say a single spell cast won a game for me, but a single opponent's miscast did. his only wizard got reduced to level 0 and then my VC were free to raise massive amounts of skeletons that won me the game. both of us couldn't stop laughing when it happened, it was hilarious.