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I was again talking with the fantasy guys at our FLGS and they were saying that the Beastmen Army book was just terrible...
I remember when the Chaos army was 3 factions and your warlord determined what was core or special or whatever.
They were saying that the European tournament scene gives those players extra points JUST TO SHOW UP??
Please tell me the Beastmen are viable...My Romans are well underway and need a "Badguy" counterpart..

I can't speak to their current viability but I really miss the 6th edition fluidic combined forces approach to Chaos.

Hopefully 9th brings some of that back, even if it's only through a core allies mechanic.

Its definitely a sub-par book.

Core are overpriced. Rare choices may as well not exist they're so bad.

That alone puts them in a bad spot.

You can definitely still win with them, buts it an uphill battle requiring a lot of player skill.

As someone who's seen a competitive Beastmen list, I can safely say that they are not a bad book.

They just are very control dependent. If you control the pace, you will do well. If you let your opponent control the game, you'll lose.

The extra points is because of books like Warriors and Ogres. Competitive lists for each have the mobility, strength and armour to ruin Beastmen.

And I don't want allies. There are enough cannons about as is. Bring in allies, and everyone and their mothers will take cannons, as an allied force.

You can still make good lists with a bad book. A book being bad simply means it has an overall poor design and unit choices.

Any book which overly limits the ability to make good lists is bad by my count.

It's just a poorly designed book overall. Things are over-costed and not properly tested or thought-out.

For instance, take minotaurs. 55 points a model, or a 12 point premium over Ironguts. In exchange they get +1 WS, strike S5 at I3 instead of S6 with greatweapons, and have -1LD. They also don't get the opportunity to do d3 impact hits like the ogres do.

But most importantly, they have a rule that gives them frenzy and a cumulative +1 attack for every round they win combat. That's awesome! Except it also states that they can only overrun d6"...and since they're frenzied they MUST overrun that d6". So they're a combat machine that can break units but not chase them down.

Oh, and not to mention that the ironguts are core, while the minotaurs are special.


You can still build a beastmen list that packs a mean punch. They just don't have the tools to combat stronger books (like warriors or ogres), and are fighting at a disadvantage due to their over-costed units.

Speaking as a Beastmen player:

- No ranged output. We lack any real shooting units beyond Shortbows and a hilariously overpriced Stone Thrower. While our magic is impressive, it is also best applied to Shadow and so we don't really have any ranged hitting power at all.
- Inability to deal with certain targets. Building on the first point, we are only really capable of slapping people up in melee. Unfortunately this doesn't work against a lot of people, meaning that Daemon Princes, Chimerae, or generally anything with Fly and decent melee output, is generally capable of walking through the army. Basically any target where people's response is usually 'Just shoot it!' cannot be dealt with in a cost-effective method.
Silly points costs. Minotaurs are not worth 55pts, our monsters are certainly not worth 275pts. I disagree that Gor are overpriced relative to other 8E units but there are a few stinkers in the book.
Every army looks the same. As a result of poor internal balance, every army tends to be built along the same lines. There will be a brick of Bestigor and a cabal of Shaman around a Herdstone somewhere. Expect to see at least 3 Razorgor and the Core section split between Gor and Raiders. Sometimes players will be adventurous and take the Doombull for a spin but it's rare to see a truly unique army that is capable of playing well.

I believe the book has potential and I want to love the army. I think that simply giving us the BRB version of Ambush would help out, along with *something* to deal with big monsters reliably. And there is a lot of recosting to be done.

All of the above. Our monsters have -great- models but stats that are underwhelming. Feth. All the Beastmen models are great. And the fact they are my best painted are hands down why I haven't sold them.

I'm actually sort of tempted to rework them into a Warriors of Chaos army. But with thinks like Centigor Knights, Warriors that are bestigors with shields and swords etc.

I can tell you the Beastmen WoC army works very well. Buddy who plays beastmen got so disillusioned with the book he converted them all over to WoC.

Centigor Chaos Knights(using chaos steeds as lower bodies)

Bestigor/Gor Warriors

Best of all he can use his Dragon ogres again

^

More or less exactly what I wana go for. But right now i'm head over heels with my Dark Elves. Even if my lvl 2 stabbed herself in the foot with power of darkness then blew up on her miscast. Effectively taking half of my 750pt list with her in the first turn.

Not including special characters, Orc and Goblins have 42 units (and a giant), while the Empire has 31.

Beastmen have 21 and a giant. Put another way, the writers got about half way to 2/3ds of the way through writing the codex and then decided that they couldn't be bothered to finish it, so just called it complete and went home.

It's just an unfinished codex is the problem. I bet if you added another dozen units to it, it would get properly rounded out.

It was also written shortly before 8th edition came out, so was likely written with a prototype of 8th in mind. The book was released but 8th edition was changed before its final incarnation. So the book was also written for essentially a different rule set.

I heard a rumour that the person writing the Beastmen codex quit partway through and took all the files with him, forcing the person who took over to bang out a rushed codex that he wasn't particularly enthused about to begin with.

Not sure how true that is, but it definitely would explain things if it was.

There are a couple of good units in the book - razorgors spring to mind - and the potential to build a strong magic phase.

Ambush is rubbish unfortunately, which is annoying because the 8th edition generic ambush rule is better. It's just about workable if you take Khazrak One Eye but you have to build the army around it.

Too bad the Razorgor model is... well. what it is.

 Ailaros wrote:
Not including special characters, Orc and Goblins have 42 units (and a giant), while the Empire has 31.

Most people won't say O&G are a top tier list. They are kind of multiple armies in one book O AND G. A lot of their units don't mesh together.

The simple fact is that nearly everyone has moved to 8th edition rules. They have been repriced. Big stuff is almost universally cheaper and they got more options. So yeah, they're struggling with an old book. They have some units that are still crazy good. Minotaurs being one.

21 units is still a small number of units. VC and elves both have high 20's, but then they also have a massive number of mounts to choose from, so those numbers are deceptively low (as there's rather a difference between a vampire riding a zombie dragon relative to riding a skeletal steed, rather than going on foot, despite being treated as a single unit for the purposes of my counting scheme).

I mean, let's say that you only add 6 more units (so it would still be a relatively limited codex), but those 6 units were three artillery pieces of some sort (even just some bolt throwers, for example), and two small arms units (archers, etc.), and a new wizard. Throw in a few different types of mounts to make it even with other army books.

With those few changes, how much would people still be complaining about beastmen? How much would people be complaining about ANY army if they had a third of the units hacked out of their army book?

It's not that what's there is necessarily THAT bad so much as there just isn't enough there.

I'd rather argue the biggest problem is the overpriced (sometimes to silly levels) units. Ungors need to be cheaper to viably use them as the fodder they should be for instance. The book wouldn't be too bad if they tweaked the points costs and addressed the ambush rules.

My biggest problem with the book was after rebasing all of my ungors onto bigger bases, they then asked me to rebase them back onto the original sized base they had........

That and returning to brown O&G's.

Ebayed.

I have faced beasts many many times, as a clubmate plays them (and is somewhere in the top five beast players in the US? Though it is a small club ), and I can attest that they are far from a bad army. Shadow magic, rerolls, T4, great chaff options and bestigors being leading reasons for their viability. But I would be pretty deranged to not admit the book itself is not good, for many of the reasons cited above. For me, the most glaring mistakes are the lore of the wild () and the rare monsters - even the ghorgon, which IMO is halfway to brilliant, is still a poor naked bastard that costs too much.

While there may be something to arguing for sheer variety of available units in a book, take a look at the standard list(s) generated by the 8E books and count the number of different units you see across them all. I'd wager it's not particularly high for many of them, especially the 'best' books, particularly ogres. For me the true measure of an armybook's success is how many different viable builds it allows for, not average tournament placing or other competitive metic (which are going to be heavily influenced by system rules and current meta). As such the OK book is something like a functional failure, as there's really only one build that has come from it.

But I digress

- Salvage

Well, just because uncreative people only take that one, THE list for their army doesn't mean that variety is pointless or that not bothering with it isn't the sign of a bad codex.

Not everybody wants a codex that produces A list that's overpowered and just beats up everybody else. That might be a definition of what makes a codex "good", but it's certainly not the only.

So the Ogres get d3 impact hits and Minotaurs only get one?
That doesnt seem right--but oh well. I guess I can start collecting the models, just not with any army build in mind. Back in the day - the priestly/perinin edition- my beastmen had a huge block of minotaurs and and even bigger block of bestigors...but that was when you could ally the WOC and Daemons and Beastmen in the same list...ohh those were the days werent they?

Ogres only get D3 if they roll 10+ on charge. So usually not.

What makes an army book good is the ability to field multiple viable units and create an army that can be unique and still affective. Beastmen have a single mind-set, get into combat and hope for the best.

Strange how Skaven and Beastmen were both written in 7th and while Skaven thrive, Beastmen are a massive struggle. Skaven seemed to have been pointed absurdly low while Beastmen were priced out of this world. Mayhaps it was an effort to correct their skaven problems.

I have considered using Beastmen for WoC army as Marauders, because marauders are awful. I think it would be a very solid looking army.

DukeRustfield wrote:
Ogres only get D3 if they roll 10+ on charge. So usually not.

Its basically a 1/6 chance of getting D3 impact hits.

At least its way better than the old book. You needed to charge at least 6 inches to get 1 impact hit

Somewhere, in a dark corner, my Rat Ogres are crying, waiting their turn to be taken on the battlefield (usually fielding 2 out of 12 painted ones)

Plus, people complain about steadfast, so how about a unit that gets more and more free attacks per turn to just wipe the unit out? Free attacks that you get to keep until you lose a round of close combat?

Man, I'd pay at least 50 pts a model for a unit like that...

Im sure the next Army Book will fix things.
Soooo...
What units do you guys think the Beastmen need..Honestly the idea of a stone thrower is a little much for me to handle, I picture beastmen as wild and savage and incapable of operating any kind of machine. How about beasts that breath flame or something or magical eruptions from the earth or bloated frogs raining from the sky..

Beastmen have a stonethrower. They need it to be a little more cost effective is all. Take out a bunch of the ineffective, screwy, magic hating rules the Cygor has and drop the points a bunch. I'd pay 225 for that. Then it would be fine. I expect the Ghorgon to be about 240 or so. They'll probably both get upgrade options of some sort since most of the newer monsters have that.

Centigors need to drop in points enough so there's a reason to take them. A few more units in general will be nice; mount options for the characters besides a chariot would be very nice...

Really, I think the three main things that Beasts need to be competitive are things that have been mentioned.

A better lore/access to more than Beasts/Death/Shadow (though these are probably the three that help the most anyways), a way to reliably handle decent armor saves (besides hoping for Okkam's Mindrazor), and point drops on many units. All monsters, several characters, Centigors, Ungor, Minotaurs, and Bestigors are, IMO, overpriced anywhere from slightly to a lot.

While I think that Bestigors were probably fairly priced when the book was printed, look what else I can get for the same points; a DE Executioner. I'm not sure how Primal Fury compares to Murderous Prowess mathematically, but I assume it's fairly close. Let's compare:

Exec: ASF(cancels GW penalty), S6, T3 I5, WS5 (IIRC), reroll 1s to wound, HA
Bestigor: S6, T4, ASL, WS4, HA, Primal Fury, funky banner rule

T4 is pretty huge...as is WS5 and swinging at S6 at I5. Hmm...looks like the Exec has that one.