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I played WHFB in 5th and 7th Edition and have quite a lot of Wood Elves. I became curious about AoS and so far mostly like what I see. I really like the models and aesthetic of what are now the Sylvaneth and the Wanderers and have quite a few sweet projects that I never finished. That said, I'm a little concerned about the actual gameplay.

Back in 7th edition, Wood Elves had two strong advantages: maneuverability and striking power. This was balanced out by lack of staying power. I could never really win a protracted fight, so I had to use a lot of very careful maneuver to enable me to isolate and destroy enemy units with fast attacks and then using speed/terrain to either escape or domino into the next target. Not many other armies could play like this, and it led to pretty compelling game-play.

Looking at AOS, it's not really clear to me what strengths these factions have, if any.

Sylvaneth have their own battletome (which I haven't gotten to check out yet, so I haven't seen the battalion bonuses), but nevertheless the actual unit warscrolls seem very underwhelming. I'll grant that the characters -- Alarielle, Durthu, and Drycha Hamadreth -- and Kurnoth Hunters all seem reasonably efficient and pack a lot of punch either at range, in melee or both. The rest of the army, however, seems incredibly one-dimensional. Dryads, Tree-Revenants, and Spite-Revenants all seem to fill vaguely the same role. They are all decent-ish in melee and have a slightly special characteristic (7" move, teleporting, bravery debuffs) and seem kinda lackluster for their point cost. Then you have the Treelord, which is fine but pales in comparison to a lot of other monsters (comparing the Treelord to the Soulgrinder is pretty depressing). That's it. No cavalry speed units, no fliers (other than Alarielle), minimal ranged units. At the end of the day I'm not sure I see anything that makes the Sylvaneth stand out.

Wanderers don't have a battletome yet, so i suppose I can excuse a lot of their units not being really up to date, but again I don't really see how they measure up. While the close combat units look fine on paper, they start looking a lot worse as soon as people start talking about what basically any army that has actual synergy can do, turning basic troops into dice-piling monsters with rerolls, killer defense etc. The ranged units just seem bad. When Glade Guard are getting out-shot (and BADLY) by Orcs (erm, Orruks), something seriously weird is going on. The list looks reasonably fleshed out in terms of tactical options, but all of those options seem dreadfully weak.

I know you can field these armies together, but in doing so you sacrifice what synergies you do have as they don't share keywords. It's weird being in a world where skaven and chaos warriors and chaos daemons can all take up Nurgle banners and form a fully synergized army while Wanderers and Sylvaneth can't.

Am I missing something here? I've seen people claim that the Sylvaneth are good, but seriously? Five unit choices that aren't characters, and three of them are REALLY similar?

Sylvaneth would be the most mobile faction at the moment I think. The entire faction can teleport between wyldwoods and there's a few things that can place some for you. You get a free one placed before you both choose sides for having the sylvaneth faction but you need at least 2 for teleporting fun times. Basically they really don't need calvary since it' not hard to have a treelord ancient tank (with traits he can ignore rending unless its -2 or better and there's an artifact to give him +1 to his save roll, combine this with his command trait and you have a 2+ save that rerolls 1s and needs a rend of -2 or better to deal with) and some hunters in their face for a turn one assault.

Dryads are like an anvil you run them in units of 20 generally and they do decently. Tree revenants are like assassins, you can teleport them into the back to take out some cannon crew or wizards. Spite are like the gimmicky unit if you're going to play with bravery stuff there's some nice combinations for them with stormcast stuff if I remember right.

Wanderers I haven't really looked into however. I'd say gameplay wise you'd be better running pure sylvaneth than adding in some wanderers to them.

Sylvaneth are one of those armies that seems bad on paper, seems worse the first time you try them, and seems insanely powerful when you have to fight someone who knows how to use them. They are very synergy-dependent not just on how the units work together but in how the units work with Wyldwoods and their placement. I would certainly say they have a notable learning curve.

The constant power of the wyldwoods teleporting shenanigans they can get up to is surprisingly potent, they are however pretty weak in direct face to face combat, thus they do rely on their tricky stuff to deal with things that'll hammer them down.

Your Treelords are where it's at.

Durthu, and Drycha Hamadreth and Kurnoth Hunters will all serve you well and just throw the rest of your points into branchwraiths/dryads to soak up the wounds it takes to get the others across the board.

IF you take revenants, be warned they look good on paper but without proper support they will die quickly.

Good luck! If you have all the older models you can still make it look good.

Yeah, revenants look very dicey to me. The abilities are cool and at least add a little tactical depth to the army, but 20 points a pop for 1 wound/5+ save infantry with no range seems exceptionally dicey. Kurnoth Hunters gets you 5 wounds, a 4+ save, better offense, and better special rules for the price of 3 revenants.

I guess I really can't judge Sylvaneth without seeing the book first. Clearly some of these battalion rules, traits etc are pretty important!

swarmofseals wrote:
Yeah, revenants look very dicey to me. The abilities are cool and at least add a little tactical depth to the army, but 20 points a pop for 1 wound/5+ save infantry with no range seems exceptionally dicey. Kurnoth Hunters gets you 5 wounds, a 4+ save, better offense, and better special rules for the price of 3 revenants.

I guess I really can't judge Sylvaneth without seeing the book first. Clearly some of these battalion rules, traits etc are pretty important!

Think of them as mobile attackers who can get back into your enemies backline to deal with Warmachines and squishies who really don't want to be tied up, while usually getting cover saves due to being near the Wyldtree's.

I currently run a mixed wood elf/sylvaneth army, drawing from the free pdf and the recent book.

I'll tell you right up front that not being completely sylvaneth I don't focus on the teleporting shenanigans as my options to take wyldwood is severely restricted, that said:

You pay for dryads in groups of 10, and their massed unit bonus kicks in at 12, so they're actually well suited for deployment in groups of 20, becoming more effective individually until the enemy can kill off almost half of them.

Spite Revenants are designed to increase your gains from battleshock kills, and therefore are very useful anywhere you're killing a lot of models, they work well with those aforementioned massed dryads if you can arrange a combat near a terrain piece. They also work very well with drycha.

The wild riders are still that fast, hits hard unit and they can push hard into unwanted places with relative ease. The PDF I have says they get a really good reroll with proximity to Orion (still a valid warscroll, I'm told) who also, somehow, has been a consistent murder-machine in every game I've played him with.

Sisters of the Thorn are a spellcaster unit that don't take up a coveted hero slot, they are valuable for that alone, but they're also fast movers and have a good unique spell that pairs well with say... a large unit of wild riders.

The Spellweaver profile is the reason I use that PDF, it's the only source that says she can take a mount (and the general's handbook tells you how many points that costs) and is essential for the role I use her in: to resurrect dead sisters of the thorn and wild riders.

Overall I find they compliment each other, but they are distinctly two armies now. Lacking the ability to take their special lore and relics sucks, but at least I can fall back on to the generic order stuff.

Just for note, there is a Sylvaneth unit not updated in the battletome, the smaller treekin (bigger then dryads, smaller then the monsters) within the wood elves PDF.

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
Just for note, there is a Sylvaneth unit not updated in the battletome, the smaller treekin (bigger then dryads, smaller then the monsters) within the wood elves PDF.

Do tree kin have a point value in the General's Handbook? I'm waiting for my copy to come in. Scrollbuilder has them as 100 pts for a unit of 3, which seems weird as I doubt the point cost would be 33.3. It also has Sisters of the Thorn at 44 points each which seems a bit odd as well, albeit not impossible. If they are, in fact, ~30-35 points each that seems like a really good value. Tree Kin were never very good in 7th ed WHFB but I always wanted to field some because it seemed like a fun conversion project. The old models were terrible, but with some wire, greenstuff and creativity it seemed very doable to turn the dryad kit into Tree Kin.

Why not a come back of the sort-of-bretonnian as faitful knight who fight for the Queen, aka alarielle ?

Aos is all about pushing up to eleven his most iconic theme. Graal knight with shining armor and more "wood" icon, like deer antler or licorn mount, less iconography and another name would be a nice view along driads and the more "savage" aspect of the sylvaneth faction. The could serve as cavalry or heavy infantry.

In the end time, ariel (if i remenber well), wanted to create a refuge world guarded by the best bretonnian knight. A call back on this could be quite pleasant.

What happened to that refuge world?

ledha wrote:
Why not a come back of the sort-of-bretonnian as faitful knight who fight for the Queen, aka alarielle ?

Aos is all about pushing up to eleven his most iconic theme. Graal knight with shining armor and more "wood" icon, like deer antler or licorn mount, less iconography and another name would be a nice view along driads and the more "savage" aspect of the sylvaneth faction. The could serve as cavalry or heavy infantry.

In the end time, ariel (if i remenber well), wanted to create a refuge world guarded by the best bretonnian knight. A call back on this could be quite pleasant.

I could totally see myself doing this at some point. I liked the Green Knight quite a lot and toyed with the idea of making a small army of "feral" Brets that were allowed to patrol the outer borders of the forest by the Wood Elves. It's nice that the AoS rules make this an actual possibility.

I'm not sure about the list builder you are using, but in the GH you pay for min units - so the 3 for 100 sounds right. But they are not 33.3 pts each. You pay for the minimum, so 3 for 100; 6 for 200 etc. You can take odd numbers but you pay full price.

So if you took 5 of them you are still paying 200 pts.

Ohh, I see. Strange! That does make Tree Kin quite a bargain then. I'm surprised I don't see more people talking about them. Compare to Kurnoth Hunters against a target with a 5+ save

Kurnoth w/ swords: .062 wounds/point @ 1" range
Kurnoth w/ scythes: .044 wounds/point @ 2" range
Tree Kin: .047 wounds/point @ 2" range

Kurnoth (melee, not charging) against no rend: .33 effective wounds/point
Treekin (melee, not charging) against no rend: .24 effective wounds/point
Kurnoth (melee, not charging) against rend 1: .19 effective wounds/point
Treekin (melee, not charging) against rend 1: .18 effective wounds/point
Kurnoth (melee, not charging) against rend 2: .12 effective wounds/point
Treekin (melee, not charging) against rend 2: .15 effective wounds/point
Kurnoth (moving/charging) against no rend: .17 effective wounds/point
Treekin (moving/charging) against no rend: .24 effective wounds/point

Treekin have an extra inch of movement, Kurnoth have an extra point of bravery. Kurnoth extend the range of your command abilities, while Tree Kin give your wizards an extra spell.

Overall, I think these units are really very close in power level. Kurnoth Hunters with swords are more offensively efficient, but Tree Kin beat out Kurnoth Hunters with scythes. Which is better depends a lot on how much you value the extra inch of range. Just for what it's worth in these calculations I'm assuming minimum unit sizes (which is an advantage to the hunters who get a champion), assuming Tree Kin are within 18" of a hero, and assuming that all Kurnoth Hunters survive to make their mortal wound roll at the end of combat.

On defense, Hunters really shine when either getting charged or getting bogged down in combat with units that don't rend. In this scenario, they are about 40% more efficient than Tree Kin. On the other hand, in situations where the Hunters can't use their thicket ability (ie: any time they are moving), Tree Kin are about 40% more efficient. In other situations they are very close to one another.

Seems to me that if Kurnoth Hunters are considered to be very good, then Tree Kin are at least in the same league and deserve consideration depending on what you expect to face!

Flank Dryads with tree kin and keep the hunters back for shooting duty. 30" range is some of the longest in the game. They can go hth if needed, but if anything gets through the dryads and tree kin that's what the tree lords are for!