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Fiends were fire/fire/ratling in 2 of the armies and I believe triple fire in the third, although I didn't get to play him.

From what they have said in the tournament, they will start counting high output shooting units as an artillery choice to prevent this.



I suffered a fair bit from it, but wished I had taken my mourngul as it would have helped loads.
Being a beginner tournament I left it out though.

Saving grace was blood knights ripping through them followed by fell bats as support.

 auticus wrote:
They are battleline in a skyre army so are unlimited use within points.

My group simply enforces WYSIWIG, which I think is a very reasonable thing to do. Given that the Stormfiends box only builds ONE dude with Warpfire Throwers and costs $62... getting the 9 you'll need for the standard Skyrefyre list would cost $558. GW doesn't even sell a Warpfire Thrower Weapon Team right now. They seem to be going for about $20 on eBay and you'll need 6. That's another $120. The Warp-Grinder Weapons Team is only $30 for two, but has been out of stock for some time and is metal... so don't hold your breath for a restock next week. Oh, and the Arch-Warlock is in the same boat. $16.50, metal and out of stock. The two Warlock Engineers you'll need are currently in stock at $20 each... but are also metal, so buy now before they're also out of stock.

So... that's $764.50 minus whatever discounts you can get online for the Stormfiends PLUS whatever you have to pay for shipping on eBay for the other models... if you can find what you want. From a practical standpoint, putting this list together is expensive and annoying. You can't just go down to your local shop and pick up the models. It's a lot of work to put together for what is really a one trick pony list that has several hard counters.

To summarize... Yes. You can take as many of these as you want, but holding players to WYSIWIG means they'll be spending $62 per model if they want the same weapons load out on each. As such, they're fairly expensive per point from an actual dollar standpoint. If money means nothing, great... but money usually means something and most people I know won't invest heavily into a 'meta army' that might be invalidated with the next release.

We don't enforce that you must only use parts from the box. People convert or mod models regularly, sculpt etc. So they only need 3 boxes and then they mod / convert/sculpt the missing parts as needed.

Or, you know, just buy the bits from ebay for a (relative) pittance since you don't need the entire sprue for, what, 10 bits?

Of course, you're not wrong about it dissuading bandwagoners, but anyone who really wants to play a certain army will do it with little problem.

I was looking at those things a couple weeks ago to theorize the army cost, and they weren't out of stock then. eBay WFT were 10 or less... I think that alone says something.

I so feel your pain on wanting to use the units you think look cool. I suffer from that, so have learned to stay away from the tourney scene and only play friendlies.

Afterall, I got into the hobby for hobby sake, not the game sake so much, so I want to have a really cool army on the field! So, I usually play my sons and happily lose most games - no regrets at all! My army looks cool and I have fun playing.

 auticus wrote:
We don't enforce that you must only use parts from the box. People convert or mod models regularly, sculpt etc. So they only need 3 boxes and then they mod / convert/sculpt the missing parts as needed.

That's fair. If you allow non-standard mods, everything will obviously become cheaper. Firm WYSIWIG is general community standard where I live. You should be able to match the weapons up to the pictures in the books even if there is a conversion.

this is a long thread and I didn't read through it all.
but I went to a 2k tournament on the weekend with a powerhouse archaon list. I smashed my first opponent who was new to the game and had a very weak list. my next opponent had a soft khorne list but beat me slightly with crafty play.

as has been stated, play to the mission and remember there are only 5 turns. you brought a really soft list with no synergy and basically not a single unit that will accomplish anything; be it scoring, killing, holding etc.

skeletons for example... if you like them the bring blobs. 1p skeletons is nothing. 3 squads of 30 would be cheap and almost impossible to kill if they're buffed.

death has a ton of good stuff and you could definitely make a list you love the look of that holds up competitively. it sucks to play against a list you have no chance of but don't fault your opponents. in all my years of competitive gaming I've never been to a tournament where there weren't power lists. people pay money to enter and compete. Doesn't mean you have to be an donkey-cave or that your games can't be fun but most guys aren't showing up for a fun game win or lose.

if you'd rather play super fluffy and fun then maybe focus on narrative events and you'll have a blast. if you like competitive play then utilize dakka to help you get the most bang for buck to tweak your list and you'll be fine. morghasts are great and relatively affordable. or go on ebay and find a mourngul for 30 bucks. you'll put it in every list lol.

just don't buy 3 of them or you'll find people making posts like this about YOU

have fun!

There is a lot of good advice here on your list. However I would also emphasize taking advantages of the Synergies that can be found in the army.

Here is what I would do with the list.

Necromancer on a Horse
Artifact: Ring of Immortality

Legion of Death Battalion

Wight King with sword, steed, standard. - general
Command trait: Ruler of the night
Artifact: tomb Blade

5 black Knights
10 grave guard w/ great swords
30 skeletons
10 skeletons
10 skeletons

Total: 980

Ok here is the synergies that you can get with this configuration. The Legion of Death formation gives you an extra 4 inch move instead of running, and you get 1 extra model back each round. This is in addition to what you gain back from your banners. With your command and alliance ability, you can ignore a wound on a 5+, and then you can roll for your standard and ignore those that get through on a 6. Lastly your wight King can heal himself or any nearby multi wound model if he kills something in combat. All this combines to add to your resiliency.

Offensively, your key combo is to use the Wight Kings command ability on your grave guard, followed by the Necromancer casting Danse Macabre. This gives them an extra Attack, and the ability to make a second pile in and Attack. So each grave guard will get 6 attacks each, with any 6's on the wound rolls dealing double damage.

Unit selection was based on what you already had. The Heroes are on mounts, because there is no downside to doing so. You have one big tarpit unit of skeletons, and 2 smaller units that I would focus on objectives with. One squad of grave guard as your hammer unit, and a minimal unit of black Knights as they are required for the formation, and can be used to hunt targets of opportunity and mobile objective grabbers. The Sword is there to keep your wight King alive mostly, as is the ring for your necromancer.

That's what I would do with it. It doesn't have any monsters, but I think the formation benefits will out weigh it. This list wins through attrition. You focus on resilience and regenerating your units, while you whittle away at your opponents and cripple their ability to hit back. It doesn't do a lot, but it should do what it's supposed to really well. At least until people catch on to it and start sniping your heroes.

That is actually a very clever list, I never really appreciated the usefullness of the Wight King

responding directly to the OP:

I think you will have a lot more fun playing against opponents in a casual setting where you can make sure the lists aren't obviously mismatched. Wargaming is a weird hobby in that it is part competitive strategy game, part art. Caring about aesthetics is a totally parallel concern to caring about winning matches. They have nothing whatsoever to do with one another. If you happen to like the aethetics of the models that also happen to be very competitive then great, but I suspect that is not true for you specifically. As such, you are going to have more fun in an enviroment that doesn't prime competitors to care more than usual about winning matches (like a tournament -- even a beginners one).

I think part of the problem too is that you have stumbled into a situation where you are both having problems theorizing because of inexperience and also happen to like a bunch of units that are relatively mediocre. Also, while 1000 points is a nice point level for people who are starting out from a financial sense, it's also somewhat more unforgiving in terms of list design. A tuned 1000 point list is just going to be miles ahead of an untuned one simply because every point that you spend in an inefficient way is that much larger a percent of your overall resources.

Non-TK deathrattle is a very low powered army right now. Eventually they may get better if they get their own book, but for now they just aren't going to be a competitive tournament army outside of some very specific builds.

That said, there is plenty of fun to be had outside of tournaments -- especially tournaments being run by jerks.

 gummyofallbears wrote:
That is actually a very clever list, I never really appreciated the usefullness of the Wight King

Thank you.

To the OP, from the list I made above, I would do the following to go up to 2000 points.

Increase each skeleton unit to 40. Add the bone giant (nice thematic choice by the way), 2 Morghast (either are nice, but I like the Archai). This gets you to 2,000 on the dot. You will have 3 tarpits, and 3 hammers, and everything but the Necromancer is a skeleton in appearance. I might have to build this list myself. Lol. It's not top tier and has glaring weaknesses, but would be really fun and thematic to play with and against.

Thanks for the advice, everyone. I am indeed more of a narrative/fluff player rather than a competitive one, which is why my choices are more based on aesthetics than anything else. I was hoping that the "tournament" I'd joined would have some narrative element (as it was meant to be the prelude to the league that starts this month), but that clearly wasn't the case.

Anyways, I've been thinking some more on the subject, more specifically on what I personally would like to run as an army. Skeleton Warriors aren't my favourite, in fact, they're the models I found least attractive in the VC range, so I'm probably never going to run more than 20 of them. On the other hand, I love my Grave Guard and Black Knights, as I think they're awesome and they fit my army's fluff way more than the scantily-clad peasants that the Skeleton Warriors are - in my opinion, anyway

I'm willing to make a compromise though, if it means that I can at least get a fighting chance. To that end, I've been considering the following:

Wight King
Necromancer

?x Grave Guard
20x Skeleton Warriors (2x10)

?x Blood Knights

In this list, I'd run my Black Knights as Blood Knights; they look pretty much the same, even equipment-wise, and I don't think many would make a problem of them having skeletal faces rather than vampire ones. I'm not sure if I'd be better off running 10 of them (which means I could take only 5 Grave Guard) or just 5 (which opens up a lot more options, including Spirit Hosts or even the Bone Giant).

The Blood Knights could function as the hammer to the Skeleton Warriors' anvil, while the Grave Guard stick with the Necromancer and Wight King to hold objectives/serve as bodyguards.

Thoughts?

Blood knights are absolutely brutal. They refuse to die, even when faced with overwhelming odds, I usually run them with a vampire lord on a horse near them to keep mystic shield on them and have a little more close combat oomph (obviously that isn't an option for you but thats alright).

The necromancer paired with a bunch of grave guard is also an amazing choice, if he keeps buffing them with magic support them they can become quite brutal.

Happy wargaming!
~Mikey

 Ezra Tyrius wrote:

Requizen wrote:
That said, there are very few units that are just straight garbage, so if you want to make something work, you can make it work.

That said, you can't make everything work at once. You can't just pick random units and make a working list - especially with an army like Death, which generally requires support and combos to work. Pick the one thing you like - if it's blobs of skeletons, you can make it work, but you'll probably be sacrificing the Bone Giant and Grave Guard to do so. No army can just slap units together, list writing is definitely a necessary skill to have.

My main problem is that the highlighted seems like the only viable option available. Every single time I've posted my army list here on Dakka, the response was virtually always the same: get more Skeleton Warriors. But I personally don't like them, they just don't have the cool-factor the Grave Guard do have, and it sucks that I apparently need 30 of them before they even work somewhat decently.

Also, I thought my list was going to work, as it all seemed to check out in my head: the Skeleton Warriors tarpit an enemy, the Grave Guard hack said enemies apart, the Archers provide cover fire, the Black Knights go headhunting with the Spirit Hosts and the Bone Giant fights the big monsters, while the Wight King and Necromancer provide all the above with abilities and spells.

Does that sound random to you? Well it sure as feth didn't to me.

If it's the aesthetic of the Grave Guard that you enjoy (I do too!) then why don't you just use those modes as skeleton warriors? As long as you make it clear, I don't see why there would be a huge problem.

In hindsight, I probably should have done that... Part of the reason I bought the Skeleton Warriors kit was because I needed some legs to convert my Hexwraith parts into Spirit Hosts, and I had a box of push-fit skeletons to fill up the unit, so yeah.

My plan now is to get myself a SC: Skeleton Horde box, so I can run a second unit of Skeleton Warriors (or one big blob of them), or two units of Black Knights (or one unit of 10 Blood Knights). I'd convert/use the Mortarch as either, well, a Mortarch or run it as a counts-as Terrorgheist/Zombie Dragon/Vampire Lord on Zombie Dragon.

That should allow me to experiment a bit more with my army composition, and hopefully figure out how best to use my skeletal horde

Basically I like a lot of the choices you made on the original list, but you kind of spread yourself out thin with your choices.

Necromancer + Wight King is a rock solid choice. I love the combo of the Wight Kings command ability and the Danse Macabre. The command ability adds one Attack, and the Danse lets you pile in and Attack twice. Use them both on your Grave Guard and they will be doing 6 attacks a turn each. They only problem is that at 1,000 points they are nearly a quarter of your points.

Grave guard are great, but I would put them into one unit of 10 instead of two units of 5. Main reason is that you need a cushion to keep your unit from being wiped out and allowing your banners to replace lost units. I prefer the great blades as the better to wound roll is worth more to me than the shield benefits. A unit of 10 Grave Guard buffed by the above Necro/WK combo will on average do 62 attacks, hit about 41 times, deal about 27 wounds, 4 of those dealing double damage, all with a -1 rend. This will delete any unit it charges against.

So right there that's 400 points out of a 1k list. It's a great combo that can totally devastate what it's thrown against, but it's nearly half of your 1k list devoted to it.

10 skeletons are a speed bump, not a tarpit. Skeletons can be one of the games best tarpits with a little support. Support can include Legion of Death formation and the Tomb Kings Tomb Herald each can add +1 to their regeneration every turn. With a d6+2 models coming back every turn it can hold up against almost anything. You just need enough cushion to keep them alive long enough to bounce back. In the mean time whatever they are holding up will be diminished in return.

Skeleton Archers can do work, but they really need numbers. They really want to be in units of 30. That way they can take a few casualties and still get their double shots. 10 skeletons will do about 1 wound a turn. Not enough to have any impact in the game. 30 archers will make 60 shots, hit 20 shots, and wound 10 times. That's enough to make an actual difference in game. Still, 30 archers is 300 points and can be hard to fit in a 300 point game.

Skeleton Horesmen are ok. But in your list they are basically mobile objective grabbers that satisfy your requirement for a 2nd battle line. I wouldn't expect much more than that from them.

The Bone Giant is great, fits the army aesthetic perfectly. It makes for a nice secondary hammer unit.

Spirit Hosts are kind of out of place. They really don't bring any synergy to the list.

I would go with the suggestions I listed earlier to focus on synergies. At the minimum I would drop the archers and ghosts and up the skeletons to a squad of 30. This gives you a great tar pit to tie something up while your giant and grave guard take things down. At higher points I would bring back the archers and other units, but at 1k you have to really prioritize and focus on a few key things.