I feel that Nighthaunt are among the weakest warbands in warcry, if not actually the weakest warband, even after the points "rebalancing" done in Tome of Champions 2021. They were one of the first
AOS warbands to be translated into warcry, so the design ethos has changed a lot since that point.
Here is why I feel Nighthaunt are lagging behind:
Anecdotal evidence first:
Terrain vs. Flying -
While flying is powerful and should be baked into the cost of a model, rarely do we see terrain setups that make flying matter at all. if you use the terrain cards to set up your battlefield, (and why shouldn't you?) then there is a 99.9% chance that anything over 3" high will be placed on the table that matters to objective gathering or gameplay in general. And when cards are not use, terrain is still rarely set up so that anything higher than 3" is used. We cant have baby hurting their wittle head on the hard turf of the bloodwind spoils by falling down and going boom, can we? So the promise of verticality in the rules is thwarted by fundamental design fiat of the terrain cards themselves. Flying allows ghosts to get to the enemy fast and do next to no damage while they get brutalized in return. There is a disconnect here.
Toughness vs. damage output -
If you trust the statistical analysis that people like Reedo have performed, then there is no question that
GW designers overrate toughness. Though I would hazard to guess that we as players feel it on an intuitive level outside of such mathematical influences, and thus makes this anecdotal. Yet, for all the huffing and puffing by
GW design team about their valuation of toughness, it fails to give nighthaunt the stamina such insubstantial/incorporeal beings would intuitively enjoy. Chainrasps are a joke, and it is my estimation that they should be avoided unless you have 80 points that cannot be filled any other way. And it cant because of how everything is costed. More on that next point. I would not begrudge the low damage output of the boo bois if the toughness was actually there. But ghostys still drop easily, and flying nor toughness helps with that.
List building -
There isn't a "point spectrum" to build a list from. and if you're trying to get the most out of your points without going over, or relying on the good graces of your opponents when you do go over, then you are stuck building some fairly predetermined lists. This leads me to believe that even with the new points adjustments, they are still not costed correctly. Just when you think you've got something that might remotely enjoy the same combo techniques an other warband would enjoy, you realize that such a thing isn't remotely within the allotted points.
Objective evidence:
Reedo's youtube channel pouring over the math averages and reverse engineering the design process is fundamental to understanding how toughness is criminally overvalued by
GW designers, and how this among other design choices negatively impacts Nighthaunt and their average chances against other warbands.
This has been corroborated in other content creators channels. One content creator thinks that nighthaunt are not as bad as everyone thinks they are, and even he lists them as least amongst all available warbands. How he comes to that conflicting conclusion is beyond me.
I have a lot more to say on the topic, but I want this to be a back and forth discussion and not me vomiting a screed across your screens.
[edit]
This is my grab-it-from-the-case-and-play nighthaunt list post TOC2021:
Briar Queen
3x Myrmourn Banshees
2x Spirit Hosts
1010 pts.
Spirit hosts are about the only thing nighthaunt have a solid lead on, and even they were reduced in points with the update. The myrmourn are a bit better now, so taking 3 gives me back 45 points i would have spent prior to the update. The briar queen is an interesting ranged option to explore for the ghosts, and still being a not bad leader option. I wont take a second leader options as that eats into my spirit host points. And you cant have those points. They are autoallocated, and immutable. And as you can imagine, that becomes boring super effing fast. For me and my opponents. But what other choice is there?
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