That sounds a lot like what the hex wraiths do, passing over stuff and dealing mortal wounds, only this stuff is a lot better, arguably to good. Maybe they could instead deal d3 mortal wounds each on a 2+. What your suggesting is awesome, but in comparison to hexwraiths which deal a mortal wound on a 5+ this 2+ would be extremely powerful. Arguably the best way to improve the terradons is add some rend to their attacks while also giving them more attacks and 3+ hits and wounds.
Imho their bombs need fixing, being a one-use thing is already annoying but with D3 per model on a 4+ they also end up having a massive potential spread in terms of damage done. They can easily fizzle and do nothing, or work brilliantly and completly wipe out whatever they target, even at minimum size. It should more reliably do some damage, and be Multi-use, but the maximum potential should be lowered. Also, their ranged attacks need to get some utility back. They used to have short ranged attacks they could use to fire over a screen into a backline unit while their melee attacks dealt with the screen. But now that you can no longer shoot in melee they've lost this skirmishing utility which was one of their major draws. Interesting, but probably too weak. With only 1 potential wound/terradon it makes them very costly while doing fairly little since you sacrifice melee completly. Could have some niche uses against melee based armies though. Could be interesting if you make their ranged attacks way better alongside this.
I would definitely make their ranged attacks a little better by increasing the range... but part of the purpose of the rule design was to further separate them from the rippers in terms of role played. rippers are melee glass cannons.... terrordons should be shooty and more utility. you can use them to effectly block the enemies movement (under my rule they cant be charged, so they could screen out 3" of space around them effectively blocking some access to areas. they have to move to trigger the ability so you couldn't leave them parked there to perma block an enemies movement towards objectives) @Lizerd this is part of why I don't want to give them rend or more attacks.... they are utility in my mind... rippers are attackers. theres more to the game than killing stuff, and though we as seraphon players often lament the fact that we don't have killy things.... we have good tools for objective and utility battles and we should have units that focus on that.
Utility is great, but a 3-model unit is usually considered an "elite" unit. Having a unit like that be utility focused is a bit awkward. It would be a great ability on a 5 or 10-unit squad though. Especially as those would more easily cover a larger area, be able to make more interesting shapes (for screening) and have a higher potential for the damage from a bombing run, thus allowing the trigger to be worse than a symbolic 2+ while still retaining an noticeable amount of damage (idem for their ranged attacks). Anyways in short, I like your idea, but I feel like the current terradon models would be the wrong unit for it.
just bump the points a bit. they are also unable to charge... signifying the altitude in which they are dropping the bombs from. Elite battlefield control is still elite... and their current points are equal to Fyreslayers Herathguard berzerkers unit of 5. those things can deal 2 mortals on a 6 to hit and then continue the attack sequence.... so I don't really see them as over powered with a cant fight and cant be fought trade off if they do mortals and block out a small area. in fact smaller units would be better for this concept so that they CANT be abused to completely block out an opponent that has limited magic or shooting.
Elite units generally aren't fielded for control unless it's to tie down enemies by simply shrugging off whatever damage is thrown their way or to "control" the battlefield by making sure everything that comes near em is very very dead. Hence it's a bit weird. I never said they'd be overpowered, in fact with what you wrote down I think they'd be on the underpowered side of things, often requiring a 6+ unit to start having a noticeable effect on the game and they'd be quite expensive for what they do. I mean, yeah it's briljant if you can get a bloodthirster or terrorgheist stuck cuz there's a screen of unreachable terradons in front of him. Especially seeing as armies who have scary monsters like that tend to be light on ranged firepower. But that's only a handfull of armies, everything else will have sufficient ranged firepower or magic to just blow them out of the sky quickly, and even then, any capable opponent is unlikely to give you the oppertunity to block more than 1 or 2 important charges per game (if that..) Not to mention it being largely pointless if your opponent has an army that doesn't have any particularly scary melee stuff.
you didn't say they were OP, Lizard did, and Bacon called the cant be charged part OP. I was replying to all of you... though admittedly not very clearly with which part was to whom. "Elite units generally aren't fielded for control unless it's to tie down enemies by simply shrugging off whatever damage is thrown their way or to "control" the battlefield by making sure everything that comes near em is very very dead. Hence it's a bit weird." that's the point!!!! Seraphon have unfathomable goals, that none but the slann and old ones comprehend. couldn't that result in some "weird" unit uses? Im so sick and tired of everything being essentially the same cookie cutter with some fluff changes. an ability that is out of the norm, on a unit type generally designed for combat is EXACTLY what the weird lizards from outer space should using...
You can fire in melee. You just cannot fire at anything that isn't in melee with you, if you are in melee. So the tactic of fighting the chaff in melee while shooting at something that is behind the chaff doesn't work anymore.
It wouldn't be a point issue at that point. You could literally prevent enemies from charging into your important stuff because they'd have to detour around the Terradons. Charge prevention would be way to broken to balance with points.
The seraphon might be weird themselves, and every so often will do something that appears insane due to us not understanding their goals. However, their units and functions will still follow common sense as war itself isn't alien and unfathomable to us. Aside from that, the game is still played by humans, making "weird" units generally results in them either being really broken or borderline useless depending on if people can figure out how to use them or not. Lastly it's just a nightmare to balance when you create particularly weird units as well as confusing when playing the game (imagine say a skink priest stomping a bloodthirster into the ground with ease, it'd be confusing as hell). There is of course room for fun weird stuff, and making every army have cookie-cutter copies for each role is boring. But throwing massive amounts of utility on a class of unit that normally doesn't have that strength tends to result in disaster either because it's normal strengths need to be gutted resulting in a unit that makes very little sense (and is often overpriced and impossible to use effectivly by most players) or because it ends up stupidly powerfull as it now has both the added new utility and the usual strengths of this class of unit.
I don’t have much of an opinion one way or the other about levels of damage, what Terrrradons hit on, or mins or max damage. (How about same as a catapult rock?? Bad idea?) But the reload thing: Slann reload them. Slann re-imagine all our troops out of stardust or azyr/Light? Right? If a Slann can summon a whole unit of these, conjuring a reload of stones would be a simple cantrip by comparison. So there’s the ^ fluff. The Rule: the Slann will fail at imagining a reload for a Terradons unit one time out of six tries. You have to remember to roll; but it usually works.
I really like the idea, but from a game perspective: please not another thing only a Slann can do. One of the things I dislike about Seraphon at the moment is that too many things depend on the Slann, up to the point where lists without Slann become almost pointless.
I don't get why our various skinks don't assist him more... it'd not even be too difficult to set up.
The real problem there (from my point of view) is that Skinks and Saurus characters does not do enough, not so much that the Slann does too much. Basically I would want an option for saurus and skinks to give bonuses like the Slann does, or have some allegiance ability, so the Slann does not get all the love himself, even tough that is what makes the most sense fluff-wise.
just make up some fluff stating the skink or saurus is favoured by his slann master and has been given an artifact or taught a ritual that allows him to do a thing. The slann might be the supreme master of our magic and summoning, but that doesn't mean everyone else can't be any good at it.
I wish they would just make everyone real again. It would fix so many issues with stuff like that. Make up some stuff about how the slanns knew the lizards needed to evolve to face the new threats and how the surviving slanns basically turned them into daemons through old one magic and now some of them are finally ready to return to their corporeal forms.
They already hinted at something like that once or twice actually. Some Seraphon being more real than others. But yeah, I'd like them to expand on that a bit in the new Battletome which, yes indeed, we will absolutely surely get.
It is cannon in the BT and in one of those "hammerhall news" things, that Seraphon that remain at a location for an extended period of time become corporeal again. the slann used this to their advantage to send in hordes of warriors to fight an unwinnable fight, cleansing the corrupted ground of Nurgle with the celestial energy infused blood of the Saurus warriors.