8th Ed. Optimising the New Magic System

Gone are the days of constantly 6 dicing spells. The new magic system instead allows for the spamming of many lower casting cost spells, and with 4D6 magic dice per phase, that can be a lot of spells if we try to one dice them. Having thought a little about it, i propose the following.

Slann with Wandering Deliberations (now gives you all 8 spells from each lore). The 8th is the new end times spell. Thats 64 spells to choose the right one from.
Book of +1 to cast
Magic resistance 1 item

Also bring Tetto

The Plan

Try to summon an Arcane Fulcrum (this is a new spell that allows you to place the terrain piece within 6" and then sit your frog on top of it. This think gives you a 3+ ward, immune to multiple wounds effects, and +2 to cast.

Conjure Arcane Fulcrum is a 12 to cast. So it can be cast very reliably on 3 dice, and over 50% on 2. This is also an End Times spell, and therefore cannot be countered.

All told your friendly frog now has +7 to cast, and combined with Tetto, gives us a 77.7% chance to cast a 10+ with a single dice. There are a lot of spells that can cast on a 10+. My favourites are:

Searing Doom
Enfeebling Foe
Wyssan's Wildform
Curse of Anraheir
Max Range Spirit Leech (through a skink +24")
Soul Blight
Speed of Light
Light Of Battle (to bog down the ridiculous end times characters)
2D6 Fire ball.... (this on a single dice that can be cast over an over)
Piercing bolts of burning is a good opener..
Fulminating Flame Cage (after tagging the target unit with one of the previous two spells)
Throne of Vines
Flesh To Stone
Earth Blood
Long range Ice Shard Blizard though a skink at all war machines.
Urannon's Thunder bolt


I am sure there are loads of other combos, but these are the spells that stick out for me.

Ray

I'm not sure I follow. I've only gotten a very small amount of knowledge from posts around the place.

What were the changes you're talking about? (I had heard they were End Times only, and optional if both players wanted to play it?)


Cheers

It is very likely that the system that is being used as part of the End Times is going to be the one used in 9th or one that is very similar. Also the new rules basically say that if one player wants to use them, then you have to use them.

Highlights of the rules:

Roll 4D6 for power dice, highest two for dispel.

Any caster that knows a spell from a lore, now knows the entire lore. It specifically states the loremaster as an example. Warlocks are now even more broken....lol. Loremasters can now re-roll their casting attempt if they want to.

No more loss of concentration.

Spells with casting cost less than 15 can be cast over and over again until you fail to cast them.

All magic terrain now has provides +2 to cast if you are within 3 inches of them as well as their other rules.

Ray

Thanks Ray,
That's interesting. Focus of Mystery gets a bump, which is great! It also means that Slann is much more valuable than he was previously.

Though I'm not sure I agree with the loss of broken concentration... Kind of removes any chance of ruining things with bad rolls. It becomes player vs player, not player vs play and luck....

Very interesting though.



I think Focus of mystery may be the way to go. But what happens when a spell is beefed up to a higher value (>14), can the smaller version be cast multiple times?

I can't see the loremaster of spells being carried across to 9th, as it would break alot of characters. Teclis, for one. Wandering Deliberations/Loremaster of Hoeth for another. :/

I think Focus of mystery may be the way to go. But what happens when a spell is beefed up to a higher value (>14), can the smaller version be cast multiple times?

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Nope. Once it is cast > 14, it cannot be cast again by ANY wizard.

Oh, i forgot something very important.

Casting is different.

1) Choose a Wizardl
2) Choose a Spell/Target for spell
3) Roll a D6. That is the maximum number of dice that you can put into casting the spell. Minimum of 1 dice.
4) Roll Dice
5) Opponent then has a chance to counter as usual. I read elsewhere that the dispeller has to also roll a D6 to see how many of their dice they can use, but i am looking at the rules right now and i can't see anything.

Sorry about forgetting the most important part..lol

Upshot of this is that going for big spells is much riskier, and going for lots of small spells with multiple castings will be optimal.

Ray

Seems like a mixture of older rules (can only use dice equal to caster level) and today's rule.

I think I'll give it a try, but it doesn't sound very friendly of a phase change, it also really elongates the magic phase which is already quite long.
I don't like to play Storm of Magic for the very reason that the magic phase is more complicated than I feel it needs to be.

So it seems like this new magic system will result in more spells being cast, but of slightly lower power. So lots of magic missiles flying around and no way to shut down the opposing wizard barring death.

So that leads me to two questions I've been pondering:

How do we magic missile-proof our armies?

What are our best options for killing enemy wizards?

Magic Resistance and Feedback Scroll?

It certainly is making the magic phase much more of a big thing. Instead of just 6 dicing the spell you want, you will need to try to work some strategy into your casting whilst bearing in mind the randomness of the whole phase. This is why i proposed the build in the initial post. The randomness doesn't effect it, and it has access to a wide range of spells, so there will generally be an optimal spell to choose.

Ray

Are we thinking channel staff and convergence is going to be less potent if this rolls into 9th?

So lore master high and tetto in the same army. Take the book like raymond suggested and then spam soul quench?
If you need any spell from any lore just swap out at the end of the phase and get the entire lore. Need black sun, np. Mind razor.. too easy. Or you just want to throw fireballs at trolls, Done!
These rules are busted. It's like bringing a grenade launcher to a knife fight.

having all the lores is way better then loremaster high now IMO

Gringold said:

So it seems like this new magic system will result in more spells being cast, but of slightly lower power. So lots of magic missiles flying around and no way to shut down the opposing wizard barring death.

So that leads me to two questions I've been pondering:

How do we magic missile-proof our armies?

What are our best options for killing enemy wizards?

Click to expand...

I was thinking that more magic missiles might make small units of Skink Skirmishers and Chameleon Skinks worse, and increase the value of bigger and/or higher toughness units (Saurus blocks, Kroxigors, Stegadons).

As for wizard killing, I've seen some references to Ripperdactyls being good wizard killers...

Raymond Caleatry said:

Also bring Tetto

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He is not an auto include.
His "re-roll 1's" ability reads "MUST".
If you re-roll a 1 in your casting attempt, you can no longer use the loremaster ability to re-roll the casting attempt.
As you can never re-roll a re-roll, and your re-rolled ones is part of the dice-pool the loremaster allows you to re-roll, you can not opt to do so.

NexS1 said:

Are we thinking channel staff and convergence is going to be less potent if this rolls into 9th?

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unless the staff and/or how channeling works changes.

hard to say.
as it is now, I wouldn't use it.

We are pretty sceptical at my group.
We adopted 50% hero and lords
we adopted Lore of Undeath

but this seems too steep a change.
Need to test it properly.

sure Tetto will be less powerful if a loremaster high slann is on the table, but not with a slann with the brb lores. Having 8 lores will give you lots of cheap augments, hexes and MM you can spam. You fail? No problem mate, you have lots of others spells of the same kind and you can cast them several times! You don't need soul quench when you have fire, beast, metal, light, life and heavens. You don't need apotheosis when you have life. You don't need HoG when you have shadow. You don't need tempest when you have... well, pretty much anything. You don't need convocation when you have to spam your cheap spells, and if you wanna try a big one, well, both life and metal have a better number 6 (which can actually do something to charachters and immortal deathstars). Sure, walk beetwen the wordls is unique and arcane unforging will become really useful because of the crazy characters hanging around on the gaming tables in these days, but rerolling failed casting attempts is not enough for me to beat this huge number of spells, spammable and with their own lore attributes. Sure you can swap spells with HM, but would a swapped spell give you a full lore back? We don't know (same issue in the case of 2 slanns swapping a spell with telephatic cofabulation). Using wandering deliberation and fielding Tetto you'll have the possibility to one dice lots of spells, you have 8 RiP spells (actually 7 since a slann cannot use kadon) to delete the enemy power pool and you have EVERYTHING. A wandering slann is the way to go now IMO, and with Tetto that's just better

I think the new system is going to be brutally complicated and likely incredible cumbersome

I think the new system is going to be brutally complicated and likely incredible cumbersome

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I think that it is not that much more complicated than before. The difference is that people will now have a lot more choices, so decision parralasis will become a large factor. If you look at how the magic system has changed, mechanically, the only difference to casting a spell is that you roll to see what the max amount of dice you can put in the spell will be.

The real time sink is going to be considering what spells to try and use. This will be especially the case for us, as I suspect that the Wandering Slann is going to be the King, and with 64 spells to choose from, that is a lot of decisions.

Ray

I still think loremaster(the power to reroll) is going to be god like. Soul quench is the best MM in the game too

Madrck said:

I still think loremaster(the power to reroll) is going to be god like. Soul quench is the best MM in the game too

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I think it is good, but remember that with 4D6, choosing the two highest for dispel, the gap between caster and dispeller is even closer.

I'm thinking that disppelling became a lot more risky if you roll for the amount of dice you can use.

you declare you want to dispel a spell cast with a value of 15. You roll 2. Even on a level 4, you now need double 6s to dispel, but you HAVE to dispel, which means you either waste 2 dice trying to dispel, or you just roll your 1 die, fail, and hope the spell doesn't destroy you. Since you have less dice than the opponent, you can't afford to waste dice in this way.

It's also true about the channeling. 3 channel dice at 5+ is still a weak chance at getting more dice, when you have 4d6 power dice already. You have on average 14 dice, so the average of 1 additional dice per magic phase is pretty weak.