AoS Are stardrake shields of any real use?

I've been wondering wat exactly the use is of stardrake shields. Obviously being able to ignore -x rend is usefull, but I've been running into several issue with it.

1) Rend seems to be fairly rare, and mostly comes on units that do a lot of damage regardless (e.g. heroes, monsters). And altough its great and all that saurus warriors can ignore his rend they're not going to stop something on the scale of a rampaging carnosaur without some serious backup. Nor is the rend-protection going to help them slow him down all that much more.

2) It only ignores -x rend. Once you have more than x rend it does nothing. Which means that if you can get a unit with high enough rend the one defensive bonus saurus warrios/guards/Knights get is completly pointless.

3) It's not like saurus have an amazing save to begin. So it's not like people need to bring a heavy rend-focussed army to kill them. Which further makes rend-protection a bit superfluous.

4) Wouldn't pretty much any other defensive effect be more powerfull, even in the situations where the rend-protection actually does something? For example the liberators ability to re-roll save rolls of 1 seems to save my girlfriend far more wounds than my saurus avoid by not getting hit by the rend of her heroes & retributors.

So I'm wondering, in what situations does the rend-protection actually start to shine? Do I need to buff the crap out of my saurus so they become so hard to kill that rend actually becomes meaningfull against them? Or is it just a slightly odd ability that makes my units slightly more expensive while not doing all that much?

try saurus guard in an eternity starhost with a skink priest next to them then you have a 2+ re-roll-able save which ignores -1 rend. Other than mortal wounds you won't be losing models fast. Very few armies have stuff that does more than -1 rend tbh. Also as soon as you put a mystic shield on a unit with shields then they become a lot tougher to shift

Yeah, but those saurus guard are though because they have 2+ re-roll-able saves. Even if they'd suffer -1 from rend they'd only drop back to 3+ re-roll-able. The thing making them though seems to be the re-roll-able saves, not the protection from rend.

2 up rerolling 1s will still save you more saurus. It's easy enough to add to your save or get rerolls on it. I am failing to understand the problem.

There isn't a real problem, just curious which particular niche rend protection in general, and the stardrake shields specificly, are supposed to serve as I don't experience rend like that much of a threat.

Also it surprises me that rend-protection seems to be so common for seraphon while rend itself seems fairly uncommon, especially considering that seraphon aren't extremely armored to begin with. It's not like when you try to build a counter-seraphon army the first thing you think of is "I need as much rend as possible because otherwise they'l save everything". If we don't get to stack buffs most of our stuff isn't especially sturdy.

essentially it just seems odd/out of place.

You say rend is uncommon but I've not experienced this against any army I've played. With saurus warriors, I tend to field them in the masses and so it's not uncommon for them to go up against behemoths, these guys usually have some rend attacks with big damage and being able to ignore those can save you quite a few models.

When I say rend is uncommon I mean there's frequently only a handfull of enemy units have it out of the entire army. The seraphon on the other hand have rend protection on all our battleline units with the exception of skinks, and on 4 seperate heroes. Basicly in an average battle a large chunk of our army will have rend protection while only a small part of the opposing army is likely to have rend. Yes against those behemoths that are present it saves you a couple of wounds every so often. But unless you're facing an army consisting only of behemoths you most likely end up in a situation where there are for more seraphon units with rend protection than enemies with rend.

If I got you right, @Canas, you're disappointed that the shields only work against rend and don't buff the save of the unit... and I say I am, too... ok shields are free (Are they? Don't own a GHB ...) and I think they look cool,so I won't peel them of... but...
But I guess that's the point... they a free and therefore the benefits of having shields isn't that huge...

Essentially yes. Especially when compared to other shield effecs I've seen since those shields are also free. the shields stormforged have re-roll 1's. Skaven clannrats re-roll failed saves if the damage is 1. The new tzeentch guys get to roll a dice whenever they get hurt which ignores the damage if you roll a 6, which includes mortal wounds. Each of those variants seems more usefull than ignoring rend. Or at the very least those variants do something against most, if not all opponents. Whereas rend only does something against a small part of the enemy army.

And yeah, it's "free" but it'l be considered in our overall pointcost. Without it saurus warriors would be say, 10 points cheaper. Which given that it's a horde unit would actually be significant given that we currently need to spend 300-400 points to truly benefit from the horde bonus. Which feels a bit steep for horde.

You are watching it from the wrong side.
Compare troops to troops: basic troops (as saurus) usually have "rend -", elite troops (as guards) have "rend -1"
Let's take a quick look at other armies: Empire Greatswords, Tomb Kings' Guards, Stormcast Decimators, Dwarfs hammerers, Vampire Blood Knights... they all have "rend -1".

Even shooting follow the same "rule": the best one (thunderers, handgunners) got rend -1; heck, even some cheap warmachines got rend -1 (Screaming skull catapult, Organ gun)

Basically, almost all the troops you will face, have no rend, or rend -1. This means that your troops with stardrake shield, will make useless the advantage of all the elite troops of any other army.

To find rend -2 or -3, you must face heavy warmachines, great heroes or big monsters, and frankly I expect unsupported troops to die against them.

Canas said:

When I say rend is uncommon I mean there's frequently only a handfull of enemy units have it out of the entire army. The seraphon on the other hand have rend protection on all our battleline units with the exception of skinks, and on 4 seperate heroes. Basicly in an average battle a large chunk of our army will have rend protection while only a small part of the opposing army is likely to have rend. Yes against those behemoths that are present it saves you a couple of wounds every so often. But unless you're facing an army consisting only of behemoths you most likely end up in a situation where there are for more seraphon units with rend protection than enemies with rend.

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You say only a handful of units have rend out of an army, but in most games I play, I find it's about a third to a half of units have rend attacks, even a handful is going to be 2-3 units, average army I've seen has 9 units. In quite a few games, I'll only field three battleline units so that rend save comes in handy a lot. It means saurus warriors can go up against a lot of elite units and actually hold their own. Makes the warriors quite a versatile unit.

Oh and skinks can have the rend protection, but it's useless anyway! Haha!

scubrat said:

You say only a handful of units have rend out of an army, but in most games I play, I find it's about a third to a half of units have rend attacks, even a handful is going to be 2-3 units, average army I've seen has 9 units. In quite a few games, I'll only field three battleline units so that rend save comes in handy a lot. It means saurus warriors can go up against a lot of elite units and actually hold their own. Makes the warriors quite a versatile unit.

Oh and skinks can have the rend protection, but it's useless anyway! Haha!

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Right I forgot about the skinks being able to wield shields.

Anyway, a third of the units I consider relativly little in comparison to our entire battleline & 4 heroes. And yes, obviously it's nice to have and it gives the units a slight advantage when facing elite units. But well, you're not facing a lot of elite units. And not even all elite units have rend on (all) their attacks. Which further lowers how frequently it actually ends up doing something. It's just odd to have such an anti-elite focussed defensive mechanic on nearly all our stuff, as opposed to a more general purpose defensive mechanic like the ones I mentioned before.

Anyway: tl;dr: it has it uses but why do we have anti-elite focussed defenses on so much when our general defense isn't particularly amazing.

Well other unit's shields have their uses! Let's throw 12 wounds at some of the examples you shared:

The clan rats you mentioned, only have a 6+ save, so rerolling damage 1 means they save 3.67 on average.
The new tzeentch guys also have a 6+ save, so rerolling means the same thing, they save 3.67 on average.
The liberators have a 4+ save, so rerolling 1s means they save 7 wounds on average

Now the 12 wounds thrown at us:
Saurus warriors, save 4 wounds
Saurus guards, save 6 wounds, not as good as liberators, but they are often used in an eternal starhost, so they've often got a save of 2+ so would save 10 wounds
Saurus knights, save 4 wounds

But what if the 12 wounds have -1 rend now? Clan rats and tzeentch make 2 saves and the liberators make 6.67 saves. And the saurus stay the same.

Let's fight 100pts of guard against 100pts of liberators, they have 4 warblades and the prime has a grandblade.

You get the first turn:

Saurus guard will take off 3-4 wounds on average, leaving 4 liberators, maybe only 3
Liberators retaliate, they take off 1 wound on average maybe 2, leaving probably, 4 guard

Liberators get first turn:
Liberators will take off 2 wounds on average, leaving 3 saurus guard
Saurus guards retaliate, the take off 2 wounds on average, leaving 4 liberators

There are a lot of variables obviously, but this is a unit of guard without the eternal starhost, I don't know enough about the liberators to know their buffs but you can see, they're fairly evenly matched.

The more I read about our army, the more I like it and the main reason is that he is pretty weak straightforward. Now don't get the wrong idea, let me explain myself:

I believe it to be almost undeniable that we are one of the weakest - if not the weakest - army if we just place our units in the battlefield. Meaning that without having lots of experience on your own - or a lovely forum like lustria (hehe) - you would probably get crushed against same lvl players that, like you, choose some units due to their stats and maybe one cool command ability.

BUT this is also the reason that I consider Seraphon to be the most interesting - and one of the most beautiful as that was the reason I picked them up in the first place ! - army out there. Because it is made that way, so you can make different synergies to make up for our weaknesses.
Now, being able to choose from THAT many synergies, can actually make us one of the most fearful enemies as we have THAT many choices to go after that our opponent can hardly be prepared for what's coming to him, or make a tactic beforehand regarding our list since there is NO particular list - besides a fine core of course which is 100% logical - because there are just too many things to go for !

I totally understand what you mean about the rend characteristi and I believe that the exact same goes for all of our units solely taken except Bastiladons. But this is our strength. Not just having some bulked up units but troops ready to shine above all when used from a strategic mind ! (well I most definitely ain't one but will work my way to becoming as good as I can ! )

@Seraphage yea, the synergy we have can be amazing. But it makes a lot of individual units appear really expensive for what they do. And it makes certain abilities look questionable. For example this rend-protection; a fully buffed up unit with a mystic shield, a starlight, and a priest backing it up for re-rolls, the rendprotection means that the only real threat are mortal wounds and it can probably easily outfight any scary monsters (provided they don't deal mortal wounds). But on just the base-unit the rend-protection is less significant.


@scubrat yes, but that combines it with its safe and possible other mechanics. If you take just the rend-protection versus the others you get the following.
Let's stick with your 12 wounds (why did you pick such an inconvenient number, why not 10? )
i'm just going to list the extra saves the shields generate in each situation without any external buffs. I'm just going to go for absolute values, in the case of relative values tzeentch wins all of them given that without their shield they're increadibly squishy.


No rend:
Saurus save no additional wounds.
Skaven save an additional 1.67 wounds
Tzeentch save and additional 1.67 wounds
Liberators save an addtional 1 wound.

-1 rend:
Each saurus unit saved an additional 2 wounds (compared to no shield).
Skaven save no extra wounds
Tzeentch save and additional 2 wounds
Liberators save an addtional .67 wound.

-2:
Skaven shields are useless
Saurus shields are useless
Tzeentch save and additional 2 wounds
Liberators save an addtional .33 wounds.

-3 Rend:
All the shields are useless apart from Tzeentch, which still save an additional 2 wounds.

Mortal wounds:
All the shields are useless apart from Tzeentch, which still save an additional 2 wounds.

Out of this we can conclude the following:
The only situation in which our shields are superiour are when there is -1 rend, in every other situation our shields are inferiour. In most cases our shields are vastly inferiour, and in one case (mortal wounds or >2- rend) they are "average". The best appears to be tzeentch shields.

And this is basicly what I mean. Yes, the units as a whole aren't weak, but our shields do mean our units get more expensive while adding comparativly little in terms of power in most situations.

o, I finally found something that isn't fairly elite that has rend: bloodreavers can wield a meatripper axes and those have rend. Finally something on the level of cannonfodder with easy acces to rend.

I guess it depends on your definition of elite. Free People handgunners and halbrediers are both -1 rend. So are Orruk choppas, both regular and savage. Duardin thunderers. I'm sure there are others out there.

Padre said:

I guess it depends on your definition of elite. Free People handgunners and halbrediers are both -1 rend. So are Orruk choppas, both regular and savage. Duardin thunderers. I'm sure there are others out there.

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I'm sure there'l be others. I haven't seen the description of every single model in the game. And when I said elite earlier I'm using it in the sense of either being a "better" version of a rank and file unit (e.g. saurus guards vs warriors) or being a "specialist" unit that can do something special. Handgunners and halberdiers potentially fall in this category depending on how much they actually differ from the common rank and file that army uses (e.g. handgunners are ranged in an army where the rank and file are swordsmen/spearmen and halberdiers would in most universes be a more elite version of "normal" spearmen with the ability to ruin armour but I'm not entirely sure how halberdiers would compare with spearmen in warhammer).