8th Ed. 3000 point life/death slann army

Hey Lads,
Im starting to run a 2 slann army recently. Will be playing empire, dwarf and wood elf armies. Just wondering what ye think.

Life slann[general]
focused rumination, focus of mystery
iron curse icon.

death slann
higher state, be-calming cog
cupped hands

scar-vet [battle stand]
l.armour, shield
sword of the hornet, glimmer armour[-1 to hit wearer]
huanchis blessed totem

scar-vet
l.armour,shield
potion of speed, pihranha blade

skink priest[lev2]
cube of darkness

skink priest [lev2]
dispel scroll

skink chief
add hand weapon,l.armour
venom of the firefly frog
cloak of feathers
potion of strenght

25 saurus with spear and command group

25 saurus with spear and command group

21 skinks with 2 krox, command group and chief

3 jungle swarms

steg with giant bow

10 cami skinks

2 packs of 2 salamanders with extra handlers.

Thanks for reading, any thoughts good or bad welcome.

First a couple of things on the legality of your list

The BSB scar vet is an illegal build,

They can either take a magical standard (the blessed totem) or magic items, not both, usually it is better to take magical items.
Also you can't take light armour and magical light armour (glittering scales) so one of them has to go

You can only take one item from each magical item category: your skink chief has three enchanted items (cloak of feathers, VotFF and potion of strength) they can only have one of these three.


When it comes to actual list:

Do you definitely want the death slann to be higher state? Would it not be more useful to take a second focus of mystery or ruminations?
Also when you have two slanns it is better to have one general and one BsB rather than make the scar vet the BSB

The scar vets: although these will pack a punch, they are woefully under armoured, your BSB only has a 3+ AS and no ward, for such an important character it would be better to arm him better, you can easily get a 1+ rerollable or 2+/one use 2+ ward on a scar vet and still have excellent attacking options,
For examples:
Amulet of Itzl, Venom of the Firefly Frog , dragonhelm, Great Weapon, Light Armour, Cold One = 1+ AS/ one use 2+ ward (cannon dodging) 2+ ward against flaming and 4 strength 7 poison attacks, pretty good.


With two slanns, they will use of the power dice so it is pointless having the skink priests as level 2, save those points and buy the scar vet some gear. And where do you envisage your skink priests going? You have no skink skirmisher bunkers so the only place they could go would be in a combat block, they will die exceedingly quickly there.

Skink chiefs are easy to kill, what do you plan to do with him? Move up safe in the Skrox block then fly out to attack a Mage? I think you will struggle to get that to actually work, the only useful skink chiefs I ever see are on terradons, I would save these points to buy some skink skirmishers


The army have three nice big combat blocks, looks good, thought common Internet wisdom says you need to be 30+ to get use of out spears, I prefer Hw shield myself.

What do you wish to achieve with the jungle swarms? They are the worst unit in the book, I would swap these for skink skirmishers

I would split the chamos into two groups of 5 for flexibility

Sallies and steg look good,

The army looks pretty solid, I'm just not convinced by the character builds

As a note life can often struggle with dual slann as it needs lots of dice to make certain spells go off, sometimes light can be a better choice

Thanks alot for that, Have always used infantry/skirmisher armies til now. First time going magic/character heavy. Have made my death slann BSB now.
Have also re-done the scar-vets
scar-vet 1
gold sigil sword
armour of glitterig scales
enchanted shield
luckstone

scar-vet 2
gamblers armour
sword of battle
potion of speed
enchanted shield

Going to keep skink chief. have not used one before and want to give him a go.
Skink priests are level 2 because i want to be sure to maximise chance of comet of casandora.[i face alot of war-machines]

Dumped the spears and added 2 more saurus to blocks.

Now have 29 skinks with3 krox

swapped the swarms for 2 units of 8 skink skirms.

Thanks again. What do you reckon now.

PS Forgot about illegal chief, working on him now
Skink chief
cloak of feathers
add hand weapon,l.armour
sword of might.

angry lizard said:

Skink priests are level 2 because i want to be sure to maximise chance of comet of casandora.

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But why? If you have 2 Slann, no priest should be casting anything. If you really want comet, take Heavens on a Slann. There aren't enough power dice to power anywhere near all the spells you are fielding, which means you are wasting points on spells that cannot be cast.

I second what david said, but if you dont believe him just try it out and you will find you have too many spells and not enough dice to go around.

Also if you face a lot of war machines, I highly recommend looking at Charmed shield or Amulet of Itzi for your scarvets, both give 2+ saves against cannonballs.

A couple problems with the things you changed. You gave both your scarvets enchanted shields, and you cannot duplicate magic items in a list. Also skink skirmishers are minimum unit size of 10

Good points.
Swapped one of the enchanted shields for charmed shields.
Will bump the skinks up to ten.
My skink priests are dispel and cube carriers. however They always get of one spell in turn one, the comet. It has yielded some great results against empire cannons and dwarf war machines. Dont like the rest of heavens so dont want to waste it on slann. For 70 points i double my chances of getting the comet and have a +1 to the casting. Thats my thinking.
Other then these issues do ye think the army is solid. Im looking forward to trying the life\death slann combo

Am I miss understanding something here???
You say there will not be enough dice to go around.

Attribute of death is add 1 dice to the power pool per wound caused.

If you purple sun a unit and kill lots you get all that back in dice?

Can you not then keep casting untill dice or spells run out??

Death adds about 1/3 the wounds caused as power dice, not all.
Sure, if you get off a purple sun, it isn't dispelled, it goes enough distance to do real damage, and the enemy infantry block is below average initiative, you should get another 6-12 dice. But frankly, if purple sun is refilling your dice pool, you've probably won without doing anything else that phase.

Although the death lore abilty is great im not relying on it.
One slann will have extra power dice abilty.
The odd dice back from death.
Skinks will only try and get off comet once or twice in game, other then that they add to my channelling chances[4 chances to channel each phase].
Can throw the odd magic missile through them also.
I think together the 2slann\2skink priest combo can be effective in everyone of my magic phases which a lizardman army needs due to our lack of artillery.

I woud drop Becalming Congition on the Death Slann and take the Banehead. If an enemy wizard is causing you problems, don't nerf it, use Death sniping spells on it!.

I'd consider giving the Life Slann the Forbidden Rod. This will let you get some extra power dice in a weak winds of magic phase and your Slann can easily use Lifebloom to heal back the damage (which shouldn't be severe because of the Ward save).

I'd consider giving both Slann the extra power dice.

Both Life and Death Slann go better with a Temple Guard buffer than without one in my opinion but I can understand how points are liable to be scarce when you are taking two souped up lords.

In relation to the banehead swap. I dont have the books with me right now but i think i found many of the assaination spells in death very short range.[Might be wrong, pretty new to death lore]
Might swap forbidden rod for be-calming though even though i often find myself up against a nasty flying death wizard so robbing him of 6's when he is lining up puple sun would be great.
Im afraid the TG are out of this one. I need a change from them anyway, ran a pretty standard army for the first year of playing.

angry lizard said:

.
Skinks will only try and get off comet once or twice in game, other then that they add to my channelling chances[4 chances to channel each phase].
Can throw the odd magic missile through them also.
.

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Life and death don't have any magic missiles so I wouldn't count on that!