AoS 2018 is gonna be another tough year

They have a 6+ ignore because they are paper thin against regular attacks.
If you are struggling with mortal wounds then I would suggest you stop spamming Saurus Guard

I wouldn't count on Seraphon ever getting a direct update.
That's not to say it won't ever happen, but we are far more likely to receive minor updates through supplementary material like the Generals Handbook, FAQ/Erratas, and campaign books giving us new options (like Malign Portents)

 

Stormcast got a new battletome because they got new Vanguard models and it was obvious that the "micro factions" idea explored with Extremis and Pestilens was a failure and they were going in a different direction after the Tzeentch book combined 3 factions. They quickly rewrote the original Stormcast Battletome, combined it with the Extremis book, and pasted the Vanguard Chamber inside.

While I can only conjecture as to why Khorne got a new battletome, I think it's because:
a. The Tzeentch battletome format of combining mortals, arcanites, and daemons was extremely popular and successful so they quickly did one for Khorne
b. Khorne Bloodbound were arguably the worst army in the game and desperately needed an update.
c. They are in the starter box and it's not a good idea to have a trash tier army be a flagship product

 

I know they're supposed to be paper-thin otherwise, them having it is fine. I'm just slightly miffed that they've been putting in more and more counter-measures against mortal wounds spam on new factions (and also more mortal wounds as the spam is kept in check by those countermeasures). Whereas we're still stuck without any real defenses against it and activly suffering from the countermeasures as newer armies end up overal better (e.g. saurus guards wouldn't have had 1 wound if they were released now, nor would we have issues like the rule of one outright breaking several of our special abilities and massivly diminishing our supposedly amazing wizards). It's just a tad frustrating to constantly be falling behind with every update and only getting bandaids here and there that frequently screw us over more than they help us...

To be honest, the SCE update would be sufficient for us. It introduced a handfull of new units, and some general faction abilities like prayers. That's all we really need. Fix the weird flaws several of our units have, like the 3 abilities we have that are outright broken by the rule of one, give us an actual decent summoning mechanic, and give us a specific spell lore. These three issues should all be fairly well known and thinking up a solution shouldn't be too difficult. Then do a rough rebalancing of our units in general to bring em more in line with similar units and to give us the necesary tools to deal with some of the newer monstrosities that are just flat out better cuz of powercreep. That should solve 90% of the problems we have... Hell there's plenty of ideas floating around on this forum (and I'm sure in other places) that'd bring certain units more in line with those of other factions that are fairly minor changes.

Plus, it's mostly free money for GW. The changes are relativly minor & a large chunk of the issues are already fairly well known. Shouldn't require a massive amount of effort to do while having a relativly high return with book sales and probably a refreshed interest in Seraphon as they're the new cool thing for a while again. And if nothing else, I'd at least would like a compilation of all the errata and F.A.Q. and whatnot.. it astonishes me they don't do updated reprints of their rulebooks like is done with well every other book I've ever seen really..

 

@Canas I totally agree with all of that. Not having a spell lore is really rough, especially since we are supposed to be the best at magic. The fact that we have the global unbind is really good against any army with a wizard, but HUGE against Slyvanth and probably death now. I'm just glad I found this thread lol. I've been really bummed on our stuff lately and was thinking it was just me haha.

 

Seraphon are one of the strongest, if not THE strongest army in the game right now with multiple lists capable of crushing tournaments and tons of unit variety... and people are still complaining. It's kinda surreal.

 

Are we actually winning any (big) tournaments? All the reports I see on here has us end up somewhere in the middle of the rankings. I haven't even seen us rank in the top three once.

We do have amazing variety, but since about half our units have peculiar flaws in em a great deal of em don't work in the vast majority of situations. Which is what people are mostly complaining about. We're not awefull by any stretch, but we're nowhere near "good". And more importantly the various flaws make for an army that can be very awkward to play with. Half of our potential never gets used as it just doesn't entirely work for it's intended purpose.

Even putting us in the top 5 is pushing it. We rely mostly on one-trick pony lists and lists tailored to counter the current meta to remain competitive. The moment we face something that can deal with that one trick, or someone steps slightly out of the meta, those lists tend to fall apart.

As an example there was this report of someone running kroaknado in some high ranking tournament a while back. He did fine untill Kroak got killed in one of his games by some stormfiends at which point he got utterly crushed. That entire army relied solely on Kroak, pretty much everything else was fodder to buy Kroak time or stuff like a astrolith bearer to further improve Kroak. That's not a powerfull list, it literally stands or falls with the survival of 1 model and even then that 1 model isn't going to win everything...

 

Vanguard Wing is an easy matchup for Seraphon.

Dracothions Tail completely outdeploys it.
Kroak lists are basically hard counters because Prosecutors arent enough to kill Kroak on a vortex.
30 Liberators won't put a scratch in a properly deployed Thunderquake (especially not after you put Starlight on them), we can easily pick off the Prosecutors to deny their mobility and the Castellant to drastically reduce their survivability, Bastiladons are the ultimate tool for tying down the Stardrake, and our teleporting capability is strong enough to give us control of the board while we kill the Liberators. After he wraps your army you snipe the Prosecutors and use the Slanns command ability to fly everything away, keeping one unit on his flank so he is forced to spend 3 turns piling everything into range.
All that aside, if you face a lot of deep strike/rapid redeployment armies you can include a Gryph Hound for only 40 points and completely shut them down.

It's the same with Changehost, Aetherstrike, Grand Host of Nagash, Necroknight rush (although they are much weaker since losing Vanhel's), etc. We have all the tools we need to deal with every popular army.

I hate using the phrase "git gud" but I think that the army is incredibly strong and if you are struggling then you are not getting the full potential out of it.

 

Yeah the top-10 makes sense. Seeing as we can fairly easily build something that counters the general meta. If we have an edge over half the armies while the other half annihilates of chances are at least some will get quite far before they run into a bad match up

It dissapoints me there's so few competitive lists, but it's not entirely what I meant. I meant that our lists rely on very specific aspects to succeed and if you counter that 1 aspect they completly break down. A kroaknado falls apart with kroak (i mean come on, clue's in the name ). In contrast it feels like the other armies have this issue less. An SCE army doesn't rely on any one unit in the same way as a kroaknado relies on kroak. You'd need to actually defeat the army, not just the general, or that 1 powerhouse monster.

I think we need to make one thing clear. We don't think the Seraphon are "weak" exactly. We have potential and when used well we can get very far, quite possibly competing with everything provided we get to tailor our lists for it. However, we are very "flawed". Various of our units have glaring weaknesses, abilities that are far too unreliable or difficult to pull off, funky stats, or abilities that are outright unuseable because they've been gutted (or even completly negated) by new rules like the rule of one and lastly our army is extremly reliable on synergies which aggrevates the issues as it puts us in a place where when our synergies work they work reaaaallly well, and when they don't we get completly annihilated.

Anyways what we mostly argue for is for these things to be solved. Hence why I said that SCE update would be all that we need. We don't need a complete overhaul by any stretch, we just need several clunky aspects to be fixed and a general pass at rebalancing to correct our numbers for powercreep.

 

@PJetski @Canas hit it on the head with how I feel about it. We can build great counter lists to armies, but a good all purpose list is hard for us.

 

Thunderquake is a take-all-comers list. It's not specialized in any one particular way.

 

Well it is a shooty list more or less. While Stormcast are not top tier, a thunderquake can have a HORRIBLE time against fulminator squads and a priest

 

Any battalion that has some form of limitations on its units is specialised. In the case of a thunderquake starhost its a low model count behemoth and monster list that needs to stick together. As such it's suspectible to certain attacks (e.g. a liberator's lay low the tyrant), it's suspectile to being outmanouvered as it lacks the models to form much of a formation & the distance requirement force it to stick together further enforces this. However as the individual models are powerfull enough without the bonus from the battalion they aren't completly tied together, spreading them out just means the battalion is significantly worse in these sitatuations.

In short: it's a block of big powerfull monsters that prefers to stick together. Given its healing this makes it a great anvil, though it can also be a hammer. It's preference to stick together & low model count makes it unfit for contesting multiple spread out objectives or for chasing down an army that can easily split up it as this starhost lacks manouverabiity.. Furthermore, as it consists solely of monsters certain attacks/abilities are especially potent against it.

Now it's "take-all-comers" in so much that the things it's good at, being a powerfull block of healing behemoths, is a generally good formation to have & the fact that fairly few dedicated anti-behemoth things exist rather helps. There's only a handfull of abilities that specialize in taking down monsters/behemoths and thus take advantage of the main specialisation of this battalion so they rarely end up being properly countered.

 

@PJetski I am going to try a Thunderquake soon! So thanks for making me a bit more excited lol.

 

That's why I've stayed away from it it reminds me of playing Beastclaw raiders lol.

 

Proxy your Carnosaurs and Troglodons as BCR. Use Saurus knights as mournfang. Feels good watching the carno maul people as you hurl sunballs for 6 mortal wounds.

Onto the topic of Death I do find it hilarious this book and the campaign are just giving death a ton of free buffs. It makes me excited for the future when we get another book (hopefully with more spells) just thinking of all the cool stuff that could be in there, they've really come a long way making fluffy rules.

 

Bonesplitterz actually have a competent list? They’re just Savage Orcs, Savage Orc Boar Boyz and Savage Orc characters, one of the armies with the smallest amount of choice in AoS!

I know Fyreslayers are getting more competent with the new Command Traits and Magic Items. I’m sure there was one tournament where Fyreslayers won with Kharadron second and Tzeentch third.

How many points do tournaments play at usually, because I have an idea for a killer 1000 point list...