Ok, so my last army list was horribly ineffective against an army of Chaos Warriors. I am finding Kroxigors to be completely crappy in 8th Ed. I recall in 7th Ed they were beasts (I fielded a 5 strong unit and chewed through flanks and Knights with ease). in 8th Ed I have lost both hth combats in first round of combat (Against maneaters and a large unit of marauders of khorne). Skinks in 8th Ed ive also found little use, in 7th I was using them as screens for kroxigors or giving them scout rule and harassing/march blocking, so far they have been nothing but speed bumps. SO I have decided to create a list using the units I have had success with thus far and see if I can get some advice or tips on how to round it out or modify it. Slann Mage - Lore of Life, Cupped Hands, Cogitation, Rumination, Mystery, BSB w/Gleaming Pennant He will sit inside a Temple Guard and use his buffs to augment and strengthen the lines where he can. I pretty much dominated the magic phase last game with this build. One question I have is, against a War Machine heavy army should he be made Ethereal or have the Divine Plaque of Protection? Temple Guard x 25 w/champion and Standard Bearer(Razor Standard) These guys will protect Slann, 6 wide x5 ranks. Might be overkill a bit so I am looking for advice and reasoning, but these guys always perform for me. I am wondering if I should put a magical weapon or anything on the Champion, unsure what the general thought on this is. I was going to give them the Razor Standard to make the unit cause -3 AS so that knights and Chaos Warriors might not do so well. Scar-Veteran on Cold one w/Glittering Scales, Dawnstone This Vet would ride with a large unit of Saurus Warriors. This is the build I stole from the forums here and want to try it out. But if anyone has suggestions on how to better employ this build I would love to hear it. Skink Priest lv2 on EoTG w/Dispel Scroll I had fairly decent success with EoTG last game and love the model so I hope to keep him in my list for now, however; I could easily drop the Ancient Stegadon and add another scar vet and 1 or 2 priests to the list instead. I would mainly use this for the ward save and keep him from combat until I had a solid battle going and wanted the impact hits and thunderstomp to turn the tide. I do not want the stegadon in a long lasting combat as I think it makes it vulnerable and the enemy will just kill priest and crew. There are some decent spells in Heavens and the lv 3 priest has a better chance getting some of them off. I will likely take iceshard as a one of my options though to augment combats. Saurus Warriors w/fc x 25 This will sit on one of my flanks and hopefully is able to hold its own. Id love to match them up against another armies core and see how they fare. Saurus Warriors w/fc x 28 Slightly larger Block, the Scar Vet will slide into this and lead them. I generally would try to have these guys take any charges from my opponents big unit and try and hit the flanks with my other large blocks. Salamanders x 2 w/8 handlers I am slowly learning how to use these guys and get shots off properly, I'd love to try using 6 in a game, maybe if I dropped EoTG I could field one more. These guys will likely sit next to Temple Guard and inbetween the TG and a Saurus Block, they will soften up oncoming Enemy Infantry and hopefully not get involved in combat. Sarus Old Blood w/Charmed Shield and Luckstone There isnt much points left to kit this character out due to slann, so I could drop it to a Vet perhaps. Im assuming with the items he has they almost act as if he has 2 bonus wounds. He would sit in TG and help defend the Slann and soften up units so that I might feel comfortable charging with stegadon. so thats my army idea in a nutshell, ive not played many 8th edition WH yet so I will gladly accept advice from the old ones. I know I have no warmachine hunters (Currently dont have an opponent who fields them often). If I dropped the Eotg and swapped out the Oldblood for a veteran Id get back about 500 points. With those 500 points what would be reccommended to take? The Armies I will likely play against the most are Warriors of Chaos, Ogre Kingdoms, Tomb Kings, Empire, Dwarves, Beastmen, High Elves and maybe Orcs and Goblins.
Can anyone give advice or opinions on if this is a valid list or if I am going in the wrong direction? I dont want to go spend the money on units if I dont have to.
Since noone else has I'll chime in: -Slann looks fine, only thing I'd say is replace the gleaming pennant with the +1 leadership one (or none if pts are tight). You can only reroll something once so with the BSB reroll you won't be able to use the gleaming pennant ability anyway (and you shouldn't be failing a leadership 9, coldblood, stubborn, reroll anyway). -Drop the razor standard from your TG. It's way too expensive for what you're getting for it (unless you regularly face opponents with 2+ or 3+ armor saves. Even then I don't figure it's worth it. Since you're running life, you can probably get away with dropping this unit to 20 TG (since they can be buffed with regen, toughness by slann and regrown if killed). -Get more salamanders. Run at least 2 units of 2 sallies. This is basically auto-include for most LM armies. -Drop the old blood. You can use those points to get the sallies (who will earn their pts more effectively). -You need some skinks for poison (especially if you are facing ogres or monster heavy armies, ie high toughness). Get at least one unit of 6 chameleons (to snipe warmachines and monsters) and a unit of 10 skirmishers (to redirect scary enemy blocks).
I would contemplate adding in some more salamanders and chameleon skinks, but I still have a hard time justifying skinks in a useful roll. Perhaps I am not employing them properly, but I find them useless so far. No scouting means they cant get up and harass large targets/high toughness units like I would want them too. often enough they just get in the way of things and are quickly dispatched in entirety offering up 70+ VP. maybe my dice just suck, but I average like 3 kills with skinks per game.
Skink skirmishers aren't really meant to kill things. They are meant to redirect enemy units away from the battle. With proper positioning, you can force the enemy to charge your skinks and draw them way out of the line of battle. Especially useful against frenzied units since they have to take a leadership test or charge the nearest enemy. If you do get them to charge your skinks, they will slaughter them yes but then they have to overrun and now that big horde of marauders are a good 2-3 turns off toward the other side of the board and away from battle. A bargain for 70 pts really. It's very rarely that a skink skirmisher unit does a substantial amount of kills/wounds.
skinks skirmishers are a must! esp. against orcs and goblins, against giants and spiders, poison is the way foward...