He also only debuufs 1 bravery now instead of 2, and buffs your own skinks' bravery by one, which he didn't before.
Umm so with Serpent staff the bite has the potential to do 12, 10 or 8 damage. Low rend but still. YIKES.
I rly dont like the fact my Dread Saurian now has 1 jaw attack less, and sooo much less rend Same feeling with the healing only in our hero phase, but its kinda awesome together with the Starpriest, might play him now only together with the Starseer too, to make sure the jaw attacks will wound enemy, or to let my enemy reroll their saves. Point increase from 380 to 420, kinda dont get it but yeah, thats life^^
If you fully buff the Dread Saurian the chance for massive damage isn't even that low. Curse of Fates for +1, rerolls by the Astrolith, Serpent Staff, and reduce enemy saves by one using Curse of Rust from the Chamon spells.
Flat damage is great, -1 rend is pretty dumb though. He did get a tail attack and his claws were massively improved. Hitting on 3s and -2 rend on 10 attacks is wonderful. I wish they had kept the -3 rend and just made him cost more points honestly. I'll still field mine, I love the model and I can summon him for free if I ever want too.
The rend decrease does suck, but look at how they normalized all of the dmg. Before it was all D6's and your big beastie, even buffed up, could do very little if you had bad luck. I think it is much stronger in terms of consistency and expected dmg output. Take for example 8-10 wounds. Before you were rolling a D3. Now you get 4. Huge buff. Same for the claws. Hitting on 3's rerolling 1's against monsters is always a big buff. I bet if someone did the math against different save values, the new one would do more dmg. But I could be wrong, maybe one less Jaw attach does hurt more, but I think the new one is much better after taking dmg.
So we confirmed the new points at 420? I think a lot of the big baddies went up in price this edition right?
I take it back. It some ways it's a big nerf to the jaws. Against a armor 3 monster, you now have a 34% chance to do 0 dmg with your jaws. That excludes any buffs to the enemy. That being said, you do a lot more dmg when it goes through, but I would say you would need curse of fates up as much as possible. 34% chance to do 0 dmg on your best attack kind of sucks. Luckily some of it is made up by the improved claws and new tail attack. It might sort of end up being the same damage most of the time, but it has a much better chance of doing insane dmg than before.
i did it and yeah, in general the new one will deal more dmg, still a little bit sad about loosing the only rend -3 in our army.
In the end my Dread Saurian was always the one thing in my army i buffed to a powerlevel over 9000, not necessary for me to talk about an unbuffed one^^
Yeah if you can lower that percent chance to do 0 dmg with buffs, overall everyone will be happy with the amount of snacking you will do
Reading through this, I love the image of a Dread Saurian tearing through enemy ranks with a bit attack that can one-shot dragons, and a Starpriest following it laughing like a child with a new favourite toy.