8th Ed. First Impressions of Playing Against the New Dwarves

I had a 2000 point game against the new army book today, and here are my thoughts, not in any order.

1) Shooting has been nerfed. I didn't take much damage from his shooting units at all.

2) Organ gun can be brutal if combined with an engineer and the +1 to hit rune. However, it is nice to be able to use skirmishers / Range / other modifiers to reduce the to hit roll. They are brutal against saurus.

3) My opponent gave shields to everything. This means that you should think of handgunners, or quarellers as dwarf warriors that also happen to have ranged weapons for 4 points extra, instead of "ranged" troops.

3a) This means that even small units of 10 guys get a 4+ armour, and a 5+ ward when you charge, on toughness 4 with ws4. I cannot stress how unexpectedly hard they are. My saurus where bouncing off their ranged troops. When i charged into an actual big block of guys with a character in the front, I broke and ran away, just because i did not do enough damage.

4) +1 strength on the charge is huge. Even nastier when they have a runesmith that gives them armour piercing. On the charge, they hit on 3s wound on 4s and reduce our armour save to 6s. This is not nice.

5) If they charge you, and by some miracle you don't break, and then you charge them, the whole unit gets use shield wall, so the next round of combat may go worse than if you didn't charge at all.

6) Magic phase was not very strong for me, but I still managed to get a lot of spells off. Dwarves can control the magic phase, but I think that the points needed to do this would far out weigh the cost of the casters on the other side, and they can still go for irresistible.

7) nice magic items and rune combos. 2+ armour save, toughness 6 and 3 wounds on a thane bsb!!!

8) Skinks run rings around their entire army, especially as they have such poor ballistic skill and movement.

9) Hammerers are nasty, but very vulnerable to saurus, skinks, and magic missiles. My opponent gave them shields, which I think really worked for him, considering that they are 14 point models, you only need to save 2, for the shields to have paid for themselves.


Summary

After that game, I think that their greatest strength is core troops. Take a block of them with a rune smith and they will tar pit anything, and may well win. Certainly they will live long enough for their army to respond to the charge. Don't be fooled by a line of dwarves with guns. If you get close, they can charge you kick your ass with WS4 Str4 attacks and 4+ armour. Dwarves are far better in melee than shooting.

I won the game, but it was very brutal. I had mostly skinks and my Slann left.

Ray

 

I finished a game against the new dwarfs only three hours ago. I was running a slann, skink priest beasts with tetto, a blastidon with an ancient steg, several skirmishers, terradons and rippers, a terradon chief, an a salamander and it wasn't easy for him. My thoughts from playing him:

His war machine, his one cannon he took, never got to be used. I irresistibly cast comet of casandora that took it out with ten str5 hits, it took 11 hammerers too.

He ran a big unit of ironbreakers i couldn't kill, the 3+ armor save and 5+ parry stopped my 34 saurus from making a dent. The longbeards were good, but didn't stand up to a stegadon plus saurus.

His thunderers were able to take out my three rippers, but my terradons and chief eventually took his unit out, not much protection.

Final thoughts: theyre incredible in combat. I agree completely, their war machines are good but he didn't use as many as I thought he should have had. Btw the gyrobomber can be good when it gets direct hits.

Their magic breaking is not nearly as good as it used to be, I was still getting insanely good magic off as he tried to dispell. I had good rolls, but my dice usually outnumbered his.

Good game but he should have taken more war machines but it was fun.

 

I had a game vs the new dwarves as well.
Opponent didnt have any warmachines. he had mainly quarrelers and great weapon warriors, belegar and two choppers.

what happened was that i had a brutal victory. thanks to the rippers having good flank and rear charges, getting enough CR and making stuff flee or just doing heavy casualties. 7-8 attacks from a single model is killy. quarrelers didnt manage to do much damage via shooting.

belegar seems to be overpriced. much cheaper gw oldblood tore him down in one round of combat.

tetto wasnt having any troubles with magic either
their anti magic seems to be not-good nowdays

 

You rolled well then, three 6's in 10 dice is awesome.

 

Sounds mostly like reports playing less than optimal armies and units and builds and lower poiint limit games.

The biggest shift will be toward more core quarrellers and thunderers, especially with shields to take advantage of shieldwall and heavy armour they gained and stand and shoot benefits. At S4 and with thunderers having AP, they will take down a lot of skink cohorts, skrox and Krox, saurus and TG if not screened by skirimishers. The one limitation is move or shoot means you can move things out of their shooting arc. We are seeing builds with the new 12" bubble stubborn banner on hammerers screened by these units where these units are able to shoot, stand and shoot and take charges and hold up for a turn or two and the hammerers or core warriors them countercharge.

Gyrocopters are likely to be very popular. They are like the old model but 43% lower poiint cost and gained a drop bombs ability (artillery dice autohits at S3 AP once per game on a unit they flying over). With T5 and 4+ AS and steam gun (S3 AP and flaming, basically a shooting attack placing the breath weapon template in the forward arc from the front base; only in shooting phase and cannot march and shoot) they can block and take out chameleons and skinks pretty reliably. Up to half, rounded up, can also be upgraded to vanguard. Their one weakness is inability to shoot if they march, but with 10" move range and no march blocking or with vanguard, they can fly out and gun you skinks if you move your skinks forward enough and take a lot of shots for their points cost to be killed.

Dwarves also can now take small units of rangers, scouts, as small as 5 models with crossbows, heavy armour, great weapons, throwing axes (shorter range, move and shoot and quicktofire) to counter scouts and vanguard units and get some shots in. But they are limited by being a ranked unit and having M3.

The new organ gun is devastating to cold one riders and TG if not screened (with S5 AP and two artillery dice worth of shots with no multishot penalty). Screening with skirmishers is the best solutiion because it is BS shooting. But with rune of accuracy (for +1BS) and rune of forging (re-roll misfires at will) it will get a lot of shots off (just under 12 on average) that will hit at range. The other set up is master enginner to give the model entrenchment (hard cover to make it harder to shoot and charge and often negate poison shooting at range), give BS4, and allow it re-roll one misfire. In the most extreme case, they can get to BS5 with a special engineer character or with a master engineer (re-roll one misfire) and rune of accuracy.

The new unit is Iron Drakes with shooting at 18" range, quick to fire, S5 flaming and AP. They are basically IronBreakers without shield but with a better overall save in some instances, 4+ armour save and 6+ ward but 2+ ward to flaming. The basically have elite fighting stats, WS5, S4, T4, with good armour and a larger magic/runic banner allowance. They can take rune of slowness which subtracts D6" from your charge distance (take the greater of the charge dice rolled to charge if it is boosted) to increae the chance of a failed charge and provide for the potential of an extra stand and shoot and round of shooting. A runesmith in the unit will give it MR1 and AP attacks to the unit; so the unit will have some protection from a lot of magic damage and will still be effective in combat

Also, Hammerers now get two attacks each and can take a really expensive runic banner, so with WS5, S6 and I2, they match up against the TG and saurus and can kill the monsters in the army and cut through oldblood and scar vet high armour saves. Hand of Glory (and Miasma if rolled into) is huge in this case to potentially switch the WS advantage and allow your troops to hit first.

With the nerfs to magic defense (cannot spam rune dispel scrolls as easily and took away bonus dispel dice), the key is to get augments up on your units and hex their units with magic.

They provided also for a stubborn banner which can be combined to allow on to make units like longbeards and Ironbreakers and Iron Drakes stubborn.