Sadly i must agree but he does serve to scare the living crap out of my chaos playing friend. Also my friend doesn't use charmed shield and that is what a WD Slann with fireball on lvl. 1 is for.
I'm not a fan of the fully maxed out DP, especially with the troll unit screen to deal with cannons and such and with a bigger unit of skullcrushers. It is just too maxed out and will tell my opponent that it is not fun for some armies with otherwise competitive builds to play without tailoring their army to deal with that WoC army. If I have the tools to beat that army it can be an unfun game just because I plinked the DP to take away the charmed shield protection and then hit it with a couple of cannons or two more bolt thrower shots (wounding on 3's), or some spells, and killed the DP on turn one or two and then ran over the army. I stopped playing Daemons, even though my builds were middle of th road but competitive, because there were simply too many instances where either: 1. the greater daemon dies on turn one or two and the army gets run over; or one takes no greater daemon and magic spells (esp lore of light) can't be stopped and the army dies in a couple of turns to magic (esp lore of light spells); 2. your run into the BOTWD high elf horde and can't do anything but try to avoid it; or 3. the opponent has no answers and units like the greater daemon and beasts of nurgle just run over the opposing army. Armies where you either have a good or bad matchup and either win big or lose big are really nt fun to play with or against. ETC rules are kind of special, designed for a team tourney (without the sports votes and feedback to discipline abusive stuff and players coming from different gaming cultures) and an example of over-managing the issues to the point that a lot of restrictions seem unnecessary or not fun. We sometime look at them as a broad guide for abusive lists submitted, but otherwise ignore them. They tweak here and there and pretty soon every army gets overly restricted. The game is generally so balanced right now that I'm not finding them necessary, not Swedish comp either simply because it seems overly complex and overthought. Maybe Epidemus and a few special characters need to be looked out for and the DP with Chimeras and skullcrushers and trolls and charot armies needs to be looked at for tournaments approving lists. There are only a small number of kind of broken or irritating combos out there (some with special characters) that are not necessarily broken but can make for an unfurn game. I tend to accept that people should take what they want but with the understanding that a max list will risk a bad game or bad comp score at an event or tourney if they play the DP/WoC build with all the toys and you won't get many positive sports votes with those lists. If you run chariot core, chimeras, DP, a big or two units of skullcrushers, tzeentch BSB, and a unit of trolls, that is probably one of the few times I will give a bad game vote in a tournament if bad game counts toward comp and certainly wlll give a bad comp score if the tourney has opponents rate comp and that counts in the points. I don't penalize people for having a list that is a bad matchup for me if I know that the list is not OP and has its own bad matchups to worry about because they'll likely draw a bad matchup or two in a five round event. but you need to give even those with bad matchups a puncher's chance of winning if they play well and roll well. If you run a maxed out DP but warriors and marauder horsemen and warhounds in core and chaos knights and mabye one not overly big unit of skullcrushers then I don't find that list too hard to be unfair. The problem is that there is a fine line between someone just getting really lucky or outplaying an opponent and tabling the opponent (including the oppoent having bad luck) and an OP list or bad matchup. I'm in the camp that most of the time, a player loses on psychology by giving up or playing poorly when one might have at least a 40% chance of winning or at least a chance of an honorable close loss or only minor loss if one plays it out with full effort and is not intimidated by the DP. Like the Texas comment. Playing in Texas, I'm part of that group that will tell people frankly (I get into trouble being too frank even though i don't swear or insult people.) if I think their list is unfair, if they did something during the game wrong or that bugged me, or if it is not a fun llist to play. Also, I appreciated Texas players telling less experienced players how they might improve their play and what to avoid. I and my son learned a lot over the years and still learn a lot from that. We've got a number of people at our tourneys, including from Arkansas, that will do that and it sure makes thing a lot better. Even experienced players do that with each other after games and during casual games. I never minding someone telling me that the my movement was sloppy or the way I fled a charge (directio and measurement) frustrrated them or if they thought my army was too hard. It was the guys that don't have the courage to say it to your face and just ding you without telling you (or spread false rumors) that I never respected. I agree with the chaos daemons comment even though most of the time I beat that army. I have issues with the chaos daemon list, even more with K'dai, although poison shooting and magic attacks avoid the re-roll to wound the K'dai and can deal with some of the uber tough models in the CD list. A CD army has trouble with a lore of shadow mage hitting the K'dai with withering causing a greater risk of the k'dai failing the T test and other models (like the combo wizard/eniginner by the war machines and the war machines) getting removed by pit of shades. The dreadquake mortor is not fun. It is a classic over-the-top model to sell premium priced forgeworld stuff. It is not that the mortar is unfairly costs, just not fun to have units pineed down or risk dangerous terrrain tests. I similarly don't like playing the castled up dwarf build with the four war machines, (2 runed up cannons, 1 runed up grudge thrower, and an organ gun that autohits) and three infantry blocks, runelord max and BSB Thane, even though it is not broken. A friend came up with a winning build and played that army successfully. winning some GTs, but he stopped after about a year. It is one of those lists where the opponent must get some luck and he doesn't crush your army with cannons and grudges before the opponent manage sto destroy some war machines or the dwarf player has some back luck with war machines shooting allowing you to get into combat and have a chance of killing his blocks of GW warriors and hammerers. Absent that, if you don't have the fast movement or tools to get the war machines or fail to get them, your main units get pummelled before you have a chance to do sometihing. These armies, as well as some magic focused armies, are too point and click and luck driven and don't create a game with the interesting movment and deployment and matchup tactics that make the game worth playing. It is not that there is not skill, learning target priority and sequencing and subtle deployment and positioning of units can be the different between winning or losing with those armies, but the opponent just feels too often helpless, like one is part of Picket's charge hoping enough models willl be left by the time one gets across the table to actually have a hope of doing something in combat.
This is going to be the major factor of the comparison. Followed by the winds of magic roll. My math says a level 2 wizard trying to roll for a specific spell has 11 chances out of 36 to roll the spell they want, or roll a double. That's a 30.5% chance of even getting the spell. (5 doubles that aren't 3 & 3, plus 6 ways to roll at least one 3) If the cannon shoots 8" in front of the target, assuming that there is at least a 2" wiggle room to hit the monster base, then it needs to not roll: 1. miss fire 2. a 2 followed by a 2 or a 4 3. a 4 followed by a 2 3. a 2, 4, or 6 followed by a misfire I count 31 different out comes and 22 of them hit the target. (70.9% hit rate) A L2 wizard has to roll 6+ on 2-6 power dice AND roll higher than their opponent rolls on 1-6(or more) dispel dice with an extra +2 (from likely wizard level imbalance...) The math gets crazy here, but going just by averages (and assuming you roll all your dice to cast and he rolls all his dice to dispel) you will get the spell off at least half the time if you roll a total winds of 6 or less (ignoring channeling). Once you roll 7 or more winds dice, the odds are in your opponents favor to dispel. So you can estimate that a winds of magic roll of 2-6 = a successful casting, and winds of 7-12 are a failed casting (unless double 6's are rolled) so that gives you a 26.3% chance (according to http://www.ehergert.net/drop_folder/Mathhammer.pdf) I get a 41% chance that you roll less than 7 on winds of magic (and 50% of the time you'll not be dispelled so 20.5% success) and 26.3% of the remaining 59% is 15.5% which gives you a 35.5% chance to get the spell off. It's actually a little higher than that because with the lower dice rolls you can still roll IF, so lets round up to 40%. So, 5 attempts to cast the spell (assuming 1 is scrolled) gives you 2 successful castings per game. And 30.5% chance you even have the spell to begin with is an average of 0.61 hits per game (over the course of multiple games.. any discrete game will average 0 or 2) The cannon blowing up each turn which would lower it's number of attemps from 6 to 5.5 which makes it ht 3.8895 and other misfires make it skip a turn, which would probably drop it another .3 or so (numbers are starting to get fuzzy..) So a cannon has 5.2 attempts to shoot with a 70.9 hit rate giving it 3.68 hits per game. I think that makes the cannon 603% more likely to hit than the Skink Priest (although, only 184% more hitty than a Priest that successfully rolled the Spear) and only costs 25% more. Note: if you assume no dispel scroll it increases the number of hits per game-with-spell from 2 to 2.4, so it's not that big of a jump compared to the cannon's 3.68... and there will almost always be a dispel scroll ... plus the Cannon probably has an Engineer to mitigate misfires. Anyone want to check my math? (I did it all inline.. so it is ripe for errors) In the big picture, though, 2 out of 3 games you won't even have Amber Spear to cast with just one Priest.
As I said to reasonably guarantee spear you need 6 wizard levels. That is 300 pts worth of priests. so again not a guarantee just a threat
Of course. I was just comparing a single Skink Priest to a single Cannon. I actually take 3 Skink Priests all the time! 3 Skink Channels + 3 Slann Channels at 5+ = a lot of extra power/dispel dice plus 2 dispel scrolls all starting at the low low price of 605 points! (plus a massive block of Temple Guard for shipping and handling)
Yikes. That is a lot of magic to carry. Most go with one Slann and one skink priest. With lvl 4 death out there, a cube and a scroll are in order. The amber spear is only one of the magic options and best casted boosted for the S10 and D6 wounds. Having savage beasts will scare him into avoiding your best units if they have a character or avoiding a comboy. Even wildform will let a saurus unit, TG unit, or character in a saurus or TG unit increase its wound output and cut into the DP armour save. Of course, charging the DP with a skink priest turned into a dragon is kind of funny and will force him to spend all or most of his power dice to dispell and kill the skink piriest it in his magic phase (which of course means the DP is pinned in his movement phase), taking away his ability to get off spells. If you've got that many skinks and channels on the slann and a lvl 2, cbarging a sknk priest into a DP and then casting boosted kadon (counting on the fact that either your rolled something like a 4 and 3 and he has only 4 dispel dice or you burned some of his DD he has but you still have 6 to throw at the spell) would get a response, also if you miscast there is a good chance of putting a S10 hit on the DP with 7 or less. 6 dice average a roll of 21 plus 2 for 23, so you can go for the great fire dragon which is S8 and T8 and 8 attacks plus a S5 breath weapon or mountain chimera at S7, T7 and 4D6 poisoned attacks and S4 breath weapon. Also, neither monster has flaming attacks and each only has regular breat weapons. The DP hits first but you have enough wounds to survive hist attacks while a monster and he will have a hard time cutting through that high T. You will auto hit on the breath weapon attacks at S4 or S5 hit on 5's with the normal but those S7 or S8 hits hurt against T5 and cut right through most of the AS. Give the skink priest cloak of feathers and it will distract the DP and if it rolls after the other lvl 2 skink priest for spells odds are good get a double and pick up Kadon. Funnier yet is hand of glory on fire dragon will put it at WS10 2/3's of the time, hitting a nurgle daemon prince on 4's. If you managed to get off savage beasts following by boosted kadon, then the DP is dead. Not saying it happens reliably but it would be a great story and I have seen people pull off the skink priest suicide charge Kadon trick or baiting something like a DP into going after the skink priest in a skink cohort unit (ranked unit of 10 skinks with champ and skink priest invite the charge by the DP, DP must accept challenge and can't kill emough models to break steatfast, skink unit in range of general and BSB is steadfast and holds, skink priest gets converted in his own turn by magic and goes to town).