A very good question, and one that I will give my own answer to later this afternoon when I'm at my computer and not on mobile. But to give the shortest possible answer right now, I think that our monsters should be able to hold their own against other monsters in the game and should not rely on synergy stacking like our troops do. It is also very much a lore thing for me, which I will get into later.
Excited to hear the response! From my pov I think the current strategy fits the lore better. Seraphon aren't an army of one commander on a ridiculously overpowered monster. It's the jungle come alive, with more of a swarm or feral feel. To me it makes sense that the carnosaurs of the world aren't as tough as dragons as they probably aren't as rare and I think the aesthetic of 4-6 monsters (depending on steg battleline) feels more thematic than the "here's 2 massive monsters" that most other armies fall into. I guess I just feel like people are constantly looking for seraphon to play like other armies when those armies exist already. Seraphon occupy a pretty unique space and I'd hate to see that sacrificed.
The fluff hypes us up too much. Recent fluff is pretty aweful and full of plot holes but the old world fluff pretty much cemented us as s tier in all aspects. Warriors were bred for combat over thousands of years and had become the perfect warriors each able to kill many demons single handedly. Heck 1 temple guard hero bit the face off a demon prince to save his slann. When the elves were in danger an army of lizardmen marched into combat slaughtered all the skaven with very few casualties and then left without a single word to the elves. In another instance when elves visited the lizardmen they were immediately slaughtered and could not put up a fight whatso ever. It took armies of demons hundreds of years and millions of bodies to capture just 1 lizardmen city in combat. The slann taught the elves magic and the elves often were too weak so the slann had to secretly aid the elves for them to get anything done. Carnosaurs are apex predators with no equal each bred specifically for warfare and paired with partners so in synch that they are basically 1 entity. It goes on and on and on. And then you see the army in tabletop form, and its none of that. At all. So people complain.
12+(14-16 is much better) movement usually with fly, 3+ save or other survivability , at least 20 damage againsed a 4+ save. this tends to be what i look for in monsters in general and why i was so harsh on our guys when our book came out.our guys being as cheap as they are helps but still move 10/8 and 4+ save hurt a lot and we profile super badly far worse then most monsters
I think it's a combination of the disconnect between the lore and the warscrolls combined with the fact that everyone on this forum is, to some extent, a fan of the army or we wouldn't be on a forum dedicated to the army. So we naturally want the army to be really powerful on the table. I'm not saying we aren't an overall strong army from a metagame perspective, but our individual units are not powerful compared to other things that are out there. I initially quit Warhammer when GW squashed fantasy and it wasn't until 5 years or so later that one of my friends talked me into AoS, saying that there are points again (lol), the game is relatively balanced, there are frequent (by GW standards) erratas, etc so I gave it a shot. My first thought after reading up on seraphon and looking through the battletome was that we lacked a god tier model. I was jealous of Archaon, Morathi, Nagash, and even Allarielle. I wanted something big and flashy even if they weren't a competitive choice. So when I saw the new Kroak release, I was really hoping he would be 800~ points and have a warscroll to match, but alas that's still not the case. So really I'm just disappointed, not in the overall power of the army, but the lack of something individually powerful.
I like that kroak is so cheap points wise. It means I can use my awesome model without having to decide he is my army. Plus, he could have been 900 points and be horrible like arialle. Then he would really be unusable.
Thats totally fair! I think a lot of the lore (from the perspective of that army) hypes them up to be pretty awesome, but I can definitelysee where you're coming from. Id also tentatively argue that there's a lot of complaints on this forum around how "weak" we are in the lore and how we are "always losers." It's hard for both of those things to be true. I do understand you said aos is different, but to be fair I think a vast majority here didn't play fantasy. And I think aos should probably be judged within the confines of aos, no? Always hard to hold an entire community to consistency, but it comes across (to me at least) as theres just a difference between what people want and what seraphon are. Feels like people think dinosaurs and instinctively want something that brings that childhood fantasy to life, just an absolute rampaging monstrous beast of a thing. Or the internet just amplifies the complaints, which is always fair. I would love a carnosaur to absolutely destroy on the tabletop because of course it's fun to feel powerful in all scenarios. I just personally think it's just as (if not maybe more) fun to have that dinosaur fantasy come to life in a slightly different way. One that means I can bring more toys to the table which is always sweet. There's no wrong way to look at it, I just think it's pretty interesting that it seems to pop up repeatedly and reliable for about as long as I've been on the forums haha. Appreciate the answer!
that mostly only apllies to AoS lore. we where bosses in the old world. and since thats where most of the lore comes from and since AoS lore is so hard to find are you really supprised if most are working off of decade old lore? i would rather they be good rather then they be "different".
But you admitted they are good, they just aren't good in the specific way you want. Throwing a quick edit in here: came across a little more argumentative then I wanted, sorry dude!! I definitely want the monsters to be good to. I think they are, just in an unconventional way but we've talked a lot about the way seraphon functions and the relative goodness or badness of that playing style before. I appreciate your response, thanks for answering my original question!
no i said that them being cheap helps and then immediately qualified it with 3 major weaknesses. carnasuars don't meet any of my qualifications for being good they just aren't garbage like they used to be. alls good bud you know this is my jam
Sorry for the long post, TLDR at the bottom. @Jason839 said pretty much everything I was going to say about the lore, and @Erta Wanderer summed it up nicely. The lore makes us look like super-elites but the game rules want us to play as cannon fodder. We waited and waited for GW to give us new lore for AoS, but when they did, it turned out to be crap. I know that's a very subjective opinion, and lots of people like the "space lizards made of magic memories" thing and are fine with us royally losing pretty much every battle we engage in because it's all "part of the Great Plan," but me personally I hate it. I'd much rather we stick to an army that shows up, kicks demon ass, and goes home, but that would mean that the Stormcast would have competition for the saviors of the universe role, I guess Now, I really don't have a problem with a synergy-based playstyle. But that shouldn't be the whole army, imo. It's perfectly fine mechanically that our army is based around weak base stats that can get buffed until we match or exceed similar unit types. But it just doesn't match up with the lore that I've always loved and that got me into Warhammer in the first place. I never got to play Fantasy, I was too young and the thought of buying grey plastic figures that I'd have to assemble and then try to paint was just too daunting. But since I had friends and a sibling who were into both Fantasy and 40k, I learned a lot about both settings and grew to be a fan of Fantasy in general, but the Lizardmen specifically. So I never got to experience the rules, and therefore I can't speak to how Lizardmen used to play on the tabletop back then. But TW:W2 came out, all of a sudden there was a much more accessible way for me to play in that setting and experience the army I'd always liked. So I fully admit that's where my bias comes from, but at least as far as I could tell, the Lizardmen in that game play just how you'd expect them to. Saurus can out-fight most other regular infantry units, Skinks are quick and effective but weak, a Carnosaur can duel a Dragon, a Stegadon or Bastiladon can smash through an infantry unit with little resistance, and Kroak can wipe out multiple infantry units at once, and our legendary lords are unique and fun to use. You get the idea. Then, when I finally get into the tabletop hobby and start actually getting to play AoS, while I still have fun and love the hobby, seeing how they actually play was a bit of a shock. Instead of our troops being able to go head-to-head with the enemy, our only strategies are suicide Ripperdactyl charges and trying to drown our enemies in enough Skink blood to prevent them from getting to a specific spot on the board, and all of our units die to whatever touches them. Not at all how the Lizardmen I've read about are supposed to be, as far as I can tell. Especially since in the new lore, they are essentially the only race that actually survived pretty much as they were from the old setting. But also apparently we're the last race in the game to get an updated ruleset for the current edition, and the first edition of AoS was apparently a free-for-all mess, so I guess it's somewhat understandable. Then the new book comes out and at first glance, it's really just mediocre. Lots of useless rules or rules that make no sense, Starborne are blatantly more powerful than the Coalesced, which hurts because Coalesced are how I want to play Lizardmen. We get a faction terrain piece that was the worst in the game at the time, but no new or updated models, faction endless spells, or named characters. For a faction that has a lot of big monsters, we don't get things like mount traits, which have been given to other factions with fewer monsters than we have. Our troops are still weaker than pretty much any other facton's units without buffs, (except BoC, sorry goat bois...) and our heroes are all squishy enough to make shutting down our buffs easily achievable unless we're playing the one list that seems to have almost accidentally become oppressively overpowered. That was my problem with the 2e book. Everything seemed haphazardly thrown together just because we had to have a new book, and little thought was given to either the lore or game balance aspects. Did we come out of it very strong mechanically? Yes, if you were playing Kroaknado in Fangs of Sotek, because our whole army was based on how many buffs you could stack and that subfaction could take the most and the best buffs and use them the most effectively. But that was our only competitive list and everything else was more or less "just for fun." I honestly think that Seraphon becoming OP was completely accidental, as whoever wrote the book clearly didn't really pay attention to the rules and didn't catch how much you could pump up Skinks in FoS, but also didn't see how mediocre everything else was. I also dislike how our army (and AoS in general, to be fair) encourages a "spam unit x" playstyle. FoS? Spam Skinks. Draco's Tail? Salamanders. Koat's Claw? Saurus. Thunder Lizard? Bring 1 Bastiladon and a bunch of Stegadons. And the other thing I didn't like is how units are point costed for Starborne because they have summoning, but still cost the same and don't perform as well in Coalesced due to their stupid bravery rule and lack of mobility. But when the book came out I basically said it was good, but clearly lacked the creativity and passion you could see in other rulesets. Maybe we ended up being good because whoever wrote the book was looking at it from a mostly mechanical perspective, but I really wish that someone who actually likes and cares about our faction would get to write rules and lore for them. Final note about our tome is the complete lack of named characters/heroes. I think that has a lot more effect on people that some might think. Again, we're supposed to be this super-elite army of complete badasses who's sole reason for being is to defeat Chaos, but we have no characters. That just adds to the feeling that in the actual game we're just cannon fodder. It's no wonder that all we do in lore is show up and die when we have no heroes with stories and goals to add to the setting. If GW's not going to bring Kroq-Gar, Oxyotl, and other old friends out of stasis, then they need to start introducing new heroes so that both the writers and readers actually have some way to get invested in the Seraphon when it comes to lore, and to give GW a good reason to actually give us powerful units on the tabletop. All of that rambling out of the way, on the topic of our monsters specifically, I really do wish that they were actually powerful on their own and were not easy to kill and didn't rely on buffs to get to a decent damage output. Let's be honest, more than a few people who got into this army did so because they just liked the idea of lizards and dinosaurs. And come on, they're freaking dinosaurs! They should at least be able to hold their own in a fantasy setting. Again, I 100% agree that mechanically, they work. They're relatively cheap points-wise, and they can be buffed to perform better just like everything else in our army. But really, that's just not what I and a lot of other people want when it comes to having savage dinosaurs battling on the table. It just feels...wrong, that an Oldblood on Carnosaur literally can't 1v1 any other monster of a similar base size and have a reasonable chance of winning. That our Stegadons are basically missiles that we throw at an enemy to do damage and then die. That our Terradons and Ripperdactyls hit like wet paper and are about as durable. Yes, there are some units that actually feel like they work well and are fun to play without needing 2-3 heroes to babysit them. Salamanders, Kroxigors, and Bastiladons are all in a pretty good place. (But come on, GW, fix the Ark of Sotek to actually be good in melee, please!) But our army has almost no rend, and that needs to stop. It was a problem in 2e, but it's downright crippling in 3e since everything gets such high saves and our buff-stacking has been severely reduced. What I want from our monsters is first and foremost for Carnosaurs to actually be good in combat, especially 1v1 with other heroes and monsters. As Erta said, they need to be faster, tougher, and hit harder. Carnosaurs should focus on taking out the biggest, most powerful threats, not being buff-wagons for Knights. The Oldblood should be the best anti-monster duelist in the army, period. The Scar-Vet should be slightly lower-tier, but still good at hero-killing and taking out things like cavalry and elite infantry. They would work best with a relatively small number of attacks that have high damage and high rend. Stegadons are pretty good where they are, all they really need is a bit more survivability, even if at the cost of some of their damage. But I really don't think a Stegadon Chief should be our strongest damage-dealing monster, that should go to the Carnosaurs. Make them more tanky and better at clearing infantry and weaker monsters. Bastiladons with the lasers are great. Tanky, with a good shooting attack. I'm not sure why they're not classified as artillery, because that's what they are. Bastiladons with snakes are clearly meant to be chaff and horde clearers that excel at bogging the enemy down, but for some reason GW just doesn't know what to do with their snake attack. Personally, rather than continuing to try and re-work the mortal wounds the attack does over and over again, I would just make it a straight-up horde-clearer. Either make it like the spells where you roll a die per model within x range and deal MWs on a 5+, or give it attacks equal to models within x range, make the attacks average in strength, and give him an aura debuff for the poison instead of mortals. And last but not least, the poor, poor Troglodon. I've heard people say it was bad in Fantasy, and it's always been bad in AoS, even when it was our cheapest dino. Just copy Total Warhammer on this one. Make him a ranged-based monster that's ok in melee, but buff the spitting attack so that he can snipe characters effectively. Then his 1 spell cast per turn is fine. Or, give him 2 casts per turn and make him primarily a spellcaster that's ok in melee like the Idoneth Eidolon wizard. Then make him count as a Slann for the purpose of buffs that require Slann (like EotG), an ability to roll for CP, and now you have a monster that's a viable alternative for a Slann and lets you have some magic in your all-monster lists. As far as Lord Kroak goes, I like him and I like his rules. He's fun to play, but I wish that all of the buffs he requires to actually be powerful were included in his warscroll and he just cost more. But I get that people like the lower point cost if they want to bring him just to be a buff-wagon and character sniper. As has been said, he really is the least lore-accurate high-tier character that has a model in the game right now. Of course, if he were able to instantly nuke the entire enemy army that simply wouldn't be playable, but I totally understand that it doesn't make sense that he has to have an entire support entourage included in the army to reach his full potential. I guess what GW could have done is to make the new Kroak a truly god-tier model with the rules and costs to go with it, and actually kept the resin Kroak as a Relic Priest that would be an upgrade to a normal Slann, but not on the level of Kroak himself. You'd have to remove Celestial Deliverance, but you could have kept all his other old rules and it would have made sense. Then people could choose the regular Slann, Relic Priest for extra spells, durability and CP generation, and Kroak could have been a fully self-reliant character. But I'm sorry for going on so long, TLDR: I don't want our army to play like another army in AoS, I want them to play like the Lizardmen they're supposed to be. We should be Custodes, not Skaven, as Erta said. Our current playstyle is fine, even if severely nerfed in 3e, but it doesn't live up to how myself and quite a few other members of this forum wish it was. It's not that we wish that we were playing the same way as Orks, Ogors, Lumineth, etc. It's that some people have a specific idea of how Lizardmen should play, and it's largely influenced by the old Fantasy lore and games like TW:W2. And according to that lore, our monsters are supposed to be powerful, our Saurus are upper-tier infantry, not cannon fodder, that's what Skinks are for, and Skinks should not be the best way to play Seraphon. Our magic is second to none, and our one named character Kroak should be the single most powerful spellcaster in the game, regardless of the fact that his game power level will never match his lore power level.
There's a lot here and I think it makes total sense the way you're describing it! I don't necessarily agree with a lot of the things you said, but different strokes and all that. I'd only quibble with where you say fangs was our "only" strong list. I think you can look at tournament results and kind of empirically show that isn't necessarily true. Seraphon over the last year has done extremely well and all 4 suballegiances have won GT size events (some on tts some in person). There was one (fangs) that certainly rose above the rest, I just don't want to get too hyperbolic in how we talk about this stuff. The relative shittyness of our warscrolls was way overblown (at least up until 3.0, too early to say for that). I've made this argument at other points in the past and supported it with various data points so won't reiterate it all here. I just think the argument starts to break down a bit when you say things like "cannon fodder" and "mediore" warscrolls. I definitely think there's a disconnect between the lore and the tabletop, but I think you see that relative "toning down" across a lot of the game. Space Marines are another example. Personally, I feel when you compare a saurus' warscroll against other "cannon fodder" scrolls, there is a pretty big difference. I think saurus (and most seraphon stuff pre buffs) occupy this pretty odd above averageish space thats hard to judge at face value. It's not garbage but it's not great either so it feels bad compared to the great stuff out there, but better than the trash so it seems like they should be good. Also, think it's super interesting how you came in through TW2! I think they really nailed the feel of lizardmen in people's heads and I sometimes wonder if GW should take more cues from them. Edit: forgot to ask, so would it be accurate to say you think a carnosaur and a vampire lord on zombie dragon should be equals? Do you think that feels right given the models size and relative role of those units?
Interesting, fair enough! To me, it feels like there's an appropriate separation there, altho maybe a carnosaur is more in the 300-325 space. I think stonehorns and vlozds seem like more powerful units to me for a variety reasons but all pretty subjective! If you could get a 3+ save and move 12 for something in the high 200 or low 300s that would feel really good. Maybe too much to ask haha. Edit: realistically what should a 3+ save and move 12 carnosaur be pointed at? Assuming no other changes.
Just same exact scroll except 3+ save and move 12. I could see that feeling better for a carno assuming you can squeeze that in under stonehorns
240. i say this mostly based on the General on gryphon. the general on gryphon is a moderately good hero monster nothing incredible like the VloZD but he is the best in his faction for this roll. he costs 305 has 15" move, flight(this is the big one), +1 wound, can have a natural 3+ save(although you cant buff it), does the same base damage as the carnasuar, is a much better buffer then either the scar vet or the old blood, and has much better support from his book. so i don't think it's much of a streach to have our carnasuars at 240 with 3+(call it a +1 from the sheild same as GoG) with only 12 move and no fly