Tutorial Seraphon List for Battletome 2.o

Maybe. Or you could give them +1 to save, and the enemy -1 to hit, or hit that same unit before shooting it with Tide of Serpents, or give the Salamanders Hand of Glory for re-roll 1's without needing a CP, which you might generate on a 4 or 5+ which can be spent otherwise. Whittling down a unit of 30 Daemonettes with Tide of Serpents before shooting the remainder with Salamanders may yield a dead unit, and having a better save on the counter attack may save a wound or two that might be crucial to keeping a Salamander alive. Or just making the Daemonettes hit on a 5+ instead of a 4+ drastically reduces their efficiency. I think the heroes are totally worth it for a variety of situations.

 

That was my initial thought, but after some playtesting I thing they are not an auto-choice. You may take 120 pts and bring a starpriest and give kroxigor MW on 6's or you can pay 140 and take 3 more kroxigor. Starseers ability is golden, but what if you are already too close or in combat? Or unit, which needs to charge is too far away? 120/140 points are a lot, and often taking brute force for their points are better. Honestly, I wouldn't bother with starpriest for anything, but 40 skinks.

 

Or just take more salamanders. No CP, no casts, which may fail. Just pure damage.

Or reduce efficiency even further, by killing them.

Many things seems good on paper. In fact, you will rarely be in range of Tide of Serpents. 12" range is nothing. Astrolith? +140 pts. Balewind? +40 pts and no more mobility. In the end, you already have stellar tempest.

And stuff like tzeentch or OBR doesn't care.

 

Knights in Coalesced is a pretty good target for the Starpriest. Otherwise I agree - It might sound great to deal MWs on 6s to wound, but when mathing it out, it often doesnt result in THAT much extra damage and the Starpriest isnt free by any stretch.

There is no way the Starpriest will be on a Balewind, ever. Realistically I would bet he often is outside of Astrolith range too, since he wants to follow whatever is being buffed. Ontop of this a casting value of 8 isnt very reliable, especially since you likely wont receice any buffs to casting on him. Tide of Serpents is rather underwhelming to me, especially compared to Stellar Tempest.

 

That seems a bit of a narrow approach, the support heroes aren’t there just to add on more damage, they give you the cp, they give you access to skink spell lore and their own spells. The utility shouldn’t be completely ignored in favour of more damage every single time

 

I did specifically mention from a damage point of view though. My point is that people seem to give the Starpriest way too much credit because of the MW output. He obviously brings other things, but the the added damage is quite bad on a number of units. On 3 Salamanders it is like a 10% damage buff, where as spending his points on more Salamanders would give you 50% more damage output.

Edit: Even from an utility point of view, Im still not sold on either of the 3 Skink heroes. As Nart said, you are probably better off getting additional units for their costs.

Skink Priest giving +1 save (which fails 1/3) is reasonable on paper, but is it really though? 3 Salamanders is dead to any reasonable unit if they get caught regardless of having a 3+ or 4+ save. The added damage isnt worth it on Salamanders compared to just getting another.

Skink Starpriest is again not really worth it damagewise outside of a few specific units, certainly not on Salamanders. Hes a 1 cast Wizard that likely wont receice any bonuses to cast or range of spells and 1/3 he will generate a CP.

Mind you, Im not saying they are outright “trash”. The whole discussion was about why we are seeing the current lists on TTS, but that doesnt mean you cant field other stuff and have success.

 

Salamanders just warp a lot of the conversation because they are like the only unit in the book that just needs no buffs.

I personally don't think a starpriest or seer are must takes in every list, but there's also a lot of lists that flat out dont function without them.

I dunno where I was going with this, but salamanders are broken and its hard to talk about anything else in the book without just being like "well... you could just replace it with salamanders."

Also hard to blame people spamming them. Why spend 100 games figuring out some niche list and a 100 games practicing it, when you could just spend 200 games practicing what you know is good.

 

As I already mentioned, the question is, how much do we need this utility. For example, I often have tons of unused CP with my starborne lists. I am not taking starseer/starpriest for CP. Skinks lore is meh. Celestial Harmony/Hand of glory are the best spells, but I can just spend CP to imitate their effect. And I have lots of CP. As for Blazing Starlight/Control Fate - defense-wise they wouldn't help against top-tier stuff, because of how much damage they dish out. As for offense - once again, taking more straight-forward units almost always more preferable.

My point is not that our heroes are bad. All I want to say, that they are not all-around auto-includes, like Kroak. They have to have special purpose in a list to justify them. For example, I am taking starseer mostly because of his 3d6 charge ability. And he casts control fate on kroak turn 1, so I can safely throw itself near opponent's position and drop salamanders. I am not taking him to thunderquake list, because it is all about CP. 3d6 could be nice, but, unlike salamanders, bastiladons/eotg are long ranged and can run and charge, thus, they don't need this 3d6 as badly. I am taking a starpriest, however, to support skinks. List is CP-hungry, so I need celestial harmony to conserve CP too.

The only exception is Skink Priest. It is super-cheap and you rarely have something to fill the last 70 points, aside from endless spells or more skinks. And his abilities are both really nice.

 

I feel like when talking about lists with people it is hard to say “this is a great list!” without thinking “but if you switched X and Y for Salamanders, it would be much better..”.

Obviously this is for squeezing out every little bit of extra power, and you can easily play without Salamanders and have success, but you just cant deny they are incredible strong.

This is obviously rather unhealthy for the tome overall imo, but Im hestitant to call a nerf for Salamanders until we have seen a proper display of what Seraphon can do. If Salamanders is the only thing keeping Seraphon in the game at a top level, nerfing them makes no sense to me. I would rather see a point decrease for other units, so we have more viable top end lists, not fewer.

 

They are a good utility unit but a bit circumstantial and must be used with care. I think one unit with a chief can justify its cost in a lot of Fangs lists, but again as others have mentioned once you start creeping up to a combined costs value of almost 240, you might as well just take Salamanders.

 

This (Salamanders are the best unit) being the case is there any hope for competitive Saurus? The reason I moved away from the battletome in AOS 1.0 was due to the fact the Saurus side of things was....basically horrible. Is this the case all over again? I had hoped to have a bone-crunching aggressive melee list and actually do somewhat fine. Although I've come around to the magic and skinks and the like, what I truly love about Seraphon at its core is the Saurus.

 

If you’re aiming to do fine, you can do worse than Saurus-based Seraphon.

Koatl’s Claw, Starpriest, Knights or Warriors and some hero buffs will always do work. A good block is relatively difficult to shift too.
The only real disappointment is Saurus Guard, for which the only real purpose is babysitting your Slann.

 

What I'm really trying to do is run Kroxigors and make the best list I possibly can with that caveat

 

Kroxigor can be a strong component in a few different lists.

Saurus are in a much, MUCH stronger spot than they were but are not an S or A tier list (probably). I could see a knight list punching above its weight, but i think warriors are just too slow in the meta we're currently in.

 

What do you mean by competitive? Going 5-0? Most likely no. Going 3-0? You have good chances if you don't run into any S-tier builds. Coalesced are B-tier army, while I can easily put Starborne in S (considering Tzeentch will be S+).

Saurus have certain stengths, but they are not the best melee unit there. They are neither extremely survivable nor overwhelmingly damaging. What you do is just stack buffs and hope, that they will get the job done.

Honestly, I'd look at Starborne saurus, not coalesced ones. You see, coalesced lacks any tricks. They are absolultely straightforward. I am talking mostly about saurus, because you can do some interesting stuff in TL. At least in starborne you gain mobility and good bravery and summoning. This gives you some tools to manipulate the flow of the game. It is, of course, at the cost of killing power and survivability, but the mobility will give you more. And sunclaw starhost is better then templehost.

If I had to go Koatl's Claw, I'd look at knights. At least, they move 8, have less models in unit and can have +3" to charge thanks to templehost.

I'd still take kroak, maybe slann too. You'll need lots of CP to make saurus work. Starseer and starpriest would be both helpful here, since you won't likely want more than 90 saurus/30 knights anyway. Since you also want Scar-Veteran, Oldblood and Sunblood too, you'll have to make choices.

This one will be easy, cause Kroxigors have little synergy with the rest of the army. Simply take as much as you can fit. You won't really need support heroes. Take kroak for CP and magic defence and some skinks for filling battleline and activating battle synergy, Taking a Bastiladon is also not the worst idea, since he is a skinks, he is hard to remove and can provide at least some ranged support.

I view kroxigors more like a support fighter, not a centerpiece. I like the idea of 6 in the thunderquake templehost.

 

Yeah I've got a Thunder Lizard Thunderquake list I'm trying to min/max and squeeze every last little drop of competitive viability out of I can. It's somewhere in the Seraphon list section.

Mostly it's just been Grotpunter and I kicking the ball back and forth and exchanging ideas.

 

saurus punch very hard for their points being comparable to daughters of cane and iron jaws

 

As someone who has been basically playing Ironjawz since the start of AOS with some dabblings in other armies: GOOD I love that playstyle!

 

We played Places of Arcane Power (2019) yesterday in my club. I was Starborne and my other mate on a nearby table played Coalesced. My opponent gave up at the end of turn 2 so I had time to go watch my mate play his Coalesced. He almost killed everything on the table but lost due to VPs. Just couldnt get on the objectives fast enough.

Even on this battleplan where a hero has to end a move within 3” to capture, it was clear it was so much more difficult for him to challenge objectives, compared to me having significantly better mobility. On almost any other battleplan where you instantly capture after a teleport (no move requirement) the difference would only be bigger.

Anyways, my point is that after first hand seeing how slow and crippled his army in general was due to Coalesced (largely Warriors with 6 Salamanders), I would agree on going Starborne even with Saurus/Krox.

I really like Knights over Warriors, but losing 2 jaw attacks is really a bummer. I would try to math it out and see how big of a deal it is when slapping on a couple of realistic buffs on them plus the Starborne batallion buff and compare it to Koatls. Otherwise I would try to get some kind of deepstrike threat in a couple of units of Chameleon Skinks (dont need 20 in a unit) and stay Coalesced. It isnt that many battleplans where heroes need to capture tbh.

 

Oh man I'm practically looking for an excuse to run chameleon skinks! I think a Saurus based list with Chameleon skinks would be rad. My main list I'm eager to try is the Thunderquake one we've been brainstorming. All the various little iterations of that, that's the list I want to perfect. However eventually my goal is to have the best list I possibly can using at least every Warscroll once because I love the entire Seraphon range xD