With a solo slaan it is. If you're in a block of temple guard, you end up killing off too many of your little buddies. After using soulstone, it would make the miscast cart look like this: 2-3 Dimensional Cascade (very bad) 4-8 Slaan Takes a hit that wounds on 2+, D6 dice are lost. 9-10 Slaan and skinks take hits that wound on 2+, D6 dice are lost. 11-12 Power Drain (loses D3 magic levels, very bad) It reduces the very bad results to ~16%, (effective that outright kill the slaan, or take away his magic levels). Without Soul Stone, very bad things happen 33% of the time. I usually go without it. But that's because I'm not gunning for the big "6" spell and throwing lots of dice. I'm running with 3 bound spells and doing a higher volume of low die casting making the chance of me miscasting much lower in the first place. -Matt
I like it. I rolled a 4 on the miscast table in my last game. Many Temple Guard still died, but I didn't risk losing my Slann on a 50-50. Without Cupped Hands, I think this is an auto-include for me.
I love it, it gives you the choice of which miscast you take, which can save temple guards at the cost of a few health point which can be healed next round.
I agree w Lizardmatt, on a solo slann it has a lot more potential. On a TG bunker slann, most of the time you will be blowing half of them away anyway, so if I'm trying to shave points I leave it off but would likely take the reroll first failed dispell before that. However, I have yet to actually play w the new book and reguardless one should always play the builds that work for them!
I want to make it an auto-include but I usually go 100 points over. When I'm trying to trim the fat I drop Soul of Stone and say "I guess I won't roll too many dice for one spell." I'm sure I'll change my mind later but I haven't miscast in the new book yet.
This is actually quite an important point. I've been running a wandering Slann and haven't yet thrown more than three dice at a single spell (two is the norm), on the other hand if you are running a mystery Slann then you will need to throw more dice at spells to get them off because high magic has a fairly high average casting value. My solution to the miscast problem has been to 'try not to' rather than trying to mitigate the effects when it happens.
+1 to the above. with wandering deliberations, no I dont think you need it (havnt played him yet so this is pure thought process) with mystery: most definitely auto-include....but its to save the slann and not the TG as you want to go from 11 to 10 if you can. I usually solve the early miscasts this by exploiting the neat new feature called "the slann dosnt have to be in the TG anymore". I usually run him solo if against a shooter-weak army, or in a skink-bunker if opposite. I then try to get the big ones off, and since Fiery Convocation is probably a 1time spell it will get swapped afterwards. If danger gets close to the TG or the Slann they can always get together to go stubborn and ITP, hopefully after you went through the high-dice spells.
In the lists i wrote w tg ive included a skink bunker for the slann to hang out in that trails the tg. that way, uf he does miscast it hurts the skinks, then when i get close to combat i pop him into the tg. not sure how well thats gonna work but it was one of the ways i thought of to mitigate miscasts
I like it. I would've gotten a dimensional cascade last time if it weren't for SoS. Instead I got the other one and "only" lost 11 Tguards lol...