I've been doing some reading on the Battle Engines while being ill. The first thing I noticed first was the ranged attacks on every other BE than ours (
Legion has a spell). A ranged weapon allows an Engine to participate in fights where the 120 mm base might not fit, and not having one is a major hit to the Wraith Engine.
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| Guess why I'm considered the best engine? |
The second thing is token accumulation, because the Menoth engine runs on health that can be replenished, Cygnar and Skorne accumulates tokens from getting hurt (
which doubles as a deterrent) but work well without them, and Khador/Retribution/Trollblood doesn't need any. Circle generates tokens slowly, while Legion has to harvest corpse tokens, and we're stuck with souls.
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| I'm nine points of dead weight! |
It wouldn't be so bad if every opponent came prepared to place three living warrior models within twelve inches of the WE, and we had a solid ranged game to harvest them without expending resources on it, but Cryx players have been avoiding soul-dependent models for as long as I've been in this game, because they're unreliable.
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| And I'm ugly too! |
The Legion BE isn't much better, because while corpses are a LOT easier to grab, the poor thing has to do it in
melee. It does have a ranged attack, and some crazy 20" charges, but it still has a very low potential without a full compliment of corpses, which I doubt very much it will ever get and survive to use them.
I don't know exactly what Privateer Press was doing during the testing of the Cryx engine, but it's a spectacular fail, and the one thing that actually worked just got hit with an errata (
eSkarre could actually do some interesting things with it). Then with the release of the Witch Doctor the Wraith Engine (
not to mention every other soul reliant thing we have) will be even harder to justify, which is downright stupid since most of them were already hard pressed.
I accept that with a few exceptions the Battle Engines are pretty poor on the table, and I like the way Privateer Press is trying to avoid power creep, but the Wraith Engine and Iron Lich Overseer feel like models that are deliberately made as poor choices, and I can't see why that should be necessary.
/Lamoron
Surviving with eskarre's feat was the last good idea I had for the Wraith engine. Thankfully that got errata before I shelled out for one.
ReplyDeleteI still have it on my To Do list to create a 2x Wraith engine list. Haven't picked a caster yet. eSkarre was a top choice and still might be with Death Ward. Scaverous looks interesting as well. My expectations are not too high. I think they'll make for some novelty lists.
ReplyDeletepSkarre, pDenny, or eDenny will still work, but when I say work I mean like Drudges work...
ReplyDeleteI had planned to use a WE with eSkarre, but since the eretta to her feat, I'm not so sure. I guess I'll have to think up something else then, but I must say I'm a bit undecided on caster and troop choices for my WE list.
ReplyDeletepSkarre seems the obvious second choice. With the huge range it can achieve, and the added ARM to survive the round, it might actually do something. Raiders + Battle Engine...
ReplyDeleteOld news is old
ReplyDelete:p
pSkarre might be a good idea. I think I'll try out eDenny as well.
ReplyDeleteDoes she gain +2 ARM from the WE when she's Incorporeal? If so that's not half bad.
ReplyDeleteYeah, eDenny gets the +2 while incorporeal. Helps a lot with blast damage. Her debuffs help the wraith out a bunch too...just like every other model we have.
ReplyDeleteIt's ok for Denny to get the +2 ARM, but I can't really see what other incorporeal models we have that would actually benefit that much from that bonus. Ofc this means that every once in a while you will see something incorporeal survive a magic attack of some kind.
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