MK III is GO!

Well, MK III is upon us. The rules are now available for free. You can pick up either the Prime or Primal versions of the rules, though each contains the other. I played my first game under the new edition last night and to be honest it doesn't feel that much different. If you're curious as to the main changes then I'll point you here as a user on the privateer press forums has done a great job of summing that up. As for the game, here's what I took:

Ragnar Skysplitter
Runebearer
Dire Troll Mauler
Earthborn Dire Troll
Troll Axer

Fennblades w/officer and drummer
Fennblade kithkar

Krielstone bearer and stone scribes
Stone scribe Elder

My opponent was

Kaelyssa
Manticore
Hydra

Dawnguard Scyir
Manticore

Mage Hunter Assassain

Arcanist Mechanik x3

Dawnguard Sentinels w/ officer and standard

My opponent won the roll off and took first turn.

Top of 1.
Not a lot of action, as per the usual. Seems not even a new edition can change that. He hands out focus to the Hydra from the mechaniks in addition to it's free power up points. And everything else ran to get into position.

Bottom of 1
Ragnar dumps all his fury into the stone, the Fennblade mass runs up and to the right of the table near the flag. The earthborn runs (14" thanks to his abilities) and sits there, the mauler runs up with a pathfinder assist from the axer, axer moves up, runebearer runs, and finally the KSB uses their protective aura and runs. Lot's of positioning going on here.

Top of 2
Again, not much. The Hydra moves up and takes a shot at the EBDT and softens him up just a bit, the manticores advance and use covering fire to make life difficult for my fennblades to move (POW 12 vs ARM 16 is not good) The sentinels advance and get into position for next turn and Kaelyssa feats to keep me from charging and gives her forces stealth.

Bottom of 2 EBDT runs again, trying to get to his flag and hopefully score a point. Mauler hangs back a little since I don't want to lose him this early and it sadly was going to be my Earthborn or my mauler that left the table. Fenns advance in the only direction they could, and surround the flag. However, they're now kinda trapped from the covering fire and the building to their right. Runebearer moves up and casts Earths Sanctuary on the Fenns, making them dug in and giving them cover. The KSB advances again and uses their aura, the elder hands out stone strength. Ragnar goes, tops off the KSB and feats. This is where I made a pretty big mistake, I should have cast pulverizer now instead of waiting till the next turn. Axer advances and bides his time till the next round.

Top of 3
He moved the dawnguard up and surrounded my EBDT and took him out. Both Manticores laid down covering fire and trapped my Fenns in the corner yet again.

Bottom of 3
Ok. Getting a little desperate to get some action in this game. KSB activates first, protective aura and stone strength. Next, Ragnar activates and does two rages on the axer and mauler and puts the rest on the stone to top it off. Axer charges into the grouped up Dawnguard and uses Thresher. POW 18 hits all around and most of the dawn guard are dead. Then they run away!! Except no, no they didn't since there are no more command checks. Runebearer activates and uses his spell slave ability to cast shockwave at one of the manticores, knocking him down and giving the Mauler a nice juicy 'jack to kill. One little problem with that, when I pre-measured, I added in his melee range twice, so since I was going to be an inch short, I charged the remaining Dawnguard instead and took all but one of them out. Then, since I had a 'jack laying on the ground I decided to go ahead and charge my Fenns through the covering fire. Bad idea. I ended up having to make 8 tough rolls and I failed 7. Not much left to do but pass the turn.

Top of 4
Again, not much moving from him. He knew I didn't have enough to out last him, so he held back and just took shots at me. His Hydra landed a good hit against Ragnar and took 9 health off him. The last two Dawnguard and the Scyir moved over to engage the mauler and failed. They did no damage to him at all. More covering fire from the manticores, since that's been effective all damn game thanks to my mispositioning them. Magehunter assassian moves over and takes a swing at Ragnar and misses.

Bottom of 4
Ragnar casts shockwave and knocks the Mage hunter down, then charges him to finish him off. Mauler rages and finishes off the Dawnguard and the Scyir while using beatback from Pulverizer to get closer to the flag, he ended up just a hair away from touching it. This had the bonus effect of causing one of the Manticores to go inert since it's 'jack marshall had been killed. Fenns stayed put, and the runebearer shockwaved the hydra this time. Still no scenario points scored on either side.

Top of 5
Seeing that the end is near, my opponent makes an assassination run on Ragnar. Between Kaelyssa's shots, the Manticores shots, and my opponents dice betraying him, Ragnar was left on one health and Kaelyssa was in a terrible position.

Bottom of 5
Not much to do now. Ragnar moves over and Shockwaves Kaelyssa and knocks her to the ground. Mauler walks over and takes his swings at dice +2, 3 hits later and she's dead. Trollblood win!

So, what did we learn from this? Well, MKIII isn't nearly the doom and gloom the internet made it out to be (I knew that already). The point values have made it a little bit smaller of a game if you can believe that. 50 point games are small. Both my opponent and I couldn't believe how few models were in our armies. The Earthborn has the potential to be a speed demon. His +2 speed from being near rough terrain, combined with the +2 from the Axer makes him SPD 9 and running 18. The combination between Ragnar and the Runebearer gives you two 4" POW 14 AOE's that have knock down. Throw those out there before charging the Fennblades in with cleave and you have a whole lot of dead models. It's going to be interesting to see what lists come out of this.

I bring you these 15.........*CRASH*......

......10. Ten Commandments.

Here's my Trollkin Runebearer. He is changing pretty significantly in the new version and his home in my Gunnbjorn list may be disappearing. Seeing as how he can no longer cast upkeep spells or spells that have a RNG of CTRL or self, he can't cast a single thing on Gunny's list. He still lowers the fury cost of a spell, and that's useful, but most of the time I want Gunny to be empty so that my multiple beasts don't frenzy, so I'll evaluate him and figure it out from there. He will still be found in my other lists that I plan on running. He's going to shine with the new Troll caster.

This guy was a nightmare to assemble, putting that one single piece of metal on a base was really hard, lol. He wasn't especially hard to paint either. Lot's of leather and then his runes and that was about it. Here's the final product.

I really like this guy, both his rules and the actual sculpt.

Bombs away!

Yeah, cause the title didn't totally give it away. Here's a look at my completed Dire Troll Bomber. He comes as part of a multi-kit with the Mauler and Blitzer so naturally I looked into magnetizing to keep my options open. I ended up only doing the bomber and mauler since the Blitzer doesn't really impress me much. That may be different in MK III, but who knows.

I have to say it was difficult at first glance to see how to get this done. After looking at it some more and looking at what others had done, here's what I came up with.

 The heads were pinned. This kept me from needing to trim anything off their necks and allow for a flush fit.

 Magnets were placed on the right hand, and left arms (the kit comes with two left arms). This is the only place I had to do any trimming, all the other magnets fit right into the sockets. The left hands were glued in place, so if I ever do run a blitzer he'll have one open hand.

Magnet placed directly into left arm socket

Magnet placed directly into the right hand socket.

The hardest part was figuring out the back. I ended up angling the front part of the torso a little forward and now the back pieces slide in and out and stay in place on their own.

Here's the finished product, well, the bomber anyway. See my previous post for the mauler.

These guys look to be killer in MK III and he'll almost always be in my Gunnbjorn list.

Testing....Testing I, II, III

Well, it happened. As per the usual, a gigantic leak happened and showed all the cards for the upcoming MK III faction decks. Now, as with any leak, this info is highly suspect and should be taken with a massive grain of salt. I don't believe it was a total forgery, but some of the cards do contradict the confirmed stuff we have from PP and some of the cards match dead on. It's more than likely an early playtest version of the new rules. So, what to do with this info. Well, I took what I did know to be true and built an army with that info and played a game of "early MK III" Here's what I took:

Gunnbjorn
Bomber
Dozer and Smigg
Pyre Troll
Storm Troll
Rune bearer

Trollkin sluggers
Dhunian knot

This was a 50pt MK III game which is the new 35.

Some of the changes to the trolls have been huge, both good and bad. They were particularly good to Gunny who got an actual feat now which makes friendly faction members in his control range immune to ranged damage, immune to knock down, and gives them all cover. He also now has Field marshal: Kill Shot which lets you shoot at something after you've boxed a model in melee. Now, I'm not a huge fan of my gun line beasts getting into melee, but it's cool to know it's there. The bomber stayed about the same, he changed out his animus for the new Far Strike which costs 1 and is range self now. Dozer changed very little, going up a point in MAT, STR and AOE 4 on his gun now. Sluggers now no longer need to stand still to get their d3 shots and under snipe from Gunny, RNG 14 POW 13 shots are pretty strong. Especially when you can get up to 15 of them. I always thought they were cool, just didn't work well. Now they work well and will be finding a place in my lists. The elemental trolls changed as well. They gained a point of RAT and 2" of RNG but their animi are now all RNG self. All that info was confirmed by privateer press in the troll insider and the official answers in the forums. They were identical to the leaked cards.

My opponent brought Menoth
Harbinger of Menoth
Vassal
Templar
Avatar of Menoth
Choir of Menoth
Holy Zealots
Wracks

I'll spare you most of the boring details, but here are the highlights as they pertain to the new rules. Pre-measuring, is awesome and a blessing to someone like me who can't judge distance to save their life. I was able to skirt around control ranges, correct what would have been a failed charge, and measure optimal distance for my guys to shoot and not get charged. We were not on the clock however, and I don't know how much it slowed me down. The Power Up rule for 'jacks works really well. The spirit bond rule for beasts, eh, not as good. The rule that really got me (and the one that won me the game) is the change to overboosting on warcasters who camp their focus. Before you could just add the amount camped to your armor and it never went away. Now, you spend a focus point and it prevents 5 damage. He had Harby on full focus which would have made her ARM 24, under the new rules she was at ARM 14. I shot once with the bomber at POW 16 and rolled 13pts of damage. He took off 5 and that let 8 get through. Under the old way, it's only 3 pts getting through. I roll the second shot and do 15 and he can only take off 5. Harby dies from 2 shots. Before hand, she would have only taken 10 points total, not 18. It's going to make a huge difference in the game IMO.

So, there ya have it. Game one of MK III (kind of) in the bag and it's a win for Gunnbjorn. Can't wait till June 12th to start playing actual games in this new era of Warmahordes.

Intoducing, the tag team champions of Immoren!

Dozer and Smigg!!

I finally finished this bad boy up and man does it feel good. I really feel like I leveled up in terms of painting. Every little detail on this guy was a challenge. I did more shading, blending and highlighting than I've ever done before and I'm very happy with the results. Usually this is where I give you a run down of what the model can do, but with MK III coming in just a couple of months, there's not really any point. I have no idea what he's going to be able to do in the new edition. Don't really care either. He's one of the reasons I started this faction and a badass, highly detailed model. I never painted anything in 40k that even comes close to the detail on him. Anyway, here are the pretties.

Going to kinda take a break from painting for a little while and recoup my energy since I have like 40 some models to paint and have no idea what they're going to be like in June. I am still currently playing though and have a couple of batreps to post when I find the time.

MK III Musings

Ok. So Privateer Press have announced their new system for Warmachine/Hordes called MK III. What do we know? Well, We know that the core rules will be released for free on June 12th with the books being released on June 29th. We know that they have "rebalanced" all of the units and jacks in the game. There are going to be new battleboxes for each faction except Minions, Mercenaries, and Convergence (insert sad face here). New faction decks also for every faction, since you'll need a shiny new set of cards to go with the shiny new rule set. We also have a couple of the updated rules for the new system.

First up, what they are calling "Power Up" basically all 'Jacks in the game with a functioning cortex (so no convergence or cephalax monstrosities, more on that later) will get a free focus for being in their casters control area. This is kinda big. Now you don't have to choose between running your 'jacks first turn or casting those upkeeps on first turn. Warcasters have much more flexibility than before. This was done in an attempt to balance the game against Hordes since Hordes has a pretty large advantage in the early stages of the game when compared to Warmachine.

Now, I mentioned that Convergence and Cephalax do not benefit from Power Up. That's because they get their own rules. Convergence has always had induction. Power Up + induction would have been broken as hell. Instead, they removed the restriction on induction so you can now induct up to three focus from one 'jack to another. This is amazing.........as it stands right now. We don't know what (if anything) they've done to re-balance the 'jacks and units in the army. So yeah, right now the Corollary is able to hand out 6 focus a turn, but we have no idea if that's going to be true in the new edition. Until that new card is in my hand, I won't know.  Cephalax on the other hand, now power their Monstrosities through damage. They get one focus (up to the usual three) when they take damage. This focus stays on them until they use it. It doesn't go away at the end of the turn. I haven't played against these guys and only know one player locally who plays them, but this sounds like it could work really well for them.

The second major rule is something called "Spirit Bond" This is a Hordes specific rule that was put in to balance out them in the late game where Warmachine has the advantage. This rule lets you gain one additional fury from each of your dead, destroyed, or removed from play Warbeasts. Like I said, this is meant to shore up the Hordes late game since once they start losing beasts, it gets harder and harder to get work done as your Warlock has less to pull fury from. I don't think it'll alleviate all the fury you need late in game, but it will help.

The third major rule is the one I dislike the most. Premeasuring has come to Warmahordes. Yes, you may now pre-measure anything on the table. I think it takes a major skill out of the game. The ability to judge distances is key and without it, you either play more conservative or you end up failing charges or that shot you lined up misses by just a hair. It's a skill I lack completely. So why am I complaining about something that's going to make my life easier? I think it makes the whole game much easier and I'm not sure I'm happy with that. Like everything else though, it remains to be seen. There is the limiting factor of the timed turns that will make it hard to pre-measure a lot of things and still be able to move and attack. We'll just have to wait and see how it will fully impact the game and I may change my opinion on it over time.

That's about all we know for sure. Like usual though, the internet is exploding with pointless speculation and rumor mongering. There's no point in it. I've watched it happen with 40k countless times and it's beyond pointless.

So where does this all leave me? Well, I'm going to continue to play MK II until the new rule set comes out. I'm not, however, going to be buying any new models until MK III releases and we see how things are going to shake out. There's no use purchasing something only to have it not be that good in the new system.

Don't Make Me Angry

Finished up the Dire Troll Mauler for my army. I imagine him kind like the Troll version of the Hulk. He's pretty strong already, but add in his Rage animus which give +3 Str and the fact that he has 5 fury, and he becomes a real monster. He has real value in just about any list. Hell, I even have him in one of my Gunnbjorn lists. Being able to pass around rage to other beasts gives him lots of synergy with just about everything. I mean, come on, who doesn't want to punch harder.

I built him from the newer plastic/resin kit and magnetized him so that I can use it as a bomber (or a blitzer if it ever comes to that) as well. It wasn't terribly hard to do, as most of the magnets went in with no trimming of the joints. Just glue down and done. The back piece was the hardest to figure out. In the end though, I figured out a way to position the front part of the torso a little further forward and now the back pieces slide in and out easily and stay put without anything holding them down.

I'm not sure what happened with his paint, but it turned out sort of undead-ish looking. The grey highlight layer didn't wash like it usually does. Really happy with the leather and the rust though. Also, I'm playing around with the LightRoom app and it's having a huge impact on my pics. Here's a before and after of my Gunnbjorn I took a couple weeks ago.

Before (with minor iOS editing)

After LightRoom editing

As you can tell, it brought the colors back to more true and took out a lot of the washout caused by the lighting. I'd highly recommend it.