Skarre Queen of the Broken Coast

 

 

Winning the tournament I knew that it was time to try out a new caster and expand my force. I had never tried Skarre queen of the Broken Coast, but thought that she would be the ideal 3^rd caster I played, because of esthetics and her abilities which looked equally good.

I started out by just swapping the caster but keeping the list that I mentioned in the last post, but already in the first game I found that this incantation of Skarre has problems taking out heavy armor and boosts shooting out the wazoo. I ordered some new models and BAM she started winning. I made a 50 point list which I will go over at a later point, but in this post I will just take a look at her abilities and the changes that has happened since she was just a pirate queen.

Changes

They might look alike, but they sure play different

When looking over her base stats the first thing you should notice is that, she got another focus giving her a great control area of 14. This makes her a better at running her army spread more apart than with her prime version. The second thing to notice is that she had forgotten her awesome Bloodwyrm sacrificial knife and replaced it with a hand cannon and a gun blade. While I am all for having a hand cannon, she lost Life drinker, Sacrificial Strike and Ritual sacrifice to gain it. The loss of Ritual Sacrifice will make the extra focus she gained come in handy as well as the extended control. She kept backlash and blood drain but changed all other spells, making her play completely different to her former self. She lost Dark Guidance, the spell I made my army around, and it is replaced by Black Spot. The Hellfire as a spell assassination opportunity has been replaced by Perdition. On top of that, she has gained two upkeep spells, Admonition and Death ward. Skarre has also found new ways to use her blood with Blood trade, allowing her to upkeep spells by suffering 1 damage point in place of the focus cost. She has gained Inspiration Satyxis (never flee and immediately rally) and Seas of fate allowing models in her battle group and within control area to boost attack and damage rolls after seeing the result of the roll. The final big change in how she plays comes from her feat. She still suffers up to 5 damage from using it but this time for each damage taken she picks a target to be effected. If friendly it cannot be targeted, and if enemy cannot make attacks for one round.

Offensive

With perdition and Black Spot Skarre can harm enemies from a safe distance

Her offensive has changed from melee attacks, and the random spell assassination into jack bullet and ranged fire by two spells; Perdition and Blackspot. Perdition replaced the, rarely used, spell assassination option with a great “jack bullet” option. Perdition is a range 10 pow 10 spell that if damages enemy model a jack in the battle group may make an advance towards neares enemy. As we have fast heavy jacks, an additional advance can give 6 inch of addition treat (8 if you use nightmare close to his prey), and because it is only towards and not directly towards I have used it to get a great trample lane. Most importantly, when used in combination with her feat you can leave a jack within charge/trample range of the enemy caster, which is almost impossible to handle without allocating enough resources that it was worth the effort. Gained a few caster kills in this way.

This guy has beaten Skarre in melee, now perdition allowed this seether to grant her revenge

 

Black spot gives enemy mode/unit -2 defense and when a friendly faction model destroys affected models it gains an additional attack/shot ignoring ROF. This increases the range potential of the army exponentially, and ensures the shift in the foundation from a good Pirate queen Skarre army list with lots of multiple attack infantry  to a good Skarre Queen of the Broken Coast army list with something shooty.

On a good day this guy can kill 4 infantry models a turn with Black Spot

 

Backlash is still an option but without sacrificial strike and the option to make satyxis raiders harm jacks reliably, the assassination in this spell has gone away. Blood rain is still situational, but due to Black spot and including ranged weapon models, I find that I use it even less with this Skarre then before.

Defensive

Skarre gained Death ward, a spell that is equally good on units and jacks. The unit gains +2 arm (not good for high def low arm satyxis in my experience) and the jacks gain the same as well as you getting to pick the column that suffers damage. I have tried only having 6 damage boxes left and still have a fully functioning jack because I got to place the damage where it did no harm. With 1 wound infantry I found that getting to 17+ from 16 – is the biggest change in survivability and if you can do that for a unit, they have changed their level of survivability against shooting quite a lot. This is due to the nature of numbers allocation using 2d6 and the fact that several commonly used ranged weapons have a POW of 10 (gun mages,…). The second spell, admonition, is one that puts pressure on the enemy because it can deny him charges and assassination runs. Basically when an enemy model ends its move within 6 inch of the target you can activate the spell to advance up to 3 inch without suffering free strikes. I have used this spell to make clear charge lanes only partial lanes, getting the caster to safety when charged by a jack, and even used it as a follow up when an enemy caster tries to escape your jack bullet. Finally I need to mention fate weaver, the feat, which protects up to 5 models of your own, or makes 5 enemy models useless. While they cannot be targeted, common way to deal with a jack that has this effect on is run a friendly model up close to it with back ark towards, say, Gorman. Gorman will then cast black oil (blind thing) on your target, but also hit that protected jack, making the feat wasted.   

Conclusion

The combination of perdition, seas of fate and fate weaver, Skarre is able to make one hell of a “jack bullet”. Black spot gives Cryx a good ranged boost needed to have an effective ranged game. This makes queen of the broken coast a completely different caster to use when compared to her prime version. I found this Skarre to be lots of fun. I would also mention that having these extremely offensive jacks standing under the effect of her feat can lead the enemy to keep his models back, giving you a great opportunity to go for the objectives and a solid win in steam roller. She is an effective caster that people will fear once you learn what models to use with her, and how to use them effectively. I went for a 50 point list that I will show you one of the days, and I have had much luck with the list.

Until then, be good, have fun, play some games, subscribe to this blog, give be some comments if I forgot to add something.

Ohh and I have now 03.03.2013 played 70 games so only 30 left to picking a second faction.