by Etheneus » 21 Aug 2015, 20:11
I tried 9th today against my two main opponent. One playing VC (undead legion mostly but with 9th he since they aren't covered yet he chose VC) and the other one had WoC.
First game was against VC. He had Vampire lord lv4 vampire and was a bit killy, made up half his army points. He also had a horde of 30+ skeletons and a horde of zombies, about 50+ I think and 3 spirit hosts.
I had three list ready and rolled for my fighty one but he wanted to meet my tree list and I wanted to see what they could do so chose that instead. One treeman ancient lv2, 2x12 dryads with nymph, 4 treekin, and one treeman with strangle root.
Basiclly we both castled up in a corner and while I wanted him to come for me in the forest he wanted to fight at the swamp on his side. Since he had magical domination I decided to come to him in turn 2, he met me a around the swamp and while my treekin fought his horde of zombies my treeman smashed his spirit host, slowly I might ad due to poor rolls. My TA fought his general who had failed to get 3 on two dice when charging out of his skeleton bunker into my dryads, he charged with his skeletons into my TA flank and I countered charged with my dryads into his skeletons both in flank and front. A complex battle you might say if it wasn't for our challenge between my TA and his lord. I tried to treewhack him to death and he tried to make firewood of me. He rolls a six for initiative and fail his ward, the wound roll became a 4 and that was game. He had one skeleton left but it still gave me half of that units worth which I felt good about.
This game really highlight some of the changes to the game with 9th. My dryads could hold back a horde of skeletons thanks to 5+ ward making them survivable. My Treekin could smack his zombies to the ground thanks to S5, otherwise I wouldn't have made enough wounds to compensate for his ranks. Magic was still hard with a lv2 vs. lv4. I didn't get a lot through his dispel and could hardly stop anything of his. Miscast didn't do much. I suffered two, one on four dice, rolled 7 for miscast and as we read the rule I could only take one wound (it also failed to wound), the second miscast on three dice and this time I took a wound rolling 7 again on the miscast. I felt I needed that lv4 so that he wouldn't dominate the phase but I also realised that the miscast made us both scared, throwing many dice was scary as hell, even only four.
Next game I randomized my army and got the tree list again, this time against WoC. He had a disc sorc lv2 and a exalted on daemonic mount, he also had 12-14 slaanesh warriors, a nurgle gorebeast chariot, 12 khorne marauder horsemen with flails (khorne now giving +1 strenght first round of combat and flails giving 2+ he had S6 fast cav).
Long story short, he five diced gateway, suffered miscast but erasing my treeman on turn 1, the miscast took one wound of him. On the second turn he four diced gateway killing just one dryad and dying to the miscast. My magic was dwellers and I was afraid to cast it, needing 5 dice to get it, and master of stone. It actually killed two of his horsemen and they failed panic fleeing of the board. Again my dryads and treekin held good thanks to S5 against warriors of chaos with treekin (killing all but one of them) and dryads held against his chariot for like 8-9 rounds of combat. Nurgle now reroll all succeful hits of sixes and that made the fight in the venom thicket a hard one since poison was out of the picture. The two units of dryads got four wounds on the chariot before it killed the first unit of dryads (in the front on combat round 7) he died to DT when turning towards my flanking dryads. His exalted never failed his I test and had other trickster shard and s7. My TA died in the last round.
Again the trees held good except for against his magic that hurt him as well but due to lucky rolls the first turn nothing much happened. He won slightly but I felt good and confident about the treelist and we found it fluffy that nurgle didn't care for poison.
Last game was uneventful, once again against VC. It ended with a 50pts difference to him. Again,he had a lv4 and I couldn't get anything through and only dispel one spell if I was lucky.
Trees are good now, and many, low value spells is what you want to cast, not the big ones. For dispel mostly I wanted a lv4 but to be fair, had I brought another wizard or two I can acording to the rules pool them and basically dispel as a lv4. I really enjoyed it but both my competitors felt that although the new magic was good, they didn't like the balance changes, granting me that my trees was as good as they deserved and that the chaos marks was good/fluffy.