Warhammer Fantasy Battle Reporter Forum

With the overall low leadership of the Beasts of Chaos Army can you really afford to take a general with a leadership of 7. I've been asking myself this and it seems folly to me.

Being new to Beasts can anyone offer some good reasons to use the Great Bray-Shaman as your Army General ? I'd be interested to hear your opinions. Is it commonly seen on the battlefield or do most people go with a Beastllord of more probably, I suspect, a Doombull ?

There are some players out there that theme their armies, the most common great-bray shaman is a slaanesh one for the cool spells that allow you to direct or control your enemies units. however slaanesh spells tend to be a little high in the casting cost (specially if your opponent doesn't want you to cast those controlling spells) also remember our 2 best magic items atm are both in the arcane items part, meaning only casters can use them

those items are the staff of darkoth (trades one of your rolled spells, for a movement spell, forget the name of it right now)

the other item is goretooth, giving you hatred at all time. (and is not a weapon so can be used with bears anger below)

Nurgle great-bray shamans are around as well, along with the standard beasts lore, or deaths lore. remember a great-bray shaman with the beasts lore can become a pretty handy combat fighter using the bears anger spell, +3attacks, +2str, +1toughness

in regards to the leadership issue, it's a problem but it's one of the main weaknesses of beasts anyway, so dropping point to get a lvl 4 caster is not so much of an issue.

EDIT: added a thought to goretooth in brackets

nice note about the goretooth, thanks Thordoc.

Pursuing 3d6 inches could be quite nice if you've just hit a unii with rerollable (hatred) Bears Anger attacks. That would give a standard Bray Shaman hero 5 str 5 attacks, rerolling hits (not bad).

The spell you were thinking of is The Wild Call. Quite handy actually, immediate charge decalration for any of your units within 12" of the caster. No stand and shoot reaction. Could be useful (esp against the likes of Dark Elf corsairs with hand corssbows !)

Actually, would this prevent a Razordon from "shooting" too ? I guess it would.

sigmar

one point is that brayshamans have supirior combat ability to other wizards and ungors. therefore they can hold in a fight.

as for leadership so long as you mob the enemy (ambush) and not take tests from shooting (skirmish) and have magic defence (great bray shaman) you dont need high leadership

I would disagree and say that in games of less than 3000 points you should not take the Shaman as the low Ld will severely hamper you force. As Sigmar says the Beasts army already has low Ld as a Key weakness and this will make the issue worse.

As the game stands now Ld is a huge factor and one of the key reasons VC and DoC are dominating the tourney scene. By all means take the Shaman against armies that you know are not going to field a lot of fear/terror causers or are not going to cause a lot of panic tests via shooting.

In 3000 points game and above with the dual lord choice I can see that the Shaman becomes very valuable. Hopefully the new book will put the Ld of the Shaman in line with most other Lord Caster choices and give them an 8.

Alternatively they can levae the Ld of the Beasts low and come up with another mechanic to offset it like Skaven or Lizardmen.

If you want to got he magic route with Beasts I think you'd be better off grabbing a Beastlord and giving him the Mark of Tzeentch, you have your higher leadership as well as a mage and vicious combat character all in one. Sure he is expensive but you can put him in a superherd loaded with other characters and magic items were he'll be well protected.

both good points L,D&P and The Engineer.

the beastlord with mark of tzeentch is almost worthy of his own thread, but outside of mortals and the greater daemons the tzeentch beastlord is one of the more dangerous spell casters in the game.

in a game of less then 2000pts the great bray-shaman can be really dangerous, unless your opponent goes heavy in the magic defense there isn't a great deal that will stop the spell casting

Hi Thordoc,

What makes you say that there isn't a great deal that will stop a great bray-shaman spellcasting ?

In less then 2000pts most people go either combat heavy or magic heavy.

I realise now that it was a poor choice of words, could be that I'm not too used to playing with magic heavy armies.

6 power dice with a single great bray-shaman isn't that many in todays day and age, a simple scroll caddy could do a fair bit to stop the spell casting from one spell caster like that, now that I think about it.

However if you don't want to have a tzeentch beastlord then it's still looking like a fun version, but you'd want some bray-shaman heros to get some other lores and to possibly draw out some dispel dice.