Using Special Characters

It is also a matter of how the rules have been written...

In 3rd for example... I believe you needed your opponents consent to use Special Characters... Special Characters often weren't very good anyway...

Now special characters are often good, but they also make major changes to some armies... Hell I'm rather annoyed that my Deathwing army now requires me to take Belial... I can't run a strike-force under the command of a chaplain or librarian.

I completely agree Helios I hate when you have to take a special character to unlock units as troops. I always like customising my HQ and coming up with my own back story.

I don't like using special characters if its a friendly game, but for a league or competition some of the buffs they bring to the army are too good to miss. Often I think that the cheaper ones are more effective in this category though, whereas the expensive ones tend to play better on their own (eg. Duke vs Drazhar)

I don't feel bad about using special characters and seeing people using them. Unlike Warhammer Battle, those guys are not enough to make the result of the battle themselves. It depends on how you wanna play your army. If you like to follow the path of one character or if you prefer having something custom that feets in your way of playing.

Also, those guys got habilities but they're not cheap. Okay, Drazhar is a tough guy, but I'm not gonna pay such an amount of points at 2000pts. Marneus's the same, and a lot of others. I think it's all a matter of cost/quality. If in an army it's a normal HQ that has the best ratio, people will choose him instead of the special character.

I can see on "les voleurs d'âmes", on over 500 members, the large most part don't use those characters even if, in France, for 99,99% of the tournaments they are allowed. And when i say the most part, it includes the best players we have.

Personaly, i prefer using a haemonculi to save points, or an Archon, if i need a good close combat squad. I use the special characters sometimes, but mostly when i wanna play for fun or in apocalypses.

About the fluff... well, even GW doesn't know how to make it right, so... who cares ?

Quote :

About the fluff... well, even GW doesn't know how to make it right, so... who cares ?

shadowseercB wrote:

I dont know anyone that plays games with out HQ's though.

Because they don't have a choice, you have to take a HQ in the game rules, HQ and two troops are mandatory choices. Unless you house rule it.

For my gaming group, it usually depends on what size, points wise, we're playing. I like the idea of a lot of the SC's but in most of my builds, depending on which army, as to what I will take. Some SC's, like the Baron, are not overwhelming and when I play my DE, I will take him(I own a lot of hellions). As for what they did to my Deathwing, hmph, ruined. With the new Eldar, I've just been using autarch's , spiritseers and farseers. I think a lot just depends on your opponents play style as well as your own. Like already stated, just a game, so having fun should be the main goal.

Jack Frost wrote:

I'm kind of confused, ShadowseercB. Did I give off the impression that my group does't use HQ's?

Well thats the way I interpreted it. I personally feel the same way actually. I always thought it was silly because if they die in my game what then? Besides that Vect is pretty busy keeping Commorragh straight and watching his own back to take a real space raid.


The way I get around it is that, atleast for DE since its easier to do rather than SM, I have an archon with amazing powers that rival or come close to Vect and has the same abilities. Of course he is very expensive and i dont use him but you get the point.

hellios wrote:

It is also a matter of how the rules have been written...

In 3rd for example... I believe you needed your opponents consent to use Special Characters... Special Characters often weren't very good anyway...

Now special characters are often good, but they also make major changes to some armies... Hell I'm rather annoyed that my Deathwing army now requires me to take Belial... I can't run a strike-force under the command of a chaplain or librarian.

Techancly Black Templar special characters are still opponets permission! They kinda suck though.

Ben_S wrote:

Yeah, I don't like SCs much either. It's funny that people seem more accepting of SCs than Allies, just because Allies are new in 6th edition. I'd have thought that there would be far more cases of Dark Eldar fighting alongside Eldar than of Vect himself leading raids. But at the end of the day, it's up to each individual what they want to use in their army.

I think it's the cheesy combo's people have found, or min maxing to get the super unit, that have caused a hatred of allies.

There's no reason to dislike them. They're usually no more powerful than a standard custom-made option, they just have personal, special wargear and rules. If you want their rules but not them specifically, just use their rules and use your own model and backstory, no-one ever said you have to be using that exact character.

Yes it's sometimes annoying when they're the method of unlocking FoC changes, but Typhus is really the only situation where I imagine that would be annoying because you might want, say, a Biker Lord and Zombies.

Belial is a common one, but he is the one and only Master of the Deathwing, there are only about a hundred of them, a large number of which are probably in your army at the time if you're playing pure Deathwing. A pure Deathwing force is a relatively rare thing which would indeed almost certainly be led by Belial, considering the percentage of their number a pure Deathwing army encompasses.