In Defense Of: Dragons

 Hey Reader!

Today we're continuing the In Defense Of series, and Tiberius asked me to jump in and chat about the Dragon from Moria, as it's often passed over for other hero choices - both monstrous and goblin - for various reasons. We will start by looking at why people tell you not to take this model, then we'll discuss why you should take it, and then close out by discussing how to make it work effectively in your army list.

Why NOT To Take Dragons

I have not bought the GW dragon, because I don't think it's that cool looking.
This is Argamentum from Loot Studios.

We've heard it all before: for the same cost as a fully upgraded dragon you can get The Balrog, who gets Fight 10 (instead of F7), Strength 9 (instead of S7), free heroic combats, and the ability to pull people into base contact with him (thereby making it harder to keep him from fighting, as you effectively have to stay more than 14-17" away from him if he hasn't moved yet, which is really hard to do on any sized board). Tack onto this 10 wounds, turning auto-death abilities into 5 wounds instead, and being available in a legendary legion that makes him even more dangerous (and less susceptible to shooting, which is a huge boon when you only move 6"), and it's easy to see why people take the Balrog over a dragon.

Some people really like smaller heroes to make their army stronger, and Moria is in no shortage of these. For the same cost you can get Groblog to help your goblins fight harder (plus a tricksy Heroic Defense up to three times if you need it), Druzhag to give you extremely dangerous beasts, Durburz to keep your battle line in place and give you a decent warrior slayer, Ashrak for tons of poisonous spiders, and a few warriors for each of them. So the opportunity cost of running a dragon, no matter how big and dangerous, is high because it's part of the Moria army list.

But the real reason people don't like running dragons is the fear of Survival Instinct, if I had to guess. Let's be real: they're afraid that after the first wound he suffers, they're going to roll Snake Eyes (double 1s) and be forced to spend 3 Will Points and 1 Might Point just to stick around (maybe more if there is a Harbinger of Evil or similar rule running around nearby), and then fail a second Courage test and run away from the fight with tons of wounds left. That's the fear: if you have a choice between models that have guaranteed Wounds (like the Balrog) and models that don't (like the dragon), why wouldn't you run the one that's guaranteed to work?

Heck, why not run two Cave Drakes, which have more Attacks and Wounds combined than a dragon does, even if it means you're a shy bit slower (8" v. 12" with Fly, assuming the dragon takes the wings, which I think smart dragons always do)? Sure, you don't have Heroic Strike, but in all other respects a pair of Cave Drakes will be more dangerous on the battlefield than a single dragon, especially since they can be in two places at once. If Survival Instinct bites you, wouldn't you be better off fielding two monsters that can take a beating over and against one that might let you down?

No - the dragon is better than all of these options, the Balrog included (which is why I'm writing this post and not Tiberius, as he will not go as far as is needed for this post! :P Fight me). Here's why.

Why TO Take Dragons

Ashrex, also courtesy of Loot Studios

To start off, I should note that my philosophy for Moria hinges on four rules, and if you disagree with these four rules, then you're not going to want to run dragons, and fair enough. You're not wrong, and there are many, many others that agree with you. So before we jump into why dragons are the best hero choice for Moria, here's my four rules.

1) Moria is a good horde army: you're not as good as Shire, Goblin Town, or Lake-Town, so you don't go all-in on goblins. You bring a strong contingent of goblins to hold the line while your high-end models break the enemy lines, or give up on hording entirely and just go with big stuff to beat in lots of faces. So you're going to need more than just a swarm of goblins led by goblin heroes to win, and I recommend that the first model you add is a dragon.

2) Moria is a good monster army: you could run an army that is 100% monsters if you wanted to, relying on overwhelming firepower and brutal power attacks to even the odds in terms of model count. And in a world where spells are becoming more and more popular in play due to new legendary legions that empower spellcasters, the Moria monster suite is actually quite good at stopping magic, as all of the hero monsters have a good Will Points store. But even if you don't run all monsters, there should be a few monsters in your army to help your goblins break through enemy lines, the first of which should be a dragon.

3) Moria is hindered in mobility without good shooting. The lack of good shooting combined with limited mobility (most heroes are 6" move or less, and your goblin warriors move less than 6") means that reaching your opponent is hard, and your kill count can suffer dramatically when your heroes can't reach the enemy. So you'll need a few models with 8" or more movement to reach your enemies, and ideally models that can also kill stuff (having a few bat swarms is good, but they shouldn't be all of your fast attack models).

4) Moria has poor archery defense, the Depths of Moria legendary legion notwithstanding. The fact that most of your models are D5 or less means that if someone hits your weaker troops they have a good chance to wound them, which en masse can take away your numerical advantage. So being able to shut down enemy shooting - not just make it harder, but actually removing shots - is a very important thing to maintain your numerical advantage.

So when we're looking for that centerpiece model - especially when it's also your army leader - I think these are four things you need to keep in mind. And I think the best model to play to your strengths as Moria is the dragon.

For starters, dragons have a variable cost: you can run them as cheaply as 250 points, though I don't think you should unless you're playing in a 250pt tournament, and in that scenario, yes: I'd say just run a dragon. You'll be very hard to kill at 250pts unless someone is bringing Aragorn or a similar hero (in which case anything from Moria at 250pts is going to die). Dragons cost anywhere from 250-350 points, whereas big heroes like the Balrog always cost 350 points, allowing you to potentially save points to boost your numbers if you want.

Second, dragons are good at killing things. Dragons have access to Heroic Strike, and they get this starting at F7, so they are very likely to get to F10. And with a high Strength value, Monstrous Charge, and a base of 4 Attacks (so 5 Attacks on the charge, 10 dice to wound against both infantry and cavalry), woah Nellie these guys hit like a train. That's enough to put any man-sized model in danger of being slain in a single round, even if they are at full wounds and Fate Points (heck, even if they have rerollable Fate Points). And with the potential to get all of this with a 12" flying move, it's hard to avoid or escape this killing power, or get the drop on it.

Third, dragons are quite defensible (we'll tackle Survival Instinct in a bit). There are also few heroes in the game where a dragon is thinking, "Okay, I have to call Heroic Strike in order to win this duel," and depending on what upgrades you choose, you may not even worry about winning the fight, as the opponent may not be able to deal wounds (if you Transfix them) or they are not likely to wound (if you are D9). And with the ability to call Heroic Defense, they can be very hard to kill regardless of what you roll to win the fight if you don't feel like calling Strike.

And if you're against lots of archery, dragons are fantastic counters to archers. Not only will any archer be in trouble if charged by a dragon (Legolas, Bard, and heck, even Bolg notwithstanding), a D7 dragon, and even more so a D9 dragon, is insanely hard to wound with archery. And even if they have a siege weapon, if you run the dragon far from the rest of your models, the chances of getting hit and wounded by a siege weapon is extremely low.

Fourth, dragons are mobile. We touched on this above, but dragons get a 6" move for starters, but they can have up to a 12" move if you take the Wings upgrade (which, as I noted above, I think you should always take). This makes them by far the most mobile heroes for Moria, and among the most mobile heroes in the game, especially since they are in a list with cheap captain who can call Heroic March or Heroic Move for you.

And with all of this in mind, it begs the question, "Why don't people like these guys?!?!?" The vast majority of people will say in some form or another, "Well that's all well and good except for Survival Instinct," so since we've danced around that (pretty nice dance though, don't you think?), let's talk about it now.

Survival Instinct is overhyped and overplayed. The only time it comes up (an exaggeration, but hear me out) is when people take the Breathe Fire upgrade, and find themselves with no Will Points to use to boost the random (and not often) low Courage roll. So I should caveat everything below by saying that if you take that upgrade you are more likely to see Survival Instinct come up in a negative way.

And I think it's a bad idea to take this upgrade. You're not Smaug. It's a trap. Don't do it.

Assuming you take different upgrades, Survival Instinct doesn't come up nearly as often as people make it out to be, and I'd wager the majority of people who make this claim have 1) never run a non-fiery dragon, 2) never fought a non-fiery dragon, or 3) both. With a Defense of 7-9, the chance that you're wounded at all is very low, and gets even lower if you call Heroic Defense. And then, after a wound is dealt, you have to fail a Courage test. Thanks to 3 Fate Points and a high Defense value, not to mention the ability to jump into and away from combat quickly and easily if you take the Wings upgrade (which you should always take), avoiding ranged attacks is very easy, avoiding magical damage is quite easy, and avoiding melee damage is not only above-average, but against non-heroes it's basically a guarantee, as the vast majority of warrior models are wounding on 6s, or worse if you are D9 (by taking the Tough Hide upgrade, which, spoiler, I always take for this very reason).

And this brings us to a central aspect of why people don't like dragons: they take the wrong upgrades. A lot of people pass over the Tough Hide upgrade, even though it gives you D9 (which is really hard to wound for the vast majority of people - even Big Boromir is getting less than 1 wound on average unless he's willing to spend Might Points). And if Survival Instinct isn't as big of an issue, then 9 Wounds is fantastic, so let's do some quick math on how many wounds you can take before reliably failing a Survival Instinct check if you take this upgrade.

Your standard dragon has 7 wounds, Defense 7, and Courage 4. This means that, if you need a 10+ to pass a Courage test, you have a 56% chance of passing, but for our math here we'll reduce it to a 50% chance because maybe there's a Harbinger of Evil bubble nearby or something. Most armies won't have this, but let's just say every army does. Just hypothetically. With 7 wounds, you'd only suffer 6 wounds with the chance to trigger Survival Instinct (as the 7th would just remove you). This means that of the 6 wounds you could suffer, you'd have to add Will and/or Might Points to your roll in 3 of them, and you have 3 Will Points (we'll assume you use your Might Points and can't get them back). Which means, even if you're spending more than 1 Will Point to pass, you can easily suffer 3-5 wounds without any issue, and you're only losing...what, 1 extra wound? Fleeing on the 6th wound out of 7? Maybe the 5th wound?

And with the vast majority of creatures wounding you on 6s, suffering 5 wounds means you need 30 wounding rolls coming at you to get to this point. That's...a lot of attacks. Even if we assume everyone has a two-handed weapon, uses it, and wins the fight and makes strikes, that's what - 15 attacks? Maybe more depending on their Strength? Again, a lot of attacks that, thanks to Moria, is likely to be in separate fights because outnumbering a Moria force is not easy to do, especially if your dragon has wings.

But all of this gets better if you are D9 instead of D7. Now wounding is far harder, and thus the number of attacks needed to deal 3-5 wounds is upwards of 40. Possibly over 50 depending on who is doing the wounding. And again, you're Moria: getting more than a few people into you is hard to do.

And if you're lucky and roll well, you can go up to 8 wounds - over 50-60 attacks - without being removed from the table. All for 350 points. That's basically the balrog, except with Monstrous Charge.

So I think a lot of people shy away from dragons because of something that might come up, but on the whole isn't going to be an issue very often, assuming you take the right combination of upgrades (Tough Hide and Wings).

"But Centaur," you say, "what about the Riders in Black Legendary Legion that can penalize our Courage more than a -1?" Two quick thoughts. First, the number of wounds you'll actually suffer from this legion is very small: the best shot they have at wounding you is 4s from a Black Dart, and even then that's a 50% chance on the dart that it wounds, which means you're looking at, realistically, about 4-6 successful Black Darts being cast against you total, which is not as easy as it sounds, especially when you have the rest of your army to deal with first (as you won't send the dragon off on his own ahead of the rest of your army).

Furthermore, even if they do get off a number of Black Darts against you and they're able to sneak in a few wounds, the fact that you have Resistant to Magic means you don't need to spend Will Points to block magic: you can save it for if/when they wound and if/when you roll low (which is not a guarantee). If you roll a 4 and a 4, congratulations: you'll pass the save, short of being surrounded by the majority of the ringwraiths (which, again, shouldn't happen). And that's about a 50% chance.

So don't worry about Survival Instinct. Take a deep breath, realize it's a thing, plan ahead (aka, buy the Tough Hide and Wings upgrade), and then crush things with a dragon.

 

Making It Work

My OG Dragon model from Atlantic Miniatures. I like dragons - can you tell?

As noted above, you'll need tools to make sure that your dragon is safe, and the nice thing about the dragon is that we don't have any legendary legions that involve dragons, so you know you'll be using Standard Moria for this build.

We need four things to make a dragon work, based on what we noted earlier. First, we need numbers to make sure that we don't get ganged up on in fights, give us protection against archery, and make it harder to break us, so that means goblins. Second, we want to minimize our use of Heroic Strike as we only have 3 Might and no guarantees on getting it back. Third, we need distractions to make sure that spellcasters, snipers, etc. have something other than our D9 high-Fight dragon to deal with. And finally we need Might Points to make sure we move first with our dragon, so we need some non-dragon Might Points to give us those clutch Heroic Moves (and possibly Heroic Marches if we need to cover ground quickly).

So with 800 points (as that's what I'm thinking in for the Nova Open in September), here's an idea of what it could look like running a dragon:

Warband 1

The Centaur Dragon (Tough Hide and Fly, just the way we like it - Army Leader)

2 Bat Swarms

7 Moria Goblins with Shields

5 Moria Goblins with Spears

Warband 2

Moria Goblin Shaman

3 Moria Goblins with Shields

2 Moria Goblins with Spears

Warband 3

Moria Goblin Captain with Shield

1 Warg Marauder

5 Moria Goblins with Shields

6 Moria Goblins with Spears

Warband 4

Moria Goblin Captain with Shield

1 Warg Marauder

5 Moria Goblins with Shields

6 Moria Goblins with Spears

TOTAL: 47 models, 9 Might, 2 away from max warband size

Naturally we can't fit everything we want in this list (no cave trolls, no drum), but this list has everything else that we want: really high numbers, a shaman for providing reliable charging where we want it (and/or a distraction for ringwraith magic), two captains for marching and moving the dragon, two bat swarms for halving Fight Value, two marauders for some archery support but mostly for fast moving attacks, and a massive hedge of spears backing up a lot of guys to make sure your dragon isn't overwhelmed. Sure, you're relying on Courage 2 on objectives, but that's an issue with every Moria army, so don't sweat it.

And do you know what the nice thing is about this list? It's way more versatile than the Depths of Moria legendary legion, and in some respects more versatile than any list involving the Balrog. The fact that we have a monster with 5 Attacks on the charge that can knock over mounted models with a 12" flying movement to get the charges we want is incredibly good, and very hard to plan against, especially when dealing with 46 other models (two more of which also fly). The fact that you still get the D9 but you could accompany this with any number of monsters, special characters, possibly other options for warriors depending on which heroes you take because you don't have the restrictions of a legendary legion is incredible, and all the while you still have a good centerpiece. Except as a bonus: this centerpiece has Might Points.

So just give it a try: unleash the dragon!

Conclusion

This is a matter of personal preference, naturally, but seriously: you get a lot of value that is harder to tie down than a 6-8" move monster or a magic-wielding goblin. If you value the higher mobility, access to Monstrous Charge, and Might Point flexibility that the Dragon offers, try the dragon.

Until next time, you know where to find me,

Watching the stars,

Centaur

"(Your teacher) is a human...and is therefore blinkered and fettered by the limitations of your kind." ~ Firenze, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix