The Problem with Beornings

Pic courtesy of GamesWorkshop

Hey Reader!

So to start off, I should mention that I don't mind Beornings: I think they are a fantastic new addition to the game, and I'm so glad to see them in the miniatures line! A+ job by the team in model design, mechanics, points cost, and the legion associated with them.

But beornings bring out a potential issue in the game, which is the concept of "stat creep" from one release to the next, as the release of the beornings outdates, in my opinion, an entire faction in the game. Rythbryt covered this faction recently on the blog, so if you haven't played with them before, I recommend opening that article to give you a deeper dissection of the models in the force, as we won't be going that deep into it here.

Because from what I can see, The Beornings legendary legion is the new Rangers faction, except that they do almost everything better. Let's see why.

I.  "Warrior" Options: Better Profiles with a Better Cost

Beornings cost 20 points, and they allow you to swap out a hand-and-a-half axe for a greatbow for free. This means that they always cost 20 points, so you can easily slot them into an army without having to worry about odd costs due to wargear choices.

Dunedain - I like the old sculpts

Compared to the Dunedain (at 25-26 points, depending on whether or not you buy a spear), the beorning has +1 Fight Value, -1 Shoot Value, +1 Wound, +1 Courage, and the Burly special rule plus a few other special rules (which we will discuss later) in exchange for the heroic stats of 1M/1W/1F.

So for +5 points you have a weaker close combat character (save for the presence of 1 Might Point, assuming that a F4 model wins the fight where a Fight 5 model did not, and assuming we're up against a greatbow-wielding beorning, as an axe-wielding beorning is S4-5 with +1 to wound and no penalty to win the duel) that can suffer less damage (as I'd definitely prefer 2 Wounds to 1 Wound and 1 Fate, as the only time the Fate Point really matters is against an auto-kill special rule, and a 50/50 chance is not a great answer to that kind of special rule), and a bow that is less likely to wound (you land about half as many wounds with a bow than you do with a greatbow, with only a marginally larger chance to hit).

And of course the points variation gets worse as you look at Rangers of the North: they go up to 30-41 points (depending on whether or not you take a horse and/or a spear) to gain +1 Defense and possibly a horse or spear, and that's arguably a worse trade for points because S3 and S5 are quite common in the game so D5 may not actually help you. Let alone the fact that you go down to 1 attack if you are charged, so it's actually harder for a Ranger of the North to win a fight if he's mounted and charged than a beorning, even without factoring in the ranger's lower Fight Value.

And this isn't all: beornings get the Resistant to Magic special rule as part of the legendary legion, so while you can't get this ability if you ally Grimbeorn with another faction, in the legion (which is what we're looking at today) you get the ability to shut down enemy magic every time they cast against you.

Furthermore, beornings treat all bears within 6" of them as a banner, so you can get those necessary rerolls on your 2 Attacks in melee to help your F5 win the day for you in close combat.

...Do these kinds of bonuses sound familiar?

That's right: you can get two 6" banners in this legion, whereas a Rangers army can only get one (Halbarad), and killing Halbarad is far easier to do (2-3 wounds past D5) than it is for the beornings (3 Wounds + 3 Fate + a 33% chance to ignore each wound before Fate past D8). And while Halbarad's banner gives you a Fearless bubble, since Beornings start at Courage 5 and the heroes already having Fearless (so no need to measure range), it makes the absence of a Fearless bubble less noticeable. But more on the bears compared to the primary heroes for the Rangers in the next section.

"But Centaur," I hear you say, "the advantage of the Dunedain/Rangers of the North is that you can field a lot more archery than a beorning army!" And that is true - if you really push it and don't care at all about banners, armor, horses, or big-time heroes, you can technically get 30 bows at 800 points. That's...a lot of bows, admittedly. But let's do some quick math, first without Blinding Light in the equation, and then with Blinding Light, to see if it actually makes a difference compared to an 800-pt Beornings legendary legion. 

30 shots from a Rangers army, assuming a 3+ Hit and no In the Ways (which is rare), is 20 hits. Assuming D5+ (which is very common) we need 6s (or more) to wound, which on average is 3-4 out of 20 (and about 0-1 against D7+).

Compare this, at 800 points, to 7 greatbows on your Beornings + a greatbow on Grimbeorn, all hitting on a 4+ with no In the Ways, giving us 4 hits. Assuming D5+ we need 5s or 6s against the vast majority of models in the range (D5-8), we get 1-2 wounds per turn. Which means that if you're fighting D7-8, the wounds are about equal. If you're shooting a D5-6, the wounds are within 1 of each other.

If Blinding Light is in play, 30 Ranger shots results in 5 hits, which gives you about 0-1 wounds per turn for the Rangers at D5+ (and it's far closer to 0 at D7+). The 8 greatbows for the beornings give you 1-2 hits, which results in 0-1 wounds per turn. So again, it's the same. So the "advantage" of the Rangers actually isn't as great as you think it is (it's the advantage of a higher ceiling if you roll uncommonly well, which I wouldn't count on in a given match), mostly because beornings are twice as likely to wound as a Dunedain, so that makes up for having less than half the total number of shots.

So why do Dunedain and Rangers of the North cost so much more when they are not better in melee, not better at range, and are more fragile than their beorning counterparts (as half the time they can only suffer 1 wound)? I honestly don't know. But they are, so here we are.

II.  Hero Choices: Everything But Better

Aragorn and Halbarad - good, but monsters they are not

And for heroes, yes, the Rangers have Aragorn, who is basically a monster. But the beornings have - wait for it - literally two monsters that have great movement, Monstrous Charge in their legion, access to the best types of heroic actions for monsters, and the ability to do (I'd argue) better damage than you get with Anduril, Flame of the West thanks to their brutal power attacks. Aragorn is also far more fragile, doesn't get access to Resistant to Magic (which means heavy magic armies will do better against him than against the bears and their beorning companions), and while he gets a lot more Might, the F7-8 bears don't need as much Might, especially by virtue of how much more resilient they are.

And as an aside, yes, they are more dangerous than Halbarad and Arathorn, your other choices for heroes. I don't feel like we need to chat about this; these two are outclassed in all categories.

So yes, you don't get the advantage of infinite Heroic Marches or Heroic Moves, but short of that, you're beating the Rangers in every category. And the Rangers have Aragorn, one of the best heroes in the game.

Does that feel right to you?

And we haven't even gotten to the quality of the sculpts, but to be completely honest that's fine by me; it's a worthwhile trade for having had the faction as long as we have, and I'm ever so glad I've been able to play them for about ten years rather than about ten weeks, so I don't mind that. But I hope you can see that there's some work that needs to be done to solve this issue, as we've effectively replaced the third faction in the Armies of the Lord of the Rings book with a new legendary legion.

And I wouldn't care as much if these weren't supposed to be some of the most powerful and most courageous men in all of Middle Earth, at the same time that the beornings are around. Why are beornings F5, when as far as we know the only martial experience they have is cutting down some goblins (not even orcs by the time of the post-Hobbit era where they come into the picture) from the Misty Mountains, whereas the Rangers have been holding back armies of orcs for centuries, are trained in war with their backs against a wall from a very young age, and are described as the only men of their time who could accomplish what they did? Why are they only as good as a Rohan Royal Guard or an uruk who was born yesterday, but a beorning has the fighting skill of a high-end hero from a human faction? I have no idea - it makes no sense.

So what's the solution?

III.  The Solution: A Ranger Revamp

For starters, it's not to nerf the beornings: the legion is excellent, the models are well costed for what they do, and the heroes are excellently built (and time-tested from the release of the Armies of the Hobbit book way back when). I love this legion, I love the models, I love their synergies, and I currently have a 100% win record against them, so the beornings can be defeated and are not broken.

The issue is a longstanding issue with the Rangers: it's no secret that Rangers of the North are almost always left at home, mostly because for the cost you don't really get that much. The faction got a nice boost (albeit at the cost of taking troops) with the new army special rule, and I won't complain about that, but the fact that you're capped at S4 with swords for everyone in the faction is a huuuuuge issue, as it means that you blunt easily in melee combat against the same people that blunt your archery, so there are some factions where you just don't get a leg to stand on (Dead of Dunharrow and Iron Hills, anyone?).

And some of these changes could be made with a simple errata: change all "Swords" in the list to "Hand-and-a-Half Swords," and don't adjust the cost (as they don't get Burly, so trading -1 to duel for +1 to wound shouldn't come with an added cost) so that you give them an option for better damage. The army special rule should allow Rangers of the North to have 2 Attacks while on horseback (to incentivize taking 1 Ranger of the North instead of almost 2 Dunedain, which is a lot to give up in an army like this), and those changes can be made overnight to improve the chances for the faction without a lot of issues.

But I don't think that's where it ends: the faction is ripe for a supplement, and in that supplement you could release updates/benefits for the faction that would can fill needed roles, preserve the flavor and feel of "the mighty men of Numenor protecting the remnants of a fallen kingdom" that the faction gives, and give more scope for the imagination, so to speak, in how you run the faction.

The Middle Earth team did a great job with this in the Scouring of the Shire book, where we got far more than I ever expected we would get to flesh out the Shire faction, and it's my favorite supplement that they've released so far because of what it did for both the Shire and Sharkey's Rogues. And if we had something like that, focusing on the Rangers warring against the remnants of Angmar, Gundabad (so we can have some crossover with Hobbit-era models to boost sales of Hobbit era stuff), and the Misty Mountains (so people can use some of those sweet sweet Moria models), that would be a sweet supplement.

Maybe you even design it like Quest of the Ringbearer, except that it starts in the North Downs with the Rangers fending off Angmar, Gundabad, and Moria armies, but then has to travel south to Dunharrow to meet up with Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli to go through the Paths of the Dead, and on the way they encounter more Moria forces (maybe even some Goblin Town forces to bring more Hobbit-era armies into the picture?), Dunlendings, and then inevitably the Dead of Dunharrow before they meet up with Aragorn, fight off some Corsairs, and then sail up to the Pelennor where we get a heroic last stand for Halbarad and the Rangers as they help lead their king to victory.

Our team is currently working on a fan-made supplement, and gearing up to test those changes in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for more! Who knows - maybe we'll even showcase some of the missions from the supplement here; we'll see, :)

Conclusion

I love this game - it's my favorite game bar none for tabletop gaming, and it was my first foray into the hobby. And I've loved seeing the newer additions being made to the range in the past few years, and I don't want to see older lines in the range outdated or outclassed because of the new stuff, because I was a Bretonnia player in Warhammer Fantasy 8th Edition when everyone started just running Daemon Princes with a 3+ Ward save behind scores of summoned zombies to chaff up armies within a leadership penalty bubble to make it nigh impossible for your opponent to play the game, because that was by far the strongest way to play the game. 

So when I see a Bretonnia-style faction like Rangers, with an emphasis on a few heroic warriors standing tall against all manner of evil, facing down a similar gameplay situation, I want to help avoid the catastrophe that killed that edition and led to Age of Sigmar (which is a discussion for another day). And if there was a way that we could help to revitalize a faction that should be evocative and heroic, we want to be part of that. So until we release our recommended update for the Rangers faction, you know where to find me,

Watching the stars,

Centaur

"I set myself against what is lurking in this forest, Bane - yes, with humans alongside me if I must." ~ Firenze, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone