Good morning gamers,
Today is our seventh post in our series on magic and we turn our attention to spells that do precision damage (that is, damage to a single target). While we've already covered Sorcerous Blast and area-of-effect spells, these spells require a lot of thought to use well - just plucking off a Wound here and there or sniping a random warrior could leave you drained by the end of the game without doing enough for the cost you pay. The spells we'll be covering today are the feared Chill Soul, the deceptively alluring Black Dart, the cool (mostly for Kardush) Flameburst, the very-much-hated Paralyze, and . . .
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| BANISHMENT!!!! Credit: Quora.com |
As I was preparing this post, I didn't see a lot of places that needed pictures, so I've passed on them again. Call me lazy, I guess.
What Do These Spells Do?
Two of these spells do Wounds: Chill Soul does 1 Wound against whoever the target is (need to specify if the mount or rider is the target if the model is a cavalry model), while Banishment does 1 Wound against a target Spirit model. If Chill Soul is channelled, you add 6" of range to the spell, which means you'd only want to do this if you need that range (more on this later). Banishment moves from doing 1 Wound to doing D3 Wounds against your target. This could mean one-turn-killing many Spirit models in the game (even if they pass all their Fate). As has been discussed in previous posts, sometimes that D3 roll will still result in a single Wound - whatever.
Two of these spells do Strength-something hits: Flameburst does a Strength 6 hit (which is a pretty decent hit - any model in the game will be wounded on a single die, most warriors will be wounded on a 3+ or a 4+, heavily-armored troops and most combat-oriented heroes will be wounded on a 5+), while Black Dart deals a Strength 9 hit (which will wound most things on a 3+, really tough things on a 4+, and Sauron on a 5+). While you have to specify the mount or rider for Black Dart, Flameburst damages both mount and rider.
When channelled, the Black Dart deals D3 hits instead of one hit, which (again) means that sometimes your channel will do absolutely nothing because you will roll a 1 or 2 and end up doing 1 S9 hit. Flameburst, when channelled, adds Set Ablaze to the target (mount and rider), which deals an extra S9 hit and a S5 hit at the end of each turn until the model a) lies down and crawls (aka, chooses to be prone for a turn), b) walks through water (aka, risks drowning or is entering difficult terrain), or c) dies. This can be REALLY useful at forcing an enemy hero to step away from the fighting for a turn or two, but more importantly, this will make whoever you're facing think twice about whether their hero can just press through and kill stuff.
Finally, Paralyze on its own doesn't do any damage, but functionally, models that are Paralyzed will take damage from whoever charges them. As we discussed in our podcast on evil spell-casters, when you choose to cast Paralyze, you need to make it count - charge that model with strong stuff, beat the model into a bloody pulp, and move on. Paralyze, at the moment, cannot be channeled - it's channelled version is cool, but not game-altering (each turn the model is Paralyzed, they take a S5 hit - this would be really good in some cases, but since most of the targets for Paralyze tend to be big models that you don't want to deal with, you probably aren't wounding on better than a 5+ each time).
