by Peter Atkinson

Geez they love it, don’t they?  Anybody playing an army with observably better outcomes than Ironjawz (so that would be most of them) loves to make two comparisons:

1. They love to compare their damage output to yours, assuming yours has a Warchanter buff applied.  But never adding those extra 120 points to the cost of the Ironjawz unit they’re comparing, obviously.
2. They love to compare their buffing hero to your Warchanter, arguing that the Warchanter does more and therefore Ironjawz don’t know how lucky they’ve got it.

Well you know what?  You can have him.  Yes, he is amazing – and that’s the whole problem.  The Warchanter is holding back the army and I hope his role is completely reengineered in 4^th Edition. Here’s why.

Sniping is back

Remember way back, ooooooh a couple of months ago, when GW embedded the hero-sniping rule into Look Out Sir and everyone rejoiced?  How we all thought that was a great decision?  How there was probably the closest thing you’ll ever get to universal agreement in a community packed with hundreds of thousands of quarrelsome nerds? 

Well if we asked you nicely – if we begged you, Games Workshop – would you consider backtracking on the best decision you ever made and completely reversing it?

Yes, the rule that nobody asked for is here – sniping is back in 4^th Edition.  Cue much short-sighted rejoicing from Rat players who can’t wait to snipe out your Warchanter, but haven’t yet thought through the consequences of having their own foot heroes blasted off the board turn 1.  Hubris is a bitch.

We don’t know how widespread this kind of sniping will be, but two things we can make a bloody good guess at:

1. As the Activation Wars taught us, when Games Workshop implements a terrible idea their instinct is to spread it right throughout the games as extensively and rapidly as possible.
2. Ironjawz will both suffer from sniping disproportionately, and have no access to it themselves.

So expect your Warchanters to get smoked early and often in 4^th Edition.  Having so much of the power of your army tied up in these fragile-ass losers is never good, and it’s about to get a whole lot worse; remove the Warchanters early, and Ironjawz are stuffed. 

He’s a walking nerf to the whole army

And that’s the crux of the matter – Ironjawz without him are pretty pillow-fisted.  They don’t have summoning or shooting – none of the bumper rails that facilitate winning games despite bad decisions.  The magic is crap too, so all they’ve got is combat.  When that’s the only thing your army does, it has to be be the best at it.  Not quite good – the absolute best. 

With Warchanter buffs, most Ironjawz units are good at combat (but no better than Squigs, Plague Censer Bearers, Chaos Chosen or plenty of other Big Bad units).  Without them – they’re lacklustre.  The army has been held back by the existence of Violent Fury for years now.  The designers take baseline damage away from you, to give it back at the beat of a drum.

Looks at Brutes: the signature combat unit of an all-combat army in a combat-oriented wargame.  And what do they look like?

Three attacks at damage 1.  Whoop de fucking doop.  How the hell is this army’s signature combat unit still trudging around with 3 measly attacks at damage 1?  Because of Warchanters, that’s how.

The reality is, Brutes would have been baseline damage 2 years ago if the Warchanter didn’t exist.  GW’s scared that your units might be too good, so they get pre-nerfed just to allow that 120-point buff to bring them back up to where they should be in the modern game. You’re a couple of hundred points out of the money overall, because power that should be right there on the warscrolls is instead locked behind a buff piece – which can be carved out of the army.

Still not convinced?  Look at Ardboyz: comically overcosted from launch.  People who disagreed with me about that are currently working through the Stages of Disagreeing with Pete and have mostly reached “Convince yourself that you never really disagreed in the first place”.  GW were shit-scared of how much damage they could do with a Warchanter buff, forgot that the rest of your army also desperately needs that Violent Fury and there is only so much to go around, and as a result we ended up with the abomination of 220 point Ardboyz – all because they have potential access to the Warchanter buff. 

They’ve already dropped like a stone to 190 points (and counting), and you still never see the bloody things on top tables.  I would have loved to have been wrong and seen my beloved Orruks dominate, but the sad reality is that I could have told them exactly how this would play out.

So what are we gonna do about it?

Knowing GW, the answer will be “Send the fucker to Legends”, because that’s their answer to everything right now.  But assuming (hoping?) they’ve been quite proactive enough in crapping on our collections for a little while to come, the Chanter is going to be in the army for the foreseeable future – it’s just his role that needs to change.

Screw Violent Fury.  Blast it into the sun.  It’s a burden on the army and it’s holding us back. Transfer that power selectively to the warscrolls, and we can kick on from there.  I would add +1 to the baseline damage of the basic Brutes, and also to the Brutes’ own weapon profile when they’re riding Pigs, so they’re sitting at damage 2 natively.  Leave the pigs themselves as damage 1 and that will make the unit easier to balance overall.

You can also bump up the Megaboss’s damage by one pip too (both on foot and on Maw Krusha), but again just the Orruk and not the Mount.  They “just get” the damage boost baked in now, but with the payoff that you can’t buff the cabbage they rode in on.  Big Pigs really need a complete rework anyway, and your other heroes like Warchanters and Shamans can just go and whistle.  They aren’t combat units, they don’t need access to the damage buff and they can just live without it.

What about Ardboyz?  I think we need to reserve that baseline damage 2 for Brutes and Bosses, so you could just let them labour at damage 1 and drop the points accordingly.  This way your true combat units get the baseline stats they need to thrive, and the wannabe-combat units are there to play a different role while scrapping a bit.

If you do want Ardboyz to keep access to that situational damage buff, make it something that the new Ardboy Big Boss dishes out (specifically and only to Ardboyz) – you might actually sell a few models if you didn’t keep giving Orruks such shit rules.

Overall it just creates a much more controlled environment for what damage sits where in the army.  At the moment everything is costed on its potential – which is to say everything is overcosted (or starts out underpowered), to allow for the possibility of a Warchanter buff on top.

The current buff catapults units from being underwhelming to being really strong (doubling a unit’s output will tend to do that), and thus makes them impossible to cost correctly. Pretty much a full edition of Ironjawz skulking near the bottom of Metawatch has shown us that, and moving past that paradigm will be better for all concerned.

So what will he do for the army instead?

Strip away Violent Fury, and there’s no end to the productive use a Warchanter can be put to instead.  The most likely answer, Warbeats, is already right there on his warscroll:

Boost this ability and drop his points cost, and he still has a useful purpose.  I’m going to look at three different ways we could go here.

1. He knows the lot

One thing you might notice about those three Warbeats is that they all act in different phases. So there is a world where you could let the Warchanter know all three, and attempt all three, every turn.

In this case you would keep the 3+ roll, and as you progress through your turn his beats dictate the rhythm of the army. Sometimes you’ll hit all three and have a big turn, other times you’ll fluff a couple of them, but if the beats are all he’s doing I think it’s pretty fair.

2. It just happens

Does it have to stay as a 3+? Well plenty of buffs in the modern game just happen. Freeguild Command Corps springs to mind for example: Sawbones healing is like a better Fixin’ Beat, and you don’t roll a dice for that, just jump straight to the D3:

The new Gobbapalooza warscroll suggested we might be going in a different direction for 4th Ed (they have to roll a dice to dish out their pseudo-prayer now) but the key thing to bear in mind is that all of these Warbeats require a further dice roll:

• Fixin’ Beat you still have to roll the D3 to see how much you heal
• Get ‘Em Beat you still have to roll the charge
• Killa Beat you still have to roll the hits.

If you roll a 1 on D3 healing for example, I’d argue that’s already punishment enough for rolling low. So instead of rolling a dice just to roll another dice, you could let him pick one of these three buffs each turn and dish it out.

In this case, he would know and have access to all three Warbeats, but only choose one of them to apply each turn.

3. We mix it up

We don’t have to keep the three Warbeats exactly as they are, of course. The effects could be refreshed even if we go with either of the two scenarios above. One update that I feel is quite likely is that Fixin’ Beat could be harmonised with the new Rally rules:

The Warchanter has quite often played a role in drawing in extra Orruks from the Badlands, with the rhythm of his drum beat calling new Boyz to war.  He’s also been involved in enhanced Rally mechanics on similar grounds.  You could easily do something in that space, especially now that Rally is less “all or nothing”, and let him pitch a few extra dice at Rally (or improve the 4+ required) as the modernised Fixin’ Beat.

Similarly, we’ve seen various Crit effects already which could slot right in for Killa Beat and replace the +1 to hit. The point is, while we can haggle over the exact details like the range of each Warbeat and his new points cost, some improved version of Warbeats would give him plenty of scope as a useful buffing hero without falling back on the blunt-force trauma and faction-warping power of Violent Fury.

Closing Thoughts

This article is not scoped to be a full redesign of Ironjawz, although they could probably use one. There’s plenty of other issues that this army has, but whipping away this crutch – while lifting the baseline strength of selected combat profiles throughout the army – would be a good start.

What do you reckon?  What would be a fair points cost for a retooled Warchanter?  Would moving in this direction help the army?  Am I full of shit?  Keen to hear your thoughts, because something has to change.

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