by Peter Atkinson

Amongst the smoking ruins of the Ogors reveal was the new warscroll for the God of Earthquakes himself.  There’ve been mixed reactions to this one – strongly skewed towards despondency and frustration (most people consider it to be a huge nerf), but a handful do see chinks of light:

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2024/05/30/warhammer-age-of-sigmar-faction-focus-ogor-mawtribes/

I have a bit of skin in the game here.  Kraggy has featured a lot on the blog over the years, because I do play him regularly, so I’ve got at least some idea about how his warscroll functions in practice:

So today we’ll go deep into the new warscroll, looking analytically at whether or not the changes are really nerfs, and extrapolating a little as to his potential place in the game moving forward. No, we don’t know the points yet, but the goal of this article is to give you some tools to assess Kragnos’s value and competitiveness when we do see them.

You’ll still need to weigh up for yourself things like the impact of his access to countercharge against (spoiler) what he’s lost elsewhere, but you’ll at least be going in with a good understanding to underpin your own assessment – including (for example) an objective and mathematical review of his survivability and magic shrug.

Ready?  Let’s go.

Kraggy putting it into action with his Squig chums

Donkey Dick just fucking smoked Nagash 💪

TAKE IT OFF https://t.co/FB5jll3TuE pic.twitter.com/S8sWSYwU64

— Peter Atkinson (@PlasticCraic) January 15, 2022

Baseline

Smash Bang Whallop with a 2+ save, that’s what he’s known for:

Kragnos has always been a funny one – at launch, very few Destro players really embraced him as one of our own.  I think this is mainly because the model just looks way too much like he belongs in BOC or even Kurnothi Sylvaneth – if he really was designed from the start to be a Destruction God, then they didn’t exactly nail the brief. 

It also doesn’t help that he’s basically a jobber in the fluff – he’s been around for a full edition now and done fuck all, so that’s another swing and a miss on GW’s part.  And to round out the hat trick of a failed launch, the initial warscroll was underpowered and overcosted, and while the second crack at his rules was a vast improvement, he has stayed stubbornly expensive for most of his lifespan so far. 

Strengths

• Concussive hitting power
• 3D6 charge is an excellent synergy in any Destro army
• Specialist synergy with multiple armies:
  • Ironsunz countercharge
  • Grimscuttle (Spiderfang) 3D6” charging out of 9” deepstrike
  • Ogors’ charge mortals
• Counting as 30 models on objectives is dominant
• His unique charge mortals sit in the nexus of cool and powerful
• 2+ save is absolutely elite
• 3D6 magic shrug is excellent against almost all spells

Weaknesses

• 6+ ward is often insufficient to save him from concentrated ranged mortals
• Prone to bounce against stacked saves
• Specific weakness to Merciless Blizzard in the current GHB, given its high CV

Where he’s ended up is a very interesting warscroll that is just a little bit overs on points.  Certainly good enough to be playable at competitive events if you like the guy, which I do.

The New Warscroll

So how do we break this down?

Fighting, Surviving, Capping and Tech.  That’s how we’ll tackle it. 

Fighting

Looks great.  In an early 4th Ed preview post, Games Workshop claimed that we’d see a general reduction in rend, of which there has been precious little evidence in the reveals so far.  Most things we’ve seen have stayed static, which is fine, and Kraggy fits that mold.

Still packing his rend -3 on the iconic Dread Mace profile, and note those exploding 6s on the Tuskbreaker: you’re only rolling a handful of dice and it’s been nerfed from hitting on 3s to hitting on 4s, so it’s basically a wash, but it’s still always exciting when you do bang out a couple of symbols.  Where he’s probably caught a bump is that high rend is high status in 4^th Edition – we already know that Best Day Ever is gone, we already know that Mystic Shield no longer improves your basic save, and Command Point economy might mean that All Out Defence will be used less commonly.

That last one remains to be proven – you won’t have to save one CP for Battleshock any more, and Kraggy has lost Roar to switch off AOD.  So you probably should assume he’ll be swinging into +1 saves most of the time – but rarely more than that.  Overall he’s operating in an ecosystem where rend -2 is fearsome and rend -3 is just devastating.  That’s a net win for Kraggalicious in my view.

Surviving

OUCH.  That is one hell of a kicking.  We’ve moved from a 2+ 6++ to a 4+ 5++, and that’s a significant net loss overall.  Let’s break it down.

Firstly, just looking at it in raw numbers.  This is how much damage goes through against both defensive profiles (old and new).  The higher the number, the more damage he takes, and the worse it is for Kragnos:

That 4+ save evaporates so quickly against even milder rend, and the increment from a 6+ ward to a 5+ ward is not enough to compensate for the detonation of your core armour save.  Even against Rend 3, the classic 2+ 6++ profile is superior – it’s only when we get to mortal damage that the new profile comes to the fore.

For completeness, if we slap All Out Defence on him, the old profile still wins out:

All the way up to Rend 3 we’re better off with the old 2+ 6++ than the new profile.  Importantly, you’re way more exposed in the Rend 1 Zone (and its neighbours on either side) which is where the majority of damage in this game sits. 

It’s a nerf, folks.

Counterpoint: Fewer ranged mortals?

Historically his great weakness, the indication is that we’re less likely to get blasted off the board by ranged mortals at the top of turn 1 (in Indexhammer at least), simply because there’s a lot less of it around.  We’ve seen mortal damage shooting stripped back if not all the way to zero, then at least to a good extent. 

So if that’s gone, he should be in better shape.  Now this is where I’m really just throwing out an education opinion, but I don’t think it’ll help him as much as we would hope.  What I mean by that is while he’s certainly better against ranged mortals (and there are fewer of them to worry about), the main reason that they’re his nemesis is that he’s always been so good against everything else.  And that’s no longer the case. 

With only a 4+ save he’s now emphatically in range of all conventional damage, not just nukes.  He’s shored up a big weakness that was very niche, but swapped it for a much more broad-based and pervasive weakness to pretty much any unit.  You were weak to ranged mortals before, but you didn’t always come up against them, while you were largely impervious to a lot of very common output profiles.  And now you’re vulnerable to a far broader sweep of enemy units, that’s a bad deal overall.

Secondly, looking at it holistically: it’s not uncommon to switch off wards, but it is vanishingly rare to completely ignore armour saves.  Relying on a 5+ ward is inherently more vulnerable than sitting on a 2+ save.  You’ll almost never be denied the opportunity to at least roll a dice with a 2+ armour save, but having your ward switched off does happen out there in the real world.  I know because I do it to people all the time.  You can take that elite armour save to the bank in a way that you just can’t with wards – we’ve already seen rules that switch off wards in AOS 4, and even if it’s rare, it’s just another thing pushing you further away from the new profile.

The more subtle whack that he’s taken comes from how core combat has been stripped down.  We’ve seen extensive Fights First tech already, and we know that piling in has been simplified to be towards a unit of your choice (not necessarily the closest) and you’ll be fighting with a universal 3” range.  It’s really a separate article in its own right, but some major counterplay to Fights First currently revolves around tagging the enemy unit with chaff to manipulate what targets the majority of their models can swing into, eating the Fights First output with a sacrificial unit of your own and then swinging with the big dog.  That’s all gone, and when you come up against Fights First (which you will) he’s now just a victim.

Finally, we have that heavily nerfed Avatar of Destruction ability.  Insta-kill rules have gone from slapping D6 damage on him to straight 6, and that’s a gulf as wide as the Glottkin’s ass. 

All in all, if you took one look at this and knew it was a nerf – you were right. “But muh 5++ ward” is simply not enough to make up the ground we’ve lost.

In current terms, Kragnos will be closer to Stonehorn Beastriders than a Frostlord on Stonehorn, and any Ogors player knows that the difference between the two is just night and day.  As a God-tier character, he really should have kept the 3+ base save as a matter of principle, and that’s the source of much of the frustration – if the 2+ had to go, then that is what it is, but bypassing the 3+ completely is honestly pretty harsh, and you can’t blame people for being frustrated with that.

It’s OK if you’re not exactly delighted that a model that you’ve bought, painted and enjoyed playing games with has been made worse, which in terms of survivability at least, Kragnos most certainly has.  He’s quite literally God tier – or at least he’s supposed to be – and he should really have been moved to a 3+ save instead.  Very disappointing here by GW unfortunately.

This was me killing a Mega Gargant with charge mortals about 30 minutes ago

And if you don't ask me how the rest of the game went, you and me will get along just fine pic.twitter.com/huXXM9JrWg

— Peter Atkinson (@PlasticCraic) January 21, 2022

Capping

This is honestly the hardest one to reach a conclusion on.  He’s dropped from capping as 30 models to capping as 15, while other units have had their control score bumped up; but on the other hand, the objectives themselves are significantly smaller. 

If you plonk him in the middle of the circle, it’s going to be rare that he doesn’t control it.  But it’s already rare that he doesn’t control it, even with just a toenail on there; and what’s more he’s substantially easier to just knock right off it now. 

I’m going to say it’s roughly similar overall when he’s actually on the objective, but his reduced durability has a knock-on effect here too.  He’s gone from being an extremely rugged anvil that dominates any objective he’s standing on to a more risky proposition that still does the same.

Tech

Let’s take a look at his special rules and tech, some of which will feed into his output or toughness too.

Firstly, Kraggy has kept his signature charge mortals which is great.  They work in basically the same way except that they’ve been moved over to Rampage now, which is technically a nerf (because he used to do both), but is to be expected and is honestly fine.

He’s also kept his trademark 3D6” charge bubble.  EDIT:  Thanks to regular reader mpandelidis for pointing out that you no longer need to be within 12″ to declare a charge, so the old stipulation that you could charge from 18″ away is simply no longer needed. Great pick-up:

Kraggy’s core mobility (a slightly miserly 10” non-flying move) hasn’t changed. 

I’ve seen a lot of people unclear on whether The Shield Inviolate ability (Kraggy’s magic ignore) is better or worse.  I’ve ran the numbers, and it’s worse.

As a reminder, the old rule means that you need to beat the casting value of the spell (what’s printed in black and white, not what your opponent happens to roll) on 3D6.  The probability of hitting the 3+ (with the new rule) is clearly 4/6 = 0.67 in all cases, whereas the probability of beating the CV the old way scales with the casting value.

I’ve ran the numbers, and the tipping point is CV9 and above:

A spell with CV8 requires a score of 9+ on 3D6 to beat it, which is a 74% shot.  So you’re better off which the old way.  Whereas CV9 requires a 10+ on the dice, which is still a good bet, but marginally worse than hitting a 3+; so from that point onwards the new rule takes over as being preferable.

In practice, CV9 or above is vanishingly rare, so realistically you’d take your chances with the old rule every time.   I’m afraid it’s objectively another nerf, despite what the assorted shills (or people who are just bad at maths) will try to tell you.

Worth pointing out that Kraggy is potentially a key beneficiary of Countercharge.  He gets charge mortals (and plenty of them) plus it’s great to get him fighting both turns.  I actually haven’t seen anyone talking about this, but for me it’s the sleeper hit of his whole kit, and what I see as giving him a real home in 4^th Edition.  The 3D6″ roll means that he (or the friendly unit nearby) is that much more likely to actually stick the charge, too.  One CP well spent.

Now let’s close it out by looking at the top and the bottom of the warscroll.  Note that the Header describes this as an “Ogor Mawtribes Warscroll”.  This at least implies that he could have different scrolls in different Destro Battletomes, which is interesting.  Let’s just hope it doesn’t mean he’s on a 6+ save in Gits because “fun”.

Meanwhile at the bottom of the scroll, we see the Ogor Mawtribes keyword.  This dangles the promise of keyword synergy, although we haven’t seen any yet – the Battle Traits are race-locked to Ogors which he doesn’t have.  Also the Huskard does benefit Ogor Mawtribes units, but only their Companions, which again Kraggy doesn’t have.  So there’s nothing really in that reveal to hook our shiny new keywords into, but it’s something to look out for as we see more rules, at least. 

Ogors keyword? Doesn’t help. Ooh ook, Ogor Mawtribes keyword…also doesn’t help

To bring it home, that end-of-phase Throw a Tantrum thing that randomly does a mortal here and there is gone, which is neither here nor there. And just for completeness, the Drogrukh keyword (which never meant a damn thing) is gone, but who cares.

Overall Verdict

It’s so, so hard to look past the disappointment of that 4+ save, and I get it.  It’s honestly pretty deflating to see that GW holds our supposed God character in such low regard.  We’ve already seen 3+ 5+ profiles elsewhere in AOS4 so if the justification is that it would be “a bit much”, then I’m afraid that just doesn’t hold water.

The magic shrug is worse, the 3D6″ charge bubble is worse and we’ve traded out a specific vulnerability to ranged mortals for a general vulnerability to pretty much any half-decent unit.

And yet.  There are a couple of upsides here, which are less in-your-face than the shock and brutality of that 4+ save.  His melee output is pretty much the same, which counts as upside in this new paradigm; he should be fair set in future to get even more mileage out of that heavy rend; and he’s ready to be a key beneficiary of Countercharge, to get him fighting in both players’ turns and to bang out a bunch of charge mortals on the way in.

His signature kit (those 3D6″ charges and charge mortals) largely remain intact, so we do have something there to work with.  I’m going to say that his warscroll overall is in worse shape than before – that 4+ save is such a heavy knock, it overwhelms the rest – but it’s not all one way traffic, and with potential keyword synergy to come, old Donkey Dick could honestly end up in decent shape overall.

Points are going to be really important. Kragnos was already overcosted so he needs to come down.  Theo has a theory that we could see a general points inflation as the demo game on stream was about 1750 per side in today’s points, so we’ll need to keep that in mind; but if we get something favourable in that space Kraggy could see a reasonable amount of play.

Let’s put it another way: the “Knowns” (solid output and Countercharge potential more than offset by weakened survivability) make it a solid nerf at this point, but there’s enough in this scroll that the “Unknowns” (points and keyword synergy) could yet rescue him.

Now when we get the Battletomes: Put him on a 3+ save, for fuck’s sake.  Cobba’s the God of Earthquakes, not a bloody Auric Runefather.

Cover image credit Games Workshop

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