So, I had my first game with the End Times magic. I played against Lizardmen and was expecting End Times filth (and my opponent joyfully provided it - as promised). My strategy was to focus my points into a strong combat army with a variety of spells (by taking a Vampire, Death and Nehekharan Wizard but all level 1) and rely on powering spells through with my dice when able. Originally I had planned to take level 4's and a Heirotitan, but I figured I couldn't out play a dual Slaan list with Focus of Mystery and Wandering Deliberations. I ended up only facing the second, but a Level 4 with all the lores in the BRB was still WAY overkill (along with Tetto'Eko) . But more on that later.
Before I give my review, I'm going to address the current debate and also address how we ruled on a couple things. Currently, players are debating whether a spell that is dispelled is able to be recast or not. I believe it can not, and that approach at least provides a defending player a way to prevent spells being just spammed, thus disrupting your opponent and forcing them to figure out another approach with the other spells from the lore. This is likely the whole reason for every spell being known.
The reason I take this position is on page 8 under overview, bullet 5 and the first paragraph following it under the heading 'End Times Spells'. The first bullet refers to successfully cast spells recasting and the following paragraph refers End Time spells that are successfully cast not being recastable. The third bullet point under casting spells on pg. 9 when everthing is taking into context is just worded poorly. Before you say, well the overview is just that, an overview. But read it again, because bullet point 4 is the only place anywhere it states that a dispelling Wizard rolls a D6 to see how many dice they can use to dispel a spell. That important bit is not in the actual rules. So, the overview contains rules you need to play.
Another area we had to resolve, Bound spells and army dispelling. We ruled that since neither are done with Wizards, you followed the rules in the main rulebook. Thus, you didn't roll a D6 before casting or dispelling this way. End Times magic says clearly when Wizards cast or dispel, so not sure what their intent was, but we followed the RAW.
So, the sloppiness of the writing is one of my issues with Magic of the End Times. Unfortunately, its not my only one, but more on that later.
So let's get into it.
The Good
Curbed nuke spells - So, that D6 rolled before hand causes Nuke spells to get cast with less than 6 dice. This is generally good. My opponent and I both had to rely on lower casting values to get things done. Nuke spells still went off. I cast Purple Sun, he cast Dwellers once and Final Transmutation twice. But it wasn't because we were six dicing them, it was because we did the other things first and had so many dice they were easy to try to cast. So they actually went off more just due to lack of dice.
More consistent dice pools - We on a whole had a much more stable pool of dice. The defending player usually ends up with 10-12 dice, while the caster gets 12 - 18 dice. You can do whatever you want. Its unlikely you will have a phase bottom out on you. Magic having less randomness in its power and dispel was a nice change.
Re-prioritizes arcane items, effects and special rules - Most of the arcane items and many options Wizards have are changed. This is refreshing to look at the choices and feel like they can matter more or make a key magic phase turn in your favor. Power stone, power scroll, wand of jet, trickster's shard.. these things allow you to twist part of the magic phase to your advantage now. What it shows is that six dicing spells in its current state is bad design. There are alot of items and options that these new rules make you take a second look at. I hope whatever they settle on for 9th can do this too.
Wizards not breaking concentration - This was unexpectedly pleasant. I just had to focus on using my dice and choosing spells, it was simple. Previous editions allowed wizards to keep casting if a spell rolled poorly. Now, playing this way again, I think breaking concentration just over complicates magic and takes some of the fun out it. 9th edition should get rid of that rule. Its bad enough to fail a casting and lose your dice. Not being able to cast another spell isn't fun.
Level matters less - I only used 3 level 1 wizards. My opponent had three level 2 and a level 4. I was able to get spells off and had choices because my wizards knew all their spells and the dice used to cast and dispel were constantly in flux. I like that I'm not required to take a level 4 (though it's help get over poor dice rolls and allow me to avoid miscasts still), but not needing levels to control spell choices was a good thing in part.
The Bad
To many spells - Period. I had 21 spells to choose from with three level 1 wizards. My opponent had every BRB lore spell plus the end times spells. That is 64 spells! Absolutely stupid. I felt like part of the art of learning magic in Warhammer was missing. I enjoy how normal spell selection allows you to diversify and deal with randomness and signatures, while focusing your Wizards on one lore allows you to control the spells you get to some extent. This is absolutely gone and players are overloaded with to many choice. This kills the flow of the magic phase and creativity in using what you get in a tactical manner. You can't plan your dispel dice based on their spells they have because they have all of them. That feels like a fun part of the game is dead.
To many choices - Once you have all these spells going (both in hand and in play), there is way to much happening. You can do to much during a phase and its easy to lose track and have to many effects dominate the game. You get to many dice and can cast to many spells. We had easily 4-6 spells between us constantly in play every turn. That doesn't include direct damage and magic missiles. This caused us to forget about a spell and have to go back and resolve it. Between augments, hexes, RiPs and Vorticies, there were things occurring in every phase that had to be remembered.
Magic is to random - Between the D6 to determine maximum power dice and then a D6 to determine dispel dice, plus dispel dice piling up, effects coming into and out of play is very random. This makes magic feel unpredictable and something you can't play around tactically. Your spending a lot of time reacting to it instead of working it into your tactics. This makes End Times magic spoil a lot of what is good about the current magic system. Even worse, this negatively impacts armies like ours that rely on magic. We can't methodically play around our spells, because we don't know when they will get off successfully or our opponent will easily stop us. We can't choose to force a spell through with six dice when we absolutely need to.
End time spells - Many of the end times spells are just to strong and the ones that aren't may be to weak. I had to deal with Meteoric Ironclad and Let the Four Winds Blow. The first gives a unit a 2+ ward save, period. The second moves four units back 2D6 inches. In a game where movement is so important, taking movement away shouldn't be so easy to do. Likewise, giving a unit a 2+ ward save and having absolutely no way around it (unless you cast another 15+ spell) is just to much. It removes your ability to do anything for a turn. You can't remove that critical unit or get into position. These spells were a step to far. They don't ruin the game, but they are to absolute.
The Ugly
One Sided Phases - so the D6 casting and dispelling has a poor side effect that occurred at least twice in our game. A turn of bad rolls can make it either impossible to cast or impossible to dispel. This causes your opponent to end up with unused piles of dice, sometimes a dozen. They then just dispel RiP spells you needed to stay in play. This is in part because you can't really bait out dispel dice any more. Either you roll bad and fail the spell or you get spells off and your opponent can't stop you. This leads to the subtle interplay being lost. Players are no longer forcing each other to choose, but just taking advantage of opportunities. This is really unfortunate and has hurt something I really love about Warhammer.
Rules are messy - The reason we are all debating what is a failed spell and how many dice you can use for bound items or army dispelling is because the rules are poorly written. They hop around, key pieces of rules are only found in the overview and they failed to address Bound Items and Army Dispel rolls. Other important interactions aren't clearly discussed. Can a Remains in Play spell be recast without removing the RiP effect? (We ruled it can). Little things like this came up more often than they should and weren't addressed in the rules.
Rules fail to address overpowered effects - This is the worse offender. There are results of these rules that more than any previous edition break previous rules by taking them away from their original context. Units like Doomfire Warlocks, items like the Sacrificial Dagger, powers like Wandering Deliberations. All of these immediately break wide open in these rules. My opponent and I were laughing at how ridiculous his hand of spells was. The current army books were not written to function in these rules. The design studio should have gone through each army book and identified and adjust the rules for the worst offenders. In a matter of minutes we discussed solutions and came up simple ones that should be considered. Is it so hard to just say that effects and units with choosen or preset spells do not get their whole lore and come with built in spells? This would mean that Warlocks and Sisters just have the two spells still and Wandering Deliberations would just give you the eight signatures, etc. Those powers were already good and still would be competitive.
So, I need to play these rules more. Next I going to try building an army that can take full advantage of them, but I don't think it will change most of my observations. In fact, my whole strategy was to see if I can play a low magic army and be competitive and unfortunately the answer was no. That's not a good thing.
Overall, End Times Magic creates to many issues and doesn't address any of its problems. There is good ideas, but this set of rules lacked long term vision and needed another rewrite or two. Plain and simple, they are sloppy and short-sighted. They are written in a way that they force themselves on players and even worse, will cause frustration and arguments over how they should be ruled.
I've been playing Warhammer for over 25 years. I love this game and I'm a solid GW fan. But playing with these rules put a pit in my stomach. I feel GW may have jumped the shark here. A lot of interplay and reliability I enjoyed in the magic phase was gone. Hopefully they put things back together properly in 9th edition, but these rules from a first impression of playing with them create more problems than they address.
What's unfortunate is these rules could have been so much simpler and much more dramatic. These are rules that could easily carry in to 9th. For example:
1) Remove Broken Concentration.
2) Replace the miscast table with effects that scale with number of dice used.
3) Wizards generate spells by rolling them. Duplicates can be chosen from the lore, but no swapping for signature spell.
4) Wizards automatically know their signature spell in addition to the other spells of their lore (instead of replacing a spell they don't want with it). This gives Wizards an extra spell to increase choices but not give them all the spells of their lore.
End Times only games
5) Keep 4D6 Winds of Magic for End Times games. (Return to 2D6 for 9th).
6) Allow recasting of any spell that is successfully cast (and not dispelled).
7) Add end times spells, but allow them to be dispelled.
That's just me spending 10 minutes cleaning them up. and still kept them tied to Storm of Magic (which is obvious what they were going for). These rules could probably be cleanup even further. Its surprising to me that GW didn't do this. Hopefully, 9th doesn't suffer from these problems.
Before I give my review, I'm going to address the current debate and also address how we ruled on a couple things. Currently, players are debating whether a spell that is dispelled is able to be recast or not. I believe it can not, and that approach at least provides a defending player a way to prevent spells being just spammed, thus disrupting your opponent and forcing them to figure out another approach with the other spells from the lore. This is likely the whole reason for every spell being known.
The reason I take this position is on page 8 under overview, bullet 5 and the first paragraph following it under the heading 'End Times Spells'. The first bullet refers to successfully cast spells recasting and the following paragraph refers End Time spells that are successfully cast not being recastable. The third bullet point under casting spells on pg. 9 when everthing is taking into context is just worded poorly. Before you say, well the overview is just that, an overview. But read it again, because bullet point 4 is the only place anywhere it states that a dispelling Wizard rolls a D6 to see how many dice they can use to dispel a spell. That important bit is not in the actual rules. So, the overview contains rules you need to play.
Another area we had to resolve, Bound spells and army dispelling. We ruled that since neither are done with Wizards, you followed the rules in the main rulebook. Thus, you didn't roll a D6 before casting or dispelling this way. End Times magic says clearly when Wizards cast or dispel, so not sure what their intent was, but we followed the RAW.
So, the sloppiness of the writing is one of my issues with Magic of the End Times. Unfortunately, its not my only one, but more on that later.
So let's get into it.
The Good
Curbed nuke spells - So, that D6 rolled before hand causes Nuke spells to get cast with less than 6 dice. This is generally good. My opponent and I both had to rely on lower casting values to get things done. Nuke spells still went off. I cast Purple Sun, he cast Dwellers once and Final Transmutation twice. But it wasn't because we were six dicing them, it was because we did the other things first and had so many dice they were easy to try to cast. So they actually went off more just due to lack of dice.
More consistent dice pools - We on a whole had a much more stable pool of dice. The defending player usually ends up with 10-12 dice, while the caster gets 12 - 18 dice. You can do whatever you want. Its unlikely you will have a phase bottom out on you. Magic having less randomness in its power and dispel was a nice change.
Re-prioritizes arcane items, effects and special rules - Most of the arcane items and many options Wizards have are changed. This is refreshing to look at the choices and feel like they can matter more or make a key magic phase turn in your favor. Power stone, power scroll, wand of jet, trickster's shard.. these things allow you to twist part of the magic phase to your advantage now. What it shows is that six dicing spells in its current state is bad design. There are alot of items and options that these new rules make you take a second look at. I hope whatever they settle on for 9th can do this too.
Wizards not breaking concentration - This was unexpectedly pleasant. I just had to focus on using my dice and choosing spells, it was simple. Previous editions allowed wizards to keep casting if a spell rolled poorly. Now, playing this way again, I think breaking concentration just over complicates magic and takes some of the fun out it. 9th edition should get rid of that rule. Its bad enough to fail a casting and lose your dice. Not being able to cast another spell isn't fun.
Level matters less - I only used 3 level 1 wizards. My opponent had three level 2 and a level 4. I was able to get spells off and had choices because my wizards knew all their spells and the dice used to cast and dispel were constantly in flux. I like that I'm not required to take a level 4 (though it's help get over poor dice rolls and allow me to avoid miscasts still), but not needing levels to control spell choices was a good thing in part.
The Bad
To many spells - Period. I had 21 spells to choose from with three level 1 wizards. My opponent had every BRB lore spell plus the end times spells. That is 64 spells! Absolutely stupid. I felt like part of the art of learning magic in Warhammer was missing. I enjoy how normal spell selection allows you to diversify and deal with randomness and signatures, while focusing your Wizards on one lore allows you to control the spells you get to some extent. This is absolutely gone and players are overloaded with to many choice. This kills the flow of the magic phase and creativity in using what you get in a tactical manner. You can't plan your dispel dice based on their spells they have because they have all of them. That feels like a fun part of the game is dead.
To many choices - Once you have all these spells going (both in hand and in play), there is way to much happening. You can do to much during a phase and its easy to lose track and have to many effects dominate the game. You get to many dice and can cast to many spells. We had easily 4-6 spells between us constantly in play every turn. That doesn't include direct damage and magic missiles. This caused us to forget about a spell and have to go back and resolve it. Between augments, hexes, RiPs and Vorticies, there were things occurring in every phase that had to be remembered.
Magic is to random - Between the D6 to determine maximum power dice and then a D6 to determine dispel dice, plus dispel dice piling up, effects coming into and out of play is very random. This makes magic feel unpredictable and something you can't play around tactically. Your spending a lot of time reacting to it instead of working it into your tactics. This makes End Times magic spoil a lot of what is good about the current magic system. Even worse, this negatively impacts armies like ours that rely on magic. We can't methodically play around our spells, because we don't know when they will get off successfully or our opponent will easily stop us. We can't choose to force a spell through with six dice when we absolutely need to.
End time spells - Many of the end times spells are just to strong and the ones that aren't may be to weak. I had to deal with Meteoric Ironclad and Let the Four Winds Blow. The first gives a unit a 2+ ward save, period. The second moves four units back 2D6 inches. In a game where movement is so important, taking movement away shouldn't be so easy to do. Likewise, giving a unit a 2+ ward save and having absolutely no way around it (unless you cast another 15+ spell) is just to much. It removes your ability to do anything for a turn. You can't remove that critical unit or get into position. These spells were a step to far. They don't ruin the game, but they are to absolute.
The Ugly
One Sided Phases - so the D6 casting and dispelling has a poor side effect that occurred at least twice in our game. A turn of bad rolls can make it either impossible to cast or impossible to dispel. This causes your opponent to end up with unused piles of dice, sometimes a dozen. They then just dispel RiP spells you needed to stay in play. This is in part because you can't really bait out dispel dice any more. Either you roll bad and fail the spell or you get spells off and your opponent can't stop you. This leads to the subtle interplay being lost. Players are no longer forcing each other to choose, but just taking advantage of opportunities. This is really unfortunate and has hurt something I really love about Warhammer.
Rules are messy - The reason we are all debating what is a failed spell and how many dice you can use for bound items or army dispelling is because the rules are poorly written. They hop around, key pieces of rules are only found in the overview and they failed to address Bound Items and Army Dispel rolls. Other important interactions aren't clearly discussed. Can a Remains in Play spell be recast without removing the RiP effect? (We ruled it can). Little things like this came up more often than they should and weren't addressed in the rules.
Rules fail to address overpowered effects - This is the worse offender. There are results of these rules that more than any previous edition break previous rules by taking them away from their original context. Units like Doomfire Warlocks, items like the Sacrificial Dagger, powers like Wandering Deliberations. All of these immediately break wide open in these rules. My opponent and I were laughing at how ridiculous his hand of spells was. The current army books were not written to function in these rules. The design studio should have gone through each army book and identified and adjust the rules for the worst offenders. In a matter of minutes we discussed solutions and came up simple ones that should be considered. Is it so hard to just say that effects and units with choosen or preset spells do not get their whole lore and come with built in spells? This would mean that Warlocks and Sisters just have the two spells still and Wandering Deliberations would just give you the eight signatures, etc. Those powers were already good and still would be competitive.
So, I need to play these rules more. Next I going to try building an army that can take full advantage of them, but I don't think it will change most of my observations. In fact, my whole strategy was to see if I can play a low magic army and be competitive and unfortunately the answer was no. That's not a good thing.
Overall, End Times Magic creates to many issues and doesn't address any of its problems. There is good ideas, but this set of rules lacked long term vision and needed another rewrite or two. Plain and simple, they are sloppy and short-sighted. They are written in a way that they force themselves on players and even worse, will cause frustration and arguments over how they should be ruled.
I've been playing Warhammer for over 25 years. I love this game and I'm a solid GW fan. But playing with these rules put a pit in my stomach. I feel GW may have jumped the shark here. A lot of interplay and reliability I enjoyed in the magic phase was gone. Hopefully they put things back together properly in 9th edition, but these rules from a first impression of playing with them create more problems than they address.
What's unfortunate is these rules could have been so much simpler and much more dramatic. These are rules that could easily carry in to 9th. For example:
1) Remove Broken Concentration.
2) Replace the miscast table with effects that scale with number of dice used.
3) Wizards generate spells by rolling them. Duplicates can be chosen from the lore, but no swapping for signature spell.
4) Wizards automatically know their signature spell in addition to the other spells of their lore (instead of replacing a spell they don't want with it). This gives Wizards an extra spell to increase choices but not give them all the spells of their lore.
End Times only games
5) Keep 4D6 Winds of Magic for End Times games. (Return to 2D6 for 9th).
6) Allow recasting of any spell that is successfully cast (and not dispelled).
7) Add end times spells, but allow them to be dispelled.
That's just me spending 10 minutes cleaning them up. and still kept them tied to Storm of Magic (which is obvious what they were going for). These rules could probably be cleanup even further. Its surprising to me that GW didn't do this. Hopefully, 9th doesn't suffer from these problems.
Kings of War is not Warhammer.
