For that to work the way you want (if I understand what all is being said), you have to keep ALL your other formations 12" away from Khamul when you do this, otherwise he will bounce hits on someone else once he kills your one formation.

I looked at my earlier post and my syntax was a bit mangled.

Khamul's presence isn't that significant as the cheap heroes are being expended to get the Ringwraiths to use up their Might. They F5 unit Heroes can't win (unless the Ringwraith rolls a 1 and the Hero rolls a 6, followed by a 6 followed by a 3+) so it is rare to inflict any hits to be reflected back.
*
It seems 'counter-intuitive' to spend 80+ points to get a Ringwraith to burn use up 1 Might, but in my limited experience of such tactics it sends the Ringwraiths either off to some side-line unit or makes the Mordor player wary of attacking a formation that contains an Epic Hero, or better *might* contain one. Going second is such a big advantage generally.

Stephen

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So, you are anticipating the formation being killed by carryover hits from the duel, and not getting a chance to fight, right?

Interesting.

Pretty much. If he wins, then the Nazgul may be dead. If he doesn't win then you loose only a cheap 1-2 Company Formation. Either way, there is a good chance you forced the Nazgul to burn his one Might to assure he survives. If he trounces on you with his Epic Strike the worse he will do is kill of a cheap Hero and an expendable Formation.

Actually, if you play Rohan you have a couple extra bonuses here. First, these expendable Formations can be RoR so you are harassing with bow fire while dancing them around. Second, you could pick the best time to rush one of these in and surprise them with Eowyn in the Formation. Now you have a relatively affordable Hero to call Duel on the Nazgul and have her dueling bonus. Almost forces the Nazgul to call Epic Strike to defeat her. Now you have a Nazgul with no Might left and potentially a torqued off Eomer that wants to run ravage over their Formation.

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If I were playing that Nazgul army, I would only be using the ES when I actually needed it and just trusting to the odds vs everything else. Sure some will die from the variance, but I would have five and they are all still mastery 3 Darkness and Dismay casters - one unit would be getting Gothmog's duel back for free, and a wraith is actually pretty likely to survive a duel when there is only a small margin involved.

The wrongness of RAW ES is that it allows small margins to become large margins, duels to become almost 'sure things' and the variance to become a case of worst case = nothing bad and best case = devastate the formation. Without that in play, I would suggest a reasonable player will trust to the averages. Almost all the Nazgul will survive those lower level threats and preserve the ES for the higher level ones. The Mordor army as a whole is pretty efficient outside of duels.

Lance cav in small units is the way fo the future though - so thanks HRM for opening my eyes

And Forgottenlore, I've been chuckling about the idea of actually having a Woolley Mumak all day. It is still silly in terms of the setting, and I definitely wouldn't want to take advantage of the permissive rules (which are there to give us some freedom to to fit the broader setting) to get too much synergy via allies, but it would be a genius conversion eh? I am a terrible converter. Hmm, I am sure there is the right child's toy out there somewhere lol.

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the chaos war mammoth on forge world looks about right.

When the Dueller is F6, such as Elrohir or Elladan, or Eowyn (the additional dice she rolls is about equivalent to +1) there's about a 15/36 prob that three rolls will be made on the Duel table, about enough, on average to slay the Ringwraith. Sure, the odds are marginally in favour of the Ringwraith approx 55/45, but who, seriously, is going to take that risk just to save 1 Might? Having saved it and being slain is not much use, is it

Once Khamul is gone, and to a lesser extent the Betrayer, then Mordor players start to panic a bit. Serves them right for putting all their eggs in one 'cheesey' basket :lol

Off topic: Re the Gorgoroth Horde debate on Warseer. Wouldn't a unit of 2 co. of Gondorean knights with Aragorn and Gimli destroy it entirely if they hit it in the flank and Gimli called his Epic Rampage (relatively easy I would have thought against a unit of 12-18 companies)? Come to think of it, if Gimli spent another Might and called Epic Rage then it could be destroyed from the front. Gothmog wouldn't help much as cavalry hit before and Epic Rampage he copied.

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I would take that risk with the Nazgul - not to 'save one might' but to ensure they are not an easy mark for the three actual duelers in there. Once you add in the odds of the table results that do not harm heroes, and average it out, it is a reasonable risk. If the othe duelers weren't lurking out there, or it was getting later in the game, I'd just use the might to ES and kill the weaker dueler instead.

The cav version will not work, since the heroes will not be in the same coy. However the Axemen version would. You could also Mumak it, and do a couple of other things. The real issue with it was that, with the right Mordor Epics in there, you had to have brought very specific counters to have a chance.

In anycase, I also agree with the interpretation that you cannot include other heroes in the battle-host. So the Gorgoroth horde is not the issue it first appeared.

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Xelee,

I see your point now. This gives the lesser duellists roughly the same chance as the major ones though. F5 (with +1 advantage) v F5 or later on F10 (with +1) v F10. The logic of your point is that this is better than than F10 (with +1 advantage) v F5, which can't be denied.

Stephen

P.S. I realised the error of my ways wrt Epic Rampage and cavalry shortly after posting. Thankfully, you're the only one that gently pointed this out Having acknowledged my ignorance , I still think that the Gorgoroth Horde is over-rated - stick in Khamul and Gothmog (to prevent Duellists taking out the 'Lord of the Ringwraiths', well by the frequency of his appearance in Mordor armies you could be mistaken) and you're looking at, if my maths is correct, 550 pts to 670 pts. 1 co. of Khazad Guard with Aragorn and Gimli is 425 pts. with Epic Rage you'd take them out, albeit losing your unit in the process. Seems a decent trade in my eyes.

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How should Epic Rampage work against Khamul?

Should the Rampaging player simply decide on some arbitrarily large number of hits that he inflicts and then Khamul tries to redirect all of those, so I say Gimli inflicts 200 hits and then Khamul rolls to redirect 200 times? Or should hits be redirected for each round of attacks so Gimli hits 7 times, Khamul tries to bounce 7, then Gimli makes 7 more attacks and hits with 5 and Khamul makes 5 bounce rolls, and so on? Or do bounced hits count as misses, so Gimli hits with 7 attacks, Khamul bounces 2 of them, then Gimli makes 5 more attack rolls?

Could be important since some of those would make Epic Rage very dangerous to the attacker.

Forgottenlore,

If, for instance, Gothmog is present in this horde and raises D to 7 with Epic Defense, then the Khazad Guard now need basic 5+ to hit, 4+ with 2H weapons. Aragorn lowers this to 2+. In this case, surely, you roll the dice for the all the attacks, the Rampaging one and any others in contact, BEFORE Khamul starts reflecting. That being the case my reasoning suggests you can then roll as many dice as you like counting 1+ as a hit and after that Khamul rolls his reflection. So I guess I agree with your first suggestion.

Otherwise, unless your Khazad Guard, or similar, is at least 1/3rd the size of the unit containing Khamul, then it will on average be destroyed before its target. I can live with 'mutally assured destruction', just, as a result of Khamul's ability. Being able to destroy his attackers before they destroy him is one step too far.

Stephen

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BoromirofIpswich, I made exactly the same mistake with cavalry and rampage a couple of weeks ago... so I am going to say it is 'understandable'.

I think that the Gorgoroth Horde is either not allowed to be joined by any other Epics OR they included a totally meaningless clause in the battlehost rules.

With Khamul vs Rmpage is a tricky one, I'd love for there to be a consensus. I have that sinking feeling that an FAQ would say "roll it all out".

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Surely it'd work like this...

For example Gimli's Company has 10 attacks (8 basic, 1 for charging, 1 for higher Fight value), if they auto-hit on 1+ then Khamul rolls 10 dice and models are removed from Khamul's Formation and the Khazad Guard depending on how the dice run. Repeat this process until one of the Formations is destroyed.

If both Formations started out at full strength (4 x Khazad, 9 x Orcs) then with perfectly average rolls the Ocs would outlast the Dwarfs and have 1.5 Companies remaining.

In order for the Khazad Guard to come out on top (on average) they would need to be more than 50% the size of their target.

So of the 3 possibilities I suggested, we have one person saying

"surely it is option 1"

and another person saying

"surely it is option 2"

and a third saying

"I don't know"

wonderful.

I don't think there IS an answer Forgottenlore. I do think you can't put other Epics in the Battlehost, but that this still happens with other units. There are two abilities that are worded as both happening instantly.

I'd love to say that the way that best fits the gameflow is to do in sets, so enough instant kills to kill the formation, then 1/3 of that comes back via 5+ rolls, then enough instant kills to kill the formation, then 1/3 of that comes back then... Just picturing myself in that game makes me not want to play it!

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Actually, would the Khazad Guard attacks continue even if they have themselves been destroyed by Khamul's deflected hits? Thinking about I think they would - they are not new attacks, simply a reitteration of the attacks the Company made before they were killed - therefore it would guarantee Khamul's Formation's destruction.

You would still need to roll and repeat because Khamul may have poor dice rolls and his Formantion may be destroyed before the Dwarfs, even if it was more than twice the size.

Also, even after the Dwarfs had been killed, there may be other Formations within 12" to deflect the hits onto before the Orcs were finally taken out.

I think you could certainly make that argument. Whichever way you cut it, there are going to be a LOT of dicerolls.

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I'll look at the other two "options" as well.


I really don't think that this stands up as you could say that Gimli's Company inflicts a million hits or even an infinate number of hits - try rolling that many dice.


Bounched hits count as hits.


The only option that fits the rules is this one - and with auto-hits (1+) you get the results I've outlined in my earlier posts.

Still playing devil's advocate here, I think Xelee is right and there really isn't an answer.

Rich, Rampage says to "Immediately" make additional attacks.

On the other hand it also says to keep doing that "Until they all miss or the enemy formation is destroyed" Implying that hits are applied before the Rampage happens.

If it wasn't for the auto-hit scenario I wouldn't even be questioning it and would assume that the Rampage completes it's run before Khamul rolls to bounce any of them. Its just that one very rare situation that calls into question a ruling that I don't think anyone would have even thought of otherwise.

You could always counter with a Ringwraith army of your own which will give him a taste of his own medicine. You'll have the advantage because you'll know his build. You could swap The Knight of Umbar and the Shadowlord out and spend 250points on some other things.

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