Quote from: MrSaucy on July 13, 2014, 06:29:37 PM

Interesting to see how different people open. I like opening Necromancer with:
1) 20 mana; Death Ring (-5) + Graveyard (-14); 1 mana left
2) 11 mana; Libro (-9) + Harmonize (-2) on Graveyard; 0 mana left
3) 10 mana; reveal Harmonize (-2), deploy 1 Venomous Zombie (-4), harmonize Libro (-4); 0 mana left
4+) Deploy a Zombie Crawler from Libro every round and pump out Venomous Zombies and Zombie Minions from Graveyard when it feels necessary. Also conserve mana by putting on Leather Boots and Leather Gloves.

I am a fan of using both spawnpoints heavily in order to take full advantage of Death Ring.

Definitely interesting stuff! How aggressive would an opponent have to be for you to move away from this 'economic' opening? Against my normal forcemaster opponent, for instance, you'd have been hit for 10 dice on turn 3 and would have very little time to use those zombies! In general, I'd be very scared of an opening that doesn't give you any armour OR any creatures that can guard.

Can you do us a favor and put this into the sbb? So new players can use the hover function. 

1).  I don't really see the point of a vet belt if your max armor can only ever get to 4 (plate + leathers), and that's if you spend 3 actions to make that happen.  Pretty meh.

2).  I love creatures, but you have way too many, I think.  A good move with your book, since it doesn't run any zone/arena buffs that goblins/orcs rely on, is to just go Dwarves and drop all the goblins and orcs (except the alchemists). 

Dwarves don't really need buffing outside of incantations and you already have plenty of those (maybe too many considering you have the helm).  It would also make more sense to use them since you don't have any higher cost conjurations and would have more mana to spend on individual creatures, but I guess that's just my view on it.

3).  If you decide not to dump all the orcs/goblins, you should probably swap out that heal for a group heal.  There will undoubtedly be times where most of your guys have damage and you need a action/cost efficient way to heal them all.  It's caused huge swings for me, pretty awesome to have.

4).  Just because you have the monolith doesn't mean you shouldn't include enchants.  You give up so much that it doesn't make any sense in the majority of games I would think.  I won't list all the great enchants you give up, but not at least including standard bearer seems pretty suboptimal to me; especially with all those creatures.

5).  More attacks? At least something to extinguish with, an acid ball, etc.  Seems ill-advised to run an elemental wand when the only thing you can bind to it is hurl rock, which you have multiple copies of anyway  ...and besides, you run so many creatures I'd imagine it that 99% of the time it would be better just to power strike, etc, one of your troops instead...

My over feel with the build is that it gives up too much utility in certain areas (enchants/attacks) for excessiveness in others (creatures/incantations).  If you're going to stay with such a creature heavy build I think I'd recommend switching over to the Bloodwave Warlord for Veterans; The AT Warlord seems much better with a battleforge.

I too am working on a Warlord build with 0 enchantments. I'm thinking of making it a Bloodwave Warlord, although I tried it with an Anvil Throne Warlord, and I'm still debating running Barracks and Battle Forge or just Barracks.

I really like Reflex Boots with the Rune of Shielding. It's a bit expensive to get down, but it's tremendously helpful against big attacks. You might want to include a piece of equipment that gives a defense so that you can use the Rune of Shielding.

I'd rather use the Rune of Power on Elemental Wand with Hurl Rock than on Helm of Command simply because it lets me try to kill things efficiently during the first quickcast phase. Plus it lets me attack flying creatures, whereas there aren't good orders to support a ground force attacking flying creatures. Sniper Shot is not exciting if your target doesn't have a defense.

I need to try Goblin Slinger now that Armory and General's Signet Ring are out. I didn't like them before, but I can see them potentially being decent now. So far I really like Goblin Alchemists though. They're probably slightly better with the Bloodwave Warlord though, since stripping creatures of armor is more exciting when you can't give a bunch of Piercing with Battle Orders.

I'm not a fan of your opening, since you don't start playing creatures very quickly in order to make the General's Signet Ring efficient.

With Barracks based play, I'm focusing on smaller creatures rather than Bloodcraig Minotaur, Sir Corazin, and Thorg. General's Signet Ring is more efficient if you cast creatures often, and it doesn't have much of an impact on the efficiency of creatures that cost ~15.

I'm still skeptical of Goblin Grunts, although there is enough additional support for soldiers now that they may be okay.