This month is bringing a massive host of updates to Age of Sigmar as the setting transitions to Ghyran, the realm of life. Each army is getting two whole pages of additional rules and optional alternative warscrolls for you to use in your games and we are very excited about all of it! Before we get stuck in, a thank you to Games Workshop for providing us with these rules as an early release to review.
After a bit of a disastrous initial faction pack, post-hotfix Sylvaneth have settled into the niche of being one of Age of Sigmar fourth edition’s more successful monster factions, with builds focusing on Alarielle, Durthu and Belthanos proving popular. With their infantry options being okay but unspectacular, this leaves Scourge of Ghyran with some underperforming heroes and the bug riders as units that could use a hand.
Battle Formations
Wargrove of the Burgeoning
At the end of every turn you can pick a non-hero unit within 3″ of terrain and either bring back three slain models if they have 1 Health (ie Dryads) or roll a die and heal the target unit for that amount or bring back models with a Health pool equal to the roll. Dryads needed the most help of all the infantry options and get a mixed blessing here – flat 3 is nice but because the alternative roll is a d6 you’re missing out on the potential for it to be quite a lot more.
If you’re looking to heal larger Health pool units, the timing of this is the same as Endless Growth, so for a damaged unit you could trigger Endless Growth first to heal a unit and then use this to punt for bringing a model back. Probably the best pick of a battle formation for a Kurnoth focused build, as other aspects of the army have options that could benefit them more.
Wargrove of the Everdusk
Your Heroes get to Walk the Hidden Paths even if another unit already has. The trick of the wording here means that whilst your heroes can do it infinitely, your non-hero units will still get stopped from using it once a hero has – so Walk your non-hero unit of choice first and then do all the heroes. This is an interesting alternative to Lords of the Clan and directly benefits the same kind of build – Alarielle and her big monster friends. This leaves you with two options: Either extra healing from Lords or a fairly substantial increase in mobility here.
Artefacts of Power
A new selection of artefacts is quite welcome, as the old batch were a bit naff, so we’re fishing for really good choices here rather than trying to craft alternatives to previous strong choices.
Glamourweave
Each phase the unit can re-roll 1 hit, wound and save roll. The new Durthu artefact, given that he shoots, fights and is often a priority target you will get a lot of use out of this ability on him.
Acorn of the Ages
Once per battle if there are fewer than three Awakened Wyldwoods on the table you can set up a new one in your hero phase, wholly within 12 of the bearer, more than 3″ from objectives and 1″ from enemy units or terrain features. A returning classic that conspicuously missing from the original artefact offering (and presumably a victim of the arbitrary three-thing limit on enhancements). Wyldwoods are a double edged sword now – they’re required for all of your battle traits to function, but used too aggressively will provide your opponent a springboard into your army.
Ranu’s Lamentiri
A once per turn reaction to your opponent declaring a spell ability within 30″, you make your 2d6 unbinding roll and if successful the spell is stopped as per the usual unbind. Then you inflict mortals on the caster equal to the difference between the casting and unbinding roll up to a maximum of 6(!). Very funny and will hideously punish some armies. There’s a bit of synergy with the Warsong Revenant who can naturally get +1 to unbinding rolls. There’s enough armies that don’t care about this at all that in an all-comers environment I’d rather take Glamourweave for a fighty hero than this.
Warscrolls
Drycha Hamadreth
A hero desperately in need of a reimagining, and thankfully this is a pretty hefty change. 12 Health is a very welcome change to her statline, as is the mild movement boost up to 10″. She’s still squishy, but no longer being exactly as durable as 5 Liberators is better than nothing. The big change to Drycha’s core profile is that the bugs no longer attack (and so the mechanic for doubling either the shooting or melee output of them has also gone), but the slashing talons have themselves doubled up to 10 attacks with crit (2 hits) and rend 2 by default. This is a monumental increase to her melee output and puts her in a similar weight class to Durthu.
For abilities, the spiteswarms are now her rampage and instead of messing about with control it’s a reaction to an opponent declaring a charge within 18″ of Drycha. Your opponent then gets to pick one of two terrible outcomes: either -d3 to their charge roll (including if they re-roll it), or -1 to hit for the charging unit’s attacks until the end of the turn and also your army gets +1 to hit them. 18″ is a fantastic range and your opponent getting to either risk failing a charge or a big swing to the combat maths is good stuff. The hit roll changes are particularly big under the new GHB, where making your opponent have to All-out Attack leaves them even more vulnerable.
Finally, her spell now picks a target friendly unit and gives them +1 to wound, even for companion weapons. Also, if the target it non-Kurnoth it gets +1 attack. A much better buff than the old version where the extra boost only worked on Spite-Revenants, this spell is massive on both flavour of bug-rider who love +1 to wound across two attack profiles and an extra attack for the rider. Even if you’re doing hero hammer, the spell is decent enough – most Sylvaneth heroes don’t care much about +1 to wound, but Durthu loves a +1 attack.
Overall, one of the more dramatic power ups we’ve seen in Scourge of Ghyran (thematic!), but you do pay for it with Ghyran Drycha going up 80 points over her previous self. Still, old Drycha basically had no reason to exist outside of an extremely niche Spite-rev build. This version is applicable to basically the entire army (outside of some sort of pure Kurnothi thing) and gives you a lot for her points. Good stuff, big fan.
Revenant Seekers
The unit trades its self heal for a flat damage 2 on the sickles and swaps the rally boost for a once per turn (army) ability to hand out a 5+ ward to a friendly unit on the roll of a 3+. 230 is a decent chunk of change over the old warscroll but the glowup here means this unit actually has a purpose, and that’s always nice. They’re a bit more expensive than Kurnoth hunters, but I can see players squeezing a unit of these into the standard Alarielle list in place of them, as the potential for a 5+ ward on one of your very consequential heroes is obviously huge.
Final Thoughts
Solid changes here, honestly. New Drycha seems pretty immediately competitively viable, bugs got a boost in a few ways and there’s even new options for the monster mash army. Not much here for Kurnoth, and Dryads still feel like they’re languishing, but you can’t expect too much out of just two-pages of updates.
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