Friday 12 June 2015

Croak Raiders and Me... a love story!

Welcome to my first article! This sacred text is some thoughts of mine on the latest minion unit to be released by PP, the Croak Raiders:



Now being primarily a Minion player I shall be focusing most of the article of their uses for the Blindwater Congregation but will offer some speculation at the end to using them with Legion as that is my latest project.

If you haven't seen them before, here are the cards for the Raiders as spoiled from LnL by Chain Attack (Missing is the cost at 5/8 and FA2):





Stat wise they are pretty quick and are decent shots but otherwise it's victim all the way. Gang and Vittriol are abilities taken from the Croak Hunter Solo, as is Advance Deployment and Immunity - Corrossion.

These are all nice but on one wound troops you are going to need a Witch Doctor to zombify them for tough to get use out of Vitriol... This is a sound plan but will then run counter to using them as a source of souls and corpses for your Sacral Vault or Swamp Shamblers as Undead denies these tokens. PP giveth and PP taketh haha so make your choice dependent on the lay of the land so to speak!

Advanced Deployment though is money on a ranged unit, it gives them 30 inches of threat at T1 with the Gourds and 32 with the Darts if you go second so you're threatening enemy AD troops or if you go first your crazy frogs are running over the halfway line ready for a strike next turn yeah.

Each frog gets to throw a single weapon; either a Gourd or a Dart due to the cumbersome rule. The trick is to lob those Gourds first to cover quite a few enemy with the oil then light them on fire with a couple of darts, then lob another Gourd at more of the enemy unit rinsing and repeating till they are either dead or on fire. Now the Gourds do no damage by themselves but will auto boost the damage rolls of the darts or any other fire based attacks that effect the oiled models... Nice! The real touch on this is that the oil lasts a ROUND so the roll for continuous fire is also boosted, this is big, this can end warcasters right there or murder shield wall troops hahaha.

In the Congregation each of the warlocks can get some use of the Raiders, most notably Barnabus and Calaban:

Barny offers swamp pits to make them immune to return shooting, Iron Flesh to bump their DEF up to a usable 16 and his feat knocks down enemy non-amphibious models making them far more likely to connect with the flames. Setting Barny up with a proper gunline is now a realistic proposition and not just a couple of Spitters.

Calaban is a surprise choice but I feel they buff his game so much! Calaban is best in tier which means no Vault so his only real source of guns to maximize his feat was Ironback Spitters... Now he has a cheap source of multiple ranged attacks that also AD and if he can land a parasite on their target it's POW15 flames and continuous fire ftw. Calaban also brings occultation which will grant stealth, great for a shooty skirmisher unit like the Croaks and when combined with tough from a Witch Doctor gives them a fighting chance. You can be doubly sure and have them wrap around an Ironback to grant them girded and immunity to blast damage as a fallback but it's often not going to happen.

Yes they provide similar benefits to the other 'locks but these in my eyes are the biggest and and most game changing... Barny gets a game plan to create a new cryx or doomreaver drop and Calaban gets a game fullstop!

There has been some talk of taking these in Legion with the new Saeryn/Rhyas unit to abuse marked for death which definitely has game, but most armies featuring a lot of fire based attacks such as Ravagores, Seraphs or Typhon will enjoy the extra layer of fury management provided by not having to boost on blast damage shots. 

So for a summary, in my eyes these little frogs could possibly be the best unit in Minions, a tough order given the already excellent Posse but time will tell whether this is true or not!

Thanks for reading,

Rid

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