Truth & Consequence

On to the hulking masses of metal that brought many players to Warmachine in the first place, Warjacks have been an important part of the Protectorate stable for a long time. In Mk. 2 we ran warjack-centric lists heavily in a world where that was almost never done, and although the ability to do that has opened up across nearly all factions, the Protectorate still boasts a very solid stable of both Warjacks and Warjack support options. Blessed machines level all that lay before them on the battlefield, enemy's shots always firing wide, spells fizzling when they touch the sacred metal... Protectorate delivers our warjacks even against terrible odds. Menoth Brings the Metal My grading rubric as before: A  is a serious powerhouse of the faction. These are the pieces that will appear in most, if not all, lists, and whose effect on the games in which they're played will be massive. B  is made up of very strong, very solid options. These are the core workhorses of the Prot...

Protectorate units are a mixed bag of great options, most with quite strong roles, some more niche, and a few... appear to be missing any kind of niche to fit themselves into. Luckily, as with much of the faction, most of them do have a pretty interesting place in some build or another. Today I'm doing a letter grade breakdown of all of the Protectorate's unit options. Burn, baby, burn! My grading rubric as before: A  is a serious powerhouse of the faction. These are the pieces that will appear in most, if not all, lists, and whose effect on the games in which they're played will be massive. B  is made up of very strong, very solid options. These are the core workhorses of the Protectorate, but aren't going to shock anyone with their extreme power. C  is average (this isn't necessarily a bad thing.) These pieces pretty much do what you'd expect at their point cost, maybe fulfill too niche a role but still perform it well, or are more likely to be a ...

Recently on  Druid's Dice , Jaden went over the entirety of Circle on a model by model basis, reviewing each piece as it stands in the current environment, going over its power level, and detailing what changes could be possible to fix things up a little. I thought, after some suggestion from fans, that doing the same here might prove interesting. Protectorate is blessed (hah?) with a relatively deep model pool compared to... almost any other faction, really. We have our duds, certainly, but truthfully I can find a place (an interesting one!) for almost every model in our arsenal... emphasis on almost, of course. Some things are beyond even Menoth's ability to save. Today we're going to start from the bottom of things with Protectorate's interesting solo options. These are the guys you use to fill out your list, and we've got a varied set with some interesting roles... although some certainly have a stronger role in an army than others. Every piece is just goi...

The most recent  Primecast Episode 44  brought us our first real spoilers about upcoming theme books (aside, I suppose from Exemplar Interdiction's appearance in No Quarter.) Overall, quite a bit about the sorts of things we can expect from the Trencher book and these books in general was talked about, and I just wanted to touch on those and what it *could* mean for the Protectorate. Hey, at least this game got us some  neat 3d renders, ok? New Units/Solos/Characters So in total the Primecast mentioned a new character, unit attachment that works for all trencher units, artillery crew of sorts, unit of combat mechanics, a warcaster, and a brand new model type entirely. This points to the potential of what we could see in an Exemplar book. The releases aren't intended to be mirrored, but the possibility of a universal Exemplar CA or WA could be really interesting, especially something that gives the right benefits for some of our more maligned models like Exemplar B...

The Reclaimer Gatekeeper (most often known by his Mk. 2 name, the Reclaimer) is an interesting little solo. He's a cheap little support piece with some interesting options, although he finds himself quite difficult to fit into lists. Here we're going to touch a bit on exactly what his place is... or if he really has one. Nobody expects... Reclaimers are three points, which is a pretty easy sell but puts them in the same point category of Vassals and Allegiants of the Order of the Fist, which is fairly competitive in the Protectorate. For those three points you get the Jack Marshal rule, which makes him a ridiculously cheap option if you'd like to marshal a warjack. He's SPD 5 with a very basic 13/13 defensive statline, and has a RNG 1 PS 10 melee weapon that causes continuous fire. Reclaimers sport five wounds, and you can take two of them if you wish. The back of a Reclaimer's card is a mess of abilities, and it's this series of support abilities, in a...

I play Protectorate for the teleportation shenanigans, clearly. Often times a list can really end up being a lot more than the sum of its parts. There's definitely something to be said about taking various, already quite strong pieces, applying synergistic buffs and the right warcaster, and going from there. There's some instances, though, where an entire list skews in a direction, regardless of whether the individual pieces in it are good or not. We've seen that in the past with box spam, such as Karchev and approximately a thousand Berserkers, each of which are quite poor pieces in a lot of ways but become absurd in the numbers they could be taken. Sometimes we see armor skews in which even less effective pieces are taken just because their ARM value is high, or DEF skews in similar veins.  Sometimes, though, lists skew slightly odd things. A common "skew" in Protectorate is spell hate, for example; entire lists designed with Blessed, anti magic bubbles...