Healing Hand spell

Description of Healing Hand spell "[...] any friendly models within 2" are stunned or knocked down, they immediately comes to their senses, stand up, and continue fighting as normal."

Situation: My model (e.g. Witch Hunter) is in hth with enemy model and is stunned. My Priest is within 2" of Witch Hunter. It is my turn, so my Priest casts Healing Hand spell, which causes my Witch Hunter to stand up. Hth combat phase begins.

Question: Does Witch Hunter fight in an Initiative sequence (according to spell description "continue fighting as normal") or he is last due to standing up?

P18, who strikes first, Close Combat, Main Rulebook wrote:

If a model stood up in the Recovery Phase of that turn then he will strike last irrespective of any other circumstances.

The spell makes you stand during the shooting phase, so you clearly do not incur the 'strikes last' penalty. RAW to the rescue! .

Standing up in the shooting phase is better than standing up during recovery?

That aside I agree that your warrior would strike by initiative rather than suffering the strikes last penalty, however the wording of the rule could be tweaked by those rules reviewers...

Why bother tweaking the rule? It is perfectly clear as it is. If you are going by flavour text over rules then the real question is "Is standing up with an invigorating burst of holy healing energy better than standing up by yourself?" Turns out the designers think "yes". Or at least, according to the rules-as-written they do :-p.

Because it says "as normal". This leads to discussions of what as normal means. Striking last as per standing up after being knocked down? Or striking per initiative as in an ongoing fight? Since the warrior just stood up the applicable rule can be argued to be strikes last. The discussion ensues and the game slows down.

The rules as written don't tell you what happens.

Indeed it does say 'as normal' and what normally happens? Why - If a model stood up in the Recovery Phase of that turn then he will strike last irrespective of any other circumstances. So if you stand up in any other phase then there is no penalty. Really, in this case the discussion of what 'normal' is should only last as long as it takes to pick up the rulebook and find the rule, so not very long at all.

The rules as written tell you *exactly* what happens (for a change ). The applicable rule *cannot* be argued to apply in the Shooting Phase because, as written, it only applies in the Recovery Phase, not the Shooting Phase when the spell is cast.

I mean, sure, there might be a small amount of discussion if someone only remembered the 'if you stand up, you strike last' part of the rule, but as part of a mature and sensible discussion (which I am sure everyone always follows :-p) the first step when a disagreement pops up is to go back and read the actual rule in question.

I think in this case the lack of clarity really only comes from people not remembering the exact wording of a rule rather than a lack of clarity in the rules themselves. Would that some of the other rules in Mordhiem could be solved so easily .

"...they immediately comes to their senses, stand up, and continue fighting as normal."

"Normal" means just like a regular melee round following the basic rule - going in initiative order.

Going last because of a recovery from being knocked down isn't "normal", it's conditional. And there are no rules for when you strike after standing up from being stunned, because "normally" you can't stand up from being stunned, only from being knocked down. So when the spell description says someone stunned stands up and fights as "normal" it cannot be referring to the strikes last rule because "normally" that could never happen.

I agree wholeheartedly with MWeaver - the "as normal" seems to apply to the "fighting".

I may just be biased because I play Sisters of Sigmar, but that's how we've always played it.

So we played it well. :-)
Thanks for the answers.