Matriarch Advancement: To Spell or not to Spell

My Sisters of Sigmar Matriarch has a pair of Sigmarite Warhammers and the Soulfire spell. For her first advance, she rolled up a new skill. So the question: does a combat sort of caster take survivability skills like Step Aside or Resilience, or are the Spells generally too good to pass up? And for the Matriach in particular, does her status as Leader make for a different train of thought than the same question for a combat style Orc Shaman?

Opinions?

Your leader should be getting Hunch or Tactician at the earliest opportunity. Having both of those is not only enormously helpful, they help take the edge off of your opponent having infiltrate.

Once you have those two, then another prayer and then Mind Focus is a good way to go. After that, I like getting things like Step Aside to keep them alive.

It depends on your priorities. In your position, I would be considering the Matriarch 1) a leader, 2) a caster, 3) a melee fighter, 4) a close-support shooter.

I would be taking skills that make you a better leader, then skills that make you a better caster, *then* skills that make you do more damage in melee. With no access to shooting skills, all you can do for close support shooting is give her a sling (which you have doubtless already done ).

Since many of the spells enhance the character and the warband taking a chance on them is never a bad idea.
It does depend on what your plan is for the Matriarch and the mix of opponents you face.
In our world the recommendation would likely be another spell or Step Aside.

We've pretty much banned Tactician and don't encourage the use of the other add ons from the Annual.

Of curiosity, what made you ban Tactician?

1. It is another vague and poorly written rule with open ended implications for its use. Attempts to house rule Tactician were met with resistance from the people who liked to use it. They quit playing. We banned the use of that skill.

2. It appears in 2 publications but they were not purchased by the majority of our players, which led to people using the rule without any written copy to reference for their opponent.

3. Multiple people using the rule meant that starting a game took almost half an hour as each player would use his redeployment to move every model a couple of times.

Finally it is the single most likely rule in my experience to engender a shouting match.

Because there are several newish players in the campaign, I decided not to introduce the supplement. Tactician and Hunch seem like great ideas though.

But since we're using basic skills, it came down to the choice between Fearsome and a spell. Fearsome always struck me as a good alternative to Step Aside for a leader since you don't want them charged anyway. I wound up going with the spell though, and got Armor of Righteousness. I can't imagine too many situations when I'd cast it rather than Soulfire in close combat, but it's a good sometimes missile deterrent.

Ahhh, sorry you got Armor of Righteousness, the spell is so useless on a 9+...
Concerning Tactician: we all use it and it's never a problem. During the usual deployment, you just space out 8" as much as you can to leave not so many good deployment points for your opponents. No need to care about lines of sight and such, since you'll rearrange anyways. Next, you rearrange in order of previous setup. 1st round charges might become possible, but since you decide later who gets first turn, it is risky for both sides.
What we DO ban though is referring to rules that you didn't even bother to print out...

Mind focus is extremely useful for a spellcaster.

Yes, but it is still very risky if you want to use it in cc or anywhere near (which my Priest of Sigmar has to). The Matriarch will not be much different.

Depending on what type of campaign you are playing, Utter Determination is an incredible skill. Once your leader gets up to leadership 9, combined with that skill, you will rarely ever rout unless you want to.

Keep in mind to increase your warbands strength, you don't want to be fighting to the last model every game. However, if your campaign is going to feature some sort of 'final match' type battle or an elimination tournament, you need to make sure you have that skill (and that your leader is kept nice and safe.

Oh yeah, and late campaign, having Healing Hands is nice if you park your leader right behind your T4 W3 Resilient/Step Aside hero(es).




Side Note: Since Sisters of Sigmar is kind of the the focus of the discussion, has anyone else's groups contained weird enough people that when one of the models gets Knocked Down, they insist on referring to it as 'Knocked Up' instead?

Nope.