Were Slayers ever good? I can't remember them being used on tabletop rather than the usual Dorf Artillery tactics...

Were Slayers ever good? I can't remember them being used on tabletop rather than the usual Dorf Artillery tactics. Even in TW WH I can't see much use beyond monstrous guys & that's not when they're being raped by cycle charges.

Slayers is the best, man.

The lack of armor made them useless. I saw a single, ten-dwarf unit of Slayers in some dwarf armies I faced every now and then, but they ware brought because of fluff reasons or because they are cool (they are!), they pretty much always ended up getting slaughtered as nobody wanted to spend points on a good character for such a nonsense unit.

Age of Sigmar turned them into an army.

Guess where they are located on the tier list.

If you were building your WHFB army based on usefulness you were playing the game wrong.

No, they were overpriced and had no armor. In 6th and 7th edition, where casualties were taken from tge front, them having great weapons made them unplayable. Back then, if you had shitty initiative, you better had high armor.
In 8th, they were too expensive. You either were a deathstar, a horde or a tarpit bus, and being high cost and low armor, they couldn't be anything.
The heroes had the problem of being slightly killier than regular dwarf lords, but vastly more fragile, making them useless. The regular heroes could already outlast and kill everything in the game, Slayers gave you nothing.

To top it off, they were an unbreakable monsterkiller unit on the army that never breaks and that has the easiest time in the world to kill big, multi-wound models.

Dammaz Drengi were stupid, useless, but fu, tho.

While I agree with you, your depiction of Dwarfs as uber killy unbreakable army differs from my experience, when their high morale and toughness usually onle meant you got to slaughter much more and for longer for the blood god before they broke.

I don't know who you were playing against, but in all of my time of 6th, 7th and 8th edition I've never seen a melee focused army even put a dent into the good, old back-corner dwarf fortress. Everything just gets shot to shit by cannons, organ guns and thunderers and whatever is left is tarpitted until the end of time by ironbreakers and longbeards.

Unless you were playing Chaos Demons in 8th. But then, y'know...

FPBP

Slayers were that one unit everyone WANTED to like, but just couldn't get to work. Why take a Lord when you could have a tuned up Dwarf Lord or an Anvil? Hero was eclipsed by the Thane's, and even the regiments had better great weapon answers. Lore wise they were dwarfs trying to die, and if you ever fielded them, their wish came true.

I don't think you get aos. All units from a grand alliance count as a single army, so you can take other units from other Grand Alliance Order factions to fill in your list while still keeping it as predominantly Fyreslayers. Essentially there are only 4 armies, with things like fyreslayers and sylvavneth being tags used to categorise models.

GW tried hard to hammer this idea down, but it was quickly forced to yield to unprecedented levels of bitching and released matched play.

Ehhh, you're missing the whole synergy aspect. You CAN do as you describe, but when your general only buffs a certain subfaction or, in the case of the Magmadroth, harms things that aren't the same subfaction, it narrows your viable options.

Yeah, but you get more rules and bonuses if you try to wield a pure Fyreslayer army.

Otherwise, it's just a generic order army.

>I get to dictate what is and isn't the right way to play a game!
What fun you must be to be around.

Oh no a company complying with the wishes of their customer base, how awful.

The Storm of Chaos campaign list. In that list they were ridiculously good.
Not sure if that counts considering it's not a regular armybook though.

They have always been hard to use on tabletop and even in WFRP the career is wonky. I think people expect them all to be Gotrek when he's a really unique slayer with one of the most powerful axes in the setting. The rest of slayers usually die in droves.

If you cared more about viability and usefulness than fluff and your dudes then you were not a fun person to play.

Problem is, their Slayer skill doesn't allow them to fight large monsters better, it lets them WOUND those monsters better. Being an unarmoured dwarf with standard stats, meanin low initiative ammong other things, pretty much means they all die before landing a strike.

That was especialy true in earlier editions when you removed dead troops starting from the front rank, meaning if a single Giant or anything fought a unit of Slayers, it was enough to kill four (rather easy feat for large monsters) to be sure there will be no retaliation.

They ware just fucked by designers imo, since tehre are lightly armored/unarmored units that compensate their lack of armor with special rules or stats.

A bunch of independent minimum point Slayer characters could be used in 7th edition to form a grid that bricks of models couldn't get through. Meanwhile, they could just keep swinging at enemy characters to try tax their wounds and possibly kill them.

They really should have had a mechanic where you earn victory points yourself for getting them killed, so your opponents incentives were to try and NOT kill the little buggers and to keep them from chopping up anything important.

They're cool

That's why you use em

See that sounds good in theory but it would be difficult to implement as it would begin to feel unbalanced. A better solution would be to reduce their points cost so that they could be taken in large units so that they could take the casualties and thus fight on.

If I could put a slayer character in a normal unit I would take them all the time. I would do it even if there was a rule penalizing me for it.