Desert Hydra
With five huge heads independently biting and spitting acid at its foes, the Desert Hydra is one of the most devastating warbeasts the Skorne Empire has ever captured and conditioned for war. Each head can release a focused spray of highly corrosive acid or snatch up opponents to be devoured by its gaping, hellish jaws. Flesh hooks protruding from beneath armored plates keep the beast maddened with pain, spurring it to further carnage even after suffering multiple decapitations.
Contents
Basic Info
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Weapons
- Acid Spray - 6" spray, POW 12 ranged attack(s)
- Variable ROF, refer to the Multiple Head rule.
- Damage Type: Corrosion
- Continuous Corrosion
- Concentrated Blast - (★ Attack) - This weapon becomes a 10" spray, POW 16 for this attack.
- Bite - 2" reach, P+S 18 melee attack(s)
- Variable number of attacks, refer to the Multiple Head rule.
- Critical Grievous Wounds - On a critical hit, a model hit by this weapon loses Tough and cannot have damage removed from it for one round.
Abilities
- Gargantuan - Gargantuans are mega-warbeasts, even bigger and stompier. They use nearly all the same rules as normal warbeasts but with a few alterations. These changes are summarized here or can be read in full here.
- Warbeast - All warbeasts share a huge stack of special rules. The short version is they're big, furious, and beat stuff up pretty good. Click here for a newbie-friendly recap, or click here for the full rules.
- Pathfinder
- Circular Vision - Models never gain a back strike bonus against this model.
- Multiple Heads [5] - This model can make 5 initial attacks each Combat Action, using any combination of ranged or melee attacks. This model loses one initial attack for each of its aspects that are currently crippled. This model cannot be forced to buy additional ranged attacks.
- Regeneration [d3+3] - This model can be forced to remove d3+3 damage points once per activation. This model cannot use Regeneration during an activation it runs.
- Snacking - When this model boxes a living model with a melee attack, it can choose to RFP the boxed model. When it does, this model can remove d3 damage points.
Animus
- |-
|colspan=7 style="text-align:left; font-size:110%; border-right: 1px solid #fff; border-left: 1px solid #fff;"| |colspan=1 style="text-align:left; font-size:110%; border-right: 1px solid #fff; border-left: 1px solid #fff; border-bottom: 1px solid #fff;"| |- |style="text-align:left; font-size:110%; border-bottom: 1px solid #fff; border-left: 1px solid #fff;" rowspan=1| Sandstorm ! style="border-top: 1px solid #A8A8A8;"| 2
! SELF
! (★)
! -
! Round
! No
|style="border-bottom: 1px solid #fff; border-right: 1px solid #fff; border-left: 1px solid #fff; border-top: 1px solid #fff;"| |- |colspan=8 style="text-align:left; border-bottom: 1px solid #fff; border-right: 1px solid #fff; border-left: 1px solid #fff; border-top: 1px solid #fff;"|When an enemy model targets a model in the spellcaster's command range with a ranged attack with a RNG greater than 8", the attack suffers –3 RNG to a minimum of 8".
Analysis of the Desert Hydra
Desert Hydra in a nutshell
The Desert Hydra is a wrecking ball that costs more than two heavy warbeasts, but moves fast, hits hard, shoots ... adequately, and has an animus that is a spell that would grace the card of any warlock as a slightly cut down version of Krueger the Stormlord's Windstorm at a lower cost.
Combos & Synergies
- Paingiver Beast Handlers - fury management and to make it an effective melee warbeast when it needs to engage by buffing its strength.
- Agonizer - Extra ARM is wonderful on a tough model - and Sandstorm prevents the Agonizer being shot.
- Morghoul1 and Xerxis2 - The Hydra is very fury efficient and they both can buff it into the stratosphere letting it out threaten all other gargantuans and kill them reliably in one round. Morghoul in particular loves Sandstorm to force all RNG 12 shooters into the area covered by his feat.
- Croak Raiders - it can spray straight through them without hurting them.
- In the Disciples of Agony list, you could give this Rage or Primal. Hilarious, but maybe overkill.
- Cyclops Savage animus future sight is more effective the more attacks are made, such as 5 potential sprays or 9 potential melee attacks.
- Supreme Aptimus Zaal can make ample use of this warbeast if he can afford the points. A Huge base to hide behind is not a hindrance to casting and being able to utilize the feat for ancestral rage tokens while taking advantage of Inviolable Resolve stacked with either a Basilisk Krea animus or gnawing pain from an agonizer.
Drawbacks and downsides
- The Desert Hydra does a lot of things and is only really worth taking if you want them all;
- If you want to shoot at heavies (as opposed to remove infantry), take a Mammoth
- If you want hitting power in melee without much fury efficiency, then the Hydra costs more than Tiberion plus a Titan Gladiator. -Negated somewhat by making 5 intial attacks, which, granted is 1 less than the two titans total, still destroys a lot of things, or devastate for a fury or two more, and is faster than both. Pow 18 on its own is decent enough for most things.
- Between Basilisk Krea, Aradus Sentinel, Aradus Soldier, Paingiver Bloodrunners and Praetorian Keltarii the Skorne have a lot of choices for anti-shooting tech and too much gets redundant.
- Hit slightly less hard in melee than the Mammoth
Tricks and Tips
- As a huge-based model, the Hydra is immune to Grievous Wounds.
- The hydra has an excellent animus, well worth casting from either your warlock or a Cyclops Shaman
- You can walk and make 5 breaths, or charge and make 4 breaths, to reach to a model who is behind a bunch of other. It's a way to put the last lousy point of damage on a caster; it doesn't hit hard, but it reaches very far away.
- You can heal a startling amount of damage in a turn. An average of five damage from the regen plus two from each infantry model you snack (and then there's the Paingiver Beast Handlers using their Medicate ability)
Other
Trivia
- The rules were released in Hordes: Devastation (2015), but the actual model wasn't released until 2017.01
- This model was only ever released in the new hard plastic (HIPs). A mold defect means that the left side of three of the heads is missing the flesh hooks. Much moaning was heard from the skorne community.
- The story for these is fairly ridiculous. They're basically just bugs that live in the desert/mountains. They take a small army, with significant losses, to capture and then even more losses to maintain. They are almost never truly broken, just sort of set loose occasionally.
Theme Forces
Other Skorne models
Rules Clarifications
Rules Clarification : Corrosion (Edit)
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Rules Clarification : Concentrated Blast - None yet. (Edit)
Rules Clarification : Grievous Wounds (Edit)
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Rules Clarification : Gargantuan (Edit)
Huge Base (Edit)
Also, simply being on a huge base triggers a bunch of rules scattered throughout the rulebook, click to read them. [Show/Hide]
From the 2020.02 edition of the core rules (Edit)
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Rules Clarification: : Warbeast (Edit) | |
See also the Warbeast page for a recap of the core warbeast rules.
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Rules Clarification : Pathfinder (Edit)
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Rules Clarification : Circular Vision (Edit)
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Rules Clarification : Multiple Heads (Edit)
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Rules Clarification : Regeneration - None yet. (Edit)
Rules Clarification : Snacking (Edit)
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Rules Clarification : Windstorm and/or Sandstorm and/or Fleeting Storm (Edit)
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