“Come, my friends. The Ents are going to war. It is likely that we go to our doom. The last march of the Ents”
The biggest, baddest, elf-tree-mashup is here, ready to stomp all over your enemies and throw them around like ragdolls. Let’s get into it!
The Moss Hermit is, as advertised, a big treeperson – 8 wounds, Nemorous, and most importantly, large. Large is a unique skill for Sÿenann, and as a refresher, does the following:
- You ignore Immovable on non-Large units
- You are Immovable, even against other Large units
- You can move through non-Large units, including with the Charge and Assault skill
When you move through units, they have to pass a WP test or suffer stress. Also, they must roll their defence against as many hits as there are troops in the unit, max 3.(Rules update 1.5.2 removed this!)- You can charge while engaged. Note that although non-Large units can see over each other towards a Large unit, Large units cannot see over other units (and you have to see to charge)
- You have a 4-stride base
Most of these points are unique to Syennan and allow tactical options which were previously unavailable. The 8 wounds by themselves are pretty cool, especially given the reasonably tough defence roll and will be a prime target for healing abilities like Oona, assuming she ever becomes allowed in tournaments. The poor WP is a bit sad, as is the conquest of 0, but at least the Hermit has morale 2.
The attack roll is pretty underwhelming, but has reliable chip damage with the direct damage switch. The main value of the attack roll however is the first switch – “Displace (3) an enemy unit within 3 strides.” Displace practically means to move an enemy 3 strides in a direction of your choice, ignoring non-Impassable terrain. You can use this to move units into or out of combat, and you can target units you are not engaged with – you can use it to pull multiple units into contact with you or push a single unit multiple times (as long as they are within 3 strides when you use the switch). This !! switch has an 84% chance of triggering at least once on the attack roll, 22% chance for twice, which rises to a 50% if you add a yellow die from the Druid buff. On the defence roll you have a 72% chance of getting it once – letting push units out of engaged with you, but only a 9% chance of proccing twice.
Tree hugging becomes mandatory
In addition, the Moss Hermit is quite understandably intimidating – when engaging, the opponent must pass a WP test to avoid stress. “When engaging” means whenever units go from not engaged to engaged, it doesn’t matter who did the movement. So, if you use the switch to push a unit out of engagement, then again to pull them back, intimidating will trigger again. The Moss Hermit also has the excellent skill Wail of the Liberation – give 1 stress to every enemy within 3 strides, no line of sight required. Do you see what’s cooking here? The Moss Hermit is a stress inducing tarpit-bulldozer.
Charge requires you to move in a straight line but does not specify that you have to use the shortest movement. Thanks to large you can charge through a unit to end up engaged on the other side of them, forcing them to roll WP against stress from the trample. (thanks 1.5.2!) Then thanks to intimidating, the enemy rolls WP because they became engaged with you. Unfortunately due to the 1.5.1 rules update, intimidating can only trigger once per activation, so you can’t push a unit away and pull it back towards you to use it again on the turn you became engaged (but you could do that if you started the activation engaged). Win the combat, give them a stress. Then you use Wail and give a final stress. If they fail the WP roll against intimidating and the combat, that’s 3 stress in total, which is not half-bad for a dancing plant.
A truly terrifying foe
The Vengeance of the Trees means if an enemy ends their activation within 3 strides of you, they might become vulnerable and/or take 1 damage. Since you have a 4-stride base, this bubble of vengeance is 10 strides in diameter. Considering your good defence roll and 8 Wounds, enemies are likely to spend multiple activations hacking away at you, so with vulnerable and the chip damage they may not live long enough to chop you down properly.
The Lorax sends their regards
Let’s walk through a tactic I’m going to call the “Garden of Friendship”. Imagine you’ve got two enemy units sitting in their deployment zone relatively close to one another, and you would like them to stay there for the rest of the game, holding hands and singing songs instead of taking your precious positions or consolidating any progresses in particular.
A Hegemony, lacking completely in friendship and gardens
First, you ambush in the Walker of the Leaf Storm and pick up the Moss Hermit and the Shadow of the Hawthorn from your deployment zone. For spice, you could have buffed the Moss Hermit with the Druid the turn before.
Walker of the Leaf Storm picks up some friends, circa 2026, colourised
Next turn, you ambush in Aileen and use Walk Between Realms to give someone you don’t like disarmed, frightened, and vulnerable (70% chance of getting 3x!), before jumping away to watch from the bushes.
Come one Aileen! (Toora, loora, toora, loo-rye-aye)
At the end of that turn, the Walker portals in 3 strides from Aileen and drops off Hawthorn within 3 strides of her, engaged, and the Moss Hermit nearby.
The seeds of friendship are planted
The Moss Hermit charges over the Bucklermen and the Black Angels, forcing WP tests on both for the trample and then again for intimidating.
More hugs for everybody
Then Mossy attacks and displaces the Angels into being engaged with the Hawthorn and herself.
The Garden of Friendship is grown!
Now the Bucklermen and Angels are stuck engaged with the Hawthorn unable to move away by any legal means, and having the Hermit there gives them a the gang-up penalty. You pop Wail, and give each unit another stress. One of the units is disarmed, the Hawthorn rolls 7-8 blocks natively and if they activate to attack the Hawthorn they will have to roll against Vengeance of the Trees to avoid vulnerable. If anyone comes near to try and save the situation, the Hawthorn can use his Innate Agility to jump over the Nemorous Moss Hermit, and the Moss Hermit could charge through the other units anyway. In addition, Aileen is still in the area ready to give out any states she likes. No one is dying here, but no one is going anywhere until you let them. If this is on an objective, you might have physically blocked off all the space available to conquest it, and the Hawthorn’s conquest reducing ability might mean you have the objective locked down.
You could also do a similar move with Sprigs instead of Hawthorn, but then the opponent’s need to be slowed before they get pinned, which Aileen can do at the cost of another, better state.
The only real issue is that if you demoralise the enemy, the Hawthorn stops them running away. Speaking of which, if you had done this whole thing against a unit with weak WP without the Hawthorn, you would have a good chance of routing them in their own deployment zone and right off the table– particularly thanks to frightened from Aileen. A pretty nasty turn 2 option.
Make like a tree and get out of here!
Ok, that was a lot. What have we missed? Oh yeah, Quickbeam. What a weird skill. “While you are demoralised, you cannot perform any kind of movement or be placed (so you can’t run away, you were already Immovable because of Large) and the enemy considers you to be a terrain element who is Impassable.” I don’t know why they specify you Block LoS, as enemies always do that, or why you are Impassable, because enemy units can’t move through you anyway. Further weirdness is that only your enemy considers you to be terrain, so you don’t get the benefit for things like Camouflage, but they do. I don’t know what this skill is meant to be doing except preventing you from running away, and if so, why it includes the whole part about terrain. A Hegemony Engineer could arguably use Explosives to blow you up, but even then, the Moss Hermit would have to continued to be demoralised when the bomb goes off, otherwise the target terrain no longer exists. What would have been cool would have been if the Moss Hermit turned into a terrain element when it died like the Rock Troll, but oh well. It’s even permanent for no reason I can tell. If you figure what this skill’s for, let me know.
So overall we have a unit that can do a number of unique things for Syennan, mostly to do with being Immovable, and being able to move others at your pleasure. In addition, it’s tough to kill and gives out lots of stress, so will be excellent at bogging down enemies and blocking choke points. It’s Nemorous and has 4 stride base so gives out a large bubble to trigger synergies. A poor morale, lack of conquest and inability to do any consistent damage stop it from being a total one-treeperson show and it might not find it’s way into every list, but I certainly look forward to seeing how it performs on the tabletop.
That’s it from me for today, if you want to check out the new dwarven release, have a read here. If you want to support me financially, use this affiliate link to the Corvus Belli store and I’ll get a little something something at no cost to you. Thanks for reading!