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Orion should be as fast as Wild Riders
Loupi#8512
Registered Users Posts: 3,907
Orion serves no unique role in the wood elf faction. He is slow, has a relatively weak missile attack and low-damage bound spells that only encourage blobs and since most WE lords have vanguard now his once unique selling point is no longer. Now that cloak of Isha’s strength has been halved he cannot function as a late game damage tank, though this should never have been his purpose. He was always meant to be a fast hunter and cavalry support character. Here I will argue why Orion should be as fast as wild riders, suggest core balancing changes to him and his items and show that at wild rider speed and higher his animations in combat and in motion remain normal and would not be problematic.
Cloak of Isha + Unbreakable
Remove unbreakable from Orion (like it was removed from Ariel, it can always be added as a skill in campaign as it was with Ariel). With 85 speed unbreakable is mostly unnecessary and would lend itself to very strong and unwanted interactions with cloak of Isha and terror. With 100LD Orion would still be very hard to rout so such a change would not be out of character.
Remove the activation threshold and change the effect to constant healing and magic resistance (+8hp/s with 20-30% magic resistance) with the condition that the effect is disabled when Orion is broken (like Sigvald’s armour). This would bring Cloak of Isha in line with other powerful self heal abilities like Auric armour, Jade Griffon and the Middenland Runefang. It would “spread out” Orion’s power over the whole game instead of getting a power spike when low and would also help (along with other balancing changes) with his balance of power problem where often his army will hit army losses prematurely because the balance doesn’t take the Cloak of Isha power spike into account properly.
With the discussed changes Orion would be a viable, unique and interesting lord with his own clear niche as a monster hunter and cavalry support lord. He would offer some versatility with his items and abilities and be a much more faithful translation from the TT in function and closer to lore in terms of his role as monster hunter who leads the wild hunt. The most important change is to his speed, closely followed by cloak+unbreakable, then reworks to his other items.
There are other balancing changes that could be made to his combat stats, such as ammo count, improving his 60% AP and magic attacks but these are tertiary and would be better left to another time
I. Reasons to have Wild Rider speed
- Balancing and Army roster
After the nerf to cloak of Isha, Orion has nothing to offer as a Lord that can’t be done better by other lords, and can no longer function as a damage sponge/distraction carnifex.
Treelords are far tankier vs ranged and in melee and are casters. Durthu has the added bonus of being a strong (but very slow) combatant and is the only manticore caster available on the roster. Glade lords work much better with WE armies in general, combining high mobility, good ranged and decent duelling ability for a reasonable cost. They are excellent all rounders. Drycha is probably the best at vanguard rushes thanks to summons, aoe buffs and pendulum and is cheap enough to allow wider rush armies. Spellweavers are another competitive choice simply due to being cheap mobile casters with an AOE stalk item, and the sisters of twilight are very mobile ranged damage dealers who are hard to kill.
To compete with the other lords Orion needs his own niche in which he excels. WE are missing a specialist monster/character hunter and a hard hitting cavalry supporter. To do this Orion needs to be as fast as wood elf cavalry. This will give him a purpose and enable more build diversity in WE armies and more variety in competitive lord choices. Making him as fast as Wild riders is the most important point. - Tabletop and Lore
Orion has been completely mistranslated from both TT and lore. In TT he was as fast as wild riders, more expensive than Kholek and had stats on par with a greater demon of slaanesh, and had a long range bow attack in addition to his spear. Instead in game he is the same speed as trolls and is a cheap monstrous infantry lord with a few weak bound spells and a short ranged attack with very limited ammunition. In the lore he has always been about hunting monsters and leading his wild riders in the charge but he can’t do any of these things that define him due to his troll-speed. - Animations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ay1fb5ZIpo&t=12s
In the video we see Orion running at his current 55 speed side-by-side with him running at 81 speed and higher to show how the animations work at higher speed in combat and in motion. In combat we can see that his regular attack animations are unchanged at higher speed as well as his leaping/charge animation.
While running at 55 speed he actually looks like he is in slow-motion, as though he was running through water. When he uses foe-seeker to boost his speed up to 69 he starts to look better but still looks like he is being held back. At 81 speed and higher he looks much better and more natural, and there are no issues with his locomotion animations, such as sliding along the ground.
There are also no issues with him running at the maximum speed shown in the video (134 speed). This is shown at the end of the video. When he is buffed to 134 speed he slowly falls behind the wild riders who are moving at 105 speed, meaning his speed seems to be hard-capped to roughly 95-100 so if he was given a base speed of 85 then using speed buffs on him wouldn’t break his animations.
As an aside, we can see in the top video at 01:50 that his animations are currently not working properly. When chasing units he repeatedly tries and fails to throw a spear while running. Also he seems to have lost his single synch-kill animation where he grabs an infantry model and impales it with his spear. These issues should be fixed. It would also be nice if he received another synch kill animation; in particular the one where Minotaurs will impale a model with their horns would fit Orion very well.
II. Core Mechanics Changes
To accompany Orion’s speed increase to 85 there should be a few key changes to his core mechanics to prevent him from becoming overpowered or broken (other than an appropriate cost change). This is secondary to increasing his speed but is almost as important in order to keep Orion balanced.Cloak of Isha + Unbreakable
Remove unbreakable from Orion (like it was removed from Ariel, it can always be added as a skill in campaign as it was with Ariel). With 85 speed unbreakable is mostly unnecessary and would lend itself to very strong and unwanted interactions with cloak of Isha and terror. With 100LD Orion would still be very hard to rout so such a change would not be out of character.
Remove the activation threshold and change the effect to constant healing and magic resistance (+8hp/s with 20-30% magic resistance) with the condition that the effect is disabled when Orion is broken (like Sigvald’s armour). This would bring Cloak of Isha in line with other powerful self heal abilities like Auric armour, Jade Griffon and the Middenland Runefang. It would “spread out” Orion’s power over the whole game instead of getting a power spike when low and would also help (along with other balancing changes) with his balance of power problem where often his army will hit army losses prematurely because the balance doesn’t take the Cloak of Isha power spike into account properly.
III. Items and Ability Changes
In addition to the core changes above his items and abilities should be updated to better fit his role as monster hunter and cavalry lord, and to update him to the game 2 standard before Warhammer III launches.- Horn of the Wild Hunt
The horn gives a massive power spike to units with already high charge (e.g. wild riders and great stags) while doing little for most units. It would be a good change if it instead gave a flat charge bonus increase instead of a percentage based. Units with very high charge would see a lower effect than currently and low charge units would see a stronger effect.
The effect should be changed from +54% to a flat +20 charge, with an additional +24% speed and fear causing effect. The item should also be capped to 2-3 uses. Foe seeker should then be removed to avoid having 2 mobility boosting items. For example this would drop Stag Knights charge bonus from an insane 113 to 96, while a low charge unit like dryads would go from 18 to 32 while the Horn is active. There should also be an animation when he uses the Horn, like Imrik. - Hounds of Orion
There are several possible ways to make this a good ability. One popular idea is to change the ability into becoming a summon of ethereal “monstrous cavalry” Hounds capped to 1 use. Though the idea makes sense, adding more summons, especially those not bound to winds of magic might not be good for the game. Hounds of Orion could instead be added as a special Regiment of Renown for Orion in campaign, like Drycha’s beast units.
Another option is to remake the ability into a wind spell (like the change to burning head) keeping the same leaping hound animations. It should be made stronger vs single entities and large units to reflect his role as a monster/character hunter. Depending on the amount of damage it would be capped to 2-3 uses with the current cost. - Hawk’s Talon
Hawk’s Talon is the name of Orion’s massive longbow, which on TT granted Orion a multishot ranged attack so a better in-game implementation would be to change it to a magic missile ability with many projectiles, exactly how the “Hail of Doom arrow” item is designed. This is a simple change that would work much better and is a nice reference to his long range TT bow attack. - Addition of ‘Mighty Roar’ ability of Rahagras pride for ~160 gold and either ‘Call of the woods’ ability or ‘Howl of the forest’ included by default. These items would be a simple and effective way to give Orion some supporting ability for cavalry.
With the discussed changes Orion would be a viable, unique and interesting lord with his own clear niche as a monster hunter and cavalry support lord. He would offer some versatility with his items and abilities and be a much more faithful translation from the TT in function and closer to lore in terms of his role as monster hunter who leads the wild hunt. The most important change is to his speed, closely followed by cloak+unbreakable, then reworks to his other items.
There are other balancing changes that could be made to his combat stats, such as ammo count, improving his 60% AP and magic attacks but these are tertiary and would be better left to another time
Post edited by CA_Will#2514 on
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2 · Disagree 2AgreeBut same speed as wild riders is a must, followed by base stats and abilties. Only thong i like about him now is high ma low md that is about all
Theres no reason he cant be in range of 2000g+ also.
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6 · 1Disagree 6AgreeAnyway i agree and some other old dudes like Thorgrim needs even a bigger rework than Orion.
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1 · Disagree 1AgreeVisuals could be the hounds circling him for a couple seconds on activation.
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0 · Disagree AgreeIn the meantime, could easily give him a bit more ammo and speed without any issue.
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1 · Disagree 1Agree+8 ammo. 12 ammo is too low for any lord with a missile attack
+15% missile resistance. With the nerf to cloak it would be safe to give back some of his lost missile resistance especially since he has only 30 armour. 15% is the standard missile resistance for heroes and lords.
So with cloak he would have 35% resistance to magic missiles which is decent but not crazy considering he has no armour.
+ magic attacks (self explanatory)
+5 MA (this gives him base 70MA) to compensate a bit for losing permanent frenzy due to losing unbreakable.
+40 AP/-40 WD. His 60% AP ratio is very low for a “Monster hunting” lord (the average AP ratio for melee monsters is ~70%), when most monsters have high armour. This especially hurts his damage output on the charge. An AP swap of 40 puts him up to the average AP ratio for monsters and AP lords.
Depending on whether he goes up to 1900 or 2000+ the AP could be increased further to something like throggs level.
+400 mass. This puts him up to 2000 mass like Grimgor which is still much lower than similarly sized monsters like Throgg, Ghoritch etc. More mass will help him pull out of infantry more effectively, something that is needed for his role as a hunter.
These changes should only be considered after the changes discussed in the OP
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2 · Disagree 2AgreeAbout ideas, yeah, sure, they sound nice.
Flat +20CB might be a bit much, though.
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