Wild Speculation: Convergence Dev Chat Edition!

I hopped back on CoC for an Oblivion Campaign with a friend of mine partially in anticipation of the new Convergence CID and partially because the Void Archon should be here next week. It's honestly been a lot of fun with some good back and forth thus far. We're officially half way through the campaign and I'm looking forward to every time we get to play.

Much to my surprise, the CoC CID is going to start in less than a week (Nov 4th), and yesterday we were treated to an extended Dev Chat where they showed off artwork and gave some rules previews.

You can watch the video on YouTube here.

I posted a summary of the Dev Chat on the Convergence Facebook group you can check out here, but honestly watch the video those guys are great.

Because I'm not a patient man and because wild speculation is fun as hell I wanted to write about what possibilities have me the most excited and the few places where I'm a bit worried.

The Tesselator 
"SHOTS! SHOTS! SHOTS!" – Lil Jon

Two Guns, Range 10, POW 12, Volume Fire (+1 Hit and Damage vs. Med Base, +2 for Large/Huge bases), Reload 1 on each gun. Flight.

Can you imagine Orion's feat turn with a swarm of these? It will simply gun down entire units worth of models, including things like Satyxis Raiders. Oh and vs. huge bases it's easy to get this thing to POW16.

The only weakness is that it's not a spray, so range limiting abilities will apply to it, making it as sad into Kruger2, Old Witch2/3 and a few other bits. Still, if it's fast then this can be mitigated.

We don't know it's points cost yet, which will be a big deal on what this model can really do.

Asphyxious 4
"The Most Interesting Robot in the World"

Do you like taking damage buffs and/or a melee beater in ranged focused lists? Because Gaspy4 will do that for you!

Gaspy is in Convergence and he brings Dark Shroud to everything in his battlegroup. He can take Cryx(!), Merc, or CoC jacks.  He also has his Iron Litch stats with DEF 15, ARM 17, and 18 Boxes with 5 focus, with the ability to claim souls to get even more focus.

Many casters in Convergence can bring a +2 damage buff for jacks, and Gaspy probably brings a more reliable Dark Shroud application than taking a Void Archon. As such it seems almost trivial to swing +4 damage on a target.

What's better is that he gives Bloodthirsty to all construct models in his command range, extending the threat of jacks and infantry alike vs. living models. So he brings a conditional speed up and a damage buff to Convergence, plus whatever the other two spells are on his card (it's revealed he has Caustic Mist clouds).

Gaspy has always had MAT 6 and RAT 3 and my guess is that will stay to keep him reasonable and to not make an obvious melee addition able to effectively run ranged vectors.

While he is being added to Clockwork Legions and the new Strange Bedfellows themes he's the only Mercenary unit Convergence can take, so he's easily available in Destruction Initiative without sacrificing your Merc solo option. He will be expensive at 14 points PLUS taking a jack, but honestly 1 or 2 Stalkers with him seems like the de-facto standard, though there definitely seems to be a case for taking some other Cryx heavies or even Merc Heavies that can do ranged roles if you want them.

Stalkers just to apply Dark Shroud reliably from a million miles away just seem incredibly obvious and it's not hard to get them up to PS16 with Blessed and Grievous Wounds, and they have extended control, meaning they can be up to 20" from Gaspy.

Imagine Orion with a bunch of the Tesselators and other jacks, with Gaspy providing Stalkers for applying Dark Shroud when the melee gets joined, or to apply Dark Shroud to a huge base, further buffing our ranged output. Heck if you want to go the Assimilator route, you can apply the +2 damage to any target.

Still, Gaspy4 with just a single Stalker would cost 22 points, likely 30 points with two stalkers. That's not a cheap package, but it seems like it could seriously add a ton of value.

Nemo4 
"Look at what they've done to my boy" - Hungerford

We know a bit less on the specifics of Nemo4 beyond the fact that he's a Protoss Looking Battle Engine with 30 damage boxes, a good gun, and the ability to take Cygnar, Merc, and CoC jacks.

So why am I excited? Well Nemo1, 2, and -1 (the alt CoC caster) were all MAT 5 RAT 5, Nemo3 was MAT 5 RAT 6. I'm guessing Nemo4 will probably be MAT 5 and RAT 5, making him very likely to focus on bringing ranged jacks to CoC lists that don't want to take ranged heavies in the Battlegroup because the caster has a low RAT: Axis and Lucant, I'm looking at you.

That's not all he's good for, there are certainly some other jacks that may be interesting from Cygnar that immediately come to mind: A Centurion in a Lucant list seems really rough to deal with on Feat turn, and then there are all the ranged lights in Cygnar.

Nemo will have limited applications because he will only be in Destruction Initiative and Strange Bedfellows with no ability to get him into Clockwork Legions.

Still, I can see applications for wanting to take him in an Axis DI list where he'd support some TEP's, putting out serious firepower and not being able to be charged.

Negator
"Well Damn"

6 Points, two Initials, flight and "fast", and POW 11 with Flank: Negator 

Um, yes please. This thing can easily get itself up to POW 15 or 16. Taking a literal swarm with the new Syntherion setup seems like it could be utterly devastating. I'm having a hard time identifying what caster  wouldn't be strong with this. Flank on jacks gets silly and this thing is 6 points. That's two for Requisition options in Clockwork Legions after you take a Corollary, and then you start filling up jack points. I do want to see the rest of the rules but this just seems incredibly powerful based on what we know.

Debbie Downer Time

I have some mild concerns that there will be a few Legacy models left behind in the CID, though I hope that bringing this up will have a few simple changes be addressed:

No Pathfinder out for our Infantry

CoC has two casters that can actually solve Pathfinder issues for our infantry: Aurora 1 and Axis. Neither of them really help protect the rather expensive Enigma Foundry package we need to keep our infantry running.  I'm hoping that the Transverse Enumerator will get Pathfinder as an option to give out turn to turn. They are FA:3 so they limit the ability to spam it everywhere, and it gives a reason to take the UA that largely gets ignored a lot these days.

Primarily this just lets us play infantry in a variety of casters that would otherwise get ignored and it requires a tax to take it. It's an easy way to open up new options in list design for a limited faction that doesn't appear to really break anything by allowing up to 3 units to be able to pay for the ability to get Pathfinder.

Modulator Guns

Most of the new electric guns are coming in at POW12 base, which means the Conflux can up the damage to POW14 with some hoops and well, a 33 point conflux. The Modulator being taken up to POW12 base would be a real quality of life improvement, especially since the new Tesselator starts at that and brings more shots at only 1" shorter range. We still don't know point costs for the Tesselator so this could just be moot, but I'd love to see the Modulator get a bit of a boost while keeping it's value at 10 points.

Conclusions

Monday is going to be awesome, I can't wait to see all the new rules. I intend to get playtest games in as well as post at least the Pathfinder concern above in the general feedback group Overall I'm stoked to see what can be done and I'm trusting the process to get us what looks like will be awesome releases.