Greetings, eldritch. Fraser from the Warmachine dev team to take a look at a Fane of Nyrro warlock I’ve been incredibly excited to share with you: Nymara the Shadowblade.
To get the standard stuff out of the way, Nymara has a solid stat line. She’s an eldritch warlock on an 80mm base, so I doubt this is particularly surprising to anyone. Anyway, we can talk about her impressive personal capabilities later. But first, my favourite part of her card…
Nymara is a battlegroup warlock who’ll routinely bring a swarm of Vordaks and Strygons to the battlefield. If you go heavy on forcing these warbeasts, you can easily end up with 20+ fury on the table. Nymara is ARC 5.
So how, you may ask, does she accomplish this without her entire army constantly frenzying? And that’s the neat part: she doesn’t!
Instead, Nymara makes frenzying GOOD. She does this by liberal application of her Feral Onslaught hunger ability.
There are an impressive number of potential combos to take advantage of this alongside Fane’s unique frenzy-altering abilities, like choosing your target or frenzying twice in the same activation.
And if you look closely, you may spot a secondary damage buff in there. Often, warbeasts that frenzy do so because they charged in and generated a bunch of fury on your previous turn. This tends to leave them close to the enemy and unable to find a full 3” to charge and gain their boosted damage dice. With a convenient 3” more before the frenzy, this stops being an issue.
And that’s just the bit I personally find most fun. Let’s take a look at why Nymara’s warbeasts are going to be in a position where they’ll routinely be frenzying.
I’m going to start with Murder, a defining ability for Nymara that she also bestows on her battlegroup. Murder can make models in her battlegroup particularly dangerous, if you can get to the full +3 damage bonus.
As we’ve covered previously, Fane don’t typically have access to the same “one-for-one” model trading patterns as other factions. They have to commit more models than that to get the job done. Murder is how Nymara turns her Warbeasts into killing machines while still adhering to this philosophy. Particularly when also applying the bonus to hit rolls with We Descend.
In addition to this, she speeds up her warbeasts with On Dark Wings, then is able to force them from 18” away with extended control range.
On top of all this, Nymara can spend hunger on boring stuff like casting spells and healing her battlegroup, freeing up her fury for cool stuff like making melee attacks.
Now, all of this sounds great. However, some of you may have noticed the downside: all of this is highly dependent on Nymara having a significant amount of hunger. And her way of getting it is… a little, shall we say… reckless.
Nymara’s personal hunger generation comes directly from getting her warbeasts killed while running hot on fury. I know intentionally getting your warbeasts killed to get things going might not sound too appealing. However, there is an upside:
Nymara’s feat, From Lowering Skies, not only gives her one of her warbeasts back, but lets that beast more efficiently stack up the Murder bonus. Love a bit of double-dipping.
And now we come to the final piece of the puzzle: Nymara’s short but potent spell list.
Nymara has two spells that help protect her forces as they close in on the enemy. Deflection classically gives her DEF 13/14 beasts a meaningful bump in their resistance to ranged attacks.
The second, Borne Aloft, is unique to Nymara. It grants a warbeast a potent buff that persists until one of two things happens: it makes an attack, or gets damaged.
So you either get an oblative +3 HP (assuming the next enemy attack that hits also damages), or 2 extra damage on an enemy. Two damage might not sound like much, but remember this is a 1 cost spell that Nymara can cast with hunger points. AND she uses a LOT of beasts.
TL;DR – the +2 damages add up.
For the +3 ARM component of the spell, there are two important things to consider:
The first is that it can be used on Shield Guarding Strygons, allowing you to direct enemy shots onto the models most protected from them.
The second is the Shadow Shift ability. Fane beasts typically allow their enemy to get one good hit in, before they shift away to safety. So, reducing the damage of that one hit by 3 can really be impactful over the course of a game.
And finally, Slingshot, cause who doesn’t like repositioning?
And last, but certainly not least, we get to Nymara’s personal output.
In melee, Nymara boasts a casual POW 15 and two POW 16 MAT 7 initial attacks, which can be further empowered by Murder and We Descend to reach POW 18/19 and MAT 10. Pretty good.
On top of this, she can turn that POW 15 into a weapon master if she has enough spare hunger kicking around. At range, she throws a short ranged Javelin with the skewer rule to drag enemies into Murder range (pun intended).
So, are you ready to take to the skies? Pre-order Nymara the Shadowblade here and prepare to play risky, hungry, and furious! Nymara's full rules are also releasing in the app today, so don't forget to update.
