Greetings.
The discussion of Gandalf the Necromancer ( love that
) got me thinking about another question on Company of Heroes and I figured rather than leeching off that thread, or starting one too specific to a single question, I might just start up a thread to discuss these special Formations in general.
I'll lead off with a question on Spell use.
I know the rules limit a spell user from casting the same spell more than once per turn. But in a many of the Company of Heroes Legendary Formations there are multiple spell casters. The Formation itself is given an overall Mastery level and a rule that says how much Mastery is lost for each spell user removed. This gives you a clear understanding of which models are casters. It also says that when casting a spell to pick one model in the Formation as actually casting it for range purposes. So it’s clear that the individual models, not the Formation as a single entity, is casting the spells. So…
In a Company of Heroes formation with multiple spell casters, can the same spell be cast once per magic-using model or are you still limited to one casting of each spell for the Formation?
Having it limited to one would nerf spell-heavy formations because often there are only a couple spells that you really want to cast and if your wizards were spread out then you can do so. At the same time though, having a single (often more affordable) formation that can lay down multiple instances of the same spell could really boost it's power.
The most extreme example is probably The Nine, as I don't think any other Formation has that many individual spell-using models (others may have the same Might, but have fewer individual models to multi-cast specific spells with. If each caster can use a specific spell once then The Nine cast Sunder Spirit five or six times to drop the Courage of a Formation to zero before attacking them (Spirit Grasp), with maybe a couple Visions of Woe in there for good measure. Or how about 9 Strength from Corruption just for effect? Being able to do this sort of thing, combined with their freakin’ amazing special rules all lumped together, would not be pretty (and make that 500 points look even better). But if you say they can only cast each spell once per Formation but you still have 10 Might, you will probably run out of useful ones after about 5 or 6. So that’s a lot of wasted power. You could get 4 individual Nazgul for that same price and have an average of 8 spells cast per turn including the ability to cast the same spell from each of the four individual models.
I would hope this is clear in the book at some point but when I was looking this morning before work I just couldn’t find anything.