This Isn’t Even My Final Form!

So, with Voodoo Strings in mind, it’s time to finally look at the front of Scalpel’s card. Her stat line is completely untouched, as is her melee zone of 1”. Scalpel’s total number of health points has dropped from 17 to 16 because as we’ve seen already, Scalpel is way more about offence than defence.

At first glance, Scalpel’s playbook looks a lot simpler than it did in Season 3. A lot of the combination damage + X results have disappeared. It’s true that at first glance, this playbook ‘looks’ weaker than it did before, but don’t forget about Voodoo Strings! Every one of those playbook damage results effectively has a double push attached to it, that can be used on any model within 6” of Scalpel.

Onto Scalpel’s character plays! Firstly, Scalpel still has Second Wind, but this character play has seen a number of changes which have affected each model that also had Second Wind in Season 3. We noticed that Second Wind was starting to promote an unintended new way to play the ‘hit and run’ playstyle for teams, mainly being caused by Union Decimate. As a result, the first change we made was to ensure that Second Wind can only be used on friendly Guild models, ensuring that it is used only by Guilds that it is intended for in Season 4.

We also changed the effect of Second Wind from a jog to a 4” dodge. In some of the more extreme cases, Scalpel included, it was possible to use a very fast model to engage the opposing team, deal a lot of damage, and then retreat so far that the enemy team couldn’t retaliate. This is not a fun playstyle to face, so we have changed Second Wind to be a 4” dodge to limit the maximum distance that a model can use it to retreat with. However it’s now a dodge move, so it can be used to more easily disengage from enemy melee zones since a model making a dodge cannot be targeted by a Parting Blow. However, with these two changes effectively limiting the potential of Second Wind, it only made sense to also lower its cost from 2 to a much fairer cost of 1 influence.

The next change we need to mention is that the other two character plays Scalpel had in Season 3, Tormented Agony and Wake the Dead, have both been removed. These character plays represented the parts of Scalpel’s design that we felt were confused and unfocused.

The new character play that has replaced Scalpel’s older ones, Spirit Bomb, is the icing on the cake of Scalpel’s new positional control playstyle. There are models that are fairly safe from Voodoo Strings a lot of the time, such as enemies with Unpredictable Movement that Scalpel might struggle to engage. Spirit Bomb is Scalpel’s answer to problems like this. If there is a situation that Scalpel doesn’t want to rush headlong into to sort out or if she needs to drag a model with decent defensive tech towards her, she can pull the pin off a Spirit Bomb grenade and throw it in first. On top of that, she can even use her heroic play to use a Spirit Bomb without spending influence!

Scalpel has become the aggressive positional control piece to mirror Obulus’ more singular style of control. The challenge when using Scalpel will be knowing when to pull her back, since Voodoo Strings only works during her activation, it won’t help her when making Counter Attacks. So make sure to plan where she finishes the turn carefully, and don’t forget to save an influence or an MP for Second Wind!

That’s all for today folks. We hope you enjoyed today’s reveal of the all new Scalpel. Join us next time for a reveal of some of the tweaks we’ve made to the Ratcatcher’s Guild!