Uthar - Destined for the shelf?

Uthar the Destined, only named character of the Leagues of Votann, seems like he could become a pretty cool character in the lore. But what's with his rules in the 10th edition index?

So here you are, being "born" from the crucible gestation pods fully adult and educated just like everyone else, expecting to lead a humble life in honor of the ancestors, maybe become a soldier or a mechanic... And the first thing you see is a throng of grave faces, proclaiming you to be "The Destined" because the Votann spoke of your coming. And before they even give you a cup of caf-brü, they push a sword into your hand that apparently was made for you especially and named the sword of the ancestors...

That's what happened to Uthar, and while we don't really know a lot about him yet, the story about him in the 9th edition Codex is actually pretty cool: While the Votann thought to tell everyone else that this guy is destined for some ultimate showdown (of ultimate destiny), he himself didn't actually get the memo, so he's working damned hard to be ready for.. whatever it is.

We, however, care most about how he helps us win games. If he does at all anymore.

In the Leagues of Votann 10th edition index, Uthar is basically a Kahl with a Volkanite Disintegrator and a fancy sword, and some bespoke rules. He comes at a premium points wise, at 115 points he costs the same as a Kahl with an expensive enhancement. So lets see if he's worth it compared to the unnamed version.

What you lose by by picking Uthar over an unnamed Kahl.

Apart from a 25 point difference in cost, Uthar is notably missing two things a normal Kahl can get, if we ignore weapons for now:

• The ability to take a Teleport Crest (Uthar is locked to the 5++ invulnerable save-granting Rampart Crest, which a normal Kahl can replace with a Teleport crest granting deep strike to his unit).
• The unnamed Kahls Kindred hero ability which grants lethal hits to the units attacks when he's leading a squad.

The crest isn't a big concern. If you want to deepstrike him with Hearthguard, you can put a teleport crest on the Hesyr, and it will work just as well. I haven't yet seen any great play in teleporting in Hearthkyn warriors. So we'll ignore this limitation.

The lack of Kindred hero is notable. Getting Lethal Hits on a squad of Hearthguard is pretty good. As we saw in the article on Hearthguard loadouts, a squad of 5 Hearthguard with disintegrators goes from doing a total of 5.85 wounds to a normal Marine squad, to 6.5 with lethal hits. But it isn't be-all-end-all. Lethal hits is more significant against tougher targets, but even against a Knight a squad of 10 with plasma guns only go from dealing 5 wounds on average without lethal to 8.5 wounds on average with lethal hits. If Uthar has other ways of dealing those wounds per activation, or something else that makes up for it, losing lethal hits is fine. Even more so if you end up putting him with Hearthkyn, who you shouldn't expect to kill anything anyway.

Of course, he also needs to make up for the points difference. Considered together, he needs to be significantly better than a Kahl to make up for it.

Attacks and offensive abilities

For ranged attacks, Uthar comes with a Volkanite Disintegrator, which is fine - it is the more damaging weapon for a Kahl, and if you can get him into range it is better than the combo bolter a Kahl can take. And if you can't, he's just a single model, not much lost.

For melee attacks, let's take out the old calculations on the Kahl and compare it to the Sword of the Ancestors.

The Blade of Ancestors hit significantly harder than ordinary Kahl weapons, which could be situationally significant if he gets into combat - especially used with the Epic Challenge stratagem if you can use it to take out an enemy buffing character before an enemy unit fights.

It's not amazing but it is definately something.

On top of this, Uthar can once per turn change a hit, wound or damage roll into a 6... but only for himself. This does improve his damage output a bit, as he has enough 2+ attacks both in shooting and melee to always use this to trigger devastating wounds (which he has on all his weapons). Especially on his damage 2 sword, that is worth something, and could situationally be significant. 

But again, it's not amazing.

Defensive stats

Compared to a normal Kahl, Uthar has 1 extra wound, and significantly the ability to change the damage characteristic of incoming attacks to 1. As with the ability to give himself 6s to hit or wound though, this only works for attacks allocated to himself. Which means he's guaranteed to survive at least 5 hits. 

With only T5, a 3+ save and a 4++ invulnerable save though, he's still dying fairly fast to small arms fire. The ability is good, but I can't see it very useful. Unless and until he's finding himself in melee with enemy characters precisioning him.

This ability does mean he is harder to snipe down, which is actually useful for Votann because we want to deploy a Kahl-equivalent that can see the enemy in our first command phase. I've lost more than one Kahl to various snipers that way, trying to get tokens on the enemy. You can be abit less worried about putting Uthar in such an exposed position. And this may indeed be the best play for him.

But he's far from unkillable. The most common sniper in the game right now seems to be the Vindicare Assassin. The vindicare has 3 attacks at damage 3. Great, you might think, Uthar can't take more than a total of 3 wounds per turn from that!

Wrong. As per the Rules Commentary page 17, section on modifiers, "changing" is done before "adding". And the vindicare has an ability that adds to the damage characteristic on critical hits. So the vindicare can still one-round Uthar, though it's a lot harder than taking down a Kahl.

I'm not sure how many similar rules are out there, but don't feel completely safe using Uthar as a "forward spotter" to put tokens out in the first round.

Conclusions

And... that's it. For exactly the same cost as Uthar, you could take a normal Kahl with the Wayfarer's Grace enhancement to bring him back up on a 2+ if he gets sniped. Uthar is probably slightly more survivable than that for a "spotting Kahl" - but the Wayfarer will push out a token for being killed.

And in truth, I've been happy just using an un-enhanced Kahl and taking my chances with any snipers.

The "change something to a 6"-ability will generally increase Uthar's shooting output by making sure he does one mortal wound to something. Not amazing. Even in a 5 man Hearthguard Squad that doesn't make up for loss of lethal hits. If he joins Hearthkyn, the loss of lethal hits doesn't usually matter much, but then he's unlikely to be in range often with a range 18" gun and you might wish you took a normal Kahl with a bolter.

Uthar is legitimately good in melee, though not earthshakingly so. I'm not sure I see play for him as a beatstick though, probably overpriced for that role.

I'll most likely just be taking normal Kahls for now, but if you want a tougher Kahl to put on your frontline at the start of the battle, Uthar can do the job.

...or if you want 4 kahls for some weird reason, you can take Uthar as well as three unnamed ones. But I think that's a prize for an Ork.