Slay Mighty Beasts and Win Games! Questor Soulsworn in Warcry

 Here is my complete guide to The Questor Soulsworn for Warcry. See below for the YouTube version but if reading is more your thing then welcome and lets go!

Special Rules

If we take a look at the Questor Soulsworn fighter cards themselves, an important thing to note is that they all have the hero runemark. Under normal circumstances, you are only allowed to bring up to three heroes, and the rest have to be regular fighters but the Questor Soulsworn's special rule, Heroes All, allows them to break this convention by allowing any amount of fighters with the hero runemark in the warband. Allies still work as normal however, so you can bring in up two heroes as allies.

Reaction

The Stormcast reaction is Swift Retribution. A recurring theme among the fighters and abilities within the Questor Soulsworn roster is that there is a lot of extra move and/or fight actions which are very much necessary given the points costs of the fighters, and the fact that under most circumstances, you will be limited to 6 fighters in your warband thanks to those points.

I think that the reaction itself is very good. You're not going to see it a whole lot because of course the entire warband is made up of toughness 5, 20 wound Stormcast, but when it does happen I think it's going to be very impactful. Free actions are one of the strongest abilities a fighter can have and especially with smaller war bands, you want to stack as many free actions in there as possible so that you can get around the board and be where you need to be and bring your force to bear.

Questor Prime

For 170 points you get a fairly standard Stormcast Eternal stat-line but we have two generic Questor Soulsworn abilities and one unique to the fighter.

Thundering Strikes enables all of the fighters in your warband to give each other a bonus move action. This is of course very useful as in a warband of 6 fighters, and with the expectation that you will make approximately 2 doubles a turn, those two extra actions equate to an additional fighter's worth of actions. Note that it does say friendly fighter and it doesn't specify that it needs any specific rumemarks so in effect every single fighter is able to be allied into other order warbands to give a bonus move.This  makes any of these Stormcast very valuable in terms of what they can bring to the table and what they can bring to your ally pool.

The second double that they all have access to is, You Won't Even Slow Me Down. Again, we have another instance of action cheating. This ability you already see on a number of different fighters and as a double with the Stormcast stat-line, using Thundering Strides to get your teammates into combat, them attacking twice and then popping the second double means that we will likely see a lot of bonus attack chains coming out of this warband. These are both very welcome abilities to see in a wholly Stormcast Eternal warband.

The triple that the Questor prime has is searing light, and that's a very simple allocate three damage points to all visible enemy fighters within three inches of this fighter.

Knight Relictor

The main reason you would bring the Knight Relictor, and also the reason why you would want to ally it into other order warbands aside from the Thundering Strides double, is its Translocation quad. This is the most expensive teleport in the game as most others only cost a triple but the main difference is that the Relictor can use it on ANY friendly fighter within 3" including itself.

The combination of the Translocation and Thundering Strides makes it the best ally candidate out of the entire warband; You can use it to teleport one of your main fighters into your opponent or teleport one of your other fighters onto objectives as well as providing a speed boost for another member of your battleline.

Duelist with Twinblades

The duelist with twinblades comes with it's own triple; Face Me, Cowards! I am not entirely convinced that a no-disengage ability is necessarily worth the inclusion of the duelist specifically but as a niche control piece it could definitely work in some situations.

The majority of the time you will be bringing the duelist for its 5 attacks with consistent damage profile; Depending on your local meta it could be very strong. It has the highest damage potential against all toughness types when compared to the other weapons that you can bring but you really need to be capitalising on fighting T3 fighters to get the most out of it. 

Errant-Questors

These three fighers all have in common the With the force of a Thunderbolt double. A bonus attack action when finishing a move within 1" of two or more enemy fighters means that these are going to be your bread and butter against swarm, especially warbands like Soulblight Gravelords which would otherwise heavily outnumber your Stormcast. 

The real differentiating factor will become which weapons you choose. You can see here with the damage values, the Grand Blade and the Grand Axe compare quite favorably to each other. The Grand Hammer does a slightly less damage, but overall it's negligible so the Grandhammer remains a good choice, especially with the S6 meaning that you will almost always be wounding on a 3+.

Grandspear

Finally we've got the Errant Questor with Grand Spear. At 170 points, it's five points more than the other four Questors but with a higher crit damage profile at three attacks.

However, it does have a three inch range, which I think is extremely valuable. I'd probably play at least one of these because that extra reach makes for an effective zoning tool and despite not having the Force of a Thunderbolt double, it can attack from a very safe distance meaning that it will have slightly more survive-ability then its comrades.

Which Errant-Questor to bring?

The main decision that a player will have when building their warband will be which combination of Errant-Questors to bring. Because of the way the points work out you will only have space for 6 fighters and realistically 5 of them are going to be Questors (including the prime) given the almost auto-include nature of the Knight Relictor.

It is worth noting that out of the box you can make two of any fighter or four grand hammers, so you do have the option to customise your warband.

From above we can see that the twinblades has the highest damage profile but due to the strength 4 it is unlikely to use it's highest damage profile the majority of the time. The Grand Blade and the Grand Axe perform very admirably next to each other. The Grand Spear does have the lowest damage potential, but I still think that you want to be bringing one of them due to its zoning potential with the range 3. I also very much like the stats of the Grand Blade. It combos very well with Force of a Thunderbolt because it only has that one inch range so you aren't wasting any stats when compared to something like the Grand Axe for example.

Out of all of the weapon options that you can pick, it really seems like the Grand Axe is the one that doesn't do anything special by itself. It doesn't have as much range as the spear. It doesn't have as much damage as the hammer. It doesn't have as many attacks as either the blade or the twinblades.

Allies

The points levels make it almost impossible to take a 7 fighter warband without both of the allies being very cheap and in most instances they won't bring anything new to the table that the warband can't do already with it's high impact doubles. The obvious choice however would be Calthia Xandire. She allows you to stay at six fighters and use her action cheating abilities to fake that seventh fighter, which is something that other Stormcast Eternal war bands have been doing to good success in tournaments recently. It also gives you a not insignificant 125 points to play with to bring some other fighter, which might have some kind of utility. Options might include a cheap Cities of Sigmar fighter for bonus movement, the Kharadron Overlords Company Captain for fight for profit, or Kixi-Taka from the Starblood Stalkers.

Aside from having M5 and a solid Wizard Bolt ranged attack, Kixi-Taka's triple gives a 9" range bubble of +1M and +1T so your other fighters effectively go up to Movement five and Toughness six which i feel could be very impactful.

Sample Lists

When building one-box, I would take a core of the Relictor, Grandspear, 2x Grandblade and a Grandhammer which leaves a flex slot for an additional fighter depending on the meta you expect to experience; Twinblades for T3 heavy, a second spear for more range, or a second Relictor to be able to spread out your teleport double. On average you will be looking at generating 2x doubles per turn so ideally you want to run 3x Force of a Thunderbolt Questors so that you always have the opportunity to use either Thundering Strides of Thunderbolt when the need arises.

If I was looking to build this slightly more competitively,  I'd probably be looking to maximize the amount of action cheating that I could fit. I'd definitely look to play Calthia Xandire and Kixi-Taka due to their high-impact triples, the Knight Relictor, two Blades and one Hammer. We are dropping the spear in this case because between Calthia's free moves/attacks the Relictor's teleport as well as Thundering Strides, I don't think that the extra range is necessary. Of course your priority will be to make high-level triples for Calthia but if you manage to make a triple 5/6 it's the equivalent of an additional one and a half fighters worth of activations in one ability.

Final Thoughts

Overall I think that the Soulsworn are a very interesting warband. If you want to play pure Stormcast Eternals, taking them as either the core of your war band or allying one of them in just for the additional action cheating to combo with Calthia Xandire could be a very strong pick. I don't yet know how they would do in objective heavy missions like the Rumble pack, but they do certainly seem to have enough action cheating and bonus actions and bonus move and bonus attacks in there to be able to at least make a dent in one of these bigger 10 man war bands.