Fritskuhntm wrote:
A) include Legolas in every army?
B) ignore Shadow Lord and shoot everything else outside his Pale?
C) keep trying to volley him: stats say 2 out of 12 will be sixes...
A) is the most common way
B) doesn't happen because any good player in almost every game ensures everything is under the Pall
C) eh? You hit once every 12, then wound once every 12, that's 1 wound per 144 shots and 2 Fate with 2 Might, not likely
The 2 best weapons on the good side are:
1. Legolas - Because of autohit and Might points, pretty obvious.
2. Saruman - Because of his 18" Compel and Transfix he can force the SL to move back or stop still far away from your army. That means that if SL fails to resist your opponent has to decide whether to move out of Pall of Night and get hit by bows, or to stay and waste a turn. Either way he's burning Will to resist and won't have much for spells after a while.
You can also blast models into Shadow Lord and then might up the S3 hits with the indirect hit to get the same effect as Legolas's. If you combine both of those heroes, no SL will ever give you troubles (and you will probably then want to play a Mirkwood force with Saruman, Legolas, 1/3 bows, 1/3 spears, 1/3 throwing daggers
).
A common misconception is that people think that Shadow Lord is an anti-Saruman model. This is WRONG. It is Saruman who is the Anti-SL model.
Either of those ways allow you to still cause damage with bows to your opponent. I had 24 bows with Saruman and and a total of 45 models in my this year's GT winning list, fared pretty well
I don't understand how can an Eagle work - even if you manage to charge the SL, you have 2 attacks with S6 and no Might. Given that SL has 2 Might, chances are you're losing combat, get transfixed next turn and lose the Eagle. And you shouldn't be able to charge SL anyway because any half decent player will put 2 or 3 models behind him to stop you from doing so.
Using less bows doesn't make sense - bowmen are almost exactly the same in combat as the rest of the models. Having less won't make almost any difference in terms of combat, while it will make a lot of difference if SL happens to die at long range or is not present (ie. in a tournament force you should always have 33% because you don't always play SL).
In terms of non-Legolas/Saruman... there's Gandalf that has similar effect to Saruman, but lower range. That's about it, otherwise you need to be using a couple of combat heroes in your force. But given the easiness of allying Legolas and Saruman, almost every army in top 10 at GTs for the past 3 years has had at least one of those two
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I know its rare to be able to include an eagle, but they work well against the shadow lord, they can fly right over his crew, then pick him off 