Editing WARMACHINE (section)

===Warcasters and Warlocks===

[[File:202953-1366x768--DesktopNexus.com-.jpg|600px|thumb|right|It's essentially this.]]

Games of Warmahordes tend to revolve around each player's warcaster (Warmachine) or warlock (Hordes). These are powerful battle-wizards who have forged a mental link to your army's robots or kaiju, giving them direct control over their actions. Beyond this, each warnoun brings a list of spells to the table to further augment your army's abilities (or to just blast enemy models to ash), and every one ''also'' has a single-use Feat ability. This can only be used once per game, but is almost always devastatingly powerful and can basically win the game on its own if timed correctly. They're also generally no slouches in combat, with some of them being able to wipe out entire squads of normal soldiers or go toe-to-toe with heavy warjacks (though there are quite a few who ''aren't'' that fantastic in a brawl). What your warnoun does and what types of unit they synergize with is one of the most important parts of building an army and how that army works on the tabletop. No two warnouns are alike; you might be running exactly the same army list, but if you swap out one warnoun for another, you can completely change the playstyle.

Despite their incredible power, however, most games of Warmahordes require you to protect your warnoun rather than throw them into the mix. This is because they are functionally equivalent to the king in a game of chess: lose the warnoun, and you've lost the game.  

What makes warcasters and warlocks so powerful is their ability to make use of FOCUS or FURY, respectively. These are the fuel that makes your army work. 

Focus is the simpler of the two: warcasters generate focus, which they can then give to their giant robots in order to make them more powerful. Alternately, they can keep it for themselves, to cast spells. Focus is awesome and you want as much of it as you can get. What's worth spending those precious points on?

Fury is slightly more complicated, but still not too bad. Warlocks still use fury to cast spells, but they can only generate it themselves by taking damage. But your warbeasts will also generate it as they fight, and your warlock can leach it out of them. This is important, because any warbeast with fury left on it has a chance to flip its shit and just nom the closest unit, whether friendly or enemy, and every warbeast can have only so much fury on it at once before it tops out and needs to remove it to accumulate more. Your warlock can only handle so much fury per turn, so you need to manage it efficiently to keep your army under control. On the other hand, if you aren't generating ''enough'' fury, your warbeasts probably aren't doing the work they need to be, and your warlock might not have enough to fuel their spellcasting. How much can you handle safely? 

How much focus your warcaster generates (or how much fury your warlock can leach) each turn is determined by their FOCUS (or FURY) stat. This ranges from 5 (abysmally low) to 10 (stupidly high), with 6 being about average and 8 or higher usually indicating that the warnoun in question is a squishy spell-slinger rather than a frontliner. This also determines the model's control range, which is a distance equal to twice your FOCUS/FURY in inches, and is the maximum distance at which you can manipulate focus or fury. Keeping your robots or kaiju inside that bubble is important, since 'jacks without fuel aren't terribly effective and 'beasts without a babysitter can't hulk our and are liable to start devouring friendly infantry.

It's also worth noting that, when building an army list, a warnoun is effectively worth ''negative'' points. Your army's warnoun costs nothing themselves, and comes with a few free points to spend on warjacks or warbeasts.