Sonnia's appetite for stones

[von Clausewitz]

I find it interesting that people in this thread are pointing to confiscated lore mostly for her blast spells. Her blasts are nice but I find they are not her most effective spell.

Onto the question of the Desp Mercs and their losing wounds. They do not lose wounds every turn. Sonnia, however, has a great way to reduce them to Violation bait turn 1. Typically Sonnia is not needing to use Confiscated lore turn 1, so putting up an inferno and leaving the Merc's within 3inches of her drops them to 1wnd. This fires up their Frantic ability plus makes them perfect Violation targets.

I agree, I think three stones is the most I have ever spent on confiscated lore in a single game. I generally spend 1-2 stones per game on confiscated lore. This thread is specifically about Sonnia's SS use and not a general tactica. My entire argument for running 8 stones every game with Sonnia is that she has a 1-2 SS per game demand that other masters do not have. At 8 stones Sonnia's effective SS pool is actually 6-7.

Also, I typically use Confiscated Lore in a turn in which I plan on spamming Violation of Magic, not for repeated Flame Bursts.

[Headcase2]

While multiple castings of Violation can be devastating, getting enough targets to cast multiple Violations is often tricky, especially against a savvy opponent. I've also run many a game with Sonnia where I didn't cast a single Flame Burst. But I still feel Sonnia is at her most effective when she can burn a stone for Confiscated Lore and then just do 2 or 3 soulstoned bursts (which is up to 4 stones in a single turn on offense alone) against a crew that isn't spread out enough (which, with 2" extra range and 3 is hard to do). If your opponent does spread out to minimize blast damage he's often at a positional disadvantage, so if you keep your crew tight enough together he'll have a hard time engaging.

So, in short: if you take a smaller cache of soulstones with Sonnia you're limiting her potential, because if you only have 4 - 6 stones, would you really be willing to burn 4 of them in a single turn?