why are dwarves so vulnerable to magic ? how can they counter it ?

[Sgt Bilko]

hi there, just watched the latest let's play (kolek suneater) - the video as a whole looks great but the player in charge of chaos admits that his magic wrecked the dwarven lines early on

i always thought that the dwarves were supposed to have exceptionally high resistance to magic; plus their runes. i haven't seen mention of runes so i assume they're coming in an expansion which makes the dwarves magic resistance even more critical.

So a question in three parts:
do the dwarves have any special magic resistance as a race ?
if not, why not ? or posed differently, how do the devs envisage that the dwarves can counter a magic-heavy army ?
are there runes in the game (that i've missed) ? If not, what are the plans for introducing them ?

ok... so that's a question in 4 parts :)

[Túreo_inórë]

1. Yes they have a natural magical resistance meaning they will suffer less damage than humans.

2. Magic heavy armies will dry out their magicka fast making them vulnurable to the dwarf war machines and heavy inf.

3. There are runes in this game for normal troops,the anvil of doom will probably be in at release date as a runesmith is already here meaning that if you have on of them the enemy magic isnt worth that much,it will either lower the magic damage for your entire army OR raise te enemy misfire chance.

[Vacca]

The problem here is that there is no way to "counter" a spell. In tabletop you automatically get one counterspell scroll per game, plus for Dwarfs tons of way to deny spellcasting - and let's not even mention bringing the Anvil on the field, which pretty much shuts magic down. But here? Magic resistance does little if someone drops a Sun of Xerus on my infantry block. There has to be a way to "deny" spellcasting.

[Ultima Ratio Ecate II]

1)dwarves as race are the second creation (third if you count the lizardmen) of the old ones and were created by them exactly to be high resistant to magic. so they are to most resistant to magic in all warhammer(even if ogres and halflings are too resistant. but they are more chaos resistant that magic resistant). in the lore most weak spell don't work on them, and many powers like the vampiric charme are inefective. they still can be affected by major spells however. they are resitant not immune

2 and 3)in the table top they are specialized in counterspell. they have more counterspell scrolls, or way to deny magic, like the formidable anvil of doom. in the tabletop they were amazing to counter magic based armies.
in the tabletop they are maybe the only rae without real magic as spells. they don't have a race magic lore, neither can use the normal winds of magic like humans. they have runes that can do a lot of things, like powering up stats, offering save wards, give special traits and so on. runesmiths can cast runes with many similarities to normal spells on the battlefield but they are usually power up or runes to counter magic spells.

in this total war however mage and spells seems to be such usefull that a race completely without mage will be heavily weakened.
in my opinion(i don't know for sure is just an ipothesis) i will imagine that runesmiths will have runes (like the mage have spells) to be activated on the battlefield. like a rune to stop a or dissolve a spell or a rune to make a single unit immune to target based spells.
also the idea xnino of more quick drains of magic against dwarves is intersting.

but this is all speculation. i admit that i don't know how they will deal with dwarves and their rune/magic sistem. neither i know if they actually ever spoke about it