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How do you go about killing nurgle daemon princes?
I see them too often, and they always seem to cause problems.

I've been seeing a mix of gear, but more often than not:
Scaly skin, chaos armor, and charmed shield, dragon bane gem (1+ armor save, 5+ ward, 2+ ward vs fire)
Along with Fly, Soul Feeder (recover wounds), Nurgles Rot (S1 no save hit on all in Base to base), Poison attacks, flaming breathe and other tricksters shard.
He's typically a level 4, and picks up about 2 points of toughness and 2 bonus wounds during the game from successful casting.

I've found him exceptionally difficult to kill. At 515 points (bonus 100 if you kill him makes him worth 615), he's a big target, but most things just bounce.
I can take him with vampires, as I just pin him and scream at him. But most other armies, he's a huge problem.

I haven't been able to reliable shoot/magic them to death before Prince Nurgle rolls into combat, and by then, he recovers wounds faster than he takes them.
The WS9 Init 8 is a bitch, even swordmasters only hit on 4+ with no re-roll. Most of my armies only hit him on 6's and are then dealing with a 1+ armor save.
Once he gets a point of toughness or two, he's totally unstoppable.


How do you deal with these guys?

-Matt

Obviously each army has their own ways, but taking a glance through some books one idea that might be resurrected and used among various armies is: Giants.

Yell-win combat
Swipe-2D6 wounds no armor (though ward)
Eadbutt-1 wound, lose all attacks next round

One giant can't take on a DP but one giant costs about 1/3rd as much. 2 Giants would rip him apart. Giants are fast and don't have too much of a footprint, so can get into combat where the DP is. If it's a WoC army they won't have the best cannon support to take out your giant(s). So 2 giants is a hard counter, but you can also have some kind of super elite block (MC, GW) to hold the DP and score hits while a giant flanks and does his funky combat rolls.

Which army are you playing now? Some armies have a multitude of ways to deal with them. Some armies have little to no chance outside of silly luck.

For clarification, it sounds,like you're talking about the WoC DP bc the DoC isn't as hard to shoot, magic as he has no access to magic items.

Personally, I think this is another one of GWs big mistakes. Most of the books were well balanced in 8th, then the warrior's Lord choices came out. I think the tzeentch lord on a disc with stubborn and 3+ ward reroll 1 is also ridiculous and really has no place in the game.

Death lore, doom and dark, then apply other spells.
Bolt throwers, reg cannons, stone throwers, lots of shooting (notas effective)
Runefang, reroll to hit and no armor save sword.

Situational stuff like enchanted blades and plague of rust combo, shadow drop toughness or movement, or WS,etc.

For me? Usual Empire tank character (in this case a specific anti-DP), arch lector w/ Van H, white cloak, enchanted shield, warrior bane, heavy armour and a war alter.
1-2 turns of a banishment, equal chance of a charge (chariot), immunity to fear/terror/t-stomp, then challenge. Sure Im hitting you on 6s, but hatred, however many attacks you have and str 6 mean what I do hit should hurt. Combine with priest spells means a reroll to wound too.
You hit me on 4s (cloak gives -1 to hit) but only wounding me on 6s, and with 2 attacks, and with only -1 to my 2+/5++(2++)Yeah, ties you up a while...

DukeRustfield wrote:
Obviously each army has their own ways, but taking a glance through some books one idea that might be resurrected and used among various armies is: Giants.

Yell-win combat
Swipe-2D6 wounds no armor (though ward)
Eadbutt-1 wound, lose all attacks next round

One giant can't take on a DP but one giant costs about 1/3rd as much. 2 Giants would rip him apart. Giants are fast and don't have too much of a footprint, so can get into combat where the DP is. If it's a WoC army they won't have the best cannon support to take out your giant(s). So 2 giants is a hard counter, but you can also have some kind of super elite block (MC, GW) to hold the DP and score hits while a giant flanks and does his funky combat rolls.

If you get Yell....do note the deamon prince attack before the giant... so the yell doesnt make you auto win..

He only doesn't auto win if the giant dies. And a DP isn't going to kill a giant in one round or even close. So yeah, he does auto win, it's just he giant might take some wounds, probably one or two at the most. So if that went on until the giant was dead it would be 3-6 rounds of the DP beating on a giant and not doing much else. You tied up the general who is 400-600pts using 200pts for nearly the entire game.

Yeah, the Giant's rules basically say "ignore everything else in the combat. The Giant wins by 2".

buckero0 wrote:
Which army are you playing now? Some armies have a multitude of ways to deal with them. Some armies have little to no chance outside of silly luck.

For clarification, it sounds,like you're talking about the WoC DP bc the DoC isn't as hard to shoot, magic as he has no access to magic items.

Personally, I think this is another one of GWs big mistakes. Most of the books were well balanced in 8th, then the warrior's Lord choices came out. I think the tzeentch lord on a disc with stubborn and 3+ ward reroll 1 is also ridiculous and really has no place in the game.

Death lore, doom and dark, then apply other spells.
Bolt throwers, reg cannons, stone throwers, lots of shooting (notas effective)
Runefang, reroll to hit and no armor save sword.

Situational stuff like enchanted blades and plague of rust combo, shadow drop toughness or movement, or WS,etc.

Warriors of chaos daemon prince of course... better gifts and better items.
Lore of Death: Soul Stealer, not horrible, but being direct damage, you're not going to have a lot of chances. With ward save, the daemon is very likely to survive. Fate of Bjuna looks awesome, but with 12" range, and going against toughness 5 (or more), it's not likely to do 5+ wounds. Caress I think shakes out better, just because of the 24" range option.
Shadow: debuffing his toughness and weapon skill helps, but he's also packing spells that buffs his toughness and debuffs all weapon skills around him.
Light gets 2D6 S6 hits, but it's flaming and bounces off his 2+ ward. Banishment might work if you get enough light wizards, but that's not exactly a super common build.
Metal and fire likewise bounce missiles off his 2+ ward.
+1 to hit and armor pierce is nice, it means I hit on 5's!, but hitting is only half the problem, I still have to wound him, which isn't exactly easy either.

Shooting him is tough, as he can shelter behind mounted marauders and then charge over them.
Cannons are of course the answer, for the armies with them.


Let me know if you've got better than:
Brettonia: ASF Heroic Killing blow lord. Hope for the best.
Beastmen: Cry.
Daemons of Chaos: Skulltaker, hope for the best, or Greater Daemon melee beat down.
Dark Elves: Unkillable dreadlord tanks him all game.
Dwarf: Cannon/stone thrower him. Can't target him with the anvil as he is not large and is a lone character.
Empire: Speculum or cannons.
High Elves: Cry.
Lizardmen: Cry. Only a dedicated tooled up Old Blood can take him, and the prince can easily avoid that guy.
Ogres: Hell heart and cannons.
Orcs: Massed warmachines, manglers and fanatics, troll horde mass vomit.
Skaven: Slaves and warlightning.
Tomb Kings: T8 monsters, and hope for heroic killing blow?
Vampires: Scream it to death.
Warriors: Prince of your own, or hell cannon it.
Wood Elves: Cry.

I guess you didn't see giants, but giants are monster killers. That is what they do. They're not worth it if you just stuff a guy down your pants every round. No one uses them because no one brings monsters. A DP cannot engage your army safely if you have a giant. And it's simply not that many points. Multiple giants would be an absolute hard counter. Fourish armies have giants.

All kinds of armies have counters if you look. Doesn't have to be wtfpwn counters. In DoC you have a soulgrinder, nurgle or TZ that fight is going to take ages. With a claw he's going to fail likely once and that can be a 1 shot kill (though probably not). Two ranks of Beasts of Nurgle will sit there all game. The the SG is a lot more common.

Any mass ward/regen troops can hold him off. Though they won't kill him. But if one side has 500pts doing almost nothing that's worse than 300pts doing almost nothing. All other things being equal, the 300 will have more troops to otherwise attack with.

HawaiiMatt wrote:

Tomb Kings: T8 monsters, and hope for heroic killing blow?

I was thinking Sepulchral Stalkers and Light of Death from a casket.

DukeRustfield wrote:
I guess you didn't see giants, but giants are monster killers. That is what they do. They're not worth it if you just stuff a guy down your pants every round. No one uses them because no one brings monsters. A DP cannot engage your army safely if you have a giant. And it's simply not that many points. Multiple giants would be an absolute hard counter. Fourish armies have giants.

All kinds of armies have counters if you look. Doesn't have to be wtfpwn counters. In DoC you have a soulgrinder, nurgle or TZ that fight is going to take ages. With a claw he's going to fail likely once and that can be a 1 shot kill (though probably not). Two ranks of Beasts of Nurgle will sit there all game. The the SG is a lot more common.

Any mass ward/regen troops can hold him off. Though they won't kill him. But if one side has 500pts doing almost nothing that's worse than 300pts doing almost nothing. All other things being equal, the 300 will have more troops to otherwise attack with.

I did see the giant, he's sub par.
Thump with Club is an Initiative test, against an initiative of 8.
Yell and Ball: Daemon prince does his attacks, then the giant ends combat without doing anything. Daemon prince is unbreakable. All that happens is that round, the giant doesn't test to fall over and does take his Ld10 stubborn test. It's literally the worse result on the table.
Swing with Club is S6 S6 hits. 3+ to wound, 4+ to armor save, 5+ ward. If the prince has the curse of the leaper up, it's 4's, 5's or 6's to wound. Without the buff, the prince is taking an average of .77 wounds.
Meanwhile, each round the prince does an average of 2.5 wounds (poison attacks) and recovers .41 wounds.
The prince can breathe if he wants to end the fight early, averaging another ~2.3 wounds.
Basically, if he uses the breathe, he's back loose after ~2 combat rounds, 1 game turn. Or he can save his breathe, kill the giant in 3 combat turns, and be free to charge again on his turn. Since he should be in combat on turn 2, the 200 point giant just stalled him for 3 out of 10 remaining combat phases. It's not an effective exchange.

Then you have another problem.
Giants are horrible and don't normally show up in armies.
Taking one to counter a daemon prince, and then trying to get the giant into combat with the prince when you want to, as opposed to when the prince wants to is very tough to do.

I have not seen 300 points of anything hold him up.
I have seen him work through a minotaur bus and a gut star.
I've seen him take out a corsair horde (eventually).

He's going to average just over 5 wounds a round against anything WS8 or less, Toughness 4 or less, with a 4+ armor and 6+ parry. Having lighter armor, or less toughness doesn't change anything.
What worse, he's pretty good at killing characters, which means you either have to decline challenges or risk him rolling on eye of the gods.


Take white lions for example. A horde of them is tossing 12 S6 attacks a turn. Against most monsters, that's 5.33 wounds a turn (other monsters are hit on 3+ with re-roll, wounded on 4+, and bypasses armor).
Against the prince, he's hit on 5+ with out re-rolling to hit him, wounded on a 3, saves on a 4, then saves on a 5. It's .88 wounds.
What's sad about this is he's recovering wounds at the same rate as white lions are inflicting them. On average, the price will walk out of a fight against 50 or less white lions, and is likely to be down only a wound.
You're going to need a large bus to hold him, and then hope you don't fail the 6-8 steadfast tests you take before he ends up grinding them all down anyway.

-Matt



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 kirsanth wrote:

HawaiiMatt wrote:

Tomb Kings: T8 monsters, and hope for heroic killing blow?

I was thinking Sepulchral Stalkers and Light of Death from a casket.

Light of death is decent, especially if you can debuff his LD with deathmagic.
I'm not sure on stalkers, you'll need 6's to wound, he'll get his ward, and you can't shoot into combat. It is a pretty narrow window to get the whole job done in.
Too bad the skull catapults are always flaming, if they weren't that might have enough to get it done.

-Matt

He doesn't swing with club. DP is large. I did think the thump with club for whatever reason was the giant's I to get embedded. I hadn't read it in a while.

But let's skip to the end and say all this is true. The Giant does nothing and dies in 3 rounds. You have designed a, according to your specs above, 525 point character, general and lead wizard who sat for 3 rounds fighting a single 200 point model. I say that is an easy victory and what I said still stands. 2 Giants would still clock in at 400 and would hold him for the entire game.

300pts is a soulgrinder. It's 20 Phoenix Guard. It's 10 Trolls. It's 5 beasts of nurgle (20 T5 wounds with regen at -1 to hit--and just to be annoying, every single one of them can challenge him every round).

A DP is super duper defensive. The breath weapon is a single use. But if he's not Tstomping, he's got 4 (poison/magic) attacks. If you use 525 points to kill him, which is huge, you've broken even. The above is just 300pts to hold him up, because that's arbitrarily what I said. 525 pts is more than 2 soulgrinders. Balesword, lvl 4, Greater Unclean One. A Changeling + a buncha horrors to hide in. 2 skull cannons + a soul grinder.

You can do an awful lot with that much points. A mega buff DP is no doubt really good but you're making him out to be unbeatable.

He kind of is unbeatable for most armies. the fact that you can cram two of them in a list and 3/4 the armies have no way of dealing with it is a little unbalanced in my opinion. Poor move on GWs part IMO.

You can only cram two naked ones into a list. You can maybe fit in 2 with armor and nothing else. Which is still nice. He's a whole lot less powerful without all his other stuff though.

HawaiiMatt wrote:


lots of stuff

risk him rolling on eye of the gods.

more stuff

-Matt

Since it's the second time today I've seen this fallacy, I thought I'd mention it; DPs don't get to roll on the chart. They don't have the Eye of the Gods rule. As such, they are also not forced to issue challenges. Being as they are Monsters who are characters, they aren't allowed to decline them, but there's a whole other reason for that.

 spyguyyoda wrote:

HawaiiMatt wrote:


lots of stuff

risk him rolling on eye of the gods.

more stuff

-Matt

Since it's the second time today I've seen this fallacy, I thought I'd mention it; DPs don't get to roll on the chart. They don't have the Eye of the Gods rule. As such, they are also not forced to issue challenges. Being as they are Monsters who are characters, they aren't allowed to decline them, but there's a whole other reason for that.

That's good to know. I keep thinking they roll on eye of the gods. Thanks for correcting.

-Matt

I guess that makes sense. The gods are like, "dude, what more do you want?"

Mine die to cannons when I fail the 2+ ward... every time...

Ok i take it back having Nurgle lore on him... is pretty kick ass.. i made him Toughness 8 with some lucky sixes after succesfull spells was thrown.

Yeah. Death is okay, but whenever you talk about flying over and Purple Sun'ing down the enemy's battle line, it doesn't really matter what you're running, so long as it's a Wizard with access to Death and can fly.

Death-head Party Slann in a Skink Cloud would make short work of him. He'd probably never get to cast in order to regain wounds/toughness for fear of the feedback scroll, and the Slann should kill him inside 2-3 Magic phases without mentioning the help from the skinks themselves. He'll kill a couple hundred points of Skinks before he goes but the Slann should come out on top.

I personally run Death/Metal and would cast Spirit Leech,FT, Purple Sun, Searing Doom, even with needing 6's to kill him outright (a good payback for 615 points), getting lucky on Spirit Leech, and the 2+ ward for fire, he will go down eventually.

Sneaky_Gobbo wrote:
Death-head Party Slann in a Skink Cloud would make short work of him. He'd probably never get to cast in order to regain wounds/toughness for fear of the feedback scroll, and the Slann should kill him inside 2-3 Magic phases without mentioning the help from the skinks themselves. He'll kill a couple hundred points of Skinks before he goes but the Slann should come out on top.

I personally run Death/Metal and would cast Spirit Leech,FT, Purple Sun, Searing Doom, even with needing 6's to kill him outright (a good payback for 615 points), getting lucky on Spirit Leech, and the 2+ ward for fire, he will go down eventually.

true but then you use all your magic for one guy and the chaos forces go loose.

phatonic wrote:

Sneaky_Gobbo wrote:
Death-head Party Slann in a Skink Cloud would make short work of him. He'd probably never get to cast in order to regain wounds/toughness for fear of the feedback scroll, and the Slann should kill him inside 2-3 Magic phases without mentioning the help from the skinks themselves. He'll kill a couple hundred points of Skinks before he goes but the Slann should come out on top.

I personally run Death/Metal and would cast Spirit Leech,FT, Purple Sun, Searing Doom, even with needing 6's to kill him outright (a good payback for 615 points), getting lucky on Spirit Leech, and the 2+ ward for fire, he will go down eventually.

true but then you use all your magic for one guy and the chaos forces go loose.

Oh yeah, but the Scar Vets hopefully stall 2 units, and I'll lose a few 80 point units of Skinks. It's not reasonable to expect every army to be able to economically down a 515 point lord choice.

A single deathshrieker rocket, hellcannon etc has a solid chance of obliterating him. If you wound him (after saves) with either of these you have a 50/50 of killing him

I used on my Empire army, a Battle Wizard Lord with Van Horstmann Speculum + Sword of Striking +1 to hit + 5+ ward save. When he switches stats he only got 1 attack ws9 str 3 and I got his stats on ws3 with +1 to hit. Tho it is not a solution cause flying makes him really hard to lure him whereever you want him to be.

Tiarna Fuilteach wrote:
A single deathshrieker rocket, hellcannon etc has a solid chance of obliterating him. If you wound him (after saves) with either of these you have a 50/50 of killing him

Yeah, if you ignore the chance to misfire, the chance to scatter off target, the chance to fail to wound, his chance to pass a ward save, then yes, you can kill him in one hit.
You do a D6 wounds, and he has at least 4 wounds. I say at least, because lore of nurgle can give him both toughness and wounds from the lore attribute.
You can't really just look at the last role in a required series and say Ah-ha! 50/50.

If it were 50/50, 2 hell cannons should almost always kill him in 2 shooting phases.
Here's the odds.
5/6ths of the shots don't misfire. 1/3rd of those that don't misfire "Hit" instead of scattering. 5/6 of those wound. 2/3rd of the wounds bypass armor.
So to connect and get to the point where you get to roll to wound, you're looking at ~15%.
Then you need to do ~4 wounds.
1 shotting a prince who has not increased his wounds is under 8%.
At 210 points a hellcannon, it becomes a really ineffective method. With no other shooting in the army to speak of, if you wound him with the hell cannon (didn't roll the 4+ for number of wounds) you lack the ability to finish him.
If I had hell cannons, I'm going to bet I have more effective targets for the S5/10 shot.

This is the problem with the Nurgle Prince. He hits hard enough that you can't totally ignore him, casts effectively enough where you don't want to ignore him, but he's stupidly durable making him very hard to kill.

-Matt




Automatically Appended Next Post:

Sneaky_Gobbo wrote:
Death-head Party Slann in a Skink Cloud would make short work of him. He'd probably never get to cast in order to regain wounds/toughness for fear of the feedback scroll, and the Slann should kill him inside 2-3 Magic phases without mentioning the help from the skinks themselves. He'll kill a couple hundred points of Skinks before he goes but the Slann should come out on top.

I personally run Death/Metal and would cast Spirit Leech,FT, Purple Sun, Searing Doom, even with needing 6's to kill him outright (a good payback for 615 points), getting lucky on Spirit Leech, and the 2+ ward for fire, he will go down eventually.

I never though about feedback scroll and banehead. That's awesome.
I'll have to keep that in mind for killing vampire lords as well.
That combo would cause some big problems for any power house caster that needs to roll lots of dice.

-Matt

Impact hits are good to bypass the WS portion of things. Obviously you'll have to combo-charge or take a few wounds off the Nurgle Prince through other means, but I've lost a Nurgle Prince to a chariot in CC.

Coven of Light High Elves S6 3d6 re-roll wards 5+/5++forced-re-roll it works

 captain collius wrote:
Coven of Light High Elves S6 3d6 re-roll wards 5+/5++forced-re-roll it works

Awesome. That averages 10 hits, 6.66 wounds, 2/3rds fail armor and 8/9ths fail ward. Average is 3.95 wounds. I'd six dice that. You have a very real shot at dropping him in one round.
As long as he doesn't get leaper up, or give himself regeneration, you should be good to go.


Triad of Banishment, and Slaan with bane head and feedback scroll both made my short list of things to pretty much always take.

-Matt