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Bruteboss wrote:But that will all be a thing of the past in a week or 2

Not really, in fact if the 'rumours' (i.e. they are pretty much fact at this point) are anything to go by, Necrons will be an even bigger headache for Grey Knights, what with the Quantum Shielding all over the place.

Subject: Is Draigowing Competitive

So it seems the concensus is: It depends but for the most part, yes it is competitive. Ive used a draigowing personally and did kinda bad in my 1st ever tourny and even better in my 2nd tourny. I took the things I learned in the 1st tourny and made vast improvements. My 3rd tourny I used a crowe/purifier list and did well also, so I think im semi qualified to say my 2 cents.

imweasel wrote:Actually, I would think DE and 30 hamminators + libby would be a huge pain for draigo wing to deal with.

And that's just for starters.

Actually Space Fairies are eminently beatable (though if well played they can win). 30 TH/SS plus a Librarian will likely be eaten alive by a Paladin/Stormraven list.

jv2 has it right when he says the armies that give paladins (and GK generally) the biggest problems are often the unfashionable ones. That's why a lot of people who whine that GK are broken are playing lists that follow typical 5th ed dogma and/or are playing 'top tier' armies that have previously done well.

When I started playing paladins, people assured me that I didn't have enough troops and that Draigo was overpriced. When I added stormravens to replace landraiders, I was assured that they wouldn't last beyond turn one against any decent competitive list. Everyone said I had too few models, full stop. But none of these dogma-based criticisms have actually stood up. I win more than twice as many games with my paladin lists than I did with my MSU marines (which list would have been praised by adherents of 5th ed dogma). Now that's partly because most good players don't actually understand how paladin forces really work and so don't counter them effectively for a game or two. But even when they do adapt their tactics, the paladin list remains effective (ie it's not just opponents underestimating the list that makes it successful, though that does play a part in its aggregate of success).

I would qualify that night shields make all the difference for DE versus GK, but especially Draigowing.

Generally speaking, DE players find nightshields too expensive, but I know a guy at the club that uses them, and they're murder on GK, particular if you don't have a ton of Psyflemen (I usually run just one, gauche, I know).

What it boils down to is, 24" + 6" movement is sufficient for decent board control, 18" is not. Seems like a small thing, but it gives the DE player an extra 12" of "corners" to run to.

Like I said, this is bad for all GK (except heavy psyflemen) but it's just murder on a pure Paladin list, since 24" + 6" is literally all they got.

imweasel wrote:Actually, I would think DE and 30 hamminators + libby would be a huge pain for draigo wing to deal with.

And that's just for starters.

As the last poster mentioned, if DE bothered with taking night shields, and was playing a "scoot and shoot" list (ie: stay in your venom/raider and blaster from as far away as possible), then maybe I will give you that they can win. The average DE list, and more importantly the kind that players are bringing to tournaments, are a completely fair fight for the GK, because you have too many short range/melee units in that kind of army to be able to afford standing back all day.

As to th/ss terminators, they are a "counter" of sorts for marines, but only in the sense that nothing else in the army will survive a fight with paladins. The difference being that th/ss terminators "can" survive, not necessarily win. If you look at JV2's battlerep, as we've mentioned before, 2 squads of paladins were able to wipe out 19 FNP th/ss terminators and only lost 2 men in exchange. That was against terminators with FNP, meaning that shooting was completely useless and the the only way to kill them was close combat, which is their strength.

My regular opponent played deathwing for years before switching to BA, with a healthy does of terminators thrown in as well. He has learned his lesson about facing paladins and no longer expects his terminators to win in a fight against my paladins. The best you can really expect to pull off is finishing off a weakened squad (in which case you were already winning), or holding off a full power unit for a turn or 2 before they wipe you out.

Hmmmmm, I would like to point out that a kitted out archon with husk blade can put some serious hurt on paladins. Initiative 7, power weapon, instant death, and 2+ invo himself. I think 6 attacks on the charge. Not often taken, but he can have a 2+ to wound, as well. He'll lose to Draigo, eventually, but he can murder the whole squad around you. And you're not fearless, you will run, and they will catch you.

And that's one reason why paladin squads should always have a stave.

It's actually quite unlikely that Space fairies will win assault, even with a huskblade (though it can happen). But whilst paladins are not Fearless, they have ATSKNF, so they can't be swept.

As well as being given a Grand Stratagy from Draigo, most likely rerolls of 1 to wound, or even scouts.

Artemo wrote: Actually Space Fairies are eminently beatable (though if well played they can win). 30 TH/SS plus a Librarian will likely be eaten alive by a Paladin/Stormraven list.

Anything that will tear apart a 30 hamminator list will do just fine vs draigowing.

And you are going to take a total of what winds up to be of 11 1 wound models and draigo, plus the ravens vs 30 termies? And you would call the space fairies are going to be eaten alive?

I don't even think your more expensive list is barely even odds vs my much larger list.


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Bruteboss wrote:As the last poster mentioned, if DE bothered with taking night shields, and was playing a "scoot and shoot" list (ie: stay in your venom/raider and blaster from as far away as possible), then maybe I will give you that they can win. The average DE list, and more importantly the kind that players are bringing to tournaments, are a completely fair fight for the GK, because you have too many short range/melee units in that kind of army to be able to afford standing back all day.

As to th/ss terminators, they are a "counter" of sorts for marines, but only in the sense that nothing else in the army will survive a fight with paladins. The difference being that th/ss terminators "can" survive, not necessarily win. If you look at JV2's battlerep, as we've mentioned before, 2 squads of paladins were able to wipe out 19 FNP th/ss terminators and only lost 2 men in exchange. That was against terminators with FNP, meaning that shooting was completely useless and the the only way to kill them was close combat, which is their strength.

My regular opponent played deathwing for years before switching to BA, with a healthy does of terminators thrown in as well. He has learned his lesson about facing paladins and no longer expects his terminators to win in a fight against my paladins. The best you can really expect to pull off is finishing off a weakened squad (in which case you were already winning), or holding off a full power unit for a turn or 2 before they wipe you out.

Well golly gee, you seem to be surprised that a much more expensive unit(s) is able to beat cheaper unit(s). Gosh!!! Surprise!!!

Try it on an even point total and see how that works out for ya.

imweasel wrote:

Artemo wrote: Actually Space Fairies are eminently beatable (though if well played they can win). 30 TH/SS plus a Librarian will likely be eaten alive by a Paladin/Stormraven list.

Anything that will tear apart a 30 hamminator list will do just fine vs draigowing.

And you are going to take a total of what winds up to be of 11 1 wound models and draigo, plus the ravens vs 30 termies? And you would call the space fairies are going to be eaten alive?

I don't know what you are talking about. He said the 30 Hammernators, and those 3 units alone add up to 1200pts, will be munched by Draigo( 2+/3++, 4 wounds, EW), 9 paladins (2 wound Termies with WS 5, and Stormbolters, and strike first with no saves), and Str 5 Strombolters, a Libby, able to cast 3 powers, including 2 that give +1 Str each, plus a Stromraven, all for 1200pts. the same as you, and much more deadly.

Artemo wrote:And that's one reason why paladin squads should always have a stave.

It's actually quite unlikely that Space fairies will win assault, even with a huskblade (though it can happen). But whilst paladins are not Fearless, they have ATSKNF, so they can't be swept.

My experience with this (and I have a fair bit) is that it depends upon how much Draigo gets to engage, and this can be controlled fairly well by the charging player (most likely DE). For instance, it is possible for the archon to contact Draigo and another model, locking Draigo in place, keeping him out of contact with the Archons squad (often Incubi). Draigo is left swinging on the Archons 2+ save, so assuming 3 hits and wounds, let's pretend nothing happens there.

The archon, on the other hand, has 6 attacks, hits 4 times, and with poison, yeah, wounds 4 times. He swings for the squad mind you. sure, warding staff makes one go away. You probably have some swords in there, but possibly not 3, let's say 2 get through. That's 2 dead paladins, 4 wounds. Before even the halberds swing, mind you.

It depends upon how many incubi he brings, but he can win at far less points than you. And he shouldn't pursue, he let's you run, then escorts you off the board.


This is not to say this auto-beats a Draigo deathstar, nothing of the sort. Just saying it has more than decent chance to, for far less cost than your deathstar. But they're DE, that's frankly how it SHOULD work. Your job is to shoot him before he gets there.

Why would a poisoned attack ignore armour saves?

If he has a huskblade then he surely wounds on 5+ but ignores armour saves. But huskblades aren't poisoned, are they?

So you can have six venom attacks of which 4 hit on average and probably all wound but the squad gets 2+ saves so could well escape unscathed. Or you can have the same number of attacks hitting but wounding on 5+, so 1 or 2 wounds, one of which the stave will absorb on 2+.

When we say 'draigowing', do we mean say, at 2k points, nothing but Draigo, Libby and Paladins or are we talking about an army that contains Draigo, Libby and some Paladins but necessarily backed up by other units (Psyfleman Dreads and/or Interceptors) like Blackmoor's list?

Running a Paladin list has been at the back of my mind for a few weeks now but I'm not sure about it because I can't see an all Paladin footslogging army taking on all comers. I think it does need support in which case, should we really be talking about a Paladin hybrid army because that seems to be more competitive than an all Paladin build?

Personally I mean a list where the infantry are exclusively paladins. But they ride in 'ravens and are backed by venerable dreadnoughts.

I think a good working definition is where the only troops fielded are paladins.

Artemo wrote:Why would a poisoned attack ignore armour saves?

If he has a huskblade then he surely wounds on 5+ but ignores armour saves. But huskblades aren't poisoned, are they?

So you can have six venom attacks of which 4 hit on average and probably all wound but the squad gets 2+ saves so could well escape unscathed. Or you can have the same number of attacks hitting but wounding on 5+, so 1 or 2 wounds, one of which the stave will absorb on 2+.

With the court of the Archon you can give him a Lhaimeas or whatever it is, which gives him 2+ poisoned, just cuz. That can be combined with the husk blade.

Expensive. But I think the Court looks pretty decent, to me, most people just don't have the options.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh, also there's this gem that will double the archons str every time he kills an IC or MC. Not too likely to occure against your average Draigo wing, though.

The Lhameans only upgrade poisoned weapons to poisoned 2+. Not all weapons to poisoned 2+.

Oh, OK, well, that wouldn't work, then. There's still the Gem.

You mean the Soul-trap. In a typical paladin list that means the Archon must kill either Draigo or a librarian (who should always have a warding stave). So you're looking at either 3++ T5, 4 wound eternal warrior (needing 6s to wound and 4 such wounds to kill, 2/3 of which are negated, ie 72 hits or 96 hits) or 2++ T4 (needing 5s to wound and kill, 5/6 of which are negated, ie 18 hits or 24 attacks).

The difference being that th/ss terminators "can" survive, not necessarily win. If you look at JV2's battlerep, as we've mentioned before, 2 squads of paladins were able to wipe out 19 FNP th/ss terminators and only lost 2 men in exchange.

I just want to interject on this point, since I have seen this sort of fight play out more than once, and participated a couple times (On both sides.) in house games:

It turns into a very binary "Can the TH/SS user roll a 3++ well?" situation. I have seen more than one instance of the stormshields making enough of their saves to wipe the paladins in return or hit them hard enough that next phase they can be finished off.

I've watched Calgar and 5 TH/SS come out of a raider and crush draigo and a paladin squad with the loss of a single terminator.

I've watched Logan and a terminator squad do similar. I've seen bone stock TH/SS leave draigo standing alone to be shot by the time the last one went down. Heck, I have had test games where my TDA libby (When he isn't busy rolling perils) smack 3 paladins off the board with vortex before combat began!...Aaaaaand I have also seen the reverse cases where like Jy2, the paladins do enough damage/wipeout that the ensuing phases don't matter, the paladins have won already. "Do you feel lucky?" applies here, big time.

As an aside though, what's up with that battlerep? No note is made of what units failed their red thirst check, but then there is reference to BA termies taking no retreat wounds, which should not happen except in the case of a red thirst unit. Also it should be noted that even in this lopsided 5 terminators + SP removed vs. two paladins, he still only lost combat by two, and with a much cheaper unit.

I've noticed bad luck being used as a 'defining' argument in a post above; as good a sign as ever to leave the thread.

Luck does play a part in it though, both good and bad. Instead of dismissing luck, it should be gratefully received (in the case of good) and learned from and planned for (in the case of bad).

I've assaulted a 5 man TH/SS termie squad with a 10 man purifier squad, all armed with halberds and 1 hammer and lost big time due to rolling badly despite 30 power weapon attacks. And I've won an assault after being assaulted and having far less attacks due to rolling really well. It's just part of the game.

ColdSadHungry wrote:Luck does play a part in it though, both good and bad. Instead of dismissing luck, it should be gratefully received (in the case of good) and learned from and planned for (in the case of bad).

I've assaulted a 5 man TH/SS termie squad with a 10 man purifier squad, all armed with halberds and 1 hammer and lost big time due to rolling badly despite 30 power weapon attacks. And I've won an assault after being assaulted and having far less attacks due to rolling really well. It's just part of the game.

You don't seem to understand, what you are talking about has nothing to do with what was stated earlier. Someone pointed out that because 5 Paladins and Draigo beat 19 FNP TH/SS Termies (because the FNP guys fluffe their attacks) that the Paladins are always better than the FNP Termies. This is a bollocks argument.

Deadshot wrote:I don't know what you are talking about. He said the 30 Hammernators, and those 3 units alone add up to 1200pts, will be munched by Draigo( 2+/3++, 4 wounds, EW), 9 paladins (2 wound Termies with WS 5, and Stormbolters, and strike first with no saves), and Str 5 Strombolters, a Libby, able to cast 3 powers, including 2 that give +1 Str each, plus a Stromraven, all for 1200pts. the same as you, and much more deadly.

You do know the pallies are basically 1 wound models vs hamminators, right? With a 5+ invul save, that with the space marines are going to reroll successfull ones, right?

And I never knew that pallies struck with no saves? Perhaps I am wrong on this, but I didn't realize they ignore ALL saves.

The reason I picked the number of models is as follows:

10 pallies and 1 librarian. All essentially 1 wound models since no EW from the hamminators.

Draigo has 4 wounds.

Plus 2 ravens. That's probably around 1300pts or so, if you don't trick out the pallies to much. It's over 600 alone for the transports and draigo.

You do know the pallies are basically 1 wound models vs hamminators, right? With a 5+ invul save, that with the space marines are going to reroll successfull ones, right?

Worse. Morale games play a part too.

Direct all attacks to the paladins. Each one you take off the board with a powerfist or TH counts as TWO wounds for combat resolution. Two wounds that will be converted directly into No retreat! for draigo should you wipe his squad and revert him back to fearless status. If you do not, you start quickly ratcheting up the difficulty for his LD test with every paladin off the board versus every TH/SS, and though you can't sweep him with TH/SS and vice versa, you CAN escort him off the board.

Paladins can obviously win against TH/SS, for that matter so can purifiers or even charging strike squad when the dice gods smile. But it becomes an awful lot like a fair fight to try in most cases.

Godless-Mimicry wrote:

ColdSadHungry wrote:Luck does play a part in it though, both good and bad. Instead of dismissing luck, it should be gratefully received (in the case of good) and learned from and planned for (in the case of bad).

I've assaulted a 5 man TH/SS termie squad with a 10 man purifier squad, all armed with halberds and 1 hammer and lost big time due to rolling badly despite 30 power weapon attacks. And I've won an assault after being assaulted and having far less attacks due to rolling really well. It's just part of the game.

You don't seem to understand, what you are talking about has nothing to do with what was stated earlier. Someone pointed out that because 5 Paladins and Draigo beat 19 FNP TH/SS Termies (because the FNP guys fluffe their attacks) that the Paladins are always better than the FNP Termies. This is a bollocks argument.

That's not what was said at all - it was Draigo, a Libby and two squads of Paladins and the TH/SS Termies had 27 attacks but only killed 2 Paladins. That is bad luck. But nobody argued that Paladins are always better - it was just a person trying to reconcile the differences between the survivability of terminators at range and in CC. He said that the TH/SS are better equipped to survive.

I was just commenting on what you said about time to leave the thread because 'luck' had been used in an argument. I feel that luck does play a part in all games, that's all.

I can't see them doing well against a well played, mobile force with fire power such as the Dark Eldar, Tau, and a few others. If Storm Ravens have been taken, they will be slain pretty quickly since a TAC list will include a lot of anti-tank that won't have much else to shoot at...Then you have the dark lances going to work on the Pallies.

When we say Draigowing we do not mean an army built solely out of Paladins.

Certainly the army has Draigo and it is centered around Paladins, but they are not the only units.

Just like Deathwing armies are not true Terminator only lists, but include everything from dreadnaughts to Ravenwing bikes and speeders.

Blackmoor wrote:When we say Draigowing we do not mean an army built solely out of Paladins.

Certainly the army has Draigo and it is centered around Paladins, but they are not the only units.

Just like Deathwing armies are not true Terminator only lists, but include everything from dreadnaughts to Ravenwing bikes and speeders.

I was just asking for the sake of clarification and to see what other people would expect to face if they knew they were going to be playing Draigowing. But sometimes, on here, you do see people arguing that something isn't 'pure' deathwing if it contains Ravenwing elements etc. Personally, I have Landspeeders in my DW force but I just call it Deathwing, not Deathwing/Ravenwing.

Artemo wrote:

imweasel wrote:Actually, I would think DE and 30 hamminators + libby would be a huge pain for draigo wing to deal with.

And that's just for starters.

Actually Space Fairies are eminently beatable (though if well played they can win). 30 TH/SS plus a Librarian will likely be eaten alive by a Paladin/Stormraven list.

Really? 30 TH/SS will be hard to remove from play no matter what. Okay, the TH/SS will strike last but every wound saved by a SS and every would inflicted by a TH will hurt the Paladins badly. Did I muss something here? Don't assume that the SM player is an idiot.

With 30 TH/SS I'd move up to hold the center in mission based games but stay back in a KP mission. With FnP it will even be harder to remove some of them via shooting. Now some Pallies make it to the front ranks of the SM army. Good luck charging them. I'm too lazy to do the math but I'd be rather confident that the Termies come on top.

I do try not to assume my opponents are idiots. I'm slightly exaggerating as a response to the rather knee-jerk 'Paladins are useless against list X, army Y or weapon-spam Z' posts that seem to either assume the paladin player is an idiot or are borne from mantra-like reciting of internet dogma. If you want a balanced view (if of course rather simplistic as terrain and mission type and deployment all can make assumptions dubious)

Generally speaking, I'm probably going to have given my paladins Counter-attack if facing a TH/SS list. I'm also going to be casting sanctuary (and mindstrikes will have removed any supporting librarian from the TH/SS list well before assault is reached. Given that I'd be using stormravens, I'd also be expecting to get first assault (which will likely reduce a TH/SS squad to 1 or two models), whilst taking 1 or no casualties in return.

The danger comes from a simultaneous assault by two squads (perhaps with a supporting character). The canny TH/SS player will be positioning to sacrifice two squads to draw each paladin squad in and then charge each squad with 2 TH/SS squads (giving a pretty even combat). Sensible play by the TH/SS player should pretty much nullify the disrupting effect of Sanctuary (though a model might be lost from one of the squads).

So really a lot will depend on how the supporting units perform. Because in fact the troops on both sides are quite well matched.