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In an effort to provide my insights to the community at large, similar to the distillation of thoughts I submitted in my thesis regarding the use of the BA techmarine, I would like to suggest that the Blood Angel CC scout is an ideal troop choice to sit in your backfield, hold objectives and protect your devastators from assaults. With a power weapon and a priest nearby (potentially sitting with the devastators) these scouts can put a hurting on units looking to harass your missiles. Give it a try and let me know how you do.

This part of your guide on how not to play blood angels?

To be fair there is nothing wrong with Scouts as backfield objective holders. They won't do much more than that but if the rest of your list is full of aggressive units then they will do the job for cheaper than a Tactical Squad and better than an Assault Squad.

DooDoo wrote:In an effort to provide my insights to the community at large, similar to the distillation of thoughts I submitted in my thesis regarding the use of the BA techmarine, I would like to suggest that the Blood Angel CC scout is an ideal troop choice to sit in your backfield, hold objectives and protect your devastators from assaults. With a power weapon and a priest nearby (potentially sitting with the devastators) these scouts can put a hurting on units looking to harass your missiles. Give it a try and let me know how you do.

this could work, except for the part about having a priest nearby. the priest part won't work for 2 reasons.


1) what BA player would play the Shooty card and bring Devestators? Red Thirst could pull your guys out of position and mean they won't be shooting for a turn. Devestators are lame in the vanilla dex without having the chance they might start running towards the enemy.

2) IF a BA player DID play the Shooty Card why would he waste a Preist babysitting his Devestators when it could be with his Tacs, Assault marines, and Terminators. yeah i can have 3 Priests, but that won't be enough for the whole army so it's more like 6, but WAIT. i can't do that because i have 2 of those lovely Jpack Techmarines with a Combi-melta hogging my Elite slots so i can Melta things

Red thirst just gives you Furious Charge and Fearless instead of ATSKNF. It doesn't make your devastators run anymore.

The rest of your point is good though.

Really?

No Rage


So the idea sucks...Less

Grey Templar wrote:1) what BA player would play the Shooty card and bring Devestators? Red Thirst could pull your guys out of position and mean they won't be shooting for a turn. Devestators are lame in the vanilla dex without having the chance they might start running towards the enemy.

Why would they start running towards the enemy?

Dok wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:1) what BA player would play the Shooty card and bring Devestators? Red Thirst could pull your guys out of position and mean they won't be shooting for a turn. Devestators are lame in the vanilla dex without having the chance they might start running towards the enemy.

Why would they start running towards the enemy?

The old Red Thirst gave them Rage.

as Xcaliber informed me that was removed from the rules.

Also the BA devs get MUCH cheaper weapon than the SM ones. Their ML are only 10 pts, just like the space wolves and you can get Plasma cannons for only 15 pts each, that is so cheep.

I could see you having one priest in the back field giving a whole bunch of devastators FNP and then having a guarding unit of close combat scouts...kinda

Honestly with a shooty force, you should be looking to take out enemy mobility first. If they get to your lines you have lost. It would be better to take more guns to shoot and slow down and kill the enemy faster rather than guarding a gun line with a mediocre combat unit.

Even with cheaper heavy weapons, Devestators are overpriced.


Why would you abandon the Codex's greatest Strength? BA's are meant to strike from the heavens with the speed of lightining. not sit back and shoot.

4 MLs for 130 pts is not over priced. Also, having a priest cover 2 or 3 squads of Devs is not a bad 50 pt investment. The scouts are there to deal with things that get through the front lines. They are cheaper than assault marines and more killy than tactical marines in CC.

are BA scouts as bad as SM scouts? If so I'd rather pay a bit more for a tac squad

Why would you dedicate a Priest specifically on the backfield to babysit Devestators and Scouts?

Not to mention that the majority of units that will CC your firebase will likely do it in their turn (outflanking 'Stealers, Callidus, Snikrot, Wolf Scouts) and more than likely have the killyness to wipe the squad in one phase, and all you've really done is given him another squad to eat.

The only bit of advice I would agree with is using Scouts to hold home objectives. Even then that would only be because they can take camo-cloaks and GtG all game for a 2+ cover...

L. Wrex

I can't wait to hear your thoughts on elites.

I may not have agreed totally with DooDoo's previous post on Melta Techmarines, but I can't help but feel we're ganging up on him here, without actually taking the time to assess the merits of his proposal.

While it is undeniable that aggressive DoA and Mechanized builds are something that C:BA excels at, do not forget that they are still very similar to C:SM Space Marines, and, with the right units and options, can be played as a shooty army.

I think a sound strategy is being presented here, which many of you are missing out on due to preconceived notions on how Blood Angels are supposed to be played.

Consider the following:

Due to the Red Thirst special rule, (particularly when coupled with Astorath) it is possible for a many units in your army to become Fearless, which of course means, will not run away or go to ground.

Sanguinary Priest, of course, also make it possible for a large percentage of a concentrated (read: castled) army to become even more durable through Feel No Pain. Devastators in particular are a large investment. Might as well protect that investment.

Land Raiders (you know, those things with dual twin linked lascannons that can be fired at seperate targets?) can be taken as Dedicated transports, freeing up Heavy Support slots for more ML Devastators.

Finally, Librarians can take Fear of Darkness. I'm sure most of you can see the value of easily making an enemy run away from your gunline?

To me, extra durability, steadfastness and firepower seem like pretty good attributes for a gunline army. In a list built around these concepts, the CC advantages Blood Angels have make for very good screening units for the gunline.

I'm going to go experiment with this concept, now that it's been brought to my attention.

Even with cheaper heavy weapons, Devestators are overpriced.

The amount of cluelessness out there never ceases to surprise. Devastators are one of the few BA choices I'd class as 'always taken'. Firepower and resilience in a tight economical package (the amount of anti-tank weapons out there really doesn't work against in-cover FNP Marines). It's baffling that a person who doesn't even know that BA Devastators and Marines don't rage is giving 'authoritative' advice to people here.

Not to mention that the majority of units that will CC your firebase will likely do it in their turn

Having just erased 55 outflanking Stealers that tried to make it to my 15 Devastators last saturday, I'd beg to disagree. What do you need to do that? A couple bargain 55 point fast TLHF Razors and some Baals roaming around. Problem solved. While 35 were killed by shooting a unit of 20 actually made it to combat with Mephiston waiting in a counter charge role but the Stealers were gangbanged by 15 Devs and 10 AM in assault and wiped out in one phase.

In an effort to provide my insights to the community at large, similar to the distillation of thoughts I submitted in my thesis regarding the use of the BA techmarine, I would like to suggest that the Blood Angel CC scout is an ideal troop choice to sit in your backfield,

There's no need for anyone in particular to babysit your backfield. If the enemy is coming to you, every single one of your units are babysitting your backfield while you soften up the enemy. That means AM in Razors, your HQ units, and very possibly Baal Predators. If the enemy isn't coming to you, the Devs are just fine on their own while the faster elements of your army move up to engage.

Determine whether you can outshoot your opponent and act accordingly. If you can outshoot the enemy, you don't need to go anywhere in the first half of the game. If you can't, it's likely he isn't coming to you, so you move up and definately won't leave any non-shooty units to your backfield. Doing that would be an absolute waste of points and only increases the chance that you don't have enough shooty/assaults elements actually doing their jobs and taking enemy units out. BA are ridiculously fast for Marines and can easily react to changing battlefield situations.

Grey Templar wrote:

Dok wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:1) what BA player would play the Shooty card and bring Devestators? Red Thirst could pull your guys out of position and mean they won't be shooting for a turn. Devestators are lame in the vanilla dex without having the chance they might start running towards the enemy.

Why would they start running towards the enemy?

The old Red Thirst gave them Rage.

as Xcaliber informed me that was removed from the rules.

Good advice like this is really what makes dakka sutch a good forum for qualaty advice.

Niiai wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:

Dok wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:1) what BA player would play the Shooty card and bring Devestators? Red Thirst could pull your guys out of position and mean they won't be shooting for a turn. Devestators are lame in the vanilla dex without having the chance they might start running towards the enemy.

Why would they start running towards the enemy?

The old Red Thirst gave them Rage.

as Xcaliber informed me that was removed from the rules.

Good advice like this is really what makes dakka sutch a good forum for qualaty advice.

Because of this, now I'm afraid it isn't anymore =P

DooDoo's post of techmarines was crap, but a ba dev list is viable.

Priests
3 dev squads with 12ml=390 points
Add jump spam=100% vehicle free list

From that base there is a lot of ways to skin this cat.
Hg
Sg
Mm attack bikes
Tac marines
Scouts
Scout bikers

Scouts are perfectly viable in that list. They can play backfield with the devs, infiltrate and join a wave of assault marines, or outflank and join the assault marines/reinforce the dev squads.

Ba all infantry works, and scouts are a good infantry unit.

People who suggest that this actually is a good idea, haven't tried making BA lists.

I bring a 10 man Scout squad on occasion... 5 snipers (SGT gets one with his PF), ML or HB and 4 "other" scouts... Combat Squad them up and try to stick near a Medic and provide a mobile security for the backfield... Most folks forget about them when faced with the rest of my list, and sometimes the snipers even hit something :-)... But for objective games, they actually work out well for me...

i could see Scouts being good as a secondary assault unit. a cheaper alternative to Assault squads that can infiltrate.

they are also good as objective holders, but i wouldn't give them a priest unless i was at very high points.


the best way for scouts to survive(and they are very good at this) is for the enemy to ignore them. you accomplish that by having your FNP assault squads, Terminators, and Dreadnoughts in the enemies face while the scouts sit around objectives and tell campfire stories.

:-) Yes, I joke about my Scout SGT's PF being used to light the hibachi they use to grill out...

pchappel wrote::-) Yes, I joke about my Scout SGT's PF being used to light the hibachi they use to grill out...

ahh, yes.

a little Hibatchi and a chapter from Twilight(they are BAs ) before bedtime.

Scouts are OK objective holders/beacons for deep striking off of.

For all other purposes, however, they are really lackluster. Honestly, I use em for a cheap objective holder, if I use them at all. But as for a CC unit... typically people shoot devs. I rarely see them get assaulted any earlier than T3 or so; and if that happens either you put them in a bad spot, someone dumped snikrot on them, or something like Wolf Scouts got them. Either way, scouts are OK, but for protecting devs... its pretty much tossing another KP at a unit in an attempt to salvage a 130 point unit.

I do love me some devs. This actually isn't a bad idea, but I would give the scouts snipers so they can help the devs mop up.

Sanguinary Priests seem pretty important for BA Devastators given what we're seeing from the new Codex: Dark Eldar.

As noted, BA Devastators are an outstanding value for points.

Priests in general are probably not worth the expenditure to accompany such an efficient and durable (sitting in cover) choice, but could be if you are facing a high volume of long-ranged anti infantry firepower making your Devs take a lot of saves. Like Venom/Splinter Cannon spam.

I do think the assault scout/FNP combo sounds pretty good. The idea of having them be a combination of backfield scoring unit + counterassault element may work, depending on the overall list.

IMO it doesn't sound like a terrible idea. I've thought of having a Sanguinary priest baby sit my tac Marine Combat squads that want to sit back and shoot...the same principle can work fine with Devs too. Sitting CC scouts back with them makes it more of an investment though. However if its an objective mission they could be sitting back on it. Is it a real competitive option? Meh maybe not. Is it a terrible idea I'd say no.
Also Blood Angels can make for a fairly decent shooty army, they don't have to be the I get close to chop you up stereotype that some lead on.

Cheers,
~Volkan

jdjamesdean@mail.com wrote:This part of your guide on how not to play blood angels?

I lol'd.

Though to be fair I have thought that the Sanguinor + 60 BA scout + 30 BA scout biker + assorted priests list would be... interesting to see.