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I'm having a tough time deciding between a librarian or a grand master in my acolyte + psyback + 6 dreadnought list
It's 1750 and has essentially 6 dreads, 4 squads of 3x acolytes with melta/flamer/plasma in psybacks and a chimera with cotez and 3 servitors with plasma cannons in it.

There's room for either a grandmaster with 3 servoskulls or a liby with said servoskulls
I just can't decide if an extra sanc + shrouding is going to be worth it or having potential for extra 1-3 scoring dreadnoughts would be worth it.

what do you all think?

In A list like that, I would take the Grand Master over the librarian.


1) Scoring units

Against a Smart player, you may find they simply focus fire on the Acolyte squads to remove all of your scoring power in objectives games. Even if you kill more of their points, you still need troops to take objectives.

Grand Strategy + a Venerable Dread gives you a very hard to kill scoring unit. It is not easy to shoot dead, it is hard to kill in close combat, and it can hang back and shoot while camping on an objective.


2) Sanctuary and Shrouding.

You already have sanctuary from Coteaz.

Shrouding is useful for tanks that either smoke or go flat out. It is not a huge help in a list like yours.

I think the librarian is wasted unless you are using 4 powers a game turn. You do not have good targets for Might or Titan or Quicksilver, and the PSA's are good, but short ranged. The rest of your army should be keeping their distance and the librarian needs to stay with them to give them buffs.


3) Psychic Communion.

One issue with a list like yours is it as MSU as you can get. It can give up a lot of kill points very quickly. You can use this power to put things in reserve and keep them there.

You can also combine this with "scout" from grand strategy to outflank something when you need it. Use this for a late game objective contest.







[PS. if you want any other henchmen units, I have an article in my signature]

Thank you for the input, it was very thoughtful and I think it makes good sense. I'll stick with the grand master =)

On the flip side, I also ended up reading your nice post from your sig on other henchmen builds. What I ended up was some additional questions on the typical 3 acolyte build. All plasma? all flamers? all melta? or mix it up? I don't expect the men to survive very long on their own. I also can't afford carapace armor in this list either as it just has 2 spare points that'll probably end up on top of some sort of search light since I expect to be facing necrons and their night fighting till I say we're done craziness.

Personally, I would just settle for coteaz and taking more msu spam psybacks.

Weapons.


The only weapon I would take as a single would be the Flamer. With BS3, only one Melta or Plasma gun is not reliable enough to be worth it. One flamer can still hurt, but having three means you can put enough wounds on MEQ ot TEQ to hurt as well.


You could run 1 flamer, 2 melta.

I think that the plasmas may not work in a list like this as well. Melta or Flamer as a suicide attack, while the plasma is better shooting out of Chimera Firepoints.

Personally, I would just settle for coteaz and taking more msu spam psybacks.

well technically I could but that would only result in 1 more tank and 3 men with spare points left over.More bodies really don't matter too much as I'd rather have the occupants die in any assault so I can keep shooting whoever.

I'd also lose servoskulls which I like to mess with people's deployments and occassionally help my scatter dice. Grand stragety would also offer up some more tactical freedom. Maybe a late game outflank or something could be somewhat useful. Although 1 more tank can be useful, I'm not convinced just yet that 1 more gun is quite worth it. (though I can probably get more searchlights and dozer blades with some one shot missle launchers?)

It's already got essentially 11 tanks+dreads at 1750 points. Would be pretty hard to kill for most folks. List changes completely though at higher point spreads. (well maybe if someone was doing ravager spam or something, but that wouldn't do very well vs most lists that didn't use so many tanks)

How about interceptors?

How about interceptors?

It's not a bad idea actually, and in different lists, I really like them. In this one, however, they would not be able to contribute as much since this list is more or less a mobile gunline. The whole thing can move around as a giant blob shooting everything at will. All the heavy bolters and autocannons can blast away at 48 to 36' while on the move. Effective threat range is more like 54 to 42' at any turn. Interceptors would likely serve as a last minute objective grab unit but unsupported, they'd die pretty fast otherwise and can't contribute much to the gun line. Also if things are tied in combat with them, I also can't shoot them

I use interceptors extensively in my crowe purifier list. I quite like them. *especially since I can get sanguinary guard wings to throw on their backs*