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Bloodthirster w/ UM, BoBG, DS: 295 (BIG distraction in 1500 points, and my creature/character/tank killers)
Bloodthirster w/ UM, BoBG, DS: 295 (BIG distraction in 1500 points, and my creature/character/tank killers)

4 bloodcrushers w/ icon, FoK, IC: 200 (real heavy hitters of the army)
4 bloodcrushers w/ icon, FoK, IC: 200 (real heavy hitters of the army)

8 bloodletter w/ Fok, IC: 143 (for objectives, support)
8 bloodletter w/ Fok, IC: 143 (for objectives, support)
8 bloodletter w/ Fok, IC: 143 (for objectives, support)

15 flesh hounds and Karnak: 260 (I would like to see longfangs take down these before being food... hehehe)

Total cost: 1,679

What can I take away from this list to make it fit under 1,500 points. Any comments/criticisms welcome. I would also like to field some DPs or soul grinders. (Please don't say pick another army though.) Thank you!

Double-thirster is mean and nasty. I would start by dropping the death strike on the thirsters, though - saves you 40 points.

Next, I would consolidate the bloodcrushers into a single squad. 8 is simply better than 2x4. So that saves you another 40 points.

Drop all of the upgrades on the bloodletters - they're almost completely unnecessary. 45 points saved. 55 points left to go, which is tough, as its pretty much going to require that you lose your 8x theme. Up to you, really.

Lose Karanak and Unholy Might on two of the Thirsters. I know S10 on the charge is very good, but I do not think you are going to see enough multi-wound T5 models in regular gameplay to make it worth it.

I almost never see TWC, Ogryn or Grotesques where I play.

Lose the Fleshounds and the Deathstrikes on the Thirsters. Beef up the Letter squads, 8 works with Fateweaver nearby... but 8 letters in a mono-khorne will just get shot off the board as they drop. The alternative would be a 4th letter squad giving you a perfectly even drop split, doing that will give you much more predictability with your strategies. That is to get to 1500 like you were saying. With 2 monsters and 2 crusher units I would not worry about princes or grinders until you go to higher points.

If fleshounds work for you then ignore me, I find them gimmicky and easily countered by a good player. 2 Thirsters, 2x4 Crushers, 4x8 Bloodletters might be ok though.

I think you should KEEP the FoK on the Bloodletters. It prevents your unit from being completely useless from being assaulted by Armored Sentinels (or other AV11+ walkers).

I also think you should beef up the Bloodletter squads a bit by dropping the +str on the Thirsters.

-Reece

calypso2ts wrote:Lose Karanak and Unholy Might on two of the Thirsters. I know S10 on the charge is very good, but I do not think you are going to see enough multi-wound T5 models in regular gameplay to make it worth it.

I almost never see TWC, Ogryn or Grotesques where I play.

UM only boosts Bloodthirster to S8, so he'd be S9 on the charge. Nothing too special about S9, but I guess base S8 is good for multiple rounds of combat vs Paladins...Nobs...Wraiths...but still, not enough to be worth it. The only upgrade I ever pay for on a Bloodthirster is BotBG. Like UM, it only helps in extreme situations, but it costs a lot less for a huge potential benefit.

I kind of agree with keeping FoK since you're so low on AT. But that's not really going to help...you'll still have no reliable AT. Against a foot-slogging gunline (see these often?), you'll do pretty well, but mechanized armies will give you fits. You have little to no way of cracking a transport, which means much of your army will be ineffectually milling around waiting for targets far too often. If you're even getting into assault, it'll often be at your opponents discretion...and that is not how Bloodletters want to be fighting.

To be perfectly honest, I don't really believe mono-Khorne works. For all of Khorne's strengths, their weaknesses are too easily exploitable for them to work solo. A list like this amplifies--even flaunts--that weakness. I think if it's going to work, you need Daemon Princes or Soulgrinders to open up armor before you get shot up. I hate to say it since they're one of my all-time favorite units, but I think this would require dropping all of the Bloodcrushers. This will still be costly and not too reliable, but it's better than pinning everything on two lonely Bloodthirsters. As is, a mech opponent will simply need to take those two out and continue moving away from the blood-soaked power weapon-wielding daemons (and that's not a very difficult counter-tactic to figure out).

calypso2ts wrote:Lose Karanak and Unholy Might on two of the Thirsters. I know S10 on the charge is very good, but I do not think you are going to see enough multi-wound T5 models in regular gameplay to make it worth it.

I almost never see TWC, Ogryn or Grotesques where I play.

Unholy might makes them base S8, and S9 on the charge. As a result, unholy might is a mandatory upgrade for bloodthirsters, since it means that you'll still be able to inflict instant death on T4 models.

Centurian99 wrote:

Unholy might makes them base S8, and S9 on the charge. As a result, unholy might is a mandatory upgrade for bloodthirsters, since it means that you'll still be able to inflict instant death on T4 models.

Whoops! I was thinking they had base strength 8 for some reason. If you really need to cut, I still think the cut should be on UM overall given the rest of the list.

I am really wondering if Khorne can be competitive. If I beef up my squads I will overkill and then get shot up because a 5++ isn't very helpful. And if I don't beef up my squads, they will get shot up right when they arrive. It takes 115 points of longfangs to take 3 wounds off of the bloodthirsters, so that 295 points will do nothing. Or in the off chance that they do get into combat, they will reck the squad completely and then be open to shooting next turn. This is what I have heard, at least. Do you think that it is viable to win more than 20% of the time?

Please?

I think it should do good, I like the list!

To get down to 1500:

Drop the two death strikes (-40)
Drop 4 Bloodletters divided mostly evenly (-64)
Drop 5 Flesh Hounds (-75)

Definitely keep the 2x4 Crushers, the advice to combine them is horrible. Your main weakness is going to be popping transports in assault, and then having to weather a turn of exposed shooting every time. If you want to stick with mono Khorne, that's the price you pay. Otherwise, Fiends of Slaanesh would be a good replacement for the Flesh Hounds.

Drop a blood thirster, all the khorne beats and spam 2 IC on JOK and with remaining points bloodletters. Beasts are decent but no power weapon means low tank killers and infantry will shoot them up and probably win combat on lucky rolls.

<sigh>

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/413762.page

For a variety of reasons why 1x8 bloodcrushers is better than 2x4, read my last post in the above thread.

Just because 1x8 Crushers doesn't lose you games, doesn't make 2x4 worse.

With 2x4, you can guarantee that a squad and an icon will land in your first wave. That's a big deal in mono-Khorne especially.

With 2x4 you also have wound allocation, which is very likely to help a non-trivial amount. It's rare that AP3 or better fire is going to be hitting you more than once per unit, so you can always roll the 5++ on the least wounded model. And S4 weapons like bolters will inflict very few wounds against the T5, you aren't going to get drowned in saves.

You already said that 4 crushers will kill anything they touch, which is true, so why not have double that killing power? If someone does manage to kill 3 of them from one squad, you would still have another 4-man squad at full strength even if your 1-model unit was floundering. There is no reason to spend 360 points on a single death star unit when it's already insanely good at 200.

Emperor awfulness wrote:Just because 1x8 Crushers doesn't lose you games, doesn't make 2x4 worse.

I never said that. What I said was that 2x4 has some very significant weaknesses in a highly competitve environment.

1) In a competitive environment, opponents should be grouping their fire together. Which means that its not really all that rare for massed AP3 to hit your crushers. Long fangs with ML, vets with plasma or melta, etc. And even if they don't mass armor-ignoring weaponry...they're going to mass high volume of fire. Wounding T5 isn't easy, but almost all armies have some way to do so reliably. If a 4-model squad takes 12 wounds (not impossible, or even rare if your opponents know what they're doing), you have to put 3 wounds on each model. Statistically, you'll fail 33% of those saves. But that doesn't mean that you'll fail 1 save on each model. You could easily fail 2 saves on 2 models, and leave the other 2 untouched. There's no way to predict it, and therefore no way to counter it.

2) Splitting 2x4, like you're advocating, is simply moronic. It means that your opponent now doesn't have to worry about all 8, and can simply focus fire on them as they come in.

3) Even if you don't have fateweaver, 2x4 is harder to drop together. They both have to drop close to the enemy, which means they're going to be competing for landing zones. As I said, although its somewhat counter-intuitive, you can drop 8 crushers easier than you can drop 2x4, because geometry makes it so that 8 crushers can drop far away, and use the deep strike rules to have a model ending up 7.5 inches away from their initial drop point. Or, if you scatter towards the enemy, as long as you start far enough away, you can arrange the drop so that they avoid mishaps.

2x4 is also not double the killing power. It's exactly the same killing power (the slight bonus against dreadnoughts notwithstanding). So what you're really paying for by spending 400 points for a 2x4 is this:
1 - slightly better wound allocation. I've already explained why this is a false concern.
2 - a second icon. Which good mono-khorne doesn't need. (the only unit that really needs an icon in mono-khorne...are bloodcrushers. Everything else is either expendable, or moves fast.)
3 - a second instrument - which is useless to begin with (in three years of Chaos Daemons, I've had exactly one assault where the bloodcrushers tied and the instrument was used).
4 - ability to drop in two different locations (Situationally useful, I'll admit).

You give up:
1) Ability to abuse the large footprint to essentially gain 7.5" of free movement on the drop.
2) Ability to essentially guarantee that the unit won't die in one turn. You can drop 8 bloodcrushers in front of almost any army, and it'll almost never die in a single turn. It's happened to me a few times, but it's required some pretty silly combinations on the part of my opponents.
3) Ability to wipe out not just regular units, but also wipe large units, especially hordes (thus getting the all-important combat res in your favor).
4) Ability to draw fire away from bloodthirsters.

And a 200 point bloodcrusher unit is simply not insanely good. It's just good at one thing: assaulting and killing an enemy squad.

I don't think Groove's army list is the best place to have this argument, but I'll defend one point. The 4-man Bloodcrushers will kill 90% of anything you normally encounter. They can easily inflict 10 power weapon wounds at I5 on the charge, which will only fail to wipe out hordes, and TH/SS terminators, and a few other rare tarpit units. For any situation but the hardest of hard targets, 8 Crushers is overkill. I'd rather get two general use units than one overkill unit.

I actually have to agree with Centurian on this. I have seen the exact same thing running Seekers. The large footprint is extremely flexible in getting you where you need to be after a DS and you can pretty much custom tailor it to avoid mishaps.

8 Crushers also provides a very broad threat range on an overall slow unit to enable you to put, say, one BC into a squad and the rest into the nearby vehicles.

Exactly. The biggest strength of the 8-man bloodcrusher unit is that you can throw it against multiple enemy units successfully. Charging 3 or even four vehicles at once can easily end up with 4 dead vehicles. If you can hit one infantry unit, you can even preserve yourself from incoming fire by directing the majority of your attacks at vehicles, and piling in on the enemy infantry.