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First off, I don't play DE, and I've only started to ponder making an army of them.

Now, while optimizing Beastermaster squads has been done to death (rending + wounds from Razors and Invuls from Khimeras), the whole mathcrafting always leaves out the Clawed Fiend because of mixing him with the others will result in losing the sweet T5.

With that in mind it came to me, what if we did 5 Beastmaster and 5 Clawed Fiends (212 points), that should allow the fiends to still be hard as nails and do their thing in close combat.

Objectives:
- SCARY AS HELL: Making people afraid of them will likely result in them getting shot asap, leaving the much more fragile stuff intact.
- PACK A PUNCH: If enemies don't take the bait, they still have to deal with a very fast moving / assaulting pack.
- THEME: Yeah yeah, it pretty much goes against optimization, but still, having 5 brutal beasts seems like something awesome.

So yeah... what do you guys think?

First off, 5 Beastmasters and 5 Fiends is going to be 260 points not 212 (which would be 1 Master and 5 Fiends, which is illegal).

Anyway, the short answer is they don't get used because its a terrible unit. Fiends have by far the worst damage output of all the Beast types, and T5 doesn't mean much when you aren't getting saves 99% of the time. A full squad of Clawed Fiends is only going to kill 3-4 MEQ on the charge. For comparison, a squad with 4 Masters, 5 Khymerae and 6 Razorwings (which cost 62pts less) are going to kill 6 MEQ on average on the charge. In terms of durability the Razor + Khymerae are much better, they have 40 vs 25 wounds and the 4+ save on the Khymarae means you can occasionally survive being shot and most importantly give you a chance of saving some wounds in combat (and not losing by heaps). For 10 points more than the Fiend unit you could get another 5 Khymerae, which makes you significantly more durable again.

I'm inclined to agree. with Powerguy. The only thing that the clawed fiends do better than the usual combination of khymerae and razor wings is not get insta-gibbed by S6 shooting attacks (Primaris Psyker, Leman Russ, as two IG examples that can ruin your day).

I've found clawfiends to be a bit better then most people think, with just one stuck in with the usual Razor/Khymera combos. 3 ablative wounds to use against S6+ is not too shabby, and lets face it, it's 5th edition, you'll be rolling the same 4+ save as the Khymerae, albeit a cover save not an invuln. Then you get 7 S5 attacks. Whats not to love? By comparison if your were to dump those S6+ wounds into khymerae, well you would have 3 less khymerae. So instead of losing offensive power with each wound (the purely khemra and RW option) you are actually gaining OP with each wound (up to 3).

People over value the "loosing T5" and undervalue the "hiding wounds that magically turn into attacks."

ShadarLogoth wrote:I've found clawfiends to be a bit better then most people think, with just one stuck in with the usual Razor/Khymera combos. 3 ablative wounds to use against S6+ is not too shabby, and lets face it, it's 5th edition, you'll be rolling the same 4+ save as the Khymerae, albeit a cover save not an invuln. Then you get 7 S5 attacks. Whats not to love? By comparison if your were to dump those S6+ wounds into khymerae, well you would have 3 less khymerae. So instead of losing offensive power with each wound (the purely khemra and RW option) you are actually gaining OP with each wound (up to 3).

People over value the "loosing T5" and undervalue the "hiding wounds that magically turn into attacks."

The issue is that S6 shooting tends to be multi shot, and usually its not part of a mixed unit (i.e its on vehicles or specialised units rather than a single S6 heavy/special weapon inside a squad which also has S3/4 weapons) and unless you have a large number of Fiends you are still majority T3, so get wounded on 2+. This means that you tend to end up taking 2+ S6 hits at a time, so either way you end up allocating to something which can get instant killed. For 8 points more than a single Fiend you can get 4 Khymerae, which have the same number of wounds, still don't care about instant death and in fact make it easier to protect against Razors being instant killed (since you need to do 5 wounds to force allocation rather than 2). On top of this they have 3 times as many attacks at I6 rather than I5 (yes its lower strength, but against the things you use Beasts against it make no difference) and crucially have a 4++, which means you don't have to stay in cover and can survive assaults. Yes its easy to get cover in 5th, but Beasts really don't want to get slowed down at all so if you can avoid running through area terrain you should.

One of the biggest issues I have found with Beasts is that its very easy to lose combat and break with them, sure they make a mess of whatever they touch, but they have almost no defence in return so its quite easy to lose guys in return and overall lose the combat (and then break with Ld8). The 4++ means you can actually avoid some of this, which is vital for large units of Beasts. The alternative is to do what I do, which is keep my Beasts small and cheap (I use mine through a Portal which does change things a little) with 2-3 Masters and 4-6 Razors so even if they do take casualties it really doesn't matter since the unit is so cheap.

A little confused by your post, I was saying using all three in conjunction not CF instead of Khymera...so the wound allocation doesn't make much since.

The fact of the matter is none of what you said takes away from the fact that dead Khymera have 0 attacks, where 1-3 wound CF's have 1-3 S5 attacks.