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I recently had a game with a huge Paladin squad (all spec-ed out with 4 Psycannon, Psybolt, Draigo, Librarian, techmarine grenade caddy). Needless to say, the Paladin squad does very very well taking on lots of fire while being super tough to kill.

After the game, I talked to a fellow gamer and we questioned why would a Paladin build be better than a more diversed MSU build such as Purifiers or Strike spam? That and whether Might of Titan + Hammer Hand is broken (Str 6 + 2D6 penetration on all units with 3 attacks is kindda ...)

leohart wrote:I recently had a game with a huge Paladin squad (all spec-ed out with 4 Psycannon, Psybolt, Draigo, Librarian, techmarine grenade caddy). Needless to say, the Paladin squad does very very well taking on lots of fire while being super tough to kill.

After the game, I talked to a fellow gamer and we questioned why would a Paladin build be better than a more diversed MSU build such as Purifiers or Strike spam? That and whether Might of Titan + Hammer Hand is broken (Str 6 + 2D6 penetration on all units with 3 attacks is kindda ...)

Who says its better? Just different. Run a Paladin list against Melta CSM with 9 Oblits and throw in some LoS to good measure. IG Demolisher/demo charge spam. Blood Angel fast Vindicator spam. There's plenty of counters for Draigowing. Tough yes, the best, not so much.

MoT and HH aren't broken IMO. Plently of crazy abilities in 40k. Hood spam helps counter that as well.

Overall, I'd say purifier spam is the better list. Much more versatility.

Paladins are a vicious one-trick-pony. Vicious, but still only one trick.

@Fafnir: I do agree with you but I have a hard time convincing my friend. What would be the talking points when trying to prove that purifier spam is better than paladin spam?

1. Capable of having more firepower on the table at once: Firepower between Paladins and Purifiers is pretty consistent. And you can buy a lot more purifiers than you can paladins. For this reason, purifiers offer much more ranged damage potential.

2. More target control: More units of purifiers means you'll be able to take down more units at once. A major weakness of paladin armies is that they can be easily overwhelmed by too many units to realistically take down, since they have trouble destroying more than one unit at a time outside of multi-assaults.

3. More mobility: Purifiers have access to smaller, cheaper transports like Rhinos and Razorbacks.

4. More area control: Paladins work well at guarding objectives because you'll never move them off the table. But their poor mobility and the fact that you'll have so few on the table makes them poor for actually controlling the board. You can easily get several units of purifiers on the table, allowing you to have much easier coverage of the board.

This is coming from a guy who plays a Paladin army and hates powered armour Grey Knights. As much as I love Paladins and GKT, Purifiers are just way better. Purifiers are versatile and powerful, and can adapt to a variety of situations. Matchups with Paladins, on the other hand, tend to be fairly cleanly cut. They tend to do really well against some armies, and horrendously against others. Paladins are more intimidating to look at, and can be a daunting task to take out, but once you start thinning the numbers and removing bodies, they get a lot less scary.

Purifiers also don't auto-lose objective missions.

Paladin lists(if pure Paladins) will find it very difficult to win because they will rarely have more then the minimum 2 troops and they have almost zero mobility. They pick one or 2 objectives and they hold those ones very nice, while the enemy snatches everything else up.

The only reason they would win an Objective mission(or indeed any mission) is when people make the mistake of trying to kill them. unless you have 36+" range AP2 weapons coming out of your ears you arn't going to do much damage, but what do people do? they rush right up and try to kill them and get their face pounded in for their efforts.

I think this holds true for most GK builds too. People rush up close and try to kill the GKs with short ranged shooting and assault. Unfortunantly, this is exactly the kind of thing GKs counter hard.

leohart wrote:That and whether Might of Titan + Hammer Hand is broken (Str 6 + 2D6 penetration on all units with 3 attacks is kindda ...)

Might and Hammerhand is not broken on Paladins.


It is much, much better on an Arco-Flagellant henchmen unit.

S7 plus 2D6
5 Attacks each on the charge
Half the squad is crusaders for 3++ Inv saves
Oh, and each model is only 15 pts (plus the librarian) and only takes up one spot in a transport.




In general, close-combat against vehicles is not great, even if you are dealing massive damage.

- The vehicle has probably already gotten to move, so the troops inside have got to where they need to be. killing the tank before it moves and forcing the unit iside to walk up the board is much better
- The unit inside the vehicle generally does not take a lot of damage no matter how hard you blow up the tank (yes a few random guys die, but generally the Sarge+any Special weapons will be fine and they are what matters most of the time)
- The unit inside will probably be able to act next turn, allowing them to shoot your assault unit, OR charge it with their own assault unit, usually winning combat and breaking the unit.
- you do not get to make any consolidation moves meaning your unit is very vulnerable to blast markers and template weapons.


To make assaulting vehicles worth it, you generally need to multiple assault and take out a lot of tanks before they can move too far out of their deployment zone. Even then, you are generally going to loose the unit that assaulted the tanks (or take very heavy damage)