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So I've been debating on what allies to use for my Imperial Guard and have come to the conclusion that Dark Angels fit my tastes best. But I can't decide between using Deathwing or Ravenwing. Both of them would fix a weak point in my army, with Ravenwing bikes capturing objectives and providing assault support if it came down to it. Deathwing could provide the same objective control with deepstrike, with the added bonus of amazing close combat that my guard wouldn't otherwise have but not contributing anything to the speed/mobility my army is lacking. Eventually I think I'll build into both, but we all know warhammer ain't cheap, so which army do you think better fills the gaps where IG fall short?

If it helps, I tend to run balanced guard lists for the most part since I've only got about 1250 points of guard as of right now.

Thankfully DA termies and bikes are cheap due to Dark Vengeance so you could go that route to get both, at least to start with. Especially if you don't mind getting some chaos, or don't mind splitting or selling the chaos half off.

The termies are a bit mono-pose so you might not want too many of them but it's harder to notice with the bikes. Some cutting and greenstuffing can generally fix that anyway.

Oh wow, I never noticed Dark Vengeance came with bikes too. I'd like to buy it if I could trade off the chaos for more dark angels, but this far into 6th edition I feel it's hard to find any players who still want to trade off. Thanks though, definitely helped giving Games Workshop's website didn't have a cool full picture of the models like with past edition boxes. Though, if it came down to a 1750 point game and I had to specialize in either terminators or attack bikes, which would be more useful?

Unfortunately you can only take DWT or RW bikes as troops if DA is your primary detachment. That being said, a RW command squad let by a Libby and a RW attack squad, boosted by a RW banner would be great to have with IG. For troops you can take a cheap 5 man heavy weapon squad, or scouts with cloaks.

UnadoptedPuppy wrote:
Unfortunately you can only take DWT or RW bikes as troops if DA is your primary detachment.

Yeah, this is the fatal flaw. When they aren't troops Deathwing/Ravenwing are a lot less interesting.

However, depending your IG list you might be able to take DA as your primary detachment and use IG as the allies. IG can fit plenty of troops into only two FOC slots, so you really only need them to be your main detachment if you're taking lots of tanks or Vendettas.

From my experience as an Ork player, Ravenwing is not very good. They look and sound scary in the statline, but when you put th me on the table they really are just toughness five marines. They drop like flies out in the open, and die to anything space marines wild die to in close combat. Wich basically means anything that's even remotely good at CC will kill them, and pretty quick.

Termies are much scarier with their tu Ron one deep strike and twin linked shots. On top of that all of them have power fists and better armor saves. Go with the death wings.

 Peregrine wrote:

UnadoptedPuppy wrote:
Unfortunately you can only take DWT or RW bikes as troops if DA is your primary detachment.

Yeah, this is the fatal flaw. When they aren't troops Deathwing/Ravenwing are a lot less interesting.

However, depending your IG list you might be able to take DA as your primary detachment and use IG as the allies. IG can fit plenty of troops into only two FOC slots, so you really only need them to be your main detachment if you're taking lots of tanks or Vendettas.

So I've heard armies that get special troop choices are usually the allies you'd want to be taking. Is there another army that provides this still? And if I were to have IG as my main army still, how effective would the deathwing army be? I dislike having tank squandrons and prefer them on their own, so taking deathwing as a primary feels like it's hurting more than helping.

Deathwing would be great with guard allies. Deathwing lacks in bodies and anti-air, mainly. Take a blob with azrael, trust me.

GK and SW can give you termies as troops, and the regular marine codex can give you bikes as troops (strictly less cooler than Ravenwing).

I had a discussion very similar to this here: http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/540486.page#5865343

I tried figuring out what DA allies would work best with my IG and in the end basically ended up just being that DA were better off being the primary and IG being the allies.

Not sure if RW or DW are either better than the other but I do believe that a mix will probably be a bit better than all of one.