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Hey guys! I was looking through the rules of the breaching drill in the Krieg codex and i loved the idea of my guardsmen coming from under-ground with a gargantuan drill popping out of the ground, and zealous guardsmen following behind the rubble being thrown into the air due to the drill. Fluffiness aside, i heard a few words about this particular vehicle being hit with the nerf bat rather hard.

So my question is, How did it get nerfed exactly? And can it still be of use in competitive games? I still intend to have a few for fluff, but i always love playing competitive games every once and a while Thanks for any help!! ~Ashley

I don't remember what the current rules were but they were bad. Old rules were great and fairly balanced when used in a DKoK list(but not balanced at all in a normal IG list).
-Comes in on second turn. Place the big blast marker and roll normal scatter. Anything under(on top of) the marker got hit with a Str 10 melta hit. Anything that survived was moved off of the marker. Drill sat on the marker.
--The next turn it acted normally and the troops came out of the whole or didn't if they had no where to move and waited until it is clear.

The new rules I think nerfed a lot of that.

you scatter the small bast and tank shock,ram out of it with a few melta hits.

If it fails to remove the vehicle,building or models, it mishaps with a -2 mod which suuuuuuucks.

also if its destroyed. the unit behind it is destroyed. edit: Funny though thinking about a thunder hammer chapter master playing wackamole as it pops up.

Essentially it went from inflicting an S10 Ap1 large blast hit to an S8 Small blast hit when it comes in (which was fine, that was a warranted nerf) but also then no longer moves units out of the way, meaning if you didn't kill your target (which, if it's a vehicle or a building, you won't most of the time even if it's a relatively light vehicle) you mishap, and they added a -2 modifier on the mishap for some reason, and the mishap now applies to the follow up unit. The follow up unit also cannot launch an assault on the turn it comes in. It also no longer comes in automatically turn 2 with the follow up on 3 but rather from normal reserves.

Unfortunately, it really has no more practical use, it's just too dangerous to use to engage vehicles and structures and it's viability against infantry is very expensive for a single small blast attack, and as a simple Deep Strike enabler, it's horrifically expensive, moreso that a drop pod and lacking all of the hazard mitigation.

There were three big nerfs:

1) Down from a STR 10 AP 1 melta pie plate to D3 hits. This is probably the smallest of the nerfs, and the drill would still be useful if this was the only change.

2) The infantry squad attached to the drill is now elites instead of troops. So now it's a suicide weapon like storm troopers instead of a delivery method for a scoring unit that you can build a list around.

3) The drill used to move any models it failed to kill out of the way so it could arrive. Now if you fail to kill enough models to place the drill you get a deep strike mishap with a -2 penalty (IOW 50% chance of losing both the drill and squad), and you will often fail to kill enough unless you just barely clip a single infantry model with the template. You used to be able to use your drills aggressively and target your opponent's biggest threats, now you have to be careful about where you arrive and waste the entry attack by arriving in clear space if you care about getting the infantry squad on the table.

Peregrine has it completely.

It can still be useful for a suicide melta and disruption unit. I have also been considering it as a way to deliver an annoyance unit like a AS priest in a carapace vets melta or plasma squad. I am pretty sure it will only be decent but it could be fun.

In the Siege regiment list, you can add extra Engineer squads to the Drill, they still count as troops.

That's quite expensive, with that said.

Darn it, i really really wanted to use something like this in a tournament, for me IG would be complete if they had some sort of Deep strike, but this just sounds bleh under current rules. :| I'll probably have to proxy drop pods as drills, and make heavily armoured imperial guard conversions to count as Marines >.<