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Honestly you should only be buying the Apothecary if you have at least seven Paladins and one attached character. Same with the Banner.

I disagree. I've come round to the view that a 5 man squad that will be accompanied by a character should have an apothecary and that a 6 man (sans character) squad is probably worthwhile having one.

As regards the orks example above. Arew we assuming the orks are WS 5?

Artemo wrote:As regards the orks example above. Arew we assuming the orks are WS 5?

You don't start hitting on 5s until the opponent's WS is more than double yours. So WS 4 hits on 4s against WS 4-8.

I rather meant for the paladin attacks but of course you added the hammer afterwards -- sorry. You're quite right, I was dividing by 3 when I should have been by two for the ork attacks.

But the apothecary is still worth it because 30 wounds to save is still the difference between one wound per model without apothecary and 2 or 3 spread over the whole squad. he keeps more men in the fight for longer. An extra model instead is superfiucially attractive, but creates transport difficulties. If the squad is not to be accompanied by Draigo or a Librarian, then the apothecary for 5 men instead of another paladin is a closer call.

FNP is absolutely worth it if you field Paladins.
Equip them differently to benefit from the rule of wound distribution.
I'd use them as Shep said.

wuestenfux wrote:FNP is absolutely worth it if you field Paladins.
Equip them differently to benefit from the rule of wound distribution.
I'd use them as Shep said.

Thats how I was looking at it too. Yes the FNP option is pricey, BUT IMO its worth the cost. Yea, paladins are super friggin tough to kill depending on how you upgrade them, but they still die. I can imagine how frustrating itll be pouring a million and a half shots into that unit, FINALLY get a couple wounds past all the awesomness that is their stats, and then Oh sorry Ive still got a FNP to roll.....and...... nope no wounds.

What weapons do you use to take out 2 would terminators? Plasma, Melta, power weapons, LasCannons. Basically, you're going to aim for ignoring their 2+ armor and instant killing them if you can. Basically, what most people are going to use against paladins is the kind of stuff that already ignored FNP. Weight of fire can take down regular terminators, but it's already pretty ineffective against wound-shenanigans.

After 170 lasgun shots (I use what I know), you're looking at four wounds. If the allocation is kind to you, the Paladins still have all of their members. With bolters, you're looking at 9 wounds. How many squads have to fire for how many turns to accomplish that? You should be in combat ripping them in half before that happens.

I ran a squad of 5 Paladins and a Grand Master in a game against SW at 1500pts. Ran then against his command squad, that was Arjax the upgrade character, Logan Grimnar and 3 more th/ss terminators. I equipped them all with Halberds and one with a incinerator. I killed the SW squad with only loosing my GMaster and the one with the Incenerator. I feel like with the 6 Int and force weapons they can rip apart a small elite squad with ease and this is the role I prefer for them.


I just don't feel like they are useless/don't belong CC and I am trying to find their place in a list.

The idea that working out how survivable Paladins are based on facing a particular squad doesn't seem quite right to me. Think about it this way;

5 Paladins with 2 psycannons and apothecary upgrade is 390 points. Add in Draigo who is 275 points and you've got the make up of the type of Paladin squad that you will usually see. You can obviously make it much more expensive if you add in banners/mastercraft things/take psybolt ammo. You could dump Draigo and take a GM to save some points. It's also likely that a Paladin squad will take some kind of transport to avoid them footslogging so let's give them a Land Raider for 255 points. Total 920 points. More often than not, this unit is going to take up the bulk of your army. Also that Libby that you'll see a lot of with Paladin armies costs 150 points base.

So, for me, when talking about how survivable a Paladin squad is, is it not better to consider that they will have to survive against almost an entire army from the word go and not a particular squad or two.

They're likely to be backed up with a couple of Psy Dreads so to counter those, you could take a Dev Squad with 4 missile launchers which is only 150 points, maybe take two and those Dreads will go down quickly enough. A 2 man Broadside squad is 140 points - again Dreads will fall quickly enough to 2 or 3 squads of those. So, aside from a couple of squads of something for a turn or two, your Paladins will basically have to shrug off wounds from almost an entire army from turn 1.

That's why I think that the Apothecary is very important to a Paladin unit because whether or not you believe it's worth firing small arms at them, with practically a full army shooting at them, you will be firing small arms and the apothecary will help them to shrug off many wounds that they would otherwise take through sheer numbers of attacks.

All in all though, unless you can give your opponent a lot of other things to aim at, your Paladin squad is going to take far too many hits per turn to make them worthwhile in my opinion until you get to much higher points levels to be able to survive against so much firepower. It may be easier to stay alive if you can stay in CC but at range, I don't think that they are tough enough despite Terminator armour, 2 wounds FNP etc etc.

I am toying with the idea of a fairly "cheap" squad of 5 with pyscannons and attached libby anchoring my center. Not sure how viable it would be though. In my mind you have to target saturate the AP2/Str8 hits against them with other units such as dreads and DKs to have any chance of them surviving.