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Hello!

I am trying to decide whether to run plague marines or just normal marines as my troop choice.

What have been your experiences? I know that plague marines are tough as hell. However, I could give my normal marines the mark of nurgle and that would at least make their toughness equal.

Here is the problem... I like the plague marines, but I just don't know if I can justify their cost. Are they really worth the points? Any advice would be welcomed!

Thanks!

My advice. Go with what you like. Unless your a competitive player. Then just wait a little longer. I'm sure plenty of people will tell you what's better for that.

Ok, lets do a unit review.

CSM with MoN:
$39 for 10
16 points
leadership 9
Access to a single heavy weapon

Plague marine:
$45 for 7
24 points
fearless
Access to take two special weapons at only 5 units, do not have to take a squad of 10 to take a second
33.33% more survivable against weapons that are not STR D or STR 10 thru Feel No Pain
Plague Knives! Allow them to take down even Monstrous Creatures with a bit of luck and make them even better at killing T3 troops as they will wound on a 3+ and get to reroll 1s and 2s
Defensive Grenades! Reduces the amount of attacks fast moving assault units will get

So, would you pay 8 points extra per model for those? Its up to you pal

Go with what you like, but plague marines are pretty deadly. In CC, I believe they wound no matter what on a 4+ because of plague knives, and grenades do the same thing I think.

In my experience, normal marines with mark of nurgle are the way to go.
Plague marines are 50% more expensive point for point than a marine with the mark of nurgle, which I think makes up for the 33% extra resilience.
In CC with MC's you have krak grenades, you can take 10 nurgle marines with 2 special weapons for the cost of 5 "naked" plague marines, and they are I4.

Fearless & FNP are the main things you're paying for, and well worth it.

Take the Plaguemarines. I havn't seen a CSM player in my local scene actually take Chaos Marines in a solid year.

Recently tried out normal Chaos marines over my normal plague marine build, and I got to say the fearless and feel no pain makes up for the points you spend.

Belly wrote:
Fearless & FNP are the main things you're paying for, and well worth it.

Take the Plaguemarines. I havn't seen a CSM player in my local scene actually take Chaos Marines in a solid year.

And the ability to take 2 special weapons at 5 man squads, that is also huge.

7th made poison worse sadly with no longer getting a reroll when stabbing marines but it isn't too bad, and the buff to vehicles means that you get even more 'objective secured' survivability.

The baseline, unmarked marine in the current CSM book will almost always under-perform compared to almost any other troop unit in the game. I would actually echo the advice of the person who said to try out taking the baseline marines and giving the the mark of Nurgle and then taking a few squads of actual PMs for support.

In terms of game play the plague marines turned to troops are vastly superior stand alone troops than the normal CSM.

The real problem with CSM is that their moral is awful. This means that if they escort a fearless character then they work pretty good but on their own they are strictly worse than almost any troops choice you can make. As they are too expensive to just break and run from 25% casualties.

Also price is no argument as a conversion from SM to plague marine is relatively simple and usually gives you results that impress.

I consider PM one of the best troops in the game... Quite durable and good in a fist fight too.

Agreed. Conversion wise, throw on some nasty green/grey, rough em up a bit, paint the trim bronze, and boom.

 jreilly89 wrote:
Agreed. Conversion wise, throw on some nasty green/grey, rough em up a bit, paint the trim bronze, and boom.

Add a little rust and some greenstuff pustules, and youre golden. All of my PMs are done this way. I avoid the legit ones for two reasons (even though I love the look): price, and the fact that I don't like working with finecast.

It's worth pointing out that the point cost of a Nurgle Marine is misleading; They might look like 16pts, but there is a forced Champion cost on top of that as well. There is also Plague Marines already having ultragrit as part of the upgrade. So it would be more accurate to say that an equivalent Nurgle Marine is actually 19-20pts depending on whether you are taking lots of small squads, or a few big ones. When looked at from this angle, the Plague Marine looks far more tempting.

Say 300pts spent on Troops; You would get 2 units of 5 Plagues plus 4 Plasma Guns between them. The equivalent of Nurgle Marines simply cannot achieve the same level of Plasma-ey goodness, so you are potentially looking at a loss of total firepower. You could have 15 bodies plus 2 Plasma Guns, but the FNP puts them on equal resilience. The Plagues then come along with Defensives, Poison, Fearless and Ultragrit to seal the deal.

It really depends on the kind of list you want. Do you want an offensive list? Then go with unmarked marines to save as many points as possible: if you want to kill stuff, the Troops section is the wrong one... Marked, Unmarked and Plague marines all have a pitiful damage output if you compare it to other codexes

Do you want to camp objectives, trying to resist at everything the enemy will throw at you? Then Plague Marines with 2 Plasmas and a melta bomb are virtually able to kill everything while having a better than average resilience.

However always keep in mind that you pay a lot of points for units with a very limited range, mobility and damage output (compared to other units within our codex with the same point cost). So you will never be able to outkill the enemy, but merely outlive it.

It really depends on your style and your meta, IMHO

ansacs wrote:In terms of game play the plague marines turned to troops are vastly superior stand alone troops than the normal CSM.

I'd take the other side of that, actually.

To start with, plague marines are nearly TWICE as expensive as a regular CSM. Everything that's going to be said about them has to take this into account.

Firstly, we've got to remember that plague marines don't shoot any better at all than regular CSM by-model, which means that they shoot nearly half as well as regular CSM per-point. Meanwhile, they get a poisoned weapon, which is a close combat upgrade. This is especially obvious when you consider that their other wargear is defensive grenades and their banner causes fear, both of which are CC upgrades.Clearly plague marines are meant to be the counterpart to khorne berzerkers, where berzerkers are better against the little stuff and plague marines are better against the tougher stuff.

... but. With that cool 4+ poison, you also lose a point of I. That's HUGE. It's like going to noise marines and saying that your bolters will ignore cover saves, but they're only Ap6, or going up to 1ksons and saying your bolters are still Ap3, but only S3. They're tooled up to do one thing, but then they turn around and get nerfed in that thing. If khorne berzerkers are going to be better in close combat (because they also have a much better CC banner, reroll > fear), and if plague marines cost way more, but don't give you any better shooting, well... then what's the point?

They do have more durability, yes. Against bolters they're nearly twice as expensive, but a little more than twice as durable, so it evens out. It seems like the idea between berzerkers and plague marines is that khorne takes more casualties but does more damage while nurgle does less damage but takes fewer casualties, so it all evens out, in theory.

But you know what else is twice as durable? Twice as many CSM. And that comes with twice as many attacks, and twice as many bolter shots. You get both more durability AND more killing power, instead of just one or the other. Furthermore, of course, there are plenty of things that plague marines aren't any more durable at all against, like S8+ weapons, which is especially damning given that if the place they want to be is close combat, that's where they're going to find powerfists, and if their speciality is supposed to be against monstrous creatures, well good luck, all can, and many can automatically ignore FNP.

So if they're not really that much more durable per point, and they have lousy killing power for their cost, then what's the point of ever taking plague marines?

Well, they do have fearless, and that's not nothing. This problem is fixable by many various means with CSM as well (my favorite being chucking a lord in the squad), but native fearless is just straight a bit better, especially in circumstances of very small squads (in a rhino rush it's going to be more points-prohibitive to give several squads an IoV). Also, like other god warriors, they do have much better force concentration. In this case, it means that you have 20 marines worth of durability on a 10 marine footprint, which gives you a little bit of flexibility on the offense, but is really better for beign able to hide completely out of LOS by an objective. But, I suppose, if you're out of LOS...

Anyways, I think that plague marines are the weakest, not the strongest of the elites-choices-come-troops. Their wargear and special rules conflict, and try to make them good at a role they're not particularly good in, while being expensive. I think the main reason people gravitate towards them is because having to remove models from the table is scary and makes you feel like you're losing, and plague marines do that less. They're the soul food of the chaos codex... but not a whole lot more.

Plague Marines all day bro!!!!

I was running three five man squads of PM in rhinos with dozer blades and one meltagun per squad. If I got the first and could move the rhinos to midfield they were golden. They have been slightly nerfed in 7th edition with the changes to poison and defensive grenades. I will still take them at five per squad over 10 CSM any day. You could mix in one squad of CSM and attach the Chaos Lord so they benefit from his fearless to save a few points.

Played with both, extensively.
CSM are, as Ailaros mentions in his well thought-out and worded post, cheaper. More bodies means more models with a 3+ save, means more objectives you can capture at once, means more bolters, means more attacks, means messier target priority for your opponent.

But Plagues are definitely a little scarier and can mess with your opponent's target priority, have access to more nice guns /model count, are fearless (which is as mentioned by previous posters a serious buff), solid in CC against MCs which CSM very definitely struggle against, and look cool. Plus I think the new defensive grenades are a good thing. Being T5/FNP means you can generally survive the first round of attacks in CC due to going 2nd with I3, but if your opponent is hitting you with WS1, then suddenly you've got less attacks getting through to stop you striking back. Also makes giving a powerfist to your champ less of a debate because you're usually already going second in CC (presuming you're the type to spend points on champ weapons).

And don't forget Grandpapa Nurgle fluff is awesome!

The fact is, they are equally durable - you will get 3 Nurgle Marines for the same price as 2 plague Marines, but FnP means they both weather 3 wounds. PMs are less durable to any instant death, but CSM might be less durable against a blast or template at times because they achive the same durability through numbers. Both of these issues are rare and pretty negligible.

It just depends on the rest of your army - are you reliant on that extra Melta or Plasma and the ability to CC with MCs? Or would you rather have extra Bolter shots and CC attacks? If you want to spend less points on your mandatory troop slots, or if you want to make the entire mandatory investment a little more likely to achieve something at the cost of more points. There is no right or wrong answer here, and it's entirely dependant on your list, similar to deciding whether to take an anti-tank or anti-infantry unit. I will say taking a Nurgle Lord specifically for PMs is probably a bad idea if you wouldn't have taken him otherwise, but a Nurgle Lord on a bike is a great model anyway that often finds it's way into lists so often it's a non-issue. To sum it up, PM's are probably more effecient for the points - however, you may not want to be spending those points there at all. Neither are terrible but I think you can't go wrong with the points saved by taking the CSM and just dedicating less to something that may or may not be a better investment like Plague Marines and more to the rest of your army. I wouldn't take either if troops weren't mandatory. I'm often a min size cultists kind of guy however, so keep that in mind.

@Ailros
Did you read my entire statement. I specifically said that as long as you attach a fearless HQ to the CSM they are fine.

 ansacs wrote:
The real problem with CSM is that their moral is awful. This means that if they escort a fearless character then they work pretty good but on their own they are strictly worse than almost any troops choice you can make. As they are too expensive to just break and run from 25% casualties.

I even went through the trouble to qualify my statement of superior troop with "stand alone" ie not needing an attached character.

 ansacs wrote:
In terms of game play the plague marines turned to troops are vastly superior stand alone troops than the normal CSM.

As per the worst elites turned troops in the CSM book that is most definitely not plague marines who due to having 2 special weapons per squad have better shooting than CSM (and most of the other possible troops) and have melee abilities comparable to khorne zerkers. One of the biggest advantages of them is that a unit of 5-7 plague marines is good shooting, good melee, and durable and fits into a rhino. A unit of less than 10 any other CSM troop choice is either too fragile or does no damage.

You can make CSM fearless stand-alone as well.

Plus, I'm not sure how "doesn't benefit from synergy" is that much of a benefit. Yes, I guess it's easier if you don't have to use your stuff in an integrated way, but... meh... I'm already taking a lord anyways, and I'm already attaching him to a squad of something. Plus, fearless is only one benefit anyways.

And plague marines don't have better shooting. They get an extra special weapons slot at fewer than 10 dudes, but for their extra cost, you could have just bought 10 dudes, and both a 5-man PM squad and a 10-man CSM squad fit in a rhino.

And given that plague marines don't have as many weapon options because they can't take heavy weapons... well... that means they're sort of worse at shooting. Especially when you remember they get half as many bolters.

Edited for inaccuracy

Due to their durability Plague Marines are one of (if only) CSM units that works well using rhinos as transports. Sure you save some points taking a plain Jane Nurgle Marine but they can be swept or run right off the table - both of which are potentially huge liabilities and shouldn't be ignored when looking to skim some points. Plague Marines are also an excellent tarpit unit... I've locked up ScreamerStar for the course of a game. They are by far head and shoulders over any other cult Marine. Chaos Space Marines on the other hand are a big disappointment.

 Ailaros wrote:
You can make CSM fearless stand-alone as well.

Well, not exactly stand-alone. If the icon-bearer eats a sniper round or barrage template you're going to have a problem. It's also a huge points-sink, nearly two Marine's worth, which erodes the only real strength of Chaos Marines: their cheapness. On a related note, Chaos Marines have to pay extra for their Mark and their CCWs (or else sacrifice their bolters), while Plague Marines get the Mark of Nurgle and poisoned CCWs included in their cost.