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With the current state of things, would you consider 3 Vindicators to be a strong asset to Space Marine lists or a liability because of the opportunity cost? I'm considering 3 fast Vindicators in my Blood Angels army so I'm curious what the prevailing opinion is.

Vindicators are good at killing infantry, both horde and Elite. They're capable of hurting Vehicles, but as one-shot vehicles, they're unlikely to do so quickly.

Fast Predators, with Lascannons, are able to provide the long range AT that the rest of the army lacks. You've got Death Company and Sanguinary Guard for flattening infantry. Fast Vindi's look good on paper, but they don't add anything that you aren't already good at.

I'd suggest that Preds are a more useful addition. Since our only Flyer is in the HS slot, you might want to take a Raven in there, unless you're allying flyer defence.

They're not great. They are great at hurting all kinds of infantry but its easy enough to get cover negating the ap2 bonus and its not hard to find other ways to deal with infantry. They're mediocre against MCs and Vehicles because each blast can only do a single hit max so they do little damage. Also it has such short range that anything that can easily threaten it will be close to it. It's only a problem because of its steep price tag

1 word - Invisibility.

I run 2 Vindis in my Space Wolves list and have rarely wished for anything else. I spread a lot anti-tank options out amongst my units so I usually don't need something like a Predator (or at least, a Predator wouldn't help all that much in an instance where long-ranged anti-tank would be needed). Vindicators basically create a 24" "no-go" zone for your opponent, so if you're smart then you can funnel them into your sights or deny areas of the board. Plus, AV13 on the front makes them useful for moving up units behind them, and they become even more dangerous in an armour saturation/threat overload list like mine (5-6 Rhinos, 2 Vindis, 2 units of TWC, etc).

Vindis can be dangerous to your own units if you plan on getting close.

I know someone who adamantly advocates Vindicators, simply because of T5 assault units. Wolfstar, Wraiths, etc, all much easier to deal with when you fire Vindicators at them.

If you see a lot of those, Vindis are your friends.

When the pie plate works, the pie plate works

Generally I think preds are more flexible. But you need to respect the pie.

The AV 11 sides kill Vindis for me.

Personally I loved them when I used to play blood angels. It also probably had something to do with my love of unnecessarily big guns, but I usually ran 2 if not 3 for gaks and giggles. I don't know if they've gotten better or worse in 7th, but if you like them go for it. Nothing makes me laugh more than when a shot scatters off of the enemy and massacres my own infantry. I can just imagine the tank commander saying oops and pretending he didn't see anything.

You could run one Vinnie with two vanilla preds covering the sides. Probably not the best but that's how I always wanted to run them...

I used to run two, but grav cents with invisible do more damage more reliably.

Always enjoyed obliterating entire squads of terminators with 125pts of tank, though, or any t5 unit out there. One of my favorite memories was a good scatter, clipping 3 leman russ and taking them all down.

Easy to negate with good spreading, or at least mitigate, though.