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Hello there
Can anyone give me some advice on fielding Thousand Sons with Ahriman?
How should I field them?
Pros and cons etc

Thanks

The Pros:

4++ save is nifty and makes them a bit more tanky.
AP3 bolters are very nice if you are playing against SM a lot.
1 Warp Charge with one spell on the tzeentch table and the primaris

The Cons:

Most expensive of the cult marines.
One of the worst Icons of them all.
Slow and Purposeful.
No Special Weapons!!

How to field most effectively:

They need Rhinos. They are so slow, if you dont get rhinos for them you will have to walk them up the board doing... not much. They are tanky enough for it, but you will want a 150 point unit to do atleast some damage.

Take units of 5 to gain maximum amount of warp charges from them. Adding more Thousand Sons to a unit is a waste of points. 4 of them are tanky enough to protect the warp charge (their best asset....). And seeing as you dont unlock any heavy or special weapons with higher numbers, there is even less reason to.

Just stick Ahriman with one of the Thousand Sons squads in a Rhino, move up, pop him out and start causing a psychic gak storm. I would also recommend getting either a Daemon Prince with Mastery Level 3 or a Sorcerer with Mastery Level 3. The Sorcerer is a way cheaper supply of warp charges than the Thousand Sons, and the Daemon Prince adds some more danger along with extra warp charges (he is however very expensive, so taking him along Ahriman is only recommended in high point games).

You could also look into Chaos Daemon Allies for some cheap warp charges. The main goal is to get some good Witchfires on Ahriman and shoot them all 3 times, to a maximum of 12 witchfires per turn from him alone. Some really good ones are:

Psychic Shriek (you can roll on the Telepathy table and if you dont like the result take this)
Smite (you can roll on the Biomancy table and if you dont like the result take this)
Tzeentch's Firestorm (you will always get this from Chaos Psychic Focus)
Doombolt (you have to roll atleast once on the tzeentch table, pray to the chaos gods you get this one, Breath of Chaos can be okay, just hope you dont get Boon of Mutation)
These are 4 Witch Fires, if either your biomancy or telepathy rolls resulted in anything good (Endurance, Iron Arm or Invisibilty) use his last mastery level to get the primaris that you are missing. If both of your telepathy and biomancy rolls were bad, roll on biomancy again.

Not Thousand Son's specific, but I use Ahriman to lead my Alpha Legion to get the outflank Warlord Trait.

With that you can take some chosen with meltas and redo the 6th ed tactic of outflanking chosen in rhinos. Not necessarily as good as it used to be, but something to distract your opponent while the thousand son's march forward.

You could also just take 5 man squads in rhinos and outflank them to get in position better.

The best tactic to use is to use them to use them to represent other models. The situation is literally that bad for them.

How about putting Ahriman to squad of plasma gun havocs?

 Draco wrote:
How about putting Ahriman to squad of plasma gun havocs?

Not durable to be bullet catchers. Ahriman is such an easy target someone is gonna want to kill him immediately for Slay The Warlord.

 KillMaimBurn96 wrote:
Hello there
Can anyone give me some advice on fielding Thousand Sons with Ahriman?
How should I field them?
Pros and cons etc

Thanks

1) Don't.

2) Leave them on the shelf.

3) Pros;
- AP3 can be handy, effectively every guy has a special weapon
- 4++ can be handy, especially for tying up walkers or monsterous creatures
- Force Axes/Staves are handy to have on someone who can accept a challenge and 1 cast will activate the force weapon of any attached character/s
- Doombolt isn't a bad power to know and can be fired from the top hatch of a rhino
- Can assault after rapid firing bolters
- Are Fearless
- Ld 10 even without the Sarge
- +1 to Deny from being a psycher while the sarge is still alive
- Can be troops

Cons;
- Very fragile to small arms fire considering they are 23 points per model
- Cover gives a 4++ (or better) for free
- Cover gives a 4++ (or better) to your enemies, negating the AP3 on your bolters, and you don't have access to Div for perfect timing without taking the balestar from crimson slaughter
- No AP2
- Gets outshot vs a 10 man CSM squad with a pair of plasma guns against virtually any target you can think of for equal points.
- All your bolters are Str 4, so hurting T5 or higher is difficult.
- Slow and purposeful means no run, no overwatch and no sweeping advance
- Sarge is 58 points for a T4 1W character
- Requires a Rhino, mandating a mech focus
- Sarge MUST roll on Tzeentch, not only the worst table in the book, but for my money, the worst table in the game.
- Requires a Tzeench marked psycher to make them troops, who are all expensive and forced to waste a roll on the Tzeentch table. Absolutely terrible if not taken as troops.
- Ahriman is 230 points, doesn't have a spell familiar, must waste a roll on Tzeentch, is T4 with 3+/4++ and no eternal warrior. A single krak missile has a 50/50 shot at doubling him out.
- Don't have grenades (except the Sarge), so strike at I1 through cover, and the sarge should have an Axe, so he's striking last anyway.
- Fearless units may not chose to fail a morale check due to out weapons are useless
- You'll rarely have the warp charge to efectively use your psycher sarge, and if he perils, 2/3rds of the time, he's dead, no saves.
- 1 attack per model, hitting on 4's in CC, AP- coupled with the inability to fire overwatch due to SnP means everyone and their grot will try to charge you and once you're there, you're stuck.
- Chaos characters MUST accept any challenge offered, and must issue a challenge whenever possible. Enjoy that with your squishy T4 HQ and sarges.

Given the volume of high strength, poor AP that abounds these days, the amount of things that can wipe you off the table by wounding you on 2's and forcing you to take your 3+ is beyond a joke. Would you pay 23 ppm for sternguard who couldn't take combis, only had their AP3 special ammo and could never ride in a drop pod?

As to comments that others have made;

- In no way is a 5 man squad sufficient, these guys cost more than 10 CSM (thanks to the sarge) for half the number of guys. Can you kill 5 tacticals? Yes? Then you can easily kill 5 TSons.
- Taking MSU TSons is crazy, not only are they extremely easy to kill, but you're paying 150 points per warp charge. You can get 3 for 110 with a sorceror HQ and not have to waste a roll on the Tzeentch table soi you can join a not-terrible unit and have not-terrible powers.
- Ahriman may only use up to 4 witchfires a turn as he is a ML4 psycher. He may use any witchfire up to 3 times per turn, but he still may not exceed the 4 power per turn limit.
- The infiltrate warlord trait from the chaos book is d3 units, must be infantry models (so no bikes, beasts, monsterous creatures, vehicles, jump infantry etc) and doesn't include the warlord, unlike the one on strategic, which is flatout 3 non vehicle units + the warlord.

As far as I was aware there's no stated limit how many powers a psyker can cast, other than the number of powers they know. Ahriman can cast eight powers per turn (Force, Chaos Primaris, Three Powers as per normal and then one Witchfire cast three times), but good luck finding the warp charges to do so. But I wholeheartedly agree, in my experience the thing my TS fear the most is basic shooting, even from Guardsmen.

I don't play tzeentch, but if I did I would use a small core of Ahriman with some KSons and oblits, but back that up with Tzeentch daemons for more warp charges, cheap deep-striking scorers, screamers and soul grinders.

 Drasius wrote:

- Ahriman may only use up to 4 witchfires a turn as he is a ML4 psycher. He may use any witchfire up to 3 times per turn, but he still may not exceed the 4 power per turn limit.

AFAIK there is no such rule.

As long he has the needed warp points from another source (the random dice or another caster), he can keep on blasting. and its not hard to hit 4 different witchfires for him, making him potentially a 12 shot psychic gun of doom-as long as he is somehow unchecked in range.


Ahriman is the only redeeming feature of the 1Ksons.
And that's a shame, as I freaking love them. I would have played chaos to begin with if they haven't suck that much.

Lets just hope the 30K thousand sons will be good enough to field.

 Camundongo wrote:
As far as I was aware there's no stated limit how many powers a psyker can cast, other than the number of powers they know. Ahriman can cast eight powers per turn (Force, Chaos Primaris, Three Powers as per normal and then one Witchfire cast three times), but good luck finding the warp charges to do so. But I wholeheartedly agree, in my experience the thing my TS fear the most is basic shooting, even from Guardsmen.

 BoomWolf wrote:

 Drasius wrote:

- Ahriman may only use up to 4 witchfires a turn as he is a ML4 psycher. He may use any witchfire up to 3 times per turn, but he still may not exceed the 4 power per turn limit.

AFAIK there is no such rule.

As long he has the needed warp points from another source (the random dice or another caster), he can keep on blasting. and its not hard to hit 4 different witchfires for him, making him potentially a 12 shot psychic gun of doom-as long as he is somehow unchecked in range.

Page 22 of the small rule book, top right wrote:
Mastery Levels
The number of psychic powers a Psycher can use each turn depends on his Mastery Level.

Here's the most recent thread on that issue:
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/658118.page

 Drasius wrote:

Page 22 of the small rule book, top right wrote:
Mastery Levels
The number of psychic powers a Psycher can use each turn depends on his Mastery Level.

But that doesn't mean a ML4 psyker can only cast 4 spells.
It says the number of spells you can cast depends on your mastery level, which is true. A ML4 psyker can generate up to 4 spells + the primaris + force because of psychic/chaos focus which means he is limited to 6 spells because of the mastery level he has and the fact that he can only manifest each power once.

And the black staff does not specifically limit Ahriman to manifesting only one withfire 3 times. All it states is that he can manifest the same witchfire multiple times, there is no limitation to the amount of powers he is allowed to do this for.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
As for 1K son tactics, it's either go big or go home.

Small units are crazy expensive because of the cost of the sorcerer, so always use bigger units.

The AP3 is a largely irrelevant rule because the increase in firepower is neglectible due to the lower shot-count compared to regular marines.

1k sons, when not in a Rhino, should be rushed out into the open at all times. Being in cover is a waste unless night fighting comes is in effect. Now that doesn't mean that keeping some LoS blocking terrain between you and certain units is bad, but being IN the terrain is generally a bad idea.

All in all, don't expect them to do a stellar job because they are a really niche unit. If there's large amounts of AP3 on the field, you might love them, but if you're playing against infantry blobs you'll wonder why you brought them in the first place.

If only they had ignores cover or could re-roll armour saves instead of having a 4++, now THAT would be a unit.

Ahriman is a real beast, I suggest rolling on Telepathy at least once just to get psychic shriek and then try your luck on biomancy because it has decent witchfire powers.