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So I've come into a bunch of Screamers (nice old metal ones, too) and since I've not had much success with my Necrons at tourneys and competitive events, I've been thinking about running a Screamerstar. I know that LoWs with D and Stomp have supposedly "killed" most Deathstars, but I think having a big ball of Psychic power and durability on speed is pretty cool still.

My question is, what's the focus of the army? Is this to be used with a Summoning list? Should the rest of the army just go into boots on the ground to hold objectives and fight things? Should it be supported by FMCs, or CSM guns, or mass amounts of things like Hounds? Maybe some KDK stuff to give punch outside of the Psychic Phase? I'm not really sure where to go after I put the 'Star together.

What things work with this?

Screamers biggest issue is assassins it's a hard counter that makes them totally unreliable at times downright impossible to use. Another issue is skitarii, the ability to ally with marines, pod in and blast your Death Star apart with high bs gunfire means that if your not gong turn one their going to get ripped apart before they've even made an impact and with your gimmick gone your army's leftovers are next.

The problem isn't that screamer star can't be beat but that for basically no points you can render them worthless or you are going to face matchups where you simply won't win and that's before models have hit table.

 ionusx wrote:
Screamers biggest issue is assassins it's a hard counter that makes them totally unreliable at times downright impossible to use.

Why do you think that? A Culexus dropping next to them will remove all their Blessings, but the Grimoire on them gives a nice 3++ rerolling 1s anyway, which isn't bad. And then it has no way to keep up with the survivors when they do their Jetbike thing the next turn.

I think assasins ignore invuls? Could be wrong. Either way, a culexus can drop in shoot about 9 times, after hits and wounds, the opponent then puts 5 wounds on a model of his choice. So he puts it on the grimoire herald who only has a 5+, which, like I said, I think he ignores.

I play screamerstar actually so I find my biggest problem with them is that they don't do much damage. They're great at killing light troops or small tac squads. If you put them against anything really mean, they just tie them up. If you don't run fateweaver as well, they tie them up until you fail grimoire then they get slaughtered.

Screamerstar is no longer the focus of an army, but it still can be potent. Although the the damage output is low, you can grab Be'Lakor and/or Fatey to get shrouding (2+/4+ jink is nice). What I've actually been running lately is no Fatey ( :O ) in lieu of Be'Lakor and a D Thirster. Lets you give a shroud party and you can still have the grim on the Thirster, plus however many cover-tastic screamers you want.

The way that nanavati ran his daemons list is probably the best way to do it. You can google the list that he won adepticon with but basically it had 4 heralds (2 Nurgle and 2 tzeentch) with 2 stars (drone star and Screamerstar). It's a surprisingly brutal and resilient list

 vercingatorix wrote:
I think assasins ignore invuls? Could be wrong. Either way, a culexus can drop in shoot about 9 times, after hits and wounds, the opponent then puts 5 wounds on a model of his choice. So he puts it on the grimoire herald who only has a 5+, which, like I said, I think he ignores.

Almost everything you said about assassins is completely wrong. The culexus DOES NOT ignore invuls, and can't even make precision shots. His gun is BS8 S5 AP1, but a 3++ re-rolling 1s is a 77.8% chance to save, meaning that a screamer takes 1 unsaved wound for every 4.5 dealt, requiring 9 wounds to kill a single screamer. The bigger issue for the star is that all the culexus has to do is get within 12" of the unit to shut down any powers affecting them.

As one of the very few people actually still playing a Screamerstar-focused list at large tournaments, here's a general overview of my opinion of where we stand and our current problems:

First, it's important to clarify what we're talking about--essentially any list where the Screamerstar is the primary focus of the army. In many lists (like Nick's) the Screamerstar more often ends up just being an unassaible location to hide your Grimoire and generate some Warp Charge, plus some mid/late game backfield skirmishing. His list is obviously focused around the Drones, not the Screamers.

Screamerstar lists certainly can function in the current meta, it's just that the margin for error is getting smaller and smaller. Wolfstars are a big problem for us, and they're getting more and more common right now. Superheavies are also an issue, but mostly only in events that allow multiple Wraithknights--Imperial Knights are easier to deal with and can be blocked by summoned garbage. At ATC, I beat both a 3-Knight and 5-Knight list; in comparison, while practicing for ATC, I went probably 0-8 against the 3-4 WK lists that we were testing.

The biggest problem we face currently isn't even necessarily for the Screamerstar itself--it's for the second-line "extra thing" that is in any Screamerstar list, usually some means of offensive add-on to kill the things that the Screamerstar isn't good against. Once you drop in Fateweaver, Fateweaver's Obligatory Fortification, the Screamers, 2-3 Heralds, and some Horrors, you usually have 400-500 points left to work with; not enough for another all-out star like the mixed-star lists, but enough to add something to cover some holes.

Around a year ago, you could get by with this just being Be'lakor, or a similar 355-point Prince from either CD (better powers) or CSM (Black Mace). That also meant you could spend more points on Warp Charge--it's been at least a year since I was able to run a 4-Herald, 20+ Warp Charge Screamerstar. The wider acceptance of Superheavies mostly brought an end to that, as Be'lakor isn't something you can generally risk in combat against them. Going forward, Be'lakor was mostly relegated to protecting the new "extra thing" with Invisisibility.

For a while afterward (up to Adepticon), I went with cheap complimentary pieces--for me this was a Maulerfiend (as an anti-Imperial Knight missile) and a gimmick Kasyr Lutien summoning Rhino. Screamerstar isn't really a summoning army (you need most of your dice for offense in the psychic phase, or you won't be doing much offense at all) but having the Rhino there for cheap summons when I needed them was really handy, as was the addition of two mobile ObSec units (a luxury we never have). The new Eldar book quickly ended that--a Maulerfiend is fine against an Imperial Knight (comparative to their costs), but he's practically useless against a Wraithknight.

The next choice was a D-Thirster; if you can keep him alive until I1 (usually via some combination of Invis and/or Grimoire), he'll eat any Superheavy or Gargantuan in the game. He's also enough to ward off a lot of Wolfstars, since they can easily lose important models if he gets ahold of them. That was more or less the gist of my list for NOVA--Fateweaver, Be'lakor, D-Thirster, Screamerstar.

The core problem I came away with is that Be'lakor just isn't pulling his weight anymore; everything in the game is so offensive at this point, that even Be'lakor--an FMC with guaranteed 2+ Jink--was having problems staying alive, even while his only real duty on the battlefield was casting Invis on a D-Thirster. Over the course of the tournament, all he ever got to kill in combat was 5 Marines, and there weren't too many memorable Psychic Shrieks (due to a frequent need to fly off the table) either. Meanwhile, he tends to be in near-constant danger of Perilsing himself to death if he takes an unfortunate wound or two from ground fire. I was essentially paying 675 points (Be'lakor + Cultists + D-Thirster) for the mere chance of trying to get my D-Thirster into combat alive, and it's a bit absurd when you look at it that way.

By comparison, the Screamerstar itself was doing fine--but it has blind spots (unlike something like a Wolfstar that just rampages over whatever it touches and Hit and Runs from the few things it can't) and the things that cover those blind spots aren't keeping up anymore. There's a weird amount of talk about Culexus Assassins in this thread--a Culexus is a speedbump for a Screamerstar, bordering on irrelevant. I have genuinely never had my Screamerstar affected by a Culexus in a meaningful way. You would have to have an absurd amount of shooting lined up for the drop from 2+ re-roll to 3+ re-rolling 1's to be meaningful. There certainly are armies built with that concept in mind (Drop Pod Culexus + overwhelming firepower), but all the ones I've seen lately are built towards gut-shotting Psychic Wolfstars with Grav Cents, which we couldn't care less about.

So my current standard-Screamerstar is definitely still a functional list, it's just becoming a little too rock/paper/scissor-y for my liking. My current goal is to build a list without Be'lakor (or at least a list that doesn't rely on him defensively) since I feel he's the current weak point; but that also means no units that require his protection. In theory, that likely means things like Tzeentch FMCs (which would push towards a more summoning heavy list) or Flesh Hounds (as they have the raw wounds and attacks to deal with a lot of things the Screamers can't), but I haven't decided on anything specific yet.

Are there other places where you think you might supplement that offensive punch? CSM have nice Forgeworld tools in things like Rapier Laser Batteries, Blight Drones/Hell Blades/Heldrakes are solid flyers, and KDK have Houndstars with nasty characters in them as well.

I have been on the receiving end of the buffed D-Thirster (piloted by Pajama Pants himself, no less), and I know how much it hurts. But I was playing Necrons, an army with no Superheavies. I think MCs in general, even our fancy Princes, are more of a liability than a boost.

I was actually thinking of just making the primary army CSM or KDK instead of CD, since if we're skipping Fateweaver, you just need the one slot of Heralds and Screamers and then can ignore the Warp Storm table in lieu of having more support from the other Codex you use.

KDK is probably the best of the options to play the way you're describing.

The problem isn't necessarily finding offense--Daemons are great at offense--but finding offense that's any good against the things the Screamerstar isn't.

KDK can partially sidestep the issue by being a really great tarpit against the things you can't kill, up to and including superheavies unless Stomp just goes nuts. A lot of people were really impressed by the MSU Hound army that made top tables at NOVA.

When I ran Screamerstar (this was back in 6ed mind you) I had forgone the traditional conjuration witchfire route and actually went heavy melee by giving my heralds a greater and lesser reward so that they had a Greater Atherblade and a Staff of Change, and also took greater locus of change to help increase the unit's strength.

This was very effective. With that melee weapon loadout on a disc herald it meant they had 4 attacks at either S4 ap2 or S5 ap4 which I could. With 3 heralds like this it gave me 12 high quality attacks in addition to the screamers attacks plus they were usually support by prescience as well. It made this unit a very powerful force in combat being able to fight their way out of most units very quickly. I lot of the times i just spread out and multi charged a ton of units because i could kill them that fast.

The only real weakness they had was fighting MCs because their high toughness made it hard to cause wounds reliable so would tie up the screamerstar for a while. This is where the Locus of Change came in. by making the units Str a d6 it gave my the chance of actually getting the high strength to quickly get out of combat with MCs. With a roll of 4+ combined with Greater Atherblade's +1S and ap2 my heralds and screamers had a good chance of killing the MCs they made contact with. And if I did roll a low strength it usually wasn't that bad because the heralds had increased strength from their melee weapons and screamers could just use lamprey bite and ignore their newly gained low strength.

I stopped playing screamerstar in 7ed though namely because of how easy it was to not get the increased invul psy power off. Since you can only cast a power once per unit, at best you had two attempts to get screamer star off (forwarning and cursed earth) but its fairly common to not get both of these powers so were stuck with one attempt. That attempt to cast is now less reliable (70-80% instead of the 90% from 6ed) unless you dump a ton of dice and increase the odds of perils and killing off your 2W heralds. And with the new dispel system it was also match up dependent for if you ran into another psyker heavy army they easily could stack their warp dice to dispel you one or two psy attempts to get to 2++. This combined with the already existing reliability issues (such as passing grimoire's 3+) made getting the 2++ rerollable not a reliable strategy anymore. Now sure 3++ rr 1s is quite durable in its own right but screamerstar is a huge points investment and the current meta is much more volatile. That small gap in the screamerstar's defense can easily get it crippled in a single turn making your huge points investment a waste.

I too think the Screamerstar is still viable. Actually, I think its relative position to the Dronestar has gotten better. The Wolfstar is nigh impossible to kill by attacking, but the Screamerstar can choose where and to some extent when the battle will take place and with 2++ re-rollable is more resilient the Drones can ever hope to be. If you can get Endurance or Invisibility as well, you shouldn't be dying soon. With the Doomstone, you can at least hope to kill any Iron Priests and Cyberwolves given enough time. The WK turning into a GC negated some of the Dronestars biggest benefits against it, amely poison and instant death. Also, the Dronestar has to be very careful vs BC SM to not get tank shocked, whereas the Screamerstar can destroy the AV11 transports at range with S6 flickering fire. Also agree on the Culexus not being a hard counter. Most problematic things in my experience have bee the Seer Council and difficult to avoid alpha strikes, e.g. the infiltrate trait for Eldar or Flyrants

Very interested to hear what DJ3 can cook up for the future. The new Tau are only a couple of weeks away as well.

Requizen wrote:
Are there other places where you think you might supplement that offensive punch? CSM have nice Forgeworld tools in things like Rapier Laser Batteries, Blight Drones/Hell Blades/Heldrakes are solid flyers, and KDK have Houndstars with nasty characters in them as well.

I have been on the receiving end of the buffed D-Thirster (piloted by Pajama Pants himself, no less), and I know how much it hurts. But I was playing Necrons, an army with no Superheavies. I think MCs in general, even our fancy Princes, are more of a liability than a boost.

I was actually thinking of just making the primary army CSM or KDK instead of CD, since if we're skipping Fateweaver, you just need the one slot of Heralds and Screamers and then can ignore the Warp Storm table in lieu of having more support from the other Codex you use.

The problem with dropping Fateweaver is losing the Grimoire reroll and that just hurts way too much for a Screamerstar. Even if you can get 2+ rerollable jink thats still not gonna save you from Wolfstars or some hard hitting Tau lists.

I think that using a chaos knight (Khorne is probably the best kind) solves a lot of problems that Screamerstar has (with the exception of a wraithknight, since it's still I5).

But you can grim that thing down to a 3++ just like any other Daemon, and it could get a 2++ if you cursed earth it. For a knight that is already tough enough to kill, that's pretty crazy. Or give it whatever other defensive buff floats your boat.

When you grim/cursed earth a knight, does that add 2/1 to its ion shield save as well?

So the old screamerstar is dead, it just cannot function in 7th. Here is what it was.

4 heralds in a unit of tons of screamers.
1 herald had the banner of +1 to spell power, another with grimoire. All were ML3 and had flickering fire+divination.

The unit got prescience from one herald, and hopefully one got the +4 invul save spell (I think it was whole unit back then?) So now the whole unit has a ++2 rerolling 1s. The offensive part, not just the screamers with their nasty attacks, was the 4x 4D6 S6 ap4 shots that the unit spit out. Old spell phase made it really easy to drop 3 charges on flickering fire.
Oh, one of the heralds probably also got the ignores cover spell. You had 8 rolls on divination after all.

So anything sub meq was straight vaporized under the weight of flickering fire. There goes your conscript blob, ork horde, or anything that could tarpit this unit.


These days, you get your unit of screamers, 1 herald, girmoire, and either divination or malefic. Cursed earth woud be sweet. Then you dash around, avoiding tarpits, sweep attacking stuff, and eating vehicles and elite infantry.

I have used screamerstars at the national GT level and have done quite well for myself.

Screamerstar is good, because barring wraithknights, if they get their combo off they are unkillable, which is easy to do if you build your list properly. Unlike the old screamerstar which used 4 heralds and used a ton of psychic shooting and acted as a powerhouse, the new screamerstar is used almost exclusively for buffing and board control, meaning it should be as cheap as possible.

I like 8 screamers, 2 tzeralds, and fateweaver.

Do not expect them to kill much. Use them to capture hotly contested objectives, lock up multiple enemy units/threats, and use them to set up other units for victory. I generally like locking them in combat near the center of the board, which with summoning gives a ton of board control and range to important units when required.


The trick is setting up the rest of the list to do damage, they are the anvil to a hammer, like say, 20 fleshhounds.

I don't think Screamers should be used as a real starlike unit anymore. They are more like a mini-star. Their toughness (2++ Inv rerolled) can be used to tie-up anoying death stars. Their mobility can be used to block an entire line of enemy forces in their deployment zone or to summon Daemons right at the frontline. They have anti-armor and anti-light infantry damage output in a pinch, and a nice fly-over attack to boot. They are ideal as a harassment type unit as such. But their damageoutput is not enough for them to be used as a true deathstar. Overinvesting in the Screamers to make a real star can increase vulnerability to things like Stomp attacks.

I use them like this in my most recent competitive list:

300 Fateweaver
150 HoT, ML3, Disc, ER (Grimnoire)
108 12 Pink Horrors
45 3 Nurglings
200 8 Screamers
176 11 Flesh Hounds
525 Kytan
125 Sorcerer, ML3, SF
50 10 Cultists
170 Heldrake

1849 points, 12 ML's

The Screamers supplement the rest in terms of spead and diversity of threats. In a recent game vs. a Demi-Company they cleaned up 2.5 Rhino's in one assault phase and in a game vs. Eldar Scatbikes&Co. they tied up a Wraithknight for 3 turns allowing me to deal with the rest of the list in the meantime. To me the Screamers excell in these situations. Basically you want them to create some havoc more than to be a true deathstar.

Cilithan

 Cilithan wrote:
I don't think Screamers should be used as a real starlike unit anymore. They are more like a mini-star. Their toughness (2++ Inv rerolled) can be used to tie-up anoying death stars. Their mobility can be used to block an entire line of enemy forces in their deployment zone or to summon Daemons right at the frontline. They have anti-armor and anti-light infantry damage output in a pinch, and a nice fly-over attack to boot. They are ideal as a harassment type unit as such. But their damageoutput is not enough for them to be used as a true deathstar. Overinvesting in the Screamers to make a real star can increase vulnerability to things like Stomp attacks.

I use them like this in my most recent competitive list:

300 Fateweaver
150 HoT, ML3, Disc, ER (Grimnoire)
108 12 Pink Horrors
45 3 Nurglings
200 8 Screamers
176 11 Flesh Hounds
525 Kytan
125 Sorcerer, ML3, SF
50 10 Cultists
170 Heldrake

1849 points, 12 ML's

The Screamers supplement the rest in terms of spead and diversity of threats. In a recent game vs. a Demi-Company they cleaned up 2.5 Rhino's in one assault phase and in a game vs. Eldar Scatbikes&Co. they tied up a Wraithknight for 3 turns allowing me to deal with the rest of the list in the meantime. To me the Screamers excell in these situations. Basically you want them to create some havoc more than to be a true deathstar.

Cilithan

While I agree with your assessment of the ScreamerStar(lite?)'s role, I still find the second Herald to be hard to part with. You really need the rerollable 2++ for them to achieve their intended use and the extra Herald pretty much insures you'll get Cursed Earth between up to 6 rolls on Malefic from the Heralds and an additional 2 from Fateweaver as well as providing some additional Psychic oomph which really makes Daemons work. I also think a Khorne Marked regular Knight is going to be more cost effective than the Kytan.

On that note, and assuming the Chaos Knights stay relatively unchanged, what would you add to this core to flesh it out to a competitive 1850 list?

Fateweaver
Tz'erald: ML3, Disc, Grimoire
Tz'erald: ML3, Disc

11x Horrors
3x Nurglings

8x Screamers

Chaos Knight Errant: Khorne, Dirge Caster

VSG w/ 3 Shields

Comes to 1439, so 410 pts to spare.

Be'Lakor? Always nice to have invis, but his shortcomings as a 350 pt upgrade to other units has already been noted.

Lots of Hounds? Could work, but I see them coming up short against Jetbikes they can't catch as well as White Scars and Ravenwing HnR'ing them to death, while not have great damage output against said units.

Another 8 screamers + 200 points of what? Sceramers and Hounds?

Tzeentch DP? Well there's all the problems inherent to DPs nowadays.

Anything from Renegades and Heretics that could perform? As much artillery as possible screened by the Screamers and Knight might work as long as the artillery is cost effective.

There's also the fact that 12 starting WCs feels a bit light so maybe more psykers are in order.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Ok, I just made a brief foray into the Renegades stuff and came up with this to flesh out the core list:

HQ
Renegade Command Squad (55)
-Arch Demaogue w/ Covenant of Tzeentch
-4x Desciples

Troops
Renegade Vets (35)
-5 Vets w/ Shotguns

Renegade Vets (35)
-5 Vets w/ Shotguns

Heavy Support
Renegade Field Artillery Battery (100)
3x Heavy Quad Launcher
9x Renegade Crew
-Militia Training (+1 BS)

Renegade Field Artillery Battery (100)
3x Heavy Quad Launcher
9x Renegade Crew
-Militia Training (+1 BS)

Renegade Rapier Laser Destroyer Battery (79)
3x Rapier Laser Destroyers
6x Crew
-Militia Training (+1 BS)

Each Field Artillery unit consists of 15 T7 Wounds and puts out 12 S5 AP5 small blasts w/ Barrage special rule.

Rapier Destroyer Battery consists of 9 T7 Wounds and fires 3 TL S9 AP1 Ordnance shots. Demagogue goes here and allows them to snapfire at BS2.

What do you think? ScreamerStar and Knight handle buffs and board control while the ragtag militia blasts away. Not really sure what to do to make the Vets and Command Squad less useless, but it would definitely be fun to have a shooting phase for once. Could it work?

 greyknight12 wrote:

 vercingatorix wrote:
I think assasins ignore invuls? Could be wrong. Either way, a culexus can drop in shoot about 9 times, after hits and wounds, the opponent then puts 5 wounds on a model of his choice. So he puts it on the grimoire herald who only has a 5+, which, like I said, I think he ignores.

Almost everything you said about assassins is completely wrong. The culexus DOES NOT ignore invuls, and can't even make precision shots. His gun is BS8 S5 AP1, but a 3++ re-rolling 1s is a 77.8% chance to save, meaning that a screamer takes 1 unsaved wound for every 4.5 dealt, requiring 9 wounds to kill a single screamer. The bigger issue for the star is that all the culexus has to do is get within 12" of the unit to shut down any powers affecting them.

My apologies. I seem to have combined the culexus and the vindicare assassin in my head. That's what I get for not looking things up before commenting.

So, what I should have said was that you really should be scared of the vindicare as a screamerstar player. He can allocate D3 wounds to a character of his choice and probably kill you on turn one or shoot one ignore cover, ignore invul, precision shot a round into your grimoire character and almost definitely kill it in two turns.

For all the reasons that my less than happy fellow commenter put forth, the culexus usually isn't that scary, unless you're tied up in combat with something really nasty and you need a 2+ re-rollable to survive.

I use screamerstar to buff my allied orks by misfortuning things that orks simply don't have the ability to kill. I also use it as a guaranteed forward field objective grabber. They can hang out in your deployment zone for the first two turns of the game before making their move. They move then turbo-boost over to some tac squad, rhino, grots, jet bikes, *insert crummy troop choice* and with psychic shooting and assault can usually remove them in turn and claim it at the end of the game.

I'm curious how people find them as a summoning base? I tend to leave my opponent only incredibly difficult targets to shoot at, buffed screamers, flying fateweaver with cursed earth, 70 or 80 orks with a 3+ FnP. So whenever I summon a unit, for the most part my opponent is thinking "Oh good, something that I can finally shoot!" and they blow them off the table. Maybe that's something that is unique for my army but I'm having trouble finding use for summoned units that have to spend a very vulnerable turn before being able to assault.