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In my new 1500pts Necron army, I have a very shooty core with only a few decent melee units (scarabs, combat overlord, wraiths w/ whip coils). The problem with these units is that they lack serious killing power. I have a unit of deathmarks in my army which I see as being more of a suicide unit. It doesn't really complement many of my other choices well and I'm considering replacing them with flayed ones to try and shore up my army's melee weakness. What are your opinions?

Well, it really depends. How many Flayed Ones would you end up having in this list?

It depends on what your up against too. Running 20 into mass Blobguard or a green tide or any other horde is a delicious proposition, it's 100 attacks on the charge. 10 FO's work similar to deathmarks against more durable and Killy melee units. TEQ for instance won't die in large enough numbers, And when they strike back you are going to lose quite a lot of your flayed ones. So sorta like a suicide squad, though not as bad as deathmarks after their counter-strike.

There have been a few threads over stuff like this, we sort of have a trinity for close combat.

Wraiths are super fast and very durable, but don't do a lot of killing (in comparison to other cc units). They are extremely good tarpits.

ScytheGuard are super killy, but very slow. (Generally you run them as the sacrificial wound pool for your bigger Killy units in death stars but they are run with swords and boards for the 3+ inv)

Praetorians and fast and Killy, but aren't as resilient as the other two. This is comparative, as they still have their reanimate, just no invunerable or multi wound. They are our scource of mass AP2 weaponry, can shoot (with rerolling everything in the shooting phase if taken in the judicator battalion) can charge in and get extra hammer of wrath attacks and then still have AP2 in CC. Against TEQ they can be brutal.

Obviously we have more than that, Spyders, C'tan, HQ's, flayed ones, scarabs etc but these are our three standard cc units.

So it depends on what you are looking for. FO's are good en masse, I've been running 10, but my IG mate has slowly swelled his numbers to 150+ guards, so getting 10 more. I run FO's a lot, I find they scare the bejezus out of my mates, (Fear IRL works better than in game! ) I find infiltrating them in cover can cause a big enough distraction for me so my Spyder/Stalker/other important units can get up the board with relative impunity.

 krodarklorr wrote:
Well, it really depends. How many Flayed Ones would you end up having in this list?

I can bring 15.

15 is a miiiiighty fine number of Flayed Ones.
Mighty fine number, indeed...

15 is a good number. They're not as durable as Deathmarks, but they provide a very scary distraction unit, plus they can chop through things and (if they get there) overall do more damage than the Deathmarks, me thinks.

I'm unsure about that statement. Deathmarks are 6 more points for a slightly better armor save. The question then becomes if that 6 points makes a difference. For 2 Deathmarks you're getting almost 3 Flayed Ones.

Yea but they do different things. Deathmarks are more for retaliation/sniping off important targets, whereas flayed ones are more for general scaryness. In regards to the OP, proxy your deathmarks as flayed ones and try them out, see if they suit your play style

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
I'm unsure about that statement. Deathmarks are 6 more points for a slightly better armor save. The question then becomes if that 6 points makes a difference. For 2 Deathmarks you're getting almost 3 Flayed Ones.

If you're referring to my statement, then I'm talking about the armor save. The jump from a 4+ to a 3+ is massive. You may have more Flayed Ones, but you'll also lose more of them to Grenade Packs, Heavy Flamers, Heavy Bolters, Gauss Blasters, Missilesides, ext. Deathmarks getting their Armor save and then their RP is a big deal.

Granted, again, the cost does play a role. But even my 5 man squads of Deathmarks have moved around for turns, just shrugging off fire, whereas my Flayed Ones are usually dealt with quickly with the same amount of firepower.

Having just run a unit of 20 myself - I love my flayed ones now! They got charged by 8 sang guard with my opponent grinning as he did so. Thanks to the decurion, I lost 5 when he charged and the return 60 attacks killed 5 of his. Drawn combat. Second round he killed 2 more and I wiped the squad. Hilarious! The furioso dread on the other hand sucked!

Flayed ones are simple, infiltrate up, move closer, charge something juicy. Deathmarks on the other hand are much more counter tactic and strategic. I use my deathmarks as anti drop pod units. Usually the enemy will drop a melta squad near your vehicle and a well placed deathmark squad can come in when they do and shoot away their special weapons like meltas and grav cannons before they can do their damage.

Yes, but how many Deathmarks would ideally be needed to pull that off?
(what's your average melta drop pod squad consist of and how many Deathmarks would it take to stattisically have a good chance to cripple it before it can hit your vital stuff?)

Usually a ten man squad of tac Marines with combi melta and multi melta. I usually bubble wrap two Triarch stalkers with one line of warriors so when my opponent drops next to them they put the two meltas right at melta range then put as many Marines between them and the warriors. I then drop my deathmarks on the other side of them (usually at least a seven man squad) and I can consistently chew through the two or three guys that couldn't stand in front of the warriors plus the two special weapons.

It might be more anecdotal than statistical but its worked for me a few times, more than it has failed.

 Dragoon65 wrote:
Usually a ten man squad of tac Marines with combi melta and multi melta. I usually bubble wrap two Triarch stalkers with one line of warriors so when my opponent drops next to them they put the two meltas right at melta range then put as many Marines between them and the warriors. I then drop my deathmarks on the other side of them (usually at least a seven man squad) and I can consistently chew through the two or three guys that couldn't stand in front of the warriors plus the two special weapons.

It might be more anecdotal than statistical but its worked for me a few times, more than it has failed.

That right there I find is basically the point of Deathmarks. To counter deepstrikers who wish to punch/shoot a shiny new hole into our monolith/stalker/value unit, and then be basically a squad of immortals.
Flayed ones are more for turning anything from assault terminator down into fleshy ribbons, then moving onto the next squad.


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They're quite hard to compare directly.

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