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Hey guys,

I'd love to know your thoughts on the following unit. Is it worth it, or a big waste of points?

10 Deathwatch in a Drop Pod
- 4 with frag cannons
- 6 with meltaguns and special ammo bolters

They can pretty reliably blow up anything in the game, including an Imperial Knight. 6 meltaguns with re-rolling 1s to hit and re-rolling armour pens, and then the equivalent of 8 lascannons shots with the re-rolls too. Or if it's infantry you need to deal with, EIGHT strength 6 rending templates followed by 12 special ammo rounds, again with re-rolls to hit and wound. They arrive turn one, get safely to where they need to and can basically delete whatever you point them at. They can be combat squadded inside the Drop Pod to split fire between 2 units, and their overwatch (with the 4 frag cannons) is pretty insane.

BUT, they cost approximately 4 Thunderfire Cannons... Which is a lot for ten 3+ dudes.

Needless to say, they will attract a lot of enemy attention. But in an alpha-strike list running high threat-saturation and some decent board-clearing on turn 1, could they be worth it? Or is 400 points for 10 man squad just always too much? Are there other units you can think of with similar damage output?

I've never run or faced a Grav-Centurian DP, but how does the damage compare? They only cost about 3/4 the price of this unit - does the damage match up? I know there's a lot of hype around them.

If you get first turn with it you could cripple a lot of deathstars before they get their buffs off, or could pop an important vehicle, but its a lot of points for something as fragile as standard space marines.

If your enemy is remotely competant he will either reserve his fragile deathstar or bubble wrap your obvious target sufficiently that you will be outside 12" and all but immune to your firepower. The big question is - can they combat squad? The reason why suicide sternguard had so much success back in the day (and still even now against some players) was because they would come down turn 1, split into 2x 5 men units and erase 2 things. If you're putting 400 points into something, then you'd damn well better kill 400+ points of stuff because that unit is dead next turn, no two ways about it.

As for grav cents, remember that they can split fire, so that's the threat of overkilling a target gone and they ignore cover too due to either perfect timing or a white scars libby with hunters eye. You're only doing that with the frag templates.

Grav cents will generally kill a vehicle and immobilise or kill another, or if shooting at anything but daemons then expect ~10-15 AP2 ignores cover wounds needing to be saved up to 24" away.