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I've just started Necrons for the recent campaign, seeing as I happened to have a bunch of unassembled stuff stockpiled, and I thought it would be fun to do up legions of soulless automota. However, my one friend, and most frequent opponent, is playing a rather gimmicky Nurgle Daemon list that he's been picking away at since 7th ed. He tends to run at least one 30-strong unit of plaguebearers, and plans to get at least one or two more such units to run in pretty much every game. He also tends to go heavy on the plague drones to make up for the lack of mobility.

The plaguebearers take up too large a footprint on the field to simply ignore, not to mention their poison attacks have been quite brutal. And... well...

I've been trying to work out the math, and it seems simply IMPOSSIBLE to get rid of even one unit of 30 plaguebearers over the course of six turns with my entire army, let alone in a turn or two with only part of my forces. Each gauss flayer shot from my warriors has less than a 15% chance to drop a plaguebearer, assuming I'm rolling at a 3+ to hit (and it drops to a measly 11% when I count in the penalty to hit), meaning I'll need about 7-9 shots to EACH individual enemy model to reliably drop it. So even under the best of circumstances, warriors are just out of the question for dealing with this, and I've been trying to come up with alternative strategies:

- Drop a 20-strong unit of flayed ones. I heard they're poor, but they're the only things that put out the attacks-per-point to feasibly drop the plaguebearers. If by some miracle I can get MWBD to negate the to-hit penalty, and get the charge off, I -could- cut the enemy unit size by about half in a single combat, which is better than virtually anything else in my army can do. Of course, the flayed ones will cost almost twice as much as the unit they're meant to kill, and will definitely take multiple turns to do so. However, I only have my friend's hearsay on the efficacy of flayed ones, and he's a lying/wrong bastard about 80% of the time.
- Field nothing but wraiths and scarabs, and pray that there are objectives to grab while I tarpit all of his units. A 6-strong unit of wraiths is only slightly cheaper than the plaguebearers, and I'm only counting on them to simply weather the entire game locked in combat and rock that 3++. In my one game so far, a 9-strong unit of scarabs was able to tie up the plaguebearers for several rounds.
- Don't play Necrons: I have a Deathwatch army, which can put out enough shots to actually hurt the plagebearers with frag cannon spam, though they tend to keel right over under return fire. I mean, I would rather like to get some use out of my Necrons, but not if I'm guaranteed to lose every game against this opponent.

Is there anything I haven't thought of yet? Some trick someone else knows? I'm kind of out of ideas beyond this.

Tesla immortals with lord backup. On a 5 and 6 you are getting 2 extra hits. They do pretty well for themselves at removing plaguebearers. And you dont need to kill all 30, just dropping 15 in a round will cause morale loss, or forces him to burn CPs.

 Lord Commissar wrote:
Tesla immortals with lord backup. On a 5 and 6 you are getting 2 extra hits. They do pretty well for themselves at removing plaguebearers. And you dont need to kill all 30, just dropping 15 in a round will cause morale loss, or forces him to burn CPs.

An overlord, for MWBD, not TLW. But if the plague bearers have -1 to hit I'm fairly sure it goes back to proccing tesla on 6's? Either way:

Scarabs coming out the eyeballs do a lot of work. They have a lot of attacks, are cheap, and move fast
Flayed ones will clear them out, but are expensive
Tomb blades will also do this, not as effectively due to the -1, and also expensive, but give them tesla and watch him roll stupid amounts of saves.
A triarch stalker for the reroll's of 1 would also be handy if you choose to go shooty wise.