Dalymiddleboro wrote:
Daemon prince Nurgle with sword
Daemon prince Nurgle with axe
Great unclean one
Herald of Nurgle
Epidemius
Troops :
30 plague bearers
30 plague bearers
5 nurglings
5 nurglings
6 nurglings
Fast attack :
9 plague drones
* Can you convert your princes to use claws? They are simply better.
* Can you put wings on those?
* Consider a
DG prince for your warlord. The 4++ DR and 2+ armor save is pretty sweet. If you are running scabby, you can make him your warlord to really make it hard for your opponent to get 'slay the warlord'.
* Personally I like 7 nurglings. It's Nurgle's magic number
* You can leave the herald at home. They are really lackluster. Epi is just better for the points.
* Can you get some poxwalkers and use them as Malific Lords? They are the secret sauce that makes Nurgle armies work well.
* Plague Drones are about to get a LOT better.
* If your
GUO is a
FW model, you can use it as Scabby, the named
GUO. He is boss. Even a normal
GUO is not bad.
* Basically you lack any damage output at all right now. You need some way to hit your opponents.
GUOs, Scabby, Princes, Malific Lords are great ways to do this.
Takeaways from a Recent RTT
* The malific lords really do combo well with this Nurgle -- they are the grease on the wheels. When people stick flyers or Magnus in my face, it get's smited down. They don't have good range, so they are not good for long range damage. They are almost more of a defensive bonus to the units -- which they do very well. 6 mortal wounds of damage a turn standing in the middle of 30 plaguebearers is a big "stay away" sign. I don't suggest bringing 15 of them. 6 is about the magic number I think -- with maybe 8 on the high end. They are really good, but lost effectiveness because of the lack of range. I used poxwalkers models to represent mine.
* The stacking of -1 to hit in the fight phase between scaggy and the plaguebearers is bonkers good. It halves the damage output of knights doing the 'river dance' move.
On the same subject, the plauge bearers were again boss. In my third game, my opponent spent 3 full rounds shooting at one squad to not even completely kill it. Only in the first game did they take enough damage to lose one squad. 30 plaguebearers are just dead hard to remove at this point in 8th edition.
* I'm going to drop the plague drones and prince and pick up some bloat-drones from the starter boxed set. I'm just not 100% happy with the plague drones and they felt slightly out of place. I might replace them with some death guard with the codex comes out.
* I'll probably also drop the herald and upgrade to Epidemius. I kill enough crap in games to rack up the bonus' when things get close. In the past 6 games I've played, there has only been one fight (against knights) that the +1
STR has been worthwhile. In every other case it's not worth it. Epi is 30 more points and a lot harder to kill.
* The list does not score max game every game in Nova format -- it's not possible given the Butchers Bill. It does well, as evidence by me pulling 2 victories against national level players. However, it won't win first place at a
GT anytime soon - mostly because of the lack of ability to rack up the butcher's bill vs shooty armies, and that the only secondary you can guarantee is "Heart of the Matter" .
Likewise it's also really hard to pick secondary's against it, and to rack up 'Butchers Bill'. Linebreaker seems great, but often things just sit back and avoid me. Titanslayer is another red herring. Scaggy takes 1/3 of a wound per
LC shot. (I can go into the deep math if you really want) Cull the herds is another red herring. You are NOT going to be killing 60 plaguebearers.
If you want to play a game where you sit on objectives, throw a party and invite your opponent to come join - it's a great list.
I personally think it's a hell of a lot of fun -- but everyone's mileage my vary.
* Scaggy is an absolute beast. He strugs of lascannon shots (each one does 1/3 of a wound per shot on average). He absolutely destroyed anything he touched. In the
RTT and the two practice games before - he was the complete MVP. His ability to one shots knights is fantastic. When buffed with Virulent Blessing, on 'to wound' rolls of a 6, he is doing 12 damage -- which is simply silly overkill. in one round I did 36 wounds to a fortification. The damage output is just silly. This is good because it gives board control. You stick scaggy in the middle of the board, and you have a threat area with a radius of 14" where you basically kill anything that get's near.
* Scabeiathrax (from another post)
I ran 'Scabby' for the first time tonight. Holy crap, he was good.
My opponent was a
DE gun line with 4 flyers, 3 ravagers, 2 raiders and 2 venoms. That is not what I was wanting to play against :\
Scabby is T9, which means that the dark lances were wounding on a 5+. He took a few hits from the dark lances, but overall weathered multiple rounds of shooting without dying. The biggest weapons against him were the poisoned weapons (duh). Even still, a 4++, DR, and 6+ warlord trait ment he took a staggering amount of damage, and still was only dropped to 4 wounds left.
Every round Scabby healed himself D3 wounds, so over the course of 5 turns he healed himself up ~10 points. This makes him even harder to kill.
Against my
DE opponent, Scabby did not have many targets. He did some mortal wounds to a flyer and then threw up on it. His biggest role was just soaking up tons of fire.
* The nurglings seemed to do better holding backfield objectives than rushing forward. In the third game I stuck them on an objective and it worked out great. I think I'll keep them in that role moving forward. They are only 5 points per wound. If you run the math, for backfield objectives they are cheaper than poxwalkers. When the
DG codex comes out, they drop to 4.5 points per wound -- really tight.
* Plague drones plus the Virulent Blessing still work out very well. When I assaulted a storm raven, He had to make 9 saves that were doing 4 damage each. That completely wrecked the raven. The blessing just compounds so well with damage of 2 or more -- since the total damage is doubled. Plague drones are about to get a very tasty boost.
I've been playing a LOT of Nurgle this edition thus far. I'll share my 2 cents....
GUOs
If you have two models, go with them.
GUOs are excellent for their points. They do die to massive lascannon fire, but I've had them completely wreck face multiple times. If I owned two, I would likely be running two.
My only worry with running 2
GUOs is that only one can heal per turn in matched play. In one game, I healed a single
GUO for 10 wounds during the game. When you are splitting that out, it's not quite as awesome.
I've ran a renegade knight with my
GUO in the past to good effect. This weekend I'm going to try Scabeiathrax the Blighted.
Plague Drones
Plague drones are fantastic units and one of the most under-appreciated units in the codex. Their value is not immediately visible on the statline, but becomes much greater in the game.
They benefit greatly from a prince flying in the middle of them. He gives them extra punch, and he also increases their chances of hitting.
Virulent Blessing is fantastic on Plauge Drones. It increases their damage output to 2/4. To make it even better, the reroll is applied before the +1. This means if they are attacking a rhino, for example, and you score 18 hits (not unreasonable rerolling 1s) you have a distribution like this. Your first set of rolls will produce 3 six's, 3 fives and then the rest will be failed rolls. You pick up those 12 dice and reroll them. Out of these, you get 2 more six's, 2 fives, and 2 fours. This means you got a total of 5 six's, 5 fives, and 2 fours. 5 of the wounds will cause four damage, and 7 of them will cause 2. When hitting something like a rhino, those five wounds are nasty.
Plague drones also have a large base, making them great for blocking in movement. I've used them to trap models from getting to objectives multiple times. Since they can fly, they ignore enemy models for movement, meaning you can charge a unit, and proceed fly over them and block their movement as part of your assault.
Plague drones have assault guns, so can shoot them after advancing.
Plague drones can fly, meaning they can leave combat and shoot their guns when needed -- which I have done.
Run your plague drones in units of 7. It makes Nurgle happy.
I run one unit. I've found that to meet my needs for the drones well. I might switch to 2 units now.
Nurglings
3 stands of nurglings is just begging to have first blood taken from you. Personally I would not run this -- but your mileage may vary.
I run a squad of 7 of them in my army. Again -- Nurgle's magic number.
I used to use them to put heavy pressure on enemy units, but now I've been using them to place just outside my army's deployment zone to be in range of the herald and to stop deep striking alpha strikes.
A squad of 7 of them is much harder for someone to kill in a single turn.
Plaguebearers
Keep them at 30. Add an instrument. They are great units for holding objectives. In one game I had them strung along to grab 3 objectives, since units are not limited in this edition to only owning one objective.
Again, it's one of those units that can do more than they do on paper. I've had two cases where a big assault creature (hive tyrant and
DP) assaulted my plaguebearers only to get killed on my turn in the assault. Plaguebearers are weak against units that can deliver a ton of attacks, such as bezerkers, but against units that hit a few times really hard (like a
DP) they are hard as nails. This is because a unit that has, say 5 attacks that are
STR 8 and d3 wounds at -3 rend, hitting on a 2+ is really scary -- but not that bad for plaguebearers. (2/3 will hit) * (5/6 will wound) * (2/3 failed save) * (7/9 failed DR) = 140/486 = 28.8% of a dead
PG per swing, or between 1 and 2 dead
PGs per assault phase. When there are 30 to kill, that will take all game to clear out. Yes, I did some rough estimates on the math but you get the idea.
Yes, I've had an entire squad of 30 plaguebearers killed in a single round of shooting -- but this happened with my opponent spending his entire army shooting at them with a Tau shooting army. That has only happened once.
My Own Experience
This is just my own experience. You may have had vastly different experiences. For example, I've found soulgrinders to be really lackluster -- though people like
S.e.r.a.p.h.i.m have had great luck with them. Basically it means that everyone finds what works for them
