I've been straining my brain over what to support Mortarion with. At the moment the obvious setup is a sorcerer with jump pack that casts Warptime and Prescience on him for that 1st turn charge, but that just screams - and I don't know all the ins and outs of Chaos fluff so correct me if I'm wrong here - "Papa Nurgle would not approve" to me. I'm struggling to find a solid fluffy alternative though to prevent Morty from just being focus fired and killed or severy crippled before he can have an impact. At the moment my would-be setup is (I admit that I haven't playtested anything yet but I'd like to research what has a good chance of working before I spend money on more models):
- Mortarion with Miasma of Pestilence and Blades of Putrefaction to protect and buff himself.
-
DG Daemon Prince with wings, talons and Suppurating Plate to join the melee fun. Undecided on psychic power. Maybe Gift of Contagion would be nice to debuff any target before the fight phase.
- 5 Blightlord Terminators with combi-plasma together with a vanilla Nurgle lord in terminator armour with combi-plasma that deepstrike for safe 18" rapid fire overcharged plasma fire.
The things above are all models that I have in my possession already, so that would be ready for playtesting (as soon as I'm done assembling them
)
A few things that have crossed my mind:
- Deepstriking Deathshrouds to Mortarions' position after he moved turn 1 seems wasteful to me, 3 of them run about 225 points and with their abysmal mobility they will most likely be sitting ducks for the remainder of the game and 225 points for 6 ablative wounds for 1 turn is just WAY too much points.
- I also considered sending a bunch of Bloatdrones with Fleshmowers with him but I don't think those have a big enough SHOOT ME! sign on them to redirect any fire away from Mortarion. They might be nice as an offensive aide though because they'd benefit from Mortarions' toughness debuff aura and Arch-Contaminator trait as well as his reroll 1s to hit.
- I'm also considering expanding my Terminator squad to 10. Reasoning being that that puts so much plasma weaponry within rapid fire distance of my opponents valuable units (if deepstruck correctly) that he has no choice other than divert at least some firepower away from Mortarion to deal with it, hopefully leaving both Mortarion and the plasma terminators in a healthy enough state to continue having an impact.
- And finally, maybe sending a Chaos Daemon
DP with wings + talons and Fleshy Abundance could help, although he'd need to be in a separate detachment (which would also require Plaguebearer tax to not cost me
CP) which might not be worth the trouble for a D3 wound heal once per turn.
All of this would be for 1500-2000 point games by the way. Any thoughts or suggestions? Thanks!