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Hello and I am a noob building my army. Noob question, do Plague Marine Champions have to have a claw and a sword? All of the models that I have seen have that load out. Or can I just take a Plague Marine with a plasma gun and call him my champion?

Plague Marine Champions have a wide range of weaponry available to them, including the Plasma Gun.

All of this stuff is covered in the relevant codex, either Codex Death Guard or Codex Chaos Space Marines.

The models are sold with those weapons, but you do not have to purchase them, or use that model as your champion. Pick the gear you want, and use a model that works. Some people like the model to be armed exactly as you bought him (I happen to like that but my group never insists if you're trying things out etc). So yes, buy a plasma gun for him, and just use a guy with a plasma gun. Remember rule #1 is to have fun with the game and enjoy what you're doing. So try him out with different gear in different games, as listed under his costs. I use a squad of plague marines with 2 plasma gunners and the champion with a plasma gun often.

WYSIWYG is no longer an official rule in the book, but something that I like to do anyway purely from an aesthetic point of view.

Plague Marine Champions don't have to have any gear at all. you can leave them with a standard Boltgun if you really wanted to.
Options are to replace Plague Knife with a Plague Sword
Give him a Power fist (does not replace anything and can be taken with a Plague Sword)
You can replace his Boltgun with a Bolt Pistol or Plasma Pistol or Plasma Gun (combos great with Inexorable Advance!)

The Easy to build and Dark Imperium Plague Champions have prebuilt loadouts as you see them, but you can always build you own with the above gear from either a Plague Marine box or Chaos Space Marine box if you wanted to go down that route.

It should be noted that since an FAQ plague champions also got access to the options from the index: power weapons and Combi-weapons are available to them again.

Just in case you weren't aware the Easy to Build Champion has a Plasma Gun on his back pack. If you buy two boxes you can get a squad of five with two blight launchers and easily clip off the extra champions gun for your Dark Imperium guy (I went for three boxes and a squad of seven).

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
It should be noted that since an FAQ plague champions also got access to the options from the index: power weapons and Combi-weapons are available to them again.

Really? I missed this one. Which FAQ is it in?

 NurglesR0T wrote:

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
It should be noted that since an FAQ plague champions also got access to the options from the index: power weapons and Combi-weapons are available to them again.

Really? I missed this one. Which FAQ is it in?

This one-

Oh, you mean the Index data sheet. I thought you meant they FAQ'd the codex to be able to take additional gear.

I don't know why anyone would ever use the Index Plague Marine entry.. You lose so much gear just to add a power sword to a champion?

 NurglesR0T wrote:
Oh, you mean the Index data sheet. I thought you meant they FAQ'd the codex to be able to take additional gear.

I don't know why anyone would ever use the Index Plague Marine entry.. You lose so much gear just to add a power sword to a champion?

Read the pic I linked, you can absolutely use the codex datasheet and the champ can take options from the index. It's right there.

 NurglesR0T wrote:
Oh, you mean the Index data sheet. I thought you meant they FAQ'd the codex to be able to take additional gear.

I don't know why anyone would ever use the Index Plague Marine entry.. You lose so much gear just to add a power sword to a champion?

You don't use index entry. You use options not available in codex from index. Ie you take codex entry and go "hmm this has no power sword". Then you check index and "hey here you have it!". Thus you use the power sword but for cost if codex has you use codex price.

Dai wrote:
Just in case you weren't aware the Easy to Build Champion has a Plasma Gun on his back pack. If you buy two boxes you can get a squad of five with two blight launchers and easily clip off the extra champions gun for your Dark Imperium guy (I went for three boxes and a squad of seven).

This. I used the squad from dark imperium but replaced the champion with the champion from the easy to build kit, (going to use the replaced champion as a chaos lord) as well as replacing a bolter dude with the blight launcher from the easy build kit. (The replaced bolter guy was used for paint scheme testing because his pose was too similar to the plasma guy in my opinion.)
This gave me a squad of:
Champion with plasma rifle and power first
Plasma rifle dude
Blight launcher dude
5 bolter guys

All unique poses for about $35