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I play Black Legion and have been taking 2 squads of 40 cultists for some time now. Starting to wonder if a Khorne Daemon Detachment with Bloodletters is the better option.

With the Cultists - I set them up on the board, advance, and eventually use Tide of Traitors to grab objectives / return to full strength. They're reliable, and (late game) it's almost always impossible to remove them from objectives. The downside is they need to be 6 inches from the side of the table, and it's often hard to get them within distance of a reroll aura (which is pretty important when you are playing Black Legion.)

With the Bloodletters - I use Denizens of the Warp to set them up anywhere on the board, they arrive, they charge, and (most often) they get into combat. They get an extra attack for charging and the same any time they are charged. The AP -3 Hellblade is great at clearing just about any kind of unit on the board, especially when they roll some 6s for extra attacks. The downsides are that they don't regenerate and once they are on the board, they are footslogging.

So it's a trade off between offense and strategy. The Cultists let me flood a portion of the table whenever I feel like it, the Bloodletters let me clear a potion of the table early in the game. There's not enough command points in a game to let me get the most out of both.

Normally, I wouldn't consider a soup list, but the Bloodletters are just so rough on opponents. In a game against Deathguard, my Bloodletters came in to eat a unit of Blightlord Terminators, a PBC, a couple Plague Drones, and one of the new HQs in one turn. In a game against Imperial Soup, they ate 50 or so Guardsmen before tearing through a tank column without really loosing any models.

Wondering how other people would make this call. Cultists or Bloodletters? Why?

I also play black legion. My go to list so far has been

Battalion
Abby
Sorc.
As many cultists that fit.
5-8 Plasma Termies
3x Oblits

patrol
Khorne DP with skull reaver

30x Bloodletters with all the fixins

It has worked incredibly well. Typically I use the cultist blobs to just hold the midboard. I hold 2 CP as long as I can so I can threaten tide of traitors, but I usually end up spending it elsewhere.

Bloodletters are absolute monsters when they drop. You have to be very careful with how you use them because they are incredibly fragile and get focus fired quickly. I tend to hold them until the cultists have dealt with any chaff so I can get into the gooey center of his lines.

Cultists are way more tactical and have a bunch of good strategems.

If you are playing a competent opponent who bubble wraps you will rarely charge blightlord terminators. If you are playing casual you can run whatever - if you are running BL at decent strength you will have to accept the 4-6 CP sink and the fact that after they charge once they will be mince.

There is a place for both units but to be able to charge with one unit of letters 4 times is a sign of ineptitude by your opponent.

orkswubwub wrote:
If you are playing a competent opponent who bubble wraps you will rarely charge blightlord terminators. If you are playing casual you can run whatever - if you are running BL at decent strength you will have to accept the 4-6 CP sink and the fact that after they charge once they will be mince.

There is a place for both units but to be able to charge with one unit of letters 4 times is a sign of ineptitude by your opponent.

I have to agree with this. I have never faced an opponent that allowed me to charge more than once. You absolutely must get them into multiple units and deal your damage quickly because you are lucky if they last longer than 1 turn.

You dont have to sink a lot of CP into them though. 3 CP to drop them and give the 3d6 charge is IMO the best way to do it. They kill anything they touch and spending CP to just make them kill harder usually feels wasted to me. BL can very easily have 9 CP to work with and if you dont care about blobbing your cultists up you can push that to 12 CP if you really want to.

Is it uber competitive? Probably not, but it certainly is good enough to not get rolled by most competently built lists.

Yeah, BLs are frail. Finding the best way to use them is max-sized lists, where there are enough bodies to survive a turn of shooting (maybe charge with 10 - 15 the turn after.)

As far as unit placement goes, feels like the trick is to get them to arrive early, while things are still bunched up for your opponent. Can't imagine that's much different for a competitive game.

Model-wise, you should get Beastmen Gors, paint them red and BAM! You have Bloodletters that could also be models as mutated cultists

Edit. Wrong thread. Sorry