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Hi all,

So I’ve read that Sanguinary Guard feature heavily in Blood Angel tournament lists as one of their better units.

Personally, I just don’t see what the fuss is about. I love the models and I want to use them, but I can’t see it.

They lack invulnerable saves and their damage output appears to be extremely meh unless you spend a bujillion points on expensive support characters to stack buffs, as they have neither weight of attacks nor powerful weapons. And they have no invulnerable save. Hammernators, Death Company and arguably even Vanguard Vets seem much more powerful for their points.

So my questions are:

1) Am I wrong about Sanguinary Guard? If so, what am I missing?
2) What is the best loadout for them (both in terms of the unit itself and support characters)?

Power fists are 9 points. Hammer Termies are significantly more expensive than the 32 points the SG is. SG are like discounted flying vanilla termies.

They have a high likelihood of making the charge upon deep strike. They can get +1 attack from Sanguinor or Unleash Rage. They have built in rerolls from the Warlord (make an SGA or SG your warlord). They can have a 5+++ from a relic banner, DC can’t. DC are 60% of their cost and have the durability of a tac marine. A DC with hammer costs more than an SG with fist. What’s shooting you that you miss the invuln a regular suit of termie armour would give you? Melta? Not likely. Meanwhile hammer termies give up points more quickly to small arms, heavy bolters, assault cannons, etc.

My only real problem with SG is their bolters are crappy and Shield of Sanguinius is only 5++ instead of 4++. They aren’t an amazing broken unit but BA don’t have any of those anyway.

Take the banner to give them a 5+++ and you have competative for blood angels not actually competative

Actual competive blood angels

Is 3 x scouts
2 x smash cpt or mephiston
Another army

Because if you're playing BA over another marine chapter, it's because you like death company, Sanguinary guard, baal predators, and/or fast moving melee characters.

Well, Death company and baal Preds are overpriced, which leaves SG and the characters. Good news, they just came down in price and are good to great. The SG are mobile swiss army knives and the characters are good enough for other armies to splash them in on tournament day.

Just run the SG and stop looking for reasons to hate em'.

SG dont need an inv. They have a 2+ sv, and if hit by an AP-3 weapon they still have a 5+ sv, just like a terminator has a 5+ inv. You run them with PF and angelus boltgun/plasma/inferno pistol. A sang ancient with the standard of sacrifice is the warlord. He gives a 5+ FNP. He also lets SG re-roll all failed hit rolls, which makes overcharged plasma pretty safe.

Cheers for reply.

Bremon wrote:
Power fists are 9 points. Hammer Termies are significantly more expensive than the 32 points the SG is. SG are like discounted flying vanilla termies.

Vanilla termies still aren’t great, though. I guess I’m just underwhelmed by d3 damage weapons. At least if they did flat 2 damage they would be a good anti-elite unit.

They have a high likelihood of making the charge upon deep strike.

This is an advantage over hammernators, I’ll grant you that. DC have an even better chance due to Lemartes, however. And with hammernators you are better off transporting them anyway, and if you’re doing that then you’re not suffering from problems caused by current deep strike rules.

They can get +1 attack from Sanguinor or Unleash Rage.

But that’s true with the other units as well, isn’t it?

They have built in rerolls from the Warlord (make an SGA or SG your warlord).

I do like this rule, however it relies upon support characters being in range to buff them, which is statistically less than 50% i.e. SG charge in using descent of angels and characters are now out of range to assist. There are also many other sources of re-rolls to hit in the codex which the other units can also benefit from.

They can have a 5+++ from a relic banner, DC can’t.

True, but this still relies on support characters being in range.

DC are 60% of their cost and have the durability of a tac marine. A DC with hammer costs more than an SG with fist. What’s shooting you that you miss the invuln a regular suit of termie armour would give you? Melta? Not likely. Meanwhile hammer termies give up points more quickly to small arms, heavy bolters, assault cannons, etc.

DC do a lot more damage on the charge, especially against other infantry, and don’t rely on support characters to babysit them in order to lay it down.

I’m not a fan of shooty terminators so I won’t argue on that point.

With assault termies yes you are losing more points to the “weight of dice” approach and they’re also not as mobile.

I suppose SG could be thought of as a compromise between DC and assault termies in terms of their role. More specialised for anti-elite than the former, not as devastating or protected against high AP as the latter but cheaper and more mobile. Is that a fair assessment?

I have just finished painting a full 10-man squad if SG plus an Ancient to accompany them. If rules-reasons haven't convinced you, run them because they look awesome on the tabletop.

Behold the Golden Host!

 Krusha wrote:
Cheers for reply.

Bremon wrote:
Power fists are 9 points. Hammer Termies are significantly more expensive than the 32 points the SG is. SG are like discounted flying vanilla termies.

Vanilla termies still aren’t great, though. I guess I’m just underwhelmed by d3 damage weapons. At least if they did flat 2 damage they would be a good anti-elite unit.

They have a high likelihood of making the charge upon deep strike.

This is an advantage over hammernators, I’ll grant you that. DC have an even better chance due to Lemartes, however. And with hammernators you are better off transporting them anyway, and if you’re doing that then you’re not suffering from problems caused by current deep strike rules.

They can get +1 attack from Sanguinor or Unleash Rage.

But that’s true with the other units as well, isn’t it?

They have built in rerolls from the Warlord (make an SGA or SG your warlord).

I do like this rule, however it relies upon support characters being in range to buff them, which is statistically less than 50% i.e. SG charge in using descent of angels and characters are now out of range to assist. There are also many other sources of re-rolls to hit in the codex which the other units can also benefit from.

They can have a 5+++ from a relic banner, DC can’t.

True, but this still relies on support characters being in range.

DC are 60% of their cost and have the durability of a tac marine. A DC with hammer costs more than an SG with fist. What’s shooting you that you miss the invuln a regular suit of termie armour would give you? Melta? Not likely. Meanwhile hammer termies give up points more quickly to small arms, heavy bolters, assault cannons, etc.

DC do a lot more damage on the charge, especially against other infantry, and don’t rely on support characters to babysit them in order to lay it down.

I’m not a fan of shooty terminators so I won’t argue on that point.

With assault termies yes you are losing more points to the “weight of dice” approach and they’re also not as mobile.

I suppose SG could be thought of as a compromise between DC and assault termies in terms of their role. More specialised for anti-elite than the former, not as devastating or protected against high AP as the latter but cheaper and more mobile. Is that a fair assessment?

I think we have a bit of a misunderstanding. They are one of BA’s best units, but BA aren’t really a good army. They mostly get played because of the models are awesome and the snowflake factor of being BA exclusive. D3 damage sucks. Their bolters suck. They’re flying tactical termies at a discount, which doesn’t make them good but makes them playable. Hammer termies look cool and are awesome in the fluff but are significantly overpriced and don’t benefit from stratagems to the same extent SG do. Not to mention they can be kited, and they can be tarpitted extremely easily.

Do you play BA? If you do you know that DC get one chance to wreck something before they’re destroyed. As for not needing babysitters; that’s total BS. They need Lemmy or Astorath badly. They’re leadership 7. They don’t have rerolls built in like SG do with an SG warlord. A JP DC w hammer is what; 35 points? For a tac marine with a 6+++ who has one chance to obliterate something before they’re gone? DC don’t do much that a boatload of assault cannons aren’t going to do better. Except get there on the second turn, or be even more CP heavy using UWOF or FF (the latter of which is often a mistake and waste of 2 CP). As for Sanguinor and Unleash Rage; what units are better targets for it? DC with chainswords who are already pumping out 4 attacks? Troop tax Intercessors? Vanguard veterans who are best used as a mobile shooting platform because DC outperform then?

I’ve lost 10+ DC in one turn. I’m not sure I’ve lost all 10 SG in a game before; two wounds, 2+ and 5+++ is just an absolute mess to destroy. They’re nearly as obnoxious as Blightlord Terminators to displace, less survivable but infinitely more mobile which makes them far more threatening. They have 32 mm bases which means even if you use an SGA warlord instead of SG, half of them will get rerolls when they leave the ancient behind, half will get 5+++ (which is enough), and the whole unit will reroll 1s to wound, which gives them a 35/36 chance of wounding the types of things they should be charging.

I also think who hugely overestimate the threat of a unit or hammernators. Point for point SG are competitive with them, and like I said; you drop them and they’re stuck. They can move once, maybe, with the homer but don’t have 3D6 charge, don’t have guns to tickle things with, and need the same type of support SG do if they want to survive; but they cost too much. You’re getting 17 hammer attacks compared to 20 fists, but the fists have better access to buffs, can sprinkle in some inferno pistols, and likely don’t have to take a round of shooting (or more) before they engage the enemy.

All in all though we are talking about playable units in a middling faction. You mention the need of support characters, but that’s BA in a nutshell; an army that relies on quasi Death Stars in an edition that doesn’t.

SG with 5+++ are pretty mean indeed after using them a few times.

I think BA and marines in general will not be quite such a liability after CA. Maybe I'm wrong. We're also getting formations in the next campaign book.

I feel like the fly nerf for charging took them from 'useful' to 'nevermind'. In a serious fight, they're almost certainly landing in front of chaff, which they can't jump over to get to their real target anymore. That really just leaves shooting, which other units can do better.

Shame. I have a nice unit of them with Ancient.

I think these are all valid points guys. Just a few thoughts:

* My point about support characters is that DC still do a lot of damage on the charge even without aura buffs, but I don’t know if that’s true of SG. You could say they rely on Lemartes for re-rolling charges but that’s not even an option for SG, so you could skip Lemartes and still have parity on charge reliability. And Lemartes can at least re-roll his own charges and thus has a better chance of getting stuck in to help them.

* Death Company are mainly anti-chaff, so getting “tar pitted” by chef screens is not really such a problem for them as it is for SG.

* Having said that, I did a little bit of mathhammering and from what I can see SG start to edge out DC when dealing with multi-wound models. So I believe it may be worth getting some.

* With hammernators, personally I wouldn’t even think about deep striking them for the reasons you describe. I run mine with Mephiston, Corbulo and banner in a Land Raider Crusader. It’s a lot of points, but (1) they tend to make the charge due to lack of deep-strike shenanigans, (2) when they do, their support characters will be in aura range, (3) while the Crusader is expensive it does provide fire support as well as transportation. Anything they charge gets absolutely curbstomped. So in the games I’ve played, I have found that they tend not to experience the same tactical problems as deep-striking melee units.

* I totally agree about taking BA because they are cool rather than because they are competitive, and I get that we are talking about the relative competitiveness of units within the codex.

Interesting point about the Crusader Krusha, if memory serves the Assault Termies are able to use Strike of the Archangels after they hop out of the Land Raider.

SOTA is 2 CP, in addition to the unit of assault termis, plus the LR Its better to use SG with PF and PP, make one of them your warlord, and put them in the LR. After disembarking they can shoot their PP, safely overcharge, re-roll all failed hits in the shooting phase, charge, and re-roll all failed hits in the fight phase, for 0 CP. Even with PF and PP they are still 1 pt. cheaper than an assault termi with claws

I’m aware that SOTA is 2CP for something SG have built in. I’ve already stated my opinion in this thread; SG aren’t amazing but they grossly outshine DC and termies of any flavour for their points.

Land raider discount makes the crusader nightmarish for some lists, imo.

Also, SG with the 5+++ banner can be will sapping for sure.

Failed the 3d6 decent of angels charge with my SG last night (again), solidifying the idea that I should just always deploy them on the board with a Sanguinary ancient and Fnp banner. Weathering the incoming storm on my terms and having them around to do things on turn 1 seems more useful anyway

It's my new New Year's resolution. Deploy my SG on the board...

Yeah, that's probably best unless its drukhari

I’ve only failed the 3D6 with a CP reroll a couple of times but it’s absolutely crippling when it happens.

I was asking about Repulsors the other day. The guy I played last night was running one: they're almost too annoying to run. Too many guns shooting all over the place. What a hassle. Still may get one eventually, but *sigh*.

Am liking Dante buffing my gunline and a Librarian dread, though.

Edit* Oops. Thought this was the blood angel centric topic. My bad