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Ok, now GK got a great buff recently and I think bringing up analysis against their fluffy target and "preferred enemy" --- Chaos Daemons maybe viable now. Inspired by the battle report (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqkBltb_VBA ) I wish to start a discussion, although what happened in the batrep is not what I was expecting.

It looks like the GK with their buffed 4 dmg smite against Daemon and improved firepower would bring them the upper hand against Daemons, but I think GK still has many of their obvious weakness left unresolved,
1. GK are very fragile for their points
2. GK army tends to be small in size, while each unit is strong, they are still an elite, low-model count army which means the loss of every unit HURTS.

So I believe the battle would still be in favor of the Daemons, if I play as Daemon and play against GK, I would bring something similar to below:

2 Nurgle Battalions with hordes nurglings and plague bearers, use the 5+++ to offset the smite damage, their role is to hold out as long as possible on objectives, not expecting them to do great outside of being a nuisanse to the GK.
Khorne Battalion, formed mainly by Bloodletter bomb.

Plan is as follows, move the Nurgles up the field to objectives, eat all the damage from GK, hold out ALAP, then in turn two, drop in the Bloodletter bomb / bombs and let the fun begins, the Bloodletters would kill any GK unit they touch no problem (maybe the only exception is fully buffed full Paladin squad), math shows that they should be able to slay 15 GK terminator level models. Then in reply the GK will kill them no problem of course, but then Daemon has a stratgem "Daemonic Incursion" which bring back those 30 killed Bloodletters in Daemon's next movement phase anywhere 9" away from GK, then the Bloodletter bomb can charge and kill more GK again. Repeat this process until Daemon got no CP left. The Bloodletter bomb can come back infinite times but every GK dead will not come back.

The only problem is the amount of CP it would consume. But Daemon army with 3 Battalion should have 18 CP, good enough to construct 2 Bloodletter bombs while still have enough CPs to bring the bombs back for at least 3 times. By that time I expect the GK army should be all but tabled. BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD

What do you think? Any thoughts are highly appreciated.

The difficulty for the Daemons is that their shooting-phase output is somewhere between marginal and nonexistent. The GK are going to get to start throwing damage downrange long before the Daemons are.

Well in the fluff grey knights should win obviously. What would be the point of them otherwise?

Crunchwise i find it odd that the grey knights are geared with power weapons when that has no effect vs deamons and their iv- saves. chain swords would make more sense.

Like anything Imperium, the GK should win fluff wise, but at a pyrrhic level.

Re: power weapons - don’t Grey knights still have Nemesis weapons? Don’t have my codex w/ me to check.

Why are you so concerned with rules in a fluff question?

Fluff wise the Grey Knights win.

Rules-wise the GK also win. Blood letters will do a lot of damage, but paladins have 3 wounds a piece, -1 to wound via psychic powers, and probably a 3++ in CC. They can soak quite a bit. Plus, depending on positioning the GK player may simply try to kill most but not all the bloodletters, so it’ll take 2 turns to bring them back. Finally, the rest of the GK list is going to nuke the rest of the Daemon list and then just kite the BL bomb while scoring objectives.
It’s not a bad idea against double paladin lists, but there are a couple other GK lists (power armor spam or character spam) that don’t have any big sticky targets for the bloodletters and will throw out a lot more smites. It’s pretty hard to weather 4 damage smites coming from every unit.

So right after ritual of the damned came out, we did a 2000 point grey knights vs daemon fight. We had actually planned it a few months earlier, but the timing worked out great for the grey knights. Anyway, the deal was the grey knights were trying to destroy an enhanced noctilith crown (we gave it a bunch of wounds and I think a toughness of 20). The daemons had endless respawns, and were a mix of Slaanesh and Khorne.

So what happened is the grey knights killed an average of 5 units a turn. The highlight on the daemon side was Syll’eske totally messed up their dreadknight. Aside from that it was pretty brutal. 4 mortal wounds per smite is rough. And as someone else pointed out, all the guns were on one side. We did get a lot of kills in, but if not for the endless respawns the game would have been over turn 2.

Also, one of the grey knights players was so happy to finally play against daemons.

The terrifying hordes of Khorne fell upon the world like a blazing bronze spear. But the spirit of the planet was already broken, knowing Khorne's Rage, mightiest of all Bloodthirsters, was driving the vanguard of this charge, with four of his other mighty kinds. Each individually have shattered systems; slaughtering regiments of guard with barely an effort; a dozen smoking Craftworld to each of their name; a hundred empty Necron tombworlds, not a limb left intact to reawaken.

All hope lost what seemed like aeons ago, the defences of the planet had thrown themselves on their own bayonet; a mercy compared to what was sure to come.

The world was on the verge of breaking, as Khorne's Rage and his bloody coterie charged against the walls of the last, forlorn hive city.

The fight was thick, as each Bloodthirster claimed a thousand thousand heads for the Skull Throne, smashing defenders beyond recognition merely with a glare.

In this din, stood up a hero: Johnny Space Marine. He drew his mighty bolter, and with a flick of his finger cut down each lieutenant in turn. Turning to Khorne's Rage, he drew his mighty chainsword. The daemon blinked into and out of reality, dancing around the noble son of the Emperor, a move that has shattered the most fearsome Warbosses that ever scourged the galaxy. Standing stoically, he threw one mighty blow, and doing so split the very locus of all of Khorne's great fury in two.

And so the day was won, and Johnny Space Marine, known thenceforth as The Mighty, was forever hallowed throughout the sector - his mighty bolter and mighty chainsword now holy relics.





Does that answer your question?

It's almost impossible for a chaos daemon player to bring back a big unit of daemons if the GK player knows what he's doing. He will just kill 20 of the 30 bloodletter/plaguebearers and let the rest run away in the morale phase. This is specially easy to do when you have flat 4 dmg smites.

I've played twice (league games, ITC) against demons with GK post-awakening (double paladin bomb list) and they've been the easiest games of my life. Scores were 42-7 and 41-3. There's nothing in the daemons army that can trade favourably with paladins. The best demons have is a big unit of bloodletters, and even then they average 2 dead paladins before they die. Everything else just bounces and gets murdered.

 Stormonu wrote:
Like anything Imperium, the GK should win fluff wise, but at a pyrrhic level.

Re: power weapons - don’t Grey knights still have Nemesis weapons? Don’t have my codex w/ me to check.

Yes they still have nemesis force weapons. Ack in the day, force weapons were the bane of anything with more than one wound as they could inflict instant death with a single wound. Today they just do d3 damage. While the power weapon aspect of it doesnt come into play against the daemon invo save, it does help against the few daemons that have actual decent armour save ie daemon prince.

Still believe their nemesis force weapons should basically also have in inbuilt invo ap of -1 to set it apart from the rest of force weapons.

Even when the daemon player can bring back multiple units with the stratagem, GK now walk all over them. Daemons are basically forced to walk into rapidfire and smite range GKs do and due to all the anti-damon buffs they are better than them in every way.

Not a 5th edition auto-lose but still pretty impossible to win.