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I haven't been able to find this debate fleshed out so I wanted to pose the question here. I'm personally leaning towards 2 Vindicators, but the Centurions are very attractive. What would you spend 250 points on and why?

Depends on the list. Vindis work better in a mech spam list the just tossed into a TAC list. The grav cents on paper I think are a better use of points, and can be leveraged with buffs and HQs to be stronger.

But even though they are growing on me, I still don’t like the way the cents look. And at the end of the day, I want to enjoy the army I’m playing. So while I’d personally take the tanks, I’d probably recommend the cents to others. YMMV.

Vindis are better with Blood Angels (they can become Fast). With Marines, I'd go with Centurions.

Vindicators are not good for even BA. Side armor 11 is awful.

The thing about Vindicators is that a lot of scary lists now include T5 multi wound models. Thunderwolf Calvary, Plague Drones, Daemon Princes, Wraiths, etc. Even many ICs are T5 multiwound. Grav Cents deal one wound per shot, while Vindicators are going do dish out a lot of wounds that are ignoring armor and ID'ing anything that's not T6 or higher.

Against single targets (MCs, for example), Grav Cents are better, but Vindicators shouldn't be shooting at them anyway.

Requizen wrote:
The thing about Vindicators is that a lot of scary lists now include T5 multi wound models. Thunderwolf Calvary, Plague Drones, Daemon Princes, Wraiths, etc. Even many ICs are T5 multiwound. Grav Cents deal one wound per shot, while Vindicators are going do dish out a lot of wounds that are ignoring armor and ID'ing anything that's not T6 or higher.

Against single targets (MCs, for example), Grav Cents are better, but Vindicators shouldn't be shooting at them anyway.

That's great in theory, but Vindicators don't function at all after suffering a single shaken result. The AV 11 sides kill them because of GWs insanely huge side aspect on vehicles.

While that's true, it's rather easy to get cover saves on vehicles nowadays, especially if you have two covering one another next to some terrain. And while I'm not super familiar with the SM codex, can't you take a Techmarine to fix things for rather cheap?

The Tech marine can't help a shaken result. It also can't help when your AV 11 gets glanced out in a single shooting phase.

Cover can't save AV 11 vehicles, particularly ones that have a ST 10 gun.

I've been using 2 Vindicators in my White Scars list as a fire magnet that can instant kill things that can mess up my bikes in assault. Last game was against Space Wolves and neither Vindicator ever got a shot off. Granted, my opponent seized the initiative and caught my tanks in the open, but one survived a couple of turns. Two turns of Vindicators soaking up heavy weapons allowed me to send full strength bike squads into his long fangs and TWC and take away his ability to affect the board at long range. He was tabled in 5 turns. I'm not certain that Centurions would have gotten the same target priority and given me that kind of time.

s10 ap2 is very tasty. But so is grav. Depends on what you need, really. If you allready have grav elsewhere, consider vindis. If you don't, i'd probably take grav as it's more versatile, yet, can fall flat on it's face if you face hordes or something like daemonkin.