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So I thought of this tactic last night and changed up my list to accommodate it. Tell me what you guys think.

So I got a 3 man squad of slab-shielded Bullgryns with a priest attached to them. Right behind them will be an LRD with a hull HB and MM sponsons with camo gear. The demolisher is followed by a techpriest enginseer accompanied by two servo-arm servitors.

So the plan is to move the Demolisher up the field with the Bullgryns and priest right in front of it. Due the slabshields and the tank's camo gear, it will have a 3+ cover with the techpriest repairing it on a 3+, until the tank gets close enough to unload its weapons, then I'll use the enginseer to give it PotMS and allow it to fire it's Multi Meltas and Demolisher Cannon at full bs. If the Bullgryns take fire, the priest is there to let them reroll their 3+ armour save, and can even jump in front of my ogres if any weapons with ap3 or better were to fire at them. Thanks to the priests 4++ and rerollable invulnerable save, both the Bullgryns squad and the Leman Russ will be well defended.

So what do you guys think? Does it sound like a good plan? And while I was writing this I thought of a question: does PotMS affect both the sponsons or only one of them? :S and if it only affects one of the sponsons, can I use it on the cannon instead? Cause if not then I may have to rethink what loadout to give the Demolisher... so what do you Dakka Dakkers think?

123ply wrote:
If the Bullgryns take fire, the priest is there to let them reroll their 3+ armour save [...]

That hymn only works in hand to hand combat, and even then you'll need to take a check on LD 7.

123ply wrote:
[...] and can even jump in front of my ogres if any weapons with ap3 or better were to fire at them.

The priest's 4+ save means that it would take an average of 2 AP3 wounds to kill him. An ogyrn will fall to 3 AP3 wounds, and costs nearly twice as much. I'm not seeing much of a benefit here, especially as you're relying on the priest to stop those ogryns from routing. EDIT: And if the first casualty is the priest, then that's already 25% take lost, forcing a morale check.

123ply wrote:
And while I was writing this I thought of a question: does PotMS affect both the sponsons or only one of them?

It works on one weapon. So, 1 multi-melta. You'll also hear some debate on how (or rather if) the ability works when you've fired an ordnance weapon.

This sounds like an extremely expensive set-up.

You have a few problems.
1) PotMS allows you to fire one additional weapon at full BS. This means if you fire the demolisher cannon you can fire 1 MM at full BS. So with a single demolisher cannon and MM shot at BS3 this doesn't seem worth the pts. An alternative take on this strategy which might not be bad would be the bullgryn units protecting 3+ tanks (I would recommend a pask punisher or a bunch of thunderer siege tanks).

2) The reroll saves from the priest only happens during the assault phase. Thus the bullgryn unit is still pretty weak against certain types of shooting. Also be careful using your priest to tank wounds as once you loose him your bullgryn unit will loose fearless and be likely to run away or get pinned.

3) You are thinking too linear. Unless you can essentially fill the board across and fill in behind the tanks you will have DSing units and jetbikes getting in behind this and shooting the AV11 rear armour of you tanks without the benefit of the bull shields. Worse there are now a host of formations and abilities which further mitigate tactics like this. The worst offender being the new stealth cadre formation in the Tau codex which not only ignores cover but also is resolved against rear armour even when shooting from the front arc.

My recommendation would be to try it out with proxies if you want to but don't commit to buying the models just so you can run this.

Having said all that if you get the Renegades of Vraks army list from Imperial Armour Vraks (forgeworld) then they actually can do something like this pretty successfully. The big difference being that the vehicles and infantry are cheaper so they can afford to fill the board which is what is needed to make this sort of thing work.

Wow I just realized re-read the priests War Hymns, and Damm. The fact I can only use it in assault littery ruined my entire plan. Oh well x)

If you want to 'toughen up' Bullgryns, consider the Rampart Detachment - 3 squads plus a platoon command squad and they gain counterattack, fearless and give an additional +1 cover save. That camo-netted demolisher is now rocking a 2+ cover save as it rolls up the board.

I think this is only going to work if the entire army is literally in a 45 degree arc in front of the orgryns.

There are scores of units that can quickly flank this tactic and you have to choose to face the flanker or keep facing the army.