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Hi!

I am actually a Fan of the Screamer-Star + Summoning, now I heard of the Drone star.

I think this means to take many Nurgle-Drones, at least one Herald with FnP and then you get: Shrouded (good coversave if in a ruin), 3+ Save with Grimoire and FnP. You have instant kill and this rust rule against walkers / tanks.
Looks ok, but I see such a huge problem, that I am completly unsure how to deal with it: The Herald has just his normal infantry movement.
How do you deal with that ? The Herald can move only 6" and can not run...so the whole star is slowed down. What did I miss here ?

I believe the Herald can take a drone to ride on

It's actually very good. Basically what Nanavati has piloted to victory at multiple GTs. He uses a screamerstar with 2 tzeentch heralds and a dronestar with 2 heralds. You'd think that they are slowed down, but the bases are enormous. You can string them out like a daisy-chain and almost have an 8 man squad plus the two heralds reaching from your opponent's table edge to your deployment zone. You get the base size of each model plus 2" in between each model for coherency.

It sounds limiting but once you make an assault (usually turn 2 unless you need to stay in cover vs a strong alpha strike) you are able to make your assault move with the slow dude along with everyone else. Plus 3" pile in each player turn. Plus 3" end of combat pile-in every player turn. After the first round of combat, your herald most certainly should be hitting along with your drones (if the combat even lasts that long)

Ok, now I get the movement part.
I also get the "damage part" with Instant Kill Poison, Rust and a DS 2 Etherblade.

But how do they withstand damage ?

There are several options:

- The Grimoire would be an option without the Screamerstar...but the Screamerstar needs it more
- Cover is an option, but as you saig large base and daisy chaining....does not sound like much cover for me
- First power of daemonology also does not work with daisy chaining

W5, 5++ and FnP does not that sound like a deathstar to me...

It might work with Belakor with Shrouding for Screamers / invisible Drones, but not with Fateweaver I fear.

the drones are fairly resilient on their own, especially with the locus giving FNP.
the tournament lists have two heralds in the unit rolling biomancy. hopefully they get endurance. that main list everyone references also runs two units of screamers, but it doesn't appear to use them as that unmovable object style screamerstar. instead it just uses them as harassing units, with the heralds going back and forth between the units as needed. i'd imagine the main protective elements are going to the drones.

check out this battle report:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P-9J3jl0R0

Throw in Belakor for invisibility, and that unit is damn near unkillable. It can be made more killy with proper use of enfeeble as well if the charge is available. Poison rerolls wounds if the strength of the attacker is higher than the Toughness of the attacked unit, so enfeeble can actually help immensely with some units.

Melionodr wrote:
Ok, now I get the movement part.
I also get the "damage part" with Instant Kill Poison, Rust and a DS 2 Etherblade.

But how do they withstand damage ?

There are several options:

- The Grimoire would be an option without the Screamerstar...but the Screamerstar needs it more
- Cover is an option, but as you saig large base and daisy chaining....does not sound like much cover for me
- First power of daemonology also does not work with daisy chaining

W5, 5++ and FnP does not that sound like a deathstar to me...

It might work with Belakor with Shrouding for Screamers / invisible Drones, but not with Fateweaver I fear.

Fate weaver's re-roll of warp storm and a single re-roll per player turn actually does more to mitigate damage than you might think.

Screamerstar doesn't need grim as much if you have shrouded/stealth, as you can jink for all sorts of nonsense. But it's true that the drones are more inherently resilient, so I tend to grim the screamers.

With Endurance, you get eternal warrior (great vs str d and str 10) and 4+ FNP for the whole squad. Trust me, it's nice. You have a LOT of wounds. If you have any sort of cover (5+ or 4+ area terrain) then you are able to take 3 + and 2+ saves, respectively. The biggest lesson I learned from Nick Nanavati was to not be afraid to have your drones sit in cover for a turn or two if they need to in order to survive an alpha or beta strike. They will live unless you run around in the open with no cover whatsoever.

There's a great article on this principle (applied to the Tyranids, as they are even more reliant on cover saves), but the general principles are the same and it's an excellent article:

https://www.frontlinegaming.org/2014/10/16/tyranids-tactics-the-trapdoor-spider/

Cursed earth usually doesn't come into play unless you get endurance right away, freeing up your second herald to roll on malefic.


Also, generally, people tend to play with a lot less cover than you get at most tournaments. General rule of thumb - cover at least 25% of the area of the entire board in terrain. I know that it's tough if you're playing out of your basement - not everyone has that kind of access to terrain - but that's the way the game is meant to be played. In 6th, it used to be that there were ON AVERAGE 12 pieces of terrain on a 6 x 4 table. Definitely not the way that most people play 40k I think, which also warps your idea of how easy it is to access cover.

For a moment there, I thought you refereed to tau drones and I was like "I know the new drone formation is awesome, but dronestar?!"

 BoomWolf wrote:
For a moment there, I thought you refereed to tau drones and I was like "I know the new drone formation is awesome, but dronestar?!"

FWIW, I've been calling it the "skynet" formation.

#aheadofthecurve