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What units would you consider to be essential to a necron army? And what units aren't even worth purchasing?

There is not a single thing not worth purchasing, in my opinion (says the guy that owns everything minus the Tesseract Vault). However, the essential units for your basic Necron force are typically an Overlord, Crypteks, Warriors, Tomb Blades, maybe some immortals, Ghost Arks, and Night Scythes. Everything else you just fill in with what you want.

 krodarklorr wrote:
There is not a single thing not worth purchasing, in my opinion (says the guy that owns everything minus the Tesseract Vault). However, the essential units for your basic Necron force are typically an Overlord, Crypteks, Warriors, Tomb Blades, maybe some immortals, Ghost Arks, and Night Scythes. Everything else you just fill in with what you want.

I'd add Wraiths for cc goodness.
The decurion formation and some of its ''sub-formations'' are decent.

The C'tan seem to be real lackluster units but other than that I think everything in the codex is of some value (monolith is a semi bad option but it has potential value in certain formations). Only real requirement are Warriors and an Overlord. Filling in gaps in your army list is important but each "role" has multiple viable options so nothing is really a "must have".

 wuestenfux wrote:

 krodarklorr wrote:
There is not a single thing not worth purchasing, in my opinion (says the guy that owns everything minus the Tesseract Vault). However, the essential units for your basic Necron force are typically an Overlord, Crypteks, Warriors, Tomb Blades, maybe some immortals, Ghost Arks, and Night Scythes. Everything else you just fill in with what you want.

I'd add Wraiths for cc goodness.

Well, if you want CC goodness, there are many options. Wraiths are good, but maybe he'd prefer to have Lychguard, or Praetorians, all of which are viable options.

 krodarklorr wrote:

 wuestenfux wrote:

 krodarklorr wrote:
There is not a single thing not worth purchasing, in my opinion (says the guy that owns everything minus the Tesseract Vault). However, the essential units for your basic Necron force are typically an Overlord, Crypteks, Warriors, Tomb Blades, maybe some immortals, Ghost Arks, and Night Scythes. Everything else you just fill in with what you want.

I'd add Wraiths for cc goodness.

Well, if you want CC goodness, there are many options. Wraiths are good, but maybe he'd prefer to have Lychguard, or Praetorians, all of which are viable options.

Lynchguard are too slow for my liking. Praetorians are almost as fast as Wraiths but Wraiths are still much better in cc.

 wuestenfux wrote:

 krodarklorr wrote:

 wuestenfux wrote:

 krodarklorr wrote:
There is not a single thing not worth purchasing, in my opinion (says the guy that owns everything minus the Tesseract Vault). However, the essential units for your basic Necron force are typically an Overlord, Crypteks, Warriors, Tomb Blades, maybe some immortals, Ghost Arks, and Night Scythes. Everything else you just fill in with what you want.

I'd add Wraiths for cc goodness.

Well, if you want CC goodness, there are many options. Wraiths are good, but maybe he'd prefer to have Lychguard, or Praetorians, all of which are viable options.

Lynchguard are too slow for my liking. Praetorians are almost as fast as Wraiths but Wraiths are still much better in cc.

How are they better in CC?

In terms of Wraiths, please have a look at the stats. Moreover, add them to a Decurion formation and then they become even better.

 wuestenfux wrote:
In terms of Wraiths, please have a look at the stats. Moreover, add them to a Decurion formation and then they become even better.

A decent opponent won't let the Spyder live long enough for the formation to matter, so lets look at them without the RP bonus. Three S6 Ap- Rending attacks each, that can be at I5. Not bad. Or two S5 AP2 attacks each. Less attacks, but much better AP, with a shooting attack to boot. Or you have Three S5 AP4 Rending Attacks each, with a S6 shooting attack. They also always have RP. 258 points gets you 6 Wraiths with Whip coils, which is 24 attacks on the charge. 280 points gets you 10 Voidblade Praetorians with the same speed, a formation that allows them to ignore terrain just like Wraiths essentially, meaning cover is easily obtainable ontop of their RP, and they would have 40 attacks on the charge.

I take Praetorians when I actually want to kill something. I take Wraiths when I just want to tarpit.

 Vankraken wrote:
The C'tan seem to be real lackluster units but other than that I think everything in the codex is of some value (monolith is a semi bad option but it has potential value in certain formations). Only real requirement are Warriors and an Overlord. Filling in gaps in your army list is important but each "role" has multiple viable options so nothing is really a "must have".

I don't even play Warriors, just Immortals in a CAD, sometimes with a Canoptek Harvest if I'm going against a tough opponent.

 krodarklorr wrote:

 wuestenfux wrote:
In terms of Wraiths, please have a look at the stats. Moreover, add them to a Decurion formation and then they become even better.

A decent opponent won't let the Spyder live long enough for the formation to matter, so lets look at them without the RP bonus.

This isn't really fair. The spyder isn't that easy to remove, and is a pretty cheap unit for what you get. T6 3W is not trivial to remove for many units in the game.
I run the decurion quite often, it's pretty rare for anyone outside of marines to remove the spyder before the unit sees combat. Considering the biggest benefit of the wraiths is how tough they are to remove in the decurion, saying "let's just ignore that" will of course make them sound worse.

 krodarklorr wrote:

Three S6 Ap- Rending attacks each, that can be at I5. Not bad. Or two S5 AP2 attacks each. Less attacks, but much better AP, with a shooting attack to boot. Or you have Three S5 AP4 Rending Attacks each, with a S6 shooting attack. They also always have RP. 258 points gets you 6 Wraiths with Whip coils, which is 24 attacks on the charge.
280 points gets you 10 Voidblade Praetorians with the same speed, a formation that allows them to ignore terrain just like Wraiths essentially, meaning cover is easily obtainable ontop of their RP, and they would have 40 attacks on the charge.

True, but you're painting a very pretty picture here that's ignoring the most important part of a CC unit; Reaching CC.
The 3+ invul of the wraiths combined with the RP makes them very tough to remove. Not to mention the extra wound.
So not only is it tougher to cause wounds to the wraith, and you want to be shooting the cheap spyder first anyway, you have to cause more wounds (2:1) to cause the amount of incoming attacks to drop.

To give an idea, 3 wounds to the wraiths will cause 4 attacks to drop (so 20). The same unit that can cause 3 wounds to the wraiths can cause 4 or more (Depending on the AP and strength of the weapon, see plasma guns or Grav weapons for example) to the prats. This will mean a loss of 12-16 attacks, so the unit now has 28-24 attacks compared to the wraiths 20. It's suddenly a lot closer now. That many wounds isn't weird for a tac squad with 3 Pgs (2+1 combi) at rapid fire range to do. Overwatch might cause another one, making it even worse.

 krodarklorr wrote:

I take Praetorians when I actually want to kill something. I take Wraiths when I just want to tarpit.

That's funny, I take wraiths when I actually want to reach combat and kill things. Praetorians never seem to get there, being such a glass hammer unit.
Wraiths, for me, do pretty well in CC. I don't want to wipe a unit in 1 turn anyway, 2 CC phases is the sweet spot.

Wraiths are one of the best units in the game. With the Harvest formation it is possibly THE best unit.

They are almost unkillable. With 3++ and 4+++ and 2W the only real way to kill them is with D or to drown them in dice.

Their damage output isnt so great when facing MEQ, but anything weaker will die in a few rounds of combat.

The main units you should be looking at are:
Warriors, Wraith, Tombblades, Scarabs, Ghost Arc

Fisheyes wrote:
Wraiths are one of the best units in the game. With the Harvest formation it is possibly THE best unit.

Say hello to Scatbikes and Wraithknights.

 krodarklorr wrote:

Fisheyes wrote:
Wraiths are one of the best units in the game. With the Harvest formation it is possibly THE best unit.

Say hello to Scatbikes and Wraithknights.

Maybe not the best in the game, but certainly in the necron codex.