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Hey Dakka, a relatively quick fix for Soul Grinders, something which the majority of the playerbase I'm sure has forgotten exists. I personally run two because I LOVE the base idea, they're effectively a Greater Daemon in your Heavy Support slot, designed to lay down some covering fire and not be afraid to get nice and close with the enemy, just the way us Daemons like it

Except, they suck. They went down to roughly 180 points (from over 230!) and also gain the appropriate mark effect (Nurgle gets DR, Khorne gets Unstoppable Ferocity and so on) so instead of buffing the stat line my suggestion is simple -

turn all his guns to Assault, his BS is 4+ and his current array of weapons are also Heavy, meaning if he is moving (and he has a damn good move profile) he's hitting on 5's BEFORE degradation.
also in addition I would prefer they just redo his current range weapons profiles and I suggest the following -

Harvester Cannon - 48" Assault 2d3 Str 7 ap -1 D D3 (change to assault, shots from 3 to 2D3)

Maw Cannon - when you fire this weapon choose a profile from below -

Phlegm Bombardment - 36" Assault D6 Str 6 AP -2 D1 - Add another D6 to number of shots for each 10 models in the enemy unit (A less reliable Daemonic wyvern! Which does require LoS,)

Daemonic tongue - 36" Assault 2 Str 8 Ap -2 D 3 - This Weapon can target enemy models engaged within 1" of this model or 1" of friendly units (essentially can be fired in close combat) (Gives the soul grinder a semi credible anti tank gun that is targeted in a unique enough way I figured give it some more use for 'trouble shooting' )


This may need a slight points bump, but honestly Im fine with that, the weapons give the Soul Grinder some versatility and also adds some much needed long range fire power to Daemons without souping up.

Love to hear feed back on this.

I love my soul grinder model, but just like the defiler (basically a soul grinder with a less cool upper body) it suffers from paying for both powerful ranged and melee weapons, and then not being able to use both effectively. I agree with your proposal - a way of being able to fire effectively while moving up to bring its melee weapons to bear would go a long way to making it viable. I would probably swap the strength values around a bit though - I think the Maw cannon should be more powerful than the harvester guns (though the harvester guns actually look like guns not just an open mouth - I modeled mine with actual guns poking out of the mouth)

mark.

Gir Spirit Bane wrote:

Daemonic tongue - 36" Assault 2 Str 8 Ap -2 D 3 - This Weapon can target enemy models engaged within 1" of this model or 1" of friendly units (essentially can be fired in close combat) (Gives the soul grinder a semi credible anti tank gun that is targeted in a unique enough way I figured give it some more use for 'trouble shooting' )

You can probably swap out the special rule with, "When firing this weapon, choose one of the following profiles:" Other than that, this seems reasonable

For the sake of discussion, I'll point out that anti-synergies can, theoretically, be useful and intentional design choices. Forcing a unit that is pretty good at multiple things to be slightly worse at both (or slightly worse at one at the expense of not using the other as efficiently) can give you an excuse to keep the pricetag lower than it otherwise would be. So if I'm designing a dreadnaught capable of using both a dreadnaught melee weapon and a heavy weapon, I might decide that that's worth 100 points if both could be used efficiently (by letting the dreadnaught move and shoot without penalty, for instance). But by designing it so that the dreadnaught's gun wants it to hold still and its melee weapon wants it to move/advance, I can value this anti-synergistic unit closer to 80 points.

But again, your changes seem reasonable. I haven't done much with my chaos armies this edition, so I can't really speak to just how far much the soul grinder is underperforming at the moment.

Wyldhunt wrote:

Gir Spirit Bane wrote:

Daemonic tongue - 36" Assault 2 Str 8 Ap -2 D 3 - This Weapon can target enemy models engaged within 1" of this model or 1" of friendly units (essentially can be fired in close combat) (Gives the soul grinder a semi credible anti tank gun that is targeted in a unique enough way I figured give it some more use for 'trouble shooting' )

You can probably swap out the special rule with, "When firing this weapon, choose one of the following profiles:" Other than that, this seems reasonable

For the sake of discussion, I'll point out that anti-synergies can, theoretically, be useful and intentional design choices. Forcing a unit that is pretty good at multiple things to be slightly worse at both (or slightly worse at one at the expense of not using the other as efficiently) can give you an excuse to keep the pricetag lower than it otherwise would be. So if I'm designing a dreadnaught capable of using both a dreadnaught melee weapon and a heavy weapon, I might decide that that's worth 100 points if both could be used efficiently (by letting the dreadnaught move and shoot without penalty, for instance). But by designing it so that the dreadnaught's gun wants it to hold still and its melee weapon wants it to move/advance, I can value this anti-synergistic unit closer to 80 points.

But again, your changes seem reasonable. I haven't done much with my chaos armies this edition, so I can't really speak to just how far much the soul grinder is underperforming at the moment.

Thanks for the feedback both of you I wholly agree with the above about anti-synergies, but in this specific case Daemon codex can suffer from long range firepower, this is doubtlessly intentional but Soul Grinders can 'almost' fill this slot whilst not being the go to option with the above changes.

This post was more about having such a large, iconic Daemon Unit be viable to hit the table and for fill the role it had in editions past, roving fire support and line breaker. It would be nice to have a Daemon army which didn't depend wholly on the HQ and troops slot!

The soul grinder imo always suffered from the defiler Syndrom.