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I’ve got all the assassins and am going to try them against Plaguebearers. Only bring one for 2CP. My question here is which I should take? I’ve listed against these bastards before. Deathwatch player and those double 5+ saves are disgusting. I’m almost thinking I should take a vindicare and try to snipe. Would you go for scrivener or pox ringer as priority? The Culexus would die pretty fast to a horde of bearers because of the +1 to hit. He has a -2 to psychic casting but is that useful? Do daemons have many ways to ensure casting?

Eversor is completely useless here and I’m not sure what would the callous actually do since it’s too dangerous to engage melee against a daemon army.

The Caladus could work since their phase sword ignores invuln saves, and does flat 2 damage.

The Culexis will dampen their casting, and can only be hit on 6's, meaning he'll tie things up pretty well.

The Vindy can ignore invulns, hits/wounds on 2s regardless of modifiers, and does headshot mortal wounds.

Vindy is by far the most plug and play

Vindicare. Thwacking the buff characters backing the plaguebearers up is infinitely more important than thwacking a few more plaguebearers.

Deathwatch wound on 2s ammo and frag cannons are more than sufficient to deal with plaguebearer hordes without buff characters.

I was also thinking vindicate, just his results swing so much. Almost feel like I should try 3 of them! The Callidus can ignore saves but has not much ways to ensure a death to the characters and wouldn’t be that effective kill just 2-3 Plaguebearers before they return 30 hits and just murder her.

Culexus will not do well in combat and will easily be killed in one combat phase because plague bearers will hit him on a 5+.

VindicAre seems the best bet. Which target should be the most important?

if opponent play 90-120 Pb's he doesn't care if you snipe out of table all his characters, he keep winning holding obj, then if you plai ITC fan made missions maybe that's different but those aren't official GW mission so for me worth nothing. To deal with Pb's mass only useful assassin is eversor (3+ of them). I play Pb's spam since 1 year never cared of how many characters i can potentially lost pb's are self sufficient, anyway the priority target depend by rest of your list but mostly i will go for poxbringer (lost miasma) or sloppity and lost the double dice on morale that makes them more annoying, nothing worst thna kill 10 Pb's and see 6 of them come back.

 blackmage wrote:
if opponent play 90-120 Pb's he doesn't care if you snipe out of table all his characters, he keep winning holding obj, then if you plai ITC fan made missions maybe that's different but those aren't official GW mission so for me worth nothing. To deal with Pb's mass only useful assassin is eversor (3+ of them). I play Pb's spam since 1 year never cared of how many characters i can potentially lost pb's are self sufficient, anyway the priority target depend by rest of your list but mostly i will go for poxbringer (lost miasma) or sloppity and lost the double dice on morale that makes them more annoying, nothing worst thna kill 10 Pb's and see 6 of them come back.

Sure, but the context we're talking about here is Deathwatch bringing an assassin as a tool against a nurgle chaos list, I would assume in the sense of making a TAC list where the only tailoring decision you get to make is which assassin to bring.

If you assume the base Deathwatch troop model is a 20-point SS/SB vet, and you can have 5 of those for the cost of your assassin, there is no assassin who will outperform the veterans against a target of plaguebearers.

5 vets kill 5 plaguebearers with their shooting, assuming they do not commit to and get stuck into melee (they'd kill 6.5 if they charged as well, I guess if they were needing to contest an objective or something).

A vindicare assassin kills less than one (obvious reasons I'd hope)
Culexus is also not going to be competing for obvious reasons since he's purely anti-psyker and in pretty much all respects he's outperformed by the others.

Eversor kills 3.6 plaguebearers with melee and shooting combined.

Callidus kills very slightly more than that, I cba to figure out the exact math of the wounds from the neural shredder, it's a very slight difference, like 3.8 on average.

Add that in to the fact that plaguebearers have an extremely hard time with single wound, high save targets thanks to their AP- weapons that can put down some D2 hits, I don't think it's ever a contest. Deathwatch will always do better than assassins.

What they can't do is kill the slippity slopboppers and flargly snozzmeisters and epidemiologists and such that will be sitting in the back providing buffs.

What vets can also do is fall back and continue shooting with an attached vanvet, and they can have an attached terminator to tank incoming AP- D1 hits from the PBs.

Seems like Vindicare is the only real choice here and yes, contesting objectives is annoying but now I’ve done a few things with my list that hopefully helps:

1.Dropped crusader titan

2.Replace with Leviathan and Mortis Contemptor dreads (mortis not useful in this Matchup with lascannons but it’s better generally because my AT sucks)

3. Used requisition for assassin (have all of them)

4: added the loyal 32 and replaced a company commander with a primaris psyker for the dent/psychic maelstrom sniping


I’m hoping this gives me a better chance because last game I could not displace his troops at all... it was quite insane. I think one thing that seems really strong is actually that guards can have rapid fire 2, giving one squad 40 shots at 12 inches. It’s actuallt really good against these guys. I could also use move, move, move order first turn to rush to objective with up to 24 inches.

Not actually sure what to even fire at with my dreads though.

Also I would not recommend anyone take Eversors. You will get about 2 kills if your lucky and then immediately die. Maybe that will take out 2 more. Would even get back half your points. Culexus at least might deny some powers, callidus could waste their CP sand vindicares can easily kill one or two of their buffers by turn 2.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Btw, @blackmage, you recommend sniping bilepipers and poxbringer first? So I’m guessing scrivener is the least of the concerns.

the_scotsman wrote:

 blackmage wrote:
if opponent play 90-120 Pb's he doesn't care if you snipe out of table all his characters, he keep winning holding obj, then if you plai ITC fan made missions maybe that's different but those aren't official GW mission so for me worth nothing. To deal with Pb's mass only useful assassin is eversor (3+ of them). I play Pb's spam since 1 year never cared of how many characters i can potentially lost pb's are self sufficient, anyway the priority target depend by rest of your list but mostly i will go for poxbringer (lost miasma) or sloppity and lost the double dice on morale that makes them more annoying, nothing worst thna kill 10 Pb's and see 6 of them come back.

Sure, but the context we're talking about here is Deathwatch bringing an assassin as a tool against a nurgle chaos list, I would assume in the sense of making a TAC list where the only tailoring decision you get to make is which assassin to bring.

If you assume the base Deathwatch troop model is a 20-point SS/SB vet, and you can have 5 of those for the cost of your assassin, there is no assassin who will outperform the veterans against a target of plaguebearers.

5 vets kill 5 plaguebearers with their shooting, assuming they do not commit to and get stuck into melee (they'd kill 6.5 if they charged as well, I guess if they were needing to contest an objective or something).

A vindicare assassin kills less than one (obvious reasons I'd hope)
Culexus is also not going to be competing for obvious reasons since he's purely anti-psyker and in pretty much all respects he's outperformed by the others.

Eversor kills 3.6 plaguebearers with melee and shooting combined.

Callidus kills very slightly more than that, I cba to figure out the exact math of the wounds from the neural shredder, it's a very slight difference, like 3.8 on average.

Add that in to the fact that plaguebearers have an extremely hard time with single wound, high save targets thanks to their AP- weapons that can put down some D2 hits, I don't think it's ever a contest. Deathwatch will always do better than assassins.

What they can't do is kill the slippity slopboppers and flargly snozzmeisters and epidemiologists and such that will be sitting in the back providing buffs.

What vets can also do is fall back and continue shooting with an attached vanvet, and they can have an attached terminator to tank incoming AP- D1 hits from the PBs.

deathwathc is overall one of best armies to deal with plaguebearers, if your task is just deal with characters, then yes only option is vindicare, anyway you need usually couple or turns at least to kill a Nurgle character. Lists with Pb's spam doesn't care to kill lot of stuff, they just flood the table with tons of resilient bodies and score point on objectives deny same time objectives to you, they let DP's and/or letters do heavy lifting, there is a good reason why the only competive demon lists have lot of Pb's, never seen lists based on SL or Tz got good raking at majoir events.

I also gave a question regarding whether this rule is allowed. Say there are 20 Plaguebearers. Can I order my squad to fire and then fire one at a time until a single unit has died and it defaults to no -1 to hit? Then I can shoot the rest of the squad at normal accuracy.

GameDadZ wrote:
I also gave a question regarding whether this rule is allowed. Say there are 20 Plaguebearers. Can I order my squad to fire and then fire one at a time until a single unit has died and it defaults to no -1 to hit? Then I can shoot the rest of the squad at normal accuracy.

No. Plaguebearers have the -1 to hit as long as they had it at the start of the phase, so they will have it the whole shooting phase.

Wow so I can’t even reduce it with one squad and punch with the next...



Automatically Appended Next Post:
Played against another Plaguebearers today and learned another rule. He said that you are not allowed to reroll any missed that we’re going to hit before the modifier. So if I miss on a3 with an intercessors, I cannot reroll it because it was suppose to hit before. Is that true of all these hot penalty skills like the callidus?

to hit modifiers are applied AFTER any re roll, so first you re roll what you miss THEN you apply modifiers , the original 3 become 2 and you miss, your friend is right.

GameDadZ wrote:
Wow so I can’t even reduce it with one squad and punch with the next...



Automatically Appended Next Post:
Played against another Plaguebearers today and learned another rule. He said that you are not allowed to reroll any missed that we’re going to hit before the modifier. So if I miss on a3 with an intercessors, I cannot reroll it because it was suppose to hit before. Is that true of all these hot penalty skills like the callidus?

Mostly yes. Depends on wording of reroll though. If it says "reroll misses" or "reroll 1's" then those are rerolled before modifiers yes. If it says you can reroll any to hit for example then you can reroll any dice of your choosing, even hit, so you can reroll the 3 that is hit normally but miss with modifier anyway..

tneva82 wrote:

GameDadZ wrote:
Wow so I can’t even reduce it with one squad and punch with the next...



Automatically Appended Next Post:
Played against another Plaguebearers today and learned another rule. He said that you are not allowed to reroll any missed that we’re going to hit before the modifier. So if I miss on a3 with an intercessors, I cannot reroll it because it was suppose to hit before. Is that true of all these hot penalty skills like the callidus?

Mostly yes. Depends on wording of reroll though. If it says "reroll misses" or "reroll 1's" then those are rerolled before modifiers yes. If it says you can reroll any to hit for example then you can reroll any dice of your choosing, even hit, so you can reroll the 3 that is hit normally but miss with modifier anyway..

Yeah, certain models (Belligerent Carl maybe?) have a "reroll any hit rolls" aura. Most have a "reroll any failed hit rolls" aura.

Though I'm almost sure it's just one of the epidemic typos made on here, by us all, I don't know all the rules so I'm quite keen on hearing more about Belligerent Carl. I'm imagining you only get that in Kill Team on an Accountant Specialist?