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^Plague Towers please!

I haven't even seen a daemon army in a while, so I'm totally out of the loop. But it wouldn't surprise me if Plague Swords just weren't what they used to be. I'm all for just upgrading some of the daemons out there, even before adding new units.

 catbarf wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
I semi-agree. . . but I'm also old school in a way that I'm sure you'll recognize. Back in my day Chaos Marines and Daemons shared the same book! (along with renegades and heretics iirc.) So when I think of a mono-god army, I think of Daemons, CSMs and Cultist elements all banded together in sort of uber-deadly ramshackle force. That's the sort of thing I want Chaos to be really, really good at. When I collect my chaos models, that's the imagery I build towards, with Renegade Knights as the modern add-on to the old-school forces. Imo the way Daemons should be getting ranged firepower is by driving corrupted Superheavies with daemonic upgrades around.

Well, you're certainly in good company. I thought it was a bad move to split daemons out from CSM, and multi-god all-daemon armies have always felt very weird to me versus single-god mixed-mortals-and-daemons armies, but I also try to recognize that this is my nostalgia talking and a lot of folks like the freedom to mix Chaos factions, so YMMV.

That said, it does seem clear to me that the design intent is for Nurgle daemons to be primarily melee, with daemon engines providing the closest thing they have to daemonic shooting- like I said, I wouldn't be opposed to some shooting daemons, but I wouldn't hold my breath for it either.

I dont think anyone thought it was a good idea outside of GW. And their reason being is they wanted to sell more demon models and spliting the faction is a damn good way to do it. Its why marines have so many sub-faction codex. If demons or chaos were more popular you could bet that you would see mono god codex. But it isnt. So you wont.

OP, the truth of the matter is that mono-god is not supported as of this moment. The codex is built around using all 4 gods. Never mind that this is un-fluffy as the gods fight each other constantly. Really, imho, the only god that can go solo is Tzeentch. Tz has shooting on its troops and has flaming chariots and flamers. And screamers and LoC's bring melee.

You really should not be looking at a mono nurgle demons army and look for a mono nurgle chaos army. Its the closest you are going to get to what you want. I would love for nurgle to get a long range plague bombard like unit. But the kinda shooting you want is out of flavor for nurgle. Even the Death Guard have limited ranged combat. The overall design of nurgle is hard core staying power. And currently it doesnt. Perhaps this is the avenue you should be championing.

Nurgle, on it's own has never been a shooting army. The best analogy I can think of is, demanding that my Tempests be a powerhouse CC army. I am, like you, taking a full codex, stripping out 75% of the units for "fluff" reasons and then demanding that the leftovers do something they are not good at. Even at 25% left of units they are still pretty good shooting, just like your guys are decent cc with really nice toughness.

Edit :for Grammer

I want GW to pick a side and apply it equally to all factions, rather than having a rather blatant segregation between their customers based on what plastic they buy.

so either GW decides all factions are combined, or they're split into sub factions. But they should ALL be treated this way, not just the ones in the shiny 3+ codpieces.

When i say this though there are a couple of levels to it.

1 absolute maximum combination
this would look something like:

Codex imperium
Codex Chaos
Codex Eldar
Codex Dark Eldar (analogous to codex chaos in its relationship to codex imperium)
Codex orks
Codex Necrons
Codex Tau
Codex Tyranids

2 semi combinations
Codex Guard
Codex sisters
Codex marines
Codex chaos marines
Codex daemons
Codex cultists
Codex craftworlds
codex harlequins
codex exodites
codex orks
codex feral orks
etc etc

3 split everywhere
Codex marines - supplement Ultra, Scars, Wolves, Angels etc
codex sisters - supplement ebon, martyred
codex guard - supplement valhalla, catachan etc
codex craftworlds - supplment iyanden, alaitoc

and so on.


Nurgle daemon's ability to be played mono depends on the above.

I feel OP's pain, because I like mono Slaanesh daemons, but I know it's a limitation that I impose; I know that it's not GW's intent, and I know it hurts me.

Like other posters, I get around it by bringing Emperor's Children, which seems more pure to me than bringing another God. Unlike mono-daemon, it's clear from the detachment/ ally rules that this combination was in fact, intended.

As for splitting the dexes, I'm really glad they did. There's no way I'd have a Shelaxi Hellbane or an Infernal Enrapturess if they hadn't split the dexes. You can be crass and say "yeah, the only reason it was done is sales," but there are a lot of people who have wanted this level of detail for a long time.

I want an Emperor's Children dex, and I think the didcated Khorne marines- World Eaters I think, should have one too, just to complete the set. For me, that's the thing that completes a mon-god army. OP, I know its not your style, but you should be happy that grandfather Nurgle has given you a Deathguard book should you choose. I wish that Slaanesh had given me such blessings, though I suspect she still might.

I really wish each daemon faction had some big artillery piece, like the skaven's warp lightning cannon and plague claw. Right now the only one is the skull cannon, but that is laughably weak, 75% the cost for 50% the firepower of a LR.

OP you may be surprised by the fact that taking non-shooting units to do the work of shooters tends to work quite badly.

No, the units you selected are not shooters because they have a pistol, in the same way that a model is not an assaulter because he has a melee weapon profile.

If you deploy 8 riptides the concentrated melee effort kills just a little bit more than an intercessor. This is at best a bit shy of 1% of the value of riptides, so i guess that we have a terrible GW design, right?

Full Nurgle demons are perfectly fine as a non top table army, but you can't force them into a role that was not made for them. Nurgle is not a shooting force.

I would love for deamons to have more guns like DOOM demons.

But I also believe the AoS way is the proper way of doing Chaos Gods. You can split chaos by God, thats fine, but it makes no sense to split mortals from demons.

In AoS a Khorne army is slaves to darkness khorne marked units, "cult" units, and demons. In 40k the equivalent would be, for a Nurgle force, a detachment of nurgle demons, a detachment of nurgle marked chaos space marines, and a detachment of death guard...

Why theres so many people that finds that kind of list "omg I don't want to play that?!" but in AoS it just works great?


Also btw I find the idea of taking nurgle demons to show that shooting doesnt work for them unwise, when hordes of 90-120 plaguebearers were so good at just winning by objetives that GW nerfed them.

I feel like the entire advantage of Nurgle has been ignored - resilience. They don't have any shooting worth talking about (and why should they?), and their close combat is often lacking in AP, but they will win a war of attrition against the majority of opponents. Sit back and watch as an opponent has their entire army attack one unit and maybe kill 10% of your armies value.

In fact, Nurgle can be surprisingly fast. I've had great success with 3 x 9 Nurglings forward deploying with the support of Sloppity Bilepiper. They lock down enemy gunlines T1 and allow you to hold objectives. I've had many games where first blood was only achieved turn 3 onwards, just because the enemy didn't have sufficient close combat ability and the Nurglings are surprisingly resilient. In addition, I find opponents need to dedicate a exorbitant amount of fire power for the points they can remove from the board.


In short, of course units dedicated to close combat and resilience are terrible at shooting. If you want to play shooting and daemons, then use Tzeentch daemons.

JakeSiren wrote:
They don't have any shooting worth talking about (and why should they?)...

Why shouldn't Nurgle daemons be launching putrid, pox-laden projectiles about?

Give them poisoned projectiles, ranged weaponry which applies debuffs etc.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

JakeSiren wrote:
They don't have any shooting worth talking about (and why should they?)...

Why shouldn't Nurgle daemons be launching putrid, pox-laden projectiles about?

Give them poisoned projectiles, ranged weaponry which applies debuffs etc.

Which unit in the Nurgle Daemon range looks like it should be able to shoot more than 12" away? Once you are within 12" that's close enough to charge. Also, Nurgle has access to debuffs via the psychic phase. You may have an argument about them also having options in other phases, but again, I don't see any unit in the Nurgle line up that looks like it should affect an enemy unit outside of 12".

JakeSiren wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

JakeSiren wrote:
They don't have any shooting worth talking about (and why should they?)...

Why shouldn't Nurgle daemons be launching putrid, pox-laden projectiles about?

Give them poisoned projectiles, ranged weaponry which applies debuffs etc.

Which unit in the Nurgle Daemon range looks like it should be able to shoot more than 12" away? Once you are within 12" that's close enough to charge. Also, Nurgle has access to debuffs via the psychic phase. You may have an argument about them also having options in other phases, but again, I don't see any unit in the Nurgle line up that looks like it should affect an enemy unit outside of 12".

Why are we limiting this to the existing line?

Your question was why should Nurgle have shooting worth talking about. There's plenty of reasons why, first and foremost being Papa Nurgle wants to spread his gifts. People hiding behind walls? Let the pox rain down upon them!

Paint this guy green, make him putrid and even more fleshy and you have your daemonic long range firepower:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
So don't build mono-Nurgle? Or ally in other fire support if you think you need it.

Iron Hands are better than Black Templars. Should we tell all Black Templars players to switch to Iron Hands?

False analogy, choosing BT doesnt restrict you to 25% of the units in the book. Does Daemons provide a super-bonus if you mono-build?

Why should I have to ally in from outside my core forces to cover basic battlefield roles?

Or, if it's built with gaps, why can't it be viable to play an army that has those gaps?

And I fail to see how the analogy is a false one. Sure, Black Templars get slapped with bonuses if they stay mono-BT, and lesser but still substantial bonuses if they stay mono-Marine. But I'm not talking about winning grand tournaments. I'm talking about ordinary games in the local shop, and having variety in the army that I want to play.

You: "Doctor, doctor! It hurts when I do this!"
Me: So don't do that.

Like I'm legitimately wondering if GWs intent is to mono-build daemons. And yeah, the Black Templars/Iron Hands analogy is terrible. You don't lose 75% of your book by choosing a Chapter.

I mean, you only get your "Chapter tactic" if you dont' mix.

The "Daemons" keyword gives you exactly as much as the "Adeptus Astartes" keyword. Daemons codex is in roughly the same place the Drukhari codex is: GW took a fairly small army and for no real reason chopped it into several pieces that are as useful together as the Adeptus Astartes or Khorne or whatever keyword.

.....also, for all that restriction Daemons have among the very very worst chapter tactics out there. Limited to 12" range auras around their characters (for some fething reason) and weak enough that in other codexes with the same CTs, those CTs are almost always considered the worst one available.

Tzeentch CT is available in Tau and Harlequins: considered the worst, no reason to ever take it.

Khorne CT is available for Marines: Considered the worst, you are right now saying it's a terrible example to use. Oh, and it got buffed to give a bonus vs mortal wounds too and it's still considered unusably bad and unfair to compare with :^)

GW not only limits you to 1/4 of the codex if you want to get any kind of detachment-wide rules, they limit all the powers and relics and traits and most of the stratagems in the book as well. Daemons right now are not one faction, they are 4 factions that happen to be printed in the same book. Complaining that someone only uses one daemon faction is like complaining that someone who played Deathwatch back in the index days didn't bring Ultramarines, Blood Angels and Space Wolves to supplement their forces - you're not using your whole book!

As someone who plays mono-slaanesh, the hate in this thread is real.

Mono-daemons is a theme in the lore. It's also encouraged in the table top, especially with Slaanesh who grant aura buffs. Do you know what makes aura buffs more and more effective? more and more of the benefiting units - so taking other, non-benefitting-units (even in other detachments) is making your aura buff worse.

Mono-god daemons should be as viable as mono-legion CSM, mono-regiment Imperial Guard, mono-sept Tau, etc. Notice how none of those have super doctrines, and all of them can freely soup. Yet a Valhallan or a T'au or a Red Corsairs player isn't told "well, to play your army, just play a different army as part of it, duh."

All us daemon players want is to be like everyone else. Why the vitriol at the ask?

EDIT
Also, tbf I don't care about shooting. I don't want my army to become gunline. What I do want is to have an option to deal with gunlines, instead of being deleted from the board. At least in my case, in certain deployments I can alpha-strike with melee, but...
1) In other deployments, I get blasted for one or two turns before I can make it in. Even me going first gives my opponent the alpha.
2) In the deployments where I can charge first, it's usually straight into a screen, so I vaporize some irrelevant stuff and then get alpha'd anyways.

Just to emphasize: no daemon player wants shooting. They didn't pick daemons and go "wow I wanted a gunline playstyle." But what they want is a way to deal with other armies the same way shooting armies do (i.e. trivially wiping them off the board with a sweep of their arm - or at least, that's sometimes what it feels like playing daemons vs shooting).

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
As someone who plays mono-slaanesh, the hate in this thread is real.

Mono-daemons is a theme in the lore. It's also encouraged in the table top, especially with Slaanesh who grant aura buffs. Do you know what makes aura buffs more and more effective? more and more of the benefiting units - so taking other, non-benefitting-units (even in other detachments) is making your aura buff worse.

Mono-god daemons should be as viable as mono-legion CSM, mono-regiment Imperial Guard, mono-sept Tau, etc. Notice how none of those have super doctrines, and all of them can freely soup. Yet a Valhallan or a T'au or a Red Corsairs player isn't told "well, to play your army, just play a different army as part of it, duh."

All us daemon players want is to be like everyone else. Why the vitriol at the ask?

EDIT
Also, tbf I don't care about shooting. I don't want my army to become gunline. What I do want is to have an option to deal with gunlines, instead of being deleted from the board. At least in my case, in certain deployments I can alpha-strike with melee, but...
1) In other deployments, I get blasted for one or two turns before I can make it in. Even me going first gives my opponent the alpha.
2) In the deployments where I can charge first, it's usually straight into a screen, so I vaporize some irrelevant stuff and then get alpha'd anyways.

Just to emphasize: no daemon player wants shooting. They didn't pick daemons and go "wow I wanted a gunline playstyle." But what they want is a way to deal with other armies the same way shooting armies do (i.e. trivially wiping them off the board with a sweep of their arm - or at least, that's sometimes what it feels like playing daemons vs shooting).

I guess as someone who plays a lot of orks and dark eldar, slaanesh daemons just...do not seem to be the most extremely fragile things for the points? and most of their abilities and spells do seem to be based around the idea of reducing the opponent's ability to kill your gals, while most of their killing is done with their base profiles. They've got debuffs to shooting, debuffs to melee, debuffs to psychic tests, debuffs that prevent fallback, and buffs to durability.

Their troops aren't great, for sure, I think if I was playing them I'd probably be going the route of taking cheap allied detachments for my Cps of either some RnH cultists or some red corsairs and then just taking a list with all fast stuff and characters for the slaanesh daemons.

It seems like you should fairly easily be able to create an army that just doesn't give a gak about anything that's not anti-chaff firepower because everything that would care is a character.

the_scotsman wrote:
I guess as someone who plays a lot of orks and dark eldar, slaanesh daemons just...do not seem to be the most extremely fragile things for the points? and most of their abilities and spells do seem to be based around the idea of reducing the opponent's ability to kill your gals, while most of their killing is done with their base profiles. They've got debuffs to shooting, debuffs to melee, debuffs to psychic tests, debuffs that prevent fallback, and buffs to durability.

Their troops aren't great, for sure, I think if I was playing them I'd probably be going the route of taking cheap allied detachments for my Cps of either some RnH cultists or some red corsairs and then just taking a list with all fast stuff and characters for the slaanesh daemons.

It seems like you should fairly easily be able to create an army that just doesn't give a gak about anything that's not anti-chaff firepower because everything that would care is a character.

Can you tell me what debuffs to shooting there are, and what buffs to durability there are?

The only debuff to shooting I can think of is:
Symphony of Pain, an 18" -1 to-hit inflicted on an enemy unit. Unfortunately, this hits the closest enemy unit, which means it's typically hitting things you're about to shred in melee anyways - and even if it's not, it's hitting a screen 9/10 times.

The only buff to durability outside of melee I can think of is:
Delightful Agonies, which is a worse version of the CSM power of the same name, granting only a 6+ feel no pain. It doesn't help against alphas, being a psychic power, and a 6+++ simply isn't very good.

The problem is precisely that you care too much about anti-chaff firepower. Boltguns kill keepers of secrets fairly well (as do aggressors, for example) given that they wound on a 5+ and I only get a 5+ save. If you aren't bringing keepers of secrets, then you're not winning any games, because you can't actually deal with heavy machinery. Unless you know something that I don't, lol. Boltguns kill DPs pretty badly, but Slaanesh DPs in the Daemons codex are junk. Boltguns kill everything else in Slaanesh easily.

EDIT:
I forgot about the Warp Surge stratagem, but that's because it's bad. A 4++ is a pretty good save (except against mass small arms, which kills Slaanesh good and dead) but it costs 2CP (which is expensive, since it's basically rotate ion shields on a crappier model) and prevents you from spending a CP reroll on a crucial hit from a high damage weapon.

Sorry - forgot who I was talking to here. You're right, there's nothing you can do, you'll lose every game, everything is unfair.

the_scotsman wrote:
Sorry - forgot who I was talking to here. You're right, there's nothing you can do, you'll lose every game, everything is unfair.

I haven't lost every game, nor was I even the one who started this thread. You're sure making this personal after coming in here claiming that

the_scotsman wrote:
They've got debuffs to shooting, and buffs to durability..

all I asked is for you to show those buffs/debuffs, while listing the ones I'm aware of and why they're not actually very good.

And I'd say orks are tougher than Slaanesh Daemons, but Drukari are slightly less tough. However, do you know what drukari and orks both have?
Guns.

 JNAProductions wrote:
Why is wanting to play just Nurgle Daemons wrong?

Why should I be punished for my army choice?

It's not wrong.

You are free to build whatever army you want. You are free to put theme ahead of performance.

Don't complain about performance if you put theme and personal preferences ahead of it.

I don't like Thunderfire cannons. Would my list be better with one in? Yes it would. I'm chosing not to run one.

The strange thing for me is the separation of Daemons from Chaos Space Marines.

Even if they wanted to impose some limit like 'you can't have daemons in a detachment with CSMs if the latter have a different mark', it just seems like the two should naturally go together.

Then at least daemons of any god could still have access to shooting from Predators, Daemon Engines and the like.

 Ishagu wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
Why is wanting to play just Nurgle Daemons wrong?

Why should I be punished for my army choice?

It's not wrong.

You are free to build whatever army you want. You are free to put theme ahead of performance.

Don't complain about performance if you put theme and personal preferences ahead of it.

I don't like Thunderfire cannons. Would my list be better with one in? Yes it would. I'm chosing not to run one.

that is a really bad example, because an ultramarine army does not get crippled by not using a thunderfire cannon. It still has access to smash hammers, eliminators, top notch chapter tactics, great relics, agressors double taping etc

GW should not create some armies at the top efficiency level when they are mono and force other people to play soups. It gets even worse then the soups can't still deal with the good armies, because then the players are double punished. Not only are their armies bad, but now they bought a ton of units they didnt want to play with, but had to buy to have a working army.

And a Daemon army does not get crippled by using allied Daemons from a different God and Chaos Marine allies.

If anything the topic is a bad example.

 Ishagu wrote:
And a Daemon army does not get crippled by using allied Daemons from a different God and Chaos Marine allies.

If anything the topic is a bad example.

Imagine if ultramarines were so bad that you had to ally ~1k pts of guard to make your army even passable on the tabletop in a casual setting. Would you simply ally in that 1k points of IG without saying a word?

You're comparing a complete faction to parts of a faction.

There is no Nurgle Daemon codex. They belong to a greater faction of Daemons, a Chaos Daemon codex, and are allied to the Death Guard in the lore.

In the official lore, Nurgle Daemons are typically found alongside the mortal followers of Nurgle

 Ishagu wrote:
You're comparing a complete faction to parts of a faction.

There is no Nurgle Daemon codex. They belong to a greater faction of Daemons, a Chaos Daemon codex, and are allied to the Death Guard in the lore.

In the official lore, Nurgle Daemons are typically found alongside the mortal followers of Nurgle

Do you think Ultramarines should be forced to ally Black Templars to be interesting in a casual setting? They're in the same codex, after all.

I don't really care if they're allied in the lore; so are Ultramarines and the Ultramar Auxilia (for example). Yet you could play the ultramar auxilia by itself (as a custom guard regiment) or the Ultramarines by themselves if you wished.

Lol that's a different thing. Space Marines are a codex that can be played under thematic chapter rules.

Daemons are a codex. Nurgle Daemons make up a portion of that codex. You are making a choice to use 1/4th of the units available to you.

Mino God forces are easily represented by using a combination of Daemon and Mortal units. Daemons of Khorne with World Eaters, Daemons of Nurgle with Death Guard, etc

 Ishagu wrote:
Lol that's a different thing. Space Marines are a codex that can be played under thematic chapter rules.

Daemons are a codex. Nurgle Daemons make up a portion of that codex. You are making a choice to use 1/4th of the in the ta available to you.

So the question is:
Why? Why can't daemons have thematic chapter allegiance rules? Or why shouldn't they, if that's your tack?

Because their presence in the material world is limited and they tend to operate alongside mortal forces that summoned them. That's your lore reason.

There are no chapters of Daemons, they are all slaves and an extension of their God.

 Ishagu wrote:
Because their presence in the material world is limited and they tend to operate alongside mortal forces that summoned them. That's your lore reason.

There are no chapters of Daemons, they are all slaves and an extension of their God.

And if we're dealing with an assault on a Daemon Planet?

Or, what if I want to use the most common and numerous of worshippers of Nurgle-namely, traitor guard, ordinary chaos cults, and other Renegades and Heretics.

You're free to make an army of Nurgle Daemons, no one is stopping you.

You're building that army because you want a certain theme. You can't complain if the specific theme you persue isn't the most optimised in terms of play.

Just like I can't complain if the units I don't like ultimately lead to my army not being as strong if I omit them.