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Spoilers for my experience with Night Lords so far and why this Legion bums me out so much as someone who has painted far too many lightning bolts to consider simply swapping to a better legion. Skip for just list-talk:
Spoiler:
I absolutely love the Night Lords - the aesthetic, the lore and the theming. I completely loathe the Night Lords - the most feelsbad legion trait, the loss of their two best strategems in the previous edition and the fairly uninspired list of relics. The Chaos Marine codex is one of the most deep and interesting in 9th editi, it's filled to the brim with great combos -- but its depth also makes it very difficult to process. I have played a few games with Night Lords with their new codex and, perhaps it may simply be the nature of the local meta, I've found it very difficult to make the army function well when faced up against factions who truly couldn't care less about the morale phase. I played Tau -- I had difficulty making it into melee against them before their crisis suits shot me off the board, although I did enjoy easily killing lots and lots of kroot. I played Thousand Sons -- a narrow victory for the Night Lords, but the entire game felt like I was getting badly stomped until the very end where I barely managed to take the center and eke out a win by a measly 5 victory points. The Rubrics simply ignored the morale phase like leadership debuffing and combat attrition don't mean a thing to them, but eventually I killed just enough of them for No Prisoners to get me to 77 victory points over the sons 72. Then I played Imperial Knights -- rolled some of the hottest dice on my saves ever, and so didn't quite get tabled, but I didn't kill a single model until Turn 4 while losing many in the process and the knights out-maneuvered me at every turn. This match up of them all felt the worst -- my legion trait, it does nothing here! Then, I played Dark Angel Ravenwing list with lots of speeders and bikes -- while I could hold the center fairly comfortably, it seemed like I simply could never successfully charge! In the previous edition, I'd grown used to Night Lords having at the very least the benefit of reliable deep-strike charges and charges from units within terrain. But now, it seems like I can't make a charge over 6" with any degree of reliability and I am not aware of any tools except cheesing Pact of Flesh revivals to improve my charge success rate, which pains me. Finally, I played World Eaters in a Tempest of War -- and they pre-gamed moved and charged into my castle with Red Butchers under the covering fire of a Lord of Skulls, piled into my deployment zone, and then fought twice to destroy a good chunk of my army and multiple characters... even with the benefit of Fights Last and the Unkillable Brick of Slaanesh Terminators (turns out if you just kill the characters who make them unkillable and fail your litanies, they're just as killable as anything else to a lord of skulls), I just got stomped badly by end of Turn 3 and could barely hold onto the objective in my own deployment zone.
With a win/loss ratio of 1:4, and the single win seemingly a fluke, I'm forced to go back to basics with this army. It clearly isn't going to be an army that reliably charges out of deep strike, and it clearly isn't going to be an army that can go toe to toe with elite, high leadership armies who almost never have to deal with combat attrition, without serious set up.
The question becomes: if Night Lords can't reliably charge, their shooting is as bad as any other chaos marine legion, their legion trait doesn't help them in melee until the point where no more help is needed against the factions where help is needed the most... what CAN they do to threaten things such as Custodes, Knights, and other space marines of any extraction? I came up with the following list in the struggle to find an answer. The shame of it is that it requires models that have not yet been released (or are old, ugly and undesirable in their currently available form), and that I have no ability to run. But, I think a reasonably strong Night Lords list (which does not include Abaddon and is not interested in doing so - the exercise is to make a viable list which is purely Night Lord) would look something like this:
Battle Size [6CP]: 3. Strike Force (101-200 Total PL / 1001-2000 Points)
Detachment Command Cost
Gametype: 4. Chapter Approved: War Zone Nephilim
Legion: Night Lords
+ HQ +
Daemon Prince with Wings [11 PL, -1CP, 180pts]: 6. Dirty Fighter, Hellforged sword, Mark of Slaanesh, Stratagem: Warlord Trait, Warlord, Warptime, Wings
Dark Apostle [6 PL, -2CP, 110pts]: 3. Murderous Reputation, Aspiring Lord, Illusory Supplication, Inferno Tome, Litany of Despair, Mark of Slaanesh, Stratagem: Relic
. . 2x Dark Disciple: 2x Close combat weapon
Master of Possession [7 PL, 120pts]: Mark of Slaanesh, Mutated Invigoration, Pact of Flesh
I find that with just +1T, -1 to wound and ONE of Delightful Agonies or Illusory Supplication, the Terminator brick does just fine surviving. It doesn't need both Illusory Supplication and Delightful Agonies most of the time. So I didn't run Liber Hereticus here, but I did include the Inferno Tome.
Inferno Tome is just to have the option between Advance & Charge (on Chosen & Raptors) & Illusory Supplication & a second source of Fights Last.
I think Supplication is better early game, but Fights Last is something that gains more value as the game goes on. Or if say Daemon Prince + Possessed are in combat with multiple units, the Daemon Prince can always Fight Last one of those units, and the priest can ensure that there will be no potential to interrupt with a second unit with Litany of Despair... anyway since no other CSM legion has the option to have 2 Fights Last effects at the same time, having the option of Litany of Despair tends to benefit Night Lords a bit more than others.
The playstyle here is a bit hard to nail down for me. If night lords like playing dirty and ambushing their enemies, but can't necessarily make charges very well, the best way to approximate ambush focus would be just to double up on fights last and focus on baiting unfavorable charges which then become impossible to fall back from. Fall back denial in particular - which night lords have extra of from their stratagem + warp talon - tends to complement fights last, since a unit which is prevented from falling back but doesn't die in the next turn can be prevented from fighting first in that turn without necessarily needing to be charged, freeing up units to charge elsewhere.
The lack of long range guns and anti-tank weapons is still an issue, but with fast infantry list it's easier to use terrain to advantage to avoid big guns, and anyway, it also just denies efficient use of the big guns, since there are no real natural targets for low volume high damage weapons - what do you shoot here with a d3+3 or d6 gun? just won't get your points worth out of them even if you do kill 1 or 2 occasionally, and so in a way it makes the absence of long range anti-tank kind of moot.
I'm going Konrad Curze levels of insane trying to understand how to best make use of the tools Night Lords in particular provide when playing against armies that Night Lords aren't easily able to reduce to leadership 5 or force morale checks on and any help in figuring out how to make this army play like a competent warband of chaos marines, rather than a joke legion whose forte is slaughtering kroot, gretchin and conscripts, would be greatly appreciated. There's no way that codex playtesters intended for the faction to be at such a huge disadvantage in match-ups against - forget knights, dark angels and thousand sons - other armies in the same codex. There must be a way to use the Night Lord toolbox to stand toe to toe with the other legions..... has anyone managed to do so yet? How have Night Lords fared in your experience? Can you help?
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2022/07/18 10:25:10
Maybe I am missing something because I have seen quite a few CSM lists with this already, but I think this list is illegal? "Mere Mortals" requires that you can't have more cultist units than core legionaries. So you need to add one more unit of csm or reduce the accursed units from two to one.
Greed wrote: Maybe I am missing something because I have seen quite a few CSM lists with this already, but I think this list is illegal? "Mere Mortals" requires that you can't have more cultist units than core legionaries. So you need to add one more unit of csm or reduce the accursed units from two to one.
Mere mortals says you cant have more CULTISTS unit than TRAITORIS ASTARTES CORE INFANTRY. His list has more than two TRAITORIS ASTARTES CORE INFANTRY units (legionaries, termis, chosen), so its fine.
