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Character
250-Great Unclean One with Bilesword and Plague Flail
+20-Font Of Spores

Battleline
110-Ten Plaguebearers with Instrument and Icon
110-Ten Plaguebearers with Instrument and Icon
110-Ten Plaguebearers with Instrument and Icon
110-Ten Plaguebearers with Instrument and Icon
110-Ten Plaguebearers with Instrument and Icon
70-Six Nurglings

Other
110-Three Plague Drones with Instrument and Icon

It'd be more effective by swapping one or two units of Plague Bearers for units of Plague Drones.
The Drones shooting greatly helps anything going into melee. They also have better movement should you need to get somewhere.

And if it's not aimed at tourney play? Consider Furies out of Legends instead of Nurglings. They have an OC value & much better movement.

ccs wrote:
It'd be more effective by swapping one or two units of Plague Bearers for units of Plague Drones.
The Drones shooting greatly helps anything going into melee. They also have better movement should you need to get somewhere.

I think the original take on the list is the better choice. Yes, the Drones give a good buff, but if they are only using it for themselves, it's still less damage output then the Plaguebeares will do. Despite being faster and pretty chunky, they don't deal a lot of damage themselves. Having one at 1k I think is where you want to be with them, though I could see the reasoning for brining a few MSU at 2k.

This was for a quick game the day I posted this list.
I honestly forgot how the game went, other than it was a nice time.

 Tawnis wrote:

ccs wrote:
It'd be more effective by swapping one or two units of Plague Bearers for units of Plague Drones.
The Drones shooting greatly helps anything going into melee. They also have better movement should you need to get somewhere.

I think the original take on the list is the better choice. Yes, the Drones give a good buff, but if they are only using it for themselves, it's still less damage output then the Plaguebeares will do. Despite being faster and pretty chunky, they don't deal a lot of damage themselves. Having one at 1k I think is where you want to be with them, though I could see the reasoning for brining a few MSU at 2k.

That's the thing though, (ideally) they aren't using the buff only on themselves. They shoot a target, the buff kicks in (doesn't matter how much, if any, damage was actually done), and then EVERY Nurgle Deamon unit that attacks that target gets to re-roll wounds against it until the end of the turn.
Them doing damage with their shooting is nice, but it's not the point of the attack....

Hmm... I just ran some mathhammer on this and it looks like you're correct. I'd overestimated how much the extra attacks from the Plaguebearers would deal in comparison to the bonus damage from the re-roll wound buff.

It's still not a lot more damage, but yeah, it looks like more Drones are mathmatically better on the baseline. The stratagems like Fever Visions and Seeping Virulence are more effective on the greater number of attacks, but in general the Drones are better.

 Tawnis wrote:
Hmm... I just ran some mathhammer on this and it looks like you're correct. I'd overestimated how much the extra attacks from the Plaguebearers would deal in comparison to the bonus damage from the re-roll wound buff.

It's still not a lot more damage, but yeah, it looks like more Drones are mathmatically better on the baseline. The stratagems like Fever Visions and Seeping Virulence are more effective on the greater number of attacks, but in general the Drones are better.

Surprise! The guy who actually plays this army knows what he's talking about.

ccs wrote:

 Tawnis wrote:
Hmm... I just ran some mathhammer on this and it looks like you're correct. I'd overestimated how much the extra attacks from the Plaguebearers would deal in comparison to the bonus damage from the re-roll wound buff.

It's still not a lot more damage, but yeah, it looks like more Drones are mathmatically better on the baseline. The stratagems like Fever Visions and Seeping Virulence are more effective on the greater number of attacks, but in general the Drones are better.

Surprise! The guy who actually plays this army knows what he's talking about.

I play against the army all the time, by best friend runs Nurgle. I think it's more the matchups, I run a lot of 1 wound models, so the Plaguebearers are better against me, but I ran the comparison math based on MEQ for the above example since that's more common to find in the wild.

So I guess what I should have said was you're correct with caveats to be more accurate, but I didn't feel like running a vs every army breakdown, so I just posted a generalist answer. For me, given that the Plauge Drones are only slightly better against MEQ, and reasonably worse against GEQ and Monsters/Vehicles above T10, (at least for the army that OP is using), I was not incorrect either.