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Today was my worst game ever. Worst. Game. Ever.

A while back, my DA gaming buddy and I threw down. Azrael and his command squad chewed through 2 daemon princes and 2 obliterators before finally getting dragged down, and I vowed to not let them piecemeal my army in such a way ever again.


Today: 2000 points

DA:
Belial, lightning claws
Azrael, command squad, razorback

2 10-man tac squads, plasma cannon, plasmagun, powerfist

5 terminators with assault cannon
5 terminators with assault cannon
5 terminators with thunder hammer/stormshield
3 ravenwing bikers, meltagun
3 ravenwing bikers, meltagun
ravenwing attack bike, multi-melta

me, Emperor's Children CSM

2 flying lash princes
Greater Daemon

5 noisemarines, doomsiren championw/ icon, combi-melta rhino
5 noisemarines, doomsiren champion w/ icon, combi-melta rhino
10 CSM, 2 meltaguns, champion, combi-melta rhino
10 CSM, 2 meltaguns, champion, combi-melta rhino
10 CSM, 2 plasmaguns, champion, combi-melta rhino

Defiler, extra ccw
Defiler, extra ccw
3 Obliterators


Turn 1
He goes first, boosts forward, doesn't do any damage to any of my tanks with his meltaguns on the bikes. Thunderhammer terminators deepstrike midfield, assault cannon terminators deepstrike right in front of me. Tactical squads are deployed in the back on objectives, azrael moves forward in his razorback and unloads.

turn 1.5
I move forward. I try to double-lash, but fail one of them so only lash azrael's squad once. This time I'm going to take it out! Both defilers and the daemon prince are able to charge. I shoot his bikers in front, killing a squad of ravenwing, the attack bike, and get one of the terminator squads down to a single basic terminator. I charge Azrael's squad and do.....nothing. Between bad hit rolls, 1's to wound, and his 4+ invul saves, I do nothing. He wounds the daemon prince and Azrael glances the defiler twice. Lose combat by 3, prince loses another wound.

Turn 2
He pops some shots from plasma cannons, but does little. Bikers move to shoot and charge the other prince that's not engaged. Terminators deepstrike behind the combat, behind one of the defilers, far off to the side [but within 12"]. Belial deepstrikes behind thunderhammer terminators. Remaining terminator from 1st squad backs up and joins Belial. Bikes charge prince, who wipes them out. Thunderhammer terminators charge one of the defilers.

In this round, I once again did nothing to Azrael's unit, but one defiler killed one terminator that was charging. Still lost the combat by a decent bit, prince takes his third wound.

Turn 2.5
I'm done with this. The other prince flies over the combat and charges in. A squad of noisemarines unloads from their rhino and charges in. 10 marines get out of another rhino and charge in. Another squad of 10 marines gets out and moves up to kill belial and his terminator friend. Obliterators deepstrike next to these guys to lend their guns to the destruction of Belial. Greater daemon is summoned, and charges into Thunderhammer terminators along with the 10 marines and the 5 noisemarines. Other 5 noisemarines drive off to go after an objective.

The 10 rapid-firing, meltagun toting marines don't kill the terminator or Belial. The obliterators also do zero wounds, bouncing off his saves.

I kill 3 models in the close combat. 3. One terminator, two members of the command squad. He then glances the defiler once and kills a marine. I win combat by 1, nothing happens, move on to turn 3.

Turn 3.

Not much to do. He charges the newly arrived terminator squad at a defiler. Belial at the 10-strong squad of marines, and the last terminator from that first squad into the obliterators after his shooting killed one.

Close combat, I kill 2 more of azrael's bodyguard, but that's it. He gets lots of hits against the defiler, blowing it up. The explosion kills the weakened daemon prince. I lose combat by 6, and the other daemon prince, the greater daemon, and half the noisemarines all die immediately to fearless wounds as I fail all their saves.

Turn 3.5

Not much else I can do. Noisemarines off going after tactical marines unload from their rhino and position for the doomsiren. 10 marines charge into belial, 10 marines charge into the other squad of terminators engaging the defiler.

Noisemarines fire doomsiren and pistols, and kill 5 marines from the tac squad. They charge, and kill nothing. He kills 3, and I fail all the saves from fearless wounds, so the squad's gone.

The big melee has now divided into a few combats. Noisemarines and last surviving member of initial 10-man squad fight against the last thunderhammer terminator. 10 marines wound Belial twice. Other 10 kill 2 terminators. Defiler kills another 2. They blow up the defiler, Belial kills half the squad he's fighting. Obliterators finally kill the terminator that had charged them.

Turn 4.

He shoots some rhinos, shoots at the obliterators, does nothing. In combat, Azrael and the last surviving terminator from assault cannon squad 2 eradicate the 10 marines that had come to help. Belial kills a few more marines, but is dragged down. Thunderhammer terminator kills last member of initial 10-man helper squad, and last noisemarine dies to fearless wounds.

turn 4.5

The marines that killed Belial ready to shoot Azrael, along with the obliterators. He's down to just him and the apothecary. 4 rapid-firing bolters and 2 meltaguns, plus two twin-linked plasmaguns, and no damage to the unit. The noisemarine's rhino tank shocks a tactical squad, which breaks and runs.

Turn 5.

Azrael charges the marines, wiping them out. The tactical squad is too close to a rhino and falls back again. He falls back 5". 6 would have taken him off the board. They regroup.

turn 5.5

Obliterators turn on Azrael, firing twin-linked plasma again. No casualties. They charge into hth, hoping to finish the job. Azrael kills one, no damage to his unit.

turn 6.

Azrael kills the last obliterator, tactical squad charges and immobilizes the rhino.






I don't know how many 4+ invulnerable saves this guy passed. Two defilers, 2 daemon princes, greater daemon, 30 chaos marines, 5 noisemarines, plus three rounds of obliterator firing and a round of close combat, and Azrael still stood at the end of the battle. True, he had help, but the help followed the same trend of invincibility, and I just couldn't do anything. That fateful turn 3 where combat resolution killed EVERYTHING in one go was pretty much it.

This game was just downright demoralizing. I never want to see this happen again. From now on, Azrael's unit is getting lashed into a corner and kept there, contained, where it can't sit and invincibly eat a charge from my entire army.

He is a pretty strong special character.

Figuring out a way to marginalize him and then ignore him is probably the best choice.

Lol. Sorry, don't mean to be kicking someone while he's down and then kicking some sand onto him, but that was just so godawful that it was funny. If not for the incredible luck, your army should've chewed right through his. I've lost 16 assault termies to damn lash and oblits in one game. In another, a lash-sorcerer-biker just kept Ragnar & his Grey Hunters who chewed through his 8-man biker unit like a hot knife through butter in a corner unable to reach his objective for the win. Maybe you'll get the luck the next time.

I don't think he can blame luck. As he said, he should have contained Azrael rather than attacked him in close combat.

Nurglitch.....ALMOST has it. See Azrael is kinda scary. 4 attacks, 2ccw, and that banner in the command squad bring him to 6, with a re-roll to hit and hitting at S6. Definitely no slouch. Charging him with a squad of chaos marines, even berserkers and such is pretty much suicidal. Any infantry short of Thunderhammer terminators is pretty much not worth it. And with the bonus attacks, his retinue is also likely to cause some damage, what with like 4 or 5 attacks on the charge each. So yes, you definitely shouldn't charge such a unit.


......but I pitted a defiler against him, against which he needs 6's to glance and the power weapon ability of his weapon was completely nullified. His squad members' multiple attacks were neutered as well by being in base to base with defilers, against which they can only use their krak grenades, and need a 6 to hit followed by a 6 to glance and then any roll under a 5 will be completely ignored by the defiler's possession rule. Meanwhile, the power weapons of the defilers that, while they need 4's to hit need only 2's to wound plus the prince's attacks that need 3's and also 2's, even with Azrael's 4+ invulnerable save he grants his squad, they should be smashed asunder. We're talking what, 10 4+ 2+ and 5 3+ 2+ attacks on the charge turn, with only 1 fewer of each in the following? With Azrael trying to smack a brick wall with a plastic spoon, that combat should have been over VERY quickly, especially when the second daemon prince added his weight. I had wanted both princes, and was fully expecting to also need the assistance of the greater daemon, especially if some terminators got involved, and I did just that.

But lo and behold, the prince and defilers killed NOTHING, and the greater daemon killed ZERO terminators, and the second prince when added to the combat did also NOTHING. The winners of the match were the basic tactical marines that threw enough attacks into the mix to cause the occasional 1 to roll for an armour save. Beyond that it was princes hitting 1 out of 4 attacks, wounding 1 out of 3 hits, defilers missing entire combat rounds, and for the love of god the two units that managed only to fail 4 4+ invulnerable saves in that ENTIRE combat out of the MANY they received that caused the outcome of this battle.

So despite the not-as-obvious-as-you-think mantra of "well, don't charge a special character's retinue in hth!", I feel like using the defilers to support the prince by neutralizing all but a single marine of the squad that could have hurt him was taking into account a lot of things and planning out that assault pretty darn well.

But the dice had other ideas, and the one turn where fearless wounds one-shotted the new prince AND the greater daemon in a single swoop was pretty damn awful. As if three monsters and two dreadnoughts killing only two enemy models wasn't enough, 5th edition had to stick its head into things with the fearless penalty - I mean special rule - to punish bad rolling with the game-deciding chance for more bad rolling.

Spellbound:

I don't really see the results of No Retreat as a bad thing though, as close combat is pretty risky, and the risk is commensurate with the reward. Previously (3rd) you could throw Fearless troops into a combat knowing that the only risk to them was whatever the enemy could kill based on their attacks, rather than a Sweeping Advance. 4th was an advance, but the effect was pretty negligible by comparison to losing an entire unit to a Sweeping Advance. At least in 5th edition Walkers aren't affected.

You would have been better off shooting at him, or simply locking him in combat with just one Defiler while the others (Defiler #1, Greater Daemons, Daemon Princes) piled into the rest of his army. Alternately, you should have used Daemon Princes of Nurgle with Nurgle's Rot - a power that looks horribly weak on paper but is great for throwing down those buckets of dice.

Now, if you want a superstition to help you justify non-Fearless units to yourself, consider that there's only so much luck to go around and you need those Morale checks to bleed off the low numbers that might otherwise materialize themselves during combat when you want high numbers.

But a more reasonable assumption would be that you charged five Elite units into one. The problem with Elite units is that they don't roll enough dice - you yourself note how that the

When you're dealing with flat numbers like Invulnerable saving throws, volume wins the game. What you put into combat with Azrael and his Command Squad didn't have the volume of attacks to overcome. You can't blame luck if your tactics left you open to a worst case scenario when your luck turned sour.

Stubborn with re-roll is far better. Chaos for some reason lacks it entirely.

I like my discussion of what the chaos codex should be, in a couple other threads. Ld 9, add aspiring champion become ld 10 stubborn. Join chaos lord, become fearless. Fits the army fluff better in my opinion.

And yeah, I crunched the numbers on rapid-firing them instead. In the situation in this game it was risky, as getting out exposed myself to terminators charging. That's something that, had I known how it would turn out, would be a risk I'd take gladly.

Similar things have happened before, though. I've had two daemon princes and a defiler vs a tervigon and 3 termagaunts end up with me losing combat, without even losing the defiler, like one would imagine the likely scenario to be. A nurgle prince with warp time seems more reliable in combat.

Problem is the Mark of Nurgle isn't the Mark of Slaanesh. Toughy, that one.

The Mark of Nurgle isn't the Mark of Slaanesh: it's better. The Toughness bonus helps against the kind of high-volume shooting that brings Daemon Princes down, and Nurgle's Rot can be used while caster and targets are locked in combat (unlike the Lash of Submission).

Don't charge relatively squishy targets in to 'help' hard targets in CC with Fearless armies.

I had a situation like this recently, I had Waaghed Ghazgull and a Nob Squad into combat with the Swarmlord and it's guard. At the end of the round Both guard were dead and two wounds was on the Swarmlord, to no casualties in return (the Swarmlord had caused one wound, and amusingly the Nob I put it on made the 5+ invulnerable and the re-roll.), and the swarmlord took another wound from fearless.

Next turn my opponent charged a Tervigon and two units of gants into combat. I lost four wounds in total from the Swarmlord, nothing from anything else. In return The Nobs killed 9 gants, and Thraka put 4 wounds on the Tervigon.

I ended up winning combat by 9, which in the result of the fearless resolution, finished off the Swarmlord and the Tervigon, and the culmination of the 9 fearless wounds plus the wounds from the death of the Tervigon finished off the two Gant squads. The entire center of his line went *poof* in two turns of combat, and largely because of the squishy extra wounds thrown into CC.

But a lot of your situation was luck. I've had that happen too, with a lone Wolf Priest surviving three turns of Combat with Thraka, passing an average of 3 4++ saves a turn before finally failing a save and being insta-gibbed.

Next time you play him, if he starts rolling like that again, use his dice....just don't use them for your LD tests.

Nah, his dice aren't loaded. I've played against him many times. He had a good - GREAT game is all. Plasma never overheated, scatters almost all on target, and those damn, damn, DAMN saves and 6's to glance.

As far as what I charged in, it's not quite the same situation as your nob combat. It would be the equivalent of charging another hive tyrant and a bunch of genestealers in - a multi-attack monstrous creature and a bunch of T4, multi-attack units with high initiative to try to kill off his terminators before they got to attack again.

Biggest mistake tactically on my end was probably not targetting Azrael with the defiler - I thought he had eternal warrior. But that defiler never caused any wounds anyway due to him passing all his saves, so what he chose to throw his attacks away against is really kind of a moot point.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Nurglitch wrote:The Mark of Nurgle isn't the Mark of Slaanesh: it's better. The Toughness bonus helps against the kind of high-volume shooting that brings Daemon Princes down, and Nurgle's Rot can be used while caster and targets are locked in combat (unlike the Lash of Submission).

What I meant was, it's something other than the Mark of Slaanesh, and thus doesn't belong in my force. On occasion with extra points I've SHAMED myself by allowing the Icon of Chaos Glory to appear in my armies, but aside from that I'm pretty abhorrent to including any others.

I even bring the MoS when I change my princes to Warp Time princes for fun games! Still nice to go before enemy commanders.....usually....

Spellbound:

Then my hat is off to you for being willing to play with a handicap. Kudos.

Another classic case of bad dice rolls tabling an army. You have my Sympathies. In my personal opinion, while you could have Lashed Azrael in a corner, your army should have definately caused some serious pain, with your key units under performing. You should write up your next re-match and let us know how it goes

I'm almost scared to! After this, I'm so angry I almost want to lash him forward and charge everything into him AGAIN, just to murder the shmuck!

.....but what if it happens again? NOOOOOO

I wouldn’t recommend trying to hammer Azrael like that but it would be funny to try it just for kicks.

It’s highly unlikely for a bad dice roll issue to re-occur. Perhaps try distracting Azrael with lash + battle cannon fire?

Hi! I'm the Dark Angels player.

When playing against spellbound, I tend to get my but handed to me. This was the first time I tried to make an affective Multi-wing list against him, and I was not expecting to do well. This game, while it was EXTREMELY moralizing for me, made me sad to. I don't think I've felt bad for winning before, but this shouldn't of happened. There were some bad tactics in my part(actually everywhere, because I'm fairly new at this game compared to spellbound), but when Spellbound left one of his defilers open to 4 PF termes charging, I knew there was going to be some fearless deaths to go around. Rolling 5 out of 6 dice on not only the GD, but the 2nd Lash prince as well, really hurt the rest of his army. Honestly, it shouldn't of happened, and I should of gotten steam-rolled.

After this battle, I've decided to start running Multi-wing more though! I'm always losing up @ our FLGS, so this really cheered me up.

I'm sorry Spellbound! Much love <3! You've helped me want to continue to play my DA's instead of going C:SM!

Also, here is my Complete list:

HQ:

Azrael with Chap Banner

Belial W/LC's

Cmd Squad
-Apoth
-2x Meltagun
-Standard Bearer
-Razorback

Elite:

2x Terminators (Troops)
-Assault Cannon
1x Terminators (Troops)
-TH/SS

Troops:

2x Tac Squad
-10 man
-P.Fist
-P.Gun
-P.Cannon

Fast Attack
1x R.A.S
- 6 bikes
- 1x meltagun
-A.Bike

That's good to hear Rashim. It's also cool to hear the opinion of the other guy in a battle report for once. I personally prefer multi-wing as it is easier to handle and is more competitive. One day I would like to try a Death Wing esque list just for kicks.

candy.man wrote:That's good to hear Rashim. It's also cool to hear the opinion of the other guy in a battle report for once. I personally prefer multi-wing as it is easier to handle and is more competitive. One day I would like to try a Death Wing esque list just for kicks.

I would totally run a Multi-wing list, but I need at least another Ravenwing box and Sammael to do so effectively. Sadly, I don't have enough cash on me =(. I also firmly believe that even a Multi-wing list needs at least 2 10 man tacs to back them up. Straight bikes and Terms are just not enough models to handle anything from experience.

Also, WTB 3++ stormshields!

Yeah, I also agree than a good Dark Angels army needs some tac squads/regular marine to back them up. They are too good/useful to not use

Yeah, 5 of them can totally take a charging squad of CSM on the chin and kick the crap out of them in return

The multiple elements, multiple threats idea of multi-wing makes it stand out against an all-deathwing or all-ravenwing list. Ravenwing tied up in assault loses their speed and shooty advantages and offers really little in assault. Deathwing is slow, and while they can shoot and assault, has trouble against armor and can be avoided. Combine them, and you've just not got enough points to go around. Tac squads in addition is a good idea. Plus in objective games, you can leave the tacs behind as a solid objective guard [or grab the two closest in multi-objective] instead of sacrificing an expensive terminator squad.

Got the right idea Rashim. Let's see if you can pull it off again

Doubtful

Going to have to fix up that list a tad bit