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Taking fluff, appearance, and ability on the tabletop into consideration, which do you all prefer? Explanations to your choices are appreciated.

Fluff wise I like both for different reasons. The Templars are just great when you want to go all in on the zeal.

Appearance wise I find the Dark Angels with their hoods and gimmicks to be rather boring. I do not care for their aesthetic. The Templars however look pretty metal.

Tabletop the Dark Angels are leagues better. The Templars are in a shooty codex that relies on shooty gimmicks and allies to be competitive which they are not optimal towards. They have very poor defense against psykers if taken without allies.

Dark Angels on the other hand are a very varied and interesting army with a healthy variety of ways to play. They win on being competitive, casual and interesting by leagues.

Black Templars are my favorite Space Marine chapter. When I first got into 40k it seemed like they were pushing the Space Marines as homicidal space monk zealots, and that idea kind of stuck in my head. It seems like now the Space Marines are actually reasonable and they don't worship The Emperor as a god. I like the Black Templars as they fit more into my original understanding of what Space Marines were.

Dark Angels are my least favorite Traitor Legion.
(I actually need to read more into their fluff, I've only caught pieces of it here and there but I've never purchased a codex or novel that focused on them.)

Definitely more towards the Black Templars for me. For them the Great Crusade has never ended and I like how they go about (largely) ignoring codex doctrine and establishing their various chapter keeps in the galaxy as they crusade from place to place. Their fiery zealotry attracts me a lot more than the more monastic and inwardly focused DA where I only really like the Ravenwing portion of the DA. They don't have the Holy Hand Grenade as a weapon option, whereas the BT once did, once upon a time.

Plus the Emperor's Champion is by far one of my favourite SM models, so the BT largely win in the looks department as well.

I voted for the Black Templars.

Fluff wise, they are pretty neat (read as psychotic zealots) and are much more interesting than the angst laden Dark Angel fluff. Add in their disregard of the codex astartes and their universe wide bro tour of heretic smashing, and you end up with a chapter that's quite unique.

Also, much hilarity will ensure if you ally with the sisters of battle. 2 armies if zealot nutters? CHOO CHOO! ALL ABOARD THE PURGE TRAIN!

I used to love the Dark Angels from the original Deathwatch days - but then they became more and focused on the Fallen and related fluff and now I have little to no interest in them and thinking of getting rid of the army. Even the HH era novels I could barely get through and I gave them away once I had read them.

Black Templars I had no strong views on until I read Helsreach which I found awesome and now been building up the BT force I have. They also work nicely with my Sisters army so that's fun.

While I don't know much of BT fluff, I much prefer DA aesthetics, DW in particular, and DA are generally better on the tabletop. The fact that I can run a much wider variety of rosters with DA is a nice plus as well, plenty of room to experiment with lists.

table top: dangels

everything else: black templars