Rahdok wrote:
New to warhammer and assembling my first army (Death Guard), for 250$ i landed well over 1000$ worth of assembled (but unpainted/primed) mini's, BUT some of the models don't have the load out i quite want to play with. So my couple of questions are:
1. Can i just keep them as is and just say "this entire squad is running bolters/grenades, ignore the axe"?

In casual play this happens all the time, in a tournament you can generally get away with not having grenades modeled, but a bolter should at least be present on the model. I've glued a lot of bolters and chainswords to the hips of models.

2. What is an easy way to "remove" parts and reglue with as little damage to the mini as possible?

a good pair of model sheers, some Zap-A-Gap and some green stuff used as sparingly as possible. Don't worry if things like off at first. Its an acquired skill and you can always take a part off and reattach it

3. It came with a hellbrute, but i'm not a fan of the model, i heard you can buy a forgeworld equivalent, the deredeo/Leviathan dreadnoughts, are these treated as the same thing with the same rules?

They are very different models. The hellbrute is the equivlant of a melee capable light tank, while the derodo and leviathan are much larger and carry much, much thicker armor. That being said, Chaos loves itself a conversion and people will generally accept a chaos model count-as as long as the size matches roughly

4. it came with a full assembled Mortarion, is there any way in the emperors name that i could paint this guy nicely with him being fully assembled or would it be better to pass him off to someone with more knowledge? He looks amazing and I REALLY don't want to feth him up.

You can get pretty close with a brush and a three-color paint scheme but its all a question of your skills, how much money you want to spend, and how much quality you want in the final product.

5. I'm not a fan of the nurgle daemon prince model. I get nurgle minions are supposed to be foetid/bloated, but man i want my DP to terrify people, anyone got any good ideas of what i could do in-regards to kit-bashing or just as a more suitable stand-in?

Chaos loves conversions. Generally you can create a zombie version of any Daemon model and call it 'nurgle'. If you already have the prince you could always add a bunch of tentcles with green stuff.

6. All appear to have some sort of base and im used to basing first then adding the model on after, any tips here would be much appreciated.

Not certain what you are asking for. How to remove the base or how to add basing afterwards? What basing theme do you want to use?

Thanks for your time in reading this giant wall of text, any help is greatly wanted! Thanks!

Rahdok wrote:
Thanks for your answers, ill look into this. As for 4. I want him to POP, i had no plans in intially even getting a Mortarion (expensive AF and looks hard to paint). But the seller had him included so what the hell. My paint skills are...i'd say decent, but nothing amazing.
6. Anything really? Would it be easier to pop the base off and go from there? Or should i just paint/assembled the base with the model on it? And I'm going for a sort of swampy look. Thanks again!