What have your Raven Guard done lately?

[WAR]

Kicked off a new Crusade campaign last night by running over 500pts of Grey Knights. Vanguard Veterans are so strong with the Swift & Deadly warlord trait, being able to move 13-18" and charge is so powerful on a 44x30" board. I didn't even need Canticle of Hate or my Hungry for Battle chapter tactic.

 

That squad (2x2LC, 2xTH+SS, Sgt. w/ Relic Blade) killed 10 GK, 3 Terminators and a GK Librarian all by themselves without my Chaplain ever getting to swing. I've been playing RG successors for so long without even trying VVs and now I see the light, believe me.

 

Thats awesome Alcyon.......and thats coming from a Raptors and a Grey Knight player.  I cronge everytime I think about fielding Grey Knights at 500 pts

[Alcyon]

That's what I'm doing, yeah - JP Chaplain with Swift & Deadly. We're starting the campaign at 500pts and playing quite a few low-points games so there's not a ton of CP available for strats. I'm saving mine for Transhuman and things like that mostly.

[Alcyon]

 

I cronge everytime I think about fielding Grey Knights at 500 pts

 

It's pretty unfortunate that GW is letting every other marine faction hang with 1w until their codex drops, but I still think the VVs would've cleaned house with the Thunder Hammers and Relic Blade plus the Chaplain to back them up. I think the main thing is just the maneuverability of jump packs means you can define the terms of a melee so much more easily. GK Interceptors seem awesome for that reason especially when they presumably get Str +1 in the new codex.

[SkimaskMohawk]

I've had two games recently with a pure raven guard list (as in not successors) since my very first, disastrous game of 9th, and pulled out the W on both of them. It was over tabletop simulator since my area just exited lockdown a bit ago so I don't quite own everything in it, with me needing to get 7 more assault centurions, but other than that I have everything to slap it down on the table right away.

 

The concept is take the good, meta units for raven guard, but then jam as many annoying sniper units into the list as possible. My buddy really hated Ex Tenebris in 8.5 where it one hit Illic so I decided to expand that to the entire army. So we got shrike, we got a Silentus wielding apothecary, Korvidari+MM Honours Phobos captain, Ex Tenebris P.Lt and 3 units of eliminators. The rest of the list is rounded out by 10 flamer centurions, 5 flamer aggressors, 6 vanguard with lightning claws and shields, 2 attack bikes with meltas and a tactical, incursor and intercessor unit for troops. Now I'm going to say that I don't think this list is necessarily good. It's got a lot the elements that will win you games in it, but the sniper stuff isn't reliable at dealing ranged damage. But guess what? Your opponent generally doesn't know that and it can cause them to critically misplay in their use of character models.

 

So onto my games.

 

My first was against tau on priority objectives. My opponent mainly plays eldar, but he's quite a good player; he took second in our city's GT in summer of 2018 during the knight meta and big names have came out to a number of Ottawa GTs so the competition was pretty good. That being said, he can be sloppy with his off-races and some rules cases. Anyways, I think everyone knows that tau are one of the worst right now and the raven guard chapter tactic works very well against them as they hate to hit debuffs and strong armour saves. He was also overly cautious of the eliminators with his suit commanders and it really narrowed their impact; two pod suits and the forgeworld assassin one basically didn't do anything. He also made his list for scramblers, but screwed up and forgot characters can't scramble. I was able to score full points on priority target and oath of moment with 9 on assassinate, bringing me ahead by a solid 19 point lead by the end of turn 5. This being my second real game against tau, I didn't realise how much stratagem reliance they have, so popping stranglehold would have been very useful and I'll be sure to remember it in future games. Going second was rough, and I had some critically bad saves on aggressors, but he wasn't able to push me off the three objectives I started on; going first would have been a slam dunk.

 

My second game was against my regular opponent. He plays a wide variety of stuff and is pretty competent, but due to his wide pool of armies he can screw up when switching lists and archetypes because he's used to playing a certain style beforehand. As a mainly chaos player he also tends to enjoy combo elements and can feel less effective when piloting lists without any direct synergy. He was using a mixed nurgle list; mortarion, 5 beasts, 5 plague drones, three units of nurglings, two units of poxwalkers, two multimelta helbrutes, two units of 5 of plague marines and then characters in the form of death guard daemon prince, plague caster and poxbringer. This is a list he can fully field in real life so he wanted practise with it, but it's not as refined as it could necessarily be. It also, once again, matches up really poorly with my raven guard; my main damage dealers use 1 and 3 damage weapons so mortarion doesn't get a lot of value out of Disgustingly resilient, while his low AP and kind of bad strength values make the centurions also counter his blobs of daemons. My large amounts of deploying out of the DZ let me match his nurglings so i wasn't panicking for objectives. Onto the game itself; we rolled scouring and just by the nature of the mission and his army I decided to deploy the centurions on the board instead of in SftS. Getting first turn, I used Infiltrators on them and master of ambush on the aggressors to get a solid mid-field presence while also not being in range of mortarion; my vanguard failed to kill three bases of nurglings on the center objective, but also acted as bait for mortarion who rolled up on his turn and killed...5 of the 6 and also out of engagement range. I burnt him down with almost everything as a result and we quickly realised his damage output kind of relied on it; I had too many centurions alive and none of his remaining melee units wanted to touch them. He had also made the same mistake as the tau player by hiding his characters in fear of the snipers, preventing them from doing any offensive psychic powers or having the daemon prince support his push. We called it at turn 3, where I was about to leave him with 10 plague marines, a daemon prince and a helbrute. I took assassinate, abhor the witch and oath of moment.

 

Some rambling thoughts to go with my rambling game summaries;

 

Centurions are still very good. They're not the game enders of 8th, but they can fight anything in midfield brawl without fear. Mortarion, deathwing knights, other centurions, whatever. The flamers help control threats around them that you don't want them to charge.

 

Silentus is very useful. It gave the apothecary some decent damage without having to compromise on his role as battle-pile support. The strength 5 makes it feel more impactful than the other sniper weapons on characters.

 

Shrike is a good flex character. He can give his full rerolls to the vanguard or aggressors and jet off to trouble shoot. I used his charge reroll with a phobos unit for the first time to slingshot the incursors onto an objective for the obsec while he went in second to actually do damage.

 

I played the two worst missions in the GT package and was pretty pleased with how I was able to play to their strengths. Scouring in particular is brutally unfair; if you have 3 objectives to score 10, then you're scoring 15. Big melee threats work particularly well there since they can just go from objective to objective and mow down enemies.

 

Eliminators need help. They're a unit with a very narrow application and are pretty slot inefficient; without support characters on doctrine they average 2 wounds against a marine support character like a librarian or lieutenant. You use another unit and you start taking really inefficient trades of 180 points and 2 heavy support slots for whatever 4 wound character you're popping. Support characters of your own can boost the output, but that's now even more points invested in these trades. Then of course you can just hide behind obscuring and have the eliminators shoot at some really poor targets instead. I honestly think they should be able to shoot out of los still with executioners; you need a captain, lt and 3 squads on doctrine to do 4 wounds to that 3+ save model. It's 400 points and 5 slots. Hardly game breaking, especially now since most lists don't rely on castle auras.

Edited February 24, 2021 by SkimaskMohawk

[Alcyon]

Thanks for such a great and detailed writeup that includes a number of interesting units!

 

You were still banging the Centurion drum a while back when we all thought they were trash now, and I think you've been thoroughly vindicated not only by your own games but by some recent competitive results as well. They even made it into Wing's 10 units to watch out for, where he highlighted how strong they are operating on their own without as many buffs as other units might need, and how they still benefit from the Apothecary abilities despite having lost Core. 

 

I have the same feelings as you re: Eliminators but I do like them conceptually as a "retinue" for a Vindicare, since they're very hard to kill themselves and provide Look Out, Sir while having the same basic range band and goals etc. I think immobile snipers are not in a great spot now that you can rarely set them up on an objective AND with good vision but I'm excited to try this combo out. 

 

I'm more interested in the other kinds of sniper weapons you seeded throughout the list, I think Silentus is probably an underrated option. Generally I found Str4 bolt-based sniper weapons pretty weak when I've tested them but certainly Surgical Strikes helps a lot there. I question the value of the Phobos Captain in particular given how in my experience the loadout really wastes their 5 base attacks, WS2 and 4++ but if you have backline shooting units to buff I can see it being alright.

 

I guess my major question is whether Shadow Masters came up for you at all, and whether you think Shrike is worth having to swallow that chapter tactic. I can certainly imagine Born Heroes, Whirlwind of Rage and/or Hungry for Battle being major credits to the Centurions, Aggressors and VVs considering how much of your list is melee. 

[SkimaskMohawk]

Funnily enough, in my game against the tau I had a vindicare parked next to some eliminators. He didn't do anything at all due to suit commanders not being infantry. I figured I'd drop him for an ex tenebris phobos lieutenant and to shore up my vanguard unit a bit. In theory the lieutenant would actually be able to provide something even if his shots did nothing, or drop down and gun an unsuspecting character. This decision was largely vindicated as my vanguard survived mortarion with one model left, which earned me 2vp from oath and eventually claimed the center.

 

I tend to agree that ex tenebris and especially the phobos captain are frustrating to get results with. The thing is, the list is mostly using a competitive shell to be the most annoying possible with sniper weapons, so pure efficacy isn't what I'm going for. And interestingly enough, the phobos captain can multi-task pretty well even with his dud of a shot; he can forward deploy to create some area-denial for your master of ambush, protects it from any reserves, does some buffing of anything that joins him there like eliminators or attack bikes and can still pick at characters across the board. It's just one more very annoying thing to stress about for your opponent, and he's equipped defensively enough to be a real pain to try and focus down.

 

As for shadow masters, my first game it was the deciding factor, no doubt. It helped me survive the tau shooting, as well as offset the 5 markerlights. My second game was mostly against melee so it didn't come up at all obviously. Now that being said, I don't think the successor tactics would have been a better fit in any of the melee combats across either game. Either my centurions annihilated anything they touched, or my units were in protracted combats. And shrike is a pretty budget chapter master, adds to the sniper silliness and netted me 9 vps from character kills and contributed to denying 5 with his incursor slingshot, so I was pretty happy with the whole thing. Also, you cant have as many sniper-characters with successors and need to pay an extra cp on top of it all.

[Alcyon]

Hard to argue with that. I've yet to use the Vindi/Elim combo since I dropped it from my latest OoB pretty much immediately to run more Vanguards, but yeah, having to wound on a 4+ against non-infantry makes him just as tough to use as Str 4 snipers.

 

Excited to hear some ideas for the Phobos Captain, I do have a mostly painted model after all. Mine was a beast early on in the last Crusade with just his combat knife. There's maybe something cool in the idea of deploying him forward with some Scouts or Incursors or something and then using MoA or jump packs to counter charge, but generally I've found Concealed Positions to be too dangerous in terms of opening yourself up to 1st turn charges in games below 44x60.

 

Maybe I'm too conservative with staying in cover but I never found Shadow Masters useful at all. I just always end up deploying behind Obscuring and playing smaller game sizes where you can close quickly anyways. Definitely a good point that being OG RG lets you pay less CP and gives you your CM on a budget. Still, I think Shadow Masters encourages you to play more of a shooty marine game, and having built a list for that in my last Crusade I want to stay away from it unless I'm running some other Chapter with more supporting stratagems.

 

Thanks again for sharing the update, always appreciate your insights.

[SkimaskMohawk]

In the days of 8.5 I was a big fan of the knife relic with imperiums sword on the captain. But that was also when you could stack to-wound from lay low the tyrant and choose your relics and stuff on a game to game basis. You could still do that in theory and have him role with the aggressor blob for some quick character work in melee. I also found I really had to think about concealed positions and master of ambush vis-a-vis enemy charge range. Real easy to waste some forces there.

 

I found that between deploying a little forward with the eliminators and having freedom of movement on turn 2-3, that they'd push forwards and help hold mid-field objectives without necessarily being in cover all the time; the tacs and intercessors grab the rear objectives. The centurions tend to be the fire magnets and the eliminators make for just very unsatisfying targets, both in terms of threat and in terms of not being key objective holders and their marginal durability.

[BrotherCaptainSolari]

I had a 2000 points game against Necrons. I played pure Raven Guard led by upgraded Apothecarion with selfless healer warlord trait. I also had two extra WL traits for my indomitus captain which had Rites of war (obsec bubble) and the indomitus lieutenant had MoA. Other HQ´s were Shrike and Phobos lieutenant with Ex tenebris. My troop choises were 2 infiltrator squad with helix gauntlets, 1 incursor squad and 1 assault intercessor squad. In the elite slots were already mentioned apothecarion, 5 man bolter aggressor squad and 3 man bladeguard veteran squad. I also had 5 man plasma inceptor squad, hellblasters with assault plasmas, eradicator squad and an impulsor. 

 

The map we played was the four pillars from the rule book. It has 4 objective markers and the deployment zones are diagonal chess squares. I choose assassinate (he had only 3 characters) Engage in all fronts and oaths of moment as my secondaries. Since I had 5 characters he also picked assassinate. Others were repair teleport homer and last one was from the necron codex (it did´t work well because I racked lots of points from EiaF).

 

I deployed my army quite carefully. He had lots of shooting in his army so I had to hide my units well. I was able to drop my helix gauntlet infiltrators on both midfield objectives, outside of the charge range of my opponent. Other squad was exposed to firepower, but it was in dense terrain so it wasn´t a really desired target for my opponent. It was also expendable, because I knew he wasn´t able to get on the objective before round 3. I won the roll off and brought my MoA ltnt with aggressors close to his battle line. I also infiltrated eradicators on melta range to his line and brought my captain and hellblasters out of the impulsor. I had lots of firepower but rolled quite badly (eradicators did 0 wounds once again, even with captain´s reroll aura.) I charged my ltnt against tomb blades and he took 4 of them out. my aggressors brought down tomb sentinel and that was the first turn for me.

 

On my opponent´s turn, he tried to take away my hard hitting units. I lost only one of my infiltrators on the objectice, 4 hellblasters and 2 eradicators. Gravis armors withstood a ton of firepower. Also aggressors took massive amount of fire power and after charge phase, I had only sgt. left. My opponent was only able move big blob of scarabs out on the midfield, other than that he was stuck in his own deployment zone. I got full points on EiaF and did well with oaths of moment too.

 

On round 2 I scored full points on primaries. I healed one hellblaster with my warlord and dropped my plasmaceptors, Shrike and phobos ltnt. on the midfield between the objective and enemy line. With re rolls of ltnt and cptn, inceptors took out 16 warriors and wiped the squad. The indomitus ltnt and hero aggressor sgt. survived in my opponents zone, so I got full points again on EaiF. My assault intercessor charged his remaining warrior blob, and he was stuck on combat with them. In his second round he wasn´t able to do much, since he was locked on combat. He only scored 5 on primaries, and 0 from his secondaries. His Arcs and other units shot down a couple of my inceptors, but they are a really durable unit in light cover/terrain feature. Also transhuman physiology saved 2 inceptors more. 

 

In third round I scored full on primaries again, healed one inceptor and took down two of his HQ´s. Finally my aggressor and MoA ltnt fell, and I only got 2 from EiaF. He only scored 5 points on primaries but was able to took down hellblasters, assault intercessors and other infiltrator squad with his warrior blob. his other Arc charged on my inceptors and they were stuck in combat. (I need to reserve at least 1 CP for feigned flight now on). He also hold 3 of objectives, as I messed with positioning with my captain (just outside of obsec bubble). He had a good comeback round, but it came too late. on 4th. I recaptured my home objective with captain and incursors and stole his home objective with Shrike, as he assassinate his last remaining character, Chronomancer. There was nothing to do to reach me so he conceded after my 4th. 

 

Super fun game, and for the first time I played well by using chapter tactics and protecting my characters with other units. I don´t usually play 5 characters, but apparently you can do that if you protect them well. I lost only the MoA ltnt.

 

Other notions I made were:

Eradicators don´t know how to hit but they are good fire magnets with our chapter tactics, 3 wounds and gravis armor.

Gravis armors with 3 wounds again.

Inceptors are lethal against warriors. 30 plasma shots incoming!

Despite the high cost, infiltrators were a really good choice especially with this mission. My opponent had to deploy more units in the deployment than he was planning to. Also Helix gountlets saved me 3-4 infiltrators. 

To benefit from the chapter tactic, deploy lots of infantry.

 

Over and out.

[SkimaskMohawk]

Did you do double detachment to get 4 hqs?

[BrotherCaptainSolari]

Did you do double detachment to get 4 hqs?

Nope. You can take 2 lieutenants instead of 1 due to "company heroes" rule.

Edited February 26, 2021 by BrotherCaptainSolari

[SkimaskMohawk]

Lol totally forgot about that rule

[Alcyon]

In the days of 8.5 I was a big fan of the knife relic with imperiums sword on the captain. But that was also when you could stack to-wound from lay low the tyrant and choose your relics and stuff on a game to game basis. You could still do that in theory and have him role with the aggressor blob for some quick character work in melee.

 

Might be worth it with the Reiver Lt. actually, he'd need MoA to forward deploy but his abilities seem pretty spicy and the Knife would help him get some reps in.

 

Sounds like a good game, Solari. Sounds like good unit choices and a u/Stormcoil style "trap 'em in their DZ" plan executed smoothly.

[BrotherCaptainSolari]

 

 

Sounds like a good game, Solari. Sounds like good unit choices and a u/Stormcoil style "trap 'em in their DZ" plan executed smoothly.

 

Thanks Alcyon! I have struggled in my games being overly aggressive with deployment. Now I have focused more on keeping my units off my opponent´s 1st turn charge range threat. I was able to hide most of my units outside of line of sight/charge range but still managed to push them on the midfield via MoA, Infiltrate stratagem and an Impulsor.

 

My take on Oppressor´s end relic knife. I think I would still use it for Phobos captain because he has one more wound, one more attack and 4++. I really like the idea of bringing reiver ltnt. but he only has 3+ save, and his knife has no AP.

 

I´ve been toying with idea of bringing MoA Reiver ltnt with 10 reivers. There are quite some options (not really a comptetetive ones but cool) Pop the adaptive strategy on them and then they will have 10 pistol shots with -3 ap and 41 knife stabs with -1AP., They could also use the shock grenade to avoid overwatch ang give -1 to hit to some unit. If they are able to do casualties, it is -2 or even -4 to their leadership tests. With relic you could also extend Reiver ltnts. aura to 6".

 

I might try this for my next game.  1. Burn all the CPs. 2. Watch how Reivers are doing zero damage. 3. See them being crushed. 4. Sob quietly.

[Alcyon]

I struggled with it a lot in my last campaign too, especially on the smaller board sizes it's pretty tough. Maybe at 44x60 there's enough space to deploy in the midfield and still avoid 1st turn charges but I don't know if Concealed Positions is worth it at all at 44x30. 

 

The Phobos Cpt. is certainly an upgrade in some ways, but I found it was hard to get full utility out of him personally - I'm more excited to use MoA to forward deploy the Reiver Lt. for his abilities. Oppressor's End would mostly just be a way to try and let him do some damage. I expect to embed him with a unit that's probably going to wipe out their target on the charge anyway so he shouldn't have to worry too much about the swingback.

 

I think Reivers generally are yeah, too bad to be worth it, but those abilities on a single buff character can really maximize the potential of Aggressors or Bladeguard I think.

[War of the Eagle]

My Raptors fought a 1k battle vs a white scar successor the Azure Hawks. My friends first game of 9th edition so I pulled my punches. We also played without secondarys to ease him in.

Used a chapter master on bike with thunderhammer for the first time and it was pretty hilarious. Took half his army 3 turns of combat to kill him while he played wack-a-mole. Im the end I won by a small margin. Hope to get some more games in with him now hes returned to the hobby.

[SkimaskMohawk]

I got another two games in with my sniper based list.

 

The first game was against the same tau opponent and it turns out he had screwed up by only shooting his planes at half capacity! He also reworked his list by dropping a lot of the infantry so it looked more like r'lai, 2 missile pod commanders, 2 ghostkeels, 2 stealth squads, 2 sunsharks, 2 tetras, 1 riptide with relic ion cannon, 1 tigershark, some fire warriors in reserve. I don't remember the name of the mission but it was 6 objectives and you need to control 2 in your DZ and 1 in opponents for the secondary. Neither of us took it; I took Oath, Bring it Down and I think Engage but I should have stuck to my guns and went for assassinate instead of bring it down. Once again he got first turn and blasted my aggressors and just failed to kill the apothecary, I also remembered stranglehold and it burnt a bonus 3 CP from him. On my turn I killed some stealth suits he had left as bait with shrike and the vanguard and did a solid 5 wounds to a ghostkeel with shooting, also reducing a missile commander to 1 wound. He killed the vets and shrike, and also an attack bike or two, but the angle on his flyer's movement prevented the bombs from being dropped. Now this is where things started to get interesting; my centurions came in and made their charges on drones on one of his far objectives and the unwounded ghostkeel, while I also managed to snipe off his unwounded missile commander; I ended my turn in solid control of 4 objectives and he followed it up with one of the worst turns of shooting I've seen in a while. My centurions that were close to the riptide, tetras and commanders on his right hand DZ objective lost...1 model. This let me kill the tetras with them for a couple more bring it down points, and I also finished his last missile commander. He had also failed to dislodge my scoring units across from his castle with his sunsharks. The centurions died the next turn, but by then it was far too late because I'd been racking up primary and oath of moment consistently; even going second I was in the lead the entire time. By the end of turn 5, I managed to win by about 18 points.

 

My second game was against necrons and was my first loss with the sniper-style list. It was a pretty dramatic 65-97 loss on priority targets, but it's a little tricky to talk about without sounding a bit frustrated. The first thing is I have very little experience against necrons and their builds; his list was Silent King, night bringer, 14 wraiths in 3 units, 25 scarabs in 3 units, 2 of the yet-to-be-released crypteks and a token squad of immortals in the Obsec and pre game move custom dynasty configuration. This resulted in getting swamped by the wraiths and him able to quickly gain a big lead in primary, as the list was designed to do. The frustrating part for me, is that knowing how it works I feel like it'd be really easy to beat in the future as all of his threats are melee and I have enough melee to deal with it; he's going to hold the objectives anyways to start, so just deploy far enough back to make him unable to charge, and tie stuff up. The second thing was...luck. I hate using luck as a factor in my losing because it takes away from any tactical mistakes I made, and especially after my win against the tau being mainly from a bad shooting turn. But this game was certainly unlucky; I failed 3 out of 4 less than 6" charges in the first two turns, I rolled very poorly for armour saves and feel no pain (for the most part) and my opponent rolled very well for invulnerable saves. There were single wraiths I just couldn't finish off, or characters that required a huge overcommitment to kill, or silent king being alive with 1 wound at the end of the game instead of dying on the top of turn 3. So what's annoying is the thought that if we had both rolled closer to average I would have been able to win, even with my unfamiliarity with the necrons.

 

Some more thoughts;

 

Eliminators feel really good when they're kicking off and draining character wounds. But they feel terrible when all your hits convert to nothing.

 

Centurions are the bomb. They've been the most reliable during all my games and critical to any general success. It's not their fault silent king passed all 6 of the invuls they tossed his way on turn 2.

 

The phobos captain is the obvious weakest link. It's a joke list about all snipers, but if he was dropped for a bike chaplain my list would be infinitely better. That being said, he does help hold down backline objectives and screens out reserves which helped in my second tau game.

 

I was happy with how I handled the nightbringer. I was worried as I have no psychic phase, but came up with a plan to bait the charge on centurions and overwatch him for 3 in the Charge phase, do 3 in the Combat phase and then fall back and shoot him with snipers. He high rolled all the wounds and killed the last centurion with the explodes, but I still killed it way faster than I thought.

 

 

General question; how does assassinate and oath work with resurrection mechanics? I wasn't able to find an answer in the faqs and probably looked in the wrong place in the rule book.

[BrotherCaptainSolari]

Thanks for the well written raport Skimask. Damn, man. It's so frustrating to fail "easy charges". It's a dice game and there is nothing you can do when you roll badly, but still it sucks.

 

Mathhammer wont work well with eliminators because they have so tiny amount of shots to roll. Centurions for example are easier to predict because they have so many shots. Even when you roll bad, you still make some wounds.

 

The secondary objectives are listed in categories, which informs when the points are granted. For example assassinate is in end game objectives if I recall correctly.

[SkimaskMohawk]

Well on average if you need 4s to wound off of 3 hits I wouldn't anticipate getting 0 wounds. For both units lol.

[Alcyon]

Man I got absolutely bodied today by Ultramarines. We played a 750pt game for Crusade, the Regroup mission from Beyond the Veil. You have to deploy half on one corner and half in the other and get units in the middle to score. Super hard to avoid getting shot from at least 1 angle so the mission is almost decided by the die roll unless you have access to a lot of terrain.

 

Probably my fault picking the map but yeah, Grav Devastators and Plasmaceptors with BS2+ and re-roll 1s respectively killed all my 10 Vanguards on turn 1 and then the Devastators picked off my 5 Eradicators right after. The Crusade buffs make everything such a bloodbath.

[BrotherCaptainSolari]

I got to try the Reiver heavy list yesterday. We played 1000p match with my friend who collects Astra militarum. We have played quite alot against eac eachothers so I wanted to bring something completely new to the table. I brought battalion with 2x5 reivers and 1x3 eradicators led by Phobos captain, jump pack librarian and reiver ltnt. I know it is not areally a competetive one, but I wanted to give it a try. The goal was to stack minuses to Ld tests. Reivers, reiver ltnt, and librarian with the abyss could stack the minuses down to -5 . The thing I didnt know was that my friend fielded spearhead detachment including only 4 leman russes and 1 manticore.

He won the roll off. The game went as expected. I managed to stay alive and hide until the round 3. And then I got tabled. Well it was different what our games usually are allright. :D

 

I might still give this list another try later on.

Edited March 1, 2021 by BrotherCaptainSolari

[SkimaskMohawk]

Man I got absolutely bodied today by Ultramarines. We played a 750pt game for Crusade, the Regroup mission from Beyond the Veil. You have to deploy half on one corner and half in the other and get units in the middle to score. Super hard to avoid getting shot from at least 1 angle so the mission is almost decided by the die roll unless you have access to a lot of terrain.

 

Probably my fault picking the map but yeah, Grav Devastators and Plasmaceptors with BS2+ and re-roll 1s respectively killed all my 10 Vanguards on turn 1 and then the Devastators picked off my 5 Eradicators right after. The Crusade buffs make everything such a bloodbath.

Plasma cepters and grav devs in 750? That's pretty rough.

[Alcyon]

Yeah, I mean I brought 10 VVs with claws and TH and 5 Eradicators, but this is the top tier of our campaign so it's to be expected. We split up our 26 players into four groups after the first 3 games based on total VP to try and balance matchups as we have a big range of experience.

 

I was proud to be #1 after beating GK, DA and Orks, but now I'm battling against the strongest players on UM, SW, IG (w/ a Punisher Tank Commander who does mortals on 6s to hit), SoB and Necrons. I don't know if any of them are "good" matchups for my RG successors, haha. Also this is my first time playing non-Primaris this edition and I keep forgetting you can't Transhuman them. 

[SkimaskMohawk]

Well from everything I've been lead to understand, crusade does not hold up well with any competitive mindset as its too easy to break.

 

For the ultramarine player it sounds like you might need to charge from reserve with ravens blade on the vanguard to nuke the inceptors, and then deal with the grav devs. The IG with punisher shouldn't be too bad depending on Los, as it being a character procs SS.

 

A big problem always seems to be terrain density; bad boards can break lists.

[Alcyon]

Yeah, we've made some changes to balance things out, but I think the issue is even if everyone has equally broken armies, the game gets decided by first turn - kind of an 8th edition problem. I do think a different map would've made the die roll less critical. 

 

I actually didn't consider charging out of reserves, I figured it might be safer to be behind obscuring turn 1 and it wouldn't save me from the 5+ Tau Overwatch they have - plus I'd be at risk of Auspex Scan. My plan was to use the Vanguards 12" move to engineer a charge from out of LoS, and I think it would've worked if I hadn't been wiped turn 1. Ultimately I think board choice and deciding not to reserve doomed my Vanguards. I did think about reserving the Eradicators, it would've been pretty powerful to drop out of reserves and delete a unit like the Grav devs without triggering Auspex Scan