Zeal Vs. Mortal Wounds

[Marshal Arthur]

My main opponent plays Death Guard and after looking through all the new Death Guard stuff coming out, as well as current concerns about smite spam, I'm wondering if we as Templars have any useful tools to counter the growing number of mortal wound generators. In AoS this is already a huge problem and really makes my elite army feel like a liability more than a strength. So far 8th doesn't seem to suffer from this too much but I'm a little nervous and don't want to turn my elite marine army into a massive horde to keep up with the meta. With that in mind what are some tactics our army can utilize to better survive and fight back against mortal wound dealing enemies, ideally without spamming cheap units?

[CrystalSeer]

BT already have some of the best tools, as everything with Chapter Tactics can potentially dispell.

 

Aside from that, it can't cast if it's dead.

[MasterDeath]

Basically cut a bit on the small units and form bigger ones. Bigger Units have more Wounds until the important models fall. Put Rhinos or something similar in the front to facetank those smites and anything else that has to target closest. Problem with the "anything can dispel" is, that you can only do that once per turn. Save this stratagem for the high rolls (d6 mortal wound rolls) or important buff spells, do not waste it on a normal Smite.

[Brother_Gneecapper]

BT already have some of the best tools, as everything with Chapter Tactics can potentially dispell.

 

Aside from that, it can't cast if it's dead.

 

 

Everything can dispel, but only one dispel can be done a turn for a Black Templar player at the cost of 1 command point. When you go up against armies with 3-4 psykers that can cast 2+ spells each, you arent going to stop much. Also there is no stopping the stratagems which is where most of their mortal wounds generate from. 

 

I'm trying to stay positive but I feel like marines in general and Black Templar with them are getting left in the dust with each new codex release. Leaning more and more toward playing as "black marines" as using a different chapter trait :\

[Ciler]

This really isn't a Marine problem. Any army will struggle against smite spam, and any low model count army will struggle against mortal wounds.

 

If you're keen to compare though, we certainly can only deny once a phase where other armies may do it several times if they have several psykers, but in a smite spam meta that's irrelevant because you won't deny enough. Also we deny on 4+, they deny on a competitive roll, so that pretty much evens out. In the grand scheme of things, we resist smite as well as any army with one psyker.

 

Finally, food for thought : how well do you think an elite death guard army will fare against another smite army ?

[SydonianDragoon404]

One thing for any army to keep in mind when fighting mortal wound spam:

 

It does not matter how tough you are, it doesn't matter how awesome your gear is, it does not matter how fast you are or how hard you hit. The only thing that matters is the number of wounds you have. You have to have more wounds than they can dish out. Basically this means-

 

Expensive, elite units are out the door.

Expensive HQs, out the door

Cheap, spammable infantry? Yes.

High wound-count vehicles? Yes. 

[Marshal Arthur]

I figure vehicles are an absolute must then, which is fine by me as I run a mechanized list anyways. I guess I'll look into a storm raven and focus on lots of crusader squads rather than veteran squads. It may be the MSU builds our crusaders squads seem to favor could be useful, with just a couple neophytes as ablative wounds (although I wish they were a tad cheaper). I suppose when facing death guard I'll just need to keep my distance and only assault when I'm guaranteed to destroy whatever I attack. Death Guard don't have many long range shooters right now so enough long range fire can cripple them before we engage in their threat range.

[Brother_Gneecapper]

I figure vehicles are an absolute must then, which is fine by me as I run a mechanized list anyways. I guess I'll look into a storm raven and focus on lots of crusader squads rather than veteran squads. It may be the MSU builds our crusaders squads seem to favor could be useful, with just a couple neophytes as ablative wounds (although I wish they were a tad cheaper). I suppose when facing death guard I'll just need to keep my distance and only assault when I'm guaranteed to destroy whatever I attack. Death Guard don't have many long range shooters right now so enough long range fire can cripple them before we engage in their threat range.

 

The issue with trying to out range them is their stratagems that give them additional toughness or abilities that make them untargetable unless they're the closest unit which if the player is good can use line of sight and other tactics to get close enough that your shooting wont matter.

[Marshal Arthur]

And disgustingly resilient combined with their toughness buffs means they can just hide behind cheap and durable poxwalkers.

[Schlitzaf]

The Death Gaurd are certainly an interesting comparison with our boys because, I like to argue as an army if you had to compare us to a Chaos Marine Force it be Plague Marines. First let us compare to Plague Marines.

 

The basic Plague Marine will have a large variety of plague weaponry. Rerollings one to wound. Additionally they have units of friendly Pox Bearers to act as buffers. At 21ish points a pop they are about as twice as expensive as our Marines (if you are doing a Neo-Ini Combo).

 

However with 5+ FNP, reroll 1 to wound throughout the Squad, despite having 2 less attack they are about as potent as a Crusader Squad. Before we factor into Death to the False Emperor. For sake of Math. Pre-Characters. 10 Man Crusader (6-4. So about 120-140 points and 7 Plague Marines 140-160ish). We put out 16 Attacks. 11 hit. 4 wounds. 1ish dead Plague. 3 Attacks. 1-2 wounds. 1ish Dead Plague. 1.5 Plague. Plague attack 6. 4 hit. 1 Death trigger. 5 hit. 2.5 Wound. 3 wounds. Then Sgt 2 attacks, 1.4 hits then 0.7 wounds with reroll so about 1.0 for 4 wounds total. Equating to about the same damage as our 6-4 Crusaders. They are at 5 and we are 8. So sake our basic troops in melee are not that different from one another.

 

They then get a +1 Hit Power with Plague Weapons and we both get our Characters. Which will require a more detailed analysis between our armies. However the mortal wounds will put the hurt on us. Here is where we should change and focus our tactics.

 

We both are FireFight Attrition Armies. They prefer to rapid while we want to get in melee. Using their strategem and pox walkers we can't bring our guns to bear where we would want. However what we can do is turn the Pox Walkers against their masters.

 

Without advancing Pox only move 4". An advance increases that to 6-7 on average. That means unless Rhino mounted those screens and thus the plague marines aren't going anywhere fast. The danger zone for mortal will be 7" on their turn.

 

Use your movement stay out of the danger zone. Or force them to use warp time to get close and persoanal. You can try to deny warp time to make him waste 2 effective powers or deny the second. And second is perhaps the most important. Do not fight the Pox Walkers with Screens of our own.

 

Every model they kill gives them another of their own. So don't try to tie Poxes with Conscripts that is a self defeating philosophy. Gun them down with shooting. And Plague Marines are quite expensive little bros and while dangerous are most effective in in firefight range of 8-15".

 

But I tangented; mortal wounds. The best way I personally found dealing with Mortal Spam, is spread your units out. Vs Smite espacially. If I have 4 13 Man Squads for example, if I properly spread, a Smite Spam might kill "10" models. But instead of a deleting a Squad it'll kill 2-3 guys per a Squad. Or a Primaris Marine.

 

Don't simply try to 'absorb' wounds with one Squad do your best to have your army absorb the wounds overall. Having one entire Squad being deleted or reduce to a paltry 2-3 guys is far worse than having every unit your army losing 2-3 guys. The latter means your combat effectiveness means acceptable while a Squad deletion reduces your ability to project and do damage.