An exercise in futility... a DG batlle report

[Plague _Lord]

So I'm trying to shake off the shock from the latest CA, in which my main tournament army went up by 80 points and am trying to find if a new playstyle will first of all fit me and second of all actually work on the table top in a competitive environment. For this test I wen up against my regular sparring partner's orks, who also got the short end of the stick from the CA.

My list:

Battalion of poxmongers

DP with wings, sword, Hulking physique, supparating plate, miasma

Plaguecaster with ironclot furnace, plague winds and curse of the leper

5x Plaguemarines, plague skull of glothilla

10x Poxwalkers

10x Poxwalkers

5x Possessed

Tallyman

2x MBH (single unit)

2x Bloat Drones with mowers

2x PBC with entropy

Defiler with scourge and autocannon

Nurgle Daemon patrol detachment

Epidemius

Poxbringer with the d3 heal power

4x Nurglings

My opponent had a speed freaks list with Deffkilla Wartrike, Warboss on Bike, 3x3 bikerz, 3 squigbuggies, 3 corkscrew cars, 2 teleporting dragsters, 2 flamer buggies, 5 deffkoptas, 2 dakka jets (1 with kustom job).

We played the mission with the moving objectives and 1 of them is a priority target. This is from the Nachmund rule set.

My deployment area:

My secondaries were Big guns, contamination and supremacy. I deployed Epi (typhus as a proxy) in my right corner and screened him with a PBC so a plane wouldnt just snipe him. My drones, DP and Possessed were on the right flank with taking the objective in mind while I planned on pushing the MBH up the centre. The Defiler was going to be a distraction on the left flank. The Nurglings infiltrated the middle objective.

Of course the orks rolled to go first. Honestly I haven's started a game in like 10 games or so...

Orks turn 1

He pushes his planes amidst my lines as seen below:

The rest of his army moves up into the midground. The Deffkoptas line up on the Bloat Drones on the right flank. He tries to hide his buggies on the left flank behind obscuring but my PBC will see him when it moves. I prepare to remove half my army... but he whiffs his shooting phase with subpar rolling and I manage to get a few above average invul saves up. After his shooting phase I only remove 1 Mower Drone and 2 Nurgling bases, while the left flank PBC takes 6 wounds. The Nurglings tanked A LOT. The Deffkoptas go into reserves after shooting.

DG turn 1

So I actually see a possible win comming up... all I have to do is kill enough of his stuff that his next turn won't be so devastating and I'll get the Tally up and running. It doesn't start well... dumb GW rules mean that the plane on the left flank is blocking my Defiler so that it can't really move up the board - there was a forest in the middle of my DZ and the Defiler of course doesn't get any of our special rules lol. I move up my MBH up the middle and forget to buff them with the Ironclot Furnace. I make a mistake of moving the DP and drone into the centre to take out the plane (I lose momentum here). I deal a lot of damage to the plane on the right flank with my psychic phase. My shooting phase is abysmal, even worse than the Orks - I think I dealt like 5 dmg to a squigbuggy with a random entropy as both of the mortars dealt 0 wounds. The Defiler did nothing in the shooting phase, both MBH fail to wound the flamer carts next to them for more than 6 damage (from a ML, all MM miss). To add insult to injury I get super (un)lucky with my plague marine bolters and they destroy the plane on the right flank. This deprived me of a tally point and left my DP and drone useless in the centre (they could have charge the flamer carts, relieving the nurglings on the objective). I still manage to score 6 points turn 1 due to scondaries so not bad i guess.

Orks turn 2

The remaining plane turns to my right flank, while his deffkoptas deploy on the left flank from DS. He shuffles around a bit but doesn't get too close. His shooting is devastating - the remainging plane destroys my healthy PBC on it's own, while squigbuggies take 10 wounds off the Defiler without breaking a sweat. I also lose the nurglings, possessed, mower drone and a MBH on this turn. In charge phase his Warboss on bike charges the Defiler and I manage to get 2 wounds through in overwatch, which would kill him but he command rerolls an invul and mulches the Defiler.

DG Turn 2

I either get big kills now or it's over for me as even though I'm scoring decently, I've also lost most of my army and will lose if I don't get some hot dice. In short - My DP along with the plague skull take out the remaining bird, my MBH whiffs, my PBC does 0 wounds with 5 hits. I only manage to kill the remaining flamer cart with a charge from the plaguemarines (this also regains the mid objective for me), while the 10 poxwalkers take out the warboss with the MW strat. I got around 20 points from this round but I didn't do enough damage to stop him from crushing me in the late game.

Brave plague marines taking the objective!

The mop up

We talk out the rest of the game and make a few key rolls - IE if the PBC or MBH would survive. I fail all invuls badly and they die so I concede.

Aftermath:

Well that failed horribly and TBH it would have been much worse if not for my opponents cold dice during the 1st turn. Even though i fudged up with forgetting to ironclot the MBH in turn 1, they failed me pretty badly with their shooting doing near to nothing. The same goes for the PBC - they killed 0 models between the 2 of em. I also had 105pts of dead weight in Epidemius who did nothing and I think the strategy of him buffing Daemon Engines relies on a lucky 1st turn to work and is not worth it.

Overall I understand why the MBH and PBC went down - they just aren't reliable. We can't buff their accuracy in any way (Epi doesn;t count) so their damage output is really swingy. What I don't understand is how other thing didn't go down. The Defiler for example is total trash - it went down from antiinfantry fire with no problem at all. This unit needs either a hard buff or a hard points reduction. I think my Terminator list even being 80points more is much better than the Daemon Enginge list - they folded like wet paper from ork shooting, imagine what tau would do?

What worked:

Nurglings were amazing. Held an objective in no mans land for 2 turns and tanked tonnes of damage. Totally worth losing our contagion for the infiltration they get.

Plague marines were decent but are still way overcosted

The DP is a solid achiever and he allways get' stuff done.

Poxwalker are really good, worth it even with the points hike, allthough cultists should be looked at for potential actions.

I think I will still try to use Daemon engines more but without Epi. I think 2 fleshmower drones as bodyguards for my DP can be a solid threat on a flank. I will probably give the Defiler another go but man does he go down easy... Next list to try is double plague marines in rhinos!

Cheers

PL

[McElMcNinja]

I like that you are using a defiler, wish we could still buff them. Edited February 20, 2022 by McElMcNinja

[Closet Skeleton]

You're using Possessed, a Defiler and Plague Marines vs a barely toned down version of a top tier ork list. That's a very shooty ork list, being overwhelmed by it is normal.

 

Sadly Plague Marines won't go down in points until there's a policy change. The rules team want to keep 2k armies at a certain size so beginers aren't priced out of the game and are using marines as the base line for how big a 2k army should be. That's why Dark Eldar and Admech get big hikes instead of dropping marine points. Which is a good thing in theory it just doesn't work for balance with all these cheap glass cannon units.

 

I abused 15 point 2 wound marines before Black Templars got updated and spamming them was pretty viable. I only won 1 game in my first tournament with them but did a lot better in the second one. Having the extra bodies from the lower points was way better than the vows that we got instead. Sadly those days won't return for a while.

Edited February 15, 2022 by Closet Skeleton

[Xenith]

You're using Possessed, a Defiler and Plague Marines vs a barely toned down version of a top tier ork list. That's a very shooty ork list, being overwhelmed by it is normal.

 

 

That's the crux of it, really. You're using a non-optimised list with literally the best stuff a powerful codex has to offer. 

 

Secondaries also likely didnt help - I don't think you had enough bodies/mobility to really spread the sickness, and not enoguh obsec to actually hold objectives. What's big guns? That's a vehicle rule - do you mean  Bring it Down? That's a natural instinctive choice for this list, but if you look at it, buggy's only give up 1 point, so you'd have to virtually table him to max that secondary. 

 

Playing against DG semi regularly, PBC's are brutal, and didn't need the drop. The strat, disgusting force, or whatever, is really strong and should have been used each turn I think to slap buggy around. On average, 1PB mortar with force should be nearly killing a buggy, or killing one. It ignores ramshackle, and then splash damage to all that stuff clustered around (loads, with those massive footprint buggys). Entropy cannons will maybe half kill another. Tallyman gets you +2CP a round to fuel strats and rerolls on bad mortar rolls. 

 

Your oppnent also played those dakkajets badly - shoving them in your face is an easy kill, when you make them T5. From the last photo, I don't see where they can go also, so they have to fly off board. 

 

Great to see you trying new stuff, just don't draw the wrong conclusions from this game. 

[Plague _Lord]

I don't think secondaries are at fault here. Yes I forgot the name of Bring it Down - it's what I meant by Big Guns lol. Actually his army gave up I think something like 20 potential points and he also picked TTL (his big buggy squads) so I felt it was a natural choice that I could both score points and hamper his scoring by just killing his vechicles.

 

Sure my list wasn't optimal because I picked a few units that aren't top tier, but when GW nerfed our best units (terminators) I'm trying to find a solution here. Oh and I had to take those plague marines because this list was list light on heretic astartes... and they actually didn't perform bad, but mainly due to being ignored.

 

Oh and I didn't get the -1T contagion due to having a daemon detachment. They both had space to minimum move without leaving the battlefield.

 

Sure the PBC are decent but they rely a lot on RNG. The only way to buff their accuracy is epidemius and you aren't getting that buff on turn 1. I for example rolled low on mortar shots the whole game and then failed to hit with them because I was shooting into -1 to hit buggies (they have a strat for that) that had an invul. Shooting at such a profile means a PBC will deal 6 damage on average after using devastating force and that means I would have to have both PBC lined up for shots with entropies just to take down a single ork buggy... PBC are by no way op, sure their guns have nice profiles but not being able to buff their accuracy means that more often than not you will be hitting with a single entropy shot and that can just be stopped by an invul that nearly everything has nowadays. I think you overestimate the potential of BS 3+ unbuffable shooting with single shot weapons...

 

I'm not salty that I lost, I just think DG are in a bad spot at the moment and am trying different lists to find something that works and for me playing the strongest unit x3 just isn't that interesting.

[Special Officer Doofy]

Playing against DG semi regularly, PBC's are brutal, and didn't need the drop. The strat, disgusting force, or whatever, is really strong and should have been used each turn I think to slap buggy around. On average, 1PB mortar with force should be nearly killing a buggy, or killing one. It ignores ramshackle, and then splash damage to all that stuff clustered around (loads, with those massive footprint buggys). Entropy cannons will maybe half kill another. Tallyman gets you +2CP a round to fuel strats and rerolls on bad mortar rolls.

 

PBC mortar with Disgusting force is average number of shots 3.5 x to hit 0.67 x wounding against T6 rerolling 1's 0.78 x -2AP against 4+ 0.834 x damage 3 = less than 4.6 wounds. That's on average barely half the buggies wounds, assuming it isn't -1 to hit. The entropy cannons do more on average without a CP. 2 shots x 0.67 to hit x 0.78 to wound x average damage 5 (no armor save). Works out to just over 5 wounds on average.

 

I'm not salty that I lost, I just think DG are in a bad spot at the moment and am trying different lists to find something that works and for me playing the strongest unit x3 just isn't that interesting.

They are in a bad spot and good luck. Terminators and poxwalkers were the bread and butter but still winning less than 50% and just had points increase.

Edited February 15, 2022 by Putrid Choir

[Xenith]

I realise my last comment was maybe overly critical or placing blame on you - I didn't mean it that way, and apologise if it came across that way - bit of stress at work venting itself through forum posts maybe.

 

I appreciate DG are in a rough spot meta wise, but any meta statement has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Locally we're less competitive maybe, and DG do reasonably well.

[Plague _Lord]

No probs man, we all have worse days, I certainly didn't feel offended or anything! :)

 

played another game yesterday, allbeit at 1k points vs the new Tau. I wanted to try something new so took a Terminus Est list with all the overpriced stuff like 40 poxwalkers, 5 blightlords, 5 plague marines, typhus, tallyman and a DP.

 

My opponent had a coldstar commander, 3 crisis suits, 2 broadsides a riptide and 10 fire warriors + a lot of various drones. It was a fun game but by turn 3 it was over as all I had standing was the Tallyman and 20 poxwalkers which managed to get to full strength after feasting on the firewarriors. Overall my scoring was decent and we were going head to head in the VP departament but in the end he just deleted my army piece by piece and my melee wasn't even much of a threat. It took my DP 2 turns to deal with the crisis in combat (D3 vs 4wound suits makes it hard to get through even 3 of them) and he was slowly whittled down along the way. I was very unlucky with Typhus in that he periled 2 turns in a row so when he finally got into combat with the broasides he both failed to do damage and got deleted quite quickly due to only having 2 wounds left. My terminators managed to get into the riptide and nearly managed to kill him... only to get deleted by shooting into combat. Overall a fun and dynamic game but Tau shooting is really deadly and the mobility of crisis suits and the coldstar is amazing.

 

Some takeaways:

Poxwalkers still worth it at 6 points - they can do decent MW and hold objectives well, but can't be spammed any more. 1 unit still worth IMO.

We need shooting to stay in the game so I think Volcons and PBC still mandatory to compete.

Terminus Est just doesn't work after the points hike. In this game I would have had an extra 50 points to play with pre-CA and that would mean a lot in a 1k game.

[Xenith]

Good takeaways. I'm also sold on the VolCons for my Thousand sons - another army lacking in long range firepower. Tau seem really scary, and they seem to dominate at the moment. 

[Marshal Mittens]

I think PBCs are costed about right, and our other stuff is just to expensive in a meta with so many things that can strait metc a MBH or the like. Lots of our stuff needs substantial points decreases.