New Daemons

I managed to get my hands on the new White Dwarf Monday, thanks to my office moving exactly half a lunch break’s walk away from the local GW. Let’s go over the updates to the old models first.

Flamers will now no longer be taken by anyone in fantasy, except maybe as a joke. The multiple shots penalty now applies, which means a huge drop in the number of hits that they get in. Since they move every turn – because that’s how they work – they’re now hitting on 5+ instead of 4+ with no other modifiers, with cover/long range changing it to a 6.

After they do whatever damage they manage, you then roll a D6 and on a 6 they do D3 more wounds with no armour save. Sounds good? If it’s a 1, then the enemy gains +1 to their regen save for the rest of the game. Instead of being able to chip away at the ranks of a huge block of enemies, I would now avoid it on the possibility of improving my enemy.

Their strength has also been nerfed from 5 to 4, and the points raised by 5 per model. They’re now also special rather than rare. More on the reasoning behind all of these changes by GW later.

Screamers have been changed completely from an annoyance unit to flying combat. They’ve retained their slashing attack, but it’s been nerfed. They can only hit one unit rather than several and do D3 hits which hit on a 4+. So on average that’s 2 shots which then goes down to 1 hit, making it exactly the same as before. The nerf comes from the hit now being S4 rather than S5. Their buffs are pretty good, now having S/T4, an extra wound and 3 attacks. Wounds against large targets now multiply out to D3.

They’re now 10 points more expensive, which is justified. The upper unit size cap has been removed, so I've had evil plans of 50 Screamers advancing as a wave over the enemy. Joy.

As with everything from GW, this release is all about money. They have released some fancy and expensive new models as the Slaanesh Chariots and have introduced the Soulgrinder to fantasy. Since Flamers were taking up the rare points that these need, they were nerfed into oblivion and then moved to special to free the points up. To make things even more profitable, the Soulgrinder is unchanged from the 40k release except for a new base, so GW gains the income of a new model without the cost of a new mould. They’re releasing new Screamer and Flamer models at the same time, which was initially a bit confusing considering that nobody wants Flamers any more, but I’ve heard they got better in 40k.

Anyway, on to how the Soulgrinder is the new must-have unit. He’s T7 with a grapeshot cannon as standard, and can move 8” and shoot. When he gets into combat a single model in base contact takes an initiative test or is hit automatically by the 4 S6 attacks. For a bit extra he can swap all of his attacks for a S10, D6 wounds attack. He can be upgraded to have a stone thrower, flame cannon or bolt thrower -with the bolt more expensive for some reason- in addition to his grapeshot gun, firing one of them per turn.

Word around the internet is that he’s about worth his points, which is a relief considering the track record of fun but overpriced monsters. Looking at you, Beastmen.

The other new models are the Slaanesh Chariots which come in 3 flavours. The basic chariot is now S4 instead of 5, but can be taken as a special, rather than just a Herald mount. The Hellflayer takes it a step further and uses an Exalted Alluress who gains an extra attack on the charge for every unsaved wound caused by the impact hits. There’s just one chariot box which can be used to make either of these.

If you’re feeling particularly unhinged then you can combine 2 chariot sets into an Exalted Seeker Chariot, a nasty piece of work with an Exalted Alluress, 4 Daemonettes, 4 Steeds and 2D6+1 impact hits. It can be taken as a Herald mount as well, displacing a Daemonette. This one has 8 wounds instead of 4, but is still S/T4. It doesn’t come cheap, but I want to try it out anyway. On closer inspection of the rules, the Exalted SC doesn’t give extra attacks to the Alluress. Hopefully that’s just a typo, but it certainly dims the shininess of that choice.

As far as I know, these are the only chariots to have riders on the mounts pulling them, granting the ESC a grand total of 16 attacks on top of impact hits without the Herald. With a Herald it’s 18 attacks, 14 of which are ASF and 4 of which are poisoned.

While I could bitch and whine about the Flamer nerf and the blatant money grab by GW – and have a bit – I’m not going to any more. Overall this update is a good thing for 2 reasons. The first is that my lists were looking a bit samey and I’m glad to have more variety to play with. The second is that when they rewrite the Daemons book they’ll look at the changes that they made and be able to adjust them again - got to sell those new Flamer models, right?

In the past week I've finished the old Horror models and done my second Tzerald. I'll get some pictures up eventually, but for now I'm busy with another 10 Horrors.