Merry Grotmas! Games Workshop is releasing a new series of detachments – one per army, every day until Christmas. In this series we’re looking at these new detachments, covering what’s in them, how they play, and how they’ll fit into the broader meta and your games.
Slaanesh Daemons are an incredibly fun army. They have a lot of beautiful models and great datasheets, but playing Slaanesh Daemons in the index detachment didn’t quite feel like a Slaanesh army should. That changes with the introduction of the new Legion Of Excess detachment. Slaanesh Daemon players are going to be ecstatic with this new ruleset, and I can’t wait to put it on the tabletop myself.
We’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with a preview copy of these rules for Review purposes.
Detachment Overview
Mike P: Slaanesh Daemons are all about mobility and hitting hard.
The Legion Of Excess detachment is all about remaining mobile and hitting incredibly hard.
It’s a match made in hell for your opponents.
This detachment drops as one of the best buffs for a combat army we’ve seen in 10th Edition. You have sources of +1 to Hit. You have (several) sources of +1 to Wound. You have access to hit and wound rerolls. You have access to mortal wounds on the charge. You also have several tricks to mess with your opponent’s target priority.
This army remains fragile outside of Keepers Of Secrets and your tools to avoid getting shot off the board remain limited, but when a Legions Of Excess army connects with its opponent? It will really, really, really connect with its opponent.
Wings: This detachment is exceptionally strong, I would argue vying with the Necron Starshatter Arsenal for the best that has been released so far. It cranks the damage output of Slaanesh Daemons into the stratosphere, and has some Stratagems that push into whole new design space in very powerful ways. If you want to rip your opponents limb from limb, there’s really nothing quite like this.
The Video Version
If you can only properly appreciate this detachment as a full multi-sensory experience, check out the video version below:
Detachment Rules
Mike P: Slaanesh Daemons received a two part detachment rule, with each half providing real value.
Detachment Rule: Beguiling Aura
Beguiling Aura gives straightforward Fall Back and Charge to every Slaanesh unit. It’s often easy for opponents to tie up Slaanesh Daemons with units like Rhinos that they’re wounding on 5’s, so being able to Fall Back and still Charge lets Slaanesh Daemons remain mobile and keep hitting what they want. It also synergizes extremely well with the Seductive Gambit rule.
Detachment Rule: Seductive Gambit
Seductive Gambit is one of the wildest detachment rules GW has printed in 10th Edition. After a Slaanesh Daemons unit ends a Charge Move, it can give up the Fights First ability. In exchange, it gets full Hit and Wound rerolls when it fights. Basically, if you charge and let your opponent fight before you, you get just about the strongest combat buff out there in 10th Edition. The great news is you have flexibility on whether or not you use this. If you want to charge something scary in melee, you can fight before them like normal so they don’t get to fight before you. But if you’re fighting something like a Leman Russ that you don’t care if it gets to fight before you, let them have the first swing and then attack them with full hit and wound rerolls.
Wings: Good lord. Look – some matchups make this a little bit harder to use effectively, cause sure if World Eaters or Orks are across the Battlefield, it can be risky. But the upside, oh my. Essentially any time you’re charging something that doesn’t threaten to take a huge chunk out of your unit, your damage output goes through the roof. Don’t forget that Slaanesh Daemons have Devastating Wounds as their thing, and this boosts your damage so much that it can be worth going for even if you might lose a few models. Keepers also have very strong defences that mean very few targets will threaten them enough to stop you going for this a lot of the time. It’s also worth remembering that losing Fight First doesn’t mean that all your opponents units go first – if you charge with two units, and pop this on both of them, only one of the opposing units is going to get to swing first, your other still gets to get choppy. The only thing I don’t like about this is that it pushes you even harder towards “whoops all Keepers” than you’re already going to be planning, because they’re so good with this.
Enhancements
Slaanesh received two powerful aura buffs that affect everything besides Keepers/Shalaxi/Daemon Princes, and two smaller buffs for the bearer that only affect Keepers and Daemon Princes.
- False Majesty (30 pts) – Slaanesh model only. Add 1 to wound rolls in melee for friendly Slaanesh units (besides Monsters) within 6”.
- Dreaming Crown (30 pts) – Slaanesh model only. Add 1 to hit rolls in melee for friendly Slaanesh units (besides Monsters) within 6”.
- Avatar Of Perfection (15 pts) – Slaanesh Monster only. If there are no friendly models within 6” of the bearer at the start of each phase, you can do the following: Re-roll advance rolls, re-roll charge rolls, ignore modifiers to its Move characteristic, and ignore modifiers to its Advance and/or Charge rolls.
- Soul Glutton (10 pts) – Slaanesh Monster only. At the end of the Fight Phase, if the bearer’s attacks destroyed one or models, regain d3 wounds.
Mike P: False Majesty and the Dreaming Crown are both extremely powerful aura buffs, albeit less valuable than you might think given that they can’t affect Keepers or Shalaxi. Daemonettes and Fiends are both going to absolutely love these buffs, especially False Majesty. Don’t forget that these also affect the Chariot variants and Soul Grinders!
The two Keeper specific enhancements are both mediocre, but at least they’re cheap. Avatar Of Perfection will go up in value in more movement debuffs that work against Monsters are introduced to the game.
Wings: Spamming Soul Grinders does feel like a way to take advantage of the first few, and a bit of cheap healing is fine.
Stratagems
The Slaanesh stratagems are both interesting and powerful.
- Thieves Of Pain (Strategic Ploy, 1 CP) – A non-Monster Slaanesh unit can pass wounds off to another Slaanesh unit within 12” for a phase, with every wound lost for the first unit becoming a mortal wound on the second unit.
- Archagonists (Battle Tactic, 2 CP) – Used in the Fight phase to give one Monster Slaanesh unit or two non-Monster Slaanesh units eat gets +1 to wound for a phase.
- Sensory Excruciation (Strategic Ploy, 1 CP) – Used in your Command Phase and targeting a Slaanesh Monster in your army on the battlefield, you can force every unit on the battlefield within your army’s Shadow Of Chaos to take a Battle-shock test, with -1 to th etest if they’re below half-Strength.
- Phantasmal Longing (Strategic Ploy, 1 CP) – Used in your movement or charge phase, a Slaanesh unit can move through terrain features until the end of the phase.
- Cavalcade Of Blades (Battle Tactic, 1 CP) – After your Slaanesh unit makes a Charge Move, roll a d6 for every model in your unit within Engagement Range of one enemy unit. For every 4+, that enemy takes 1 Mortal Wound. Slaanesh Monsters instead roll 6d6.
- Overwhelming Excess (Battle Tactic, 1 CP) – After an enemy unit targets one of your Slaanesh units in the opponent’s Shooting Phase, they must take a Battleshock test at -1. If the test is passed, the opponent’s unit is -1 to Hit. If the test is failed, in addition to being battle-shocked, that attacking unit cannot target your Slaanesh unit. The enemy can choose new targets for that unit.
Mike P: This is a wild suite of stratagems.
Who would have guessed that Daemonettes would get the best Tank Shock in the game with Cavalcade of Blades? The one big whiff with that stratagem is that there is no carveout for Chariots, so they all each only roll 1d6 per model. This makes no sense, and is a flavor loss for Slaanesh players who loved running their Chariots.
Thieves Of Pain and Overwhelming Excess are both fun and flavorful ways to mess with your opponent’s target allocation, making it weirdly annoying to shoot some of your key units.
Wings: Whoa whoa whoa, we aren’t just skimming past these. No no no. To be clear what I’m about to say is just my opinion, not necessarily an Official Goonhammer Position, but anyway.
Thieves of Pain is one of the wildest stratagems that’s been created in any modern edition, and I strongly suspect it’ll get nuked from orbit once people see how it plays on the table. The thing about this stratagem is that it gives you a cast iron way of changing the flow of a battle that your opponent can do almost nothing about, and has a bunch of synergies to boot. The obvious one is that this is a way of allowing a squishier unit like Daemonettes to make use of Seductive Gambit without getting punked off the table – three or four wounds to them can seriously reduce their output, but might not matter to a nearby Keeper. Where this gets silly is when you start combining it with wound sinks with a Feel No Pain, because that ends up being a huge durability boost as well. While you trigger this when a wound is allocated, only wounds that are lost get shunted, so you still get to take your invulnerable save first.
If you’re shunting to a Keeper with their 5+ Feel No Pain, then we’re back in 8th Edition Plaguebearer territory, and you can potentially do better either if you’re using something with a better invulnerable save or a Daemonette/Contorted Epitome unit to soak wounds (which have a 4+ Feel No Pain against Mortals). It’s also turbo stupid on a Soul Grinder as the source, because they’re high Toughness, so harder to take down. It also lets you hugely punish opponents for trying to bring you down over two phases – if they shoot a Soul Grinder down to 4W then charge it, or something, then whoops that didn’t matter at all, and it’s claw time. The only challenge with this is maybe that it’s hard to get both all the Keepers you want (i.e. all of them) and efficient users of this onto the table, but
Overwhelming Excess isn’t quite as good simply because it isn’t reliable, but it’s also an absolute nightmare to plan against, and is going to create some real feel bad losses. It’s also really unique in not having a range limit, and if your opponent is trying to point-blank something they’re often going to be taking their Battle-shock test at -2, which is rough. Because this is a Battle-shock test and not just a Leadership test, this is also sometimes going to force your opponent to just not shoot with a unit if it’s solo holding an objective that’s key to their Secondaries. Your main complaint with this detachment is often going to be not having enough CP to use these glorious tools.
Anyway, back to Mike.
Mike P: I definitely disagree with your opinion that this stratagem might be busted Wings, but it’s all in good fun and different opinions are what makes discussing Warhammer fun!
Not many people play Daemons, and among that small group much fewer still play Slaanesh-heavy Daemons, so I think people are going to imagine Thieves Of Pain as better than it is because they’re imagining it paired with datasheets that Slaanesh just doesn’t have. There just isn’t a great “wounds per point” datasheet in the Slaanesh roster to make this stratagem to key component of your strategy.
Passing failed wounds from my T3/5++ Daemonettes off onto my Keeper which pays heavily for the -1 to Hit/T10/4++ which all get bypassed when they are the “recipient” of Thieves Of Pain sounds pretty unappealing.
Keepers are 290 points for 18 wounds with a 5+++, which is effectively 27 wounds, which is 10.7 points per wound when factoring in the Feel-No-Pain. Daemonettes are 10 points per wound (10 wounds/100 points). Fiends are 8.75 points per wound (12 wounds/105 points). Passing Daemonette or Fiend wounds onto Keepers to take advantage of Keeper Feel-No-Pains is literally a mathematically wrong choice.
It’s a good stratagem for sure, but I plan to use it more in situations like late in a game to keep a wounded unit alive on an objective, not as a key way to break the game’s math. Anyone who is raising alarms when reading this stratagem is probably having flashbacks to Iron Hands Dreadnoughts from previous editions passing off wounds through multiple layers of very efficient Feel-No-Pains, not the 10th Edition Slaanesh Daemons roster.
The only interaction I’ll keep an eye on is Daemonettes with a Contorted Epitome for a 4+++ MW FNP as the Thieves Of Pain “recipient”. That unit was never ran in the index detachment and gets way worse without access to 5” charges from deepstrike or advance-and-charge since its the most fragile 180 points in the entire game and would literally just be brought as a Thieves Of Pain battery, so I think we’re okay. I’m also open to being totally wrong once I’ve played it a few times, and more than anything just want to stop theorying ideas and actually try them on the tabletop!
Phantasmal Longing letting your Keepers/Shalaxi/Chariots/Soul Grinders move or charge through terrain will really open up your threat ranges, just keep in mind that you still can’t move through enemy models. Archagonists is a great buff, but the 2CP cost means you’re unlikely to use it except in key moments.
Sensory Excruciation is a really interesting stratagem. To be honest, I’m not sure how often you’ll use this. You’ll usually have way more of your own units in Shadow than your opponent, and risking battleshocking your own units so you can’t hold objectives is a huge downside. On the other hand, there might be certain situations late in games where this can lead to some massive swings if it works.
Playing This Detachment
Mike P: The Legion Of Excess has no ranged damage buffs or durability buffs. While that is extremely thematic for an army that loves feeling pain, it can sometimes leave you one-dimensional. You don’t really have any answers for opposing units besides running up to them and slicing them with your claws.
As a result, I think Slaanesh Daemons will want to soup in friends from other parts of the Daemons codex. Don’t forget that while all the buffs apply only to Slaanesh Daemons, you can still bring plenty of non-Slaanesh Daemons just for the value of their datasheets. Units like Nurglings, Plaguebearers, Beasts of Nurgle, Screamers, Flesh Hounds, and Be’lakor can add ton of utility to your list for various reasons.
You’ll want to use terrain carefully on the approach, trying to only take ranged damage after you’ve already pounced. You’ll also want to be very careful with your Seductive Gambits, and will need to play your Slaanesh Daemons to get a good feel for when you can afford to take the damage from your opponent fighting first, and when you can’t. Even random units like Guardsmen and Land Raiders can take a chunk out of your Daemonette units if they get to fight before you.
Wings: I appreciated Mike keeping me honest after my eyes bulged out like some sort of looney toons wolf earlier. Not sure how that happened, and I genuinely hope I’m off base about the strength. Anyway – this detachment kicks ass as a new add to the Daemonic pantheon, so have fun with it Chaos fans.
Strengths
- Strong suite of stratagems and enhancements with several standouts
- Multiple ways of messing with your opponent’s target priority
- Detachment rule ups the damage output and reliability of an already strong melee army
Weaknesses
- One dimensional army without any shooting
- Misuse of Seductive Gambit could easily cost you units – this can be a challenging detachment to play, especially against other melee armies.
- Even with defensive stratagems, Slaanesh units are generally still fragile
A Sample List
Mike P: Keepers and Fiends are the standouts units in this detachment so I’ll start my testing there, but Slaanesh has a wide variety of fun units that I’m sure will soon make their way into everyone’s lists.
Legion Of Excess v6.0 - Click to Expand
This entire list goes very fast and hits very hard. Sounds like a fun time for both players, or at least one of you!
Final Thoughts
Mike P: This detachment is basically everything a Slaanesh Daemons player could have (reasonably) asked for, and more. What’s not to love?
TheChirurgeon: Slaanesh players are definitely the big winners of the Detachment lottery this go around – while Khorne and Tzeentch have a few things that make them worth recommending, they’re not as unambiguously good as the Slaanesh offering.
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