Stop Competing: Dark Angels Tactics

What the fuck is a Dark Angel?

Is there anything cooler than Space Marines? Buff men in impenetrable armor, carrying fully-automatic rocket launchers and hissing litanies of hate through their skull-masks. What if you took those guys, give them anime swords and anime robes, and replaced the furious chanting with brooding silence? Probably cooler, yeah? Incorrect, they are no longer cool at all. These are the First Legion, the Dark Angels, and they know precisely one, very specific, fear.

Throughout this post, we’ll be offering multiple Overcharged Plasma Hot Takes from our authors, in the tabbed parts of the text – if you want to read Greg’s opinions, you can refer to the “Goofus” tab, and Chase, who is actually good, will be in the “Gallant” sections. It’s a choose your own adventure post, and your choice is to follow the guy whose record in 2019 is 1-28, or the one who went 4-1 at a recent Major and is top-3 in ITC Dark Angels rankings. We think the choice is clear, so we’ve helpfully started all those sections at their “Goofus” setting. Corrode: Also, sometimes, it’s worth clicking on the “Wings” parts, in case you wanted useful information and not just Tweedledum and Tweedledee arguing with each other.

Strengths

• Some fun unique units.
• A much smaller number of good unique units.
• They look cool?
• A couple of the stratagems are good. Literally a couple, there are two. Vigilus Defiant adds a third.

Weaknesses

• No Guilliman. Or any game changing characters.
• You don’t get Doctrines.
• Also your Chapter Tactic kind of sucks.
• And your Relics.
• You don’t get any of the cool new Stratagems.
• Remember how lackluster Marines were pre-2019 Codex? It’s basically that.
• Everything is super half-assed.

Competitive Ranking

Not great! And getting worse with every supplement that comes out as we get left behind, though getting Shock Assault and the Gravis armor updates helped quite a bit. Dark Angels don’t exactly clean up at the top, or even mid-tier, tables. That said, they’re still Space Marines, so they aren’t in Grey Knights or (yikes) Necrons territory either. Unfortunately, not having Doctrines puts them at a marked disadvantage compared to Astartes-normative Marines.

Special Rules

Grim Resolve

Your chapter tactic does two things, one utterly useless and the other only mostly useless.

The first thing is you can only ever lose one model to a failed morale test.

The other half of Grim Resolve is if you didn’t move you can re-roll 1s to hit when shooting.

Inner Circle

Ravenwing Attack Squadron

Psychic Powers

Congratulations, weirdos, you got your own special type of wizard, and wouldn’t you know it, he mostly sucks!

• Mind Worm (WC6): Do one Mortal Wound to a unit, and make them fight last. Ok? [checks notes] Ooooh, an enemy unit. Well, that makes more sense, but still isn’t worth taking. Nope. Wings Note: I honestly can’t believe this takes the time to state that it works on units that charged but then only lasts till the end of your turn. Classic Dark Angels codex.
• Aversion (WC6): This is the good shit. Tag an enemy unit and make it -1 to hit. Hell yeah.
• Righteous Repugnance (WC7): Give re-rolls on hits and wounds in melee to a unit. Not bad, but you’re probably spending your two powers on Aversion and Mind Wipe. If you have a second psyker, though, this is worth a look. Maybe. Wings Note: This is surprisingly fine in the abstract, it’s almost a shame the payoff targets aren’t really worth it.
• Trephination (WC7): I really want to love this one but it sucks so bad. Closest unit takes (2d6-Ld) Mortal Wounds, with 2 more on top if you rolled an 11 or 12. It looks the same as Smite (including the hilarious targeting restrictions), since you typically aren’t going to roll box cars due to the basic nature of how dice function, but this is actually worse because you can pass the Psychic Test, then stuff the roll and do no damage at all. Also, it’s harder to cast, for some reason. Do not take this, and I want to stress that point: This is a worse version of the power that everyone gets for free.
• Engulfing Fear (WC6): Opponent rolls 2 dice and picks the highest for Leadership checks within 6″. Why cast something that’s never going to happen. Engulf this one in my whole entire ass.
• Mind Wipe (WC7): This one rips. Forces a (Ld+d6) rolloff with an enemy model. If you win, they take a -1 to WS, BS, and Ld for the rest of the battle. It stacks, too. Brain-melting the other player’s warlord is a powerful spite move. Hell yeah. Wings Note: Especially good against a Knight, where you earn a double hell yeah if you land this.

Short answer:

Warlord Traits

In addition to the normal traits from the main rulebook, you get this murderer’s row of trash:

• Fury of the Lion: +1 strength to anyone within 6″ if your warlord charged or got charged. Considering how lackluster Dark Angels are in combat, this isn’t good enough to be worth building around, so you should never take it.
• Courage of the First Legion: Auto-pass morale within 12″ of your warlord. Absolutely never going to matter, considering the admittedly slim benefits of Grim Resolve and the ATSKNF re-rolls.
• Brilliant Strategist: Your requisite 5+ CP regen, plus a free re-roll once a game that I have never remembered to use. It’s fine, and also what you’ll have most of the time, since you should be using Azrael, and he comes with this.
• Huntsman: Turn your warlord into a shitty Vindicare, by ignoring character targeting rules for the most useless types of gun (Pistol, Grenade) and also Rapid Fire. Would be useful on Azrael, if he was allowed to take it and wasn’t already locked into a different warlord trait. In principle I love it, but in practice it sucks. I’ve used this trait in about the only useful build for it – a Chaplain with a combi-plasma – in 15 or 20 games, and he has been less than useless with it. You can questionably rely on this to plink a wound off of something you don’t care about, maybe twice a game, if you’re lucky.
• Master of Maneuver: Re-roll advances and charges for stuff within 6″. Whatever, bikes already auto-advance 6″ anyway. It could be good on charging, if you had a block of Ravenwing Knights, and even better, almost worth it, if you could somehow Field Commander another Ravenwing guy in an Attack Squadron to throw Fury of The Lion on him – it’s probably still never going to make its points back, but a biker gang with S6 pickaxes re-rolling charges and getting 3 attacks each isn’t bad.
• Stubborn Tenacity: 6+ Feel No Pain, but 5+ if you stood still. I really hate them trying to make static gunlines happen for Dark Angels. No one wants to play like that, but the rules keep incentivizing it. Anyway, the trait is ok.

Short answer:

Relics

Stratagems

Here’s the good stratagems. It’s a short list, which is good since you won’t have a ton of CP.

• 1CP Weapons of the Dark Ages: +1 damage on plasma weapons for a unit, which stacks with Overcharging. I personally love this one, it whips ass on Hellblasters, Plasmaceptors, and Plasmacutioners, and makes the decision to put plasma on everything slightly less stupid, but just as insane. Strong.
• 2CP Intractable: Did you forego moving out of charge range to get those sweet re-rolls to hit, or just fuck up positioning your screening units? Well, the two or three models that survived combat can fall back and shoot normally, at the cost of multiple, extremely scarce, CP. No, you still can’t charge, and yes, this is just paying CP for an arguably better version (you don’t take the -1 to hit in shooting, but you can’t charge) of what all Ultramarines get for free, but you take what you can get.
• 1CP Speed of the Raven: Ah fuck there’s three good stratagems, I forgot this one. It lets you use the Ravenwing ability to get a 4++ Invulnerable after Advancing, and still shoot like you hadn’t. Good as hell.
• 1CP Signal the Attack: A model in your Ravenwing Attack Squadron can pop this after putting a wound on something, and now the other ATTACK SQUADRON units in that detachment get a +1 to Hit against whatever that something was. Makes it risk-free to overcharge at things, but then you miss out on the charm of self-murdering with your own gun, so who can say whether it’s good or not.
• 0CP Pro Tip: If you’re in range of an Ancient, just overcharge all your shit constantly, all the time. You get extra shots, which is cool, and if the Ancient does his thing during Overwatch, the extra shots hit normally, not just on 6s. Do not do this.

Allies: maybe not the worst idea.

The silver lining to not getting Combat Doctrines, let alone better chapter-specific ones, is that you have no reason not to “soup” in other armies. I’ll assume you’re already familiar with the no-brainer of dropping in a Custodes/Knights/Blood Angels detachment or two, or bringing an Assassin. You can still do that with Dark Angels, a chapter perhaps best known for their history of having friends and welcoming outsiders into their ranks with open arms.

I also want to consider something even stupider: Space Wolves.

Allying in Space Wolves allows you to use The Lion and The Wolf (1CP) stratagem, where you pick a Dark Angels and a Space Wolves model before the battle, and on a 4+ each of them takes a Mortal Wound (take an Apothecary if you care about this), and in exchange they both get +1 to Attacks, Weapons Skill, Leadership, and Strength. Some units to grace with this dubious honor:

Interrogator-Chaplain with the Mace of Redemption

Replace his Crozius with a power maul, and replace that with the Relic mace (S+3, d3 Damage), then nominate him to fight the Space Wolf chump. He’s now hitting at S8, which is the Good Number since it lets you wound Marines on a 2 and Knights on a 4. The extra pip of WS is wasted, but that was always going to be the case – your tooled-up CC dudes are pretty much all already WS2 anyway, and there’s almost no reason to put this stratagem on anyone else.

Librarians

As you would expect, stabbing a werewolf makes him better at using his Anime Sword, but who cares about that. We’re taking this purely to get the extra point of Ld, because it helps with getting Mind Wipe off. Dumb idea, sure, but that’s par for the course on Caliban.

Primaris Lt with Heavenfall Blade

This guy fucks. He’ll be going in at S7, swinging 5 times, hitting on 2s and wounding MEQs on a 3 (re-rolling 1s) for d3 damage each. Can’t hit S8 like the Chaplain, but his Aura is probably better since it works in shooting as well as combat.

Intercessor or Terminator Sergeant with Power Fist or Thunder Hammer

First of all: this is the coward’s choice, risk a real model you messy idiot baby. So you have a 50/50 shot of your Intercessor or Terminator leader being half dead now, but you’ll be getting 4 gross as hell attacks that hit on 3s, which isn’t nothing. You’re also getting some extra leeway on morale checks, which very much is nothing.

Subtraction by Addition: The Space Wolves Side of The Equation

It probably doesn’t matter, but you can either take a cheap Allied detachment with some min-spec HQ or sniper Scouts as a tax, effectively making this a 2CP stratagem, or try and make the Space Wolves useful, which is hard because they’re all dumber than a sack of doorknobs. Fortunately, they have a few good punching units, which is something Dark Angels lack.

Units

We won’t be going into all of the units Dark Angels have unfortunately been allowed to use, because they’re the same, but worse, than what’s in the main Space Marines codex, which other authors have covered. And also because we don’t care.

You pretty much get everything in the main book except Centurions and Thunderfire Cannons, so we hope you weren’t planning to use those.

God Tier

• None, look in a different book.

Pro Tier

• Sammael (hover truck): Owns hard. Shooting, he gets 18 shots hitting on 2s, re-rolling 1s (3s re-rolling 1s if he moves, which he should), and in combat he is certifiably Good at Swords. Gives re-roll misses to Ravenwing and re-roll 1s to everyone else. Basically don’t take Talonmasters if you can take this guy, or take him and a Talonmaster, and zoom up the field failing to keep your jets in his aura, and then get pissed when the Dark Talons don’t do shit because d3 shots is trash and you already blew your CP rerolls on advances. Corrode: There’s some personal experience coming in here, I think.
• Ravenwing Talonmaster: I (Chase) have a big spot in my lists for these guys right now, especially with the amount of shots that can come out of them. If you are able to stay still, their BS along with the chapter tactic of re-rolling 1s makes this unit, along with Sammael, a wall of bullets that needs to be respected.
• Repulsor Executioner: As all of you know, this model is going to be everywhere. This platform of 30 shots is a bullet hose mixed with a durable chassis that simply cannot be ignored. You’re going to want to take the plasma version of this in Dark Angels. To clarify: you absolutely shouldn’t, but you’ll want to. Don’t, the laser one is better. If you go buck wild (and have the CP for it), Overcharging and WotDA-ing, this is possibly 2d6 shots at 3 damage when moving under half, compared to 4 shots at d6 (min 3) damage. This would be a toss-up if it weren’t for that minimum-3 damage on the laser, but that ignores the increased range, and the highly relevant fact that firing any plasma weapon is actively harmful to the user. Or, enjoy the plasma purely because you can high roll the shots. Roll a 6 and 1? CP re-roll that 1, get a 4 and let’s go to Plasma town. Not only that, put Target Priority on this, hit that other Executioner on 2s, and really show it who’s boss.

Mid Tier

Aww yeah, there’s my lame-ass Mall Goth sons.

• Azrael: Owns because he can overcharge his combi-plasma and instantly die, thus taking the coward’s way out. He’s a bit of a brick shithouse in combat, but the real reason you’re taking him is the auras. He gives everyone re-rolls to hit (not the Gucci re-rolls, so you’re still only re-rolling 1s and 2s against Flyers, not 3s), and infantry and bikes a 4++ Invulnerable save. Gives you an extra CP if he’s your warlord, and can re-gen CP on a 5+, which in my experience will never work.
• Sammael (hover bike): Less good at shooting, but if you’re going to use him to buff your jets, he can keep up better – the truck moves 16″, where this one only moves 14″, but he advances 2d6″, which will give you an extra inch or two on average, and you can certainly fish for re-rolls, if he’s your warlord and if you’re bad enough at math.
• Hellblasters: Take a unit of 10, then Overcharge and pop Weapons of the Dark Ages. Hell yeah, 3 damage plasma. Put an Ancient nearby and shoot even more when they inevitably eat shit and die. Chase: I feel these are the biggest trap in our book. On paper they look OK, but when it comes right down to it they have to be exposed and have to have the support of multiple characters to make them viable. Take plasma Inceptors instead, at least you can guarantee you’ll get every shot off, instead of losing half the squad on turn one.
• Plasma Inceptors: Never ever overcharge these guys. 2d3 shots means that even with average rolls you can easily self-terminate the entire 180 point unit the first time it shoots (I always overcharge them). Or you can give up the S8 shooting and use Weapons of the Dark Ages to go up to 2 damage risk-free, coward. Chase: This is one of my go-to units that I fundamentally disagree with Greg about. At this time, just taking 5 of these is 10d3 shots. Mix in a LT to re-roll 1s to wound and you have a PROTECTED (due to deepstrike) wall of fuckery here. Especially at 3 wounds a piece now, and a points decrease. These are better than Hellblasters in almost every single way.
• Ravenwing Darkshroud: Looks like idiot dumpster garbage, but is useful if/when you remember that it gives everything (Flyers included) within 6″ a -1 to be shot at.
• Ravenwing Dark Talon (Greg): Good main gun (d3 shots at S10 AP-3 D3, plus d3 Mortal Wounds on top, if you did any normal wounds and pass a 3+ after), plus hurricane bolters for hosing down troops, and with Strafing Run you’re pretty good at hitting ground targets even without Sammael around. Bit fragile (T6 W10) compared to literally anything ever, but benefits hugely from Speed of the Raven to remain alive, and Signal The Attack to be useful while it does. Can also drop a bomb once per game, which I recommend dropping the first chance you get, because this dumb thing won’t live long enough to get a second. Take two or three, it’s one of the few genuinely good units you get.

Marginal Tier

• Primaris Apothecary: This little fucker has rarely paid off, he’s cancelled.
• All the other different kinds of bikes: Fine.
• Deathwing Knights: Essentially TH/SS thicc bois that give up a point of AP in exchange for not being -1 to hit things. With the extra attack from Shock Assault, and points drops in every Chapter Approved so far, they are Probably Good now. Every other type of Terminator you can take sucks. I’d also rather not have to take the Flail on the Knight Master, who has the extremely cool rule of extra damage from his weapon rolling over instead of being lost. The weapon is damage 2, by the way, because they didn’t want to make anything the Dark Angels get too good, so enjoy that extra single goddamn wound of damage not going to waste, I guess.
• Ravenwing Black Knights: Bikes that hit better in combat (one better in both strength and AP), and replace their boltguns with Assault 2 plasmas. These guys also fuck.

Never Used Them, But Probably They Blow Tier

• Ezekial.
• Asmodai.
• Chaplains of all sorts, except maybe the Dreadnought, because it’s dope.

• Belial.
• Dreadnoughts: Nothing special here, just take a quad-lascannon Relic Contemptor like everyone else.

Shit Tier

• Nephilim: If you’re thinking of taking this, please just scrounge up 25 spare points from somewhere else and take another Dark Talon instead. It kills me to say that, because I legitimately adore the model, but it sucks so bad. Same frail-ass chassis as the Dark Talon but with worse guns, plus it can’t hover.
• Ravenwing Dark Talon (Chase): T6 10 wounds. See Nephilim. Minus the “take this” advice. Don’t. You will lose all of these to most of the meta right now before they can do anything.
• Deathwing Terminators: You can mix-and-match shooty and assault terminators in the same unit, which is stupid and you should never do it. Have fun with that. Chase: Something to be mentioned here is taking 3 TH/SS termies and 7 storm bolter ones. Being able to drop in and put down 56 bolter shots is not a joke. Then, since you have the three CC Termies, you can use a 1 CP strat to reduce any incoming wound rolls by one. No longer being wounded on 2s, or even 3s, makes these bois pretty tanky.

Lists

Dark Angels lists are inevitably going to end up looking a lot like any other Marines, for the obvious reason that they are Marines. So here we’ll look at some options that lean into the unique Dark Angel units, and try and put them front and center – obviously you can still run 3 Repulsor Executioners or mondo Aggressors if you want, and do the same thing as any other chapter, just not as well.

My Better-Than-Nanavati 1-5 NoVA GT list

I’m not joking either, I literally placed higher than Nanavati in the GT (he dropped early, I think – I only won a single game across like a dozen attempts with this stupid thing, so just to be clear and before I catch any guff over this I am entirely joking and Nick remains a much better player and person than I will ever be), and this is the meta-busting list I used. Follow along at home and see if you can figure out why this sucks.

Army List - There will be a quiz at the end

This isn’t a bad list, but there’s some problems. For one, the company Vets don’t do shit, they’re only there because I had  points left over and needed to fill out the Vanguard – this is more CP than I ever needed in the first place, and a waste of points. Thus, if you read above in re: don’t take Nephilims ever, you can figure out where the extra points to replace that thing with a third Dark Talon could have come from.

Still, you get a nice CP bank and some objective-holding presence from the Battalion, and the Ravenwing elements can put in work. Sammael advances up with the three flyers to try and alpha strike something, and the green guys Battle Pile up and Hellblast things as they press up the table under a cloud over overlapping auras. It’s generally harder to shift than you might imagine – albeit not extremely durable – owing to 2W Primaris troops and that stack of bonuses, but dissolves quickly against dedicated close-combat armies.

The Darkshroud can pick and choose which group it sticks with. I did try to include some Terminators in here, just to get all three flavors of Dark Angel into the list, but there’s not really a spot for them. Some improvements could be made, though.

Gunum’s 3-3 Nova List, The Plasma West

I beat Chaos, Tau and Orks. I lost to Knights, Chaos Daemons, and Custodes. You’ll see just by reading this list where the killing power was, and also the staying power. 

Let’s go! 

Army List

This list was a blast to pilot, but it was definitely a scalpel approach to the game. The list was 2000 points prior to the new Space Marine book upgrades and now lands at 1976 points. Essentially the game plan was:

1. Pick an Assassin to match the game. 90% of the time it was the Callidus, to siphon off command points. 10% of the time it was the Vindicare assassin to snipe Weird Bois in Ork lists. 
2. Put all the Inceptors in reserves, and place all Infiltrators in the middle, relying on line of sight to stay alive. My scouts were the objective holders, hanging back and locking down my table edges. 
3. Turn 2: Bring the Inceptors down along with my Warlord, give them +1 to hit against the unit I need to kill, kill that unit by doing 1,000 (approximately) damage. Then watch those Inceptors die.
4. Turn 3: Repeat Inceptor trade. 
5. ???
6. Pray everything is dead that can kill what I have left, then hold on for dear life.

I played against some great players, and the same four-Knight player twice. I used all of my command points on re-rolls, Auspex Scan, and Weapons of the Dark Age. 

Being in a world of 2W Inceptors was hard, but they did their job. Inceptors with 10d3 shots that hit on 2s and that you can overcharge without any fear of dying? Sign me up. I killed Knights. I killed Magnus. I killed a Tau Riptide through his drones and a 3++ invulnerable. Inceptors are straight murder machines when they do not Get Hot and also do 3 damage. Finally, since they are infantry, if anyone was brave enough to deep strike within 12″ of them, they made amazing Auspex Scan targets, dumping those 10d3 plasma shots into whoever was reckless enough to get close. 

The next key to this list was the 9 Eliminators. This was prior to the +1S +1W buff, so I had to really make their shots count. This was reflected by hiding them in an L blocker with my LT and putting every single round into one character at a time. Using the Chapter Tactic to re-roll ones to hit and the LT to re-roll ones to wound added up to a plethora of kills for the 9 sniper men. I don’t think I’ll be able to leave home without them again. 

Finally, I’ve had a lot of people ask me about how the Gravis Armor Captain did, and why I gave him the Shroud of Heroes instead of the Heavenfall Blade. His job was pretty straight forward: I started him on the line, and I ran him forward to fight anyone and everything. Being -1 to hit from the Shroud of Heros at all times allowed him to stick in with anyone he stepped up to, and then he’d take them on a one-way express train to Power Fist Town. He was used as a counter charge unit, and I was thankful to have this tool in my pocket when I played against GSC.

This list hid like a meerkat, popping its head out to delete something, then hiding again. I scored pretty average each round, scoring 20 – 28 every game.

One thing I am sure you noticed, is that I am using no Dark Angels unique units here. Because they are not good. Except Sammy in his speeder. Man, does he get it done sometimes.

Flipmode Squad

Army List

This comes out to about 1950 points, without any kind of wargear upgrades.

In general, fixing this list is left as an exercise to the reader, who is almost certainly better at 40k than the author, but it’s probably fine as-is;

You could, if you like, drop one of the flyers and put the jets into the Battalion, then mark the entire thing as a Ravenwing Attack Squadron, so you’d be able to use the +1 to hit buff on Sammael and the Darkshroud (or, more realistically, use them to get a wound in so you can pop the strat off of that, and then get the bonus on both jets), but the jets look cool so three of them is about right. Or, for almost the exact same price, throw in 5 Ravenwing Black Knights instead of the 5 Hellblasters. It trades a bit of shooting power for mobility and somewhat higher durability (T5 on the bikes is a good break point, and you can Jink for that 4++). Your call, really.

It’s certainly possible to drop a jet or two and stuff in more RepExes, to run the dreaded Tripulsor Executioners. Or swap them to the Macro Plasma Incinerators, and run the Tripulsor Plasmexecutioner list. A Dartripulsor Plasmexecutiongels list is probably not the best, but it may just be the Most Dark Angels.

Conclusion

Corrode: I’m sorry we let this happen. If you want to yell at us, check out our Facebook page or e-mail contact@goonhammer.com. Alternatively, yell at Games Workshop and make them finally give Dark Angels good rules.