TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2024, Part 36: Testing Some New Death Guard Concepts

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of competitive and hobby progress for 2024. Last time around I was focused on my hobby progress, working on finishing a second Rhino for my Night Lords and converting up a Sorcerer on bike for them, dipping into Legends for the event. This time around I’m still documenting some hobby progress and working on my Night Lords, but I’ve got another battle report to talk about.

Testing a New Death Guard List

After the Q4 Balance Update, some amazing things happened. Deathshrouds got even cheaper and a bunch of good armies got worse, really opening things up for the faction. As a result, they’re in a very good place right now, and each of the last two weekends we’ve seen a host of Death Guard lists with different builds do well – both with and without Mortarion, going heavy on vehicles, and going heavy on infantry. One in particular is a vehicle-heavy variant, wielded by my old friend Don Hooson. His list packs a trio of Defilers with a Lord of Virulence. I’m not going to lie; I couldn’t stay away from the prospect of running that list and so I set up a practice game this past week with Greg, one of the local players who frequents the local Warhammer shop.

My Vehicles List - Click to expand

It needs some tweaks, but it’s a good start. The big difference here is that Don’s list and the other list I’ve seen run Predator Destructors. Those are arguably better – they give you more 3-damage shots, and that’s great for taking out heavy infantry targets – but I don’t have them right now and I prefer the blast-weapon damage output on the PBC, which can benefit from the LoV and shoot indirectly in a pinch.

My plan with this list is to put the LoV on the table for spotting and drop Typhus and his unit back in when they’re needed. The Defilers and PBCs combine to put a lot of hulls down, and if an opponent has to focus them down it can be a bit too much. In that sense, Greg’s list is a good test of what a hulls opponent might look like – he’s running a Dorn, three Russes, a Tank Commander, two Chimeras, a Hellhound, and an Armoured Sentinel. On top of that he has some Aquilons, Leontus, some Catachans, Straaken, Harker, and some extra chaff units.

The Mission: Crucible of Battle – Take and Hold – Stalwarts

The mission doesn’t do much for me but as Greg’s running 6 characters and a lot of vehicles I opt for fixed missions with Bring it Down and Assassination. I’ve got some killing power, may as well see what I can do. The big question here is whether I can blow through a lot of T11+ units with 2+ saves, but I’m hoping that combining -1 to save from Rattlejoint Ague with Ignores Cover from the Lord of Virulence will make it all work.

I’m going second. 

That’s pretty fine – I am in a good hiding spot, though turn 1 Greg is able to clip the corner of one of my MBHs and blows it up with one of his Russes. I respond on my turn by rolling out big – I pick up the Russ and the Catachans next to it, then brace for impact. The good news is Greg’s return volley isn’t so bad – he’s still getting into range, and he’s not able to see most of my vehicles, so he takes some shots at one of my PBCs, but doesn’t destroy it. Part of this is because I drew his fire – Greg left his backfield open so I put Tyhpus and his unit of jerks back there via Rapid Ingress, ensuring they’d take some Leman Russ shots but also be in position to completely obliterate everything on Greg’s home point. I lose two Deathshroud to Russ shooting but otherwise do fine.

This is my big go turn, and it… only kind of goes to plan. My dice fail me pretty utterly, and while I kill one of the Russes, the Dorn stays alive much longer than I’d like after I biff some melee attacks. Defiler Melee: Still disappointing.

On the other hand, the Deathshroud basically cleared out Leontas and his whole unit in one turn, taking Greg’s home objective and giving me both easy scoring and an easy Command Insertion secret mission play. I’d end up taking it, as I only pulled 10 VP on primary in the first three rounds.

As the game goes on I keep rolling. It’s slower going than I’d like – the Dorn survived, charged my last MBH, dropped it to 1 wound, then killed it by exploding when it was killed in melee – but I’m steadily dropping things. Clearing out weak infantry is easy, but the tanks take a bit more work. That said, the combo of contagion range and -1 to saves and ignores cover is huge, and dropping -2 on the Dorn to end up watching it fail three saves and take 9 damage is pretty great.

What Worked: Honestly? The Defilers were pretty solid. Greg’s list is pretty unoptimized – he’s still tinkering around and learning guard – but this was a good stat test against a bunch of hulls, at least. In that regard well, it’s a work in progress. I wasn’t real happy with rolling 5+ to wound all the time, and the list very much needed to hit those Contagion Ranges early to really make them work, but once I got into those ranges the damage flowed OK. AP-4 Entropy Cannons and Defiler Claws can be pretty nasty. The two squads of Deathshroud were also great, though starting one on the board was probably a mistake – I’m not sure I needed +1 to hit that bad on turn 1, especially at the cost of 2-3 models in the unit.

What didn’t: Not having any re-rolls on hits or wounds is rough. There were times I just got boned on the shot counts or only hit 2/5 attacks with defiler claws, and those felt pretty bad. The thing is, there isn’t really a solution for that in the Death Guard. At best I can make room for Mortarion to drop in some re-roll 1s to wound, and those will help but they require castling a bit too much for the list as well as dropping one of the PBCs so I’m not sold on that. Also I can absolutely see the value in running triple Destructors over the PBCs, as that gives me more 3-damage shooting and also saves me something like 150 points, which can buy an entire additional vehicle – maybe a Helbrute or another MBH, and some Chaos Spawn if I drop the Enhancement on the Lord of Virulence. That said, I don’t have three Predators and I’m not sure I want to paint them for this so we’ll see.

It’s an interesting list and this was a lot of fun to play with. It’s a pain in the ass to travel with, but I might consider painting up a trio of Death Guard Defilers to run soon. That said, I’m also going to test the Infantry list before I make a final decision there.

Hobby Progress

More Night Lords! I’m down to two weeks pretty much exact before Atlanta and there is not a lot of time left to paint. That said, I made some good progress: First, I finished my Vindicator!

I’m extremely happy with how this turned out. My big question going in was how to handle the hazard striping or break up the front plate and doing the striping just on the lower part really works, plus I’m happy with the lightning bolt on the tank. The extra winged skulls also help break things up – they’re from an old metal Gloomspite model – by adding some extra iconography and red to the model.

On top of that, I’ve been working on my Legionaries – I had one more unit to paint for the event – and there I’ve finished two more models and have two to go before that unit is done.

As I write this, I should be done with the two models this weekend, since the champion is 80% done and the other model has some paint on him already. That just leaves me with the following to paint:

• Land Raider
• 5 Chosen
• 10 Cultists
• 5 Rubrics

That’s too much, and something’s gotta give. It’ll probably be the Rubrics and Chosen, but we’ll see on that front. I really want to paint up some new Cultists since I don’t have any great Cultist models, and I can live without the Chosen, but my Terminators want to ride in style.

On another positive note, Bryce officially finished his Battle Honours program two weeks ago – he’d painted his Invictor and another squad of guys, we played our first game, and then in the last two weeks we’ve read Attack of the Necron, the first of the Warhammer Adventures books, to help complete his card. This netted him a free minis case to go with his map of the galaxy/mortal realms, plus a brush case.

I’m really proud of him for doing this stuff, and he’s now on me to work on his “Tanksgiving” project – building and painting a vehicle or monster from new-in-the-box fresnhness. He asked me for a Stormhawk Interceptor, but ended up wanting to assemble it with the glass canopy, making it a Stormtalon instead. So that’s currently in the works.

The goal is to get it painted in November, then field it at some kind of mega battle toward the end of the month. Shouldn’t be too bad, and it’s fun to help him work on it. He clips the parts, then I trim them down and set them up for gluing, and he’ll put them into position. He’s still a bit too young to work with a hobby knife safely, so this is a good way to handle it.

Next Time: More Death Guard Practice!

That wraps up this week. Things are plugging along well with my Night Lords and I’m getting in some more practice with new Death Guard lists this weekend. Then it’ll be a slog as I race to finish things in time for Atlanta, I’m sure. I’m pretty hype for the event – there’s a ton of cool stuff in this year’s narrative – and I’m excited to talk about it and write about it every day I’m there. Anyways, I’ll be back next Thursday as always with more updates on my games and hobby progress. See you then.

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