I've been playing Daemons since the start of the year, in that time I've played 20 games losing only 6. My only losses have been when my Bloodthrister has died so I want to try a list without the big guy. So here goes.

Herald of Khorne General
Armour of Khorne

Herald of Khorne
Armour of Khorne

Herald of Nurgle BSB
Lvl 1

Herald of Tzeentch
Spellbreaker
Master of sorcery
Lore of light

39 x Bloodletters
Fc
Icon of Endless War

39 x Bloodletters
Fc

24 x Plaugebearers
Fc
Standard of Seeping Decay

5 x Furies

5 x Furies

3 x Nurglings

1 x Fiend

1 x Fiend

3 x Flamers

3 x Flamers

Total 2494

So the list has war machine hunters, lots of chaff, big combat blocks and magic that works quite well with all my core troops. Any changes you would make? The only thing I'm not sold on is the magic level on my HoN, is it any good?

Strykehammer

It's nice to have at least 'something' to fall back on in case your Herald of Tzeentch gets sucked into a Dimensional Cascade or something like that.. But a HoN with just one spell.. I don't know.. Frankly, I'd try to fit two Heralds of Tzeentch into that list instead.

I think you can probably re-arrange stuff to make that work, because frankly you may be bringing a little bit too much chaff in this list. Depends on your opponant's and how they like playing of course, but still..

What I would get for the HoN is a Palanquin, Breath-Weapon, and the ASL in base contact Gift. Which ever one of those, or all of them really..

To fit another HoT in I'd have to drop one of my other Heralds, I'm not particularly keen on that, but I'm open to idea's on how to arrange it. Also in my area chaff is king, every army is rocking so much, I'm really just trying to get in on the action. Any other suggestions would be great!

Strykehammer

To fix the chaff problem, I would drop the Furies and increase your Flamer units to six-strong. They're excellent at clearing chaff, and more importantly their usefulness doesn't stop once everything's engaged. Two solo Fiends are more than adequate for clearing warmachines and the like.

Even if you want to hang on to your chaff units I would max the Flamers by dropping some core; their effectiveness goes up so much in larger units.

I understand your reluctance to remove any one of those Locus-Heralds. It's not an easy decision to be making. Since two of them are Khornate (no magic) you only have that one Level of the HoN as a possibility.

One way to solve this issue would be to simply swap those Plaguebearers&HoN all together and instead bring a similar-sized unit of Horrors joined by a second Herald of Tzeentch.

The Horrors (4+ Wardsave Locus and all) are not as killy as PB's of course. But you'd have your magic covered, and then some.. :)

It's an alternative you could concider if you got the models.

Second to that, you could drop one of the khorne-heralds and instead rely on boosting that Bloodletter unit (lacking hatred) in the Magic Phase. One HoT with Life and one with Light would (for example) be able to play a nice tandem on those Bloodletters (get Birona's off and you're not missing the Hatred one bit, for example).

Not as reliable as bringing a HoK (as far as the hatred goes) but on the other hand you have gotten yourself some more security in the magic phase in general.

It's your call. I'm no expert by any means. :D

Thanks for your advice, those were the conclusions that I came to also. An equal sized unit of Horrors would most defiantly cover my magic phase with some to spare, but I don't have any to be honest, I never liked them lol. I may proxy them for a test run.

I just have another question. How good is the Staff of Nurgle and would it be better then a magic lvl on my HoN?

I play a lot of HE, LM (with lots of skinks) and OnG that are packed full of T2 and T3 models, it just seems that it could really hurt those guys.

Strykehammer

Staff of Nurgle.. Hm..

Well, to give you a reference:
In the DoC Book 're-write' that me and some other guys here on the Forum have been working on we 'began' by reducing the cost of that Gift from 50pts to 35pts - then we raised the casting value to 4 (rather than 3) and lowered the cost even further to 30pts.

So saying that it's 15pts 'overcosted' right now is pretty much a good summary I'd say. ;)

On the upside it's almost like buying a Magic Level and knowing which spell you are going to get. Rancid Visitation is pretty good against those generally expensive Elves, but you'd need to get horribly lucky against Goblins (and the like) in order to 'make your points' back with that item given that they'll fail those toughness checks only so many times.

Another kinda neat thing is that you can risk miscasting with this "innate ability" (getting irresistable force) without having to roll on the miscast table. So if your HoT has bitten the dirt you can just chuck six dice on that Staff without having to risk blowing up.

On the downside it's a Magic Missile, so you're only likely to get one or maybe 2 magic phases with it before you're in Close Combat where you cannot use it at all. And of course it's not really a "magic level" so no bonuses to casting/dispelling.

In 7th Ed it was a pretty cool spell because units were smaller so you could do significant damage with a little luck. In 8th the units are bigger so most enemies will be able to soak the damage from Rancid Visitation pretty well.

Bottom line is: I definately think that Stream of Bile & Noxious Vapours or 'the better gifts' available to the HoN at the moment.

Hmm I see your point with the Staff, it has some potential but not the best choice.

I've got my Friday night gaming lined up tonight which I generally get two games in, so I think I'm going to try the Staff in one and swap my Plaugebearers for horrors in the other.

Should I take the Master of Sorcery and Spellbreaker on my second Tzerald?

Thanks for your help

Strykehammer

MoS and Spellbreaker is a nice set-up. Or I should say 'a standard set-up' simply because it's so good. *hehe*

But you already have one Spellbreaker and sometimes having two of those is overkill.

The alternative I'd look at would actually be to take the power vortex instead (given that you have no Level 4 wizard that extra dice might come in handy).

Assuming you have Light on one HoT and want to go with MoS on the other one as well I'd say you got an array of nice choices for Lores..
- Life (Dwellers good vs Elves, FleshToStone excellent on 'Letters, Attribute will heal your chars too)
- Death (nice sniping magic, purple sun good against greenskins)
- Beasts (good all round lore, surprice the f:k out the enemy in CC as you turn your HoT into a black mountain chimera..)

I'd primarily concider those Lores if going with MoS.

i'd be tempted to bring blue scribes.

just for the fact your going to get dominated in magic phases... other armies tend to bring a few wizards with at least one being a level 4. I have a similar setup to yours in my 2k games, and recently i've played lizardmen, beastmen and high elves

lizardmen wasn't so bad but he put the hurt on me quite easily its, removing my 6's friggin hurt my magic phase... anyway the real trouble was beastmen and high elves, with beastmen, 3 lvl 1 around a herdstone and a level 4, he was getting 3 powerdice off the bat, with 4 channels, and his great bray had the dagger item thing, that when he deals a wound he puts that many power dice to one side to use when and where he wants. i think i managed to get 2 spells off all game, where he was gettings 2 spells off a turn... hell he cast high powered kadon 3 times... and elves are even worse, my caster felt absolutely useless... I mean... what am i meant to do against teclis... he didnt need the 2 other casters... he dominated both magic phases with just him

aaand ive done it again, sorry about the random talkings, I was just trying to illustrate a point, don't expect a good magic phase at 2.5k most armies will laugh at it... and if you don't have augments on your units, but your opponent does? guess how combat is likely to turn out

Hotz with MoS is fantastic value at 2k and under, but taking just him in larger games is a bit suicidal in my opinion

So I've just gotten home from a local one day tourney, I ended up going with the 2nd HoT with life magic. I also dropped the Plaugebearers for horrors. It went amazingly, I pulled out 3 wins from 3 games, two 20-0 and one 16-4. My chaff was amazing holding up chaos knights and hellcannons, absolutely great. Two hordes of bletters works just as you'd think it would, like blenders! The horrors only got in combat once and only for the static combat Rez.

All in all it was very brutal for my opponents, I think I'll be shelving the list until my next big no comp tourney, which is in August. Probably good that is though I need to spend some time painting

Thanks all for all the help

Strykehammer

I'm glad to hear it went well. Pretty sure you have no reason to thank anybody but yourself for the wins though *haha* A list by itself can only be so good, most of it is up to the player in The Game still..

I'm not sure it's a good idea to stop using the list though; instead I would suggest letting your opponants get a few more tries and ultimately figure out how to beat it (!) - Otherwise you'll just leave them with that sour taste of 'Daemons being broken - blargh!' and that's just unnecessary in this day and age! *lol*

You are right DaemonReign, after posting last night my friend challenged me, he wanted to test himself against my new list. At first I said no, because I didn't want to be that guy that just beats everyone, but he talked me into it. He wants to get better as a player and playing probably the toughest list we have seen in my area is the best way to do it.

If I find that nobody comes close to beating it at all, then it might get hung up for all but tournament play.

Strykehammer