Wyches : still useful ?

Calmoret wrote:

One thing to remember is that wyches are not super at killing marines, if you want to do that you should be looking at incubi, but in terms of point effectiveness increase to wyches vs. marines situation a Hekatrix with Agonizer, gets +1 A (+50% when not charging), wounds better if str 3 (+50%), and ignores their armor (+200%). So what you are doing is getting a 575% increase in offensive power (remember these are multiplicative) for a 350% increase in price. So in terms of offensive power this is a much more point effective means of dealing with marines then say adding more wyches to the fight.  

No one ever said Wyches are super at killing marines. They make good objective secured units, and do have assault grenades to enable your other units to jump into the fray. Sometimes you might want to throw your wyches through a deadly hail of gunfire from a unit in cover, just to place an assault grenade there, and enable your incubi to jump in and attack at initiative value.

I'm going to carry on using a unit of mine, if nothing else, they make good proxies for Lhamaeans...

If you're using Wyches for trailblazing for Incubi, I feel like it doesn't make sense to take the Hekatrix at all.

If the Wyches are trying to kill stuff, or at least not die, and take objectives, would it make sense to also take a blast pistol on that agonizer-toting Hekatrix? It's likely to atomize a Marine when you're charging in, which would basically earn its points.

Except that now we're talking about a 50 point unit leader upgrade.

I just don't know.

Calyptra wrote:

A Hekatrix with an agonizer is a lot of points. I really want to bring her, because I painted her up all nice. Can you elaborate on why she's worth it?

Statistically, she'll kill a Marine each turn in combat. She'll need to kill three to almost earn back her points, which seems unlikely. I'm aware that value is more complicated at that, but it still seems like a steep point cost for what she does.

I quite like the way a Hekatrix with an agoniser chews through (most) monstrous creatures, especially the ones that can't challenge to single her out. Wraithknight, Carnifex, etc - a shame we can't tangle with Dreadknights and Riptides any more, though.

Not that we really have problems dealing with monstrous creatures, mind, but I find its a nice option to have.

For me it's more of a return to 3rd edition codex.
Agonisers where the only way to get some lifting done back then. Yeah it's expensive but you need somebody to deliver the wounds that let you stay in combat. (And I have 2 units of metal wyches painted with Agonisers. It's only sad that now I have to model 3 Hydra Gauntlet Wyches. I'll create my own conversion as I don't like the GW model at all. It looks more like a Wych with two broken arms in plaster.)

To me Wyches aren't about killy-ness, it's all about their ability to get a shooty unit locked in combat and in the mean time, you have created a nice LOS blocking area, which can be used as cover for your real killy units to close in.

And yes, the Agoniser Hekatrix costs a lot but it isn't all about point-effectiveness. Sure the Venom Blade was über-cost-effective (so much it wasn't balanced anymore, hence the change) but it still would only kill about half a marine on average. The Agoniser kills you a whole marine on average. So people will turn down challenges and you will get less attacks back into the unit of wyches.

I agree, though in 3rd ed it was 8 points to upgrade a Wych to the unit leader, and the agonizer was 20.

I didn't think about the challenge though. That's a good point.