List with no melee - fun?

stilgar27 wrote:

If you have enough models, the chaos daemons release is pretty sweet and can literally be 100% melee pretty easily.

I might have a look at that as a possibility. But Daemonkin not being that helpful doesn't really bother me that much, I actually started collecting a Khorne CSM army (yes, with the current CSM book) simply because I loved reading about the World Eaters in the first few Horus Heresy novels, and Kharn is one of my favourite characters. If not my favourite. The army as I have built it is so far away from competitive it's just mad - berzerkers with all chain axes and skull champions with twin lightning claws, lord on juggernaut jumping off a massive rocky precipice that makes him a more visible target than a helbrute... But it's got so much style

I often run Reavers - the full pack of them is 18-strong, but I'd like to get my hands on a few more.

Melee's fun. By using a horde of Reavers to target a single unit and killing them at the I10 step, you also avoid the biggest weakness of melee - that your opponent gets to damage you back. Granted overwatch is a concern (and they typically stay away from units with multiple flamers). Grotesques are great too, but more for the reason that they can actually take hits.

If you're running Wyches or something of the like, melee's no fun. You need to know you'll survive the assault - that is your primary role, after all. Reavers do that by killing things quickly, Grotesques do it in the more traditional sense.

Even as low as 500pts I like to run melee. The only ranged support I run is the Blaster Warriors in Venom tax, and Scourge for anti-armor. I used to be a Guard player back in 5th though, so I figure a large part of going so melee-heavy is to mix things up after that.

While the Dark Kin are naturally more suited to the shooting game, sheer spite makes them enjoy the melee game...

We have roughly a 2:1 ratio of melee to shooting units in our book (the inverse of our Craftworld friends, though I couldn't guess at the ratio for most armies). Sadly, most of those melee units are trash.

The Power from Pain table is also biased towards assault benefits. But it doesn't seem to help.

It suggests to me that the developers either weren't sure where they wanted us to be on the shooting <==> melee sliding scale, or if they did know they didn't know how to do it.

I like melee. I like going first in melee. I like my puny space elf fists glancing off thweir tougher opponents somewhat less

In the hearts of men there is a constant desire for conflict.

Pitching wyches into the game definately makes it more interesting - a dance with death.

Cruor Mulciber wrote:

Pitching wyches into the game definately makes it more interesting - a dance with death.

The only death involved with Wyches is their own

Jimsolo wrote:

It's debatable whether the character would help against Psychic Shriek.  Most TOs rule that the majority LD is used, since the rule for subbing the character's LD score is restricted to specific circumstances.

I've had the opposite experience with TOs. This is fairly important to me, since I rarely have less than 3 farseers in my lists. What specific circumstances are required to substitute a the highest leadership score in the unit? I thought we were given general permission to do so, rather than having caveats.

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As to the original topic, while I certainly like the IDEA of melee best, and think it'd be the most fun to build and play, were it effective, I don't normally think it is effective. In general, I think shooting lists are far more efficient, especially if they also have mobility. And with DE in particular, even normal shooting units can be used as melee later in the game. When you have furious charge, fearless, FnP, etc, even charging with a unit of kabalite warriors could end up tying up a unit of space marines long enough for you to continue to hold end of game objectives.

But in the beginning of the game, THAT is when shooting units are most important. They're your alpha strike element. That seems to be shifting now with a far greater number of units and formations being allowed to deep strike and/or charge on turn 1, but it hasn't entirely shifted the meta yet. Certainly not for DE, since we've yet to be effected by this new design philosophy.

Ive been playing KDK latelyand Im getting bored with it really fast, It has some shooting, but mostly Melee, Its way to simple and idk.. Im not having as much fun with it haha.

I like shooting, movements and risk with some melee. I play DE with CTC as my melee and thats enough for me.

I once owned a world Eaters army back when rhino rush was still a thing and it got really boring really fast. I ended up selling them to buy iron Warriors.