Hellions, Hellions Hellions

The agoniser is too good to pass up as most IC's I would like pull out of a crowd might end up stomping me.

I almost feel like you need one strong, good size squad with an agoniser and a little one with the stun-claw and the Baron. One holds the original squad in place while the other one flys off with the poor sucker.

Then I thought about what happens after take sucker, you land and then surround the guy - I am wondering if there is a way to get a talos or an archon or whoever into the scrum to kill or soul-trap.

This just sounds too evil to not try. Lululu, you gotta tell us how this works out!

Good read, will speed my 15 Helions painting ))

What is your thought on Leader upgrade and his options?

Always take one squad. With Baron, I have only been running 10 with him out of a portal to great effect.

As for champ upgrades, just the agonizer.

Why agoniser? If we get FC and use Hit'n'Run constantly Power Weapon is cheaper and have same effectiveness. More in fact on GEQ.

ANyway lets hear what Kenny says.

Quote :

Then I thought about what happens after take sucker, you land and then surround the guy - I am wondering if there is a way to get a talos or an archon or whoever into the scrum to kill or soul-trap.

YOu are overthinking - just kill him or leave him. What you get is turn of ranged fire immunity and fight with just IC instead of his squad and a mobility bonus.

It could be useful. You might be sacrificing the hellion unit you might not be. But the idea is taking out an IC that could weaken a specific squad.

Some quick examples.

You could assault with the hellions and pull out a librarian who had used force dome. since he's no longer part of that squad when you assault that squad they don't have force dome. (If things work that way)

your pretty much gonna wanna target IC that helps a squad. It will do two things. One open up that unit for assault from a more assault like unit.

Rumor related: Now if the rumors are true for 6th ed. and Assault comes before Shooting. Things just got a lot better for Hit & Run. Run in smack a unit bug out and concentrate fire on them from other units! Yes please!

These are my 2cents and I'll be able to give better thoughts when I play a friend of mine. His Chaos Sorcerer is in for one hell of a surprise.

Edit: Also taking out a IC from a unit could lead to less damage for the Hellions ( i wouldn't consider them to survivable in CC)

I'll type up this into the original post soon but in summary.
When I was running this I never used the Helliarch for a few reasons.
One was because I always ran the Baron. This meant I didn't need the Helliarch's leadership, I didn't need him for the PGL, so in effect I would be using him for an agoniser or the stun claw.
That meant I would be paying 25 points for an agoniser (helliarch upgrade plus aggy cost), I reckon that if I was relying on the possibility of 1 kill to swing the combat then something was wrong. It also is useless against vehicles which the rest of the squad excell at with their S5 charge attacks. Also 50% of combat drugs have no effect on the agoniser and as was pointed out neither does FC, and getting FC is one of the basics of running hellions.
The stun claw while being fun, is very situational and again it costs so much that, I just don't believe in a tournament list it can be justified. You need to get into the right combat, get the right result, pass your H&R rolls (highly likely with the Baron), too many variables.

Put it this way, I'd rather have 1 blasterborn for the points I'd spend getting a Helliarch for what would be very limited or circumstantial benefits. The Hellion list I was running was all about massed attacks, shooting and charges, becoming fearless and holding objectives. I still believe it is the way to run them in a tournament list, however I believe there are more effective ways of spending the 350+ points that the unit and Baron came to.

Hellions are awesome as kenny pointed out, they can become expensive very quickly. I personally do not like investing too many points on any one unit. But I do think that the agonizer is a very good purchase for the hellions, making them a real threat against certain targets.

Just finished my game with with the load out i mentioned above. Pulled out his IC sorcerer. Then killed it for a pain token then shot up the remaining squade killing them. I love hellions from a WWP.

Hellions from a wwp is the way I love to use them as well. Their threat range from a well placed portal spans a great deal of the table.

Solid piece of analysis here Kenny. I was looking for motivation for finishing my Baron conversion and paint up some Hellions. Thanks!

Yea Hellions out of a WWP is really awesome The threat range is just awesome.

Grumpy Kwi: It sort of worked out. Basically it worked like I mentioned above. I had two WWP's about middle of the board. Hellions come flying out turn 3. Shoot up a squad killing a few, assault killing, a few more, lost one, then hit & run taking his HQ/Sorcerer with them 14" away. His turn he failed to turn the Baron into a chaos spawn (His dice rolls on average were 3's and below.) Then the Hellions Kill off the sorcerer. Turn 4 Hellions move, killing (shooting) a few more from the earlier squad then Charge in for the finishing blow. Overall I like the tactic but you do need to choose who they are attacking carefully.

I think using the stunclaw is worth it to pick out IC's but you need the baron for the Re-Rolls. Otherwise I would go for the quicker kill.

Now on a side note my opponent is playing CSM Thousand sons so invulv save's for everyone. Which is probably why I don't really take power weapons. (he's my most frequent 40k opponent 1 match every 3-6 months.)

While hellions out the WWP gives them a great range and probably a guarenteed charge on the turn they emerge, there is no certainty about when that will be. If you run a decent sized unit with the Baron then thats a lot of points that you could have sitting in reserve longer than you wish. Other point to note with this setup is that they cannot have a PT when they come on, meaning that you need to be sure of getting an easy kill that turn or they will be struggling from there on.

With their inherant range I believe that they do not make they best use of the portal. I tried it a couple of times and much preffered standard deployment with 2 PT's to start, By turn 2 they were at least 26" from their starting point and usually well within assault range, why take all the risks of the WWP.

I'm a Hellion enthusiast, so I must say; great post kenny. Even prompted me to finally convert my own Baron model, mwahaha.

I dont feel that holding them in reservers hinders ther performance at all. Every turn there not out is a turn there not getting shot. With standard deployment theres a whole turn of them on the board. In a wwp they pop out and are garenteed assult range. Turn 2 your looking at 50% of your army comeing out so its not as bad as you think.

I love reserving, and hellions do this very well.

Do you ever chose to deepstrike them?

I never deepstrike them. Too many variables, when will they arrive, how far will they scatter. If you use the size of unit I'm dealing with it's a pretty large footprint as well, increasing the chances of a mishap.
With a smaller unit maybe, but not with over 300 points worth. this probably holds true with WWP's as well, but the list I used them in was very much based around the 2 PT shenanigans and having them where I wanted at the start of the game.

I shy away from deepstriking anything in our codex, since I'd rather know it's on the board and I can manouvre it, than risk it being displaced, delayed or destroyed. Though it is a good idea to surprise flank your enemy, why leave anything to chance?

Plus I play against Grey Knights who bring those psy-quake things that cause all kinds of trouble for DS.

In my wwp lists I do claim the hellions (only 10 strong) as deepstriking but I have always had something to charge coming out of the wwp.

I do the same with my scourges but they are 5 strong with a smaller footprint - I would say I have only had to deepstrike 25% of the time when using a portal and only had 1 mishap so far (opponent put them in the corner).

I have been jaded by Deepstriking thanks to the Necrons Flayed ones (when I used to play them).

Added in a bit more about the Helliarch anhd a couple of brief points to note about using this unit.

I now run them as a full 20 Hellion squad with agoniser Helliarch. It's a massive points investment but I've found it to be more effective than even the 16 strong unit I was running. Awesome for objective games using the conga formation in the last couple of turns, and a very difficult KP for anybody to get.

How did you come to this?
Why have you decided to add more bodies?

Partly is was to increase the effectiveness and resilience of the hellion blob, partly to do with my hatred and disgust with limp lance, dark light fail.
I started looking for other ways of getting effective AT into the list and suddenly by getting away from blasterborn/venom/limp lance spam I had a whole load of points to play with and a different way of looking at other options in the codex.
Wyches with haywires, reavers and beast packs now form a large part of my AT along with FC'ing Hellions. I still have 1 DL ravager in there for a bit of long range AT but after that it's all up close and personnal. The points were available to increase the Hellions and once you've gone past a certain point limit on them, then adding in the few extra bodies to max out the squad really is worth it.

My new tournament list is an absolute blast to play with and has been just as, if not more, effective as the venom/lance/balsterborn list I was running.

so, has anyone experimented with Power Lances?

effectively it's a hellion blade that's ap3 on the charge, though it does downgrade to being only ap4 str3 after the fact though.

This is a great tactica! It would be nice to see it updated for 6th. We've had some significant changes and it would be nice to know how you're getting along with using it in 6th. Have you made any changes to the unit load out or your play style? Any new or developed tactics?

I'm thinking of building an army around The Baron and a unit like this. You can see my army list in the other forum although at the moment the unit is only 11 Hellions + Baron strong. Not sure how to free up more points for Hellions. I'd factored in the wrack idea to give them FNP but hadn't built the list to include a Hameon for the +1S. How crucial is this?

Another idea I had is to have an ADL with Quad Cannon for some AA as we're severely lacking in that department and I think people are going to start using flyers a lot in 6th. This works great with our tactic because the wracks and Haemon, or just wracks can sit on the ADL and fire the gun after giving their PT to our Hellions.

A thought I had was. Is it worth having the Ancient Haemon so that you're firing the gun with BS5?