Codex: Drukhari Preview: Haemonculus Covens

I don't see it's worth getting a Tantalus over but a Reaper is basically a Ravager, worth including one with that trait for the strat even if the rest of your anti tank is Flayed Skull Kabal.

Pain Engine wrote:

The Red King wrote:

Is there a rule about 0 characteristic units? In 7th if your leadership toughness were 0 you were removed as a casualty I believe. Could you imagine. A 40 man cultist blob that's so strong right now just evaporating? The look on your opponents face as you explain what just happened...

-7 is possible from turn 1 with allies and luck. 3 dark creed units. Phantasm grenade launcher. Pray (tantalus snipe their warlord). And a hemlock. Oh. -8. Horrify from said hemlock. 9 if you drop an obsidian rose archon with the armour of misery as Well or was that something else? 10 if you include a harlequins with the mask of secrets.

On turn 1

Fairly certain that you couldn't and still can't instagib units by reducing their ld to 0. But what happens with all these ld debuffs? If you reduce an opponent's ld to 0, kill two models and roll a 3 for morale, what happens? How many flee?

Pg 175, no characteristics can be modified below 1

I don't see it's worth getting a Tantalus over but a Reaper is basically a Ravager, worth including one with that trait for the strat even if the rest of your anti tank is Flayed Skull Kabal.

So my opinion about the preview :

Prophets of Flesh : connoisseurs of pain

This is likely going to be the standard, as it is really powerful, and helps Coven do what they do the best : tanking. If you're bringing some allied Covens, you're gonna bring this. However, if you're going full Coven, some extra tankiness isn't what you're looking for, so you might look at the other ones for extra punch.

Black Cornocupians : funny, but unreliable. If you want do DS 20 wracks and let them spread mayhem... why not, but without any real mobility or shooting attack, they'll get avoided at best. Not a great stratagem.

Diabolical Soothsayer : spending CP to gain more CP ? Yes please. Gain a single reroll along the way ? Hard to imagine any impact it could have on the game, but it's free, so why not ? Probably get used in an invulnerable save.

Dark Creed

Distiller of fear : be it to bring extra punch to your Coven, or to use a little Raider+Wracks+Haemy just as a support fear-bomb, this is effective against some armies (elite armies), and a great way to force your opponent to waste his CP. Not game-breaker, but funny to use.

Prey they don't take you alive : ally with some Poisoned Tongue, and use that sweet sniper to permanently debuff the enemy moral ? Can be funny. I would have prefered if this costed 0 CP (as it already has a strong requirement), but it's fine I guess.

Esoteric Kill : sure, you can use it on a DL (for the supreme gamble) or some HL, but the real question is : how playable are gonna be the Liquifier Gun ? Since you can pack a lot of them in a Grotesque unit, and they auto-hit, you could have a very cool HQ removal tool, if the weapon is good and affordable.

You can also continue to abuse the Forgeworld lack of keyword coordination, and sniper your Reaper/Tantalus. If you have too many friends ^^



Coven of Twelve
A good choice if you're planning to go full-coven, it helps mitigate their weakness : the lack of damage. Fairly good, I'd say.

Administer Punishment : A shooty stratagem in a melee-obsession ? Whut ?

What weapon are you going to use this on anyway ? Ossefactor, for a glorious chance to Nova-splode your Wracks ? Liquifier, so that you friendlyfire half your shots ? HL and HWB, okay, but does GW think we like to send Wracks in CC, and leave Taloi behind ?
This is pretty much unusable, I'd say. If I want a tank dead, I'll send the Talos to chop it, not shoot it, thank you very much.
The only scenario where you'd use this is if you sent some birds against elites. But even then, the damage output/CP ratio isn't good at all, and you can't do it multiple times in a row ?


So we had the PfP bonuses for Kabal, even though they don't benefit from it. Now we have a "shoot into melee" tool for Coven ? This is advanced trolling.

Maybe I'm thinking of 6th. And I already have a tantalus and just desperately lack the excuse to use it lol.

Pain Engine wrote:

The Red King wrote:

Is there a rule about 0 characteristic units? In 7th if your leadership toughness were 0 you were removed as a casualty I believe. Could you imagine. A 40 man cultist blob that's so strong right now just evaporating? The look on your opponents face as you explain what just happened...

-7 is possible from turn 1 with allies and luck. 3 dark creed units. Phantasm grenade launcher. Pray (tantalus snipe their warlord). And a hemlock. Oh. -8. Horrify from said hemlock. 9 if you drop an obsidian rose archon with the armour of misery as Well or was that something else? 10 if you include a harlequins with the mask of secrets.

On turn 1

Fairly certain that you couldn't and still can't instagib units by reducing their ld to 0. But what happens with all these ld debuffs? If you reduce an opponent's ld to 0, kill two models and roll a 3 for morale, what happens? How many flee?

You can't modify Ld below 1.

Lord Asvaldir wrote:

Reroll is definetly just for the haemonculus not the archon.

Dizzie wrote:

Dark Elf Dave wrote:

I like the pray they don't take you alive strategem as well and that is a Drukhari strategem so we have access to that no matter who slays the warlord (as long as it is Drukhari).

I missed this, so its actually -5 ld in pure drukhari list without knowing more.
It also says to max -3, -3 max, or from that skill only?
hope we can stack it past -3, atm we can from how i'm reading it.

It's the same deal as the Night Lords trait, maximum of stacking to -3, which really is fine when you consider PGLs is an easy -1 more than that fun slay the warlord stratagem for -5. Seems like a large enough debuff to me.

We can still hope for a Relic to mess with leadership, better PGL? If we are really lucky they give us a warlord trait too, like the Chaos 2 dice take the highest.

The Red King wrote:

Is there a rule about 0 characteristic units? In 7th if your leadership toughness were 0 you were removed as a casualty I believe. Could you imagine. A 40 man cultist blob that's so strong right now just evaporating? The look on your opponents face as you explain what just happened...

-7 is possible from turn 1 with allies and luck. 3 dark creed units. Phantasm grenade launcher. Pray (tantalus snipe their warlord). And a hemlock. Oh. -8. Horrify from said hemlock. 9 if you drop an obsidian rose archon with the armour of misery as Well or was that something else? 10 if you include a harlequins with the mask of secrets.

On turn 1

I'm not quite sold on the Turn 1 leadership bomb.  Distillers of Fear only has a range of 6", so deep-striking units to hand out those penalties won't work; most likely, you're looking at 3 vehicles advancing to get into range turn 1.  Doable, but not ideal.  Armor of Misery no longer causes Leadership penalties, so that's a bust.  Mask of Secrets has the same problem as Distillers of Fear, so you'll likely have to to put it on a Solitaire or use Twilight Pathways to get the bearer into position.  And then all these paper thin units are sitting front and center of a nasty threat, since...

...You'll need 2 targets to hit with this to be effective, as a canny opponent will just pay the 2 CP for Insane Bravery and laugh off your leadership shenanigans if you only hit one.  Which will probably be the Horrifed target.  And even if you do, one of those units is still not losing anyone to morale and will punch back.

It seems to me fear-bombing will be more effective later game, once command points are spent and unable to save units.  I love the theme and concept, but I worry it won't be as effective as we'd like.

Mppqlmd wrote:

Administer Punishment : A shooty stratagem in a melee-obsession ? Whut ?

What weapon are you going to use this on anyway ? Ossefactor, for a glorious chance to Nova-splode your Wracks ? Liquifier, so that you friendlyfire half your shots ? HL and HWB, okay, but does GW think we like to send Wracks in CC, and leave Taloi behind ?
This is pretty much unusable, I'd say. If I want a tank dead, I'll send the Talos to chop it, not shoot it, thank you very much.
The only scenario where you'd use this is if you sent some birds against elites. But even then, the damage output/CP ratio isn't good at all, and you can't do it multiple times in a row ?

Keep in mind vehicles can too have obsessions. A few raider with disintegrator cannon will cause great harm to an ennemy.

or Tantalus lol

Mppqlmd wrote:

So we had the PfP bonuses for Kabal, even though they don't benefit from it. Now we have a "shoot into melee" tool for Coven ? This is advanced trolling.

You're definetly not wrong, we are having a few cases of traits/stratagems that would work better if say black heart changed to a coven trait, and the shooting into combat stratagem changed to being usable by kabal units and a few other examples, but I'd say in about 75% of the cases we've seen so far our traits are solid and actually work for the faction they are supposed to work for, so it isn't too bad so far.

Also your assessments seem spot on. I especially agree about prophets of flesh, as I'm probably only going to have a small patrol of coven units that one seems the most enticing to me.

Lord Asvaldir wrote:

The -1ld from a venom/raider would probably be more useful, or better yet any of the kabal traits.

Without a doubt on the LD.

My reasoning is these are coven units, they are going to be transported anyway, the extra ap takes them to str4 ap-2 and they are in perfect position to support, count the shock prow for strength 6, so guaranteed 1 str 6 hit at least with -2ap.
That extra ap has changed what i would reasonably charge with those transports, at -1 ap i would never have gambled on an elite 2+ armour, now to see the 4+ save from terminator equivalents, its very tempting provided you have right support, also wracks and grotesques are not great against elite, so the extra help is welcome.
Now that's not to say we don't have better options for termies, that's not my point, my point is that the extra ap opened my targets up a little more and made it a little more tactically felxible, considering you may have 3 transports and a squad charging a squad at times.
i know i certainly do late game, i know in past its been working well for me, just seems like a really nice bonus for our skimmers to get too.

The Sniper strat is neat. It's cheap, and can achieve super funny things with a load of Liquifiers/HL (the Tantalus/Reaper will get FAQed anytime it reaches a tourney).

But the shoot into CC is just a waste of CP, and a stupid attempt at hurting your troops.



On the AP-vehicle subject : you're charging vehicles anyway to soak overwatch, so it's definitly a small plus.

I mean fair it's a point of ap that will get used but it just doesn't really seem like something to focus in on if you're considering the trait. If you want to use the coven of twelve trait it's because you have a fair amount of wracks/grotesques/talos in your list and you want them to hit harder, not because you want marginally better cc attacks for your transports.

I agree the sniper stratagem isn't worthless, if heat lances improved maybe it's a reason to take them on the talos for sniper.

I agree the -10 leadership is more of a pipe dream and probably not a good idea for the reasons you listed, but it does seem -4 Or 5 could be considered a standard and achievable goal in the dark creed.

I really hope tournaments and organisers will be more lax with the detachment limits for DE, or that the stratagems and relics are not quite as faction/subfaction locked as it seems so far.

Don't get too hyped with the Ld stacking, it sounds good but way too many armies have way to many ways to outright ignore it. It's a nice little trick to play on your buddy in a friendly game but it's not going to carry you though a tournament - it'll only last till the first Ork in sight.

I'm loking forward to running Flayed Skull Raider squads with a Dark Creed Raider supporting. Raider with Wracks and Haemy is a flying -3 Ld aura. Think about it this way:

A Flayed Skull raider fully unloading is - at minimum - 4 dead SM equivalents. PGL plus -3 Ld aura gives the squad -4 Ld. I believe most SM's are Ld 8. In the moral phase, they take guaranteed 6 casualties.

This gives us really powerful shooting, and stacking -Ld seems pretty easy to do. Most of my friends play marines or chaos, and the thought of taking multiple full squads off the board every turn fills me with delight.

There's a tingling in my cockles that says our transport capacity on Raiders and Venoms will increase by 1

I wish your tingling could be taken as fact, but we have no indication as of right now whether that will happen or not. I'd even just settle for venoms going up to 6, at least characters can chill with 5 man squads in that case.

On the Dark Creed trait, yes I think stacking ld modifiers is solid, but if you're running primarily a flayed skull list with heavy raider/warrior focus, I think a patrol of prophets of flesh would make more sense. You get the extra d3 command points trait and the few coven units you'll have will be tougher. I suppose it does depend on what you want to get out of your coven units though, just a tough unit that can hold its ground better than most DE or more damage output.

Looking neat. Propeths of Flesh will be my choice most likely but the others ain't bad either. These open up so many neat possibilities with list building.

I think i'll go with prophets, 3 grots + heamy on disintegrator raider, and a blob of wracks to act as a roadbump/deepstrike charges stopper (like those annoying blood angels). I'm tempted to with Coven of the Twelve, but i find T6 is 4+ fnp 6++ grotesques what our army lacks: sturdy roadblocks

I just wish the -1ap was on wyche cult, could you imagine that? please please please.

That's my feeling as well, +4 invul with t5 wracks is decently tough for dark eldar, actually funny to think that's technically a basic troop unit that's slightly tougher than our vehicles. I do want to say I'll go for a prophets of flesh detachment with a heamoncolus, 10 wracks and a talos but we really need to see the changes to the coven units before deciding. I suspect at least something will change, but it would be a real bummer if the coven units stay as is, especially for the cronos which is garbage now.

I doubt we'll have a -1ap wych cult since covens already got that trait, but seeing how nice our traits have been so far I'm sure wych cults will get something fun. I'm looking forward to a potential charge+advance trait which would be sweet for hellions/reavers.

Chronos, Talos, Grots, liquifier guns, Heat lance, HWB, they all need to change in order to get played.

Putting good rules on the garbage profiles is like putting wipped cream on poop.