Fighting against Nurghl

Greetings fellow Denizens of Commorragh,

There is someone in my meta who loves to run a Great Unclean One along with a Sloppity Bile Piper. It has something like T8 28 W with 4+ 5++ 5+ FNP. With my darklight weaponry, I should be able to take this down in a turn or 2, but only if I concentrate my fire when there are multiple other worrisome targets.

One of these other problematic units are the Blight Drones. They have very high tier flamers that prevent me from trying to get into CC because they automatically hit in overwatch and just love to eat big wych or hellion squads. This means that I usually target these with my darklight first, but this means letting the Great Unclean One stride across the battlefield undeterred for a turn or two.

At the same time, multiple psykers will be throwing powers around and smiting my best units.

And on top of all of that, there will likely be 1-3 squads of nurghlings that just deploy 9 inches away from my front line and bog down my stuff, especially if he hits his charges. I have some coven but I am primarily a Kabal and Cult army.

Anyone have advice for how to deal with this?

vexator mask to absorb overwatch from a haemonculus.

you need to screen against mortal wounds with chaff when you are advancing towards him. Also use any remaining chaff to absorb a charge from his meat wall so you can counter charge with yours.

overwatch distance is calculated from where you start your charge. So, if you charge from further than his flamer, they won't hit you. Have a unit or 2 of bikes, to soak the overwatch, then tarpit them with wyches. or kill them, I don't know the stats of nurgles.

Have you tried splinter fire? The higher a target's T, the more efficient splinter weapons become in comparison to other weapons... Drukhari basic rifles have the same chance of getting a wound and getting through a GUO's saves as a S8 lance weapon. One wound, sure, but also... far fewer points spent on redundant AP: firing lances is not quite ideal because of the 5++/5+++ on him, meaning that you actually don't need the AP on the lances!

Some quick math shows that you need just over 120 splinter shots to take down a GUO. That sounds like alot, but it boils down to just shy of 7 splinter shots to get a wound on a GUO in a world where it takes 9 splinter shots to kill 'one wound of marines'...

The thing I've learned fighting Nurgle since 2nd ed. is to decapitate and then defeat in detail. Target #1 for splinter weapons is always the highest T non-vehicle. By all means use lances and other stuff to finish kills by stacking wounds, but do so at the bottom of your turn after you find out how well your poison was mixed... With good target priority (and hopefully the law of averages), you'll have the main threats neutered, and be sweeping objectives clear of Nurglings or whatever by the end of the game. With our speed, we don't need to think about seizing ground until late game; LET the enemy swarm forward - right into your guns.  

Thus I advise NOT making plans assault a GUO in general, and definitely not in turns 1-2 unless doing so simply as a delaying tactic to keep shooting turn over turn. Kite and encircle the foe, focusing on high-speed, and then high-threat units. Your gut instinct to nuke those Blight Drones first is certainly accurate lol.  

But don't spread your fire, or your assaults. Just move away from the GUO in the early phases and joust, where you can outshoot them. Then, plan a multi-vector assault (ideally flank/rear > Webway or Aethersails/Screaming Jets will get it done) for turn 3, and away from the assault core of the enemy so that they can't respond in force. By that point, you should have mobility supremacy, and you'll have assault units where the enemy DOESN'T want them: on their shooty stuff or campers.

Cheers,

The Good Doctor.

I've played Death Guard for 18 years, and I can say that the Drukhari are everything that a Death Guard player fears.

As a Death Guard player, my goal is to get within 9" of you and hose everything down with plaguespitters. Assaulting you would be the cherry on top but it's not necessary. If you're outside of that 9" bubble at the end of my movement phase there's not a lot that I can do other than plink away at you with some underwhelming firepower.

Kill the Bloat Drones first. They're an extremely useful unit and will allow the Death Guard to control the flow of battle.

Use Profits of Flesh wracks to screen. Don't get aggressive and try to assault. Wyches should only assault enemy units that are already engaged or be used to pick off characters. Once the Bloat Drones are dead, you can screen or kite the rest of the army while hosing them down with splinter fire and dark light.

The only list I had some problem against it was 3Predators+3BloatDrones.
Just because I have to focus down the Drones, and I havn't so much fire to consider the Predators too.

But yes, is not a bad matchup persè. Just don't rush, wait and shoot.

Crokadilla wrote:

Greetings fellow Denizens of Commorragh,

There is someone in my meta who loves to run a Great Unclean One along with a Sloppity Bile Piper. It has something like T8 28 W with 4+ 5++ 5+ FNP.

Unless I'm mistaken, a Great Unclean One is actually T7 W18 with a 5+ and 5+ FNP. I'm assuming that the 4+ save is from a warlord trait.

I mention this because this is significantly different from what you posted, and in some key areas. T7 means that Dark Lances and Blasters are wounding on 3s rather than 4s, and it has just 2/3 of the wounds you initially posted.

Anyway, my suggestion is to simply not bother with the Great Unclean One until you've killed the other priority targets. The GUO is horrendously slow, and your transports should be able to dance out of his range without much issue.

In terms of eventually taking down the GUO, poison is your friend. Obviously Dark Lances and Blasters are good as well, but T7 with (at best) a 4+ save is practically the ideal target for poison. Drown it in poison fire.

In terms of melee . . . don't. Most Nurgle stuff is basically Coven+2, and if you enter melee with them you're giving up your main advantage (speed) and opening yourself up to all manner of unpleasant abilities. If you've got melee units in your army, you could perhaps use them to finish off wounded squads (ideally when there are no other enemy squads nearby to counter-charge), but really you want to use ranged weapons as much as possible.

Wow, thanks guys, this should help quite a bit. I usually go with a more Cult-heavy army (just my style I suppose) but now I know that I need to just go with more darklight instead. Usually I use Dark Lance Ravagers, but with a 5++ and a 5+++ plus the ability to heal wounds at each turn start allows the GUO to just shrug them off. I suppose I had not considered just going with a gigantic volume of splinter fire.

As for the rest of their army, what are the key targets? Usually I go for the Bloat Drones and Demon Primarchs/Princes first along with a few psykers if I can manage to get behind them.

I suppose just need to go full dakka against Deathguard.

Bloat drones and daemon princes are definetly good first targets, they are the heavy hitters for a Nurgle army. Only problem is DPs are characters with less than 10 wounds so are a little hard to hit. Another thing to keep in mind is bloat drones are vehicles, so you can focus your darklight fire on them and use massed splinter fire for DPs/GUOs.

A question, not a recommendation: if the nurglings are pushing hard in early game, would it be effective to unload all of your melee into them when they arrive? Keep out of charge range with the big stuff, but I would think melee Drukhari would be able to clear out a large amount of nurglings quickly. Maybe not. How tough are they to get rid of?