Scourge Gear

withershadow wrote:

Each shredder shot has about a 64% chance to hit and kill a termagant, and you get 4D6 plus 3 carbine shots. Mean average has you shredding 10 in a volley. I still prefer them on Trueborn over Scourges though, having that Venom makes all the difference.

Totally agree. When looking at our infantry that's shooting at close range like that, you have to assume they're not surviving to shoot again - rapid fire from from a squad with basically any random garbage shooting like bolters has great odds to wipe the squad or deplete it to the point of not being effective.

Shredder Scourges probably aren't making their points back in a turn killing a bunch of 4-7 pts models, but I can see space for them as a cheap unit to clean up/cap a backline objective as they are very effective at threatening that random squad of rangers or whatever out of range of the main fight that you might otherwise have to inefficiently point 36" splinter fire or disintegrators at to threaten. Even if they die immediately, forcing the opponent to commit a new, more valuable unit to holding an objective is good.

I'm also on the HWB bandwagon. Clearly worse than Skyweavers, but being a bit cheaper and the only source of Haywire shots for knights, tesseract vaults, etc without imposing detachment limitations makes them one of my default choices when I'm looking at 92-100 pts to fill and not currently bringing a Harlequin or Coven detachment (whether not taking either of these detachments is optimal is another question entirely).

They're still dead if your opponent wants to kill them, but 24" range means with good placement you can better take advantage of LoS blocking terrain and cover, and your opponent likely has to shoot them with multiple squads of garbage shooting non-rapidfire or commit more impactful shooting like Heavy Bolters, which I'd MUCH rather have killing scourges than contributing focus fire to my vehicles.

Given the biggest benefits are being cheap and easy to fit into a list, I'm usually not looking to spam Scourges - if I want more than a squad of HWB I'm going to look more closely at a detachment for Skyweavers (similar shooting effectiveness while being more flexible, Shadowseer is very good and doesn't feel like a tax at all, and the option to bring a Solitaire is gravy) or Talos (worse shooting, but an extremely powerful melee threat stacks well with our vehicles for target saturation).

I find two squads of haywire is usually necessary to make a significant impact (granted, may be biased after last game night featuring at least one Knight on every table). Also, it’s nice if you want to bring one big unit of Paingiver Reavers without having to fill other FA slots with trash Wych units.

I completely agree with the rest of the assessment, however, that 24” range means you are very unlikely to be in rapid fire range, or within charge range, it’s really easy to take advantage of cover where at least 1 squad can use Strike from the Shadows to be terminators.

And if you’re running some crazy soup list of Coven and Harlequins and what-have-you, dark lance Scourges are good for bringing some dark light to the party.

I think the biggest cost to the haywire sky weavers is the need for a Harlie's detachment at all. 3x2 bikes and an hq is 400 points. That's hard to just slot into a list unlike 92 points of scourges, which can fit into any de detachment. I guess you could use an auxiliary detachment for -1 cp but that too is a pretty big extra cost.

A succubus, 3x2 red grief reivers a unit of scourges is somewhat cheaper at only 300 points and the succubus is much easier to fit into a transport to contribute rather than lone foot shadow seer.

Yeah, Haywire is just aces against Knights (and anything with an invuln save - our own tanks leap to mind). I've actually been really high on it and really down on darklight lately for anti-vehicle duty since my own meta has lots of these types of things and fewer monstrous creatures where darklight really shines in my opinion (the fail case of darklight with only infantry and good-invuln save vehicle targets is pretty atrocious).

I ran that exact detachment (RG bikes, succubus, scourges outrider) for a while and it felt solid.

2 squads definitely makes sense if you're specifically trying to fill that niche at that dedicated points level. 3+ and I'm more likely to want to pull the trigger on a harlequin detachment - once we're close to 200pts in on Haywire and want more, then the more expensive, higher quality detachment becomes well worth it. I've been trying to run more of a mix - some darklight, some haywire - for good overall threat coverage even if you're not crushing any one target type.

My experience shooting dark light at my friend’s Nurgle and Custodes vehicles is that one wil miss, one will fail to wound, the third will bounce off the invulnerable save, and the last one will roll a 2 for damage (one of which the Nurgle vehicle then ignores with feel no pain). But they are worth every penny when the vehicles are left behind, and he brings GUO/DP or Vertus Praetor spam instead. So I try to make sure my armies are balanced in their capability for whatever nonsense he brings.

And yes, haywire has a good time against our vehicles since even the base damage profile wounds on a 5+.