Litanies of the Faithful

How good are characters in 40k really?

It turns out, they’re actually really good, like incredibly strong in a lot of armies.

Some of them are infantry, the other ones are Chaos Daemons, and we don’t really care about them, anyway. I have a GT coming up in a few weeks, it’s touted as a generally – fun and casual – event, although Aaron will be attending with his Death Guard. A worm has been digging its way into my brain telling me that I should bring a list that is essentially built to kill all of the characters in my opponents’ armies through the use of precision.

That’s it.

This is, however, heavily limited by my collection which will really in essence mean I’m only bringing 10 Ruststalkers instead of 30. I’m playing Ad Mech.

The list:

Starting off, one of the best ways to kill characters is through the use of the Precision ability, in fact, it’s the only way to specifically kill characters out of a unit. The more you know, knowledge is power. Do AdMech have any units that can do that? Yea.

THREE SYDONIAN SKATROS with the anti-infantry gun, Radium Jezzails, 3 damage, mega. These have Lone Operative, and the added bonus of forcing your opponent to take a battle-shock test after they shoot, cool.

Then like a couple units of Rangers, and a unit of Vanguard with a single Transuranic Arquebus in each. These guns have precision with D3 damage.

Next, I have 10 Ruststalkers which have precision, devastating wounds on their melee weapons. With 50 attacks hitting on 3’s, if I get into combat there’s like a pretty good chance, I’ll get enough dev wounds through to just assassinate any melee character in the game. This is pretty much where it stops as far as Precision Ad Mech units go in the army, bit of a piss weak effort but I don’t have any more Ruststalkers, Rangers or Vanguard.

Pictured above. Some Vanguard I recently ‘battle readied’. There is so much more work I could put into these little guys, but I’m pretty burnt out from just painting to battle ready stuff for tournaments. I’m hoping to spend more time painting and updating the paint job of some units I don’t have to rush over the holidays. Same with the Ruststalkers pictured below.

The list will still work, just trust the process, man.

Next up is a Vindicare Assassin. I used to run these pretty frequently but haven’t seen them a lot since the Imperial Agents codex dropped. They’re a bit over costed at 125 points, but they completely ignore the Lone Operative ability which is very cool. Combined with the Shooting from the other Ad Mech units I think I could reliably pick a character out of a unit in shooting.

Lastly is the Eversor, being able to advance shoot/charge, and get a once per game 15″ move with +3 attacks kinda cooks hard. You can pick up pretty much any infantry character in the game, combined with the Ruststalkers being able to move 18″ and charge this presents a real melee threat to all characters on the board.

Could it be better? Yeah. But it’s just enough to be a meme list while also being able to actually play the 10th edition mission pack, I hope. It’ll also give me motivation to paint a bunch of models before the next event.

The list also includes some AdMech good stuff, Disintegrators, Infiltrators, Kataphrons, a bunch of battleline.

Practice game

I managed to get one game in with this list against a friend’s Tyranids during the local weekly league at our LGS.

It was against mostly monster Tyranids with a few gaunts for scoring. This does not bode well for my ‘kill all the infantry characters list’. The Disintegrators were very average, as they generally are when I sit in Conqueror the entire game, but the Kataphrons were a reliable source of damage that I could count on.

I ended up deep striking the Vindicare Assassin on the big L ruin in my deployment zone, and it popped off killing two Lictors from range. It’s hilarious that it ignores lone operative and can pull this off. I suppose I did achieve my goal of killing all the characters in his list, but outside of the Disintegrators and Kataphrons this list lacks a big punch, when Ruststalkers don’t go into their intended target they tend to bounce big time, I miss my Electro-Priests man.

I am looking forward to playing this at the GT next weekend, running Assassins is always very fun. I’ll be doing a write up for it and taking as many photos as I remember to take.

Cya nerds.