Updates to the stats posts. Holy smokes these guys are as fun as advertised.
Two games today, a 25-power Supply Drop versus jus' Ultramarines, and a 50 total power team game with the Supply Cache mission, me and tallgeese's Thousand Sons versus jus' Ultramarines and Matt's Guard. Two wins for me, which is unusual
, although the first was phyrric.
I brought the plaguecaster as my warlord in the first game against jus, and while his mortal wounds shenanigans are as awesome as ever, he's just not all that durable, especially when faced with a couple Victrix Guard and a Lieutenant. Add in an apothecary, and the "bring a guy back from the dead" stratagem that I am
very jealous my plague surgeons don't get, and I killed like 4 victrix guards and still had one left at the end of the game - in a 2-man squad.
Basically I got lucky with which objectives blipped out and got the win despite getting tabled.
In the team game I swapped out the plaguecaster for the Lord of Contagion, and holy fish that guy is a beast. He single-handedly killed Matt's plague tank, jus' apothecary and lieutenant, and cleaned up a squad of intercessors the bloat drone had whittled down for good measure. Then I got a nice little chaos boon for killing the warlord - first one's free, as they say.
The bloat drone is as good as ever, and the strategem to regain wounds by eating (oh, say) some guardsmen helped a lot. Really, there's lots of good stratagems in there. I got a lot of use out of the +1 to hit for terminators, cancelling out the LoC's -1 to hit with his plaguereaper, and the one to bring back a whole bunch of dead poxwalkers was also very nice.
Overall, though, from the point of view of playing them, much of the new codex goodness was pretty non-flashy and workmanlike - in a good way. Lots of mortal wounds, lots of durability (it took a squad of hellblasters three rounds of shooting to wipe out a plague marine squad) and I noticed about halfway through the first game just how often I was saying "OK, 2+ to wound, rerolling 1's".
The weakness of the crusade plague I note in the fluff post above is a bit less important than I thought - when you infect someone by whacking them with a plaguereaper, they're not often alive at the end of the turn to check and see if they shake off the plague.