Dark Angels army showcase

 

Dark angels. The first legion. The unforgiven. 

This army has been a pleasure to craft over the years and started as little more than a 2k doublewing army. The advent of dark imperium and the newer dark angels books brought he temptation of expansion after expansion. Ultimately, it has grown into my 2nd largest army after the blood angels. The theme is triplewing with grass and forestry bases. 

The deathwing comprise 27 terminators, 5 deathwing knights, a land raider crusader, venerable dreadnought and a host of characters. These are: Belial, a terminator librarian, chaplain, ancient, apothecary and champion. 

Ravenwing have several conversions in there, mainly characters. There’s sammael, a bike librarian, chaplain, champion, apothecary, ancient and techmarine. 2 squads of bikes each with an attack bike make up the core of the force. There are 8 black knights (who are amazing) and a pair of land speeders, one of which can be swapped out to a huntmaster or sammael in sableclaw. Lastly, a land speeder vengeance / darkshroud and dark talon / nephilim finish off the force. 

Finally, greenwing consist of a demi-company (30 tacticals, 10 assault and 10 devastator) as the core, as well as 10 scouts. Infantry characters include a converted azrael, 2 masters, 2 lieutenants, apothecary, imperial space marine, company and chapter ancient, champion, 2 interrogator chaplains, a librarian, a techmarine and the names characters asmodai and Ezekiel. In terms of armour there’s a land raider and 3 converted tanks which can be fielded as a predator / vindicator / whirlwind or rhino / razorback, plus a drop pod and standard dreadnought. A more recent addition was a bargain stormraven which, while green, is still painted as a salamander vehicle. Finally, there are a host of veterans who I intend to donate mostly to a fallen army project as they are much more restricted in dark angel armies now. 

 

So that’s it, an unintentionally huge army that I’ve had a lot of fun playing with lately. I want to thin out the veterans to get the numbers down and form a fallen army led by cypher. In terms of additions, i would love to add another dark talon to be able to field an air wing. A wishlist item is the Forgeworld relic plasma predator just because it fits the army. Lastly, I have parts to make some custom objective markers at some point. Cheers. 

Re-rollable jink saves or armour saves on ravenwing bikes - rules discussion.

Hi folks.

So it's not often I talk about rules on the blog as I tend to stick to talking about what I'm good at (i.e. not gaming). However, my recent stint with Ravenwing and Deathwing (see here and here) threw up a question in 2 of the games that I couldn't find a simple answer to despite scouring the rulebook and internet. The question, which seems unique to Ravenwing due to jink re-rolls, is can you voluntarily choose a 'worse' save, or perhaps lower is a better term, in order to benefit from a re-roll, thus technically increasing your probability of making the save?

Before I get to the meat of the discussion, let's think about bikes in general. Take generic marine bikers. When you are shot by high AP weaponry in the open, you will choose to use your armour save and thus not compromise shooting next turn by having to fire snap shots. Low AP weapons will almost certainly make you want to jink for that 50:50 chance of a save despite snap shooting next turn. Mixed fire will leave the choice up to you depending how many casualties you anticipate and what you were hoping to shoot next turn. Suffice to say, however, that if you choose to jink, you will use the cover saves for the AP3 and below wounds and the armour saves for everything above. Those are the saves giving you the best chance of surviving - your 'best' save. Whitescars are a little different with skilled rider increasing the jink save to 3+, but the net decision making is the same. 

Now lets consider the situation with Ravenwing, who can be subdivided into black knights and bikers. Bikers are very similar to their vanilla counterparts, with the exception of the Ravenwing rule granting a re-roll to jink saves. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a 4+ re-rollable save gives a 75% chance of saving the wound over 66% with a regular armour save. Black knights are somewhat different in that they give skilled rider like with Whitescars, but in conjunction with the Ravenwing rule this makes jinking a very attractive option for them, save for the fact it decreases their plasma talon accuracy and renders their blast grenades useless (which are their greatest assets).

Before I go further with this lets look at some rule definitions. There are 3 directly relevant ones, namely jink, re-rolls and saving throws. Jink is pretty straightforward and the re-rolls section doesn't add much clarification. The saving throws section only really makes one reference of note, in which it refers to the model always being able to use its 'best save' where multiple saves are available. Pretty vague as to what the best save is. I have read arguments claiming that it is the lowest number, as with say a terminator using its 2+ over a 5++, and other arguments stating that the re-roll can't be a consideration for calculating this. Neither the lowest save or greatest probability (considering re-rolls) are therefore definitive answers.

Sadly, there are a few more complicating factors. Darkshrouds hand out the potential for the black knights to gain a 2+ re-rollable jink save. This is obviously  open to abuse in a competitive setting. There is also a factor I hadn't considered and that is choosing to decrease your chances of making a save to purposefully kill your own unit, though I'm struggling to find many non-melee situations (which although you would get a cover save you would still have hit and run) in which that would be an issue. And besides, you can always elect not to jink voluntarily so the rules kind of imply that even if your chances of survival were better with a re-rolled cover save, you have the choice not to.

This leads me to where I wrap up. With no clear rulings and much debate between Alex and I, we decided to house rule that you can opt to voluntarily use jink over armour for several reasons. Firstly, we try not to spam lists in our games and so the potential for abuse is limited. Second, given that you sacrifice your offensive potential for defensive gain it seems relatively balanced. Sure, you saved 8.4% more bikes, but they're all snap shooting next turn. Lastly, when trying to extrapolate the 'real world' scenario, the Ravenwing would all elect to jink and wouldn't be particularly selective about what they dodge and what they don't, hence the cover save would be the most applicable. A better way of looking at it maybe is that there are multiple options available and the owning player should simply be able to choose which they prefers to use.

Its the best of an unclear situation and not even necessarily applicable to tournament play, but until the powers that be chip in with a ruling we are at least happy to know where we stand in our games without needing to debate it every time. Please check out the following for further insight into the dilemma and feel free to discuss further. Cheers.

From the Fang
Reddit
BnC
Dakka

Hobby progress part 2/3 - Raven Guard, Salamanders and Dark Angels.

Though Ultramarines have been a key feature of my hobby revamp, they're not the only ones getting some attention of late. Here's a rundown on what's been going on with the other Chapters for now.

Salamanders:

To bring these chaps up to demi-company status they needed one thing: assault marines. Now due to the way the demi-company works, I had the choice of choosing bikes, marines or speeders to fill that role and also wanted to keep melta/flamers as the key elements. I decided against the speeder as the purist in me still remembers when salamanders shunned anti-grav. It was a close contest between the bikes and assault squad but ultimately I went with the assault marines, mainly as it meant not having to buy anything as I had 5 spare. I also magnetised their jump packs to allow them to be transport mounted also. Speaking of the transport, I had a dodgy lime green Rhino I bought second hand that needed a refurb so that also got some attention. This and reinventing the devastator squad to use the new legs and have magnetised options brought them up to speed. Plus a few random models I included pictures of as they had some treatment too. Worth a mention is the fact that I bought some base expander rings recently (they'll get their own post soon) and so I used them on the assault marines as a testbed. WIth some greenstuff it actually worked out pretty well. There are a few things still lacking in this army, most notably air support, which I hope to address sometime in the next 12 months. 

Raven Guard:

These chaps gained a few sniper scouts (RG can never have too many) from Ebay as well as donating a pair of no longer needed Land speeder storms from my Crimson Fists, all of which needed a bit of a trim and a new basecoat. Now, the Raven Guard share some generically painted rapiers with my Luna Wolves, yet they lack anyone to operate them. I therefore raided the bits box and grabbed some spare legs (mostly former members of the Salamander Devastators) in order to make 3 spotters and 3 gunners for them. This places the army only 3 things shy of being complete. The first is some Brass etch to decorate any new additions with. The second, some air support, hopefully in the form of a Storm Eagle, and lastly a 3rd Thunderfire cannon to get benefit from the squadron rule.  
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Dark Angels:

With the advent of the new Codex I found myself one Tactical squad short of a demi-company and so committed to building that final squad from a tactical box and upgrade sprue. Simple enough really, but at the same time I tried to  re-base some of the army onto 32mm and swap out weapons on a couple of veterans. Due to a gaming session we planned at Warhammer World I also painted up about 1/3 of the army to at least tabletop standard, which puts it at half done now. Not only that but a few veterans required weapons loadouts seeing to in order to make them even semi-biable on the table. It was a worthwhile deviation from the schedule I set out and the results can be seen below. 

Dark angels 1850 army pics

Hi folks,
 just a quick one today. I got in a game with Alex the other night as we missed out when we went to WHW. Suffice to say his Tau decimated my Dark angels, but it did give me the opportunity to get the army out of boxes and take a few quick snaps. All tabletop standard only but pretty from a distance. Cheers.

Trip to Warhammer World.

Hi folks,

Been far too long but I've finally got my act together and written some blog posts. Recently, Alex, Matt, Scott and I had a trip to the new (to us anyway) Warhammer World in Nottingham, UK. I thought I'd post a brief summary of the day as it turned out to be a great trip. We had envisioned arriving and playing 3 games at 1850 but what soon became apparent was we would not have time for both that and everything else we wanted to do, namely the store, exhibit and lunch. Ultimately we settled for two games which gave us time to peruse both the store and exhibit at our leisure.

Games

Most of my hobby time over the past four weeks has been spent getting an 1850 Dark Angels doublewing army up to tabletop standard. I won't feature proper shots here as they're far from finito but there are a couple of in-game shots later. Both games we played were maelstrom for simplicity. My list was as follows:

(RW detachment)

Sammael

5 black knights with 1 grenade launcher

4 Ravenwing bikes with 2 plasma guns

4 ravenwing bikes with 2 melta guns

Land speeder typhoon.

Land speeder vengeance with assault cannon.

Nephilim with lascannon

(DW Formation)

Librarian (ML2) in Terminator armour

5 Deathwing Knights

5 Deathwing (Sergeant with sword, TH/SS, LCs, Chainfist, assault cannon)

5 Deathwing (Sergeant with sword, TH/SS, LCs, Chainfist, plasma cannon)

I played my first game against Matt's semi-dirty Daemon list built around Fateweaver, A GUO, Winged DP, 3 units of lesser daemons and CSM allies consisting of Typhus, 4 terminators, 2 obliterators and some zombies. Suffice to say I lost by a reasonable margin, with the first turn going against me proving key as it resulted in me being castled up in the corner for the first few turns. HIghlights included a nephilim taking out Fateweaver on the turn of its arrival, Black Knights plasma-killing a winged daemon prince and Typhus carving through many a Deathwing Knight.

The second game a win against Scott's Tyranid army, which was principally a nidzilla list with a Flyrant, Crone, Swarmlord, podding Exocrine, Trygon Prime, Mawloc and Tervigon. It went fairly similar to the previous game with me not getting first turn and ending up castled. The Dark Angels proved themselves to be proficient monster hunters though with the Vengeance killing the Swarmlord in a single volley of fire and Deathwing Knights carving through an MC a turn. Highlights for Scott included deepstriking a Mawloc and killing 5 Deathwing and 2 Black Knights in one turn. Nasty. 

Overall both very enjoyable games. I really enjoy playing with mixed Dark Angel lists and hope to use them more in games in the near future as a result.

Venue

The entrance has completely changed now and once walking up winding steps/ramp from the main door you enter straight into the main GW store, which you must walk through to access the other areas. It's worth noting the SM statue is now inside the lobby, the Rhino to the side of the entrance and a new AoS statue where the SM statue used to be. The gaming area is smaller now and all 3 stores (GW/FW/BL) are pretty open plan and glass fronted so they can be seen from the whole room. The FW store is particularly impressive with most of the models from the HH and the large models on display. That Warlord is just insane! Speaking of which, I got a glimpse of a hugely impressive army of Ultramarines, Knights and titans that appeared to have just been photographed for WD. Bugman's has also changed a little bit with the rear area being refurbished. I have to say, the one consistent let down have with WHW is the food and drink. Both Matt and I had overpriced bottles of beer rife with sediment and the burgers/chips are always far too greasy.

Exhibition

Now, when I learned that GW had reorganised the 'museum' and were now charging £7.50 I immediately thought 'cash grab'. However, it's so rare that I get to go to WHW I decided I had to have a look-see. Having done it, I must say it was the highlight of the trip. What they have done with the exhibition areas is astounding. I will share a few pics (I'm sure a google search will reveal much better ones) and let the pictures speak for themselves, especially, the diorammas. The Khorne Vs Ultramarines display is literally half the size of my house and must be seen to be believed. Amazing stuff, and I'd highly recommend it. 

Dark Angels codex review part 5 / 5 - the Lion's blade and army build options.

Welcome to the 5th and final part of my Dark Angels codex review. As I've taken a rather unusual approach to this review, I wasn't sure what would be most appropriate to put in this final part. I've only briefly mentioned the Lion's Blade up til now as I thought it best discussed once I had got to grips with the constituent parts of it rather than up front. Instead of army lists I will just write some brief thoughts on the different 'wing' combinations that can be used to make up a mono-DA army and how they interact now. First things first, let's look at the Lion's Blade:

Lions Blade Strike force

Like the Codex Marine detachment, this allows you to build a 'detachment of formations' for cumulative perks. All of the formations available in the Lion's blade are individual ones from the book that I've already covered, except for two which I'll come to.

The core element, of which 1 minimum is required per detachment, is the already strong demi-company. As with codex Marines, you can double up on this to get a full battle company (one half with Chaplain, the other with Master), in which case you will get not only objective secured and fire discipline, but the same perk as  Codex marines in the form of FREE dedicated transports for the battle company. Further to this, the almighty supreme fire discipline rule applies to the entire detachment and allows all models with grim resolve to (unless jinking) simply fire overwatch at their regular BS. Wow!

Each core choice also allows you to take one optional Command choice, in this case a Selection from the Inner circle, nam0ely Azrael, Belial, Sammael, a Company Master, Interrogator Chaplain or Librarian. We then come to the auxiliary elements, of which there are 6 and of which 1+ must be taken. 5 of them are already covered, namely the Hammer of Caliban, 3 Ravenwing Formations and Deathwing Formation. The last is simply 1 1-5 unit of scouts with no perks. I think that this Strike force, while lacking as many options as its codex marine cousin, is actually a lot less restrictive. Now we will take a look at how we can put together armies (around 2K) using the Lion's blade in most cases. Bear in mind now that Deathwing/Ravenwing elements can no longer be troops a CAD is no longer an option for these as mono-lists.

Triple-wing

Naturally, the best way to Utilise all the formations through the Lion's Blade is with all 3 wings being involved. A solid Green core of a battle Company is a great start which should take up a quarter of your points minimum. A minimum Deathwing Formation will allow you to get a Terminator Librarian and take you up to about half your points. Add in a Ravenwing support and attack squadron plus some scouts and upgrades and that should give you a well-rounded synergistic army. Alternatively, using the Deathwing/Ravenwing Strike forces alongside each other plus either a Greenwing Lion's blade or demi-company is another way but the Lion's blade for everyone proabably works best. Dont rule out a CAD alongside it though. A couple of cheap units of scouts  and a cheap HQ will get you access to Black knights and individual battle tanks, both of which are unavailable in the Lion's blade a it stands. 

Greenwing

The best way to play Pure Greenwing seems to be keeping it simple. A full but minimised battle Company should provide you with lots of units that have both full BS overwatch and free transports, which after some upgrades should still leave you enough points at 2K to squeeze in a Hammer of Caliban and maybe a unit of scouts or Inner Circle member. Alternatively, a couple of cheap scout units in a CAD is a good way to access individual tanks, same as for black Knights as mentioned above.

Deathwing

Harder to work through this one due to the limitations of the Deathwing list as discussed before. The best way to do it would seem to be by taking a Deathwing strike force detachment and putting 3 Venerable Dreadnoughts into drop pods. Unlike the formation, the Drop pods will enter play on turn 1 and so you should have at least 2 Venerable dreadnoughts and Drop pods on the board that have to survive a turn of fire before your army can arrive, albeit piecemeal. Not great, but it seems the only viable way left to run mono-Deathwing.

Ravenwing

Three approaches here. Either just use a mixture of attack/support/silence formations, which means no HQ choices or black knights. The second way is to use the Ravenwing strike force, which will mean you have to take Sammael (at least until they FAQ the bike HQ Ravenwing thing) but are free to choose between units at your leisure, though without some of the perks of the formation. The third and probably best way is a mixture of the Strike force (for your Knights and HQ, and maybe less rigid air support) and then the Formations for everything else. This is my preferred build TBH.

Deathwing and Ravenwing

The old classic combo, this work pretty darn well still and TBH seems to be how the rules for Deathwing have been written to reflect. Any combo of the Ravenwing options above (so long as an attack squadron or Strike force is in there) plus the Deathwing Strike force should be a winner. The Deathwing redemption force doesn't rely on the Ravenwing element but gives you less flexibility for little reward (unless you're fighting CSM that is).

Greenwing and Deathwing

You could run it as a CAD in itself, but it's better to run as either a Lion's blade with Demi/battle company and redemption force or to break it up into individual formations/detachments representing the individual elements, of which a CAD could be part for the Greenwing but it's not really the best option unless you want to run say a predator and a vindicator in there.

Ravenwing and Greenwing

Again, could be run as above but would probably be best running it as a Lion's blade with formations or as a pair of detachments / detachment plus formations. You could even run the Ravenwing detachment and just add a demi-company to it.

Conclusions:

Despite a few gaffes with the Deathwing/Ravenwing strike forces, I'm pretty impressed with the book overall and believe it has propelled the Dark Angels back up there to be on par with their brothers. It's a shame that Ravenwing stand out as being the strongest build (with greenwing a close second) and Deathwing lagging somewhat. Of the 7 combos discussed above it would have been nice if all 7 have equal merit, but it seems not to be the case. The book itself is pretty enough, and while there are only a few new fluff pieces in there it's great that most of the numerous errors and oversights from the previous edition have been addressed. Now we have the long wait until the next 40K release, whenever that may be. Until then, time to get on with some hobby! Cheers.