Warhammer 40K: About Those New Death Guard Rules
Adam here to talk about new Death Guard rules for competitive 40K.
With the pre-order for the Death Guard coming up, we are seeing more previews on Warhammer Community. I always enjoy these as they come out a little before the pre-order and doesn’t force me to go hunting on the internet for information of a new faction or rule. This week we got a lot of info, both model and rulewise, to go over. This is in addition to the new Death Guard rules we were shown at the close of last year. This week we will look at a few things that have caught my attention with the recent information.
Increased Durability
Anyone that has played against Death Guard, or even Nurgle Daemons, knows that they can be a pain to put down. The recent change to the Disgustingly Resilient rule does seem to tone down the durability somewhat but now they get a new bonus. Nurgle Chaos Lords will get an extra toughness along with other gifts from Nurgle. They aren’t the only unit to get a toughness buff either. Poxwalkers will now be toughness four. This means that it will be harder to inflict damage on the units.
In the Poxwalker’s case especially, you cannot rely on massed fire from mid damage weapons, such as multilasers and autocannons, to easily wound the models. For both units you will have to either just use even more regular strength firepower or invest in more powerful weapons to deal with the servants of chaos. Along with their lower cost, I fully expect poxwalkers to make a return onto the battlefield of armies that are aiming for the top spot.
Mortarion – He Gets Three of WHAT?!
If you saw the preview of Mortarion last year you saw that he got a bit of a buff. He got a Toughness bump, which is huge, and a few other tweaks. Overall I think it’s a good change but what they showed us this week has me guessing. He got, not one, not two, but three warlord traits and I am wondering what they do. So let’s just speculate wildly, or mildly your choice. Arch Contaminator was his warlord trait from the last book. I don’t expect this to change too much and would be surprised if it did. Living Plague is also from his previous codex and again I don’t see this changing at all really. It is a good warlord trait that I can only see getting worse if they do change it.
Revolting Resilient is one that wasn’t available to him before. I really see this as going one of 2 ways. It can either give a different amount of damage reduction, I think 2 but maybe 3, or it could be another name for the rule that limits how much damage you could take in a single phase. so far it has always been 3 for other models. Either way I really look forward to what changes they make to these warlord traits.
New Contagions
Games Workshop are still giving more info about the Seven Plague Hosts. They are also giving us more contagions to bring Pappa Nurgle’s gifts to the galaxy. Now I have to admit that Nurgle’s Fruit doesn’t really appeal to me. I mean it’s nice to deny someone a cover save but with the max plus or minus only being one I don’t see it as being as big of a factor in the game. The other contagion, The Droning, seems to be more promising. The contagion halves the enemy movement if within Contagion Range range. This has a few applications right off the bat. First off, towards the end of the game when the range is it’s largest, you can affect a unit’s ability to reach an objective. This could cause your opponent to be unable to score points because they cannot reach an objective or a certain part of a battlefield in order to perform an action. The other effect that seems to be effective has to do with close combat. Depending on the move characteristic of the enemy unit, halving the move characteristic may make that unit unable to actually leave combat. This is especially true if you happen to have multiple units from your side positioned in such a way that no matter where they move, again using only half their move characteristic, your opponent wouldn’t be able to get their unit free from combat. this would. hopefully, protect you from any enemy fire in your opponent’s turn.
~Well, that’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed the article. Let me know what you think, and what new rules piqued your interest, in the comments section below.
