Warhammer 40K: Lord of Virulence Rules Reveal
.The Death Guard are getting a new character clad in Terminator armor and packing some mean skills – check out the Lord of Virulence.
We’ve seen several rules revealed over the past few weeks as Games Workshop rolls out the Death Guard Codex. Today, we got another piece of the puzzle for the Lord of Virulence. Let’s take a look at all of this new character’s rules as we go through what we know so far.
“Clad in ancient Terminator armour and with a vicious twin plague spewer in hand, the Lord of Virulence is a supporting commander par excellence with a host of abilities for improving the Marines they lead into battle.”
New Aura
What makes the Lord of Virulence such a good support character is his new aura ability – Master of Destruction. This ability improves the reliability of plague weapons by boosting those unmodified wound rolls of 6 with an additional 1 AP. Now, it’s a little strange that it only applies to ranged attacks with plague weapons. And it also only applies to <Plague Company> Core units. But it’s the Death Guard and they DO pack a lot of plague weapons.
Because Plague Weapons already have a built in re-roll for wound rolls of 1, this should help convert some of those attacks into those extra armor piercing wound rolls. At least his Plague Spewer is still plague weapon.
And we also know that Deadly Pathogens will boost the strength of one of his plague weapons by 1 and I think the Twin Plague Spewer is a pretty strong contender for that role. Top that off with one of the seven other abilities you can also apply to it – like Viscous Death – and you’ve got a built in combo for a very dangerous HQ option.
There are more options if you select him as your Warlord – but you get the idea. But here’s one option we haven’t seen yet:
This wall of text is actually pretty simple. Pick a point on the battlefield and place a marker on it. Then, at the start of your next Command phase, each unit within 6″ of it’s center has a chance to take D3 mortal wounds on a D6 roll of 2-6. You get +1 to the roll on Infantry units, you get -1 on Characters. If you manage to tag a unit with a 7+, then they take D6 mortal wounds instead.
It has an added bonus of being cheaper for the Lord of Virulence. It’s only 2 CP vs 3 CP. Oh – and you can only use this stratagem if your Warlord is a Death Guard character. So again, pretty straightforward and it’s a natural fit for this character. Also note that the Stratagem is “each unit” so keep your own models out of the blast zone…
Combo Breaker
Imagine rolling around within range of a few units of Plague Marines, tossing out shots with their Plague Spewers, and doing a number on whatever they hit. It’s not going to be too hard to get them in range thanks to Inexorable Advance and Malicious Volleys:
It really seems like the Death Guard play style has been refined and reinforced. With the upcoming codex, this new character is just a good example of that.
The March of the Death Guard is coming – are you ready?
