Goatboy’s Warhammer 40K: The Best Arks of Omen Detachment Allies!
Today, we turn our focus onto the new Arks of Omen detachment and nail down the best allies in the game.
Like my review stated before I am excited for Arks Detachments. It feels like a really interesting shift into letting players play whatever they want within the confines of their own army and their “allies.” While I don’t agree with all the Allies (why Votann, why – thankfully, they turn off your main armies’ extra rules, but still), it is still neat to have better avenues into playing them.
40K Best New Allies
With the talk about allies, let’s look at the three best ally slots in the game. The Imperium get the good ole Imperial Knights options and Chaos get two – a fun way to get a Daemon Patrol as well as some Dreadknights. All three of these give some interesting options to armies – especially on the scoring front. The ability to generate some value beyond their offensive capabilities is most likely the biggest thing they do – but will talk about that in a bit.
Imperial Knight Allies
We’ll go with the first one and somewhat the easiest with the Imperial Knight option. Most of the time, you will see this one show up as a way to shore up some shooting ability for the army. A few Armiger Helverins give your army some long-range fire support that can be especially damaging as they sit at 3 Damage. This is an important point as it lets you get around some damage reduction some armies can have, as well as just being a shock to the head when a unit has to take it. On top of all of that, the allied doesn’t turn off your army’s main rules, and they gain a few fun interactions with the Secondaries you can pick.
Thankfully, this unit isn’t hampered by some kind of bad Power Level restriction the only main thing is they need to be Freeblades to let you have some rules to play with. This is huge as Agent of the Imperium and Agent of Chaos are both powerful rules that help your army by “not” counting towards the main Detachment’s rule for determining extra rules. Pretty sweet and one of the main reasons to look at hiring one of these mini armies to help you with some long-range damage or other options.
Chaos Knight Allies
The Chaos side of things is very similar, too, with a lot less noble fanfare. Instead of creating a hero, you are building up some sort of damage monster to help your assault-based armies have some much-needed firepower. I can see 3 Brigands showing up in a lot of lists as just a way to let Chaos have some Melta options, as well as the newly minted super sweet Chain cannon of doom. AP -2 is the new black, so be ready to see more of it. If you don’t want to go into the cool little new Wardog setup, the good old Executioner is always a sweet piece of business to add to your army.
Both of these are pretty cool but where the icing gets even better on the cake of doom is how some of the Secondaries have extra CP generation if your Armigers or Wardogs do what they are supposed to do – killing your enemy with efficient firepower. Assassination, Grind Them Down, and Behind Enemy Lines all let you get an extra CP if you do this with a Wardog or Armiger. As I see a lot of armies using Grind or Behind Enemy lines in the future, this extra CP could become important. Also, Assassination might be pretty spicy when you “kill” Angron a few times. He doesn’t count being destroyed, but that extra CP seems pretty tasty.
Chaos Daemons Allies
The final Patrol I expect to see is the Daemon options you have available to you from some of your Chaos Stuff. The biggest winner really looks to be World Eaters when they come out, as they are specially designed to be used with the Red Angel army, it seems. A few Fleshhounds of Khorne look really helpful, as well as the criminally cheap Skull Cannon giving up 2 Blood Tithe when they die being a Vehicle and Unit dying. Oh, and Skarbrand seems to be well set up to throw down and add more attacks to your Khorne boys.
Beyond that Khorne-based one, I wonder if a Tzeentch add-on to the flavors of CSM that are less “marked” might be worth it too. From the speedy Red Corsairs utilizing a Tzeentch friendship to help out with some Behind Enemy Lines options (Screamers… seem good) or just a solid 3 wound unit that is hard to remove (Flamers are still good) to other armies just using some of the chariot options as fat bootie objective holders.
Allies have come a long way…
Allies Are Well Designed – AT LAST!
Overall, I like how the Allies feel much more thought out compared to some of the other options we had back in the day. Is this the way it will be for future stuff? The sad thing is that some of the Allies are left out, with Chaos Knights not having any friends (which makes fluff sense) and Daemons not really liking anyone, either. I wonder if this is going to be the way the Armies of Renown will be set up in the future, but we will see.
What Ally army do you think you might invest in? Is it worth it to build these things to help cover your secondaries when your army needs to go about doing the business and getting your death-dealing done?
