Triumvirate of the Primarch Tactica: Roboute Guilliman
Today we review “Big Bobby G” himself. Roboute Guilliman. Where does he fit into the 40k meta?
If you partake even a little bit in the 40k news verse you know that Roboute Guilliman, the Primarch of the Ultramarines arrived about a month ago, and the 40k community has been reeling ever since. The implication of first Magnus, and now Papa Smurf is too exciting to overlook. What Primarch is going to be revealed next? Will he be a loyalist or traitor? What’s going to happen in the fluff? Will all of the primarchs be as good as Magnus the red? While I can’t answer all of these questions I can dive deeper into that last one. Is Guilliman as good as his red horny-nippled flying psychic brother?
Special Rules:
Guilliman comes with
- Adamantium Will
- Chapter Tactics (Ultramarines)
- Eternal Warrior
- Fearless
- Feel no Pain
- Fleet
- Precision Shots/Strikes
- Preferred Enemy (Chaos)
He is the Lord commander of the Imperium, meaning all friendly armies of the imperium units in your army reroll failed morale, pinning, and fear checks. This is huge, because it basically means bringing him helps your army negate a large part of the game. Sometimes avoiding failing key morale checks in critical moments can be absolutely game winning.
As the Primarch of the XIIIth legion he gives all Ultramarines in your army an extra set of doctrines. For when you really want to use doctrines in your Gladius Strike Force for 2 straight games!
Finally, Guilliman has an unyielding will, and cannot be effected by negative leadership modifiers of any kind. Ever.
Warlord Trait/Relics of Ultramar:
His Warlord Trait is simple, he gets all of the command traits from the BRB. All of them. At the same time. This means within 12 inches he becomes a buff/debuff machine making any of your Armies of the Imperium models a lot more efficient.
Guilliman wields the Emperor’s Sword and the Hand of Dominion in combat. Which means he has a 3 shot strength 6 ap2 rending boltgun and a Str 10 Ap 1 sword with armorbane, concussion, soul blaze and the ability to turn 6s to D hits or automatically hit every model within 1 inch automatically.
The Armor of Fate he is wearing confers him a not so grav-friendly 2+ armor save and 3++ invuln save and gives him the ability to come back to life with d3 wounds on a 4+ at the start of your turn.
Also, I suppose this is a good time to go over his statline. He is WS 9 BS 6 S6 T6 with 6 wounds and 6 attacks. Everything a growing monstrous creature needs to smash his foes and die to stomps and grav.
What the heck is “Grav”? Maybe the squats invented it…
Tactics:
Before we get into what is the best way to use Roboute on the tabletop I want to talk about the model itself. He is a gorgeous model. Just my two cents, I really love what they did with his sword, and size. They really made him look more like the new leader of the Imperium and less like just another loyalist primarch. They also did a good job balancing the look of the model between too bulky, and dangerous looking. I am very impressed, and personally prefer this Guilliman to his smaller forgeworld counterpart.
Guilliman’s place in the 40k meta is currently uncemented. What we do know is Guilliman is slow, despite having fleet and +1 to run moves. He is also deceptively fragile without the ability to hide in a large unit, or deep strike in a drop pod. This means that despite his close combat capability Guilliman needs to spend his 350 points doing the other thing he is good at, buffing your units.
I do think he is a bit redundant with Space Marines. The reroll morale tests is cool, but honestly apart from that he gives Ultramarines 6 doctrines for a game stock. Which is usually more than enough to get the job done. Which means if you want to take Guilliman and use him to his full capability you need to take units that can take advantage of all of the buffs he provides. Two armies really stand out to me out of all of the possible combinations from Imperial soup.
No, one of them isn’t battle company. It is actually a Barkstar. For those of you who don’t know what a barkstar is click here or here for the audio free version. Basically what you do is run 30-40 Fenrisian wolves, give them a librarius conclave containing arguably the most powerful psyker in the game (Tigurius) and give your opponent a tough units to deal with. By using the idea of “Threat overload” you can buff Guilliman with psychic powers like invisibility or teleport him around to really make him a threat. In the mean time Guilliman doesn’t need to move along with the barkstar to buff them with his command trait aura. He just needs one dog to be within 12. Something that can be very easy to do.
Some key buffs Guilliman gives the wovles is rerolling 1’s to hit in close combat, and the ability to add 1 to their run and charge moves. Guilliman can also jump in their and bail the dogs out of combats that they are unlikely to win in, like Imperial knights and Wraithknights. Though, Celestine could also help out with that as well. Guilliman fulfills two roles here, he can protect and counter charge units that are in your backline, and also buffs the morale of units in your army that need to stick around. Mainly cheap obsec objective grabbers.
Another nifty trick is the ability to surround Guilliman in the barkstar to protect him from grav. Move them so that your opponent can not get into grav range. Or, if you are feeling really spicy, bait your opponent and give them enough room to shoot just one grav unit at him. He is survivable enough to survive one round of shooting from a typical grav squad, and in the mean time your opponent dropped right into the jaws of a hungry wolf unit.
The possibilities are really endless with this army, and any assault oriented army that isn’t space marines could really use the buffs Guilliman provides. In turn, Guilliman does a lot better with psychic support shoring up some of his weaknesses.
Finally, the second army. Guilliman does really well in an Imperial Guard Artillery army. He buffs conscripts, vultures, punisher tanks, artillery, and pretty much all of the guardsmen who like to stake nice and cozy in the backlines. In turn, those models can provide him with a bubble-wrap of warm bodies to keep any of the nastier shooting away from him.
Guilliman’s mobility isn’t an issue here because he needs to stay in the gunline and counter charge any units that decide to get in his grill. Deathstars may give this list an issue, but with enough barrage and high strength shots sometimes a deathstar is weakened enough so that Big Bobby G can handle it. Especially with some fearless conscript help.
Anyways, that’s it for today.
~How do you plan on using the new Primarch in your 40k games?
Also, stay tuned tomorrow for my review of Grand Master Valdus in all his Grey Knight glory, and my next episode of Chapter Tactics, which is temporarily moving to Sunday for this weekend. You don’t want to miss that episode, I am going to talk about time/clock management in competitive 40k tournaments.
And of course, because we’ve got to keep the lights on, be sure to shoot your order in for the new Triumvirate of the Primarch at our normal and awesome 20% off MSRP Send order to: [email protected] or call 888-781-5120.
