Wither the Deathwing

Posted by Ranillon on 11. November 2008 13:21

As anyone who has been reading this blog knows I am of the opinion that the new Space Marine codex has – in general – rendered all of the old non-codex SM chapters obsolete.  In particular, I say this concerning the Deathwing as that’s the relevant army I play.  In response to my last post Ron from over at From the Warp asked just what I meant by the Deathwing being “outclassed”.  A battle I played recently provides, I think, a good example of just that.

As it happened on one side of the board the battle came down to two units of his and two units of mine.  Both of us were fighting over the one objective model on that side, although I had the advantage as I started on top of it and was defending.  To win I just needed to keep his units away or for a draw just to keep myself from being destroyed. 

For my two units I had two standard Deathwing 5-man squads, each with a Cyclone Missile Launcher.  He had one group of six assault terminators with thunder hammer and storm shield riding in a Land Raider Redeemer.  The comparative points cost between the two sides is nearly equal as Deathwing terminators are more expensive than the new assault termies.

Here is where the differences between the two codxes start to come into play.  It takes his land raider 4 turns to get into charge range.  That means four turns of shooting Cyclone Missiles at him in an attempt to immobilize him or, at least, stun him enough times to not be able to make to across the board by the end of the game.  Since I am using the old inferior rules for my Cyclones I have a grand total of eight shots to get the job done.  The odds of any one shot hitting, glancing, and then getting an immobilized result is 1/54.  With just eight shots that’s just 8/54 or 15%.  That’s not particular good odds of success.  With the new Cyclones, however, my odds of success would be twice that or 30%.  Again, only a tad under one third chance, but remember a success here is means I’ve won the game.  Likewise, the odds of stunning the raider are just as good, so with the new Cyclones I’d have a 60% chance of stopping or at least slowing them down compared to half that for the old Cyclones.

Nevertheless, odds are that the squad will get into hand-to-hand with me.  If I get lucky and lose no one to the land raider’s shooting it’s 10 against 6, something that sounds on the surface a good match-up for me.  Unfortunately, his assault terminators are packing storm shields – the new wonderful storm shields.  That means no matter what I do even with my power weapons I still have to get through 3+ saves while I only get 5+ saves to withstand his attacks.  This makes a gigantic difference.

If you run the numbers and round off you get the following result:

In other words, my 10 guys are roughly equal to his 6 guys with storm shields. Of course, this assumes that I take no casualties from the land raider’s shooting, but the odds say I should lose around 5 over four turns.  If 10 vs. 6 is a draw then 5 vs. 6 is almost a foregone conclusion (as it happened, I lost four to shooting, but was wiped out in CC within 2 rounds).

But, wait, you say – this is hardly an ideal situation for the Deathwing.  Getting through the armor on a land raider is hard with S8 weapons.  If you had some better firepower your odds would have been much better.

True enough.  A Deathwing army has two great weaknesses – low numbers and low firepower.  That is why there is always a temptation to pull in other, non-traditional units to help balance things out.  The Dark Angels codex even encourages this, most particularly the mixing of Deathwing and Ravenwing.

Yet, the only “advantage” that the DA codex has in this regard over the new marine codex is that only the first can take terminators as troops.  The more you go away from this the more this “advantage” disappears.  This is why I say that the Deathwing has been “outclassed” – Unless you insist on a pure force of just terminators then the new codex can clearly do things better.  And, if you stay “pure” then you better get used to always playing from (way) behind.

If the Deathwing did get/could get the new wargear it would in my opinion move the Deathwing from the “only for masochists” column to the “viable” column.  You’d be able to get more firepower while assault squads (with thunder hammer and storm shields, of course) would actually be a good choice.  It would still be a tricky army, but fun.  As it stands the only real reason for playing a pure Deathwing is dogged loyalty to the force (or they are the models you have painted), not because you expect to win very often.