Warhammer 40k: The Death Guard Take A Sick Day In Today’s Faction Focus
Three new detachments are revealed for Death Guard armies in today’s 11th edition preview. Come see how they’ll be infecting the game.
The second week of Faction Focus articles comes to a close with the promised Death Guard spotlight. Pestilence, entropy, and some surprising twists on Death Guard themes have been unleashed to plague the battlefield. As usual ,the article is accompanied by a brief video overview.
Contagion Engines
Historically, the Death Guard have enjoyed some strong support from a variety of daemonic engines, but these bloated machines are not exactly quick. The Contagion Engines detachment provides your disgusting pus-buddies with a surprising burst of speed.
Advance and spread the blessings of the Plague Father unhindered. This buff grants the ASSAULT key word to the ranged attacks of a wide variety of your support vehicles. With an army that has troops on the slow side this kind of rolling artillery advance could be really powerful in capturing objectives or clearing firing lanes.
Enhancements that allow a unit to self-heal aren’t uncommong, but there’s something unusual here. Typically, abilities of this type require the unit to have hit or wounded in order to heal. However, in this case, merely having fought in close combat is sufficient. Hit or miss, your vehicle can heal D3 wounds. This is really cool stuff, and speaks to the incredible fortitude of Nurgle’s favored.
The ability to make enemy units Afflicted is at the core of Death Guard tactics, but usually, you’ve got to be up close and personal. This enhancement adds a nasty way to drop the Afflicted status on anyone in the line of sight of one of your vehicles. Reduced Toughness and potentially a reduced saving throw is no joke in this edition. Being able to fling taht debuff across the battlefield is massive.
Flyblown Host
Clouds of flys and biting insects swarm wherever the forces of Nurgle march. This detachment builds upon those swarms to add a variety of interesting abilities to your force.
The Death Guard are not known for subtlety but this rule makes your core Plague Marine troops into Infiltrators. Since so much of this army’s tactics revolve around inflicting the Afflicted status on the enemy this could be a really big deal. Get your basic infantry quickly up the table so they can cough in the faces of the enemy.
Building upon the foundation of Verminous Haze, this enhancement makes your Plague Marines even more unpleasant. Having already gained Iniltrator it should be relatively easy to get at least one unit within Contagion Range and grant this re-roll to wound rolls of 1. Since up to three units can have the same enhancement you could build a surprisingly fast and hard-hitting core of infantry for your army.
This looks crazy good to me. CLOSE-QUARTERS is the new name for what was previously the PISTOL ability. It otherwise works the same but will presumably be attached to a number of weapon profiles. Your Plague Marines can use this cheap stratagem to unload their biggest, most pus-laden guns directly into the faces of the enemy. Even if they’re caught up in an ongoing melee you’ll be able to fire mercilessly away.
Paragons of Putrescence
Previous Faction Focuses have usually included a new detachment intended to improve an army’s characters and this is the Death Guard’s moist and runny version of the same.
Simple but effective, this detachment-wide rule gives your characters an increase of +3″ to their Contagion Range. As we’ve seen earlier, the new Death Guard rules see a number of ways to increase the threat of Contagion Range. Peppering your units with characters to further boost that debuff’s range could start to really degrade enemy units from very early in the game.
Before you begin play as a Death Guard commander you’ll have to make a fateful choice between three Nurgle’s Gift options. Each of them are powerful but situational, and it’s possible you’ll come to regret your choice as the battle unfolds. This enhancement will help you minimize that problem. By giving you a once-per-battle chance you can adapt your custom-made viruses to the need at hand.
We’ve seen other armies have tricks to deal with the new hidden rules in 11th edition. It seems the Death Guard have their own trick for dealing with pesky infiltirators. Again, working off the basis of Contagion Range, you can spend 1 CP to curse a unit with a nasty cough and increase their detection range by +6″. It’s hard to stay stealthy when you’re having a seziure, after all.
This is all really fun stuff and I particularly love the emphasis on Plague Marines. The core infantry of an army should feel useful, if not critical, and I love the synergies we can see here between the Flyblown Host and the Paragons of Putrescence.
That’s the end of our second week of Faction Focus previews but there are still tons of armies to go. Games Workshop promises a double header to start week three with a head-to-head examination of Imperial and Chaos Knight detachments on Monday.
Is anyone else running a fever?
