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| The most powerful weapon of the far future: Clubs |
Daemon Princes have a lot going for them. They're tall, they have pretty good mentors, they're looked upon as idols. Some of them are really nice guys but really we want to know about the mean ones. Who carry maces. For faces.
DP WS9 S6 A5 starts with a close combat weapon and thus gets a bonus attack with the Black Mace in addition to the +2S. Oh wait sorry, that's the Axe of Blinding Fury. Black Mace gives you no strength bonus meaning you don't insta-death silly HQ's who are stupid enough to invite you to tango. It just means you have to beat every single wound outta em. Or! Get lucky and have the special rule Cursed! make them explode. One can dream.
Now how many average wounds will you have when you don't blow someone up? (On the charge here)
vs. MEQ 3.88 wounds, and a 1/3 chance per guy to have 1 of them blow up. Since you can only hit guys in base contact with you then you'll probably kill everyone in base contact with you. That's always good. You then have the Cursed! rule come into play.
Cursed wounds will probably hit every man in a 10 man unit. They have to pass a toughness test or die. Meaning 1/3 will die. So on average you'll get 6 kills between the mace and the Curse.
vs. FX you'll get 3.88 wounds as well and now a 1/2 chance of peeps poppin'.
Cursed wounds will hit everyone in a 10 man unit (I'm assuming pile-in brought them within 3'') so 1/2 the unit again dies giving you 7 kills.
Both of these are pretty swag.
I wanna do a comparison though. To the Axe of Blinding Fury.
Attacks: 8 on the charge. 5, +1 for two, CC +2 for Rage.
vs. MEQ 4.4 wounds total. Fine. Not as much as the Black Mace with Cursed! but still a lot.
vs. FX same. Also I should note, all of these, including the above, are instant-death. Very dangerous against HQ's.
now here's where there is large swing: Instant Death AND vehicles. The Axe of Blinding Fury means you're S9 on the charge versus vehicles. With 8+d6 attacks. You're going to glance/pen everything less than a Land Raider to death automatically. With Black Mace you have to halve your attacks to wound Land Raiders. You'll get 6 attacks on average so you can still hurt Land Raiders a little. The real change is Instant Death. With Black Mace you'll have to direct at least 5 of your attacks at a MEQ HQ to be sure of killing. With Axe you only need to direct 2 to have a very good chance of killing. This is a situational problem but it can arise as with the Land Raiders.
Now in this I haven't included the Daemon Weapon rule for one reason: It makes Cursed! almost pointless.
You're going to win combat, that's guaranteed. Now on the charge you have 10.5 attacks average. Which means 5.8 are dead then 1/3 of the remainder die or 1 more. They get attacks back at you. 3 MEQ won't wound you (usually) so they lose combat by 7. They fail the roll (usually) and you Sweeping Advance to destroy them. Without Cursed! 6 die and now they're almost at 20% chance of wounding you (assuming you have armor if no armor then they've got little more than 30%). So you still get no wounds. They still fail 5/6 of the time and you Sweeping Advance and kill them next turn without worry of more attacks or getting shot.
With the Axe of Blind Fury you kill on average 6.38 MEQ on the charge. You've now equaled Black Mace in killing power pretty much. And the same dealio, they don't wound you, you Sweeping Advance and slap their shit next turn without worrying about getting shot.
Also! You get freaking Hammer of Wrath attack which'll probably kill an extra guy and you start to see Black Mace does almost the same function without Cursed! as a plain Daemon Weapon. The only difference is you can't kill heavy vehicles. S9 Axe of Blinding Fury compensates for the lack of Fleshbane and to me it just looks like your wasting points 10 points to get the same effect.
But there is a place for Cursed!: Stubborn (literally) Infantry Blobs. You're going to blow up a lot of people with that 3'' and going to kill several with your charge. This weapon becomes a lawn-mower against them and now this tarpit is stuck in a dangerous situation where each person 2% chance of wounding you (only using your invuln save). There's always a chance a Stubborn unit will fail their test but Infantry Blobs should get a re-roll so you'll be 'stuck' wiping out a 500+ point unit with an ~200 point unit for the game. You can kill many more units here than the Axe of Blinding Fury can simply because a semi-circle in front of the DP becomes a death zone (even though you'll be killing quite a few people in that zone every turn).
Conclusions
The 1 pro the Black Mace has over the Axe of Blinding Fury is that it's good against blobs. If you aren't going to face a blob a straight-up plain Daemon Weapon does just as much damage so go with the cheaper one in this case. If I'm going against MEQ I'd take the Axe and just wipe all but 1 guy every turn, chuckle as the MEQ player can't shoot me for the turn then wipe the squad uninjured before engaging another next turn. You'll do the same thing with the Mace but it costs 10 points more.
So math for Black Mace: Are there several blobs in your local meta? Yes -> Take Black Mace No-> Take Axe of Blinding Fury
Even if you're just taking Mace for blob killing there are much better ways to do it than a single 4 wound 200+ point monstrous creature. A T5(!) Monstrous creature is not hard to kill, sorry.
EDIT: A comment mentioned this would be crazy good with Enfeeble. Against MEQ you'll now kill 1/2 of all the guys in the unit so +1 wound from the math above and with FX you're killing 2/3 so again, +1 wound from above. In each case on average you'll only be facing 1 or 2 guys after your I9 blitz and that's not even counting your Hammer of Wrath. Pretty gnarly.
I go with the mace because my prince regularly gets stuck in challenges with chump champions, and the little explosion lets me throw some damage on the squad anyway, where as the axe gets to kill the challenger and nothing else.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I've never had problems slapping vehicles or ICs around, as the bonus attacks from daemon weapon are added after halving attacks for smash, so unless you get that unlucky '1', you're going to have more than enough S10 attacks to paste whatever it is you're up against. Finally, mace on the prince frees up the axe to go on a lord. Or, you know, another prince.
Last note - the artifact weapons replace a weapon you already have, so the prince does not get +1 attack for two close combat weapons with either the axe or the mace.
Ahh you are right on those.
ReplyDeleteIn my games I do a more strict rules interpretation in Challenges where the challengers cannot affect non-challengers (Typhus got the FAQ saying Hive works in Challenges but not the Black Mace so I'm still undecided.)
I also interpret the Daemon Weapon attacks adding attacks to your Attacks characteristic which is what gets halved by Smash. Since the bonus attacks get added at the beginning of the phase and you chose your Smash attacks after that I'm not sure how it would be otherwise? Also you'd have to interpret the Daemon Weapon as adding attacks to your guy but not adding them to his attacks characteristic which makes no sense to me. If they aren't added to his attacks characteristic where do they go?
Both of those points need an FAQ
I do like me some Khorne Axe Lord though.
There is a FAQ response concerning Smash.
DeleteIt states that, in the case of a monstruous creature charging, the +1 attack from the charge is added after halving your attacks. So apparently, every attack that isn't directly on the profile don't get halved.
Wich is great, and also completely overpowered on a DP with black mace :p. It means you can get up to 10 S10 AP2 (5/2 = 3 from smash +1 from charge +1D6 from deamon weapon) attacks, even more if you're lucky with biomancy.
You can basicaly 1 shot every single tank in the game. against anything that isn't mechanical, you're better off without smash since black mace has flashbane anyway).
On an unrelated note, does anyone knows if you can give a gift of mutation to a DP
Yeah they can take any Chaos Reward including mutation.
DeleteI did not know about that FAQ though thank you! That's pretty damn good to hear. That means that DP's are a soft counter to Dreadknights and Riptides due to their mobility and ability to do severe hurt to them without getting too hurt back. Axe of Blind Fury works really well against them too because you don't even have to halve your attacks to get 2+ to wound.
Daemon Princes are really anti-vehicle you're right. With a good enough roll you can one shot tanks like the Land Raider and hurt flyers severely. A DP heavy list may actually be a feasible counter to the NecronAir lists you see everywhere.
Interesting update thank you!
Well, I think a DP heavy list is probably easier done with a deamon of chaos army (they can have them as troops, assuming their commander is a greater deamon of the same god).
DeleteTheir stats/items may be different, but you can litteraly make a army with only monstrous creatures that are also psykers. And they can all roll on biomancy. And you can even add the csm deamon prince as an ally to get the csm items.
Dear god I need to try that.
On the black mace vs axe of blind fury debate, I tend to like the black mace more. First it allows you to deal some damage to blobs on the first round, despite the inevitable challenge (but then again, I'm still not sure if i'm right doing that, I just assume). But mostly because you don't have to go khorne to get the mace.
Don't get me wrong, the axe is really good, but khorne just isn't my favorite kind of deamon and it forbids you to make your DP a psyker.
Last reason : there aren't that much magic mellee weapons the codex and you may also have a chaos lord in your army. And the thing is : the axe is very good on a dp and a lord, while the mace is very good on a dp and pretty meh on a lord, due to it's strengh and AP. So if you want to give both those weapons to someone, you're better off giving the mace to the DP.
In 40k Chaos Daemons can only make DPs into Heavy Support choices allowing you to field a maximum of 5 in the army. Don't know about fantasy. Then you can get another one in Allies for 4 DPs and two Greater Daemons max.
DeleteThe Khorne vs. Other is all about play style but for the cost of powers and their negate-ability by things like Grey Knights make me hesitant to take them over more attacks.
As for Mace versus Axe you're right in that you can still be a psyker and take mace but if you're going for killing power Axe wins almost always. You can take 10 men out of a blob and it wouldn't even be unusual. If the blob is big enough having two dps attack can really put the hurt on a blob.
But if you really need to take out a blob with Chaos then Slaaneshi daemon powers, i think, are the best.
There's always a lot of give and take with any strategy and fielding DPs is one of the more contentious points among enthusiasts but a healthy mix of Khorne and Slaanesh MCs reaaaally put the hurt on most armies.
Hilariously enough you can field Daemons with Tau allies and take a Riptide and Tau Commander with plasmas and plasma bodyguard. Pretty ludicrous amount of damage there.