Newhammer: The Night Lords are coming!

Hello everyone, Danny from TFG Radio here one more time to go over the evil Space-Batmen of 40K, the Night Lords! Be sure to go check out all the cool stuff over at Frontline’s Tactics Corner to kit out your utility belt.

The Night Lords are meant to be a terror-tactic army that rips the heart out of its foes, both metaphorically and quite literally.  With the new changes on the horizon, I have high hopes for the purple ones.

Striking first

So the Night Lords are a melee army, and well, being able to punch someone first is generally a winning strategy.  It also plays into the fluff nicely as the Night Lords are supposed to be the Chaos masters of ambush and terror tactics, so you think that they would be good at getting a few cheap shots in.  While Night Lords still lack the same level of attacks as World Eaters, the buff to melee in general is a buff to them.

Raptors that get to hit first and maybe even assault after Deep Striking (like in AoS)? Not too shabby at all, especially since Pistols are getting a buff.  Even just standard CSM squads loaded for melee could do a lot of work if they get to swing first.

3+ armor save plus lots of access to cover or even – hit penalty. 

So 3+ armor save is really good in the new mechanics, and cover is just adding to it, and well, the Night Lords have a lot of good rules dedicated to increasing our cover, so if this stays in some form, Night Lords will actually be fairly resilient. A 2+ armor save is real good, especially on Night Lord units that often have to survive Overwatch or an enemy shooting phase before getting into the real fun of it.  Let’s just hope that the Night Lord bonuses to cover stay in some format.

Morale matters far more, and as the masters of terror tactics, let’s see some hustle here.

This is the big win for Night Lords, or at least the opportunity for a big win.  Morale is super critical in AoS (Battleshock).  Games are easily won and lost due to this mechanic, and I reckon you’ll see this in Newhammer too.   Why is this good for Night Lords? Well, they are the Lords of the Night, the evil space-batmen.  Fear is likely going away or becoming more useful, so Night Lords could actually play super havoc with enemy morale, and imposing just -1 or even -2 Leadership to a unit can mean another model or two dead, and that can certainly matter far more against elite units where 1 model gone is really 3-5 quality wounds gone.

It would be great to see the Night Lords come into their own by really being able to nerf enemy leadership, allowing for them to exploit the morale phase far more.  This not only fits their fluff, but it gives them a solid edge on the tabletop.    Hopefully, our Artefacts stay more or the less the same and give us more ways to play with enemy leadership.

Monstrous Creatures get a buff:

The best part of the Night Lords army right now is the 2+ reroll jink save for our Daemon Prince, and with the likely increase in wounds, we can expect the DP to get a bit stronger.  Hopefully, this means that the Stormplate also stays and gives a cover bonus to the big guy.  That would again let us keep our strongest single unit.   This may or may not happen, but we can dream.

Characters cannot join units:

How does this help us? Well, Night Lords didn’t have a lot of good Deathstar options to begin with, and they lack the sheer ultrakill of other Traitor Legions to punch through, but with Deathstars going away, Night Lords can fight more on terms that favor them.  Also, our Chaos Lords can still be pretty killy, and if we hide them amongst units where they cannot be targeted, we can still get our Lords into the fight while keeping our own units around a bit longer.  Let’s hope that Lightning Claws have some good AP (-2 would be good) with a bonus to wound or something.

So overall, the big changes that I hope to see are giving Night Lords their due by making them Chaos’ answer to morale.  While Night Lords are not going to fight like World Eaters or endure like Death Guard, hopefully in this new version of our beloved game, they will be the army that actually terrorizes opponent’s by making every morale test just a bit scarier.

Thanks for reading, and as always, check out TFG Radio as we near our 100^th episode, and be sure to get to painting (or ya know, talk to Frontline) as Newhammer approaches!

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