Newhammer: World Eaters hopes and dreams

Hello everyone, Danny from TFG Radio here to go over the other love in my heart, the World Eaters.  Here is a short set of hopes and dreams that I scribbled down in my diary made of my enemies, and as always, go check out the Tactics Corner for all of Frontline’s goodies.

So, as I am a man who loves him some rage, I think it is time to be manically excited for World Eaters and Newhammer.  Blood for the Blood God, indeed!  Let’s look at what we know and what I hope will pan out for my favorite Traitor legion.

Striking first in melee!

So this is confirmed as confirmed gets, and again, it makes World Eaters very happy.  While we had solid initiative thanks to being the generic marine stat-line, giving us the chance to swing first is absolutely amazing.  Even a standard unit of CSM with Mark of Khorne (which I hope is still +1 Strength on the charge at least if not mostly unchanged) and two hand weapons (again, if this rule doesn’t change) means that you can pump out a lot of attacks that can also hurt anything before anyone has a chance to respond.

If this also includes Unwieldy weapons like powerfists, ooooooh yaaaaah.  We are going to bust through enemies like the Kool-Aid Man.   My hope is that a lot of our combat buffs stay more or the less the same, namely more attacks and even higher strength when we charge into combat.  The fact that we can also hurt anything is great as suddenly a full horde of World Eaters doesn’t have to worry about fighting a Wraith Knight or Imperial Knight that it cannot actually hurt.

I also hold out hope that our Decurion benefit of moving 2D6 before the game starts stays in somewhere because that is just money for us, especially with our lack of quality shooting.

3+ armor save plus cover

The simplification of saves is a big boon for us.  While yes, a Lascannon does D6 wounds at -3 armor, who cares when you are running squads of 20-30 dudes? Against small arms fire designed to handle hordes, we’ll have our nifty 3+ save still or even 2+ if we can grab some cover.  Khorne Berserkers with 2+ armor saves? Oh yes. This makes the gibbering hordes of Angron far more effective as our armor save is solid and any weapons designed to negate it don’t do well against massed infantry.

Rend to chain axes?

This is something I am hoping we see.  With the new armor penalty to melee weapons, hopefully our chain axes will have a bit more bite to them. This is a hope, but we’ll see. It would not be out of character, and hopefully our nifty Artefacts stay in the game in some form. If Chainaxes were suddenly -1 armor save, this would really help make Khorne Berserkers a viable choice as right now in 7^th ed, a CSM with a mark of Khorne and two hand weapons is cheaper and pumps out the same number of attacks as a Berserker at 1 less Weapon Skill but again, for cheaper.  If suddenly Berserkers all had -1 armor saves base, they are definitely a viable choice even if a bit more expensive.

As part of this, hitting on a fixed value is all money for World Eaters as WS4 essentially meant hitting most things on 4s unless you were pretty much going to wipe them anyway.  Suddenly jumping up to a fixed 3+ (which seems likely based on the spoiled Marine stat-line) means that we land 16% more times in the standard marine on marine violence of the far future, at least for our standard CSM.

Hooking units/Increased charge range

We are ever so slightly faster now with the increase of engagement distance to 1 inch over Base-To-Base, and the ability for us to use our consolidate move to hook another unit into combat is all kinds of sweet.  This helps us mitigate overwatch to some extent and it allows a savvy player to exploit poor model placement.  And in the cases we go against another melee army? Well, it means that we can stagger our units so that charging one could easily lead to charging several, and there are not going to be too many times when another unit wants to be in combat with two of our units, even if they get to swing first.

While tangentially related, the fact that we rely on pistols so much is actually pretty cool now.  Since you get to shoot the closest enemy unit, even if engaged, if you have a pistol, all of a sudden, Kharn’s little plasma gun and our bolt pistols get us a bit more mileage.  If we are stuck in combat, we get to pump a few shots out before getting down to business with the old Axe to Face.

General Hopes:

I do hope we get some kind of morale control seeing as WE are dedicated to blood for the blood god.  While Fearless seems like it is going away, at least having rerolls or a higher leadership would help us not suffer more casualties for being shot.  That’d be nice.

As I said before, I hope we get to keep some of our Traitor-Legion rules like pre-game movement.  This was not only fluffy but really necessary for a pure WE army to be able to control the board and dictate charges.

Thanks as always for reading, and when Newhammer finally drops, let’s drown the followers of the corpse god in their own blood.  Angron approves this message.  Also, check out TFG Radio while you’re at it. All the Primarchs love us.

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