Today I want to talk about Grots! No, no, not the green ones, but rather the evil pointy eared variety: Grotesques!
Guest Writer: Dan Meyer
While playing test games is the best way to understand your options, it’s hard to get in enough games to understand all the variables at play and arrive at a reasonable set of expectations. Have no fear though! I am here to help by giving you an in depth look at what you should really expect out of a unit or piece of wargear.
My Shtick
I will look at a unit and their wargear options and help you understand what is the best choice for a given situation or at least help you figure out what you can truly expect from your units. I achieve this by simulating 1,000,000 iterations of that unit attacking a set of common targets that are representative of things you will see in the meta and get a true sample population so we can not only understand the mean of the expected outcome, but also how the variance shapes the outcome distribution. This will give you a much better appreciation for the variability in your game. If you have any questions on my process, ask away!
Groovy Grotesques are invited to the dance…
While Tau and Custodes shred up the meta (go read last week’s 40k Meta Analysis article!), Drukhari have slithered down to a measly ~55% win rate. As a Drukhari player since 6th edition, I have always had a love for Grotesques (forever mentioned as Grots in this article because I’m lazy). Grots have been a mainstay for my playstyle and have only gotten more useful (albeit less tanky) as time has gone on. Today, these are found in many successful Drukhari lists and we will dive in to get a glimpse of their potential. Let’s consider the two weapon options they are armed with:
| 5x Grotesques | |||||
| Weapon | Attacks | Strength | AP | Damage | Abilities |
| Monstrous Cleaver | 25 | 5 | 2 | 2 | – |
| Flesh Gauntlet | 20 | 6 | 0 | 1 | Unmodified 6s to wound cause a mortal wound. |
The monstrous cleaver is a wonderful weapon, granting you an additional attack while delivering solid AP2 and 2 damage. The flesh gauntlet is neat in that you can fish for mortal wounds with The Torture’s Craft stratagem that Grots have access to. The other thing to recall is that Grots have Blade Artists, which means a 6 to hit grants an additional AP.
For these quick analyses, we will consider a five man squad because it fits neatly into a raider (you will commonly also see 3 and 4 man squads as well). Here we will consider three conditions for the Monstrous Cleaver:
- Baseline
- +1 Hit from Power from Pain (Turn 3 and on)
- Reroll wounds from The Torture’s Craft stratagem
- +1 Hit and Reroll wounds
For the Flesh Gauntlet we will consider a single option:
- +1 Hit and Reroll wounds while fishing for 6s
The monstrous cleaver will be examined against Marines, Custodian Guard and Vertus Praetors while we simply examine the Flesh Gauntlet against Custodian Guard and Vertus Praetors.
Let the Simulation Begin…
First, let’s take a look at the baseline squad output with no inherent external buffs. Recall that Blade Artists is accounted for in all of these results as well.
Figure 1: 5x Grotesques with Monstrous Cleaver vs. Variety of Units
A base unit of 5 Grots does amazing work against Marines, quickly making mincemeat of our power armored friends with good AP and solid 2 damage. Let’s note how beautifully normal-like that distribution is too! Up against Custodes, they do amazing work again. On average they are killing two custodian guard while almost killing a full bike from a Vertus Praetor squad. Let’s turn up the volume by considering some buffs Grots can use!
Next we consider adding a simple +1 to hit modifier from Power from Pain.
Figure 2: 5x Grotesques with Monstrous Cleaver and +1 Hit vs. Variety of Units
Plus 1 to hit does a superb job of raising Grot output higher, killing an additional two marines, helps guarantee a bike kill 60%+ of the time, and almost wipes out a full three man custodian guard squad ~35% of the time.
Instead of +1 hit, let’s consider reroll wounds by using The Torture’s Craft stratagem for 2 CP. This should really start to raise the results!
Figure 3: 5x Grotesques with Monstrous Cleaver with Reroll Wounds vs. Variety of Units
We get more bang for our buck out of this one boost over +1 hit, showing that 50% of the time you are wiping out a 3 man Custodian Guard or 10 man Marine squad, while almost killing half a squad of Vertus Praetors. That is truly quite astounding. The sheer quantity of attacks from a single squad of five sees amazing multiplicative increases in output with any sort of buff. For our final consideration for Monstrous Cleavers let’s look what happens when you stack +1 hit and reroll wounds!
Figure 4: 5x Grotesques with Monstrous Cleaver with +1 Hit and Reroll Wounds vs. Variety of Units
Holy smokes folks! Fully buffed Grots absolutely trash basic marine equivalents off the table, all while killing a 3 man Custodian Guard squad ~80% of the time. Perfect for when you really need them to go away and capture that objective. Unfortunately we weren’t able to guarantee a squad kill on the Vertus Praetors, but are capable of killing 2-3 of them ~40% of the time…really not bad when you consider how freaking jacked that unit is. The 4++ and 6+++ FNP and Toughness 6 makes for a hard unit to budge and this really goes to show it as Grots are some of the most lethal units in the Drukhari codex!
Lastly, we examine the one other weapon Grots are armed with: the Flesh Gauntlet.
Figure 5: 5x Grotesques with Flesh Gauntlet with +1 Hit and Reroll Wounds vs. Variety of Units
As it would appear here, the flesh gauntlet is not a great weapon. Here we used 20 attacks with full reroll wounds in an attempt to produce mortal wounds as well as some minor damage from the normal weapon profile in an attempt to get around Custode invulnerable saves. You are better off just attacking unbuffed with Monstrous Cleavers. It’s hard to envision a time where you would opt to fish for 6’s over probably wounding on 5s at worst with decent AP and damage output…not really sure why that is a weapon option overall. Have you found a good case to use them before?
Well there you have it! Grotesques are an amazing option in the codex and are quite capable of inflicting serious damage on your opponent’s army and are actually capable of more easily dealing with Custodes than other units we have recently reviewed. I highly recommend considering running them and if you’re like me love playing coven anyways because the rest of the coven range is pretty awesome. The Talos is easily in my top three favorite models! Personally, the Grotesque model is terrible value as a blister pack and not an overly great sculpt, so I opted to convert roughly 20-25 them over the last decade or so. I had a blast converting most of mine from Orruk Brutes models from Age of Sigmar and lots of coven bits!
Let me know if you have any questions, comments or concerns with any of the results you have seen here! And of course, I welcome all suggestions for future simulations!
The Emperor Protects,
Dan