Slam Captains derived at least some of their power from being able to leap over a screen with a big charge roll and assassinate something stood behind them – now you must declare the screen as a charge target in order to move within its Engagement Range, but also your charge will fail if you don’t land within Engagement Range of it, so it’s much harder for a single model on a 32mm base to just dive in and dumpster something without clearing the units in front of it first. On top of this there’s the impact of the new charging rules, which require you to land within Engagement Range of all units you charged, and which notably prevent you from jumping over enemy units you didn’t charge. Those big units are also, of course, impacted by the new Blast rule. A common tactic for Blood Angels in late 8th was to push a big unit of Death Company into someone’s face and then string most of them back to a pile of buff characters hiding in a ruin – this is no longer a legal move, and even if you conspire to tail back by using an odd formation it only takes a single casualty to roll a bunch of the unit up. Probably the biggest is the coherency changes, which require units of 6 or more models to have 2 models within 2″ of each other, and also force the ‘coherency check’ at the end of each turn where any models which are out of coherency are destroyed. There’s been a few changes to the rules which affect Blood Angels armies, especially the kind that were getting played right before the edition change. An aggressive, fast-paced, flying army of jump pack units was exactly what many Blood Angels players had always craved, and here it was, and it was even good enough to win events with – even, or some would say especially, in the era of Iron Hands when it presented a good counter-meta pick to their shooting power.Ĭoming into 9th edition then, how have the Blood Angels fared? Are they still viable on the table? Let’s explore these questions, ably assisted by Stephen Box from Vanguard Tactics! Suddenly a popular build emerged centred around a pile of their excellent special characters, surrounded by Sanguinary Guard and Death Company. Then in late 8th, with the release of the Blood of Baal supplement, the Angels got a new lease of life. Once the game changed, they kind of dropped out of things – you still saw them around but without being able to start with 20CP and regenerate so many that you finished with 22, fuelling the tricks a slam Captain could pull off became very expensive, and eventually other models came to fulfil a similar role better or more cheaply. Blood Angels Scouts also became very common as a way to take mid-field objectives and for being surprisingly fighty with the Blood Angels’ Red Thirst chapter tactic. Then someone noticed that you could create the horrendous Slamguinius combo, in an era when you had near-infinite CP available to fuel it, and could pair a trio of Blood Angels Captains with Guard and, initially, Custodes jetbikes, and then later on the meta-warping Castellan. Today, Liam “Corrode” Royle is talking about the Blood Angels.īlood Angels in 8th edition had a strange existence. With the Munitorum Field Manual out in the wild and the Faction FAQs released, now’s a good time to start taking a look at what’s changed for all of our favourite armies. 9th edition is on the way, and with it a whole raft of changes to the factions of Warhammer 40,000.
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