Chaos Marine Analysis - Chaos Spawn

Now that I've finished with all of the non-special character Hqs, I'm going to move on. I'll come back to the special characters later and when I do I'll also go through the units that they unlock / unlock as troops. So I'll move on to Fast Attack to give the false impression of progress.

The unit that I'm going to be talking about today is the one that I looked at first when I picked up the Codex. We already knew that they were probably going to be getting a buff, they couldn't have been much worse in the previous Codex, but the buff that we've seen is pretty strong. Allow me to introduce the Chaos Spawn.

I am pleased to say that the random movement that the Spawn saw in the last Codex is gone. Already much better, but what I can easily compare them to now are the Wraiths from the Necron Codex. Here's why.

They're beasts, so they're pretty fast, like the Wraiths being jump infantry, but what makes them most comparable is that they both tarpit extremely well. Base, Spawn are 10pts per T5 Fearless wound. That is excellent, but it can get even better once you get into the Marks. Yes, Spawn can take Marks, and the most obvious one is Mark of Nurgle, meaning that you are now paying 12pts per T6 Fearless wound. I would definitely recommend giving them this Mark. The first reason being that you are basically immune to boltguns, if you're charging a squad of tactical marines they will need 6s to hit and 6s to wound. Not easy. Add to this the fact that they cannot be instant killed by S10 weapons, whereas without it I'd just point my Manticore at you and then your Spawn are in trouble.

Yes, Spawn have random attacks, and they have a random mutation in combat, but honestly, I don't care. What you use them for is tarpitting and it doesn't matter how many attacks they get or what their mutation is, although the 4+ save is quite nice. Like Wraiths, you can't rely on them doing real damage, due to the random nature of the Spawn, but you can guarantee that unless your Spawn are in combat with a huge hammer unit they are going to keep them there for a while, many hammer units may even struggle with that, all for 180pts. In short, I think that we have some cheese here.

That said, they can still churn out a decent amount of damage if the dice are with you, with between 3 and 8 S5 attacks per Spawn on the charge. The only downside to their tarpitting however is that they're WS3, so they are going to be hit on 3s most of the time, but your opponent is also going to need 6s to hit them on 3s most of the time too. So, how exactly would I run these? I'll just put in a summary.

5 Chaos Spawn: 180pts

-Mark of Nurgle