Chaos Daemons Analysis - Bloodcrushers

Again, sorry for the lack of content recently, lots of deadlines are almost upon me and I've been painting a tonne of Chaos Marines and playing a lot of Vassal. However, if you follow the Twitter feed you'll be up to date with exactly what's happening and when new content is up here. I'm also hoping to get some video content up on YouTube soon as well. 

When the Daemons update was realeased in late July last year, Bloodcrushers dropped out of favour. Now they had much more competition in the Elites slot, as they just couldn't stack up to Flamers. But how are they now.

 Bloodcrushers are a difficult subject really, as I'm trying to think of a way to elongate this post, as they really deserve it as I really like the unit, but I'm struggling to be honest, this is one of the reasons why this post has taken so long.

The advantages that Bloodcrushers come with are as follows. They are Cavalry, so they're quick moving things. They also come with 3 wounds.

However, here are the problems. They're only T4 with a 5++ save, so they take those wounds much more easily than a Marine does, their 3 wounds also doesn't mean anything against anything anti-tank, which every army should really be packing some of.

Secondly, they only strike at AP3 in combat. If you spend too much of your time trying to avoid Terminators and get into combat with something squishy then that's just more turns of being shot at. Plus, you're spending 45pts a model for these guys, and they only have 3 attacks each, albeit at S5, WS5, but only 3 (4 on the charge at S6), so to get some serious hitting power out of them you're really going to need to pour in the points, and then even more so to saturate them in order to make sure that there's still enough of them alive when they hit combat to cause some damage. 

Thirdly, there are so many other units that are simply better at this for their points. Let's compare them to Flesh Hounds for a second.

Positives for Bloodcrushers:

- A ballistic skill (irrelevant).
- +1 Strength.
- +1 Wound.
- +1 Attack
- Strike at AP3

Positives for Flesh Hounds:

- Beasts.
- Scout.
- +2 to Deny the Witch.
- Can come in squads of 20.
- Are about 1/3 of the points costs of Bloodcrushers.

So with Flesh Hounds, you're getting twice as many wounds per point (close enough), you're slightly faster, you're getting twice as many attacks per point (base), you're more resistant to psykers, you're still striking at a high strength, you don't have to invest as much to get a useful squad but equally the option is there to make even more of a hammer with Flesh Hounds than you can with Bloodcrushers, etc. However, does it make a difference which force org slot they're in for Daemons? Well, I'll see later.

In the fluff section on the Bloodcrushers page it says this, 'Small arms fire patters harmlessly from its hide, serving only to enrage the daemonic beast further'. By this logic, Lasguns are not small arms fire. A good highlight of another example where the fluff does not match the rules.