Hey all, Vince here.
Just wanted to share my thoughts on some of the various ideas I have had regarding representing Chaos Legions better with newer codexes than the CSM dex 'The Gav Incident'. It seems to me that what Gav et al left out of the CSM dex (which was in the 3.5 dex) was the fluffier based armies, namely some of the nine legions of Chaos to some extent.
The CSM book seems to represent the newly chaos warband army, like a Red Corsairs or another renegades army who has recently turned and fails to take the flavour of the 3.5 book with the legions. Sure, some legions can be done well enough: Death Guard, Noise Marines, World Eaters, Black Legion, Thousand Sons, Iron Warriors. Thats the end of the list though. A Word Bearers army can't particularly be done with fluffy daemons unless we do an apocalypse game with 1k of CSM and 2K of Daemons allied. An Alpha Legion army can be done to some extent, but the infiltrating CSM and the cultists in the 3.5 dex are missing in The Gav Incident. Similarly, the Night Lords can't truly be represented if a player wanted to take a raptor type army like one in Lord of the Night and/or Soul Hunter (forgot which one now!). We will focus on the Night Lords in this article since I think that they can truly be represented by another dex.
So I submit that the BA codex can better represent Night Lords armies. The up side of a BA jumper style list is obvious for Night Lords and fits the fluff perfectly. DoA too makes the DS accurate and can represent terror tactics at its highest, since the ASM and VVets come down out of nowhere and freak the enemy out :P
VVets are particularly fluffy as the Chosen Night Lords who can assault on the turn they come down and really spook people. Honour Guard also make nice Chosen retinues for the Librarians (or any other characters you may want to have). DC can be the possessed marines quite well. Sang Priests are the Night Lords apothecaries who come down with the raptors and FC and FnP mixes with terror tactics nicely. And finally, should you want a Daemon Prince like character, Mephiston fits the bill nicely and has sweet powers to boot. Perhaps most importantly, the ASM can score.
So now we can compare this BA build to a normal CSM build for Night Lords. We will want DPs, CSMs in rhinos, Chosen, Raptors and scary heavy support, possibly defilers/vindis/preds/LRs etc. The main issue with this build is that the Raptors (most commonly used by Night Lords of course) cannot score. Similarly, we could go for 3 x 10 raptors tooled for combat but they become pricy for non scoring guys. CSM don't have psychic hoods and this is another general issue with the dex. Of course, we have all the usual problems with CSM too, meaning a reliance on MGs to pop armour and overreliance on Oblits (should we take them) to do everything and more for us. The limit of 30 jump pack guys is a bit too limiting imo, for a Night Lords build. What would really help the dex out is if there was a NL special character to make raptors troops and give them disruptive and terror tactic type skills. Also, I miss the days when Night Lords could actually make it Nightfighting ^^.
Anywho, I hope that the aforementioned ramblings have at least somewhat convinced you that the CSM dex is not the be all, end all of the Legions and the BA dex represents a raptor legion for NL well imo. So onto the list I will be using and its basically the BA Jumpers list Kirby made on 3++ for 2K. The VVets could also be swapped to Devs to represent Havocs but it looses a little bit of the Night Lords terror feel but adds some shooting which is quite scary for opponents so is also doable ^^. I haven't altered either of the lists but could do, dropping a Libby and HG unit for Mephiston or DC with jump packs.
Anywhoozle, the Jumpers are here and the Blood Hammer is here.
Toodles pinkies!
