"Hi Kirby,
First of all, let me thank you and everyone else in your blog. I have been reading it for the past two months and I find it pretty interesting and helpful.
Getting to the point, I would like to ask for some advice with list building. I am not a hardcore gamer, so I don't care if a list is really competitive, I rather prefer lists with a little bit of this and that so I can see the performance of different units when I play. My aim is to have an army of grey knights which is somewhat different to those I see posted everywhere on the net.
For this I would like to work around the units I like most at 1500:
* First of all, Dreadknight, which I don't see a lot in lists these days.(This is the only one unit I like so much I would take anywhere and anytime)
* Second, some heavy transport like Stormraven or Land Raider.
* Third, One unit of Inquisitor+Henchmen(preferably close combat oriented?). Note that I used "one" because I think this is the idea in the codex, and I don't like those lists of warrior acolytes spam.
Those would be my choices to start with. I know the heavy transport should carry some terminators or purifiers and that I will need some 10 man strike squads. I hope you can help me fill in the gaps and end with something fun and playable.
Mc Harr"
Glad you've found the blog useful Harr and sorry this has taken me a bit to get to. I'm pretty sure we can get a couple Stormravens and Dreadknights into a list whilst having it not be terrible, so bonus there. I actually disagree with Ravens/Raiders carrying Purifiers as they aren't super scary in combat. They are a great all-rounder unit and I love them and they will crush face a lot of the time in CC until they go up against dedicated CC units that can take their hits and punch back. We can build a Henchmen unit which is capable of doing this though as nothing else in the book is super capable of doing that (Paladins and GKT are of course viable but with only a handful of 4++ saves in combat and Paladins being vulnerable to powerfists, not always the most point efficient). You wanted henchmen as well so this works out great!
Dreadknights are a mixed bag for me. Bare bones + deepstriking in support of the Henchmen in Ravens works nicely though the Ravens are then pretty vulnerable by themselves. Teleporters are an option but very expensive and often leave your Dreadknight in front of your opponent and waiting to be smashed to be bits with shooting (hi meltaguns!). In regards to weapons for them, I like the Heavy Incinerator. GK has a lot of anti-infantry potential, particularly since we are taking the Storm Raven, but some cover busting is very nice and can be highly useful on the deepstrike. Everything is really too expensive and isn't too flash so we'll stick with barebones and potentially Incinerators.
Now then, we have to fill the rest of the force out. This is going to suck most of our points up so we're probably going to have to run small GKSS squads in Razorbacks to get efficient firepower and saturation and we may not be able to run two DK + Stormravens. Let's see how we go for points first.
We'll take two Dreadknights with Heavy Incinerators for 160 points each or 320. We'll then take two Stormravens. The question is how do we want to equip these guys? HB+Assaultcannon is pretty good when you add psybolts to them so we might try that to increase it's anti-tank potential. These cost 225 each then for a total of 450 bringing our grand total to 770. Now we want two Inqs + Henchmen units and obviously want some Servo skulls cause they rock... Let's see if we can get some solid Troops though before we build the Henchmen units.
A GKSS squad w/Psycannon + Psyback is 160 points. We'll try four of these which is a bit light on scoring bodies but they are in tanks and there are some quite aggressive threats elsewhere in the army. Four of these will set us back 640 points and takes our total to 1410 points. Not going to work at 1500 though we could do something at 1750. Let's see how many points we go over I guess and work from there.
We want two Inq + Hench units which are combat focused. This generally means Crusaders for their 3++ and DCA for pure awesome output. Hammerhand is obviously going to be a very nice bonus as well to get over that crappy strength characteristic and we want servo skulls. Let's start with the Inquisitors. We're going to go with Xenos Inquisitors for one reason. Grenades. Although they don't have the combat options Malleus Inquisitors have, rad and psykotroke grenades rock and really help out the henchmen. We'll therefore take 2x Xenos w/2x Skulls, Rad + Psykotroke nades and Hammerhand for 91 points each. Expensive so we might cut out some of the nades later. For now, let's look at our henchmen layout.
As I said before we'll look at taking Crusaders and Death Cult Assasins. DCA have high I, lots of power weapon attacks and with good WS/Strength hit hard. They also come with a 5++ so aren't completely paper thin but aren't exactly durable. Here's where some Crusaders come in. Less offensive potent with just a single attack each, lower strength and initiative but come with a storm shield and power weapon. Lots of hits can be shoved onto the storm shields to preserve the DCA to do what they do best when assaulting into cover. We therefore need to get the right mix of these guys. We'll take a squad of ten (150 points) and go for
This however takes us to a whopping 1892 points so isn't even feasible at 1750. With some tweaking and the addition of further GKSS in Razorbacks it is semi-viable at 2000 points but with only 25 scoring models and would look something like this (coming, hold on).
Now back to Harr's e-mail request. Now we are obviously going to need to drop a Stormraven+hench combo as it's just not going to work (and having re-read Harr's email, he only wanted one anyways so lucky us!). Dropping a Stormraven and adding the tooled out Xenos Inq takes our points total back to 1276 so lots of points to play with now. We'll setup our henchmen squad like this:
5x Deathcult Assasins, 4x Crusaders, 2x Warriors w/meltaguns
This gives us quite some combat punch with the DCA + Crusaders combined with grenades and the Warriors are capable of dropping a tank if needed. It costs us 163 points taking us to 1439 and leaves points to play with! That's always nice. Not much we can do so let's add another servo skull, combi-melta and power armor to the Inquisitor which leaves 40 points left. We can then add Dozer Blades and Searchlights to the four Razorbacks and a teleport homer on the Storm Raven for giggles:
Xenos Inquisitor w/Rad & Psykotroke Grenades, Hammerhand, combi-melta, power armor, 3x servo skulls
Henchmen 5x Death Cult Assassin, 4x Crusaders, 2x Warrior Acolytes w/meltagun
5x Grey Knight Strike Squad w/psycannon, Razorback w/psybolt ammo, dozer blade, searchlight
5x Grey Knight Strike Squad w/psycannon, Razorback w/psybolt ammo, dozer blade, searchlight
5x Grey Knight Strike Squad w/psycannon, Razorback w/psybolt ammo, dozer blade, searchlight
5x Grey Knight Strike Squad w/psycannon, Razorback w/psybolt ammo, dozer blade, searchlight
Storm Raven w/psybolt ammo, teleport homer, searchlight
Dreadknight w/Heavy Incinerator
Dreadknight w/Heavy Incinerator
Totals: 1500 points
32 infantry + 2 MCs
5 tanks
Not hyper competitive but also not terrible whilst meeting the brief of Dreadknights, Stormraven and combat henchmen unit. Hope you don't have any issues with the MSU GKSS Harr though if you do you can combine them to full squads but you'd hurt the lists overall effectiveness.
The lone Raven is going to get targeted a lot and if the Henchmen unit get caught in the open they are going to get pummelled pretty badly but the Dreadknights + GKSS give a good solid core to the army which can be very aggressive whilst the GKSS maintain midfield and put out pretty decent firepower.
