1500 Shooting Blood Angels

[ElectricPaladin]

Have you considered going unbound and just spamming sternguard in drop pods for instance?

I might try it someday, but at the moment I don't have enough Sternguard or drop pods...

Admittedly I haven't played with my B.angels for the longest time, but I can just see your troops melting under heldrake spam, or any ap3 badness, kinda destroying the point of having them in the first place you know? Also, unless you're really really interesting in being fluffy, why not just field them using C:SM rather than blood angels? No special rules in their codex actually benefits a shooty army, and as assault is gimped.. :\

Well, the entire point of this army is to play around with a counts-as Captain Tycho, because that special character comes with a few interesting special rules. If I wanted to play Codex Marines, I'd have hung on to my Exorcists, or actually gotten around to stripping them and turning them into Sons of Medusa.

[ElectricPaladin]

Additionally, it's actually really hard to make a Codex: Space Marines army with Codex: Blood Angels models. The differences are subtle, but just enough that it's a pain in the butt. For example - what's the most popular special weapon for Blood Angels assault squads? Meltaguns! What are your options in Codex: Space Marines? Plasma pistols and flamers! And there are a lot of good choices for Codex: Space Marines - like grav-guns and centurions - that will never be usable in my Blood Angels, even when a new codex comes out.

So... not a great investment.

[Gwhizz84]

Mm I guess, 'twas just a suggestion as I said I've never played a game in 6th or 7th, don't think I played many in 5th for that matter, but it just seems you're not really playing to the armies strengths by going for a shooty army. I don't know how your local group feels about allies for things like centurion's/TFC's? It just seems a waste to try and fit an assault based army into a shooty configuration, especially as you've gone for a very short range set up.. for like the first 1 or 2 turns all you'll have is a LRR and stormraven trundling up the table and every single anti tank weapon in their army is gonna be shooting the hell out of you :/ If you're against allies I'd atleast get some devastators in, perhaps with lascannons/ML's.. I don't have the latest e-codex so I'm not sure if they can get flakk missiles, but just having something on the board that can reliably destroy heavy armour from above 12" is always a good idea

[ElectricPaladin]

Also, to clear up a common misconception about the Blood Angels...

The Blood Angels aren't actually an "assault army." Above all, they're still Space Marines. You can't win - certainly not now, in some ways not ever - with the Blood Angels if your only strategy is "advance, then get into combat." It's not how the codex actually plays.

What Blood Angels are is Space Marines. They have the basic Space Marine traits - 4s in most important stats, 3+ armor saves, high Leadership, the And They Shall Know No Fear USR, and boltguns as the basic weapon. The question then is, what do you add to this basic templates? Where other chapters add more shooting options (ie. Codex: Space Marines adds thunderfire cannons, grav weapons, centurions, and the like) a focus on bikes and terminators (Codex: Dark Angels) or, er, whatever the hell it is Space Wolves do (I still don't understand that codex), Codex: Blood Angels adds...

• A dedicated (and terrifying) close combat unit (the death company).
• Another decent close combat unit with jump packs (sanguinary guard)
• A new kind of dreadnought that has more and better attacks (furioso dreadnought).
• A tank built for close quarters shooting (Baal predators).
• Easier and more plentiful access to Independent Characters (chaplains as Elites and sanguinary priests) that make units more durable and better in close combat.
• Assault marines who are scoring and can take melta weapons.
• Pistols that duplicate some of the rules of melta and flame weapons.
• All rhino-based vehicles are fast; land raiders can Deep Strike

If you put this all together, I don't think that you get an assault army. This isn't Orks, where everything has BS 2 or 3, but you can easily field a huge horde of models and a ton of tanks with assault ramps. This isn't Daemons where almost nothing has a shooting attack, but you can field Troops choices with a power weapon on every model. This is Space Marines plus being better at charging into combat. This is Space Marines who like to move a little faster, cut it a little closer, but a little more in the thick of things, and have (or at least are supposed to - the codex is in a pretty sad state) the durability and ferocity to make it stick even in such conditions.

As Caitsidhe said, this is an assault army. It's just not an assault combat army. It's an assault close quarters shooting army, with decent combat capability as a trick it can pull out of its back pocket, if need be.

[Gwhizz84]

Maybe these days, but I always played them as 'get into combat as quickly and overpoweringly as you can'.. this was admittedly back when rhino rushing actually worked mind you, but still.. You're really gonna suffer against anything with long range firepower, as the Land Raider is likely to be the only tank on the board first 1-2 turns, its gonna attract every single high str weapon like a magnet, if it gets destroyed you're looking at walking your sternguard up into range to do anything veeeerry slowly.. even with FNP they're not gonna last long after that, even with assault marines and the stormraven as distractions. Once the sternguard are gone you have.. 12" melta guns, and a stormraven to kill any armour, or maybe enough anti-personnel firepower to kill 1 squad a turn max. I'm not sure what match ups your facing but Tau, eldar, AM, chaos, dark eldar are all gonna rip through your marines before you can even blink imo, especially if you're thinking of unloading your 'tacs 12" away from something to destroy it. You just can't the resulting low ap return fire with the amount of bodies in that list. As it's nearly 2am for me I cba grabbing my codex out to make a 'better' list but something like Tycho, 6 sternguard in a drop pod with 3 combi meltas, 5 sniper scouts, 10 man tac with combi plasma, plasma and lascannon, 6 man tac with combi melta, melta and razorback with lascannon, 10 devastators, maybe a vindicator and a stormtalon would be more workable, with a ADL/quad gun for more AA. Target saturation means atleast something will survive enough to do dmg, the sternguard should pop a vehicle when they arrive, before they die, the vindicator should attract a ****load of fire but if it survives to get upfield it's a reliable killer of MEQ, and while they're shooting that you're destroying the biggest threats with your own firepower.