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Initial Impressions of the Chaos Daemons


My initial impression of the Chaos Daemon Army in 40k is wow. I ran a battle with the help of a friend against my Eldar yesterday, and they played well. I don’t have a huge selection of models, but I have a lot of bases covered. Out of the unit choices I do have I will run down some of the highlights.
  • Pink Horrors-shrugging off damage with a 4+ invulnerable save is beautiful. And the warpfire attack was just what I expected. The strength of the attack versus the lower Toughness of the Eldar models was great. But they even managed to drop a Vyper on hull points. Sure, you can roll 36 dice and have a bad round- but they were perfect. I have a ton of Horror models, so any list I field will be stacked with ‘shooty’ troop daemons.
  • Bloodletters- in this game, they did not come under fire much to test their resilience. But they are strong and tough. I fielded a large unit led by a Khorne Herald on a Juggernaut. He gave them that extra little kick in hand-to-hand and killed the Autuarch of the enemy force in two rounds. After they popped on the field, it was easy to summon other troops near them thanks to the icon the unit had.
  • Flamers of Tzeentch- if anyone was wondering how well this unit would perform, they were crazy. The flame template is scary. And I was dropped it five times in the first round to utterly destroy a unit of Warpspiders. The only thing that survived was the Eldar Autuarch and the Exarch for the unit. The of flamers got subsequently hammered by shots from the Eldar Vypers, but survived long enough to see the demise of those vehicles. I had a Tzeentch Herald on a Disc tied into the Flamers, and while he hits pretty hard with the Bolt of Tzeentch.

Come to think of it- those were the only units that even came into play in the battle. I had a Lord of Change would helped mop up the side of the field the Flamers and one unit of Pink Horrors successfully cleared. And the single Bloodcrusher I fielded and the unit of Furies never made it across the board because I used them to support the Bloodletters. The biggest surprise for me was just the nature of the list.

Thanks to the Daemonic Assault rule. You can deploy this army anywhere on the board. I didn’t have any problems Deep Striking in. Only one unit didn’t make it in by Turn Two, everything else popped pretty close to where I wanted. My forces we split basically toward either end of my opponent’s line. On one side I wiped out every single model, but on the other end he was tied up massacring Horrors whenever the popped. The difference in the battle was my third big unit- the Bloodletters popped in the center of the field and were able to squash the Striking Scorpions controlling the center of the board. I ended up with nearly and entire army left to face off against a third of the Eldar forces.

And the Chaos Daemons don’t give up- ever. One unit of Horrors was down to just two models and just kept blasting away. The Eldar weren’t prone to routing either, but they stood their ground admirably and refused to fail Leadership checks. But simply the knowledge that the daemons are never going to run, never going to be pinned, never going to flee from a combat is just lovely.

I can’t wait to get some more games in. Will be nice to see how well they do.

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