Unit Review: Plasma Honor Guard

So this weekend was the debut of my most recent addition to my Blood Dragons army - Plasma gun honor guard.

I painted them in one night and their transport in the following night, so they could be looking a little better. They'll get touch-ups (highlights, and probably a plasma color on their guns) with the rest of the army when I motivate myself to get started on that. Anyways, I think they turned out pretty cool. Like my squad sergeants (and captain) I gave these guys each an eldar banner bit which I got from the warstore. Also to make them stand out a little more I got some head crests by secret weapon which I am very happy with. I still need to get some kind of chalice or goblet to put on the hip of my sanguinary novitiate.

On to wargear... Well, the reason I got this squad in the first place was in order to fill a gap in my army. I needed a unit that could bring down monstrous creatures, IC's, multi-wound characters with eternal warrior... Usually, vindicators do the job of bombing scary shit. While my pair of vindicators is a great way to deal with terminator and nob blobs, what they can't do is punk a T6+ MC in one hit or more importantly the all-too-common eternal warrior with a 2+ save.

Mephiston, meet plasma guard. FNP is great gets-hot insurance and the furious charge bubble sometimes comes in handy. I wanted the squad to be shooty for a couple reasons. #1, they can't be Jump packers as said units have no place in my mech list. #2, the HG would be mounted in a Rhino or Razor and thus can't assault out of it (I went for the razorback). #3 The rest of my army is shooty. I want to avoid close combat at all costs (Sounds strange for BA, doesn't it?) unless I'm playing Tau or something equally pathetic in HTH.

Believe it or not... after the 6 or so games I have had the opportunity to use them in so far, they've been exceptional. In fact, I really don't think I'll ever take a list without them from now on.

The razorback is there because they need a transport and the army needs more ranged anti-tank. I thought long and hard about whether to take TL assault cannons, Las Plas, or TL Las. You can never have too many assault cannons, but you can have too many tanks which make it hard to move through your own army in order to fire them! I didn't want to have another tank fighting for midfield space in an already cramped castle formation.

The lascannons are nice because I can sit the razorback safely behind a vindicator or predator and shoot over my front line of armor. The las plas was ruled out simply because A: The honor guard have enough plasma already - B: I'd  rather be hitting  89% of the time instead of 66% of the time with the much needed lascannon.

The las-plas extra weapon argument  is a moot point for my army as the razorback isn't going to be getting shot at. There are much much more immediate threats in my army that my opponent needs to deal with. In addition to that, the TL las can be fired when I do make that 12" move, dump, doubletap. That's an advantage of it being only one weapon system that a lot of folks on the internet overlook.

More to come