The New Grey Knights vs Tyranids 2K - The Debut of the Dreadknight and Interceptors

[Glockster83]

jy2, great battle reports.... been going through a few of yours now and they are entertaining, full of critical review, and provide great turn by turn insight into the match and each battle.

From a guy who has never played against GK, I can say at least I know what units to look out for... as they slay my ork hordes lol

Thanks for all the insightful work, Cheers!

[jy2]

You're welcome.

I usually have 2 goals when doing battle reports. 1 is to experiment with different builds, strategies and combos. The second is to provide an informative report to readers, hopefully giving them a better understanding of the different units and strategies.

If I can help you with your game, even if you don't play the armies involved, then I am glad that my report can be of service.

Cheers.

[Tricktroller]

last tuesday I played a quick throw together list against new Greyknights and got stomped pretty bad. His luck was Amazing..... rolled more 6's than anything else including a 6 for grand startegy...... The dice gods were trolling me that day.

I played with 2 tervigons with ts and ag, 60 termagaunts with devourers, 9 warriors split into 3 squads of 3 basic tooling, 4 hive guard, a tyrannofex, and a doom in a pod.

He had a venerable dread, 2 dread knights with personal teleporters greatswords, psycannons and that crazy flamer, a stormraven gunship fully tooled, a grandmaster with termies deep striking in and, a squad of grey knights in the storm raven and a rhino with purifiers. The dakkagaunts worked alright, however the terrain was completely against me. Next time I will ask for area terrain instead of the massive bluffs we played with. With cover grey knights are not nearly so scary.
Also they are not happy with hive guard and certainly not when you drop a direct hit doom of malantai deep striking on his grand master's squad and both of his dread knights becoming st 10 first turn it dropped. Then blasting his purifiers to hell along with their transport. The 3+ invul on him is amazing, he lasted two more rounds through all kinds of s8 shots. I highly suggest this 140 point "oh btw all that crap dies" model even if he gets popped I find it to be extremely useful the first turn it shows up. I think my next list might be the parasite of mortrex, 16 warriors in two 8 man squads with bs/ls and ts with tons and tons of gaunts in front of them and the doom waiting to drop down and suck his commanders life force out. However if he has vehicles I'll simply take out some gaunts and put in zoans or, more likely, hive guard.

Also might do two tyranid primes with ls/bs and ts to go with the warrior squads, instead of parasite.

Need to play a few more games before I really decide what the least weak unit would be against them.

If you want to go shooty, I suggest 9 hive guard or, 6 and a doom or, 6 and 3 zoans. I would use tons of dakkagaunts screened by regular gaunts so you can get them in and blast away, put in a minimally tooled carnifex and lots of warriors to draw fire.

[Tricktroller]

edit double post)

[jy2]

Wow...that is 2 very expensive dreadknights, and I'm talking about 300pts a piece!

Nothing you can do when the dice doesn't go your way.

The Doom is good, but I'm concerned about taking him against the knights. If the knights are familiar at all with the doom, they would probably spread out so that you wouldn't be able to hit more than 1 or 2 units with Spirit Leech. Then next turn, S5 stormbolters would make the doom go away pretty quickly. But if the GK player is not aware, then the Doom can do some damage.

Hive Guards are just amazing against any mech armies.

[Tricktroller]

nah those s5 strombolters are pretty easy to ignore once you have 10 wounds and a 3+ invul save. Plus you have the always nice mycetic spore to give you a little bit of screening. Even if you just kill one unit with it, most of the time with grey knights it will be points for points even, and then he has a crazy ap1 blast of awesome at any strength. I have found a doom in a pod to be one of the most useful surgical strikes you can get, but thats just my opinion.

[jboweruk]

It's a matter of how an army is used, the GK's are not invincible even to vanilla marines, I'm a lousy tactical player but even I've managed a draw between UM and GK.

[jy2]

Very true indeed. While the list is important, more important is the skill of the player. I'd say list = 25%, player skill = 50% and luck of dice = 25%. Even a good player with a subpar list can win consistently and a bad player with a good list can lose consistently.

[Keetoowah]

The biggest problem one would have w/ tyranids is shadow in the warp and bio plasma vs footslogging

[jy2]

Shadows is only really good on the grey knights, who rely on hammerhand and force weapons for the majority of their powers. No other codex relies on psychic powers as much, not even farseer eldar and tervigon nids. Against any other army, it isn't really a big deal.

Bio-plasma is not a concern at all. Tyranids have enough ways to kill infantry. What they need are more ways to kill tanks. I've never played or seen any competitive tyranid players take the bio-plasma option.