I was actually surprised that daring to suggest a potential HQ alternative to Librarians would cause such a response. I don’t intend to continue that debate, but instead expand the benefits of taking a certain Chaplain in vanilla Marine armies. The best bang for you buck hands down is the named Ultramarine Chaplain Cassius. Now before I talk about my experience playing Cassius I want to mention that I almost always run my Chaplains as a secondary HQ unit. I like the flexibility the other Space Marines characters give (changing the rules of your army) and Chaplains are additions to my armies for the specific reasons as I mentioned in the earlier post. With that said I treat Cassius the same way: he is an addition not a centerpiece and thus treated as so.
Cassius is a pound for pound the best costed special character in the Space Marine codex. He is only 125 points and you get 2 wound, toughness 6, Feel no Pain, bad ass. With a WS5 he is often hitting on 3s and re-rolling just like any chaplain, but his best utilityis using him to soak up attacks in assault. The best way to achieve this is allow him to lead the charge. If you have good spacing techniques: forcing your opponent to put 3-4 guys on Cassius, will reduce the combat effectiveness of assaulted unit with little risk to Cassius. Even if your opponent is wielding power weapons they will find having to wound on 6s a low probability prospect. Throwing him at either units that rely on torrents of attacks and shots is often a good method to keep the rest of this unit alive. A good example being Ork boys. Cassius can soak up massive amounts of damage from basic 4 ws 4 str opponents that even after getting through the T6 your reward is now getting though the 3+ 4+ FNP.
What makes Cassius potent is he is in the Space Marine codex. He would get lost in another codex– like Space Wolves and Blood Angels where there are so many other options to take. In the Space Marine codex he provides a little more survivability to your assault units that can make a great difference. Cassius is also great when you need break him off with another special character for assaults. Especially when you combine him with Calgar or Lysander. The reason for this is simple: Eternal Warrior. Cassius with his high toughness (baring force type weapons) effectively has ET and combined with real ET character can prove deadly. This puts your opponent in an unenviable position of considering just how to split their attacks when faced with two models that pose different sets of kill conditions.
That doesn’t even get into the prospect of people shooting at the mini death star. Now you have a T6 unit that can soak up to 6 wounds. Take Lysander and Cassius as an example: against a barrage of Bolters from a full Tactical Squad. They should put 2.2 wounds on with only about 3% chance of wounding either Cassius or Lysander. Then say Missile Fangs want a crack at ya? Since they cannot double out Cassius he still gets his FNP save (plus Lysander has his 2+). So that means on average the Long Fangs are doing 3 wounds with about 25% chance of wounding Lysander (if you allocate 2 wounds to him) and (oops forgot about the +4 invul save for some reason in my calculations so way less than 50% chance of doing a wound) 50% against Cassius. This doesn’t even get into the fun of putting them both in a squad; throwing Joe and Schmo to the wind or annoy your opponent by throwing wounds on them avoid unnecessary death to other unit members. So unless someone dedicates some serious Plasma/Lascannon fire to these two guys you should get both where you want them and when you want them. Just remember (like any unit) put them in a situation where they can succeeded. You still are putting 325 points in danger, so don’t go throwing them at a Dark Eldar gunline thinking they will survive if you miss your assault.
So that leaves an unavoidable question why would you ever take a Chaplain in Terminator Armor if you can have Cassius? The answer is going is usually never unless you really want that combi-melta… Which gets to another little fun tidbit about Cassius: he have a combi-flamer! This little surprise has never been game winning, but has thrown many of my opponents for a loop. As well he has hellfire rounds that are pretty useless unless you plan on running him with Sternguard for some God awful reason.
Just think of Cassius as a Chaplain with some bonus survivability tricks that makes him pretty obnoxious. Overall Cassius is great choice if you want to go the Chaplain route. Sadly, Cassius has shitty metal model…err FineCast , so I suggest making your own Cassius that better represents his unique cybernetic body. Just remember that like most Chaplains they should be an addition to your Space Marine list not the centerpiece, Cassius is no different.
How have you used Cassius?