So Its been a while since I posted any of my thoughts on lists, I have written and tweaked about four or five lists with different concepts recently but here are two I feel ready to run out for some hard playtesting.

First up, A list I have named the SDS or Soulless Dirty Spam. Its one dimensional super  min/maxed (venom ) spammy , its going to be boring to play with or against and even a lobotomised baboon could do quite well with it after minimal practice.

As a side note I think it will look a bit shite on the table and anyone who is not a mindless painting servitor will no doubt want to kill themselves after the fifth or sixth venom is painted. But hen all is said and done though, It’s difficult to fault it’s potential effectiveness.

the heamo’s only real purpose here is to fill that minimum Hq requirement, for me , in a really competitive context the DE characters are a big let down, especially if you are going without special characters for one reason or t’other. He can float in the backfield and give FNP and some more wounds to anything demeched nearby. okay so I’m scratching around but tbh ,DE just don’t need HQ’s.(but thats a discussion for another time)

The Trueborn are experimental in this configuration, but really helps to max the torrent of poison also with my abysmal rolling I have seen no real improvement from 3-4 blasters , this squad can now also tear up anything you care to point it at , even at a good distance .

The wyches are there for the classic DE first turn charge on tank bunkers and the like they also have other roles they can perform, that runs to and includes speed bumping,ultimately multi charging tanks and shutting them down for even a turn is gold, if all their vehicls are stunned or out of range or whatever , the only way to shift the girls is to get out their boxes , maybe we loose 60 points of wyches but the ensuing splinter spam can pretty much erase anything not tank-like .

Its not particularly lance heavy with 21 Darklight weps in total, but combined with the wyches haywires hopefully buying some time for your main lance batteries to work, you should be able to focus fire down 2-3 vehicles per turn, there is enough splinter fire to tear a hole in reality  so once de-meched things should be pretty simple,  144  splinter shots at long range and 168  once closer in can evaporate anything.

Ravagers do their usual thing , the NF’s are again a bit of an experiment, but you need the ravagers to stay up in here so I thought I would try again .

This second list I much prefer

Wyches for tarpit/speedbump starting with FNP they rush out to shut down tanks and be a nuisance,  more longer range lances than usual to get stunning and opening boxes early on,  especially important as you want a nice freshly de meched unit to utterly destroy with the razorwing when it arrives (I’m looking forward to discussing these in an upcoming rave review)

Its a more balanced approach which I prefer, and actually contains some units I just enjoy playing with, though at the same time I think this gives a good player plenty of tools to work with, I like reavers for their melta but they are also golden for smashing long fags and lootas etc. The NF’s on the ravagers are again an experiment and will likely be replaced with FF’s if they continue to be fail.

I’ll likely end up with some variant of the second list after playtesting even though a fully tested and tweaked version of the SDS is ‘safer’, I’m just not prepared to spam anymore,and believe the DE book to be internally balanced enough to produce truly excellent non-spam lists, but as a list writing exercise and an example of what ‘can’ be done with the DE the SDS is just plain nasty .