Hi,
With only days to go until the Space Wolf codex hits the shelves the first good pics of the codex have come out. Head over to Grot Orderly's post (here) to see the pics.
Unfortunately the pics of the Spanish codex, but you can see all the points costs of the models. The pics generally confirm the rumours (but also give us some new info) on the base cost of units:
Bloodclaws - 12
Wolf Guard - 18
Skyclaws - 15
Long Fangs - 15
Dreadnaught - 95
Bjorn - 220
Harald Deathwolf - 190
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| [A Great Harald Deathwolf conversion, see here for the full forum post including more pics] |
Grot Orderly's post contains over 40 pics of the new codex, and includes weapons stats, the summary page (with both unit & weapon stats), the alternative formation (with 6 HQs), so head over to check them out.
Early Draft Changes To My Army
I've got a couple of games with my Space Wolves at 1500 points in the last fortnight, and I was pretty pleased how the army performed. My army is based around a cheap Wolf Guard Battle Leader on a thunderwolf accompanied by a full unit of fenrusian wolves, which along with 5 thunderwolves is my main assault force. To sow confusion and take out key units I have 2 units of grey hunters in drop pods with dual meltaguns, and advancing into the mid field I have a unit of grey hunters with dual plasma guns. The back field is held by 10 long fangs, and coming in via a drop is 5 wolf guard with nothing but 5 combi-plasmas to take out a key unit with 10 plasma shots.
The mid field grey hunter unit with plasma guns didn't get into combat in either game, and I doubt it will see combat much, so I'm going to save points and not give them close combat weapons. This means even with the increase in weapons costs they will only go up about 10 pts.
The drop melta grey hunters do normally see combat, and I think 2 pts each for close combat weapons is worth while to give them an extra attack each, particularly as counter attack now doesn't need a leadership test to activate. Also as wolf guard are an upgrade for the unit it's probably worth the 20 points (estimated) to upgrade one grey hunter to a wolf guard with a combi-melta to make the alpha strike against a vehicle more effective. This would increase the cost of this unit from 155 pts to 200 pts, which is a significant increase. I'll try it out for a few games before I do anything rash, however with only a slight increase in effectiveness (basically 1 combi melta shot) a 30% incr in cost is a tough pill to swallow.
Not surprisingly I haven't got any bloodclaws in my list, but with a drop to 12 pts they are looking tempting. Funny enough I even have some painted bloodclaws (back when bloodclaws were better than grey hunters (I think that was about 10 years ago in 3rd edition). A 10 bloodclaws can still win against non-assault units, and 120 points is a bargain for 10 models with Str/T 4 and a 3+ save. So rather than 2 drop pod melta units, I'm considering a drop pod melta unit and drop podd bloodclaw unit.
If I go with taking the close weapons off the plasma grey hunters, and swapping one of the drop pod melta squads for bloodclaws I'm roughly even on points. In my view my 3 troop choices will not be as effective as they used to be, but then again everybody thought grey hunters were a bit too good for their points. Hopefully they'll be good news in the changes to the rest of the codex, and I'm sure it won't be long before the community translates the Spanish codex pages.
Are you painting up anything new in anticipation of the new codex ? Or just more relieved that you con't have to replace close combat arms on grey hunters (like the early rumours were suggesting).
Rathstar