Now that we’ve got that out of the way, the proposal in question:
Remove Noise Marines and Plague Marines from the Chaos HQ.
They are getting dissolved into upgrades.
Add Mark of Nurgle and Mark of Slannesh to Chaos Space Marines as upgrades that become available at Tier 2.
Mark of Nurgle would a significant health boost and the Plague Marine passives (slow aura, normal firing, explosive death) while reducing movement speed. One member of the squad (along with the Aspiring Champion) equips a Plague Knife and Bolt Pistol while the other two squad members retain their Bolters. Plague Knives are intended to be roughly the same DPS as a Chainsword.
Mark of Slannesh would essentially turn the squad into Noise Marines – one unit gains a Sonic Blaster and the squad gains Cacophony. There may be room for the Aspiring Champion to be altered in some way, but I feel that he’s fine as he is – his melee weapon would benefit the squad admirably due to the Sonic Blaster disabling ranged attack.
Add Mark of Nurgle and Mark of Slannesh to Chaos Havocs as upgrades that become available at Tier 2.
Mark of Nurgle would essentially turn the Havocs into what Plague Marines are now – slow, durable units with two bolters, a Rocket Launcher, and the Plague Marine passives. The health upgrade wouldn’t make them as durable as the current Plague Marines, however – I’d say 1250 health rather than 2000 for a ballpark estimate.
Mark of Slannesh, as you may have guessed, would outfit them with a Blastmaster and two Bolters.
Remove Bloodletters from the Chaos HQ.
The resulting flexibility increase that would come from making those upgrades available is enough to warrant trimming elsewhere, and I feel the best place to do this would be in the removal of Bloodletters. Chaos already has jump melee with Raptors and teleporting melee with Terminators. Bloodletters’ presence also makes MoK CSM outright less desirable – while MoK CSM may be better at chasing retreating units due to a higher movespeed, Bloodletters have too many other advantages: being able to instantly close the distance with Warp, being able to dodge extremely damaging abilities with Warp, being immune to suppression, having a higher damage output (while they don’t have ranged weapons, they can teleport and that kind of nullifies that “drawback”) and being (arguably) cheaper than MoK CSM. I have no issues with Bloodletters remaining as Chaos Lord special infantry or something similar, but I feel that their presence in the Chaos HQ roster can easily be done without (especially if CSM/Havocs get the proposed upgrades).
This is something that I’ve been thinking of for a while. Back in the days of Company of Heroes, I primarily played Panzer Elite because I liked the concept of a single infantry unit that could be upgraded to handle different threats because of how unique it was compared to the other factions. Considering Chaos’s overall theme of “which god you worship heavily influences what you become”, the mechanic of upgrading base units into more specialized roles seems like something that fits Chaos’s theme rather well. While this would make Chaos infantry play much more flexible, it would also require a much heavier time investment – after all, a unit becomes completely disabled when dedicating itself to a Chaos God. This would also mean moving Chaos’s Flamethrower unit to Tier 2, something I consider to be a reasonable move what the enormous amount of AoE strength that Chaos already fields.
Most of the upgrades are self explanatory, but I feel the CSM Mark of Nurgle one could use some clarification. I think that Mark of Khorne CSM play could vastly benefit from having a squad that is capable of soaking damage for them rather than having to soak damage themselves, and I’ve always felt like it was strange that the Plague Champion was the only real melee example of a Plague Marine available. It was even stranger to me that the current Plague Marines are terrible in melee when the Death Guard was specifically trained to be adaptable and fearsome melee fighters, something that almost all Plague Marines follow. While MoK CSM already fill the “fearsome melee fighters” role, I figure that two units with melee weapons and two units with bolters appropriately represents Plague Marines’ adaptability while making them moderately effective at both ranged and melee combat.
Anyways, that’s the gist of it. Feedback would be appreciated.
