Kill team: deathwatch

It's been a while since I had a bit of a sit down and ran though a kill team and my thoughts on it, so up for discussion are the deathwatch, the quintessential kill team, designed and built specifically for this type of mission. I think that I said that I would be looking at my chaos team but I'm not, I'm going to do Deathwatch, mostly due to the elites supplement.

So, I could spend many, many hours thinking carefully about the best models to bring and the perfect weapon selection, all tied in to the most appropriate specialism or I could just get one box and build every possibly combination from said box. I went for the latter version of events in case you were wondering.

Now, it's not going to be a very good list, most heavy hitting lists are full of frag cannons and inferno heavy bolters but I've just one of each. Also, I've added in some of the vanguard vets to add some extra mobility. So what have I got exactly?

I've two leader, Watch Captain Artemis and a Librarian. For kill team purposes they are playing Watch Sergeants, with Artemis playing a Sgt with Combi melta and power sword and the librarian is playing a Sgt with bolter and Xenophase blade. This is a bit away from WYSIWYG, as Artemis has a Combi flamer and the Libby has a bolt pistol, but hey, I doubt anyone up here will mind, although I don't know why I can't take a combi flamer anyway.

Next up are the Black Shields, two of them as well. One has a storm shield and maul and the other has a shield and sword. The maul will run as a combat specialist and the sword as a zealot. This is because the maul gets a bonus to strength anyway but the sword needs a little help from Zealot.

The two Deathwatch gunners are armed with the infernus heavy bolter and the frag cannon. Now, the issue I have is what to run them as, either heavy or demolitions. The issue comes from that fact that both can benefit from both specialisms. Both are either assault or heavy, so would get the bonus from the heavy specialism but both also have auto hit weapon that would benefit from the demolitions specialism as well, although I think that that bolter would benefit more due to it's lower strength but that only effects T3 or lower.

Next up are the vets, and there's a lot of them, 14 in all, made up of a mix of shooting and melee units. I'll start with the heavy hitters, the two heavy thunder hammers. These guys will also run as Zealot and Combat. Why? Well with the -1 to hit the extra attack will be useful, plus the +1 strength have a very useful but niche benefit, taking a Marine to ST and so to S10 with the hammer, useful for doubling out nurgle (death guard) units.

Following from the hammers, are the Deathwatch shotguns. These are in for several reasons. Firstly there there for some short range fire support for the hammers, effectively taking the place of a flamer but with some extra flexibility with the various ammo types available. Secondly, these guys are cheap, so they can be thrown In to a team to fill a roster.

That's all the short range vets, granted there's not many of them, two Black Shields, two hammers and two shotguns, not a great selection but good enough for basic games. I do however have a solution to this but more on that later.

The rest of the vets are made up of bolter wielding troops, the first of which has a stalker pattern bolter. I'm not to Keen on this one, in the games I've played with him, he hasn't done to well, taking 3 rounds of shooting to put 3 flesh wound on a guardsman in one game! After this we have 5 bolter troops, 4 of which also have power swords. This are the basic fill in troops and I usually always have at least 1 of these guys in a list. While a power sword is cheap at just a coupe of points, I still have one vet without one, just in case I don't have to points and I don't really want to be running a lits that's 15 points down. There's nothing much else to say about these vets, there just there to fill the list and be cannon fodder basically.

Lastly we have the combi armed vets. We have two combi plasma and two combi meltas. I didn't really have a plan for these vets when I built them, I mostly did because I could. The plasma is always useful, especially when over charged. Having the bolter as well is also useful, especially when you don't need the extra strength of plasma. The meltas were a bit overkill before Elites came out but with the inclusion of terminators and the like, they have become a lot more useful. In addition, one of the plasma is armed with a power maul and 9ne of the meltas is carrying a power swords. The other two are just with the combi's, to keep points down.

Lastly I have decided to take some vanguard vets from the Elites book. There are two reasons for this; one, they look cool and two, they add some extra combat punch, not to mention some extra mobility. I did think about adding in terminators but decided against this in the end, mostly as I don't really see terminators as being sensible for kill team style missions.

Anyway, I went with the vanguard vets for a couple of reasons, mainly the extra mobility that they offer, with a maximum move of 12 or 18 when advancing! With a board that's only 22 by 30, getting around the board is considerably easier. Also the combat ability and weapons choice is considerably better than the standard Deathwatch vet. I chose to go with 5 models, mostly to enable me to switch them across to 40k proper if I feel like it.

There's not much variation in the models, as three of the five models have storm Shields and either a sword, axe or hammer. They all fill the same basic role, charge up and hit stuff but it depends upon what there going to be hitting, as to which will be deployed. Of the others, one is armed with a pair of claws and one with a grav pistol and chain sword. They will all be combat or zealot specialists for extra punch as well.  Now, you'll notice the odd one out the grav pistol and chain sword. Now there is a reason for this, basically I didn't know what to do with the last one and decided that maybe some shooting would be good. Also I don't have a grav pistol anywhere else, so I thought it would be fun to include.

Wow, that was a wall of text! Hopefully I'll be able to get them painted up some time soon!