Am I the only person who can make Daemons and Noise Marines work?

[Lord Squidar]

Just my own opinion here but... I think netlists are great, they are the optimum way to play, but if you have not played normally first then you will still get your ass handed to you by experienced players. Learning the hard way is worth a lot and I think people who go download a list and build the army from there are missing out on this.

[Zagdag]

Good points all around, thanks for the discussion all.

At Spell_of_Destruction: may well be that my local meta is out of touch (not that bad of a thing really though, I would rather be surprised by what I see on the table ^_^) But I do feel like there is a "huh?" factor when you use a list that doesn't work like your opponent plans.

At Sakura_Ninja: Yup, I like the occasional "Huh? What are you using?" from a passer by.

and back at Carnage: for what its worth, I have never had a problem with sideboarding. We have been playing 1750s, and I have a 1500 point core and chuck in 250 of whatever makes sense for my opponent, but the core remains unchanged. We are told a week ahead who we are playing next, so I have been using it as a way to build new units. Pretty fun way to collect I think.

thanks all.

[Spell_of_Destruction]

At Spell_of_Destruction: may well be that my local meta is out of touch (not that bad of a thing really though, I would rather be surprised by what I see on the table ^_^) But I do feel like there is a "huh?" factor when you use a list that doesn't work like your opponent plans.

It wasn't my point that your local meta is out of touch. I think it's more the case that forums like Warseer offer a skewed perception that everyone out there is using fully optimised lists at their gaming clubs.

It's not even a case of players 'not knowing how to play'. My old gaming club had many very strong WHFB players. They ran optimized lists at tourneys but most of the time left the cheese in the pantry for club games. They didn't field weak armies. They fielded strong armies in the context of what was considered acceptable conduct at the club.

[Azazel]

Daemons are good, being able to Assault on the turn they show up can be a huge advantage. And Greater Daemons always feature in my armies, I don't think theres a better way to spend 100 points in the whole Codex.

[Rick Blaine]

You aren't "making them work", you are playing bad opponents and/or rolling abnormally high.

Forum logic: if someone can make an army work and I can't, something is wrong with him.

[Cheeslord]

Damn! From the thread title I thought someone was winning with Daemons of Chaos... never mind...

[Axeman1n]

I invite the OP to give examples of some of the lists that his are beating. I love how someone said that Noise Marines are quite good at all three mission types as long as there were only 3 or less objectives, and a tie was easily accomplished. Well, that means you lost your tournment btw. You cannot Tie any games and win. Noise Marines will not beat most armies, especially those very competitive ones. My best friend used to play them. He quit the game because of all the constant nerfing, as well as the completely broken rules being given to the rest of the army spectrum.

[Xandros]

I think the main reason that noise marines are held in poor regard is the guile needed to play them to their fullest. Units are widely regarded in terms of quantities, how many shots, how many bodies, how big are their guns and the more subtle qualities disregarded for being of exotic or unwanted application. In this regard Noise Marines have good range and are highly mobile. And fearless with lots of attacks and high initiative to beat nearly any other marines out there.

Comparing to other armies' units like Grey Knights does not pull in their favour, but they're not as bad as some would have you believe. They just need other units to crack armour.

To me they have two or three basic setups: All sonic blasters, or all bolters with a single blastmaster. Combining sonic blasters and blastmaster is wasteful because the blastmasters heavy mode is so much better than its assault mode, which combines poorly with blastmasters. It's particularly good with lash of submission, because they have the same range and so can push the target out of range even as you shoot them, or pull them close for assaulting.

[DietDolphin]

I agree with Xandros completely. Noise marines are slightly better than a regular marine at everything, they are a generalist unit which internet wisdom tends to shy away from. Sure they are pricey but they do have their place in a smart commander's army.
One build you didn't mention that I think is quite good is giving the champion a doom siren in a small squad and getting in short range/combat with a rhino, doom siren can work with sonic blasters too.

[hobojebus]

A sorcerer in a rhino can lash hard units out of assault range or soft units into firing range.

No he cant lash happens at the same time as shooting if a unit is out of range at the start of a shooting phase moving it with lash will not put it into range.

If you've been using lash to move a unit into shooting range you've been cheating i'm sorry to tell you, almost certainly not on purpose but you cant use lash the way your describing.

[Johnnya10]

I've got the straight out of the box Noise Marine squad and I wouldn't swap it. Ok, so I play a fairly fluffy Emperor's Children army so I don't really feel like I have a choice about it, but even if I did, I wouldn't. They've been real game changers several times for me.

Get them into cover straight away and then let loose with the blastmaster. Strength eight and a 3" marker really gets to people and can cause plenty of damage to troops, elites and armour. That's going to make people come after them. But if they get too close, they have a sonic blaster, a doom siren and plenty of rapid firing bolters to try and deal with. If anything gets close enough for hand-to-hand, that +1 initiative proves to be pretty handy as well.

I'm not a WAAC player by any means and I tend to play games that are far more friendly than uber-competitive, but I really wouldn't swap these guys. I can make them work for me and that'll do as far as I'm concerned. Good to know there's another player who can get plenty out of enjoyment and success out of them too!

[Ace Rimmer]

I invite the OP to give examples of some of the lists that his are beating. I love how someone said that Noise Marines are quite good at all three mission types as long as there were only 3 or less objectives, and a tie was easily accomplished. Well, that means you lost your tournment btw. You cannot Tie any games and win. Noise Marines will not beat most armies, especially those very competitive ones. My best friend used to play them. He quit the game because of all the constant nerfing, as well as the completely broken rules being given to the rest of the army spectrum.

Actually what I said was I find it hard when there's more than 3 objectives, not that I can only win when there's 3 or less objectives. Those are completely opposite statements. That's only 1/3 of the standard mission types where I'm hard pushed.
I'm not saying noise marines are uber competitive, I'm not saying that with my army I'd win tournaments, all I'm saying is, as the OP quite rightly pointed out, some of us can make supposedly bad lists work in the environments within which we play.

If I'm playing KP, I'll run 2x 8 with Doom Siren, blastmaster and full sonic blasters with 1x 7 with sonic blasters and a PF champ.
If it's objectives, I tend to run either 5x5 man with 4 sonics and either a blastmaster/doom siren/p-fist or I run 3 x5 + 1 x 10 if the cover is less forgiving around my home objective.
The terminator's are always 4 x TLLC with the TLLC lord plus 6 terminators with 3 x combi flamer and 3 x combi melta either as 1 or 2 units.

This army does it's damage through weight of fire. Concentrate on a target, kill it, repeat, with redeployment to minimise losses where required.

[librerian_samae]

when I used to play my emperors children (before I got fed up with the amount of counts as I had to do) I found they worked very well.

I achieved this by using loads of 6 man specialised squads, ie doom siren champ with ccw, shooty squads with all sonic weapons, icons on close combat orientated squads.
Also I use summoned daemons as speed bumps to hold units in place untill I can mob them with multiple units. For that reason I mounted my cc noise marines in rhinos.

The whole list was iirc:

lord in termi armour
2x 3 man termi squads
chaos dread with,I think after they lost sonic weapons, auto cannon and heavy flamer
3x 6 man ccw noise marines in rhinos
2x 6 man shooty noise marines (can't remember if I had room for them having rhinos or not)
6 summoned daemons
6 man bike squad
defiler
6 man havoc squad with, I think after they lost sonic weapons, auto cannons
pred with, I think after they lost sonic weapons, auto cannon and heavy bolters

EDIT:
basically it's shooty with counter assault

[UberBeast]

I still try to run deamons both lesser and greater, and while I tend to do alright in general, it isn't them doing the hard work. I almost always manage to get them into HtoH without being shot at, but they aren't really ally that effective, and failed fearless saves sees them dying in droves against anything in power armor, or a decent CC character vs the Greater deamon.

[Gaargod]

Since when were summoned daemons considered meh? Lesser ones, maybe, but Greater Daemons are fairly effective. Shame about the summoning, but there we are.

However, I'm gonna have to agree with other posters talking about competitive scenes. If you're playing in uber-competitive scenes, with no list/specific meta tailoring and multiple games with one army, then that's what netlists do best. If you're not playing under those circumstances, then of course there are still 'levels' of competitiveness - some metas might be very close to that, but others might be very far away. But regardless, from the tournament PoV, competitiveness only matters within those limits.

And it's there that stuff like Noise Marines are of very debatable use - they're really quite expensive naked, more so with blasters. Similarly for units like deathstar Incubi, or Thousand Sons, or Flash Gitz. They may be overpriced, or just under-effective - they may not even be bad in themselves, but just work out less effective than another unit at performing a role (i.e. comparing Grey Hunters to Bloodclaws. Bloodclaws aren't bad, at all, and people still make them work, but Grey Hunters are just much better multi-purpose and are of fairly similar effectiveness even at the role Bloodclaws do).

Multiple games really evens things out too. Let's say, for example, I want a list designed specifically to screw with people planning to play Mech armies - not necessarily a bad idea. So I take foot marines - let's say that works beautifully versus an Eldar list. But my next opponent could be MechVets IG - to whom having the targets be out of the tanks already makes very little odds. And my next opponent could be MSU Dark Eldar - sure, blasters are overkill, but probably not *that* much - especially if I'm taking termies. Very few armies, except the Green Tide which itself has horrific issues with tanks, will be both non-mech themselves and not have AT weapons be fairly effective against them, whilst remaining even kind of competitive.

It's worth noting that 'mech' armies are twofold. They have gun-tanks and transports (with some overlap, i.e. vendettas). So an army taking AT still will automatically be planning to kill the troops once they bail out - and a lot of transports really aren't that pricey. BA razorback spam barely adds to the cost of the units!

[Born Again]

No he cant lash happens at the same time as shooting if a unit is out of range at the start of a shooting phase moving it with lash will not put it into range.

If you've been using lash to move a unit into shooting range you've been cheating i'm sorry to tell you, almost certainly not on purpose but you cant use lash the way your describing.

Assuming the Sorcerer is attached to a unit, then no, the unit he is with cannot fire at them, but he could be on his own or moving the enemy in to position for another friendly unit that has yet to fire.

[Rated_lexxx]

Since when were summoned daemons considered meh? Lesser ones, maybe, but Greater Daemons are fairly effective. Shame about the summoning, but there we are.

However, I'm gonna have to agree with other posters talking about competitive scenes. If you're playing in uber-competitive scenes, with no list/specific meta tailoring and multiple games with one army, then that's what netlists do best. If you're not playing under those circumstances, then of course there are still 'levels' of competitiveness - some metas might be very close to that, but others might be very far away. But regardless, from the tournament PoV, competitiveness only matters within those limits.

And it's there that stuff like Noise Marines are of very debatable use - they're really quite expensive naked, more so with blasters. Similarly for units like deathstar Incubi, or Thousand Sons, or Flash Gitz. They may be overpriced, or just under-effective - they may not even be bad in themselves, but just work out less effective than another unit at performing a role (i.e. comparing Grey Hunters to Bloodclaws. Bloodclaws aren't bad, at all, and people still make them work, but Grey Hunters are just much better multi-purpose and are of fairly similar effectiveness even at the role Bloodclaws do).

Multiple games really evens things out too. Let's say, for example, I want a list designed specifically to screw with people planning to play Mech armies - not necessarily a bad idea. So I take foot marines - let's say that works beautifully versus an Eldar list. But my next opponent could be MechVets IG - to whom having the targets be out of the tanks already makes very little odds. And my next opponent could be MSU Dark Eldar - sure, blasters are overkill, but probably not *that* much - especially if I'm taking termies. Very few armies, except the Green Tide which itself has horrific issues with tanks, will be both non-mech themselves and not have AT weapons be fairly effective against them, whilst remaining even kind of competitive.

It's worth noting that 'mech' armies are twofold. They have gun-tanks and transports (with some overlap, i.e. vendettas). So an army taking AT still will automatically be planning to kill the troops once they bail out - and a lot of transports really aren't that pricey. BA razorback spam barely adds to the cost of the units!

This sums everything up so perfectly that we could lock this thread lol

[Theocracity]

Since when were summoned daemons considered meh? Lesser ones, maybe, but Greater Daemons are fairly effective. Shame about the summoning, but there we are.

However, I'm gonna have to agree with other posters talking about competitive scenes. If you're playing in uber-competitive scenes, with no list/specific meta tailoring and multiple games with one army, then that's what netlists do best. If you're not playing under those circumstances, then of course there are still 'levels' of competitiveness - some metas might be very close to that, but others might be very far away. But regardless, from the tournament PoV, competitiveness only matters within those limits.

And it's there that stuff like Noise Marines are of very debatable use - they're really quite expensive naked, more so with blasters. Similarly for units like deathstar Incubi, or Thousand Sons, or Flash Gitz. They may be overpriced, or just under-effective - they may not even be bad in themselves, but just work out less effective than another unit at performing a role (i.e. comparing Grey Hunters to Bloodclaws. Bloodclaws aren't bad, at all, and people still make them work, but Grey Hunters are just much better multi-purpose and are of fairly similar effectiveness even at the role Bloodclaws do).

Multiple games really evens things out too. Let's say, for example, I want a list designed specifically to screw with people planning to play Mech armies - not necessarily a bad idea. So I take foot marines - let's say that works beautifully versus an Eldar list. But my next opponent could be MechVets IG - to whom having the targets be out of the tanks already makes very little odds. And my next opponent could be MSU Dark Eldar - sure, blasters are overkill, but probably not *that* much - especially if I'm taking termies. Very few armies, except the Green Tide which itself has horrific issues with tanks, will be both non-mech themselves and not have AT weapons be fairly effective against them, whilst remaining even kind of competitive.

It's worth noting that 'mech' armies are twofold. They have gun-tanks and transports (with some overlap, i.e. vendettas). So an army taking AT still will automatically be planning to kill the troops once they bail out - and a lot of transports really aren't that pricey. BA razorback spam barely adds to the cost of the units!

Basically, yeah. And without knowing an individual's meta, which is hard to define anyway, most Internet advice will default to netlists. They're not the only option, but they're the most efficient options for an unknown setting.