10th Edition Competitive Faction Focus: Chaos Daemons (Updated October 23, 2023)

We’ve had enough time to get to grips with the armies of 10th Edition, so over the next few weeks we’re going to be publishing a competitive faction focus for each of them, showcasing what’s been working for them in early tournament play. Today, Wings takes a look at Chaos Daemons, one of the factions that have significantly outperformed our early expectations.

We hope you’ve got the monster mash queued up on your music streaming service of choice, because it’s time for Chaos Daemons. Big monsters, appearing out of nowhere, impaling people with spears/claws/axes – what’s not to love? Let’s dig in, but before we do I’d just like to say thanks to Warphammer’s Mike P for providing some extra tips and insight while we were putting this together!

Changelog

• Update (Latest): 2023-10-23 for a new army list
• Update: 2023-10-13 for Q3 2023 Balance Dataslate.
• Published: 2023-08-07

Why Should You Play This Faction?

Daemons are all about smashing people with a rolling wall of gigantic monsters, pushing forward an insidious wave of darkness that makes the opponent’s situation ever more hopeless. They accompany this with a potent suite of mobility tools that allow aforesaid gigantic monsters to catch opponents by surprise, and also reward you for planning a few phases ahead. Play Daemons if you want to unleash some of the nastiest nightmares in the game, but in a surprisingly cerebral fashion.

Five Things You Need to Know

• Be’lakor Rules: Be’lakor, and in particular the Wreathed in Shadow aura, does a huge amount of work in carrying the army, though it’s slightly more viable to go without him now that a Knight Crusader can’t just no-scope you from across the table. It means you can run a list full of big monsters without worrying too much about getting instantly alpha-struck off the table, and combines with Lords of Change to force the enemy to engage on your terms.
• Monster Mash Good: Alongside Be’lakor, pretty much all flavours of Greater Daemon are very potent, providing you with lethal killing power both up close and at range.
• Mixed Battleline Quality: The Q3 2023 Dataslate has given Daemonic Battleline choices a bit of a shot in the arm, and they’re now a bit more interesting, with Plaguebearers (cheaper and very tough) and Horrors (not worried about getting one-shot by a Wraithknight or Wraithguard) now showing up in lots of lists (with even one decent attempt at spamming them), but Bloodletters/Daemonettes are still a bit sub-par.
• Deep Toolbox: You have lots of different Character options to pick from, providing a huge array of effects to build around, and a bunch of the mid-tier units are viable to play with.
• Managing the Shadow is Important: The Shadow of Chaos flips on and off at the start of every phase, so sometimes what you do early in the turn can have a big impact on your later options, particularly with the Warp Surge Stratagem.

The Q3 2023 Dataslate

Daemons got some fairly major tweaks in the Q3 2023 Balance Dataslate, seeing both some overperforming Greater Daemons get fairly substantial hikes and underperforming infantry (and embeddable characters) reduced in price. This does achieve the (presumed) goal of making a broader range of units viable, but unfortunately for the forces of Chaos, the net impact ends up being negative – you lose more points on the good stuff that you still want to take than you can make up from other stuff, and the number of top finishes the faction is seeing has dropped slightly.

All that said, the win rate is still fine (hovering close to a perfect 50%), the Core Rules changes made in the dataslate are generally helpful to Daemons, some exciting new builds have seen success, and the faction has a lot of depth now, so expect to see some significant iteration over the next few months as players explore more unusual lists.

The Good

• Towering change and the departure of Wraithknights make Be’lakor a bit less mandatory, and lets you spread out more.
• Devastating Wounds change makes infantry and cavalry more resilient.
• Free Stratagem change doesn’t affect them, so is a net positive as it hurts everyone else.
• Change to Insane Bravery makes Daemonic Terror far more of an actual factor.
• Lots of small discounts on infantry and mid-grade units make them more appealing.
• Discounts on a few already decent units like Nurglings, Great Unclean Ones, Soul Grinders and Syll’Esske make them very attractive.

The Bad

• Massive points increases on the best big Daemons.
• Targeted hits on the Changeling and Flamers, making board control more expensive.

What It Means

The trends that are emerging in the wake of the dataslate seem to be broadly as follows:

• Sticking to the pre-Dataslate core is still viable, but usually involves making some sacrifices to free up points, or dropping a Greater Daemon. Use of a Daemon Prince with Wings as a substitute for one of them is something that’s being tried.
• The big units that went down in points like Great Unclean Ones and Skarbrand are way more attractive.
• You need to cast the board control net a bit wider – more lists are using Plaguebearers as a thick slab of objective control meat (especially good now they don’t need to worry about getting Devastating Wounded off the table), and newly discounted Screamers are getting a lot of play.
• It’s more viable to get weird with it and try something unique, as more of the building blocks are well priced. We’ll see this a bit later in a successful mono-Khorne build.

Are Daemons dominating the game as they might have quietly hoped prior to the Dataslate? No – but there are still some great power pieces available to them, and the depth and variety of what you can do with them is particularly exciting for people who love tinkering with lists.

What Are the Must-Have Units to Start This Faction?

Be’lakor is your default starting point for any sort of mixed Daemon build, and if you’re looking to explore what the faction can do, get him first. Be’lakor’s ability to protect your army in the early game is critical to being able to use lots of models with a big footprint and get away with it. Wreathed in Shadow isn’t always going to completely prevent the opponent shooting at you turn 1, but it certainly will sometimes, and even when the opponent can move into range it will often stop them from focusing fire on a single target, which since your units can take quite a bit of punishment is often enough to keep them in the game. The utility doesn’t stop rolling once battle is joined either – The Dark Master ensures that a bunch of your stratagems are active at crucial moments, and he’s a very dangerous killer to boot. Now that Knights can’t snipe you across the board he’s not 100% mandatory, but is still a very strong centrepiece.

Next up, Greater Daemons. The internal balance between these is now pretty good, with serious arguments existing for pretty much all the options, depending on how you want to play the game.

• A Bloodthirster or Shalaxi Helbane for a fast, lethal threat, the former usually upgraded with A’rgath. You might think Shalaxi jumping up to 450pts would take them out of the running but nope – their datasheet is so wild that they’re a valid option.
• Big Bird (A Lord of Change) with the Everstave if you want ranged pressure. Taking additional ones without the Stave used to be popular, but at the new higher base price point you’re more likely to look elsewhere, or take Kairos as a second ranged killer (the Indirect Fire on their shooting can be helpful on denser tables).
• A Great Unclean One with the Endless Gift or Skarbrand for a brawler that can dominate a position, either by soaking punishment (the GUO) or murdering/trapping stuff (Skarbrand). Skarbrand very much wants Be’lakor around to ensure you can Deep Strike them close.

Be’lakor plus two of the above is your starting core, after which you can want to fill out with a mixture of board presence, speedy objective grabbers and maybe some tertiary big threats.

For tertiary threats, Tzeentch Soul Grinders, Winged Khorne Daemon Princes and units of Bloodcrushers with a Skullmaster are your best picks. Tzeentch Grinders give you some big shooting output that you can’t really get anywhere else beyond the Everstave LoC, and they’re tough all-round platforms to boot. A Winged Khorne Daemon Prince with A’rgath gives you a speedy threat that will utterly murderise something once per game, and can handily cause mayhem beyond that at a much cheaper price than a Bloodthirster. Finally, Bloodcrushers provide a healthy mixture of durability, speed and damage output, making them a good way to put pressure on the opponent without having to commit one of your bigger tools.

Next up, board presence – if you need something to sit in a position and soak a bit of punishment, Pink Horrors, Plaguebearers or Skull Cannons are good choices. Pink Horrors getting to split makes them very tricky to clear off an objective without dedicating overwhelming force to the task (so watch out for Aggressors and Crisis bombs, but otherwise you’re good), while Plaguebearers provide much better baseline durability than any of the other options, plus some disgustingly sticky objectives to further help. Both these options can consider some of the Leader options, with the Fluxmaster standing out for Horrors and  Finally, Skull Cannons are priced to move and tough enough to need real shooting to clear, while adding some modest amount of damage from a distance.

As an alternative to these options, you can also use the two Lone Operatives Tzeentch provides as objective holders. The Changeling now has a price that takes account of how great they are, but they are really great at holding an out-of-the-way objective, or sitting near the board centre sowing mischief and scoring Deploy Homers. Lone Operative stops them getting shot from afar, and an opponent within 12” of them runs the risk of failing a Battleshock test to shoot at them, or getting no-sold by Mischief and Confusion. On top of all of that, they also have a strong Torrent weapon, meaning that something like a pair of Crusaders or unit of Vespid risks getting toasted when they turn up nearby. The Blue Scribes is also good in this roll, and is now much more competitive with The Changeling in the slot as the price is far lower. These can also unleash their AoE Mortal Wounds from out of Line of Sight, so if you’re playing on UKTC boards with good cover near the centre of the board, they can add serious value while scoring Fixed Secondaries for you.

More recently, Syll’Esske has also seen a lot of play as a sort of pseudo Lone Operative, because they’re tough enough for you to play them like they are one. T6, 9W, a 4+ invulnerable save and getting back up with all those wounds once per game is a massive slog for the opponent to kill, and both their short-ranged shooting and melee are pretty decent. At 120pts, they will brutally bully most other units in the weight class, and is a great value piece.

The last thing you need is cheap and cheerful scoring stuff, for which your choices are broadly Nurglings, Flamers and Screamers. Nurglings are super cheap, and the former can pull double-duty as a screen in games where you need one and Deep Strike/redeploy scoring tool when you don’t. Flamers and Screamers are both aggressively priced and fairly durable for the cost, and both are quite mobile. Flamers are a little slower, but are INFANTRY and have a nice little bit of Torrent shooting for counter-play against their peers, while Screamers are extremely fast and can bite a few Marines to death in an emergency.

That’s your core, and after the rebalances it’s a fairly broad and varied one. You can also cheerfully add Flesh Hounds to the mix if you have some, as they’re another unit that’s basically just good value and a decent all-rounder. There are even more things you can try, and some have, but start with the above and then iterate from there.

How Does This Faction Secure Objectives?

Out the gate? Screamers, Flesh Hounds or Flamers. How do you hold them after that though?

Plan A here is to put a Greater Daemon or The Changeling on one. The former can be very hard to kill, the latter is a huge pain to take an objective off for all the reasons outlined above.

Plan B is to use trickery. The Shadow or Denizens of the Warp can let you sneak a unit directly onto an objective where the enemy might otherwise not be expecting it, While Pink Horrors are rather anemic damage dealers, having one unit in your army and planning to do this with them can be decent, as they take a long time for opponents to chew through. The other power move is to just use Corrupt Realspace to lock an objective to your control, and stop the opponent ever taking it back. Sometimes easier said than done if they have units that can deep strike, but if they don’t then feel free to lock in and move on.

Plan C brings in the Battleline units. Plaguebearers are pretty tough, and have the built in ability to lock-in an objective with Infected Outbreak. You can also further enhance their ability to control a position with a Spoilpox Scrivener or Sloppity Bilepiper – the former pushes them to a tasty OC of 3 apiece, which is tough for many armies to beat, while the latter can inflict Battleshock tests on nearby enemies every fight phase, setting up failure cases for enemies trying to take a position. Kind of a dealer’s choice here – the Scrivener is a bit more predictable and reliable, but the Bilepiper adds some movement as well, which is valuable on a slower unit (though you can also teleport them around with The Realm of Chaos). Alternatively, you can take Horrors, relying on their splitting to keep them in play for far longer than the opponent might expect, and possibly adding a Fluxmaster for extra durability (and the ability to throw a near-guaranteed Devastating Wound per turn in response).

Because of all of their movement shenanigans, Daemons are much better situated to score Tactical Secondaries than almost any other army in the game. Don’t feel pressured to max your own Primary score in every single matchup. Because you are excellent at denying their Primary and scoring Secondaries, you are still very capable of winning even if your own Primary score isn’t maxed out.

How Does This Faction Handle Enemy Hordes?

Happily, plenty of the tools you want to include anyway are pretty effective at killing hordes. Many of your shooting attacks on bigger threats are Blast, your best “glue” unit has a powerful Torrent weapon, and a lot of the big Daemons pack a sweep attack of some sort.

Your big challenge with hordes is more around managing the board – you often don’t have that many units, so if your opponent spreads out you can’t be everywhere at once (and it can also be hard to maintain the Shadow. Keep Denizens of the Warp and The Realm of Chaos in mind to get your units (particularly Flamers) around the table in a hurry to try and mitigate this, and against non-GSC hordes try and ensure that when you target a unit you wipe the whole thing – a few left over models can be disproportionately annoying for you. The rise of Bloodcrushers as a common tool is also a big help here – these get a lot of attacks from their horns and can inflict a decent number of Mortals on the charge, all while coming in at a very attractive price.

How Does This Faction Handle Enemy Tanks and Monsters?

Up close, Shalaxi and Be’lakor are your bread and butter for this (plus a Bloodthirster if you have one). Shalaxi or a great axe Bloodthister have a pretty good shot at one-rounding a Knight (and will trivially stomp anything smaller), and Be’lakor isn’t far behind on that front. At range, your options are a bit more narrow, mostly coming from Tzeentch. The Everstave bird is your default option, as at S12 (and picking the Sustained HIts option) they can take a real chunk out of something, and you can back them up with Tzeentch Soul Grinders. The warp gaze shooting attack that the changer of ways provides is extremely nasty (especially once bumped to S13 by the Big Bird aura), and a Grinder will also cheerfully pinch a tank to death in melee on top of that. Don’t forget that Soul Grinders are the only Daemon unit with the Vehicle keyword, giving you access to Tank Shock to take up to 6 wounds off an important enemy unit before you make your attack.

What Combos Should You Build Around?

Plenty of the tools you want to build around have already been discussed, so to recap make sure you’re considering:

• Be’lakor with lots of big friends.
• Taking the Everstave on a Lord of Change
• Taking the Endless Gift on a Great Unclean One.
• Taking A’rgath on a Daemon Prince with Wings.
• Combining Plaguebearers with a Bilepiper or Scrivener to lock in objectives.
• Combining Warp Rifts with charge bonuses or rerolls from sources like Instruments or Shalaxi for mostly reliable deepstrike charges.

There’s a few more to think about though, some which provide you with ways to use a few more tools from the roster.

The Be’lakor Two-Step

Less a specific unit, more a technique. Because Be’lakor brings The Shadow of Chaos with him, dropping him into a position (perhaps with Realm mid-game) can open up options for how you deep strike your other units thanks to Warp Rifts. He can also help give you reach on the table – the condition for using the Warp Surge Advance/Charge stratagem is to be within the Shadow of the Warp at the start of the Charge Phase, so even if Be’lakor and, say, Shalaxi are quite far apart at the start of Movement, they can meet up, high five, then sic Shalaxi on something. Or Skarbrand, if you need them even more dead.

Bloodcrushers and a Skullmaster

Bloodcrushers are aggressively costed, and the combination of the Mortals they deal on the charge (with the Skullmaster adding even more when they swing) means that you can flatten a broad range of targets. They are also well statted to soak a counterpunch (T7 gets you above many anti-elite guns like avenger gatling cannons, four wounds protects you from getting owned by D3 stuff, and the 4++ invuln protects you from anti-tank weaponry). If you’re taking lots of these you should also consider taking a Rendmaster – being able to point at a target and get a massive output boost lets these threaten almost anything.

Army Lists

Nicolas Francone – Medhammer GT 2023 – Golden Dawn

Nicolas took this list to a 5-0 2nd-place finish at the Medhammer GT event, losing only on tiebrakers for the top spot. Along the way Nicolas toppled Aeldari, Votann, Death Guard, Blood Angels, and Astra Militarum.

Army List - Click to Expand

Nicolas’ list uses a trio of nasty greater daemons as his core, with the Bloodthirster and Shalaxi getting maximum value from Be’lakor’s shadow, while the list is supported with loads of speedy units to control the board while those bigger brawlers rip the enemy to shreds.

Oisin McCormack – 6th Place – Broadsword Wargaming Major

Army List - Click to Expand

This build goes for a cheaper third big threat, then invests in some of the tertiary threat options to allow it to exert melee pressure on multiple fronts, and more Battleline units to secure positions once the bow wave advances.

Kevin Leonard – 1st Place – Dragon Fall 2023

Army List - Click to Expand

…or you could just stampede over everything. That’s an option too. This build leans in to how powerful Bloodcrushers are by maxing out on them, creating a build that slams into the opponent in record time and tramples them beneath many cloven hooves.

MonoKhorne daemons are plenty viable, and while we’ve chosen this list to showcase because it doesn’t include Be’lakor, we can assure you that if want to include him, that’s plenty powerful too – Blair MacDonald recently finished 2nd going 5-0 at the Geekfest Warhammer 40k GT running monokhorne daemons with Be’lakor, Skarbrand, and a pair of Rendmasters as character picks. The core of the list – 3x Bloodcrushers, 3x Skullcannons, and as many flesh hound units as will fit left over – is the same.

Wrap Up

That’s it for today, and best of luck conquering the mortal world. Tomorrow, we’ll flip back over to the Imperium side of things to take a look at Deathwatch.