At which point it is basically indistinguishable from teleport and doesn't need its own special rule.

Well does anyone have an idea on buying Daemons as a pool rather than having to buy the G.Daemon separately and potentially wasting your points?

I do not think any other unit in the game has this issue of never seeing battle if the player loses his 'enhanced summoning' character.

If a player pays for something, only the luck of his dice and decision of when to use it should be the only deciding factor of whether it was a waste of a purchase.

The Avatar is the first thing that leaps to mind. Other possibilities could include formations kept offboard to enter through a storm serpent's portal, which is then destroyed before they can enter play.

The random factor was part of the design concept of the chaos lists, like the variable firepower daemon engines. Trying to summon a Greater Daemon was supposed to be a little bit uncertain no matter what the player did. I think we just missed the mark on risk-adjusted costs.

At 7 summoning points/75 points, I think it's barely feasible to take a GD - not great, but feasible.

That's ~200 points for an assault scout titan (plus the other character bonuses and ability to summon lesser daemons) with a good chance you will get it into play unless that formation is quickly broken. For 50-100 more points you can kit out a second formation to make it nearly guaranteed to get on board and provide an alternate deployment.

Well this plus the downgraded Character (making it cheaper) in the EC list should make it a little easier for such a decision.

"Should be" is your perspective. That does not make it right. How many games with G.Daemons absent from Chaos Marine lists will it take before you agree on a change? You may as well just not have them in your lists if they are never going to be a selection worth considering.

If 3 of the 4 Cult lists adopt the 7 points, are you really going to stick to your guns and refuse to budge?

No. You mistake my goal. I am merely referring to the Cult lists when I bring these topics up (this was not made clear - my fault)

Let's face it, the LatD list is just an excuse to include all the minis GW never had time to consider. It is an orphan's home.

The fact that the Cult lists have to take their queue from other lists that 'borrow' their units is doing things 'arse backwards'. The years of trying to develop the Cult lists should be a testament to that.

There is nothing within reason that prevents lists having seperate summoning costs dependant on their affinity to the ruinous powers. So yes, keep the 8 summoning points for list such as BL and LatD. The cult lists are a whole different case IMO.

How so - what massive difference does it make to LatD. At the moment GD are never taken by BL and rarely by LatD

I don't think it makes an appreciable difference to L&D. An L&D formation tricked out to summon GDs is already a slam dunk, with almost a 95% chance of success. Going from 95% to 98% because it drops to 7 summoning points seems pretty minor.

OTOH, a coven with only a Demagogue would have the same chance to summon as a CSM formation, so that's about the same effect.

I'm willing to bet there are an awful lot of unofficial lists with more players than the lost and the damned list.

Also, there's no reason greater daemons need to be the same number of summoning points in every list.

"World Eaters Bloodthrister"

Tada.

Also, as Neal says, a kitted out LaTD formation can consistently summon at 8 points anyway, so reducing to 7 makes little difference.