But that's a choice you're making, to value perceived "effectiveness" over "flavour"; not every "flavour" choice needs to be "effective". If you want a GUO (or any other Greater Daemon) in your army just because "it's cool!" then you'll allow flavour to trump effectiveness.

Heck, with your skills at modelling MBR, you could simply custom build a Decimator and use that as a "permanently summoned" GUO to maintain "visual" cool with combat "effectiveness"!

If i want to include a "cool" unit in my army then i expect it that it will perform at least ok.
I can take a Warhound Titanin anImperial Guard list. Yes there might be better choices but at least the Warhound does what he is good in and the points cost are ok for this.

If i take a Greater Daemon then the risk is to high that the points are utterly wasted. Why should i include a "cool" model in my army if i can't use it? Maybe he will be destroyed the instand he is summoned but at least i want to be able to put him on the board.

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It's 150 points to potentially summon a Greater Daemon in one formation: Greater Daemon (75 points) + Daemonic Pact (25 points) + Champion of Chaos (50 points)

150 points for the chance to get a 3-4DC War Engine, plus an extra attack, leader, and invulerable save on a unit seems quite inline for costs to me... and only 75 of that is "utterly" wasted if I can't summon the Greater Daemon... so I fail to see the problem.

Perhaps reducing the cost of the Champion of Chaos and the Icon Bearer to 25 points each would be appropriate, but those ungrades are also giving leader and invulnerable save to the units they're applied to in addition to summoming enhancements.

With a summoning cost of "8" (which *is* a nice Chaos number!) the Champion of Chaos is very likely to summon a Greater Daemon with ease over the course of 3 turns.

My understanding of your proposal was that it was a universal change to the Greater Daemon, not an army specific change. If that's not the case, then obviously I've completely misunderstood your suggested change.

That said, simply decreasing the points value of Greater Daemons for Chaos Space Marine lists seems like a simpler fix to me.



I was just hypothesising when I made that points, as I hoped I had made clear, if your experience suggests to you that Chaos Space Marines do not have a wide enough variety of choice, then I obviously defer to your superior experience.



Everybody is biased when they approach army and rules design to a certain degree, which is why it is important for any rule changes to be peer reviewed and play tested, as I'm sure you will agree .

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Mind you, this question coming from the Eldar Champion who gets his G.Daemon for free.

Enough said?

For my test games I am going to trial the following summonings within the Emperor's Children list:

Greater daemon: 75 points
Summoning Points: 8

Daemonic Pact : 25 points (although one Core formation gets it for free from the start)
Augment Summoning Character: 25 points (Leadership skill was removed to drop the points)

I think the above is keeping the 'datafax stats' in line with other lists while encouraging the cult list to consider daemons within the force.

Seeing I am not playing as the EC in the next game, it will be very interesting to see what my opponent takes and then question him on his choice of army.

The difference being, of course, that the Avatar is only in play for one turn, whereas a Greater Daemon has the potential to be in play for multiple turns .

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True, but that is still a DC monster for one turn that is for Free. If I made such a proposal now, no doubt I would be chastised. I do wonder why it has not been changed?

Anyway, moving on >>>> the changes I placed forward for my opponent to use should be enough of an incentive to make the cult list far removed from a BL list and (IMO) have the list play more like 'fluff' would intend.