On Wednesday, Games Workshop released the new 11th edition faction packs for Chaos armies, and in a stunning victory for the forces of darkness, the rules for Chaos Defilers are completely unchanged. While GW never stated that it was using these faction packs as a balance update for Warhammer 40k, there was still a hope that they might tone down the malevolent, daemonically-possessed robot crabs that have dominated competitive 40k since they got slick new models and lethal new rules back in April.
If you’re not a competitive player, you might not be aware of just how prevalent these many-legged abominations have become in tournament Warhammer 40k. According to Stat Check’s meta data dashboard, since the current version of the Defiler came out to play, Chaos Space Marine armies running the Pactbound Zealots detachment have a 67% win rate and took first place in 16 tournaments – that’s as many as all the Space Marine armies combined.
The Defiler is already a very cost-effective unit, somewhere between a turbo-charged Dreadnought and an undersized Knight, with the ability to move through terrain unhindered. The Pactbound Zealots list stacks a set of buffs that can give the Defiler Sustained Hits 1, Critical Hits on a 5+, and the ability to re-roll Wound rolls, all without spending a single Command Point. Some parts of this buff can only be used once per game and others require it to pass a leadership test for its Dark Pact, but it’s a devastating quantity of firepower neveertheless.
The faction packs for all the Chaos-aligned Warhammer 40k factions are now available to download from the Warhammer Community website, and the Defiler is unchanged: it’s every bit the monster that has been devouring tournaments up to this point. Pactbound Zealots also remains the same.
But there are some rays of light. GW hasn’t updated the Munitorum Field Manual with the points for 11th edition yet, and the Defiler might yet get a price hike. And the studio has confirmed that it has two extra tools for balancing points costs in 11th edition. Some units will have a cheaper base price but pay a premium for their best wargear, and this might apply to the Defiler. New ‘points steppers’ will add an extra cost for bringing the third copy of some units in your list – and in cases like the Defiler, this price applies to both the second and third instance of a unit.
Points increases won’t change the Defiler’s raw power, but will mean that armies bringing multiple copies will have to make sacrifices elsewhere. Will that be enough to balance it out? Let us know what you think in the Wargamer Discord community.
Source: Wargamer
