Hot Take: The Eye of Terror Chaos Datasheets

Games Workshop released a trio of new datasheets today for the units in the upcoming Eye of Terror campaign book, showcasing the rules for Kravek Morne, Mutilators, and the new Defiler. You can head over to Warhammer-Community for the full preview, but we've got a round-up here of the new units, their impact, and what they're likely to mean for competitive play.

The big caveat here is that we don't currently have points costs for any of these, which absolutely blunts the ability to predict how good any of this is. That said, we'll offer some potential costs and talk about what different price points might mean for each unit.

Kravek Morne

Our second Terminator character for Chaos Space Marines, Kravek Morne comes with a Terminator Chaos Lord Profile and the CHAOS UNDIVIDED keyword. Weapons-wise he has a 2-damage baleflamer and a combi-bolter, and has an impressive melee profile with his thunder hammer - 7A, WS2+, S10, AP-2, 2 damage with DEV WOUNDS and what we're assuming is an error, plus 3 additional attacks from his servo-harness ANTI-VEHICLE 2+ which are solid enough to punch an extra hole or two in a tank. Kravek gets an extra boost from his Architect of Ruin ability, which lets you pick a target for him at the start of the battle to re-roll Wound rolls against, and you can pick a new target when that one is killed. Note that as written, this doesn't work if he starts the game in a transport, as it lacks the additional text to make it work - chalk that one up in another long line of solid abilities lost to bad transport rules. So be sure to put this guy and his unit in Deep Strike, where he can drop in and re-roll wounds to fish for Devastating Wounds against a key target.

Where this guy shines is his ability to join units that need lots of love. His Headlong Destruction ability gives his unit +1 AP when targeting the closest eligible enemy unit, and that's the real fire. Terminators and Obliterators can both reap a tremendous benefit from the extra AP here, especially when the latter fire indirectly into heavier targets, and Mutilators really want AP-4 on their rending strikes.

Wait, Obliterators? Yep, Morne can be attached to Terminators, Mutilators, and Obliterators, giving the latter two units the only character that can join them. But should he? That's an interesting question. While we don't know Morne's cost, it's likely he'll come in above a standard Chaos Terminator character, and end up somewhere in the 100-point range, with the upper bound being 120 (the Lord of Contagion sits here). At that cost, it's hard to justify actually pairing him with Obliterators - he doesn't share their shooting profile, and having a unit of Obliterators with +1 AP that costs 260+ points just isn't an efficient use of them. We know even less about the Mutilators, but there the question is less "are these guys worth it" and more "do these guys have more value than a unit of Terminators?" and it's hard to justify them in that regard, given that you'll get more efficient attacks out of your Terminators at AP-3 and shooting on top of that. Remember that terminators re-roll hit rolls when they perform a Dark Pact.

Ultimately Morne seems like a great fit for a unit of Terminators. Put him with a unit of five, drop them in via Rapid Ingress, and use them to punch up into a key target, comfortable that you can finally get there thanks to the combination of AP-3 and having a beefier character to accompany them. The Fellhammer Siege Host might make a good home for him.

Mutilators

Yep, those are melee Obliterators alright. They're thankfully faster - 5" movement is a 25% increase, even if it's still terrible - and they come in units of three instead of two. They come with built-in re-roll charges and a chance to do mortal wounds on the charge. In similar fashion to Obliterators they have three weapon profiles, one for hordes, one for heavy infantry, and one for vehicles. And the profiles are pretty solid... except for the number of attacks. These needed to be 10/6/3 in my opinion to really merit a close look. For a unit hitting on 3+, 6 attacks going into a vehicle, even at AP-4, isn't necessarily enough. Against a Rogal Dorn you're likely to score 5 hits with SUSTAINED HITS 1 from your Dark Pacts, which will average out to something like 11.5 wounds after saves and damage rolls.

In similar fashion, an average attack with the rending strikes will kill three terminators. That's solid, but not what you want from a unit whose sole purpose is to fight things in melee and be able to kill a variety of different threats. And they're more susceptible to clapbacks than said Terminators, relying on high toughness and a 5+ invulnerable save instead of a 4+. Given that once they do kill whatever they fight, they now have a 5" movement characteristic to try and reach the next thing, it's easy to imagine a situation where they're left plodding to the next target.

So what about the points cost? Well, Mutilators have a similar statline to Obliterators, with T7, a 2+/5++ save, and 5 wounds apiece. It's likely they'll come in somewhere near that 80 points per model mark for Obliterators, though I suspect they'll cost less given the lack of a shooting attack. Somewhere in the area of 50-60 points per model seems more appropriate. At 150 points, you could make room for these guys in your army. At 180+, that becomes a lot more difficult given how many good melee options you have to work with in Chaos Space Marines.

Defiler

By far the biggest glow-up here is the Defiler, who sorely needed it after they forced players to put the model on a 160mm base. And while the daemon engine picked up 4 wounds, the biggest changes here are to Movement - the Defiler now comes with a 12" move and the ability to move through models and walls when it isn't charging. This is huge for a model with a 6.5" base, and means that it can now actually easily move around the battlefield and plow through walls as needed. That solves one of the two biggest problems for the Defiler - the other is being able to hide multiple models in your deployment zone, which may prevent players from taking three.

The weapons update here is huge. Defilers now can swap out their battle cannon for an ectoplasma destructor, which you will always do since the destructor comes with S12 and AP-3, making it more effective into the targets you want to shoot at. On top of that you get two of the Venomcrawler's Excruciator Cannons tacked on free, a baleflamer, a heavy Missile launcher, and the big snippy claws. From there you have options:

The Excruciator cannons can be swapped out for Magma Cutters, each with 2 shots - not a bad play if you want to get in close, but generally we think the extra shots and range on excruciators is the play.
The baleflamer can become a Heavy Reaper Autocannon, Hades lascannon, or Electroscourge.
The Missile launcher can become a Heavy Reaper Autocannon, Hades lascannon, or Electroscourge - but you can't take two scourges.

This ultimately lets you make one major choice with the new Defiler: Shooty or Fighty? While there are definitely going to be cases where you want to go shooty, arming it with either double lascannons or double reaper autocannons, we suspect that most of the time the play is going to be gun + electroscourge. Anyone who has played with the old Defiler can tell you that 5 attacks on the Claws just aren't enough to do anything, and you need the scourge to make it actually able to do anything in combat. So we'd recommend taking the scourge.

WarCom also showed off the datasheet abilities for the five variants. Of these, the Daemonforge ability on the vanilla CSM defiler is by far the best, giving it the ability to re-roll wound rolls of 1 when doing a dark pact and re-roll all wounds once per game. This is especially nice with the [DEVASTATING WOUNDS] ability on the autocannons. The Thousand Sons, World Eaters, and Death Guard Defilers all appear to have retained their abilities from their codexes and while we haven't seen their datasheets yet, we suspect other adjustments like LETHAL HITS on the Death Guard weapons are likely to be in the mix as well.

The new option here is the Emperor's Children Defiler, which gets +1 to Hit enemy units when they aren't below Half-Strength. That's fine, but less exciting than the other two. It's helpful for making those claws actually do work early.

We don't have the points for the new Defiler yet but it seems almost certain they'll increase given the increase in wounds, mobility, and and damage output for the model. Defilers currently cost between 165 (Thousand Sons, Death Guard) and 190 points (CSM), so we expect the new one will probably clock in at or above 200 points. It's also tougher and shootier than a Land Raider, and those cost 220, so we could see something north of that pretty easily. That's a hefty price to pay; if it's closer to 200, expect to see multiples in every army. If it's well north of that, we might see it less often. This is a difficult datasheet to predict, but there's enough damage output here it's hard to imagine this unit not making an impact.

Final Thoughts

We'll have more on these units when we write our full preview of the Eye of Terror release so stay tuned for that. There will certainly be more to say when we have points for these unit as well as any new Detachments for Chaos Space Marines released in the book. Check back then.

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