Everwinter: Winter Assault Firestorm Thoughts and Unit Evaluations

 Attending a GT will really give one a chance to get some experience with a list, and I think after Winter Assault and the RTT I attended just before, I can say a few things about the Firestorm Assault Force and make some judgments about what parts of my list worked well and what parts didn't work as well as I'd hoped. 

For starters, I'd like to talk about the Firestorm a bit. I think it may be a detachment that requires a higher skill threshold to do well with than some of the other detachments available, such as the Ironstorm, or a Stormlance full of Thunderwolves.

My first argument in support of my point is that the Firestorm is a detachment focused on short-ranged firefights, but it doesn't offer any mechanisms for shooting after falling back. That seems like a pretty significant failing for a detachment that wants you to have your units shoot from within 6" of their targets. That obliges you to blank a turn of a unit's offense in order to get them out of the assault they're inevitably going to wind up in when they engage their targets from that close. 

The other reason I think the Firestorm has a higher skill threshold than other detachments is because two of their strats are particular about their terms and conditions. Getting +1 on To Wound rolls requires targeting the closest eligible unit within 6", and getting +1 to hit with Onslaught of Fire requires disembarking from an transport and targeting the closest enemy unit within 12". You really have to be thinking about the Ts & Cs of those strats in your movement phase if you want to exploit them. I did not use them the whole weekend, in part because when I wanted to use them, I wound up realizing there were closer units than the ones I wanted to shoot at.

That said, I think the Firestorm has some real potential if you can master those challenges. It does feature some neat tricks a canny player can exploit. My favorite is Burning Vengeance, which allows an embarked unit to disembark and shoot at a unit that just shot at their transport. Rapid Embarkation is neat too - it allows out-of-sequence embarkation into a transport. There are the previously mentioned strats with the finicky terms and conditions that, if you set yourself up for the opportunity to use them, can give a considerable buff to a unit's short-ranged firepower. And then there's Immolation Protocols for mortal wound output, which really obliges the player to include a unit that can exploit it.

With the detachment touched on, I'm going to move on to assessing the units in my list. I'm going to start with the ones I was disappointed by. At the top of that list is the las-grav Devastator Squad.

My intention when I included this unit in my army list was for it to sit on a backfield objective and provide some long-range fire support, firing either the lascannons or grav cannons out the Firing Deck as appropriate. I was particularly hopeful about the grav cannons, with their Anti-Vehicle 2+ and D3, I thought they would be good for peeling the last few wounds off a heavy vehicle or taking out some 3-wound infantry. In practice, they rarely got the opportunity to do the latter, and when they did the were hampered by only being AP -1. Nor did they have much impact on any vehicles or monsters I faced. The biggest impact they had during the weekend was when they jumped Ursula Creed and her Engineseer and beat them both down. In retrospect, there are all manner of better choices I might have made. I suppose I got captured by the theme of the Firestorm detachment and didn't think past infantry in transports.

My next pick for units I think didn't pull their weight is the Dark Shroud. The idea of a 6" bubble of Stealth and Benefit of Cover seemed superficially attractive, but after this weekend I don't think it was points well spent. One can get Benefit Of Cover just by paying attention to unit positioning, and most of my vehicles can use the Smokescreen strat if I really need them to. About the best I can say about the Dark Shroud was that it occasionally took fire that might have been put on other units. I keep finding myself wishing it was a Land Speeder Vengeance, but when I got the kit the Dark Shroud was much cooler than it is now.

My next most underperforming unit was the Lieutenant with Combi-Weapon. This one I'll just own as player error. I was sleeping on his Infiltrators and Lone Operative rules, so I just kept him sitting in the backfield, minding my home objective (usually with a squad of Scouts as well) instead of having him out accomplishing Secondaries for me. He actually has not-terrible melee output too if you put him into the right target. I also didn't get much use out of Priority Target Identified, because I kept on crashing the center objective with my Land Raider full of Hellblasters and fighting past it. Plus I did go to some trouble to build in full to-wound rerolls into my list. I probably would have been better served putting PTI on a side objective instead of the center one I kept trying very hard to overrun.

I don't want spend a lot of time reviewing all the units that worked the way I'd hoped they would, because that's most of the list. I just want to touch on a couple units that may be flying under people's radars. I'd like to start with multimelta Devastators and Razorbacks. I'm mentioning them both together because individually each unit is only so-so, but putting them together lets them synergize off each other for more than sum total of their parts. The Devastators provide the punch, and the Razorback provides mobility and enhances the Devastator's damage output with its Fire Support rule, providing full to-wound rerolls to the Devastators. Being able to use Firestorm strats to out-of-sequence embark or disembark and shoot enhances the total package. The two units together compare favorably to a full unit of Eradicators. Eradicators have certain advantages over Razorback MM Devastator package. Eradicators are 25 points cheaper than their Firstborn counterparts, and get full rerolls of everything against their preferred target, whereas if you want to hit rerolls with the Devs, you're tasking your Oath of Moment target to it, and you'd better just like your original damage rerolls. On the other hand, the Razorback provides more mobility than Eradicators have, so they have a longer threat range. The Razorback's Fire Support rule can be used on anything, so the MM Devs aren't restricted on what they get wound rerolls against. Plus, the Razorback does provide a little extra firepower to the total package. I was happy enough with them, at least.

I also want to heap some praise on the Impulsor-riding Infernus Squad.. I chucked them in primarily to have a unit that could exploit Immolation Protocols, and to have some crowd clearing in the event I needed it. The package was useful enough overall to make me want to include a second in my list. It's damage output wasn't great into every opponent I faced, but 5d6 auto-hits at S6 is a threat something most players are going to casually dismiss. Plus, the Impulsor by itself can throw out a lot of crowd-clearing dakka. It also makes a pretty convincing Overwatch threat, and it can do all that without the Infermi ever getting out of the Impulsor. I mounted the Ironhail Skytalon Array on the Impulsor because it's a lot of shots, it looks cool, and I figured the Anti-Fly 2+ would occasionally be significant. It didn't turn out to be at this even, so in the future I think I'm going to go with the Belicatus Missile Array, so it's a little more of a threat to vehicles.

There is one point I'd like to make about the Hellblasters, primarily because it's something I hadn't considered when I included them. They surprised me with their ability to pick up horde-type units, both with shooting and assault. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. 20 shots with Sustained Hits at S7 is going to put down a lot of 1-wound models, and then a full unit is going to throw 30 attacks in close combat, not counting what Azrael and the Lieutenant dish out. That's a lot of crowd-clearing potential from a unit that really stands out for being an anti-elite, anti-big thing unit. I learned not to be reluctant to chuck them into chaff infantry as needed.

Going forward, I'll keep playing with the Firestorm Assault Force. I do intend to make some list changes. I have two variations of the list in mind, but I'm going to save those for another post. Thank you for reading, and I hope my experiences are helpful to you.