Know The Foe: Adeptus Sororitas Bringers of Flame

Azrael knows how to play against that list

 Hello battle brothers! I'd like to start off a series of articles to help us when we face off against common armies in the meta. It's always easier to play well into an opponent's army when we know what it does, and harder when we don't. Here I'd like to strive to fill the information gap, so we all can make the best informed choices we can when we play against other people's armies.

I decided to start with the Adeptus Sororitas Bringers of Flame army as it's easily one of the most played armies in the competitive meta. According to stat-check.com, the BoF detachment is 13% of the meta. That's over twice as many BoF lists as are playing Dark Angels lists. If you go to a tournament, you're likely to play against a BoF list.

Full disclaimer: I'm not one of the Art of War guys. I'm a decidedly mid-table player at best. I'm writing this article and the ones that will follow as much to give me a reason to familiarize myself with armies I'm likely to face as for all of you. Whatever I write, I'm apt to remember, so the next time I face off against a Sisters army, I'll be much more up to speed on what it does.

Army Rule: Acts of Faith

Let' s start with the Sororitas army rule, Acts of Faith. It's right up there with Aeldari Fate Dice for army rules everyone who plays into them hates. I'm'a bullet point this for ease of understanding.

•  The Sororitas army gets to use Miracle Dice
• It gains a Miracle Dice at the start of each turn
• It gains a Miracle Dice whenever an Adepta Sororitas unit is destroyed
• The Miracle Dice value is rolled when it is gained and set aside for later
• Each unit can use one Miracle Dice per phase
• A Miracle Dice can be used to substitute one dice for any of the following dice rolls:
• Advance roll
• Battle Shock test
• Charge roll
• Damage roll
• Hit roll
• Saving throw
• Wound roll
• The value of the Miracle Dice chosen is considered an unmodified dice roll

So, in a game that involves rolling dice, the Sororitas player get to choose what they roll for key rolls. I can't tell you how much I hate this mechanic. Every time I've played against a Sororitas player, a use of Miracle Dice has been a feels-bad moment for me. This would be a powerful enough ability in a vacuum, but the Adeptus Sororitas army is designed to synergize around it, multiplying the effect it has on the game. And what's listed above is not the only way Sororitas players gain Miracle Dice. I don't think any of the Sisters opponents I've played in 10th has ever had a game where they came even close to running out of Miracle Dice.

It should also be noted that everything (and I do mean everything) in the Adeptus Sororitas index has at least a 6+ invulnerable save. Check to see if your opponent has an 6's in their Miracle Dice pool before counting on any single shots bringing down a key unit.

Detachment Rule: Bringers of Flame

The detachment rule for Bringers of Flame is exactly the same as the one for the Space Marine Firestorm Assault Force, and it's a good rule. Always being able to advance and shoot is powerful, and in an army full of easily spammable melta weapons, getting +1 Strength within 12" is huge.

Enhancements
Now let's go over enhancements. First there's Fire And Fury for 20pts. It gives Torrent weapons +1 attacks and all other ranged weapons Sustained Hits 1. It was in 2 of the 3 lists I looked at.

Next there's Manual of St. Griselda for 15 points. This allows the player to discard 2 Miracle Dice in the Command Phase and replace them with 1 Miracle Dice whose facing is the sum of the 2 discarded dice. You'd think this would be a good one, but I didn't see it in any of the lists I looked at.

Iron Surplice of Saint Istalela for 5 (!) points. Canonesse or Palatine only. Grants a 2+ save and 5+ FNP. This was in 2 of the 3 lists. For 5 points you can see why.

Righteous Rage for 10 points. Allows a model to discard up to 3 Miracle Dice in the Fight phase to gain +1 Attacks and Strength per dice discarded. This was in all 3 lists. It's a good way to use the Miracle Dice with low facing values.

Stratagems
On to Stratagems. The suite starts off with Righteous Blows for 1 CP, generating Lethal Hits in the Fight phase and a Battleshock test if a model is destroyed. 

Blazing Ire, 1 CP for a retributive disembark-and-shoot for a unit in a transport. 

Shield of Aversion, 1 CP, it's Armor of Contempt by another name. 

Carry Forth The Faithful, 1 CP, a transport gets to reroll its Advance roll and an embarked unit can disembark after it advances. Very useful for transports carrying units full of melta weaponry. 

Rites of Fire, 1 CP, +1 to wound with shooting against a unit within 12" and in range of an Objective Marker, also generating a Battleshock test if any models get destroyed. The terms and conditions for this one are specific enough I kind of doubt it'll get used much, but it could come up. 

Finally, Cleansing Flame, 1 CP, Torrent weapons get Devastating Wounds.

The Triumph of Saint Katherine
Now let's move on to units you're likely to see. I'm going to start with the Triumph of Saint Katherine. The Triumph is going to appear almost all the time.  Profile-wise, the Triumph is basically 6 Sisters Superior in a trenchcoat - M6", T3, 3+ save, 18 wounds, OC 6, with a 4+ Invulnerable save. Offense-wise, it's got 6 bolt pistol shots and 18 relic weapon attacks, the latter of which would make a good target for the Righteous Blows strat. The real show with the Triumph are its datasheet abilities. These include Solemn Procession, which generates a Miracle Die showing a 6 at the start of each battle round, and Relics of The Matriarchs, which allows the Sisters player to select 2 out of 6 buffing auras to be active each turn. These include:

• Censor of the Sacred Rose: 6" aura of rerolls on Battleshock tests
• Icon of the Valorous Heart: 6" aura of 6+ FNP
• The Fiery Heart: 6" aura of +2" to Movement and +1" to Advance and Charge roll
• Petals of the Bloody Rose: 6" aura of improved melee weapon AP by 1
• Simulacrum of the Ebon Chalice: 6" aura of use an extra Miracle Dice per phase
• Simulacrum of the Argent Shroud: 6" aura of reroll Ranged attack Wound rolls of 1.

Hilariously, the Triumph can be attached to a Battle Sisters Squad, but I don't think I've ever seen an opponent bother with doing so. It's already kind of a large, unwieldly unit, and 18 wounds with a 4++ is already a lot to chew through. It should be noted that it is Infantry, so it can just go through walls if the player wants it to. It's got the Grenades keyword too, so that's worth being aware of. 

Just getting that auto 6 on a Miracle Dice every round in addition to all the other Miracle Dice the Sisters player is going to generate is worth the 190 points the player is spending on it, and then it's got all the buffs it provides besides. I could imagine a Sisters player defaulting to the 6+ FNP and reroll ranged Wound rolls of 1s and sticking it next to a Castigator or two, but depending on board positioning any number of these buffs could be huge.

Morvenn Vahl
The next unit I'd like to discuss is Morvenn Vahl. You're going to see her in almost every Sororitas list. She and a unit of Paragon Warsuits are the peanut butter and jelly that compliment each other in a sandwich of pain. You can see her stats over on the right. As you can see, she's a beefy character that takes dedicated effort to chew through. 

She's got a ranged weapon that makes me envious. Fidelis is just about the perfect gun to put into Hellblasters being led by Azrael, and the Paragon missile launcher is a credible threat to anything on the table, be they big monsters or hordes of infantry. 

She doesn't lack for melee punch either. Having a 3-damage profile with her Lance means she'll 1-shot a lot of our tougher infantry units, and even Deathwing Knights can only take 2 of those hits. It's also nice that she's got the sweep, but we're not likely to be too concerned about it, unless she goes into Lion Dad with 1 wound left and the player fishes for Dev wounds with it.

Then there's her datasheet abilities. Righteous Repugnance allows her player to discard a Miracle Dice and add 3 to the Attacks characteristic of either Fidelis or the Lance of Illumination, depending on the phase it's done in. That's a nice way to get utility out of the 1's and 2's in that Miracle Dice pool. Her other ability Abbess Sanctorum, allows the unit she attaches to to reroll Hit and Wound rolls. That would be pretty baller on any unit, and it does so much to buff Paragon Warsuits that you almost never see them without her.

Generic Characters
You're likely to see Canonesses and Palatines in a Sisters list as well. I'm not going to go into their abilities in depth. Canonesses are roughly equivalent to our Captains and Palatines are roughly equivalent to our Lieutenants. I'll briefly mention the Dialogus because she's a cheap character that let the unit she's attached to use any Miracle Dice in the pool and have it count as a 6, so that's another good way to cycle bad Miracle Dice.

Paragon Warsuits
While Morvenn Vahl is fresh in your memory, I want to call your attention to Paragon Warsuits. Paragon Warsuits are what we wish Deathwing Terminators were. As you can see from the profile to the right, they are not a trivial unit to take down, they move pretty fast, and they have good shooting and melee.

The default Nundam guns are a heavy bolter and a storm bolter, but I've got a dollar says you will always see them on the table with a multimelta and a Paragon grenade launcher. The multimelta should not need explanation, so I'll just show you the Paragon grenade launcher, which is quite a nice piece of kit. It's a decent amount of extra threat to the unit's overall shooting profile. A Sisters player can happily put that into any target in the game and have a reasonable expectation of getting a good result. Okay, maybe not hordes, but they'll have Castigators for that. 

For their melee punch, Nundams have a choice between maces and swords (sound familiar?) Maces get higher strength and a 3-damage profile, which is not common, but suffer from only having -1 AP. Swords have a lower strength and only a 2-damage profile, but more attacks and better AP. Of the lists I've looked at, I've seen both, but I think the Paragon war blade is the better of the two, particularly when the unit is led by Morvenn Vahl and can reroll failed Wound rolls. .

Paragons come in units of 3 for 210 points. The total package including Morvenn is 370. About the only downsides to the unit are that they take up a pretty significant piece of board space, and they have the Vehicle keyword, so they have to go around ruins rather than through them. 

Castigator
Since I mentioned them in passing already, let's now talk about the Castigator. The Castigator is a battle tank capable of providing very good fire support. Profile-wise, it's got what you'd expect a medium battle tank to have. The only remarkable deviation is that it has a 6+ Invulnerable save, which grants the Sisters player the ability to spend a Miracle Dice to negate an anti-tank weapon's hit. It comes with a main gun and 3 heavy bolters, and can be given a storm bolter and a HK missile. 

The default gun on the Castigator is the Castigator autocannons, but I've never seen one that wasn't armed with a Castigator battle cannon. both weapons have similar Strength, AP, and Damage profiles, but the battle cannon has Ignores Cover, which is probably why it's the preferred option.

Rites of Castigation is the secret sauce that really makes Castigators shine. Most Sororitas lists are going to feature 2-3 Castigators, which will solidly cover the army's anti-horde needs, and being able to buff each other to AP -2 with Ignores Cover (more on that later) really makes them a significant threat to anything we can put on the table. That takes us to the Invulnerable save of our Deathwing Knights, or 5+ saves on our Eradicators, and every failed save from the battle cannon will pick up an Eradicator. 

Immolator
The other vehicle you'll see a lot of in a Bringers of Flame list is the Immolator. The Immolator is the Adeptus Sororitas version of our Razorback, only it's a little tougher at T10, and it sports a heavy bolter in addition to its turret weapon. 

Weapons-wise, in addition to that heavy bolter, it can pack a twin multi melta, twin heavy bolter, or an Immolation flamer, which you can see to the right. All of the Immolators I've seen on the table in 10th edition and all the ones in the example lists I looked up have invariably packed multimeltas. That's never a bad choice, but it gets exponentially better when you can just choose a high dice for its damage roll. It can take the usual HK missile too, so a Sororitas army can manage a decent volley of long range shooting against at least one target at least once.

The Immolator's datasheet ability, Purge and Cleanse, synergizes really well with the Castigator's. The Immolator can spritz something with its heavy bolter prior to Castigators lighting it up while putting its twin multimelta into another target, which will really degrade an opposing unit's saves between the two of them. 

The Immolator can carry 6 models, but as most Sisters units come with minimum squad sizes of 10, it also allows the Sisters player to break up a 10-nun unit into two 5-nun units, embarking one in the track while the other runs around on foot, or goes embarked in a different track. One of those split off units will often be tasked with holding down the backfield objective, and will pretty much just be 5 Sisters with bolters while the Sisters with sexier gear ride into battle in style. 

Dominion Squad

Something has to ride in those Immolators. It's a pretty safe bet it's going to be a Dominion Squad. Dominions are basically a Battle Sisters squad that can take an abundance of special weapons. They can choose Ministorum flamers or Artificer-crafted storm bolters, but what you're going to see is meltaguns. Count on Immolators carrying 4 Sisters with meltaguns and a Sister Superior with an inferno pistol and a power weapon, and maybe an attached character of some kind. Remember that Carry Forth The Faithful strat? Immolators full of Dominions are going to love that strat. 

Dominions have a host of special rules too - so many that I think it best to bullet-point them. 

• Scouts 6"
• Righteous Awareness: D6" reactive move if an enemy unit moves within 9" of them
• Cherub: once per battle, gain a Miracle Dice after using an Act of Faith
  
• Holy Vanguard: If the unit has an attached leader and is embarked in a Transport, it gains Scouts 6"
• Simulacrum Imperialis: Roll a D6 for each controlled objective marker with this unit in range of it. On a 4+, gain a Miracle Dice with the value of the dice rolled

There are all kinds of shenanigans this host of rules allows. For starters you have to worry about an Immolator full of melta-toting Dominions being right up your nose Turn 1. If you've got a Repulsor full of Eradicators, don't park it too aggressively or you'll lose it in pretty short order. It's a pretty sure bet the 5 Sisters with bolters sitting on the backfield objective are going to have that Simulacrum, so that'll be feeding the Sisters player Miracle Dice. Then, if you move a unit too close to the Dominions, they're probably using that reactive move to hop back into their Immolator. Then you have to crack the can to get at the obnoxious melta Sisters, and our currently competitive list doesn't really have an abundance of ranged can-cracking units. We're not really going to enjoy having a bunch of meltaguns light up our Deathwing Knights either.

Battle Sisters Squad
The other thing might be riding around in an Immolator is a Battle Sisters Squad. Battle Sisters are not as sexy a unit as Dominions, but they can pack a meltagun and a multimelta, so they're rolling with only 1 less melta shot than Dominions. They lack the silly mobility shenanigans, but make up for it with the ability to sticky objectives. Since their melta payload is carried by 2 Sisters instead of 4, they can also carry their Simulacrum with the up-front squad, and are OC 2, so are more likely to control a midfield objective in their Command Phase than the Dominions are. I've been seeing exclusively Dominions, but one of the sample lists I looked at did employ a Battle Sisters squad. 

Seraphim Squad

The Bringers of Flame army needs a unit to actually bring the flame, and that unit is generally going to be the Seraphim Squad. Seraphim can be purchased in squads of 5 for 85 points or squads of 10 for 170 points. The 85 point squad makes a pretty good Secondary objective scoring unit, being relatively cheap, high mobility, having Deep Strike and the Seraphim's datasheet ability, Angelic Ascent, is a shoot-and-scoot, giving them an extra 6" of movement a turn, or a 6" move after Deep Striking. 

It's also worth noting that Seraphim can equip 2 Sisters with 2 Ministorum hand flamers per 5 models, so a full 10-nun squad is packing 8 of those things - 9 if a character with a hand flamer is attached, and an attached character can also be given the Fire and Fury enhancement to give each hand flamer + 1 attack. That's going to be the go-to unit for using Cleansing Flame, and if the attached character is a jump pack Canoness, it can be played for free. Even without Cleansing Flame, that's a lot of torrent dakka to absorb, which is going to be Strength 5 because of the detachment rule, and because for some reason Sisters' hand flamers are S4 when everyone else's are S3. 

Also, be aware Seraphim have a 5+ Invulnerable save instead of the 6+ most other Sisters infantry has, for...reasons.

The units I've mentioned aren't the only ones you'll see in a Bringers of Flame list, but they're the ones I think you need to be most aware of. They are the meat-and-potatoes of a BoF list, the ones you can almost always count on seeing, the build-around units that do most of the heavy lifting. 

Edit

I got feedback pointing out that I didn't give points as context, and that it was important to know just how much stuff a Sororitas list will have in it, because brother do they have some efficiently-points-costed units. To correct that oversite, I'm going to show Nicholas Fromme's list from the Dicing Death II GT. 

Woah Big Lady

Daemonifuge (85 pts)
Morvenn Vahl (160 pts)
Palatine: Righteous Rage (60 pts)
Triumph of Saint Katherine (190 pts)
Immolator (115 pts)

Immolator (115 pts)

Immolator (115 pts)

Castigator (150 pts)
Castigator (150 pts)
Castigator (150 pts)
Dominion Squad (115 pts): 10 Dominions

Dominion Squad (115 pts): 10 Dominions

Paragon Warsuits (210 pts): 3 Paragons
Seraphim Squad (170 pts): 10 Seraphim

Sisters Novitiate Squad (100 pts): 10 Novitiates

Tactics

The Sororitas Bringers of Flame list is a high-mobility shooting army with one big stick of a close combat unit and some decent combat characters (Canonesses or Palatines) sprinkled in. and an absurd ability to control probability with Miracle Dice. The challenge for we Dark Angels players is that our current competitive build is a slow close combat army with an unusually high degree of durability, but not so much that it can stand up to the sheer weight of fire the BoF list can throw at us. 

One modest weakness of the BoF list is that it has a LOT of vehicles. Morvenn Vahl and her Nundums are a Vehicle unit, plus it won't be unusual to see 2-3 Castigators and Immolators each. That does open up Bring It Down as a reasonable fixed Secondary. We can't max BID against the BoF list, but it is possible to score 10-15 points on it pretty reasonably, and we're doing so by doing something we need to do anyway, destroying our opponent's prime damage-dealers. Playing into Sisters is already a pretty daunting proposition, so taking BID against them makes for a somewhat more manageable demand load. 

Morvenn and the Paragons are a hard unit, but they're Toughness 7, so that's a pretty good unit to put Azrael-led Hellblasters into if you happened to bring them. If you make them your Oath target and you can put a fresh unit of Hellblasters into them, you're apt to pick up all 3 Nundums and put some damage on Morvenn. The upside of putting Hellblasters into them is there's not a good return on using a Miracle Dice to succeed on a save, because we're dishing out a mass of Damage 2 attacks rather than a few high-damage attacks. Otherwise, I think the play is to put the Eradicators into them and try and get the DWKs into the Castigators. The Paragons are the one unit that the list is guaranteed to have that are a significant threat to DWKs in melee. 

If you can swing it so your opponent has to move a Castigator or Immolator into the Eradicators' range in order to draw a bead on them, then you have a decent chance of picking up the tank on Overwatch.

I'd say don't try too hard to pick off the Triumph from across the table. Chances are your opponent will be able to keep it entirely behind terrain until it suits them to pop through a wall and pick up a skirmishing unit, or a weakened heavy hitter. Unless an opponent makes a major mistake or the terrain is iffy, we're just going to have to put up with that thing generating a Miracle 6 a turn. On the upside, it's not fast and it doesn't have guns to speak of, so it's not much of a threat to anything unless it gets close, and even then its melee attacks are merely okay, not awesome like Morvenn's. If you can get Deathwing Knights with swords into them, you'll fix their little red wagon. 

That, battle brothers, is what I've got for you. I hope you find it helpful the next time you face off against Bringers of Flame Sisters. I'd like to think it'll help me, but I'll have to find out the next time I face off against them. If you find this content worthwhile, I'd appreciate it if you'd click on the Follow button over on the left. If you'd like to support more content creators who are fellow enthusiasts, check out Dank List Wargaming on YouTube. May you find victory against the pious, overzealous fanatics and all the other foes you face. For the Lion!