One step backwards...

  Late last night, one of my buddies called me about a rules question...  Let's jump back to 

Rules I hate!!!

  So I don't know if you guys have seen, but GW released this little thing a couple of weeks before the Machine God came back.  To the wild acclaim of so many of my old-school gaming buddies, this book became very popular really fast.  You see, minus Kharne the Betrayer, this book took everything 'Khorny' and tossed it onto one army.  

  Enter the Khorne Daemonkin codex, probably the best book to be released by GW in a looooong time.  As a couple of my buddies noted, "I finally get to use my OLD Khorne army!".  I tend to have a lot of Chaos fans in my entourage, and Khorne is usually their favorite (we're all a bunch of angry people).  They used to use 'zerkers and Bloodthirsters to do terrible things to my army, and I was looking forward to it again.  

  
  Enter the artifacts...  The most powerful piece of wargear on this list is the Blood-forged Armour.  I say that because I wanted to use Grey Knights (finally) to kill me some daemons, and it turns out that a Daemon Prince can pop this little chestplate on and DESTROY all hope of my GK soul-zapping that bugger.  Wow!
  When my buddy and I played our game, he admitted that the wargear was really powerful and sort of apologized, but I advised that my Dreadknight pilot wouldn't have known better.  If there were other daemons on the board at the time, I could kill them instead!

Did you see the new model!?!  Damn, GW!!!

  Enter the Bloodthirster!!!  I want to kill him so baaaaaaaad!  My buddy chose not to bring one in the standard army list, instead relying on the Axe of Ruin to bring one in.  That is the second best piece of wargear on that list above.  I was excited by that because I would get to see a Bloodthirster on the table again.  Unfortunately, the game didn't work out anywhere near the level where we could have seen that, but that's another post...  In any case, what was going to be cool was seeing a Daemon Prince go down and a Bloodthirster replace him.  It was meant to be totally scary!!!

THAT'S precisely what I expected to see...

  And now back to my other buddy calling me.  Lacking his rulebook, he had a rules question.  This guy is desperately trying to avoid AdMech and he's focused on his Daemonkin army, and he got into a rules discussion with his gamer circle.  It was a rule I never thought about.  Like ever.  

  When the Bloodthirster arrives, does he arrive in Gliding mode or Swooping mode?  In other words, does he deep strike to the ground or does he pull a Goku and teleport directly into midair?  If I had to guess, he deep strikes onto the ground, like everyone else.  When the model is deployed at the beginning of the game, he starts on the ground.  Besides, Deep Striking and Swooping are both 'special' movement modes, and you shouldn't be able to do two 'special' modes at the same time.  So I open up my rulebook and search through the rules for Deep Striking (pg 162), Conjuration (pg 26), and finally Flying Monstrous Creatures (pg 68).   

  "Deployment...  If a Flying Monstrous Creature arrives via Deep Strike Reserve, it always counts as being in Swooping mode."  

BOOM!  This means that the character with the axe dies, then the Bloodthirster rips a hole in the air, has to spend the next turn landing, them finally get to charge the turn after?  Ouch!  In fact, this applies to the Daemonology power Possession- all Conjuration powers follow the Deep Strike rules for all intents and purposes!  I no longer fear, for at least three turns, a summoned Bloodthirster or even Daemon Prince.  

  Remember back in 3rd edition where Daemons popped up and immediately charged?  I hated that and then planned to use it for my cheezy army until the rules changed.  Remember the previous editions where Daemons are simply summoned and have to wait one turn before they can charge?  Yeah, that's normal.  Now we have Daemons that are summoned, then have to wait two turns to charge?  Wow, one step backwards each time...

  Now I'm supposed to be on the receiving end of this combo and actually looked forward to seeing it happen (I just have to get my Ultra-boys back to the range, apparently), but not like this.  This actually makes that combo very unscary (in that competitive way) and kinda ruins the point of this codex.  I mean, zerkers led by a Bloodthirster that might join the fray at some point?  That's not 'Khorny' at all.  That's just a rule I hate...

Let me know what you think!