“It’s a huge shit sandwich and we’re all going to have to take a bite.”

Lt Lockhart – Full Metal Jacket

Well it finally happened, I took my beloved Nurgle army to a 4th edition event. It was against my better judgement and as one of Papa’s most loyal grandchildren I felt I owed it to the Big Guy to give them a run. In accordance with the devil’s bargain I struck with Editor Pete¹ if I run it I’m obliged to write about it.

My initial plan to do a proper review seemed like a waste of effort. The Index is a failue of design in both its performance and Verisimilitude. After the glory days of 3rd edition, 4th Ed Nurgle not only sucks on the tabletop, it doesn’t feel like running a Nurgle army. Whatever tech there is in the index, my honest tip for list building is to shelve your army and hope that they find someone competent to write the eventual Battletome.

TLDR: The 4th Ed Nurgle index is a bunch of subpar warscrolls that pop out the occasional mortal wound. Avoid.

Still that’s not going to satisfy the incessant content-related demands of Editor Pete and the Craichouse Patrons, so it might be a good idea to examine why the index is such garbage. Studying failure can teach us a lot about why things succeed in the first place. Examine any new MMO that launches with a fanfare and dwindles to nothing in five years and you will understand why WOW is still a thing. Figuring out why Zach Snyder’s Rebel Moon movies are so awful leads you to understand why Seven Samurai is so awesome.

Zero apologies to any Snyder fans, stop enabling him and he might make a decent movie² again

Hopefully, discerning and demonstrating why the Nurgle book is such abject garbage should tell us a few things about game design and the current state of the game. At the very least, writing it will allow me to inflict my ridiculous ego and limited ability on an undeserving public. If it’s good enough for Zach Snyder?

The Good Old Days

The failure of 4th Ed Nurgle begins with the 3rd Ed Battletome, which was one of the best ever written. Papa’s boys were strong from the get-go and delivered a unique experience that felt like Nurgle to play, with or against. They were never the hardest hitting army but they had S Tier resilience, a swathe of rules to wear down and frustrate the opposition and the blessed wheel.

Opponents remember the no pile-in turn but as a Nurgle Player the wheel was much more than that. An extra bit of healing at the right time, a crucial summoning point or a negated command. A good Nurgle player set the tempo of the game from that first random roll of the wheel and learned to yield to the inevitable. The Wheel always gave you something.

Sure, no pile in turns and locking people in place with Sloppities may have been a bit of an NPE. So is being blasted to pieces by Lord Kroak or shot off the board by Blissbarbs. The only Positive Play Experiences come from armies you routinely beat the piss out of. Playing against Nurgle is meant to be a miserable, dispiriting experience and not just because of the time sink of the disease mechanic.

What Went Wrong?

I have given this some thought and arrived at the conclusion that any genuine rolled-gold, copper-bottomed disaster comes down to a combination of three factors: A Difficult Situation, Fundamentally Flawed Assumptions and Bad Decision Making. As an example let’s look at that classic rite of passage, your first disastrous live-in relationship in your early 20’s.³

1. A Difficult Situation: Youthful relationships are inherently problematic and rarely end well. Everyone involved is as young, dumb and full of cum as they are ever going to be.
2. Fundamentally Flawed Assumptions: Someone being willing to have regular sex with you is all you need as a basis for a long-term relationship.
3. Bad Decision Making: “You know what, you’re here pretty much all the time anyway. Why not just move in and save on rent?”

The result of all this was, in my case, hundreds of screaming arguments, a pile of debt and a cat my mother ended up keeping until it died at the ripe old age of 17. The same analysis can be applied to just about any part of the Nurgle index:

1. A Difficult Sitation: Assigning points costs to units in an all new Index edition
2. Fundamentally Flawed Assumptions: New Nurgle seems about as strong as old Nurgle, and combat support foot heroes will be important in AOS4
3. Bad Decision Making: Let’s bring in the Lord of Blights and the Lord of Plagues at 160 points each

Which is how Nurgle enters 4th Ed with two support heroes at never-to-be-seen in competitive play prices. Plus the heroes themselves are functionally useless. The Lord of Blights buffs resistance to charges for one unit of Blightkings, the Lord of Plagues buffs attacks for charging Blightkings. On the surface this seems like a clever design option but it shows a lack of understanding of how Nurgle is supposed to work. Blightkings are attrition units, designed to prevail in protracted combats. Heroes that buff them for the one turn they charge or get charged is not what they need. Plus the buffs are terrible.

Thanks to Statshammer as always

A 160pt⁴ Lord of Plagues throws out an extra 2 points of damage (on a 2+, for one turn) and doesn’t even get the usual “Make a unit fight one after the other” buff most combat heroes come equipped with. Much like the 22 year old me who decided to patch up a fight with his girlfriend by getting her a kitten for Christmas, somebody just didn’t think this thing through. Anyways, on with some more specific examples of what is wrong with the index.

1. Disease

In fairness, reducing allegiance abilities for the Index was a tough problem for a lot of factions. Especially armies like Nurgle that relied on a lot of good allegiance abilities. That said, Nurgle’s one and only allegiance ability is pretty underwhelming:

I can see how somebody thought this was meant to work. Your armies lock up, the disease infects the enemy; and as they struggle to overcome your unkillable units it spreads to the rest of their army, leaving them trapped and gradually ground out of existence. In practice the following scenarios turn out to be a bit more likely:

1. Your opponent shoots you off the board before you can spread disease to any of their units.
2. Your opponent engages you in melee and wipes you out, ensuring nothing is in combat range at the end of the turn to spread disease.
3. You inflict disease on one unit but your opponent is not obliging enough to stand their other units next to it, so it can’t spread and you do a couple of mortals. Huzzah.
4. You inflict disease on a unit that gets rid of it by healing it. Preventing healing and returning models is pretty handy. Congrats, your only allegiance ability is pretty handy in this particular game. In your face, Destiny Dice.
5. By some miracle you disease a bunch of units, and proceed to fail most of your shitty D3 rolls in the turn when it could actually help you, getting sweet fuck all out of your only allegiance ability.

When the Nurgle teasers first started dropping, it was widely assumed that there would be much more going on with Disease outside of the allegiance abilities. There isn’t. You can spend a quarter of your points on a GUO with a short-range spell to spread Disease, or hope someone stands next to your trees…and that’s about it. I cannot stress enough how dispiriting it is to a veteran Nurgle player to be locked in combat with 5 enemy units and have to decide which one of them gets the sniffles before they heal it up next turn.

The failure of the Nurgle Index really flows from the Disease rules. It’s an attrition mechanism that doesn’t produce any reliable damage output. What makes this particularly galling is that they new rules for Tzeentch Warpflame are so much better: easier to apply, multiple sources of reliable output and they interact with a bunch of different things in the Tzeentch Index. Plus they got to keep Destiny Dice.⁵ Luckily Games Workshop realized Disease was a little weak and added Burst Pustules in the first patch: if an enemy dies with Disease, possibly from old age, it spreads on a 3+ making it slightly less useless. Meanwhile Tzeentch went from a shitty D3 mortals to a straight D3.

At some point you have to seriously consider the possibility that someone at GW IS deliberately fucking with you

2. Resilience

Well at least Nurgle are still tough right? Not especially. With an army wide 5+ Ward they look tough on paper, but it turns out a faction’s resilience is made up of a number of factors:

1. Armor saves.
2. Ward saves.
3. Healing, both damage and returning models.
4. Wound density.
5. Debuffs, things that make it harder to hurt you.
6. Inhibitors, A sort of catch-all category for fucking with your opponent’s output. Off-table deployment, movement and charge reductions, the Iron Heart of Khaine etc.⁶
7. Summoning/Recursion.
8. Your own output. Being able to kill the hell out of your opponent makes your own troops last.

So we can compare New Nurgle to Old Nurgle in terms of overall resilience:

You can quibble about some of my ratings but it’s pretty clear that 4th Ed Nurgle dropped off in overall resilience. Some of you are no doubt thinking I shouldn’t be comparing current Nurgle with previous incarnations. Well, what am I supposed to compare it to, your mother’s hairy snatch? Still, for the sake of argument, let’s compare Nurgle to some other 4th Ed factions instead⁸:

So without going so far as to assign arbitrarty numbers to the categories, it’s pretty clear that Stormcast and Soulblight are more resilient than Nurgle. Don’t believe me? Play with/against them and figure it out for yourself. Hell, Tzeentch are tougher than Nurgle.

A 5+ Ward with nothing to back it up just means your opponents take a bit longer to beat you to death. Plus, I have a strong suspicion that armies are hitting a lot harder than the devs ever intended. The much-hyped reduction in damage for AOS4 seems to only apply to ranged and charge mortals. Everything else is hitting like a truck and output is dominating the meta.

3. Output and the Companion Curse

The further I delve into the Nurgle Index, the more I am convinced that it was never properly playtested. The designers wanted a grindy attrition melee army, came up with something that looked like it from a distance and called it a day. Nurgle’s damage output is abysmal for a melee army. Every class of unit does less than its counterparts in other armies:

Elite Foot: 220 pts Skullreapers, 200 pts Brutes, 200 pts⁹ Blightkings

Credit to statshammer as always

Now nobody is expecting Skullreaper output from every troop type, but when you can’t match Brutes from an underperforming army that rarely even makes it to the tabletop then you are in trouble. Bear in mind too that Khorne and Ironjawz have access to some pretty sweet damage buffs. Blightkings have a point of rend, in their charge turn, for a mere 160 points. Now let’s have a look at Pusgoyle Blightlords, the hammer of the Maggotkin:

Big Base Cav on the Charge: 180 pts Gore Grunters vs 250 pts Mighty Skullcrushers vs 200 pts Mournfang vs 250 pts Pusgoyle Blightlords

Ouch. I was honestly surprised at what a poor class of damage dealers the Big Base Cav¹⁰ had become but when you are being outworked by Mighty Skullcrushers, you really are in trouble. Now I realize that the passionate defender of Nurgle¹¹ would be insisting that we apply the buffs to this one. Pusgoyles do get a few.

Well I’m a fair man, so let’s give them all a + 1 to hit from All Out Attack and their respective easy buffs. Plus one attack for Ironjawz and Khorne, + 1 rend for Pusgoyles and nothing whatsoever for Mournfang:

Nope, still can’t beat the Mournfang. And apart from the occasional enthusiast, Mournfang have been shelved by Mawtribes players as ridiculously expensive. The pricing on Nurgle units only makes sense if they are tougher, faster, get recursion or something.

To make matters worse, a lot of Nurgle’s output is tied up in Companion attacks. From the various Flies to Beasts of Nurgle, there are a lot of dumb animals and mounts in this army. At this stage of AOS4 it’s pretty clear that Companions suck balls. They don’t take buffs and hit on 4’s making them a drain on your All Out Attack CPs, unless you have multiple sources of plus one to hit. Nowhere is this more apparent than when you run Maggoth Lords. These mainstays of Nurgle have become shitty foot heroes riding around on what amounts to 2 Ironguts.

Sorry Bastian, Falkor is overpriced trash now. No breath mortals and whiffs half his attacks. Best of luck in 5th Ed

The Glottkin escapes the companion curse and is one of the hardest-hitting units in the army. It takes four charging Pusgoyles with every conceivable buff to out DPS him. Find me another combat army with a reinforced, buffed hammer unit with such miserable output.

Ad Nauseum

At this point I’ve made a pretty good fist of breaking down the stats to demonstrate that Nurgle is a not-particularly-resilient combat army with the hitting power of a strand of wet lettuce being swung by a toddler who’s desperately in need of a nap. I feel I can wrap this up with a quick review of some of the lowlights of the index.

Spell Lore: Not awful, but every spell lands on a 7.¹² Without a casting buff you fail 2 out of 5 casts so its not really worth speccing into magic. On the plus side, you save command points because it’s rarely even worth attempting Magical Intervention. The unlimited spell is particularly galling.

Not having the option to choose between the debuff and healing effect is just annoying. Do you want a -1 to wound buff on your block of 20 Plaguebearers or would you like to heal 1 wound? I know you can cast it multiple times, why not commit another 100-odd point Wizard to the cause?

Great Unclean One: There was a lot of excitement amongst people who struggle with reading comprehension when the Big Boy’s warscroll dropped. He’s honestly pretty good for a 340pt Wizard-General. Unfortunately he costs 480pts for less output than a Tzeentch Big Bird. The 4+ chance to return a half-strength demon unit is a trap. Avoid at all costs.

Heroic Traits and Artefacts: GW did us a solid here. One non-useless choice in each category is a real time saver when it comes to list writing. Grandfather’s Blessing and the Witherstave it is. On the plus side, you don’t lose a lot by taking all Unique heroes and skipping this crap.

Sloppity: I find this guy particularly galling. Losing the no pile in ability wasn’t enough of a nerf? You now have to roll for his ability which targets one unit of Daemons. Still, it’s the only debuff you have, and it is still useful. The wound buff doesn’t work on Companions, which are the only Daemons that do damage. Ignoring Wards is useful for the 10 or so damage a Daemon unit can put out.

The Glottkin: Still my favorite God-Monster based solely on his impressive output in an army that really doesn’t have any. Nurgle’s mightiest Mortal wizard is now a level 1 caster, which actually kind of fits with the standard of the book. Sucks to be you, Ethrac. Blighted Stampede (his countercharge ability) is another stand-out in the “Never Playtested” category, as only the most dimwitted opponent will ever allow you to use it:

Let’s see, I can charge you first myself, or have you and three units charge me, lemme think on it

Summing Up

So there it is. They managed to turn one of the best Battletomes ever written into underperforming drivel. Maybe they didn’t playtest it? Maybe the gave the job to some Nepo Baby hire? Maybe the piss poor quality of the book means the new one is pretty high up in the release schedule? Is there any hidden tech to unlock? Probably, but I’m not the guy to do it.

I took a Nurgle list to an event and scraped out a 3-2, largely by winning against players with much less experience than me, and that was enough for me. The experience of seeing such a magnificent army reduced to such insipid dross was so disheartening that I put the boys in storage. I can only compare it to buying a ticket to see the restored version of Seven Samurai and having them show the extended editions of Rebel Moon Parts 1 and 2 instead. You’re a better man than me if you can sit through that.

Of all the things to take from Seven Samurai, why would you decide to go with harvesting? You’re in space FFS. Who has an intergalactic empire that runs out of grain?

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1. No awesome Fiddle contests, just passive aggressive wheedling for content ↩︎
2. By which I mean Dawn of the Dead. ↩︎
3. Apparently this is less of a thing for generations further down the Alphabet than mine, presumably because they don’t move out of home or are too busy making people semi-famous for playing video games online or some bullshit. ↩︎
4. Be the one who comments that they dropped the points to 150. I dare you. ↩︎
5. And got cheap Greater Daemons, and got good recursion, etc etc. ↩︎
6. The no-pile ins effect of Old Nurgle is a classic example of this. ↩︎
7. With Mystic Shields and Finest hour, everyone had better armor in 3rd Ed. ↩︎
8. In case you think this article is all “Poor Me”, I play both of these factions too. ↩︎
9. I double dare you. ↩︎
10. Mostly, we’re all well aware of the exceptions. ↩︎
11. Josh Clark one of our Craichouse Patreons, ask him how awesome Rottigus is sometime. ↩︎
12. Yes I know this is lore appropriate but so is not sucking at everything. ↩︎