When you stick with an army for a while, you pick up a few tricks of the trade.  As a long-term Gitz player there’s a few things I’ve seen people often get wrong – myself included at times for sure – so today’s article presents a few little quality of life boosts you may be missing out on.

Ready to take a look? Let’s go.

1. Gobbapalooza rend works on shooting

This is a big one – given Shootas’ primary role as bulk bases to slam onto objectives, I think it’s fair to expect mainly chip damage from them, but that rend does move the needle quite significantly:

It’s the difference between probably killing one of those 7-wound, 3+ save mounted heroes and probably not, and I’ve done exactly that to Stormcast when they made the mistake of disrespecting the volume of dice that Shootas bring “because they only wound on 5s”.  Across 81 shots your own dice should be relatively reliable, but forcing your opponent to roll a fistful of 3+s means that you’ll usaully punch a couple of models out of an elite hammer unit, and occasionally have a big win when your opponent jags a bunch of 1s and 2s.

The real upside though is not just the raw damage that you’re adding, but where this slots into your army’s flow.  You’re probably taking a ‘Palooza anyway, so it’s hardly a sunk cost; this gives you a good way to use their buff in Turn 1 and start getting value right away, then move over to buffing a combat unit from Turn 2 onwards.

Shootas are great for counter-shooting into any opposing Dakka. They love blasting into anything behind a soft armour save (like Boltboyz) but as the table above shows, with the rend you’ve got a decent chance of punching through a full unit of 3x Longstrikes. Another way to get good value is by banging off a deep-striking irritation unit (like those stupid Seraphon newts) without having to send your own combat unit heading backwards.

There are good reasons why including 40x Shootas in a list has become a meme in the PC Discord, and slapping the Gobbapalooza rend on them early is a big one.  Works on Doom Divers too, in case you were wondering.

2. The Loonboss D6 model replacement stacks

Let’s take a look at this one, because it can be more generous than people sometimes realise.

What if you’ve got two or more Loonbosses in your army? There’s a general perception floating around that “abilities don’t stack”, which is only partly true.  More specifically, Passive Abilities are subject to the Rules of One:

And in conjunction with that, abilities that aren’t resolved immediately become Passive Abilities, and therefore don’t stack:

In the Loonboss’s case, +1 to wound would be a great example of an ability that is not resolved immediately, therefore is a Persisting Effect, is treated as a Passive and cannot be stacked up on the same unit. 

However… the replacement of D6 models absolutely is resolved there and then, so there’s nothing to stop multiple Loonbosses adding multiple D6 models back into the same unit of Stabbas. Cha Ching!

Just watch out because it is only Stabbas that benefit from this – not Shootas.  That would be easy to gloss over in the heat of battle.

Going back to the original ability: You do need to be outside of combat, so you can get extra value from this with the new(ish) Frazzlegit spell lore that lets you retreat in the Hero phase. And you can stack up extra Rally dice with the Clammy Hand HT too, to slam back in a whole bunch of Gits and galvanize a unit that’s been taking a shoeing.

3. Squig Herders can explode

Thanks to ya boi Sean Tufnell for flagging this one up.  The way that Squigs explode has changed so much over the last couple of years¹ and one change that I missed across the various iterations, and I know I’m not alone here, is that you can roll for the 5+ retributive damage when you remove Squig Herders, and not just the Squigs themselves.

The general gist of it is: you remove the Squig Herders and hopefully pop out some damage, leaving the Squig Herd (with their much better combat profile) to fight back. Then you can replace the Herders via Rally, and go again with their Herding Squigs ability.

Squig Herd are pretty nuts, and I’ve written a whole thing on Patreon about these guys, so go check it out.

4. Rabble Rowza works with Squig Herd (and Mercs)

The general idea with this fella is that he pops up and makes a Monster run towards him – great for Kragnos in particular, although while that’s undoubtedly fun, I’ve found that ramming old Donkey Dick across the board at maximum velocity is generally a great way to lose a lot of games.

Another (maybe better) use for him is giving Beast units Run and Charge. And Squig Herd are Beasts, which means you can make them run and charge.  Squigs at 100 or 200 points make a much more reasonable trading piece – it’s rare that they won’t trade up, and then you can half-Shrine them back anyway.

Similarly there’s no keyword lock on this, so if you fancy a Merc Mega in your army (or a lil one for that matter), they can run and charge too.  I rate One Eyed Grunnock at his points and I’m also quite partial to a Stumblefoot at 140 points, but Squigs are probably the best and most efficient target.

5. Snarlfang and Sunstealas can both Move and Redeploy

I’ve been talking about Moonwalk and Redeploy with Snarlfang for a long time now – moving 2D6 onto a vacated objective can really mess with people’s arithmetic.  And recently Chris Riley discussed using that ability to great effect with the Attuned to Ghyran battle tactics card.

More recently, Sunsteala Wheelas gained the opportunity to move in your opponent’s turn:

Noting that this (unlike Can’t Catch Us) is a Core ability, a lot of people’s first reaction was that you wouldn’t also be able to Redeploy, because you can’t use two Core abilities in the same phase.  Hilariously though, Redeploy itself is not a Core ability, so you absolutely can use both:

Now clearly you can only Redeploy one unit or the other, but whichever way you slice it up, that’s a whole lot of off-turn movement bullshit.

---

So there you have it!  Five little tricks that I’ve seen Gloomspite players miss, and in some cases I’ve missed myself at first. None of them are rocket science but I’ve seen experienced players who are unaware of one or more, so hopefully that’s been helpful.

Have a good weekend, nerds – see you on the other side.

If you’d like to help us continue our work, we’d love to have your support. All Patreon Tiers include Discord access, exclusive articles and regular contests. Our Tiers are priced to be within everyone’s reach, so please click here to join us today!

1. For a while it was 9” hero sniping, which was admittedly pretty dumb. ↩︎