As the raging debate on the internet goes on as to whether the Death Troopers are good or not…we need to go to the ground in Scarif to the real battle and take a look at the black armored, word scrambled murder squad. “warble warble warble”
Krennic’s boys and girls are here and they’re expensive. They’re supposed to be the elite of the elit and a base cost of 76 is nothing to write home about, but there’s a lot of things we need to go over. Entourage on Krennic is severely underrated, and they have a great synergy with his command cards in a lot of ways. Giving them those stand by tokens with his 2 pip will get them a free aim token. They don’t really care about Suppression like most units between Compel, Disciplined 1 and having a Suppression threshold of 2, rather than 1. I think the Death Troopers will be a play style unit, of course, which I guess really goes for any type of unit but especially for the DT’s. I think there will be a raging debate about these guys for a while, as in do you take one, two, three….four?! But let’s break it down to the basics: Disciplined 1 allows them to remove a suppression when issued an order. Precise 2 which allows them to re-roll two additional dice when spending an aim, aka re-roll four dice if you want. Ready 1 which allows them to gain an aim token when given a stand by token, which again goes hand in hand with Krennic’s 2 pip. They surge on both offense and defense, while rolling red dice. Let’s get into their weapons and talk about how you’ll probably want to play them, because this is a very interesting unit.
Death Trooper Weapon Options
I’ve talked about exhaustible weapons and how they’re typically not ideal, but I think with the DT’s you’ll want to take the DLT-19D Trooper as well as the E-11D Config to give your DT’s a weapon range of 1 to 4, albeit exhaustible. At range 4, you’ll be able to roll four black, two red, and one white…while being Suppressive and having the ability to re-roll four dice if you take an aim. In theory, you’re going to put multiple wounds through on your opponent and two suppression tokens at range 4. Seems good to me. If your opponent decides to move into range 3 of your DT’s, you won’t even need to recover the Gun Configuration to take the EXACT same shot. This should give you some really interesting board control.
Another way to use them is to keep them in cover and move them up the board towards an objective. While they’re good at long range, they’re just as good short range as well. This can really create some problems for your opponent, who could be walking into six red, one white with blast if they get into range 2 of a full DT squad. While I would prefer the long range type set up, I believe both play styles could be good.
Let’s say you aren’t running Death Troopers along Krennic, you may want to consider throwing in the DT-F16 in order to get Compel in there. Just a thought!
Final Thoughts
If you take them with the DLT and weapon configuration…and say Overwatch, you’re looking at a point cost of 122. Which, that’s a lot of points. Some people will say they’re too expensive. Some will say only take one. Some will say take four(With Krennic). Do what you want! It’s your army. I think they run really well parallel both Krennic and Veers. Veers’ three pip card could give them a free recover, especially in the early rounds, and they could get some quick range 4 shots off in succession. They are susceptible to pierce, but most units are. You still want to keep them in cover, even with the Red dice save.
The Empire has a new bag of tricks with all of these ways to apply Suppression and as a Rebel player it’s going to be on me to figure out how to answer it. Not to mention, as I stated above, the DT’s have a lot of ways to answer Suppression on their side with Disciplined, Compel, and perhaps Strict Orders on a Commander. As of right now, I don’t want to see those Death Troopers on the other side of the board! Have some fun with these awesome sculpts!
-GrandAdmiralThrawn
