Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Horus Heresy Review: Hvarl Red-Blade


Background.
Hvarl is a new HQ selection for the Space Wolves legion. In a nut shell, he would seem on a surface scan to be more of a World Eater than a Space Wolves marine. He likes head hunting and then singing and discussing the tales of the heads that have been chopped off with his brothers in his company. Oh, and his company are expected to do the same. Because if you don't have the head then it never happened and you can't boast to your mates about it afterwards and spin a yarn worthy of a campfire tale. The background suggests that he was not of a good humour and pretty much only liked being in combat. I think that's about sufficient to get the picture.

Strengths.
Hvarl has a number of factors in his favour. Firstly he has a bonus wound compared to a standard praetor. This is very strong. But backing this up is his terminator armour  with grenade harness plus iron halo coupled with his AP2 Hearth-Splitter melee weapon with armour bane. This is very nice indeed (and has a good S bonus as well. Plus he totes a heavy bolter. For fun.

His battle cunning rule is where he truly comes in to his own though. Granting scouts to several units is a powerful boon to almost any army. And it is this rule that sets him apart from other HQ selections to my mind. Having preferred enemy (infantry) in a small bubble is mere icing on the cake for this warlord.

Weaknesses.
Not much. He is actually reasonably priced for his rules if one can take advantage of them. However, if you're not going to play to his strengths then he is an over costed praetor and you should instead build a generic terminator praetor frankly.

Overall.
One needs to build an army (or a core of an army) around Hvarl to take advantage of his rules. He could readily wreck things on an enemy back line through outflanking along with a nice blob of infantry. Recommended overall!

2 comments:

Bragg said...

He is such a powerful character. Really adds some trickery to the wolves to help with the infantry heavy tactics and get those units where they need to be to threaten armour

Unknown said...

Some of his rules should've been in the Wolves warlord table.

As it stands, he's the only way to reliably outflank mayor blobs of infantry.

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