Virulent Vectorium: The 11th-Edition Death Guard Objective Detachment

Rewritten by Faction Pack v1.2, and worth reading in both halves: at the end of your Command phase, if a friendly DEATH GUARD unit is controlling an objective, that objective is secured. Until you lose control of that objective, while an enemy unit is within range of that objective, that enemy unit is Afflicted.

The first half turns the army's defining quality into points. Death Guard are hard to shift, and a detachment that rewards you for controlling objectives at the end of your Command phase is a detachment that pays you for doing the one thing you were going to do anyway.

The second half is the part people under-rate. Every objective you have secured becomes a permanent Nurgle's Gift zone, independent of Contagion Range and independent of whether any of your models are still standing next to it. In an army whose aura is 3 inches on turn one, having Afflicting ground on the board is a genuinely different kind of threat. It also means that an opponent trying to take back a point walks into -1 Toughness and your chosen Plague before they have made a single attack.

Read the whole clause together and the gameplan writes itself: take the middle early, secure it, and let the enemy come to you into a debuff they cannot avoid.

Six, which is what the 3-DP price buys, and the deepest suite in the faction.

• Disgustingly Resilient (2CP, opponent's Shooting or the Fight). Just after an enemy unit selects its targets, one targeted DEATH GUARD unit subtracts 1 from the Damage characteristic of attacks allocated to it until the end of the phase. This is where the classic Death Guard effect lives in 11th edition. It is a stratagem in one detachment, not the army rule.
• Plaguesurge (2CP, your Command). Your DEATH GUARD Warlord on the battlefield adds 3 inches to the Contagion Range of models from your army until the start of your next Command phase. Army-wide, and the 12 inch cap applies after modifiers.
• Putrid Detonation (1CP, any phase). A just-destroyed DEATH GUARD VEHICLE or MONSTER with Deadly Demise inflicts its mortal wounds automatically instead of on a D6, and anything that suffers them is Afflicted until the start of your next turn.
• Leechspore Eruption (1CP, your Command). A wounded DEATH GUARD model rolls a D6 per wound lost against an enemy unit within 3 inches: each 5+ is a mortal wound, to a maximum of 6, and heals your model 1 wound.
• Overwhelming Generosity (1CP, start of your Shooting). A DEATH GUARD CHARACTER unit names a visible enemy unit; for the phase, any Death Guard unit targeting it can re-roll the dice determining how many attacks its weapons make. Best on a turn several units are firing blast or variable-shot weapons at one target.
• Creeping Blight (1CP, your Shooting). One DEATH GUARD INFANTRY unit that has not shot can re-roll Hit and Wound rolls against Afflicted units for the phase. In this detachment, anything standing on a secured objective is Afflicted, so this fires more often than it looks.

The habit to build: hold Disgustingly Resilient for the turn your opponent commits to removing the block on your secured objective, and spend Plaguesurge on the turn you most want a wide debuff rather than as soon as you can afford it.

Four, all DEATH GUARD model only, which is the widest access in the faction and means you can put them on almost any character you own.

• Daemon Weapon of Nurgle (10 pts). Melee attacks by the bearer score a Critical Hit on an unmodified 5+. Cheap, and it scales with how many attacks the bearer already has.
• Furnace of Plagues (25 pts). +1 Strength and +1 Attack on the bearer's melee weapons, and those weapons gain [DEVASTATING WOUNDS].
• Arch Contaminator (25 pts). While the bearer's unit is within range of an objective marker you control, every model in that unit can re-roll the Wound roll. It is written for exactly the behaviour Worldblight pays for, which makes it the detachment's signature pick.
• Revolting Regeneration (30 pts). The bearer has Feel No Pain 5+.

If you take one, take Arch Contaminator. If you take two, add Daemon Weapon of Nurgle, because at 10 points it is the best rate in the list.

(Points come from the Munitorum Field Manual and move with updates; confirm in the app.)

At 3 DP this detachment consumes a full 2,000-point budget. There is no leftover point, no 1-DP splash, and no combination. That is the trade: six stratagems and four enhancements instead of the three and two a 1-DP detachment gives you, in exchange for having no second detachment at all.

This is worth stating plainly because published advice has said otherwise. If you have read that Virulent Vectorium usually forms the core of a list with a cheap 1-DP specialist bolted on, check the arithmetic: 3 + 1 is 4, and your budget at 2,000 points is 3.

At 1,000 points the budget is about 2 DP, so Virulent Vectorium is not available at all. At that size you are choosing between a 2-DP detachment on its own or two 1-DP detachments together.

What you get for the price is depth. Six stratagems, four of them 1CP and two of them 2CP, cover the Command phase, both Shooting phases, the Fight phase and the moment a vehicle dies. Four enhancements with no character restriction let you kit whatever characters your collection actually contains. A 2-DP core plus a 1-DP support gives you nine stratagems, but split across two narrower lists that each want a different kind of unit.

• Plague Marines are Battleline and the unit that actually controls the objectives Worldblight secures.
• Chaos Rhino gets a squad onto a midfield objective before the end of your second Command phase, which is when the rule first pays out. The pack gave the Death Guard Chaos Rhino the FRAME keyword.
• Plagueburst Crawler punishes an opponent trying to retake a secured point, and is a Deadly Demise model for Putrid Detonation. The pack gave it FRAME.
• Blightlord Terminators are the durable body you send to take a point you do not yet hold, and the natural Disgustingly Resilient target.
• Lord of Virulence leads the central block and can carry any of the four enhancements.
• Mortarion is the apex centrepiece and the natural Warlord for Plaguesurge. As an Epic Hero he cannot take an Enhancement, and the pack rewrote both his Diseased Influence and Inflamed Reprisal abilities.

Take it when you want the strongest single detachment in the faction and are happy to spend your whole budget on it, or when your collection is a broad, balanced Death Guard army rather than a themed one. It is the detachment that turns being hard to kill into scoreboard points, which is the version of Death Guard most people are picturing.

Be clear-eyed about the limits. It is all of your Detachment Points, so there is no second rule to cover a weakness. Worldblight only pays out at the end of your Command phase, so an objective you take in your Movement phase does not secure until the following turn. And it is a codex detachment: the pack rewrites its rule but does not reprint the stratagems or enhancements, so the six and four below rest on community mirrors.

Sample gameplan: take the middle objective by the end of battle round two and secure it. Put Arch Contaminator on the character leading the block that sits on it, so the whole unit re-rolls Wound rolls while it stays there. Hold Disgustingly Resilient for your opponent's alpha strike on that block. Use Creeping Blight on the infantry shooting whatever walks into the Afflicting zone, and save Plaguesurge for the turn a wide debuff wins you a second objective rather than the first turn you can afford it.