Foetid Bloat-Drone

Even MORE Blight Drones!? Emprah help us all....

Foetid Bloat-drones are like the Blight Drone's nasty little brother. A floating Daemon Engine of Nurgle that hunts its prey with a malign intelligence, the Foetid Bloat-drone is one ugly motherfucker even by the standards of the Plaguefather. Suffice to say they are as heavily armed as they are tough to take down, with the standard weaponry being a Plaguespitter (a silly name, but despite looking like a Lascannon, it is an assault D6, S6 weapon) and the equally unfortunately named Plague Probe (gee, you can just guess the amount of sexual innuendos created via Nurgle anal probing eh?). Despite what appearances (and Imperial propaganda) might suggest, the Foetid Bloat-drone is deceptively fast (well, as fast as a Nurglite Daemon Engine can go), with a movement of 10" at optimum health. It is also quite accurate, with its singular cyclopean 'eye' being used as a kill-scan that can mark targets through various wave lengths and imagery.

The Daemons that possess Foetid Bloatdrones are more aggressive and spiteful than most Daemons of Nurgle. Some are so willful that they cannot be entrusted with ranged weaponry at all, their desire to smash themselves into the enemy ranks all too evident. These rebellious engines are instead fitted with goofy looking devices known as Fleshmowers, which as you can already tell, turns the Daemon Engine into a bloody lawnmower. The mashed remains of flesh-mower victims make excellent fuel for those Bloat-drones armed with Plaguespitters or Heavy Blight Launchers, and so the two variants often form parasitic war packs.

The Foetid Bloat-drone's variants. Exhibit A: The Flying Lawnmower. Exhibit B: The Supreme Dakka Launcher.

Crunch

The Bloat-drone is a Daemon Engine that has both a 5+ invulnerable save (thanks to the Daemonic rule) and the Disgustingly Resilient rule which makes it a seriously tough motherfucker to bring down. Both its weapons (the Plaguespitter and Plague Probe) can re-roll 1 to wound, making it quite the threat to normal infantry. However, don't expect it to do too well against dedicated tank destroyers which will fuck up your precious daemon engine in a few turns if rolls prove to be in the opponent's favor.

On top of that, the Bloat-drone have a special ability called Putrid Explosion which means that in any scenario where the daemon engine suffers critical existence failure, 1D6 gets rolled for any enemy unit within 7". On a 4+, the unit takes a mortal wound as it is covered in substances best left unmentioned by the Daemon Engine's death throes. Pretty nice as a last 'fuck you', but rather pointless against any particularly shooty army.

In 9th Edition, the entire DG roster was overhauled due to changing Disgustingly Resilient to become -1 Dam instead of a Feel No Pain. This has changed the Bloat-Drone to be really tanky against anything smaller than a Krak Missile or Thunder Hammer (or against the few d3 damage weapons left in the edition), but is only Marginally Resilient against Damage 3 and Above, and doing nothing against the edition's clusterfuck of Mortal Wounds.

Offensive-wise, the Bloat-Drone is very cost effective for 120 points: the fleshmower lets it do 12! attacks at D2, and with its zippy 10" of fly, it can quite literally mow down Primaris Marines off an objective, making it an excellent DISTRACTION CARNIFEX. Its only weakness is that it is in direct-competition with the Myphitic Blight-Hauler: not only do they cost the exact same in points and compete for the same slots, but the Blight-Haulers come in units of up to 3, have a respectable number of anti-tank guns, and are also cheaper because they're push-fit.