Dreadknight

This page is in need of cleanup. Srsly. It's a fucking mess.

>

This article or section involves Matthew Ward, Spiritual Liege, who is universally-reviled on /tg/. Because this article or section covers Ward's copious amounts of derp and rage, fans of the 40K series are advised that if they proceed onward, they will see fluff and crunch violation of a level rarely seen.

Ready to form Voltron!

"Yo dawg, I heard you like power armor, so I put power armor around your power armor so you can be armored while you're armored." -- Techmarine Xzibitus of the Grey Knights.

The Nemesis Dreadknight is a Grey Knight suit of armor that allows its wearer to go toe-to-toe with a Greater Daemon of Chaos on his own. Yes, the regular plot armor does have its limits, and even an above-strength chapter can't always send the hundreds of Battle Brothers that would normally be required to contain such a powerful daemon.

Wearers are recognized as being the most formidable of Knights; unfortunately for them, this means that they get stuck with the really dangerous missions.

Design (And Flaws)

The existence of the Dreadknight is not problematic in itself -- a Dreadnought-sized suit of armor that doesn't require the operator to be near-dead is a reasonable thing for a chapter to have. This is especially true for the Grey Knights, as they regularly take on massively powerful daemons with relatively few Knights, and prefer to let their battle-brothers have their eternal rest rather than keeping them half-alive in a Dreadnought (what? Grey Knights have more dreadnoughts than any other chapter). It does lead to some shoe-on-head grade rules interactions, like how your techmarine can repair your dreadnought but not your dreadknight - although that one is surprisingly justified (see below - everyone just shoots the driver).

The problem is that that it looks really silly. As in, "the pilot looks like he's in a baby carrier" silly, and from a distance it looks like a hideous mishmash of mechanical bits and pieces to boot. Even a Penitent Engine, which arguably has the same sort of shape, has the contrast of some hapless victim chained against an enormous metal monstrosity surrounding it, while armor on top of armor in the Dreadknight's case gives it no dominant contours or lines in the same way that, say, a Dreadnought or Battlesuit does.

Combine this with the crunch giving the Dreadknight the saves of Terminator armor and the look of the pilot already wearing Termie armor, meaning by all accounts whenever he's getting hit, everyone with half a brain on the enemy's side is shooting him out of the middle, and you get a look so incompetently-designed that even "because grimdark" can't explain why it turned out that way. It really does look like the designer was watching Dexter's Laboratory/Matrix and thought his backpack robot suit was great Imperium material, or they saw Alien at the time and thought that the Grey Knights needed power loaders. Well, if the Imperial Guard gets tractors with cannons it's only fair the Grey Knights get forklift trucks with feet...

Add the Grey Knights' checkered reputation with the community up until 6th Ed and you get what could be the undisputed champ of units kneecapped by fluff. Awesome as a Space Marine wearing a fuckoff-huge suit of armor to go beat up really big things could be, if it's not another toy for the shiny special snowflake chapter, it's also one that doesn't even have the courtesy to look sensibly designed. Cue mockery.

Modelers Get Shit Done

Since a lot of the Dreadknight's problems are fluff and aesthetics-related, it's very easy to make a better Dreadknight with a little lateral thinking: just replace its baby carrier torso with something a bit more logical. Feel free to model one by attaching its limbs to the chassis of a Dreadnought to give it a torso that makes sense. A quick Google search will give you plenty of reference models to work off of, and as long as it plays like a Dreadknight, nobody will care all that much. Exposed-head chassis seem to be pretty popular for this, so you can't have everything, but screw those models. It's your Dreadknight and nobody can tell you how to build it as long as it's not sillier than the stock model.

Really, when you get right down to it, if you think about the Dreadknight bitz as two arms and two legs with where the baby carrier would go as a blank canvas, the possibilities are infinite. Make a beefed-up Sentinel. Create a Penitent Engine on steroids. Have Orks loot it and turn it into a Kustom Mega Dread. Noughtknight conversions are just the beginning.

Tactics

The bad rep masks what's not a bad unit, all things considered. It's expensive, but then again everything in the Grey Knights' arsenal is, and it gets customization options and status as a Monstrous Creature with the current rules. While it's the only MC that doesn't get Fearless, with S10 and Terminator-level durability it's not a bad choice, all things considered, and by virtue of being that combination of tough, strong and ugly you can guarantee the guy on the other end of the table will immediately try to kill it and ignore everything else in your army. Give it close combat upgrades, wade into battle and watch as your Termie on stilts puts a hammer up the ass of high-point units out on their own, as long as you don't get hit with Tank Shock or some similar effect.

All in all, it requires more attention than other MCs, and though you can put guns on it it won't be helping the Knights get any shootier at range, but it's at least got its uses, especially in close range combat. It also can bring along a personal teleporter, and while this sounds like a welcome addition for a quality-over-quantity army like the Grey Knights and a fair trade for having a MC that can be Tank Shocked, this toy costs more than half as much as the entire vehicle creature stock, so think about if you can afford the cost and if you really expect to lose your Dreadknight before bolting it on. Since it starts out at 130 points, you may want to think carefully about if your army really needs a MC in it or if you can do the same job with Dreadnoughts that the Knights already have. If you must take one along, though, rest assured you can do things with it and royally fuck up some special snowflake's day, especially if it's one hiding behind Warp or psyker effects.

They are also good at getting objectives: they're pretty fast, they're very killy, they're tough and they're on the cheap side for what they do. Anyway, why should 'nids and daemons be the only ones to use giant psyker MCs to grab objectives? Anyway, we have the best one for taking them, if not holding them. Now, if only we could get ObSec like Tervigons...

Gallery

• 

  In the grim, dark future, carrying babies is serious business.

• 

  It's like one of those nesting dolls, but more retarded.

• 

  What the Dreadknight should ACTUALLY look like.

• 

  Dreadknight and baby.

• 

  GW being original.

• 

  Note: As shown by the above, it is possible to make a mostly standard Dreadknight look awesome. Unfortunately, you apparently need near-Golden Daemon levels of painting skill to pull it off.