Raising an Impervious Wall: Using Paladins and Vilmon

Well, with all of the reporting on Lock and Load, Colossals, Gargantuans, and other goodies, the bug has really hit me lately.  At least hard enough to do some blogging myself.  IRL I'm still training hard for my new job, so posts aren't regular by any means, but I really wanted to talk some Warmahordes. 

My birthday is coming and up and I received a bit of cash, so I decided to make a purchase for my army that I have until recently been wanting but haven't manage to get around to.  Namely, I picked up a Paladin of the Order of the Wall and High Paladin Dartan Vilmon. I'm really excited about these two guys as they are perhaps some of the most decent defensive pieces in the entire game.  They operate around being able to negate offense through raising ARM or outright preventing damage at all.  This ultimately means that they can hold objectives, block lanes of attack, or protect flanks with relative ease.

Menoth really centers around the concept of synergy.  That's their schtick.  If you have seen pSeverius run an Avatar supported by a Vassal with Eye of Menoth up and a Choir singing Hymn of Battle, you know what I mean.  It's ugly.  Paladins are no different.  Here's my philosophy on them.  They bring a few things to the table.  1) They bring a magical, weapon master P+S 14 weapon with critical fire. That can do damage.  It will smack around even warbeasts and warjacks.  Couple that with a high MAT and you have a fairly offensive model.  "So what?" I hear you say.  Plenty of models have killing ability.  Not many have the defensive capabilities of a paladin.  2) In their turn, they can forfeit their regular movement or action to add +5 to their ARM (Stone and Mortar stance) bring them to a whopping 21.  Yeah. That's nice.  So, how does this work?  Move the paladin forward each turn putting up Stone and Mortar Stance in lieu of action to give them the ARM boost. When they get into contact with a unit and can tie it up, they can then switch to forfeiting their movement and taking a swing at models while maintaining the nice ARM 21.  With MAT 8, they will have a fairly easy time hitting things.

Here's where the synergy comes in.  High Paladin Dartan Vilmon has the ability Impervious Wall.  This allows him to ignore continuous effects and all damage and effects from nonmagical attacks. He is also immune to knockdown.  This operates similiarly to Stone and Mortar in that you must forfeit movement or action.  Additionally, Vilmon gives Impervious Wall to all paladins in your army.  This is where you options get good.  The most obvious use is to run your paladins into things you don't want getting to your army.  With Impervious Wall, the models simply cannot hurt your paladins.  Again, once you are in combat with them, you can forfeit your movement to attack.  Remember that this is a great tactic for tying up jacks and warbeasts.  Those P+S14 weapon master attacks will bring the hurt over time and your opponent won't dare to try and sneak past a paladin when he freestrikes your models with P+S14 + 4D6. 

You can also, albeit be a bit risky, get into range of a caster or warlock and put up both Impervious Wall and Stone and Mortar stance.  This will prevent mundane damage altogether and will limit most magical damage with ARM 21.  Ultimately, it will put pressure on your opponent or box him in so that you can get the kill on his caster/warlock.

The bottom line for me is that if you take a paladin, you simply have to take Vilmon.  He makes paladins sick.  This does mean a minimum investment of 5 points, but it also means that your paladins are a threat and so highly resilient that they will simply piss off your opponents in most cases because of their ability to hold up a disproportionately larger number of points worth of models.  These guys are excellent anvils.  If you position some combat units behind them for counterattacks, you can cause some serious damage with little risk to your army. 

Paladins bring great defensive options. They present a threat that can't be ignored, but most of the time can't be easily dealt with either.  This will cause your opponents headaches.  That's why I have decided to add these guys to my army. 

In other news, I'm still trying to offload some more of my models.  I have some Space Marine/Space Wolf/Black Templar stuff up over at Bartertown.  Take a look at my listing.  Thanks.