Asurman and Dire Avengers. Why my opinion has changed

Anyone reading this blog for a long time will no doubt be laughing at the amount of backtracks I have made on actually using units, as opposed to just reading about them.  This is another such article.

Despite much trepidation I have been using both Dire Avengers, and Asurman in my lists.  Both seem over priced for what they do, yet in using them, I have won more games.

In football management terms, sometimes you can have a player in your team, who doesn't appear to do a great deal, but his inclusion means you have more wins, so you keep including him without knowing why.

This is the case with my Dire Avengers.  Everything about them screams over priced to me.  Yet they consistently do a job and do it well.  Perhaps its because I don't waste points on Exarchs and just field units of 8 normal warriors.  At the moment I don't really know, but I am endeavouring to find out.

Asurman on the other hand is solid as a rock.  This is the reason he is my Warlord.  He has worse shooting than half the other Phoenix Lords, and worse combat than pretty much all of the Phoenix lords, but is one of the most expensive.

The key to using him is to understand his Warlord trait ability.  D3 Warlord traits.  What you are hoping to roll is number 4.  This allows him to reroll his armour save.  A 2+ rerollable save, with eternal warrior and a 4++ invulnerable save rerolling 1s is insanely strong.  Small arms fire will bounce off him 35/36 times he is wounded which makes killing him virtually impossible outside of ap2 fire.

Stand at the front of the unit he is in, and tank everything.  You can look out sir any Ap2 hits and even if you fail, you are eternal warrior so its not the end of the world if a railgun hits you in the face.   In the event you don't get the Warlord trait you want, you can always hope you get Fortune.  You do have a farseer right?

His shooting attacks are pretty lame.  A pair of catapults making them twinlinked isn't really all that, considering his high bs of 7 would have made it kind of twinlinked anyway.

Get him into combat however and he shines.  His special Diresword makes him S5 AP2 striking on initative with a boat load of attacks.  He can and will carve through anything without a decent save, and if they have poor leadership, he will do an even more damage when they fail their leadership tests.  This special ability even bypasses eternal warrior!