So how does Veeky Forums feel about Electro Priests?

Well, they have actually good rules now, they're the primary Admech counter-melee troops and utterly demolish elite troops. I converted 20 of them from Kairic Acolytes because I wanted a bunch.

The ranged ones are basically a guaranteed three S5 hits each at 12" and almost as good in CC as shooting. They'll be an effective horde restriction order, but they're still expensive and thus not quite on par with the Fulgurites.

I've never found a decent use for Corpuscarii, despite trying to use them both last edition and 8th.

Fulgurites have more potential, but they only seem to actually land a charge in about 20% of games. People know how much more of a bitch they can be if they happen to charge, considering they'll get their bonus mortal wounds, they'll go first, and they'll probably end up with a 3++ if they do decently, but those bonuses never really seem to come up because everyone knows when they look at them, "Oh, that's a thing I have to demolish asap, or it will become a concern in the future."
And unlike most other big bullet sponge targets like Land Raiders or something, they absolutely do not have the ability to survive on their own if the enemy prioritizes them and goes first. Even in groups of 20, I've lost entire units on first turn to Mortars, Shoota Boyz, Heavy Bolter Havocs, Da Jump'd Boyz, Termies w/ Lightning Claws charging them, etc.
That has a use all its own, in forcing your enemy to maybe pull out of position to beat these guys up, but in that role, they're basically just a screening unit, however, at 16ppm, you absolutely do not want them to serve the role of 'Big target that shields my more important units'. Because, well, they ARE one of your more important units.
Obviously, having a Transport would make them much better. Most AdMech players whine about Transports, and it makes sense, I guess.
I think their big problem is that they just get charged all the time. You could probably avoid shooting by sticking behind LoS, or you could even just be okay with having them shot to pieces so that the rest of your army is safe, but if your enemy cares about them at all, he'll probably know that a Deep Strike charge on them is extremely effective and will save him a major pain in the ass later on, so he'll probably just throw some effort into that, and you'll be out 160-320 points after their squishy bodies are torn up and their morale breaks.

Their fluff is rad, but their models look like bargain bin cenobites and their rules make them about as effective as attacking your enemy with a damp toaster.

They're certainly not godlike, but I find their primary use is in a kind of reverse Forlorn Hope force. You set up a normal Admech firebase with Kastelans, Dunecrawlers and whatever else, and screen deepstrikers away with Skitarii, right?
Then you line that screen with Fulgurites, just far enough away to avoid a potential split consolidate from two sides fucking the squad.

That way all those nasty big melee beasts can't smack your Kastelans up since they can't even run away, and if deepstrike forces drop down they'll have to either shoot the Skitarii to attempt a charge on the Fulgurites or shoot the Fulgurites before going into the Skitarii, and either way they'll probably leave enough Electros alive to smash them to fragments and allow your guns to clear up any squads that failed charge. Afterwards your remaining priests have Storm Shields, which means they can realistically fill that gap in your screen the drop squad left.

Basically you pay 320pts, which is a lot, to gain a massive resistance buff against Turn 1 charges and mass drops, which is one of our greatest weaknesses. Also make for a good anti-war machine force, because I've had Leviathans roll my entire army up without anything there to stop them a couple times now.
They won't stop an All DS army like Grey Knights, at least not for long, but against anything like a Night Lords raptor drop or SURPRISE MAGNUS charge they're decent. Who knows, they may be made better in the codex with a mobility strat or something.

After developing a religious hate for them due to their shittyness in the last edition, I've been looking at them in a brighter light after dabbling around with AM again in 8th. It seems to me like having the 12" Heavy bolters is a much more appealing than the melle variant, which is also 2 points more expensive. The Corpuscari are also not shabby in close combat, having 2 S5 attacks each along with the chance of extra hits.

I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC

I kill C'tan with them. Praise the Omnissiah.

Like the lore and the "priest" aspects of tech-priests that they emphasise, but I don't play so I can't comment on that.

Some of the paintjobs are really goofy though

Can they do anything without all the wargear?, would electoos he usefull for aanyone else?, what would you do for a Klondike bar?

>They won't stop an all DS army

Yeah, actually, I think that's why I've been finding them lacking.
My meta is either a 100% shooting enemy list like Guard or Tau, or a nearly 100% DS assault list like Orkz+4 Weirdboys, Grey Knights, or World Eaters+Dreadclaw(s).
I can imagine the scenario where I play against Marines and they only drop in like 1-2 units that I can counter, but my last experience was getting charged by 8 Berzerkers, Kharne, Exalted Champion, 2 units of 5 Termies w/ Lightning Claws, and the Dreadclaw.
The time before that was 90 Boyz and 6 Nobz.
Probably if those numbers were lower, I could see myself pushing back that assault, or at least convincing the opponent not to ram his dick into my beehive.
But most of my meta just has massive, throbbing, insensate dicks that just don't care.
I did win both those games due to people wasting too much effort on Fulgurites, so I'm not really complaining, I'm just saying that's where that unit seems to fall in my experience.

How much better would this unit be from 1-10 if it was just a single thing called 'Electro-Priest' that only came with the Volta-Geist Field, but had to purchase either a pair of Electro-Static Gauntlets with the Taser rule, OR an Electro-Leech Stave with the Siphoned Vigour rule?
What if they could purchase both for another 5ish points?

I neither play Admec, nor have I ever played against them, but if I ever used Electro Priests in a game, I'm pretty sure I couldn't stop myself from yelling this all the time:
youtube.com/watch?v=zhTHdzHhG7o

I don't care how good their rules are, their models are just too damn ugly to use.

They cost a lot of money and are ugly.

I don't really want to put them on the field as units, but I do want to incorporate them into terrain features and units as part of the model.

Kill Team has stratagems that let you take shield generators or heavy-bolter auto turrets. You could stuff a priest with the lightning cuffs inside a weird lightning cage and stick a mekboy's tesla coils to it and you have a counts-as for either.

Stick some in a superheavy's engine compartment and you have living lightning capacitors.

Well, the wargear isn't what actually allows them to go all shocking, just charge and discharge, so they'd still probably be able to slam people down with lightning punches.
Electoos are used by other people. They're a good way to have a fancy tattoo like Amberly Vail's =][= symbol she can turn off, and some forge worlds use them as ID that they can also use to control the populace and turn them into a billions-strong horde of cannon fodder if invaded.

That sounds rad - I always feel a lot of stratagems and objectives are best represented with markers that have someone on them - be it a prisoner, an adviser, a wounded soldier - just something to give the battle a bit more life

Always though the miniatures looked awesome even though I don't play Admech, so much so that I used one as a base to make a pretty dank looking Rogue Psyker for my Chaos army.

Do you have a pic of him? Cool conversions are always nice.

I was thinking of making a 20 Corpuscarii block to match my 20 Fulgurites, but I have nowhere near enough fancy guns to equip them with compared to all the spare melee weapons that amass in Admech bitz boxes.

I'm worried about what will happen when I go up against the local Night Lords player and his four squads of Raptors. Admech is pretty much the perfect army to use a mass deepstrike assault on, and the Fulgurites will only hold up so long given he has three quad-mortars as well. Guess they'll have to pull duties as "Extremely expensive secondary screen" for that one and hope they can get some swings in in the Turn 1 smashfest before too many of them die.

w-why is the tech priest assaulting that loyal guardsman?

>loyal guardsman
Oxymoron.
*BLAM*

Because it's from a FFG thing and the Techpriest is a Heretek, I think.

He most likely mistreated the machine spirits of some of his gear and the cogboy got pissed.

bump

Too fleshy for a true AdMech

There he is
The Electro Gypsy
In his caravan
He's a future man

Heeeeey mr Electoo man,
Burn a heretek for me now,
I'm not sleepy,
and there is no place I'm going to...

I think they are cool because they are the first "rule of cool" units in some time. They look like a they have a bunch of dielectric insulators on their hands and they would pretty much short to ground at those voltages. From a technical standpoint they are retarded, but definitely cool. Reminds me of how the 40k bullets have rocket exhaust but no stabilizers and how all those cucks don't wear helmets.

Warlock Stormwhatever subclass R1+L1 comes to mind

I'm pretty sure the flesh is artificial to resist the electricity.
I mean, it's potent enough to fuck over their eyes, I bet most of it's synthetic muscle fibres.

Also, beating Primarchs and Land Raiders to death with random shirtless Space Catholics is always entertaining.

Awww cute, the magos is married.

They look like Strogg from Quake. Nice job.

Had to look those up, but that's kind of what I was going for with a little less armour. Had a friend call them "JoJo Cybermen" which I think is a pretty good description.
Thanks, looking forward to painting them after I've bought some more primer. That stuff never seems to last as long as you want it to.

Do you even Divisio Genetor? Bio augments best augments, especially when they let you punch clean through power armour without so much as scuffing your knuckles.

Odd now?
It was Odd that they weren't one army from the get-go.

Pay 3CP and Fulgurites can now fight twice, albeit last. Seems like that would only be useful if they're attacking some massive vehicle or somehow Mortarion didn't gib them all if they hit him, although theoretically you could kill one blocking unit, gain 3++, consolidate past the screen into their squishy stuff, activate this and beat them to death.

Another sub-cult of the machinecums.
They worship electricity instead of machines.

Could have known someone who went traitor, and now is getting interrogated because of that relationship.

They were in a bar and the guardsman slapped the jukebox.

The Tech Priest wants to know who taught him Mechanicus secrets.

He's just a fucking cunt, that's why.
Abusing power and thinking himself better than humanity.

Going to get blammed any day now by his loyalist counterparts.

How is it odd?
The imperium wouldn't allow a cult bordering on heresy own an official army so it makes sense that the soldiers are essentially just part of "science expeditions"

Well, the Admech has a pretty huge army by default, and the Imperium is in no position to deny them much of anything. The Emperor himself had to pay quite a lot to keep them on the leash, and even then they broke it occasionally.

Explorator Fleets are also pretty dangerous undertakings. Probably not the worst idea to take some troops along.

Yeah but its not like the admech have total independence right now. They are officially a part of the imperium and in their own way pay lip service to humanity like everyone else. And every part of the imperium got their "Nuh-uh you can't tell me what to do!" shit that piss of the lords of terra to no end. Its less of an uncomfortable handshake and stare, its a conjoined mass of human bodies

Also the explorator fleet thing is exactly what I mean, to avoid having to give troops to the guard they basically go "No no they're part of the exploration team, yeah, all 40 billion of these guys have a phd."

Their old lore was better. As it was for all the admech.

They don't have to tithe troops because their tithe is in equipment and manufacturing capabilities, not people. Last I checked they didn't have to jump through any loopholes to keep a large army. Not like anyone could really stop them anyway, or they'd have no gear. They don't have total independence, of course, but they have a lot more power than most since nobody else knows how to do their job, so actual Imperial intrusion into their affairs is pretty rare as long as the cargo ships of flashlights and t-shirts arrive on time.

The Imperium lets the cogbros have the second largest army and fleet since before the HH. Because unlike the marines or the church they did not almost destroy the Imperium.

this

They did kinda have this huge battle between the butthurt seperatists and the loyalist mechanicus that did ruin mars and ruin a lot of shit for the imperium.

But then again its not like the church got a small army either and the assassins don't even matter to have a big army. And don't ever fuck with the administratum.

They're a hair's breath away from being too superhero-esque for 40k, but ultimately I find them to be on the right side of the fence. I also like the miniatures. I just feel like the Mechanicus must have some kind of transport for them, I mean surely a techpriest would understand that a group of short range or melee fighters would need some adequate method of transportation in order to survive the trek through no man's land to get to their enemy? Is the implication here that they're intended to be used defensively?

They did then sort out their own shit to an extent, and it wouldn't have been anywhere near as bad if Horus hadn't been fucking things up, whereas the Marines lost nine Primarchs as opposed to one FabGen being too curious and power-wise

Power-hungry, that was meant to be. Waste of perfectly good trips.

>They're a hair's breath away from being too superhero-esque for 40k, but ultimately I find them to be on the right side of the fence. I also like the miniatures. I just feel like the Mechanicus must have some kind of transport for them, I mean surely a techpriest would understand that a group of short range or melee fighters would need some adequate method of transportation in order to survive the trek through no man's land to get to their enemy?
Generally the rule is that the different sub-cults don't really talk or interact with eachother.

Also Ad-math cult units WHEN!?

...

Well, they are back from 2e, it doesn't surprise me them being superhero-like.

And yeah, the admech needs more vehicles. Rhinos or Chimeras, Leman Russes.

Maybe some maglev vehicles as well.

>AdMath cult
>dedicated hunters of everything Slaanesh, they suck all sensation out of ther vicinity by explaining everything with the most tedious equations and calculations

>Electro preists
>The math guys
>The "Man is just a organic machine" guys
>The guys who code stuff
>The chemist guys
>The normie machine autists
What other cult guys are there?

The cool guys.

>Well, they are back from 2e
wut?

Oh yeah, from way back in the Codex Imperialis for 2e Warhammer.

All these boys, plus the Archmagi Veneratus who command the Admech space fleet, the Executors who have normal human bodies on the outside (and are usually pretty Veeky Forums) to talk to non-Admech dudes and diplomacize and such and the Startaraga who liase with and sometimes command the Knight houses.

Also anything that fits into these categories, and this is not an exhaustive list by any means, 'cause galaxies are big.