1800 Daemons for 8th Edition

Oh noes, a cheesy powergaming Daemon player, get him! 

So, after flipping through the book and throwing out my kneejerks, I started tinkering with lists.  I've seen some chicken littles saying that Daemons will be nerfed by 8th ed.  I lol'd.  Daemons will be plenty fine in 8th, the book has lots of versatility and works very well with the new army construction format.  You lose out on tricked out Greater Daemons until you hit bigger games (exception being the bargain bin Bloodthirster and Lord of Change), but you can field plenty of good stuff, particularly the Core units, made so much nicer thanks to the buffs to infantry in general.  Really I think only Flesh Hounds got a slap on the wrist since you'll need 10 of them to negate rank bonuses, but a 2+ ward against magic and their nasty statline should make up for it.

We do 1800 points for tournies.  It was silly for 7th since so many armies are dependent on Lords and the armies they try to limit (Daemons, Dark Elves, Vampires) do just fine without Lords.  Well, it works just fine in 8th since Lords are totally possible.  Maybe they'll change it, maybe no, but I thought it would be fun to work with a different points level just to show how the new percentages make scaling much easier.

Heroes
Herald of Tzeentch - Power Vortex, Glean Magic, Flickering Fire
Herald of Khorne - Juggernaut, Obsidian Armor, BSB

Core
39 Horrors,  full command, Icon of Sorcery
20 Bloodletters, standard bearer, musician, Icon of Endless War
12 Daemonettes, standard bearer, Siren Standard
2x 5 Furies

Rare
6 Fiends

Total - 1797

So, let's go through my picks here.

Magic is risky in 8th ed.  You're never guaranteed to get the power dice you need and miscasts are extremely dangerous.  Horrors are great because not only do they ignore miscasts (only losing D6 models instead of blowing up), but they also take up a required Core slot and with the Herald are an almost immovable wall of 4+ ward save awesomeness.  As a level 4 wizard, the unit get +4 to cast and has the Icon of Sorcery for a total of +5 to all casting.  Holy shit, that's awesome.  I can comfortably cast Bolt of Tzeentch (12+) on 2 dice!  That's a lot of reliable magic coming out of this unit.  The Herald himself can throw out Flickering Fire no problem, and gets +2 to cast so he can reliably put out Glean Magic to steal some of that new hotness coming from the rulebook lores.  I think the Power Vortex may be overkill considering how easily the Horrors can zap people. 

The Kherald and his khrew, on the other hand, are all about khilling shit.  They have numbers so they can increase or reduce frontage as needed, but the real show comes in combat.  Bloodletters are fragile and only come with 1 attack, 8th ed mitigated the latter by letting rank 2 step up to swing.  That means I have my Herald dishing out his own attacks, the Jugger's normal swings in addition to stomp and the Bletters throw out 8 WS5 S5 attacks with Killing Blow and Hatred from the Kherald.  God damn, can anything survive that?  BSB is insurance.  The magic banner here gives me a charge range of 5 + 3D6" for one turn, an possible 23" threat range, average 15"-16".  That's how cavalry moved last edition, awesome!  Good way to reduce the effect of a poor roll.

Fiends are nuts.  M10 is huge on its own, but now they can fight in ranks effectively.  Thanks to enemies being stubborn due to more ranks, the Fiends can go to lunch on basic infantry all day, making an effective flanking or just infantry killing force. 

Daemonettes fill out my 3rd required Core unit and give me yet another flanker, which is why I took them over Seekers.  The Siren Standard protects them from getting out of position and getting shot up by stand and shoot, and M6 means they can easily hit the sides or go after weaker units.

Furies march block, screen and hunt war machines as always.

Now, this is just a first draft and I'm sure I'll look back on this in a year and laugh at how stupid I was.  Just me putting out more ideas I got from 8th ed.

Thoughts?