Posted on 4chan

> Implying anyone liked Kheradruakh
But yeah, GW shouldnt have genocided all the modeless characters


It's more complicated than that. PFP special rules at the time were stupid and it meant that early game DE we weaker by design in order to compensate for how powerful they *could* become. The issues naturally stem from that if they start out in a comparatively weaker state than similarly priced enemy models then after a couple of turns the DE stuff is more than likely just dead or fleeing, anything which did manage to land a killing blow only then becomes equal in designed power level to the opponents level, leaving the whole rest of the DE force underpowered still.

So Kheradruakh was a bad HQ because he stemmed from a bad unit which was subject to bad special rules. The basic Mandrake unit had no ranged attack and iirc couldn't benefit from stealth+shrouding, remember this codex launched at the end of 5th and with the benefit of hindsight it was purely done to introduce flyers to the new army (of which only 1 had a model at the time and the whole line of DE hasn't seen a single expansion of it's product line since 2012?).

The modern Mandrake isn't appreciably that much better than other 16pt models however by default a mandrake now gets 2A and an A2 18" weapon with PFP now triggering on turn 2 and improving for every turn afterwards.

People would probably really like Kheradruakh in the modern game especially if he allowed say 12" infiltrates within LOS and gives any mandrakes in the army 5++ while he is alive, has AP3 power weapons or whatever. The biggest thing for me that lets down mandrakes as they are currently is the lack of a basic save however they do fit the 'glass cannon' feel of DE the most of all DE models. They can hit really fucking hard and only get more powerful over time.