Super Friends in 7th edition

One of my favourite armies in 6th edition that surprisingly did not see a whole lot of play compared to more bike+bike+bike armies was the Super Friends list I mentioned in my first post. It was something like:

White Scars Chapter Master w/Bike, power fist, shield eternal, artificer armour
Khan on bike
Wolf Lord on bike w/thunder hammer, runic armour, saga of the bear (eternal warrior)
Rune Priest on Bike w/runic weapon
Command Squad with four grav guns, four melta bombs, apothecary, 3 storm shields

Tactical Squad (10) with melta in a Rhino
Tactical Squad (10) with melta in a Rhino
Grey Hunters (6 - if memory serves me correctly) w/ flamer in a Rhino

Stalker
Stalker

Thunderfire Cannon

It was a great meta-breaker. The death star and solid mass of scoring units meant you could handle any general army and do the whole 'break apart on the final turn and contest objectives' thing. The stalkers were beautiful, cheap anti-air that could also pop transports and hurt monstrous creatures (notably flying demon princes and Fateweaver). The rune priest meant you had a decent chance of shutting down fortune on a Jetseer Council and then assaulting them to pieces afterwards.

Enter 7th edition. The stalker is now a piece of overpriced scrap metal that can't reliably shoot ground targets and doesn't have enough muscle to reliably down the only flyers that will still be around (I'm thinking storm ravens will make a comeback with GK and the apparently imminent Blood Angels). The jetseer council won't be around so much anymore so psychic denial as much of an issue. Contesting objectives with ICs on bikes doesn't work anymore because objective secured is the new black, and mechanised infantry platoons are going to be everywhere, so you need to be able to pop transports. Seems Super Friends is dead.

Yet, if I were going to an 1850 point competitive tournament tomorrow I would take something like the following:

Chapter Master (Iron hands/Raukaan) w/bike, power fist, artificer armour, Gorgon's chain
Chapter Master (White Scars) w/bike, power fist, artificer armour, shield eternal
Khan on bike
Command Squad w/bikes, grav guns x4, melta bombs x4, storm shield x2, apothecary

Tactical Squad (Iron Hands) (10) w/Rhino, flamer
Tactical Squad (Iron hands) (10) w/Rhino, flamer
Bikes (6) w/grav gun x2, combi-grav, veteran sergeant, melta bombs
Bikes (6) w/grav gun x2, combi-grav, melta bombs (wish I had 10 more points!)

Storm talon w/skyhammer missile launcher
Storm talon w/skyhammer missile launcher

So what are the major changes?

1. The rune priest got totally nerfed in 7th edition. Runic weapons give you +1 to Deny the Witch, but deny the witch only works when you're being targeted. All the stuff you really want to stop (invisibility, fortune, prescience) is a blessing, so deny the witch is a waste of points. The Iron Hands chapter master is then better than the wolf lord because he has more wounds, independent feel no pain and orbital bombardment. Plus I have a cool conversion idea where I'm going to stick a servitor head on the back of his bike in a little pod so it looks like a GrimDark R2D2 is riding shotgun repairing his forcefield (I have converted forcefields onto my bikes instead of storm shields because I think riding a bike carrying a shield in the year 40000 is totally ridiculous - tutorial and pics to come). His bike will be called Pegasus to stick with the Gorgon reference (a bit tenuous but most people don't know their Greek myths for shit so it will do).

2. You need some tactical squads, so two stick around in Rhinos. I'm not sure yet whether you want them to be both Iron hands or whether one scars might be useful to scout up and provide some cover for your bikes (blocking line of site with Rhinos is so satisfying). Playtesting will reveal all. In the meantime, Iron hands tacticals are super scoring units because they have OS, a 6+ feel no pain (don't mock it till you tried it) and their Rhinos repair glancing hits (which is all anybody is going to use to kill tanks these days with the new damage chart). I would like to take a third small tactical in a razorback (with a rocket launcher for backfield objectives) or a Rhino, but for now I think the 2nd bike squad is more important because
                      a. Power armour is going to be everywhere! Grav-guns for breakfast, lunch and dinner
                      b. Grav guns eat most of the units in the eldar army I posted below
                      c. Necrons?
I'm tempted to give one of the bike squads melta-guns just so they can hunt wave serpents that drop their shields (and then a nearby character can assault the contents). But then I'd have less grav, which is a problem because I don't have the points to put plasma guns on the tacticals. Playtesting will show whether this change is sensible. Besides transports I'm not expecting a tonne of tanks, and grav gun fire followed by krak grenades and a melta bomb will handle transports.

3. The flamers in the tactical squads are a poor but partial replacement for the thunderfire cannon in the anti-horde department. They will do fewer wounds over the course of a match but cost a hell of a lot fewer points. Unfortunately, you lose the thunderfire's ability to snipe a particular target out of a squad (like an ethereal or annoying Chaos icon), but there aren't too many instances of that so it should be okay. The other anti-horde comes from the storm talons, which lay down more high strength shots than stalkers and are harder to kill, which makes up for the extra points cost. Will I need more anti-horde when orks hit? Maybe, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

4. The Storm talons provide some support against FMC, and (importantly) hunt those annoying jetbike farseers I talked about in the previous post. They are also liable to completely own the skies because flyers don't seem very popular right now and flying daemon circus is taking a rest (which means anti-air will also be taking a rest). They can kill Necron flyers (though the matchup is not favourable) or at least distract them for a while. They can also kill Rhinos and Chimeras (and put a glance or two on a serpent) pretty effectively, especially in the late game when they can cover the 24 inches needed to reach a shitty unit on a faraway objective.

As a general point, the main thing I like about the Super friends list is the amount of face-beating those Chapter masters bring in assault. Good assault units are damn hard to come by in 7th edition 40K, especially for marines. Vanguard veterans are solid but way overpriced and die to grav guns, plasma talons, shuriken weapons and all the poisoned assault 2 fire the dark eldar players in my group bring to the party. Dreadnoughts are slow and die to krak grenades and glances. Assault terminators take too long to reach the target, cost too much and are dead in the water after killing a single wave serpent (which is the main thing I want to assault). Chapter masters keep your bike squads alive then break away to bash things on their terms. They stop riptides, put 5 strength 8 attacks that bypass jink into a wave serpent and laugh at power weapons. Plus that orbital thing can sometimes be devastating (or just useful, like against noise marines behind an aegis.

Titus Smash!

A word on bikes. A lot people are whinging about bikes in 7th edition because of the change to jink. That's maybe a problem for ravenwing, but Scars weren't jinking much in the old rules, especially super friends. Everyone has a storm shield or an iron halo. By the time those guys are dead you're in close combat + hit and running on your terms, so it doesn't matter. Hammer of wrath is better now because it can hit invisible units automatically. Bikes squads don't have the free OS transport that comes with tactical squads, but they also have a tonne more dakka than a tactical squad because of the grav guns. So while I think maybe armies that spammed grav gun bikes have taken a slight hit from the nerf bat (which merely brings them down to earth), bikes are still the shiz-nick.

Anybody have any thoughts on this list?