std What is the best daemon faction to go with for a heavy Slaves to Darkness base?

[Ukrador]

Basically title. I am heavily interested in running a combination of Slaves to Darkness and daemons. So far I only have the start collecting for Slaves to Darkness and no battletome. I am interested in a tanky, but hero centric playstyle. Thoughts or advice on where to go? I have already checked out 1d4chan.

[Grimrock]

To be honest I don't think there are a ton of daemons that work well in slaves to darkness. The allegiance itself only has a few and most of those are individual models. Daemon princes are solid but most people only run one, maybe two with belakor. Archaon is of course amazing but he's only a daemon because of the mount. Furies have some neat rules but I don't think you'd ever want to run more than one unit. The gaunt summoner is great if you're summoning pink horrors. 

After that you're pretty much stuck looking at allies from the god specific books which do have limited potential. A great unclean one with bell could speed up nurgle StD but he's pretty pricy. You could take a big unit of any of the god marked basic daemons, but without their faction buffs they won't achieve much. 

I think the best bet would be to ally a unit 10 of pink horrors as a tarpit and the blue scribes to buff a tzeentch marked cabalists sub faction. You could take a gaunt summoner to bring on another unit of 10 pinks as well. It's not really high damage but the pinks are pretty resilient for their points, and the scribes and cabalist sub faction combo make the excellent StD spells much more reliable.

 

Edit: on second thought, if you haven't bought the battletome yet and you aren't totally sold on running the StD allegiance, you could consider running one of the god specific tomes and just marking your slaves models for that allegiance. In that case you could run pretty much any daemon heavy army with mortal support. Really it depends more on which faction you like the idea of more. I'm currently tinkering with marauders providing combat support for a primarily ranged tzeentch daemon list. 

Edited June 23, 2020 by Grimrock

[meatpipeline]

Sounds like you want to run a Nurgle / Korne / Tzeench / Slaanesh allegiance army with a large number of StD units that have the mark of chaos.  The nice thing about a allegiance army is that most of them can Ally in 1-2 units of daemons from the other armies.  The other option is Grand Alliance Chaos, which would allow a mix of daemons from different allegiances.

Look around for "mortal" based Nurgle / Korne / Tzeench / Slaanesh armies.  While they generally lack daemons, I've seen a number of them that rely on StD units.  I know Nurgle armies often rely on StD units, because many Nurgle units lack good damage output (or their damage output is over-costed).

Another option is to look at the Legion of Chaos Ascendent armies.  They use only daemons, so they'll point you towards which daemons are most powerful.

For tanky, Nurgle is that tankest of the daemon armies.  I'm not sure what you mean by hero-centric.  Nurgle armies more often use heroes in a support role, relying on them for a small number of abilities and most Nurgle heroes are not daemons.  The big exception to this is the Verminlord Corrupter.  If you want melee / shooting / spell-slinging heroes, you'll want to look at the other factions.