Comparing Blight Drones and Land Speeders

Blight drones of Nurgle are somewhat like daemonic land speeders.  At least at first glance!  So today, I wanted to check out how similar the two were and whether their points values stack up against one another well.

For 125 points, the blight drone features better armour than a land speeder, deamonic possession, a reaper autocannon and a mawcannon (with the same rules as the soul grinder's mawcannon).  Additionally, it explodes in a bit splat of putrid pus when destroyed: bile and goo showering one and all (usually accompanied by cheering of Nurgle cultists I dare say as well).

Can we build a pseudo-blight drone out of a land speeder?  Let's give it a go.

The base cost of a landspeeder is 50.  Let's give it an assault cannon for 40 points (which is mostly like a reaper autocannon in function ... but not quite, so go with me here). We'll add on a mawcannon profile for 25 points, much as we would with a soul grinder.  Let's add on some daemonic possession for 20 points.  That gives us a points cost of 135.  

Hence before we even consider that the blight drone has better front and side armour, we're already 10 points lower than an actual blight drone with our land speeder analogue.  But, this better armour is offset by having half the ballistic skill of a land speeder. Given that the mawcannon option is probably going to be the weapon of choice for a blight drone, this isn't too bad.  The reaper autocannon is much maligned, but it is not too shabby.  Perhaps the new chaos codex will give it heavy 3 instead of heavy 2 to make it more competitive.  If not, its not a great worry.

So, from the above analysis, I reckon that a blight drone is actually reasonable value for points.  When I originally saw the rules for it, I wasn't too sure (to be fair).  But now, I'm a little bit more convinced.  Moreover, they add a valuable option for the fast attack slot in both chaos space marines and chaos daemons.

(image taken from Forge World for illustrative purposes).