This is... tricky
(Note, this is not a "We are Weaker now" post, I 100% expected to be less overall than 9th ed and am happy with this. This is my experience, understanding of the army, at least 1 play test, and discussion with other both positive and negative rolled into an article)
Since Thursday, when I say the Imperial Knights Faction Focus I had resolved myself to my favorite spikey bois getting weaker overall rules.
Weaker is a subjective term here. While Forcing Battle Shock tests and making units fail them is VERY important and good from a rules stand point, it has some flaws.
First off, your opponent has to FAIL that test. I don't know about you, but I have a Space Pupper buddy who has not failed a Dread Test so far in about 10 games. Like literally, failed 0 of them. This is going to happen. The reverse is also true, you WILL have players who fail 4-5 of them. Recently I played a Goff's Pressure list and while my opponent failed 4 Gheiststorm tests (one with Ghazzy), I still lost and was nearly tabled. Great fun!
So let us look at these rules subjectively and what they mean for the best Faction in 40k!
We retain our Harbingers of Dread ability but it has... shrunk. Makes sense, we want less rules overall that are convoluted or can be confusing!
Overall this ability is fine, sounds fine, and looks fine, but it doesn't FEEL fine. Why do I say this? Well, as I stated earlier it is a Luck Based ability. We are reliant not on our skills as a player but the luck of the opponent.
Not much different to now right? Well almost. Currently we have no rules that adjust our priorities in a game for us. It is all how we impact the opponent. From making them Test to charge or shoot, to making them lose Obsec we Impact the opponent.
This rule on the other hand Impacts US. If we want to kill or hamper units A and B as our Target Priority but they don't fail their Battle Shock tests but Units D and E do, well now we have to make a choice. Do we continue with our plan, or aim for the low hanging fruit.
You WILL have this come up in your games, the question is, how do we respond?
Easier situations like A and D failing but B and E not will occur, in which case you make a decision but the times you don't get any fails, or those fails happen on units you don't care about?
The second part of Harbingers BR3 is also a half miss. We have in the leaked rules that -1 to Hit does not go beyond +1/-1 just like in 9th.
Why is this important? Well, Vehicles with a Damaged Table all currently have a -1 to Hit built in. So now we have times where the second part of this ability fails us even more.
It does counter Heavy though so it helps to some degree. It is also not ranged dependent so there is that.
What about the Detachment Rules?
Our Detachment ability is interesting. It is a 12" aura that you will be taking advantage from T2 on. Based on all available information we CAN force multiple Dread Tests in a Battle Shock step which if true is GREAT! Just be prepared for your opponent to spend 1 CP to save a key unit with Insane Bravery.
Now, this is a Luck Based rule still. Interestingly enough, the Charge Distance Odds is a fantastic DarkFortress chart to help us understand how luck based this is. For this, we want to focus on the far right column. I hear prior War Machine Players will know this chart quite well.
I had a discussion on the Chaos Knights Discord about
Luck Based abilities in 10th and this picture was brought to my attention. Based on all available information, Power Armor units (outside of a Battle Sister Squad) is LD6+. This means against CSM, SM, WE, DG, etc they will be on a 6+ or in range of our units an LD7+. This means they will roll a 6+ around 72% of the time (so nearly 3 in 4) or for 7+ it is 58% of the time.
This is not great for us overall.
Army Rules and Detachment Conclusion:
Overall I DO like these rules. They are cool, fluffy, and interesting, (here is the fabled However) they change nothing about my play style.
Overall, I play Chaos Knights in a Cagey, prod and poke manner where I am chipping a unit down at a time and forcing my opponent to have less and less resources on the table.
Pushing a War Dog Stalker up here and there to aggress and harass while keeping my back lines safe is typically my play style.
This will need to be adjusted in a few ways. Due to 24" Thermal Spears I will need to play a closer game with my opponent. Now while we are more survivable in some sense, this is doable. I will just have to be more careful.
The Cool Things!:
Alright, in the order that I like these I will be showing you the coolest part of the article.
Here we have the stratagem of the article and OH BOY do I like it. Now, I fully expect Tormented Wrath to have been retired. This is sad. I did love having all of my War Dogs look at one unit and say good bye to it (unless your name is David and you have a GK Grandmaster that can tank anything and everything.... I will get my revenge David!).
This strat is a little bit of a dual edge sword. You have to sacrifice two War Dogs worth of shooting or melee into 1 unit. This is good but scary at the same time as if you murk that unit early those two War Dogs are left hanging. This means as a player you will need to set those two war dogs to be your easiest choices on shooting. You do NOT want to get into a situation where you have multiple targets and cant finish the key one but have this strat elsewhere.
My next favorite thing of the article is the Desecrator. Lets look at some stats I crunched on
Unitcrunch. First the old profile vs a Rhino
Here we see that the Desecrator on average did 8 damage to the Rhino with its 2 Shots hitting on 3's wounding on 2's.
Now, let us look at this new profile! It is still double the Strength of those T7 that went to T9, the number of attacks are up to 3! Diamonas always! AP went down but that has happened to most units. It does mean that a 2+ in cover will get a 5+ save so there is that downside or a 3+ gets a 6+ chance... Damage did flip as well, it went from d3+6 to d6+3 so that is interesting but overall we are stronger.
As we saw, the current Laser Destructor cant quite kill a Rhino in one go. This is unfortunate, what about in 10th?
I am pleased to say that 3 out of 4 times a Rhino dies (this is out of cover)!
Unit Crunch is such an amazing site to run these tests.
Next is the Despoiler. I am rather sad here. I would of preferred one of the War Dogs. We have the most of them. Yet they gave us the unit that gives more overall information to Imperial Knights... what can you do. (This also gives us the stats of the Warpstrike Claw... which is the melee weapon of the article... I wonder if they meant to do the Slaughterclaw)
Overall if the Despoiler goes down in points, it will see play. It gives a better LD for War Dogs inside 9" which is cute and it has a weaker Vextrix rule to reroll just 1 hit roll OR 1 wound roll.
Lastly we have the Abominant...
I am not impressed. I am happy and sad to note the Volkite is indeed Devastating wounds (for those that read my first play test, you will understand my sadness). It is 9 shots so that is an improvement over its 6 but AP 0 is a wash. AP 1 would of been nice to punish units out of cover. The Diabolus Heavy Stubber got Rapid Fire but lost a shot so I am sad. No Psychic Ranged or melee is also sad.
Melee is improved! Still WS 3+ though so if the Desecrator is 2+ it out does this. However we still have the Electroscourge at 9 attacks but sustained hits 1 so you should get 1 explosion out of that. It is S10 which is an improvement over its current S8. The Balemace lost an AP but is 3 free attacks instead of D3 so that is something.
Now, the abilities... These are interesting. Warp Storm is pretty nice vs MSU armies, free mortals is free mortals after all (well, on that 3+). Vortex Terrors is our first hint at out of phase Battle Shock tests. If we have more of these then our faction ability wont feel like a waste.
Overall I am not super impressed. I am also sad to see the Pterrorshades have no rules here, hopefully they do on the Stalker, Brigand, or Karnivore.
One last thing to note and it is VERY VERY VERY important. Character is now on the Keywords for the Abhorrents (and likely Questoris). This means we might not be able to take an All War Dog list anymore as we need 1 character in list building.
I am not against taking 1 large knight, in fact I love my 1 and 10 Desecrator list. I am just worried that against certain armies, the large knights will be more hinderance than help (looking at you Aeldari and Space Marines).
Full Conclusion / TL;DR:
We are weaker but nothing has really changed for us.
In truth, nothing seems to have changed, or well not much has changed. Yes we currently don't have Vextrix for reliable Thermals, nor do we have Herpetrax for durability and some melee.
This is a net loss for us. However we are an army that relied more on Unit Profiles rather than relying on some synergy like Imperial Knight. I do think that Imperial Knights got the better rules but I have understood that my entire time playing knights since April 2022.
We do have lower ranges on our Thermals so that is an issue but while games can and will be determined by the Harbingers ability, I just dont think we can rely on it. We can use it but it is not a free Feel No Pain for instance.
Overall, I will continue playing my Chaos Knights even if Imperial is "better". I love my spikey knights and will rep them hell or high water!
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