Tzeench psychic powers

One of the things that keeps cropping up in my group is how under powered chaos are.  In particular, how under powered Tzeench magic is.  The so called god of magic has one of the weakest spell lores out there.

I have attempted to remedy this with my own list.  See what you think.

Flickering fire of Tzeench.  WC 1+   Primaris Power
This is a witch fire with a range of 24 inches.  Declare how many warp charge points you want to attempt to cast this at.  This spell does a number of d6 s4 ap5 hits equal to the amount of warp charge declared.  Eg a WC3 cast would shoot 3d6 shots.  Any unit taking at least one unsaved wound will be affected by soul blaze.

Blessing of Tzeench WC 1   Spell number 1
Malediction.  On a successful cast of this spell transfer d3 warp charge points from your opponent’s pool to your own.

Bolt of Change WC 1 Spell number 2
This is a beam with a range of 24 inches.  Any target lying under the beam takes a strength 8 ap2 hit.

Future sight.  WC 1 Spell number 3
This is a Blessing affecting the caster and his unit.  The unit gains d3 rerolls which last through this turn, and the opponents next turn.  These may be used to reroll any single dice for to hit, to wound or save, or cast or deny spells.

Breath of Chaos. WC 2 Spell number 4
This is a witch fire.  This has a range of template.  Any model hit by this template must take a toughness test or take a wound with no armour or cover saves allowed.  Invulnerable saves may be taken, but successful saves must be rerolled.  Any unit taking at least one unsaved wound will be affected by soul blaze.

Transformation of Tzeench WC 3 Spell number 5
This is a witch fire with a range of 24 inches.  The target unit takes 2d6 s6 ap 4 hits.  If at least one model is removed as a casualty you may add a chaos spawn model to the table, one inch from the target unit.  It has a number of wounds equal to the amount of wounds inflicted by the spell.

Firestorm of Tzeench WC 4 Spell number 6
This is a witch fire.  Center the apocalyptic blast over the sorcerer casting this spell.  Every unit covered by the template take a number of hits equal to the amount of models under the template.  These hits are resolved at s5 ap4 with ignores cover.  Models with the mark of Tzeench, or Daemons of Tzeench are immune to this power, but models with the Mark of Nurgle or Daemons of Nurgle take two hits. Any units taking at least one unsaved wound will be affected by soul blaze.

Chaos space marines new codex 7th edition

Wow its been a long time since I last updated this page.  I have been playing 40k but have been so busy with work that I have not felt like writing much in my evenings.

There have been a lot of arguments on the Internet of late about how badly done to Chaos space marines are.  As someone who has had an army of them since 2nd edition, I personally have issues with how they play, vs the fluff that I want them to play like.

I don't doubt there are a handful of strong units in the book, probably enough to field an army capable of beating quite a few armies out there, but the majority of units are made redundant by better units in the same slots and/or over priced

The crux of the issue is that Chaos space marines really represent Naughty, Spikey loyalists rather than the Legions that many chaos players, especially those from the older editions, want to play as.

There is of course a very simple solution . Make a Chaos renegade codex representing what a regular warband of new renegades has access to and what they lose by becoming a traitor.  I would do something like limit the amount of high tech gear they could have, but give them some of the easier to maintain stuff from the vaults.  This could even be a supplement to the loyalist codex, complete with keeping your chapter trait.  This would replace the existing codex.

Then make a true legion codex with all the cool stuff from the heresy.  Make chaos marine scary. Basic ones should have stats of chosen.  Price them as an elite hard hitting force.  This would be a stand alone new codex.

I would even go so far as to say traitor guard should have their own codex.  It could be very similar to the existing Astra Militatum book, but again swap out some of the tech for some of the older kit.  Model wise they could use all the same models as the guard range.  Make them battle brothers to the chaos faction.

7th edition Eldar Mathshammer - Which multi shot heavy weapon to use and when?

So the new codex comes out and there have been very few changes to the heavy weapons in the Eldar codex.  Or have there?

In the last edition, the Scatter Laser was king.  With laser lock the others rarely got a look in. However times change, laser lock has been resigned to the bin of history and so everyone gets to have another chance.  In this article I will compare the Scatter Laser (SL) with both the Shuriken Cannon (ShC) and the Starcannon (StC).

The reason for this article is that I read somewhere on a popular blog that there is no point in using starcannons because they are flat our inferior to scatter lasers still.  I am not so sure that is the case, so lets run the numbers shall we?  I will take several basic statlines and compare the damage each weapon does against them.  We will use GEQ, MEQ and finally TEQs.

GEQ - Toughness 3 5+ saves
SL 4 shots, hit on 3s, wound on 2s, saves on 5s.   1.49 kills
ShC 3 shots, hit on 3s, wound on 2s, no saves (bladestorm irrelevant here) 1.66 kills
StC 2 shots, hit on 2s, wound on 2s, no saves. 1.11 kills.

In a surprise to me at least, the Shuiken Cannon comes out on top here.  Saving one in three wounds really hurts the Scatter lasers damage output.  It will likely only get worse from here on out for the previous king.

MEQ - T4 3+ saves
SL 4 shots, hit on 3s, wound on 2s, saves on 3s. 0.73 kills
ShC 3 shots, hit on 3s, wound on 2s, saves on 3s (bladestorm kicks in)  0.64 kills
StC 2 shots, hit on 2s, wound on 2s, no saves.  1.11 kills

So unless my maths is wrong, the Starcannon is the best performer here.  Against the most common, popular models in the game.  Now obviously cover saves do matter, but that will only reduce the Starcannon to 0.74, still leaving it the strongest performer here.

TEQ - T4 2+/5++
SL 4 shots, hit on 3s, wound on 2s, saves on 2s.  0.37 kills
ShC 3 shots, hit on 3s, wound on 2s, saves on 2s (bladestorm kicks in)  0.46 kills
StC 2 shots, hit on 2s, wound on 2s, saves on 5++.  0.74 kills

As the armour improves, the Scatter laser really loses out. The only time the scatter laser may be the optimal weapon is against a target with an armour save of 6+ or worse.  Outside of orks, I don't think there are a great many of those around.

7th Edition Eldar - Combining lethal formations

One particular combination I have found in the new Eldar codex is just plain lethal.

You take an Aspect host.  This can be any three aspect warrior units and they all gain bonus ws or bs.  This is really strong.

You can also take an Engines of Vaul formation, of three Falcons.

Combine these two together and you can create this;

6 Fire Dragons, inc exarch
6 Fire Dragons, inc exarch
6 Fire Dragons, inc exarch

3 Falcons

Put them together and you get a unit that deep strikes without scattering, delivering a massive amount of melta guns with pin point accuracy.  Not many players would thank you for this.

7th Edition Eldar - Howling Banshees

I am not going to write a full codex review, or even cover most of the units, it only seems like five minutes ago I was doing that for 6th edition.

Howling Banshees have had a significant boost.

They now move an additional 3 inches while running or charging.  Now running is okay I guess, but the boost to charging is tremendous.

They also now also ignore penalties to initiative while charging into cover.  The exarch also prevents any overwatch being fired.

They have gone from being the worst unit in the codex, to pretty good now.  Still struggle to wound anything really tough though and will bounce off anything with a 2+ save.

7th Edition Eldar - First Impressions - The internet panics

7th Edition Eldar - First impressions

Before I start, I will admit I play eldar.  I have for twenty years, so I have seen quite few codexes come and go.

I have seen a lot of panic on the internet about how broken things are in this new book.  But this essentially boils down to two things.  Spamming list entries and tourney play.   I do neither, so I personally don't like to be tarred with that brush.

Games Workshop has said MANY times that their game is not designed with competitive play in mind.  It is beer and pretzels type gaming.  You may disagree with this all you like, but that is the fact.

There are, as far as I can tell only a small number of issues which people have with the eldar book.

Number 1.  Scatter bikers.  Every single jetbike can now take either a shuricannon or a scatter laser. I have to admit, this seems a no brainer.  There is a lot of fear about people spamming these, but it is fairly expensive to do, with the specialised FOC chart in the new book.  In casual play, taking a squad or two and limiting heavy weapons is more than fine. You probably want some ablative wounds anyway, as if ap3 ignore cover weapons come your way, then the squads going to lose a lot of models.  New good rules for new models, has been a thing for quite a while now.

Number 2. Wraithknight.  Hes now a jump gargantuan creature armed with two D guns.  He is also pretty cheap in terms of points.

Number 3. Ranged D guns on pretty much all wraith units.  I don't personally see the big deal here, most of these were s10 before, and never seemed all that great with them being a single shot, short ranged and no blast.  The D-flamers got a buff, but they can't instant death and suffer a penalty on the D chart.

Apart from that, there have been debuffs.  Serpents shields been nerfed quite heavily, although I think we all expected that.  Exarchs lost a lot of customisation options, as did the Avatar.

I dont think the Autarch is any better.  Certainly I wont be taking one.

Guardians are a bit naff still.  And unless you spam scatter bikers, you are taking some.

Free flak missiles as well as two wounds on the exarchs are welcome.

Adeptus Mechanicus

The forthcoming release of Adeptus Mechanicus is something I have been waiting on for a long time.
They are the biggest faction in 40k to never really have a model range.  All the Forge World releases have been really exciting with the Horus Heresy range so it is good to see that they are finally doing a 40k version of this army.

From the sneak peeks it looks like they occupy a space around the eldar in terms of weapons and indeed in terms of statistics and points.  This could make them a very unusual imperial army.

The models themselves look solid.  Not forge world amazing but good.  I was hoping for some Johnny 5 type robots, or at least some tracked heavy weapons servitors, but nothing of that ilk seems to have been seen yet.

I plan on having a combined Ad mech and Knight army, but it is dependant on the codex options.

Just how accurate are blast weapons? The maths revealed

Its been a fair while between posts, I don't update as often as I used to do.  I have however been thinking about just how accurate a blast weapon is, opposed to a regular shot from a unit.  Consider some basic units;

Ork: BS2
Guardsman/fire warrior/termagant: BS3
Space Marine: BS4

These are some of the common basic unit types in the game.  They cover the three most common ballistic skill levels.  An ork has 1/3 chance of a hit, a guardsman a 1/2 chance of a hit and a marine a fairly high 2/3 chance of a hit.

So how does this compare to blast weapons?  Lets consider the two basic sizes, small blast at 3 inches and the larger one at 5 inches.

All blast weapons have a 1/3 chance of a hit, from the off.  This matches what Orks already get, but is worse than the other races standard BS.  So straight away, you might be thinking, why would you use such an innacurate weapon?

Well the good folks at GW allow you to take your BS into account when seeing if you hit.  As you know, you have a mighty 3/36 or 1/12 chance of rolling a double one, or a one and a two.  This is a bonus chance of hitting, should your shot scatter.

So you will find an Ork has roughly a 0.36 chance of a hit with a blast weapon.  Except that in reality he doesn't.  Because, as you know the template is bigger than 1 inch wide, so if it scatters only 1 inch, you will still hit at least the target model.  With the larger blast, you will still hit them if it scatters 2 inches.  So what does that do to the maths?  Well it improves the chance of the ork hitting to a mighty 0.39 for the smaller blast and a fairly impressive 0.50 with the larger blast.  You also have a chance of hitting other models in the squad!

So for orks, its an entirely positive experience using blast weapons.  Unfortunately, if you have more than BS2, they get less of a boost and with bs4 small blasts are less accurate than firing a normal gun.

Chance of hitting the exact model with bs 3 is 0.42 and with scattering the small blast hits 0.50 and the larger one 0.61.
Chance of hitting the exact model with bs4 is 0.50 and with scattering the small blast hits 0.61 and the larger one 0.75.

7th Edition. Is it really 6.5?

So after a fairly long hiatus, I have finally got around to looking at the 7th edition rules.

I have to say, I am not really impressed.  For a rough estimate, I would suggest around 95% of the core rules and around 99% of special and weapon rules have stayed the same.  For the price of the books I expected more.

Which brings me to the books.  There is a big rule book, a background book and a sort of painting book.

The painting book has mostly big photos of models with no real explanation on how they were painted. There is a heavy emphasis on Ultramarines and not much on other factions and something that may possibly be classed as tactics, but it really doesn't come across that way in reading it.  I could quite happily have never seen this book, never mind paid actual money for it.  If it had shown a few more gamers armies, or shown how to do some of the painted models, or painting methods, then I would have been much more impressed.

The background book is a rehash of what has been said in previous publications.  I couldn't actually see anything new in this whole book.  While I am sure it is of some value to new gamers, to someone who has been playing for near twenty years, its not very much use to me.  The specific sections on different factions is covered in much better details in their own codexes.

Now those books have been dealt with, back to the rules.  The rules are really just 6th edition with a couple of changes.  This isn't a bad thing as 6th was a solid set of rules.

Big changes, as far as I can tell are as follows;

Psychic phase.  It looks like initially a small nerf in the volume of powers cast, although certain armies will see a boost I think.  Its quite similar to the old fashioned dice pools for casting from fantasy.  Its early to say for sure, but focused witchfires actually look usable now, which is a nice change.   There doesn't appear to be an upper limit on how many dice you use to cast either.  This means you can throw all your dice at a spell you really want.  I also like how you get the primaris power for free if you pick all your powers from the same deck.  Overall this is an improvement.

Shooting phase.  There has been a fairly interesting change.  You now roll all the weapons of one type, then resolve the effects before rolling the next set.  This will slow games down, but provides a tactical choice to the game in trying to stack melta hits on characters when the fodder is hosed down in front of him with lesser weapons.  I like this.

Charge ranges:  Has stayed the same, but with small changes.  Now difficult terrain reduces the charge by a set distance.  Makes it a bit more predictable.  I think this is good too.

Vehicle damage:  It is now no longer possible to blow up a vehicle in one hit with an Ap3 or worse weapon. This makes vehicles across the board tougher and thus more desirable.  Except oddly landraiders, and other 14 all round vehicles, which were virtually impervious to these lower damage weapons in the first place.    I am unsure how much of an effect this will have, except armour 10 vehicles become considerably tougher.

Lords of war are now included in the Force Organisation Chart.

New missions are far more dynamic, allowing armies built around speed and reaction to do well, where as static armies may struggle.

Overall my impressions are that 7th is a positive step forwards.  I can't think of any changes that have been for the worse, but it does strike me as more 6.5 than a new version of the rules.