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So, you're one of the Dark Powers and by happenstance (or infernal plotting), you might wish one of your material pawns to be capable of wielding Psychic Powers. What kind of Powers, Wielder, and Army would you use? And at what points breaks?

There's the traditional double-Daemon Prince-S&M-Duo (two Slaaneshi Daemon Princes with Lashes of Slaanesh), but what else would people take? In particular I'm going to try and make a case for taking the maligned Gift of Chaos.

Note: This strategy discussion follows on from a discussion I tried to start about how to go about using the Gift of Chaos. I was basically trying to raise discussion about how one would go about using the Gift of Chaos as part of one's strategy (one's army list, as it were). That was derailed by people talking strategy about how Gift of Chaos wasn't worth taking anyways. In a bid to get that thread back on track and pursue the interesting discussion of whether it might ever be a good idea to take Gift of Chaos here, in its proper forum.

Here's where it started: http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/208760.page

So far the discussion seems to be whether the Gift of Chaos really is the worse option by comparison to the other Powers, or whether that conclusion (as I suggest) is simply a result of circular reasoning - that its the worse option because the other Powers are better and the other Powers are better because Gift of Chaos isn't as good...

Honestly, it would be GoC but at a larger range. The ability to "convert" models to your side during the game is too close to the fluff for me to resist.

My current build has
DP+Wings + GoC + Warptime
Sorcer +Wings + GoC + Warptime + Personal Icon

I posted in the forum on topic as well

I was going to play this list, just for kicks:

15 raptors with MoT
Sorc w/ Jump pack, MoT, GoC and Wind of Chaos
Sorc w/ Jump pack, MoT, GoC and Wind of Chaos

3x7 Rubric marines in rhinos + aspiring sorcerer with GoC

2x2 oblits

The idea (no, not arguing its a good one, just that it's an idea) is that GoC is the kind of power where you want it to actually work, because you really leave yourself out there to get charged/worked over if it doesn't. So why not have five of them? And why not couple it with a unit that can tie up a bunch of enemy units at once in CC before you blow your wad (since you need to get within 6" before you can even use the power - stupid beginning of turn)

The main problem I see (other than getting absolutely pasted by horde armies) is that the aspiring champions would be casting GoC on the same squad that the Thousand Sons are shooting at, which isn't really the synergy that you want, unless you're hitting a large squad and hoping for, say, a Spawnified power fist and 7 casualties.

What kind of Powers, Wielder, and Army would you use? And at what points breaks?

I always felt that Tzeentch should have another time based spell, perhaps like the marine spell where you can reroll every dice per turn.

Slaanesh, the lash is great but again there should have been more spell options for the marks. A "sound template" that causes pinning or fall back with a negative modifier (cringing from the sound)?

Nurgle, resurrect fallen enemies with negatives!

For tournament purposes I really only seeing Lash/Warptime being amazing. The others are just sort of "nice"

paidinfull: Yup, thanks for helping to get the tactical discussion of Gift of Chaos back on track.

With regard to this discussion, your Daemon Prince would need the Mark of Tzeentch to take two powers, and your Sorcerer would need the Mark of Tzeentch and/or a Familiar to take two or three powers.

lambadomy: Redundancy would seem to leverage Gift of Chaos, as the averages would suggest you'd be able to get slightly less than 1 per turn. You'd need lots of Spawn models to really take advantage of that list. Still, it looks like it would be pretty fun, particularly against Orks or Imperial Guard. You wouldn't get pasted by hordes, at least I don't think you necessarily would, because Spawn are pretty effective against hordes - particularly if you didn't buy them. Mork help the Ork player that takes Grotz... Or the Tyranid player that takes Rippers. Or Imperial Guard. Those Winds of Chaos won't hurt.

Remember that Gift of Chaos is not a shooting power and is not cast during the shooting phase. The target can be engaged, and so can the caster. Your Sorcerers could cast Gift of Chaos on one unit, move towards another unit and cast Wind of Chaos on another. Some discussion on the placement of Spawn in the You Make The Call forum suggests that if you cast Gift of Chaos on model in a unit that is not in base to base contact with a friendly model, the Spawn won't be engaged with that unit until it assaults it in the Assault phase. Which means you could create a Spawn, rapid fire a unit and subject it to the Winds of Chaos, and the Spawn charges in to finish off the survivors. Not so much synergy, as allowing the Thousand Suns to rapid fire and assault a unit without danger to themselves.

(Hey, weirdness, the Codex page number of Psychic Powers is 88, the number of Khorne, while the Spawn in the army list is 99, the number of Tzeentch. Talk about selection bias..)

oh DUH! thought that was clear they DEFINITELY have it. And you do not need a familiar to take 2 powers if you have the mark.

Can you cast GoC on your own units? I can't recall.

Nope, you can't cast it on friendlies, just enemies (enemies on the same side don't count!). You don't need a Familiar to take two Psychic Powers if you have the Mark of Tzeentch, but it's an alternative to the Mark of Tzeentch if you want to take two powers for a non-Tzeentch Sorcerer, and you can double them up for three powers.

As for a specifically looking at the different powers:

Gift of Chaos:

Effectively a close combat power - the 6" at the beginning of your turn rule makes it nearly impossible to use otherwise. Either the caster needs to be in CC, or some other unit needs to be tying the target up in CC. No one is going to just stand there and let you cast it on them when they can back up 6, so you're either going to get charged by what you want to cast it on, or you're already fighting them.

It's odds of working are low. Most valuable targets are T4 at least, so it's a 1/3 chance. You'd need to figure out how many times you expect to cast it and against what to determine it's value. Say you expected to cast it against 180 point librarians, once a game (before it and it's squad slaughter you in CC or vice versa). You also will likely need to survive a whole combat round before using it.

One cast, .33 chance of killing 180 point model...60 points of units killed, + spawn created. Obviously this isn't the best way to calculate this since it's all or nothing.

The spawn...isn't necessarily a good thing, though I guess you could just say that you don't want to create one and just have the target killed outright. I say this because the spawn can just become free VPs for your opponents, so you'd have to decide if it was worth it for what it gained, which should be easy enough to do...the value of GoC can go up quite a bit if you manage to spawnify a member of a shooty squad that will have trouble fighting off a spawn in their midst, for example.

Warptime: pretty straightforward. If you were in base to base with the same 180 point, three wound librarian, you may be able to kill it. However, you really just need to look at how many extra hits and wounds warptime is getting you, not the results. Say you have 4 attacks, hit on 4, and wound on 4. Normally you'd get 1 wound in. With warptime you'd get 2.25. This is the sweet spot for warptime though...the harder or easier it is to hit/wound the less bonus warptime gives you.

BoC, doombolt, winds of chaos: all shooting powers, should be pretty straightforward to figure out what you want to shoot with it, how many times a game you expect to be able to shoot it, and how many casualties you expect to get. All of them are pretty effective for shooting attacks. Doombolt has a particular synergy with Thousand Sons for aspiring champions, wind of chaos a particular synergy with close combat units

Lash: there's been enough written about the lash...it is synergistic with blast templates, assault armies and shooty armies trying to avoid assault.

Nurgle's rot: kills a lot of kroot. a LOT of them. Guardians and orks too, but not as much as it kills kroot.

Anyway, the main problems with GoC is when you have to use it (and your odds of getting in that position) and the fact that it's all or nothing since you likely won't get to cast it more than once or maybe twice if you get lucky, assuming you're trying to snipe big points models, since they're likely to be able to hold their own with you at the least in close combat.

The shooting powers and warptime seem a lot "safer" because they give a well known effect - enhanced shooting or enhanced CC ability - and are not all-or-nothing in their results.

There is something to be said for reliability. Having things that are game winning if they work and probably game losing if they don't can make for some nerve wracking and exciting games, and the "wow!" moment when you spawnify the c'tan and the veil lord in the same turn, but unless they work more often than not they can put you in bad positions while you're trying to use them, and probably lead to more losses than wins.

A lot of this has goes down to play and army philosophy. Picking the most reliable choice, and the one with the most flexibility, is almost always better for an all-comers list than taking something that can be awesome but probably won't be. Especially when you're choosing between the two or paying 30 points for the luxury of the other one.

Maybe this doesn't answer anything - while it seems reasonably obvious that GoC fits either under "this ain't going to work" or at best "go ahead and try it, it will be fun but non-optimal" all I can say is you should try it. Mathhammer or unit analysis only goes so far. But I think you're going to have to build an army around trying to use it, otherwise you're going to miss the 60 points of stuff you don't get, or the warptime you're not using when you go with GoC. But who knows, maybe it will turn out to trump warptime so long as you can get both sorcs or DPs into the same combat to double your chance of spawnifying what you want.

actually I could see the GoC being incredibly potent against necrons.

Nice work!

I'm glad you brought up reliability, synergy, and redundancy. I'd like to add flexibility and complementarity to the list of properties to consider when thinking about Sorcerery strategy. Flexibility is the range of stuff something can affect. Wind of Chaos, for example, is more flexible than Doom Bolt and Gift of Chaos thanks to its flat 4+ chance of effect. Complementarity is slightly more complex and I expect much more controversial. It is the quality of being complementary, which is kind of like flexibility spread over two things. Basically the idea is that instead of taking two things that double up (synergy) like Doom Bolt for an Aspiring Sorcerer, or one thing that can be used two ways like the Bolt of Change (good anti-tank, good anti-everything-else too), two things that make up for each other's weakness such as Warp Time on that Aspiring Sorcerer to complement the unit's Inferno Bolts.

Warp Time on an A/S?
Just to be clear,
you aren't implying the unit benefits from his spell are you?

The unit benefits indirectly from the Aspiring Sorcerer being more reliable in close combat.

I think that flexibility/complimentarity (inside the same unit) is overrated, especially if it costs anything. Shooty units shoot, assault units assault (or counter-assault). Some units happen to be good at one and decent at another just by default, such as noise marines and with their I5, or grey knights with their good guns and Str 6.

When you're paying for CC punch in a shooty unit, you're normally just wasting points. This was brought up recently in another thread, wanting to add power fists to small shooty marine squads. They just cost too much to be worth it, when you really just want to avoid combat. In this case it would be even worse, since with the A/S you're also giving up a power that would probably be more useful than warptime more often.

That being said, there are instances where this wouldn't be a bad thing. it just has to be cheap enough or not cause you to give up a big part of what makes you good at what you do in the first place. Giving up doombolt or BoC on the aspiring sorcerers is a big price to pay to get something else. GoC I can barely justify and I built the list around trying to make it happen as often as possible.

That's one way of looking at it. I think that from an army perspective flexibility and complementarity is very useful. Take the premises that units good at shooting should shoot and that units good at assaulting should assault, and that doing things that they are not optimized for waste whatever they aren't using. It certainly works for Eldar - the army concept is based on it.

Here's the thing. There's lots of turns in a game of 40k, and plenty of time to lose units. If your units can only do one thing, then your army loses redundancy when its specialists are broken or destroyed. It's not always possible to avoid combat, and it's not always possible to be in range. When things don't go according to plan, when your specialized units are not in the possible to use their specialty, then you wasted points as much as if you had a similar situations with generalists.

Take the Aspiring Sorcerer for a second. Giving up Doombolt isn't so bad because the Sorcerer has a pistol with Inferno Bolts so he loses a bit of range and two attacks, so a loss of synergy. Particularly if he gains via complementarity and reliability (Warp Time) just complementarity and synergy (Bolt of Change), and so on. Giving up the Bolt of Change isn't so bad because the Thousand Suns unit could be specialized and leave the anti-tank to other units (say, Havocs or Obliterators). It could be argued that a Bolt of Change is wasted on a vehicle where all those Inferno Bolts would bounce off and a Lascannon could do the job better, while it could also be argued that a Bolt of Change is a bonus against a vehicle where all those Inferno Bolts would just bounce off and no other anti-tank is available.

I guess that's a long-winded way of saying that flexibility and complimentarity within a unit is conditional upon the context of the army. More flexibility can be good where the army itself isn't very flexible, and complementarity can be good where the army doesn't have much stamina so inter-unit redundancy is as important as intra-unit redundancy. With the Eldar the units are automatically specialized, but even then players need to judge what Exarch powers will work best in the particular army.

And there's always the issue of taking several small generalist units over a large specialized unit to benefit from distributing firepower more widely for less over-kill, so a Bolt of Change might work well if the army may be facing an enemy with lots of vehicles.

I think a Sorcerer in Terminator Armour, and accompanied by Daemons and Terminators would be something interesting in combination with the Gift of Chaos: a sort of Chaos Bomb. I'm not sure whether a Sorcerer could Deep Strike and then use that power though. Something similar might work well for Nurgle's Rot too.

I've tried using GoC in several battles. The conclusion I have reached is that it is far too fickle a power to be placing on a rare and tactically important model like a Chaos Sorcerer or Daemon Prince.

From a storytelling standpoint, it is a fantastic power. It allows you to talk about "that one time I turned the Nightbringer into a spawn." For this reason I heartily endorse it for campaigns.

But for competitive play (friendly, league, or tournament) it is simply too unreliable to build a tactical plan around it. Compounding the situation is that the armies against which GoC might be best (IG, Eldar, Marines) all have anti-psychic warger making it even more difficult to use the power successfully.

For instantly killing spooky creatures there are daemon weapons and force weapons. Typhus is particularly good at killing monsters.

The powers I choose are:
Daemon Prince: Warptime and WoC
These two powers combine to the absolute ruin of heavy infantry. Odds are that you will kill 75% of whatever the template touches. I can regularly and reliably (important emphasis) rely on this combination to be effective.

Chaos Sorcerer: Lash
Hidden inside a Raptor squad for protection, this is a good mobile unit that can leverage the short range of LoS without excessive risk. LoS is another fickle power -so relying on it for your tactics requires taking two for redundancy.

Aspiring Sorcerers: Warptime or BoC
Warptime makes charging a unit of Rubric Marines frightening to ICs and MCs as they run a much higher risk of being killed by a Force Weapon. I use BoC only if I think I will not have enough Anti-armor for my expected enemy.