Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

With all the Fearless or TSKNF is Fear really a worthless extra to take? It seems that 60% of the board is fearless nowadays and i am not sure if its worth taking.

Sorta yes. Not as useless as it was in fantasy tho. It's one of the rules I just skip all the time because of how little application it actually has.

Against armies like orks it's actually quite powerful. However, since the majority of armies played are SM or variants it doesn't see a lot of use.

 buddha wrote:
Against armies like orks it's actually quite powerful. However, since the majority of armies played are SM or variants it doesn't see a lot of use.

Orks don't roll for morale actually. They have their own separate table.

topaxygouroun i wrote:

 buddha wrote:
Against armies like orks it's actually quite powerful. However, since the majority of armies played are SM or variants it doesn't see a lot of use.

Orks don't roll for morale actually. They have their own separate table.

Not against Fear. Fear works on Orks 100%.

And yes, Fear is pretty much useless. GW has made it perfectly clear that they want Fear to be a bigger part of the game (Dark Eldar, Harlequins, Necrons, all getting a bunch of Fear based stuff) but have also made it so that the majority of the game is auto-immune or unaffected.

Yes it's basically worthless. Even if you take Marines out of the equation, a huge number of armies are either immune to it or are functionally immune to it.

Daemons: Army-wide immunity to fear.

Tyranids: Units are either fearless or in synapse, so functional army-wide immunity.

Orks: Mob rule makes them functionally immune. EDIT- Forgot that fear isn't a morale test. Disregard.

CSM: Majority of units are fearless or vehicles, the ones that aren't can purchase fearless for relatively cheap.

Necrons: Army-wide leadership 10, functionally immune.

Imperial Guard: Any infantry bigger than 10 models has a cheap as chips priest, anything smaller is usually meched up.

That leaves Sisters, the Eldars and Tau. Notice that none of those factions have particularly strong melee though, and thus anything that gets into melee with them are going to rip them apart anyway. Orks are really the only army where fear can be useful.

I've been playing Harlequins (fear across the board stacked with AOE LD debuffs) and it's weak as an incidental rule but strong if your list takes advantage of it as a neat bonus.

While ATSKNF is my constant bane and nemesis, it has been amazing against armies that "traditionally" don't have morale issues like Necrons and Chaos thanks to the debuffs.

Fear really only affects armies that are mid or low tier, and has little to no affect on a good deal of the more hard core armies out there.

So its not useless, but its too situational to be reliably effective against your opponents.

 BlaxicanX wrote:

CSM: Majority of units are fearless or vehicles, the ones that aren't can purchase fearless for relatively cheap.

I wish that was true for regular CSM and CSM bikers. Khorne bikers from the C:KDK Gorepack failing their Fear test against Nurglings 3 turns in a row is not an impressive sight

I think the only thing fear works on is Orks.

I think it's a rubbish mechanic. It's application is too limited.

I seem to recall in the dim mists of time Fear and Terror, with one being more powerful.

There should be Fear, after all there are some utterly bowel-loosening horrible things in the game. The big nids are terrifying, daemons (certainly greater ones and princes), many chaos mutations would scare you witless, spawn, etc, etc. A lot of other things are so cruel and horrible that you would be terrified of being captured by them, such as Dark Eldar, etc.

For me Fear is too limited by only working in a limited way in cc. If you were stood 20 feet from a carnifex you'd be scared! I would have the lesser Fear for stuff which is a bit unnerving and Terror for really petrifying horrors, such as trygons, daemon princes, etc. I'd give Terror a radius. Anyone wanting to charge into this radius or even fire within it would need to test and if they lost cc they would be affected in some way I haven't considered fully yet!

So at the moment it is so limited that it is useless IMHO.

In the grim darkness of the far future no one is scared of anything.

Having had a game against Orks the other day there is a use for it, especially when it makes Tau Riptides hit on 3s in close combat!

But generally no I don't think its worth going out of your way for Fear.

I don't understand why GW would give dark eldar so much leadership debuffing, psuedo psychic sceeching stuff and then say none of it works on ATSKNF. Thats crazy!

ATSKNF should be a reroll of fear test, not immunity.

Fear should be " ...if model fails it counts his WS and Initiative as 1...", and give a flat out -1 on the LD test.

Fearless is the only immunity.

MC's has instead the Terror rule, wich makes the same, but you have a -2 on the test, ATSKNF cannot reroll but has a +1 on the tet, same for Fearless.

Walkers cause fear, and Walkers with the Deamon rule cause Terror.

Also although space marines are immune to fear and panicking they will run away from things.

There's multiple occasions in the fluff where marines have ran away, not because they're scared of the thing they're fighting, but just because they know it can and will kill them very easily and they want to fight another day.

the biggest issue with fear is that power creep has ruined it. nowadays you cant walk ten feet without tripping over a way to get fearless if you dont already have it.

back when fearless was an oddity it was actually really hard to come by if you werent a marine the above being said they have been toning it down on non space marines lately though its still on everyones hq's (or their ld10 anyway) and because attaching special characters to any units that functionally matter has become so essential to army operations its become effectively worthless anyway.

gw is writing rules for fear that would have been relevant about 2 editions ago that is my opinion and its too little too late

Son of aY3ti wrote:
With all the Fearless or TSKNF is Fear really a worthless extra to take? It seems that 60% of the board is fearless nowadays and i am not sure if its worth taking.

Kinda It really only works agains Orks... If you see a lot of Orks ...maybe?

 Slayer le boucher wrote:
ATSKNF should be a reroll of fear test, not immunity.

Fear should be " ...if model fails it counts his WS and Initiative as 1...", and give a flat out -1 on the LD test.

Fearless is the only immunity.

MC's has instead the Terror rule, wich makes the same, but you have a -2 on the test, ATSKNF cannot reroll but has a +1 on the tet, same for Fearless.

Walkers cause fear, and Walkers with the Deamon rule cause Terror.

So a sentinel would cause fear?

Yes, it's largely worthless.

 Baldeagle91 wrote:

So a sentinel would cause fear?

Why not? It's two powerful mechanical legs swinging around. Those would hit with a lot of force and most infantry would probably rather worry about dodging than trying to punch it.

topaxygouroun i wrote:
Sorta yes. Not as useless as it was in fantasy tho. It's one of the rules I just skip all the time because of how little application it actually has.

Oh no, Fear in fantasy actually matters. In 40k its useless because the vast majority of codices have fearless or ATSKNF. And everyone else just has naturally high leadership or doesn't care.

Sure, there were more ways to mitigate Fear in fantasy through Inspiring Presence and the BSB reroll, but there was very little out there that was outright immune to it. And then it scaled with Terror on top of that. And it had a pretty debilitating effect as well. Plus with magic you could actually built around it if you had Death or Shadow magic.

I've chased more than a few Riptides off the board with fear in the past. I would not say it's useless, it has it's applications.

Fear is only useful in CC, and most CC units that are worth a damn either ignore fear on their own or have easy access to ICs that cause them to ignore fear.

The only real exception to this rule is, as it's been pointed out, orks. mob rule works for morale and pinning tests only, and fear is, unfortunately, a leadership test. I've checked it time and time again, always hoping I've made some kind of mistake, but sadly, it's the case.

So, yes, fear is generally useless unless you're fighting orks. Maybe CSM, and some necron units, though both of their LD values are high enough that fear usually doesn't have an effect anyways.

So, bring it if it's free (like with MCs), but never pay for just fear, unless you're fighting orks.

Son of aY3ti wrote:
With all the Fearless or TSKNF is Fear really a worthless extra to take? It seems that 60% of the board is fearless nowadays and i am not sure if its worth taking.

Yeah, it's mostly worthless. The unfortunate part is that on most of the units it would work on, like guardsmen, it's usually not doing much anyway

 Vaktathi wrote:

Son of aY3ti wrote:
With all the Fearless or TSKNF is Fear really a worthless extra to take? It seems that 60% of the board is fearless nowadays and i am not sure if its worth taking.

Yeah, it's mostly worthless. The unfortunate part is that on most of the units it would work on, like guardsmen, it's usually not doing much anyway

Oh darn, we're hitting you on 5s and you're hitting us on 3s.. wait, weren't we already doing that?

More than half the game is outright immune to it, and the remainder has a pitifully low chance of succumbing to it.

It is worthless.

Overall it's useless. Anything you want it to work on is either already going to lose in assault (Guardsmen, Dark Eldar and Eldar), has a VERY high LD which means you cannot bank on it working (Necrons, Daemons) or just immune to it (Space Marines).
Sure, when it goes off it's neat. I'd much rather pay less points to not have it though, even where it would be fluffy. After all, it's fitting Flayed Ones cause Fear, but I'd gladly pay one less point for them to lose it.

The biggest problem is probably that its too all or nothing. And it has a small chance of happening even when its a possibility.

It should probably be more of a spectrum instead of a binary condition.

It's useless, both because it isn't powerful enough and because most of the armies in the game can ignore it.

What if Fear was changed so that instead of causing fear tests, any unit within 6" that isn't fearless has -2 leadership? or -1 leadership from a unit for each unit within 6" which causes fear?

Would mean that scary things are scary even when you're more than base to base distance away.

ATSKNF shouldn't be immune to this either as the marines would retreat then rally, because although they know no fear, they're not that stupid.

Fear is more of an incidental bennie.

I wouldn't pay to have it on any unit, but if your army is based around leadership shenanigans, then Fear can be a delightful sheet of icing on your pain cake. Of the four armies I play, two have Fear on almost every model, but there's no real point premium for it.