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PuppetSoul wrote:

 warmaster21 wrote:

Faith system that actually scales by army size and isnt just inferior guard orders

Acts of Faith are significantly better than Orders in every way (shoot again is better than FRFSRF and the reroll orders; fight again is better than Fix Bayonets because it occurs before the movement phase, allowing you to attack and still fall back; move again is better than Move Move Move because it doesn't prevent you from shooting, and doesn't impact your shooting phase), and having easier access to them than the Imagifier tax would make Sisters unbeatable.

If Imagifiers were an HQ choice, I would say that the AoF system is in a really good spot (it strongly encourages souping, but that's fine).

 warmaster21 wrote:

at the very least i will take any option that lets us break away from the required 3 units of dominions with melta guns in repressors (honestly repressors need to lose the fire ports)

First, you should already be off melta Doms in Repressors in ITC, because Repressors walk into anti-knight firepower, but don't have the knights' 3++ to soak it. Further, they're inefficient against Rotate+Ion Knights, with a four melta squad averaging about 2.5 damage in melta range, making them less efficient than their weight in storm bolters at the same range (which is super sad). So they really just feed BGH and MFD points.

Second, Repressors are only a thing because of the firing ports, without them, they'd be overcosted Rhinos and you would never take them, just as you never take Rhinos.

The only way you can really get away from melta doms(which you shouldn't because they're awesome and not every list has ion shield knights and even lists that do have other targets they can go after) Is the Celestine 3 seraphim thing in a Soup list. At which point you're not really playing sisters anymore. Retributors are list padders at best, anything with a meaningful CQC profile is a gimmick you finish middle of the pack with in a locals tourney. Seraphim are good but thanks to the asinine rule of three you can't really bring enough of them to build a list around. Celestians are just gakky Battle sisters. Battle sisters are fine but are just gakky dominions if you wanna run MSU or gakky guardsmen if you wanna run horde. And at this point, you're now out of codex options.

Also, imagifiers could be Elites, HQs, Troops, Dedicated transports, or friggin fortifications and they'd STILL be terrible at 40pts. The problem isn't, and has never been fitting them into the FOC, the problem is finding a reason to justify taking them at all. They're too slow to be useful for dominions or seraphim and way too expensive to use on retributors or battle sisters. Almost any situation where you would take an imagifier it would be more efficient to take another unit of battle sisters or a unit of retributors, or even a canoness if you needed to fill a compulsory HQ slot.

 warmaster21 wrote:

(honestly repressors need to lose the fire ports)

Lol why? So we can be like Marines and never take a transport?

No fire ports essentially would mean no Repressors in the vast majority of lists, at least with any sort of attempt to be competitive. Fire ports are the only reason take a Repressor, if you want an overpriced transport you can take a Rhino, if you want an overpriced Flamer on top of a metal box you can take an Immolator. Obviously do whatever you want in friendly games.

So we'd be taking Seraphim, Rets, and souping in Guard, rather than Seraphim, Rets, Doms, BSS, and Repressors.

 Creeping Dementia wrote:

 warmaster21 wrote:

(honestly repressors need to lose the fire ports)

Lol why? So we can be like Marines and never take a transport?

No fire ports essentially would mean no Repressors in the vast majority of lists, at least with any sort of attempt to be competitive. Fire ports are the only reason take a Repressor, if you want an overpriced transport you can take a Rhino, if you want an overpriced Flamer on top of a metal box you can take an Immolator. Obviously do whatever you want in friendly games.

So we'd be taking Seraphim, Rets, and souping in Guard, rather than Seraphim, Rets, Doms, BSS, and Repressors.

Hey! There's nothing wrong with Immolators! Though they wouldn't mind a points drop. Especially for the Melta...

I have fond memories of Immolator Spam days too, but they just aren't great right now considering all our opponents are geared toward taking out knights. I'd like nothing more than to be running around with 6-8 Immolators like back in 5th edition, but the game just isn't the same anymore

reason im saying repressors need to lose firing ports is becuase nearly every armored vehicle that had firing ports had them removed in 8th edition or earlier

obviously rhinos are overcosted, so are immolators, though at least you can advance and shoot the immolation flamer. repressors had to have their points increased becuase of how stupid they are with dominions in them.

i would be perfectly fine with them turning repressors into just up gunned rhinos while immolators keep being our razorback equivalent. but i will agree that most transports need to be looked at for a reason to take them.

though we did have several editions of rhino spam and people complained, and editions where all transports were unplayable and people complained.

Iv always liked seraphim far more than dominions but with how the sisters army worked you just could never get away with taking more than 1 unit and were heavily required to take melta spam dominions in nearly every case. especially with how they completely destroyed hand flamers

and yes i understand how good breaking action economy is with AoF since we have Ynnead as a prime example of how powerful it can be, but as it is now it just does not scale at all in a pure sisters list. we get 2 nearly garunteed AoF a turn with celestine, 1 of which will most likely cost you a command point at some point.

Assuming acts of faith dont change with the beta codex, what if the effect of the imagifier was moved over to the cannoness who you would have to take anyways and the imagifier gained some sort of passive aura buff instead like the nob/waaagh banner

im really curious to see what they are going to do with AoF. the 3rd edition version was basically how command points work now, and i could easily see them moving alot of act of faith abilities to be "command" abilities which i kind of dont want to see unless we get ways to generate faith points that could be spent on acts of faith

i doubt we will see the return of unit based act of faith, and the current system of move again, shoot again, fight again, or heal is honestly just boring to me.

and hopefully we will see more incentive to field full sisters / ministorum lists

I think one of the biggest problems for Sisters have is Melta and our reliance on it for Anti-vehicle firepower. (Aside from the Exorcist (and it's own problems.))

 Creeping Dementia wrote:
I have fond memories of Immolator Spam days too, but they just aren't great right now considering all our opponents are geared toward taking out knights. I'd like nothing more than to be running around with 6-8 Immolators like back in 5th edition, but the game just isn't the same anymore

I'm expecting Knights to take a hit, come CA. Wether or not it changes the Meta, we'll have to see.
I don't want the game to quite go back to Immolator spam either, but I'm not entirely sure how to balance that...

 warmaster21 wrote:
reason im saying repressors need to lose firing ports is becuase nearly every armored vehicle that had firing ports had them removed in 8th edition or earlier

obviously rhinos are overcosted, so are immolators, though at least you can advance and shoot the immolation flamer. repressors had to have their points increased becuase of how stupid they are with dominions in them.

i would be perfectly fine with them turning repressors into just up gunned rhinos while immolators keep being our razorback equivalent. but i will agree that most transports need to be looked at for a reason to take them.

though we did have several editions of rhino spam and people complained, and editions where all transports were unplayable and people complained.

Iv always liked seraphim far more than dominions but with how the sisters army worked you just could never get away with taking more than 1 unit and were heavily required to take melta spam dominions in nearly every case. especially with how they completely destroyed hand flamers

and yes i understand how good breaking action economy is with AoF since we have Ynnead as a prime example of how powerful it can be, but as it is now it just does not scale at all in a pure sisters list. we get 2 nearly garunteed AoF a turn with celestine, 1 of which will most likely cost you a command point at some point.

Assuming acts of faith dont change with the beta codex, what if the effect of the imagifier was moved over to the cannoness who you would have to take anyways and the imagifier gained some sort of passive aura buff instead like the nob/waaagh banner

im really curious to see what they are going to do with AoF. the 3rd edition version was basically how command points work now, and i could easily see them moving alot of act of faith abilities to be "command" abilities which i kind of dont want to see unless we get ways to generate faith points that could be spent on acts of faith

i doubt we will see the return of unit based act of faith, and the current system of move again, shoot again, fight again, or heal is honestly just boring to me.

and hopefully we will see more incentive to field full sisters / ministorum lists

This is a super weird take on SoB to be honest. Repressors were bonkers in the indexes, sure. But between the nerfs, the rule of 3, and codex creep they're not really that big of a deal anymore. The fire points make it a solid, if un-amazing choice. If you take away the fire ports, you'd have to drop it 60pts to still be sub-par. At 110 it would be totally useless compared to a stock standard immolator, which is a decidedly mediocre choice in and of itself.

Dominions are the core of the army now that it's actually genuinely difficult to make 2000pts of sisters without spamming troops, but there were plenty of lists pre-rule of 3 that didn't use any and did quite well.

(Side bar: Of course people complained at 'RHINOS EVERYWHERE' and 'NEVER RHINOS' those are both bad. 'Rhinos sometimes' is what people were looking for.)

Also, seraphim are fantastic and while hand flamers are largely worthless, inferno pistols are better than they've EVER been, to the point where you see multiple soup lists with Celestine 3 seraphim as a detachment. Before the (totally garbage) rule of 3 came in there was actually a seraphim spam list that took 11th at the LVO. Even now people take the maximum number of seraphim all the time and see a lot of success with them. I personally would never build a list that didn't have at least 1 unit of seraphim and have done well at tournaments taking the full complement of 3 units.

The scaling issue for AoFs can be mostly solved by making imagifiers 10pts cheaper, bumping them up to a 3+ and giving their AoF ability a 12" range.The problem THEN becomes keeping enough infantry on the table for more than 2 AoFs to be useful. I find that I'm frustrated about having AoFs I can't really use almost as often as I wish for more.

A.T. wrote:
They get largely pigeon-holed into a coin flip on the first turn to advance seraphim followed by retributor support - at which point they are effectively a 40 point upgrade to an 85 point unit that lets them shoot twice every other round(ish). Not terrible but once the retributors get shot up the short range of the imagifier takes them out of action too.

Seraphim slingshot followed by Ret support is pretty much the best you can ask for though: assume a 75% chance to succeed on the Seraphim slingshot (50%+reroll), then provides obj capping and/or deepstrike denial while effectively generating 1.5 cp per turn.

Even if the Ret squad is wiped out, she can slingshot herself 12+d6" to an objective, where the character keyword makes her difficult to remove (and punishes the opponent when they do).

PuppetSoul wrote:
then provides obj capping and/or deepstrike denial while effectively generating 1.5 cp per turn.

1.5 cp per turn is a rather generous description.

More accurate (and still generous) would be that she provides 42.5 points of heavy bolter retributor firepower for 40 points of model.

 Aaranis wrote:
We've unboxed Blackstone Fortress at my store and I've had a quick glance at some datasheets. Thaddeus is just a Munistorum Priest with a stubber and a Power Maul, costs 65-80 pts, I don't remember. Dorne has a Assault flamer S5 AP-1 and a CC weapon for which I forgot the profile, and costs something like 25-30 pts, Elite choice.

Pious Vorne is at your low point guess, Taddeus is twice her cost at ten old melta-bombs. He does get 4 pistol shots a turn and zealot as well as a rosarius save. Not too bad for filling an HQ slot in an Adeptus Ministorum detachment. That may be important depending how the CA Dex rolls out PenEngines and the like. PenEngines were in the CA reveal video, but are they just updating ministorum and sororitas units at the same time or allowing both in the same detachment?

 dracpanzer wrote:

 Aaranis wrote:
We've unboxed Blackstone Fortress at my store and I've had a quick glance at some datasheets. Thaddeus is just a Munistorum Priest with a stubber and a Power Maul, costs 65-80 pts, I don't remember. Dorne has a Assault flamer S5 AP-1 and a CC weapon for which I forgot the profile, and costs something like 25-30 pts, Elite choice.

Pious Vorne is at your low point guess, Taddeus is twice her cost at ten old melta-bombs. He does get 4 pistol shots a turn and zealot as well as a rosarius save. Not too bad for filling an HQ slot in an Adeptus Ministorum detachment. That may be important depending how the CA Dex rolls out PenEngines and the like. PenEngines were in the CA reveal video, but are they just updating ministorum and sororitas units at the same time or allowing both in the same detachment?

The characters are Elites.

ERJAK wrote:


The scaling issue for AoFs can be mostly solved by making imagifiers 10pts cheaper, bumping them up to a 3+ and giving their AoF ability a 12" range.The problem THEN becomes keeping enough infantry on the table for more than 2 AoFs to be useful. I find that I'm frustrated about having AoFs I can't really use almost as often as I wish for more.

Sort of. Even imagifiers aren't a scaling solution. I agree they should be cheaper but Rule of Three really prevents any attempt at scalability. You could use 6 just to keep a full complement of Rets going, not to mention ones you could use for your troops, Doms, etc.

In general I have been a fan of the Rule of Three, just not for a select few armies. Some armies (particularly Fringe armies), Sisters included, have such a limited selection of viable units that it makes it nearly impossible to succeed in staying relevant without souping.

 warmaster21 wrote:
reason im saying repressors need to lose firing ports is becuase nearly every armored vehicle that had firing ports had them removed in 8th edition or earlier

As opposed to open topped vehicles that currently let everyone inside shoot out? Repressors losing firing points would be the same as removing the unit from our arsenal entirely. There is no point in it without them.

obviously rhinos are overcosted, so are immolators, though at least you can advance and shoot the immolation flamer. repressors had to have their points increased becuase of how stupid they are with dominions in them.

Ro3 certainly helped with that, rhino's and immolators and exorcists need a point decrease or nice buff to make me consider taking them again.

Iv always liked seraphim far more than dominions but with how the sisters army worked you just could never get away with taking more than 1 unit and were heavily required to take melta spam dominions in nearly every case. especially with how they completely destroyed hand flamers

Hand flamers had always been great until 8ed made them bad. The 8ed Index also made inferno pistols fantastic, CA17 made them better. Their roles changed a bit, but there has always been a reason to bring lots of seraphim. Ro3 is the biggest problem Seraphim have right now.

Assuming acts of faith dont change with the beta codex, what if the effect of the imagifier was moved over to the cannoness who you would have to take anyways and the imagifier gained some sort of passive aura buff instead like the nob/waaagh banner

I am open to changing up the imagifer somehow, but I find the re-roll 1's far better on the canoness.

i doubt we will see the return of unit based act of faith, and the current system of move again, shoot again, fight again, or heal is honestly just boring to me.

and hopefully we will see more incentive to field full sisters / ministorum lists

I am glad the AoF only have the four options, they are useful, though having reason to use them on units that aren't retributors and seraphim would be great. Having to explain more than just the four current AoF ten times over the course of every game would be a much bigger pain.

Though I had started souping in baby Knights when I started building an army of them, I find that full sisters armies do quite well, punch way above their weight and surprise a lot of opponents. Ro3 is the only real nerf they have had in 8ed.

ERJAK wrote:
The only way you can really get away from melta doms(which you shouldn't because they're awesome and not every list has ion shield knights and even lists that do have other targets they can go after) Is the Celestine 3 seraphim thing in a Soup list. At which point you're not really playing sisters anymore.

It took me a fair bit of work to come up with a list that was Sisters primary, but still cost-efficient and effective compared to what I could run if I dropped Sisters.

ERJAK wrote:
Retributors are list padders at best,

We can't be friends anymore. I'm actually considering bringing a 3rd set of HB Rets in my list, although I don't want to drop a set of Seraphim to do it.

ERJAK wrote:
anything with a meaningful CQC profile is a gimmick you finish middle of the pack with in a locals tourney.

That goes for the game at large: if your melee option requires a dedicated transport, can't deepstrike, and can't pull off a turn1 charge, it's not good enough.

ERJAK wrote:
Celestians are just gakky Battle sisters. Battle sisters are fine but are just gakky dominions if you wanna run MSU or gakky guardsmen if you wanna run horde.

Celestians have a lot of problems, so I'm not going to get into them.
Regular Battle Sisters are only impeded by not being able to run storm bolters on every model: if the counterbalance between them and Dominions was that Dominions get the scout move for a point, and BSS can take a larger unit size of special weapons, then I could see there being a tradeoff. As it stands currently ablative wounds are too expensive to elite armies (with the exception of Tau).

ERJAK wrote:
Also, imagifiers could be Elites, HQs, Troops, Dedicated transports, or friggin fortifications and they'd STILL be terrible at 40pts. The problem isn't, and has never been fitting them into the FOC, the problem is finding a reason to justify taking them at all. They're too slow to be useful for dominions or seraphim and way too expensive to use on retributors or battle sisters. Almost any situation where you would take an imagifier it would be more efficient to take another unit of battle sisters or a unit of retributors, or even a canoness if you needed to fill a compulsory HQ slot.

Ready for the next level? That isn't a problem with the Imagifier.

Imagine, for example, that you could take a 9 HB ret squad. Would an Imagifier be cost-effective with it? Of course. But we can't do that, and are unlikely to get that in CA. But what if the Ret Superior could take the same weapon options as the squad, like Hellblasters' can? Well, then we'd have five HBs, so 95 points. If she generates half that value, she's making 47.5 points, and is cost-effective. But we're probably unlikely to see that as well, since HB Rets are actually in a pretty good spot right now (and are likely to be buffed by Orders). So let's go with something more tangible: multimeltas getting a point reduction. What if multimeltas get a cost reduction to 20 points. Would they be worth running? And if so, would they be worth Imagifiering? Probably yes to both.

Dropping their points cost to 30 would make them an auto-include as a 3-of, because even targeting the most basic troops in the army would still net 25 points per turn, and reviving a single Ret or Dom would immediately earn her points back. She'd be a no-risk slam dunk that your opponent can't play around.

At 40 points, there are only a handful of units that would allow her to earn her points back, and softening those units up allows you to throttle the AoF engine to where the Sisters player "gets frustrated that they're wasting AoF".

Lammia wrote:

 dracpanzer wrote:

 Aaranis wrote:
We've unboxed Blackstone Fortress at my store and I've had a quick glance at some datasheets. Thaddeus is just a Munistorum Priest with a stubber and a Power Maul, costs 65-80 pts, I don't remember. Dorne has a Assault flamer S5 AP-1 and a CC weapon for which I forgot the profile, and costs something like 25-30 pts, Elite choice.

Pious Vorne is at your low point guess, Taddeus is twice her cost at ten old melta-bombs. He does get 4 pistol shots a turn and zealot as well as a rosarius save. Not too bad for filling an HQ slot in an Adeptus Ministorum detachment. That may be important depending how the CA Dex rolls out PenEngines and the like. PenEngines were in the CA reveal video, but are they just updating ministorum and sororitas units at the same time or allowing both in the same detachment?

The characters are Elites.

Pious is an Elite choice, Taddeus fills an HQ slot.