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Hear me out here chaps; I always had a problem with MC's units that to my mind are clearly walkers and not a living creature. To me a MC should be a living creature with flesh and blood eg Carnifex, Greater Daemon, and thus toughness, wounds etc. A walker is basically a robot or vehicle, made of metal, wraithbone etc, and thus has an armour value. Yes you could argue a Wraithlord is 'alive' to some degree but this is splitting hairs, it doesn't bleed, have flesh, muscles etc, and is beside my point.

My point is the Dreadknight is clearly what I would define as a walker, heck its just a warwalker with arms, a beefed up dread with a termie sized baby carrier on the front, yet GW made it an MC. Why was this? Because if it was a walker the MC 2d6 armour pen rules meant it would have been useless against its main opponent: Greater Daemons. Does anyone else think this proves MCs are too powerful against armour and GW know it, especially when you consider non walker vehicles are auto hit on the rear and most MCs have lots of attacks with rerolls? Maybe rending for MC attacks instead of 2d6 and power weapon would be a compromise? Could we see a change in armour rules next edition, any thoughts Dakka?

No, it isn't proof that anything is broken. It is GW experimenting on a cool new concept of a unit. Why must the dreadknight be another walker when they already have dreads and vendreads?

Everyone likes MC's and big things (well, most people at least). This is GW marketing to try to make more money. Check out this cool new shiny unit and buy! Every new codex is going to have one of these "types" of units.

I personally think the reason the DK's are MC's is mainly because think of the backstory of grey knights... before they re-joined the imperium they were within the warp, had hundreds of years with technology and warp-energy to develope new alloys and such.

I think the dreadknights are made from a dang near indestructible alloy and the enemy merely punches through the small hull that surrounds the marine within and kill him directly, laying the machine inert.

and on a side-note, they are attempting to balance the game slightly, here is how it works. MC > vehicles > infantry > MC

However, that is just one humble inquisitorial servants opinion. (there are always exceptions to this rule, like infantry taking equipment to deal with vehicles, or MC's having wide-spread attacks, or vehicles having enough weaponry to focus the MC down) but think of each unit as equipped without upgrades and that would be the general consensus on how things would work out (most of the time)

I agree that it is a bit op in that respect but think of it this way.

a lasgun cannot harm a walker but it can harm a mc so 30 or so guardsmen could in theory take down a mc but not a walker. food for though.

Besides, why must the "bad guys" (Eldar included) be the only ones to get to use MC's. I'm a Marine player and I WANT MY MCTV!

Indeed, to kill a Dreadknight you have to kill the pilot. Unfortunately for anyone trying to do this, he's got a 35 foot sized mechanised suit with guns the size of trucks pointing at you. You need to hurt him, and he's going to stop you. It makes sense that it's a tough model rather than a vehicle.

Don't get me wrong; I'm all for cool new models and GK getting special stuff because of their status; I like the DK.
Maybe I'm looking at it too logically, I see a big metal robot and think walker, not monsterous creature.

However I also think they had no choice but to make it a MC, it would not have been able to take on Greater Daemons as a walker, its whole purpose as per the fluff.

I agree that the Dreadknight should be a walker. After all, it does make sense that you could destroy an arm and have it lose a weapon, or destroy a leg and have it immoblized. It doesnt bleed, it breaks and can be fixed by a techmarine.

As for MCs, MC are currently weaker than vehicles. The only claim MCs have for being tough is their armor save. If you take the armor save away (either from AP2 or lots of dice), their toughness is no barrier to injury. Vehicles can never be hurt by small arms on the other hand, and AV compared to toughness illustrates that t6 is as good as av10.

so I am a HUGE GK fanatic and I totally agree the DK should be a walker. It makes sense with a live pilot and all, but its a machine.

NOW, what I wanna know is, they are assuming if the machine is destroyed, the pilot dies. how so? he is strapped to the front of it!

it SHOULD be a walker based on the fact that it is a piloted unit, and therefore, during a penetrating hit, the pilot should eject. thus putting a royally pissed off GK Termie on the ground.

in fact, I think I am going to treat my DK at my house, as a walker with elevated armor levels. maybe 1 up on a ven dread, but with the added bonus of having the marine piloting it able to hop out.

I haven[t even built the model yet, but its going to get some changes made. the whole baby carrier on the front is ridiculous. thats gotta be changed.

I wouldnt mind the Dreadknight being a iron clad with fortitude. Maybe even keep the invl save! Might make it more worthwhile for its points (and make the dreadnought CC weapons actually work )

So now you'll have a tough as nails iron clad running around for the risk of getting one shotted, I think its a good trade off

If DKs were walkers, they would be S10 with doomfists. They would still be as good at punching vehicles.

The OP is right. Dreadknights are not creatures. They are metal suits piloted by GKs. They are however, monsterous and therefore should have the MC rule

DeadlySquirrel wrote:The OP is right. Dreadknights are not creatures. They are metal suits piloted by GKs. They are however, monsterous and therefore should have the MC rule

by this definition, would the Great Squiggoth be considered a walker as well? should it not have an AV? you have to punch through its armor to hurt it.

true its a living creature, but its clad in armor and piloted (relatively) by the Orks on top.

actually that sounds like all the more reason the DK SHOULD be a walker and not an MC.

Uhm...is everyone missing the actual questions here or is it just me?

To the OP, I do think the Monstrous Creature rule piles up too many bonuses under one umbrella, and doing away with MC and simply applying the appropriate other rules as needed would be preferable, not all MCs need to be good tank rippers, and not all need to not be independent characters...

Jack

If a dreadknight has gotten close enough to punch your tank in the butt, then you're doing it wrong.

MC's aren't broken. If anything, armor is too resilient. Hence the reason we see vehicle and mech spams and not MC spams (barring some Tyranid lists). But in all honesty, there are so many hard counters to a dreadknight. Sure, it has a 2+ armor save but it has a 5+ invul. It'll hardly ever get a cover save, so just blow it up with heavy weapons, like you would with most mcs. That or your can force it to make too many saves.

I think the monstrous creature rule is fine the way it is, one of the few rules that doesn't need tweaking.

Maybe MC is fine, but perhaps a scaled down version of it for those things that are currently MCs but shouldn't have all the MC benefits? (mostly the 2d6 armour pen). Something with the Power Weapons and 2d6 take the highest for Armour Pen, or more many-wound models that aren't MCs (many wounds being 4+)

Or give DCCWs 2d6 armour pen. I mean, is a big chitin claw really going to be better at going through armour than a fusion powered adamantine drill?



And Tyranids are the only army that can spam MCs. Nobody else has that many.

Soulgrinders are vehicles, right? They look more like monsters to me than that Optimus Prime-looking mofo.

thunderingjove wrote:Soulgrinders are vehicles, right? They look more like monsters to me than that Optimus Prime-looking mofo.

Well soul grinder is a lot like the defiler

Plus who ever made the codex wanted to have at least one vehicle I bet

I won't take that bet; you're totally right. I don't understand why they didn't include the oldschoool daemon engines for HS in that codex.

My question is this... would poision work on a dreadknight? The thing is as much metal as a dreadnaught, both have living pilots, ect. All walkers in the game in fact have living pilots. No walker is affected by poison. Except the dreadknight.

I don't really have a problem either way with the Dreadknight being a monstrous creature or a walker. There are arguments for both. However, it is a tricky unit; if you go into the game not really knowing the Grey Knights codex, and drop your boarding plank on your Ork trukk ready to murder this guy, you'll be unpleased to find that you can only do that trick to vehicles!

Well, while it was obvious that the NDK had to be a monsterous creature so that it could stand a chance against Great Daemons and princes and such, I don't think this means the monsterous rule is ooverpowered. What it does prove, though, is that the idea of monsterous creatures and walkers having titanic battles and going toe-to-toe isn't true. In any scenario, the walker gets his ass handed to him. I think that walkers just need a slight bonus versus monsterous creatures so that this stereotype could actually be true.

What would you suggest to make that happen?

thunderingjove wrote:What would you suggest to make that happen?

Darn, guess I sorta put my foot in my mouth there.. Well, lets see. We could either make the walkers get crazy bonuses against MC, or make them more survivable. I favor the 2nd option more, because if we just made the two to be able to utterly destroy each other, then all that would matter is who goes first. Which would be yet anouther smack in the face to the carnifex, and really, lets give that guy a break. But to make the walkers more survivable against MC, but nothing else is difficult. I'll playtest several ideas with the guys tonight and let you know which ones work out best.

What the average point value of the walker versus the monstrous creature?

Hmm.. you have a point there. Most walkers cost 100-200 pts, excluding squadron things like kans. and the 200 is mostly for venerable stuff. Monsterous creatures always cost like 150-250 or maybe even 300. So maybe Walkers don't really require too much of a bonus.

Walkers do pretty well versus horde too, right, even with a power klaw or a rending weapon? Not so much the case with monstrous creatures, especially with poisonous weapons.

Well +S8 and melta weapons tend to wreck most walkers pretty well in CC but if those arent in there then walkers can tie up units quite well. AV13 is immune to normal MEQ attacks compared to the extremely rare T8

loota boy wrote:

thunderingjove wrote:What would you suggest to make that happen?

Darn, guess I sorta put my foot in my mouth there.. Well, lets see. We could either make the walkers get crazy bonuses against MC, or make them more survivable. I favor the 2nd option more, because if we just made the two to be able to utterly destroy each other, then all that would matter is who goes first. Which would be yet anouther smack in the face to the carnifex, and really, lets give that guy a break. But to make the walkers more survivable against MC, but nothing else is difficult. I'll playtest several ideas with the guys tonight and let you know which ones work out best.

Walkers are powerful enough. Kanz are absurdly undercosted and GK Dread spam is also pretty ludicrous.

And honestly, MC vs. Walker isn't as overbalanced as you might think, since yeah, the MC is almost always going to be penning with most of its attacks, but it still only rolls 1d6 unmodified for the effect, and a Walker, with a DCCW (or four) will be ignoring armour and wounding on a 2+ almost all the time.

I actually had an Apoc game, once, where a Carni-brood Apoc formation (let them do some sort of crazy acid spit thing) 9 strong munched through a Battlewagon. I had a 9 strong Dredd Mob, and some of them only had the 2 basic DCCWs. I got the assault, and I completely decimated them with sheer volume of wounds. If they'd gone first, they'd have munched me. Pretty even.


The big thing is that MCs and Walkers aren't 'even', not when facing each other, but when facing other things. MCs are murder against vehicles. Walkers are murder against Infantry. Why? Shouldn't the living, breathing beast of battle with fifteen legs and poisoned spines be more capable against a bunch of lightly armoured dudes with flashlights, and a walking behemoth of iron and steel, armed with adamant saws and hydraulic shears should be able to rip through even the toughest of armour with ease.

Part of the issue is GW's adamant refusal to allow anything to go above 10. Because, see, 2d6 armour pen for a living creature wouldn't seem so unfair to us Walkies if our DCCWs weren't just slightly faster Infantry weapons (lets face it, they're Powerfists that strike at init. Zagstruck can do the same thing as a Deffdredd. Why?), but were, like, Strength 12 Power weapons. Or just sheer doubled strength, and then the walker could have Str. 6 or something. And then Monstrous Creatures could have higher Toughnesses, while still keeping a definite striation in that certain MCs would be tougher than others.