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Fear: The one that sounded really cool until people read the whole paragraph, their hearts sinking with every line. Having CC hits agaisnt you dropped to only 1/3rd on average is a neat bonus, but it will will trigger only around 25% of the time on average, what with sargeants and a generally rather high Leadership across most armies. Oh, wait! That would be the case if we left out ATSKNF, Orkish Mob Rule, Tyranid synapse range and more. Meaning you'll be lucky if it happens one every ten games, against a weakling squad that was never a CC threat anyway.

Acute Senses: A very situational ability, and conspicuously absent on many, many units that could use it.

Hammer of wrath: Sounds fun, but it's just not much of a factor. Playing against savvy opponents, you will rarely get that many of your models in direct base contact. 3-5 extra hits at S4 are not going to make much difference unless you are pouncing gretchin, Guard or Gaunts.

It will Not Die: Full disclosure: I have never seen this one in action. It sounds very underwhelming, however. A 5+ rol lto recover a hull point or wound is very unreliable. In the case of vehicles, odds are that most dangerous enough to be ficused by the enemy will explode from AP1-2 weaponry before this can ever come into play. and the fact that it only happens at the END of each friendly turn limits it a lot; you can't even get a bit of healing before your turn to hurl your killy thing at the enemy more confidently!

Soul Blaze: This one is almost funny. D3 bolter-grade hits, and you need to cause an unsaved wound first, making it quite useless against terminators or high-Toughness beasts. It doesn't stack with itself, meaning it makes no difference if you cause one or twelve wounds with weapons bearing this rule. The 'Ignores Cover' on an AP 5 weapon borders on comedy. If it was also pinning assuming one of the D3 hits actually wounds, it would still be bad. As it is, I'd rather skip on rolling it altogether to get the game going faster.

That's a silly question to ask because the value of a special rule depends on how many points you pay for it. If GW misprices Fear and you pay 100 points for it on a 150 point character it's terrible. If it costs you 5 points for a 25% shot at cutting a huge amount of incoming damage AND increasing the damage you do back it's an awesome special rule.

Chaos space marines and chaos demon battle brothers, since there is very little they are allowed to do as battle brothers.

Phaeron.

Made completely useless in 6th.

I cant stand any fearless rule to be honest. Too many models have it, or can have it, to even make morale checks having a point in the game.

Then again, i play against space marines and chaos, so im used to everything being fearless basically. (I do play orks, but i dont have squads over 10, coz bikers)

Edit: Also agreed so much on hammer of wrath. I thought it'd be awesome to ram my bikes into close combat and get an extra kill or two. Nope...

GK Brotherhood Champions can be given Digital Weapons, which allow a single re-roll of the to-wound dice in combat, for 5-10pts. This doesn't sound that bad when you realise that the Anointed Blade the Champion comes with as standard allows you to do the exact same effect, but with *all* failed wound rolls. Honestly, what was the guy thinking when he included that option?

Suprise Assault for Warp Spiders. It allows them to deep strike, and they're jump infantry. They can always deep strike.

 Sigvatr wrote:
Phaeron.

Made completely useless in 6th.

Truth spoken. /thread

Can't you also add pinning to the list? Most units are either immune to it, or have no way of failing it. I used to desperately want to get a pinning weapon on my DE army(mandrakes, lulz), because I thought it'd really help, but then I read, and went "You know what? I don't think anyone will have trouble failing that.", it's 1 of those, if it's there, use it, but don't spend extra point to get it, and least of all, not extra slot like I was going to!

I'm not sure about HoW being useless, it's disappointing, may be, but useless? I wouldn't think so. You're still getting a couple of extra hits in for "free", so what if they're S:user AP-? You still got a few extra auto-hits on top of the attacks you're gonna do next! For slow armies, at least now you have a chance in attempting to reduce the number of attacks you take. For fast armies, well, more attacks before you strike! What would you rather it have been?

@Marzillius

I assume the "surprise" part of that "assault" is that you can't?

 Marzillius wrote:
Suprise Assault for Warp Spiders. It allows them to deep strike, and they're jump infantry. They can always deep strike.

Deep Strike has only been a standard feature of JI since 5th. The Eldar dex was made for 4th ed. Surprise Assault was useful at the time it was introduced. Yes, it's useless now, but still.

Intercept. The Exarch Power.

It allows you to hit all vehicles without a WS on a 4+ at worst in an assault, but you hit them all on a 3+ at worst anyway. And you have to pay for it. Something else that's invalid due to 6th.

Admittedly it's a Swooping Hawks special power so you aren't going to see it a whole lot, but it's bad even on a Swooping Hawk scale.

Apart from some things that are literally broken now (like targetting arrays, and the above intercept, etc.), I think the least useful general rule is pinning.

To do anything with pinning, you've got to hit, you've got to wound, and your opponent has to fail at least one armor/cover/invul save.

And then he has to fail a leadership test, which practically never happens, and literally never happens against fearless units.

And, on that low chance that it will work, what do you get? Your opponent is only temporarily slowed a bit, but they can still shoot their guns, and you've still given them +1 to their cover save, because now they've gone to ground.

So terrible.

 Rampage wrote:
Intercept. The Exarch Power.

It allows you to hit all vehicles without a WS on a 4+ at worst in an assault, but you hit them all on a 3+ at worst anyway. And you have to pay for it. Something else that's invalid due to 6th.

Admittedly it's a Swooping Hawks special power so you aren't going to see it a whole lot, but it's bad even on a Swooping Hawk scale.

In the FAQs, it is now all vehicles are counted as WS0 as opposed to WS1 if they moved.

Dragonzord wrote:
I cant stand any fearless rule to be honest. Too many models have it, or can have it, to even make morale checks having a point in the game.

Then again, i play against space marines and chaos, so im used to everything being fearless basically. (I do play orks, but i dont have squads over 10, coz bikers)

Edit: Also agreed so much on hammer of wrath. I thought it'd be awesome to ram my bikes into close combat and get an extra kill or two. Nope...

It's basically the same exact rule as you find in Fantasy. Just as many units in Fantasy are immune to it as well, so don't worry.

 PhrycePhyre wrote:

 Rampage wrote:
Intercept. The Exarch Power.

It allows you to hit all vehicles without a WS on a 4+ at worst in an assault, but you hit them all on a 3+ at worst anyway. And you have to pay for it. Something else that's invalid due to 6th.

Admittedly it's a Swooping Hawks special power so you aren't going to see it a whole lot, but it's bad even on a Swooping Hawk scale.

In the FAQs, it is now all vehicles are counted as WS0 as opposed to WS1 if they moved.

Ah does it. I must have missed that one. Thanks for the heads up.

 Sephyr wrote:
Hammer of wrath: Sounds fun, but it's just not much of a factor. Playing against savvy opponents, you will rarely get that many of your models in direct base contact. 3-5 extra hits at S4 are not going to make much difference unless you are pouncing gretchin, Guard or Gaunts.

I don't see how giving you free extra attacks is useless. Like, at all. I've had a Carnifex kill a tank with its HoW hit before it got to actually swing its talons.

I diagree with "It will not die"
I have had it use, a librarian periled to get that power, then got a wound back from that power.

When you realize that the new Chaos big gribblies have both Daemon and It will not die, you come up with an AV12 walker with two 5+ invulnerables (unless it just blows up from missing the daemon 5+ on something major).