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Going through the Army Lists, I can't help but see that people are really trying to front load psykers into their army and I can't help but feel that maybe it is overkill as everyone scrambles around to generate warp charges in order to defend against a psyker heavy army or front load psychic powers as everyone takes a gamble on which psychic powers they are going to get for that game. I understand Daemon spawn is on the horizon to upset the meta and shift the paradigm but is the answer to this really to saturate our armies with psykers everywhere to combat this? Is there anyone out there that thinks there are ways to beat psychic heavy armies without resorting to being a psychic heavy army yourself?

Now, I will fully admit that I am a GK player so generating enough warp charges isn't that much of a concern for me as other armies but I would like to think that the meta isn't fully shifting to needing a fraction of one's army devoted to psychic defense. That could be wishful thinking but in the games I have played in 7th, psychic powers aren't as reliable whether getting the ones you want and then getting those to fire off in the first place are new issues that we didn't have to contend with before so to me it seems like a knee jerk reaction to the summon daemons power.

There's no point in trying to stuff psykers into your list if it's only to bork your dispell rolls. Simply by virtue of you needing 6's to dispel while they need 4+ to cast, you will NEVER beat the offending player in an arms race to see who can throw down more dice. So I wouldn't even bother. Your only real hope against something like Daemon factory is to cripple their warp-charge generation ASAP with an alpha-strike, and then kill the rest of their stuff faster than they can respawn it.

I have been using minimal psychers at this point, one here or there to cast my own abilities but not really loading up on them, if people arent running daemon factory its not such a huge deal and i mostly just play friendly games anyways so im not real worried about someone fielding that(also we don't have any local daemon players)

 BlaxicanX wrote:
There's no point in trying to stuff psykers into your list if it's only to bork your dispell rolls. Simply by virtue of you needing 6's to dispel while they need 4+ to cast, you will NEVER beat the offending player in an arms race to see who can throw down more dice. So I wouldn't even bother. Your only real hope against something like Daemon factory is to cripple their warp-charge generation ASAP with an alpha-strike, and then kill the rest of their stuff faster than they can respawn it.

See this is my response to this fear of the daemon factory but it seems like a lot of people are trying to mimic Daemons and GKs ability to have lots of little Warp Charge generators by taking something like Inquisition allys with tiny henchman groups with one psyker in a psyback to generate "cheap" warp charge points. There has to be other ways to deal with the psychic phase and things like the Daemon factory without resorting to every list being saturated with cheap Inquisition psykers or people using things like Daemon allies. It's made me almost want to dust off the Vindicare, and use him to assassinate powerful psykers.

Inq w the 10 BS item vs psykers might be nice now too.

There's certainly an interesting facet to the arms race and psykers, namely that ignoring them might be the best option.

What I mean is that against lists bringing 20+ warp charges (pretty much only Demons, GK, Eldar and possibly Nids), whatever you bring, unless you match them psyker for psyker, is going to be a drop in the water, and the more they have, the more this becomes apparent. 3+d6 WC vs 1+d6 WC isn't too much of a difference and there's a good chance you'll be dispelling something. However, 20+d6 WC vs 1+d6 WC is next to unstoppable and really won't stop their mass casting. Similarly, they have the dispel dice to shut down your psychic phase completely.

Therefore, the 50-150 points you'd be spending on cramming a psyker or two into your list to try and fight them are probably better off spent on something to hurt the psykers directly instead. You won't win the battle in the psychic phase, so don't use it yourself. This allows you to bring more killy stuff, and also means that the 'points worth' of the mastery level that goes towards dispelling is also wasted. So you get better return on investment than a useless psyker, and are able to stop them getting as much benefit from theirs.

So unless you're bringing GK, Demons or Eldar, the best anti-psyker is just to KILL THE WITCH!

got to agree with Paradigm, my first game of 7th was a roaring success, and i had no psykers at all, just a lot of very fast orks vs typhus and a lvl 3 sorceror who turned into a GD. won just by killing them as utterly as possible. second game was a tie, chaos vs chaos and we both were spitting out daemons. the trick to getting the summoning power off is to have a really good power and not use it - my opponent was hoarding his dispel dice to stop me from getting iron arm on my daemon prince, and I summoned a unit of horrors and a herald, then used flickering fires, which he dispelled, somewhat disappointedly.

did find that helbrutes and maulerfiends are now excellent at dealing with greater daemons in epic clashes, just like you'd expect (I get the feeling dreadnaughts were kinda made to go toe to toe with greater daemons and hive tyrants, like pacific rim style).

but overall the best way to go is to treat it like it used to be, but with D6 dispel dice rather than one for each witchfire or malediction directed at you. ignore blessings and such unless you really want it to fail, then shoot 'em or charge 'em or whatever you need doing to kill 'em!

Lots of people are working with 20-30 (sometimes more, yes, more) Warp Charge in 2000pt games in my area now. GK, CSM, you name it. My normal 2k list consists of Ahriman, a Level 2, and 3 Thousand Sons units. That's 9 Warp Charge points, and trust me when I say it doesn't mean crap if someone has 20+d6 Warp Charge. My option (in the case of powers that I cannot use my psykers to DtW) is to hold all the dice for the nastiest power the person has.

Let's say next game I fight someone who has no psykers. He's working with whatever d6 roll in my Psychic Phase to try and stop some real nasty Triple Witchfire from Ahriman and/or whatever the hell else my TS units want to throw out. Now picture him complaining that Warp Charge should be limited, and that psykers are OP, even though I'm using the exact same list ported from 6th Edition, with a Level 4, a Level 2 and three Level 1's. A cap on warp charge would probably tick me off, because it will probably be 12.... and I would be mad because I made no changes to take advantage of the Psychic Phase in 7th edition- I just used my same lists, as mentioned above! Sure, high Warp Charge armies would be reeled in... but what about fluffy armies? While we're at it, what the heck is fluffy? Demons summoning demons to get more warp charge can be called fluffy.. So that's a problem lol.

They really goofed up on this Warp Charge business.. but I maintain that (some) players choose to do things that break the game with the rules, and because I fully believe that if it's in the rules you can do it, I'll keep playing friendly people and I won't be adding more psykers just to compete with someone who wants to play "look at how many dice I have". I definitely feel a little silly that I am apparently playing one of the most powerful psychic armies, but can get outclassed by a guard or Crimson Slaughter player spamming psykers and summoning more psykers that are demons.

It's not all bad.. As I have said many times on Dakka, picking and choosing your opponents is always an option that no one can take away from you. I understand the dangers of pick-up games, in that everyone has their own idea of how the game should be played.. A lot of issues can be resolved by just talking with your opponents. I've found that even people who might be called a TFG will gladly modify a list in order to get a game in and make sure that both sides have fun. They usually declare their full intention of winning at all costs, and if you want to avoid a demon list, it's all good

 Brometheus wrote:
Lots of people are working with 20-30 (sometimes more, yes, more) Warp Charge in 2000pt games in my area now. GK, CSM, you name it. My normal 2k list consists of Ahriman, a Level 2, and 3 Thousand Sons units. That's 9 Warp Charge points, and trust me when I say it doesn't mean crap if someone has 20+d6 Warp Charge. My option (in the case of powers that I cannot use my psykers to DtW) is to hold all the dice for the nastiest power the person has.

Let's say next game I fight someone who has no psykers. He's working with whatever d6 roll in my Psychic Phase to try and stop some real nasty Triple Witchfire from Ahriman and/or whatever the hell else my TS units want to throw out. Now picture him complaining that Warp Charge should be limited, and that psykers are OP, even though I'm using the exact same list ported from 6th Edition, with a Level 4, a Level 2 and three Level 1's. A cap on warp charge would probably tick me off, because it will probably be 12.... and I would be mad because I made no changes to take advantage of the Psychic Phase in 7th edition- I just used my same lists, as mentioned above! Sure, high Warp Charge armies would be reeled in... but what about fluffy armies? While we're at it, what the heck is fluffy? Demons summoning demons to get more warp charge can be called fluffy.. So that's a problem lol.

They really goofed up on this Warp Charge business.. but I maintain that (some) players choose to do things that break the game with the rules, and because I fully believe that if it's in the rules you can do it, I'll keep playing friendly people and I won't be adding more psykers just to compete with someone who wants to play "look at how many dice I have". I definitely feel a little silly that I am apparently playing one of the most powerful psychic armies, but can get outclassed by a guard or Crimson Slaughter player spamming psykers and summoning more psykers that are demons.

It's not all bad.. As I have said many times on Dakka, picking and choosing your opponents is always an option that no one can take away from you. I understand the dangers of pick-up games, in that everyone has their own idea of how the game should be played.. A lot of issues can be resolved by just talking with your opponents. I've found that even people who might be called a TFG will gladly modify a list in order to get a game in and make sure that both sides have fun. They usually declare their full intention of winning at all costs, and if you want to avoid a demon list, it's all good

This is sort of what happened to me with my GK and haven't modified my army in response to 7th. I generate around 9-11 Warp Charges depending on the set up I work with but that is all I need to do what I want with my army and still be effective. The only change I was thinking of making was exchanging out my Inquisitor for a GK Libby so I could get three rolls on the Telepathy chart but I haven't done anything to try and cram in even more warp charges into a list. I also don't see that the Psychic Phase as this big intimidating thing. How did your game go with the person with way more warp charges? You found ways to deal with it, just like we find ways to deal with the other armies that have advantage like the long range of Tau or Imperial Guard. I do think though that high level psykers are now going to have a target on their heads just as much as the Riptides and Wraithknights were priority targets.

The real reason for dispel dice is not summoning factories for the most part but for invisibility. A single casting per turn can easily turn the outcome of a game and has a reasonable chance of being denied without having to buy too many psykers.

I have seen the devastation that Invisibility can wreck on an army because I had it on Mordrak and his Ghost Knights. It made that Alpha Strike even more deadly because it protected him the first turn where they couldn't assault and then they just went to town. One way for you to get in trouble with Invisibility is that I did Perils with it a good amount though.

I have some information from a game I just played with Tau 5hrs ago, and it may be important for some people here interested in how the Psychic Phase is working out.

I had Ahriman, Fateweaver, 4 Aspiring Sorcerers and a unit of Horrors as psykers (among other things, but I wont mention those much). Both armies were battle-forged, but my opponent insisted we play with the new rules even though he hadn't reviewed them yet or even purchased the rulebook. I am not the sort of person to take advantage of someone else, and I used my same 2500pt list from 6th.

The game was Capture/Control with 3 objectives. I rolled a 6 for Master of Deception and put 3 Rhinos of TSons as close as possible to his gun line, while another was deployed out of LoS in my own deployment because Ahriman had Gate of Infinity.

I seized the initiative and took 1st turn, and he got pretty butt-hurt after the psychic phase. Ahriman wiped all the pathfinders and vespids off the board after using Gate of Infinity to appear behind the Tau line. The burning chariot erased a unit of Firewarriors. It was looking pretty good. His turn 1 was pathetic, a unit of Firewarriors disembarked, shot, the Riptides moved away from Ahriman, shot.. Did nothing because of good armor/invuls

My next turn, the Combi-Plasma terminators arrived and Ahriman moved to join them in the Movement Phase. He put Endurance on the terminators and used Psychic Shriek three times to kill a Riptide. In the shooting phase, the terminators shot at a 2nd Riptide nearby but only did 2 wounds with Combi-Plasma.. Next turn Ahriman put up Endurance and Force. His terminators went to a unit of Firewarriors in a crater and Ahriman detached to go Riptide hunting. A Rhino with a Dirge Caster was nearby, preventing the Riptide and Longstrike from overwatching onto Ahriman. The Riptide failed a 2+ armor and died because of Force.

I threw everything I could at this guy on the objective, but the way it worked out, he had 2 Objectives, Linebreaker and First Blood. Farsight hid behind a wall near an objective for most of the game (I couldn't get to him), the 9 Screamers were in combat with a Suit commander and a SINGLE bodyguard (that's how he scored the 2nd objective), and I had Ahriman sitting on a roof in his deployment zone, with all Tau forces but 3 models eliminated. That commander with 2+ save and Feel No Pain was a hard nut to crack in combat with the screamers, and I was alternating between Warp Jaws and basic melee attacks... Awful dice rolling to hit, on my part.

The Tau player only stopped a single power, and its when he magically rolled 4 6's to stop Endurance for a turn. I got every single power off except the few times I only threw single dice at Psychic Shriek.

I love the new psychic phase, even though I lost that game. I may not have won, but I had lots of miniatures left because of the powers. I'm okay with that.

My point is that this guy was SUPER butthurt at the end of turn 3. It was looking just awful for him, I'm serious. Once his suits arrived and he started playing aggressively to take advantage of my Slow and Purposeful on 4 units, he started to turn it around because he wasn't just hiding in the corner (bad news when you play vs. my army). I was outplayed, and even though I had 15+ Mastery Level dice to his 0 Mastery Levels, he was able to pull a victory.. He did not complain about that once he started winning. Psychic Phase is fine, as long as people don't abuse it.

To me, Psychic powers are like any advantage in the game, some armies have them and others don't and psychic heavy armies are going to use those powers in order to make up for what they don't have in their armies.

Here you used your psychic powers to get around the Tau tactics of having longer range and to get around the multiple wound monstrous creatures that have been dominating competitive play. The Tau player obviously still had some advantages to pull the win out so he can't complain that much now the the psychic phase gave you a bigger edge than it did before making other styles of play available to Chaos players (Which is a pretty big deal seeing as I was getting tired of seeing Nurgle dominate the table top scene. This almost makes me want to make the Thousand Sons army I have always dreamed of that I put aside to be Grey Knights because that was the best psyker army...which it still might be).

I would of done the same to get rid of his Riptides. I would have Mordrak and his Ghost Knights arrive via Deep Strike, have another psyker with them that can cast either Shroud or Invisibility to go Riptide hunting in his back field. That is my advantage vs. his long range.

The fact that Ahriman is back to being a the death dealing Sorcerer that he should be is what makes me happy about this the most.

Envihon, I am having the most fun I've ever had with this army. It's just awesome.

 Brometheus wrote:
Envihon, I am having the most fun I've ever had with this army. It's just awesome.

Man, I wish I didn't take a vow to stop spending money on models and focus on what I have, otherwise, I would be buying a CSM and Daemons Codex and wrecking havoc with Tzeentch as my co-pilot. When I got into this hobby, I knew I wanted to have psykers as a large part of my army. I have always been more partial to the Imperium but I have had a soft spot for the Thousand Sons for quite awhile especially after reading their HH book. I wanted an army of them but after someone told me that Ahriman and the Thousand Sons weren't what they used to be, I decided not to going for the new GK codex when it dropped in 5th to have an army of Psykers. Even my detachments are lead by Psykers (Farseer for the Eldar and a Librarian for the Imperial Fists) so when this new edition came I was quite excited for it. I don't like that people basically think it is the new competitive thing to do because it kind of dampens what it means to have Psykers in an army. But now that Ahriman got an upgrade, it is tempting to run a Tzeentch themed army especially with the talk of the new supplements coming being books dedicated to each Chaos god.

Given that you need 5 or 6 dice to reliably cast a WC 2 spell, perils becomes such a real threat that it alone balances out some of the bigger powers.

Lobukia, youre absolutely right. I find myself throwing 3 at Psychic Shriek, even though it's only Warp Charge 1. I run out of power dice real fast, and if I have something excellent like Endurance or Invisibility, you're damn right I'll throw 5-6 at it.

At 2000pts and above, I *always* use Fateweaver now. That re-roll is crucial to ensuring that Ahriman gets a good power off, or not rolling a "1" on the Perils chart. Of course, that doesn't make my psykers invincible!

 Lobukia wrote:
Given that you need 5 or 6 dice to reliably cast a WC 2 spell, perils becomes such a real threat that it alone balances out some of the bigger powers.

See, I think this makes the Psychic Phase more fun and tactical than manifesting the way they were in 6th. I could almost always depend on my psychic powers going off in 6th that I didn't pay much mind which ones I used, I just did but now with the warp charge pool and needing to roll more than the cost makes it more exciting. How many dice do you invest in that power to ensure it's success with weighing the possibility of trying to avoid Perils? How important is it for that particular power to go off? All things that make it better than casting in 6th.