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Mannahnin wrote:If they weren’t so ridiculously easy to kill by the time they get into range to use Soulless, I think they’d be a lot more useful. As it stands, really the only way to keep them alive long enough to be of use is to hide them behind LOS-blocking terrain, and to hope that appropriate terrain is located somewhere your opponent needs to go in order to complete the mission or to assault you.

That was my buddy's problem when he would take Carniefexes against Starcannon Eldar. Just concentrate on the stuff that is more dangerous, then when it is finally about to be in assault range, Starcannon, Starcannon, Starcannon, Starcannon, Starcannon, Starcannon. Oops, no more Carnifex.

That's why every carni you see in a tournament army is built to shoot.

A point on Spyders. They remain decent countercharge units. Well, by Necron standards. A Spyder charging into a CC where a Immortal or Warrior block was charged last turn is a decent threat to garden variety assault MEQs so long as you can keep the powerfist from squishing it. The weaknesses are of course no screening and problems vs. WS 5.

If pariahs filled a similar role, say A2-3 W2-3 independent and maybe screenable, they'd be pretty nice as a slightly different option to Spyders.

I've seen Pariahs used in the middle of a phalanx (sp?) as a counter-charge threat. It worked once, the next game someone dropped arty on them. Such is life...

I've seen a phalanx work once as well. It certainly taught the player's opponent something about leaving Blast weapons and Ordnance at home.

on paper pariah's are nasty, and if used right also in game play. ideally the enemy would pour none super lethal fire into them and ignore the rest of you crons giving you more time before phase out needs to be a worry as many people will continue to shoot them for fear until they die. the other case is the opponent tries to phase you out and they make it to opponent lines and start hacking away.

now for both of those instances to happen there are a lot of ifs ands and buts, so the end result might not pay off all the time. if i played crons i'd prolly go for a medium sized unit of pariahs

See, that's a big part of the issue: by taking Pariahs, you have already done part of your opponant's work of phasing you out. There also is not much "hacking away" they can do when they hit your lines. 5 Pariahs have 10 attacks on the charge. Wooooo. Considering how slowly they move, it doesn't take much to either redirect fire at them when they are a turn away from charging, or swinging a counter assault unit over to them to mitigate their ability to do charge. It isn't as though they are more durable than a marine on a bike, and they attack very slowly. Rough riders, assault marines (or any marine save powerfists), seraphim, and whatever Eldar use to butcher things (harlies etc.) all strike before Pariahs, and can handle them easily enough. Even orks strike simultaniously on the charge, and tau can just splatter them with Str5 weapons.
So we have a melee aspect that is inferior to pretty much every army's counter charge units. Great.

As to Soulless, almost every army's assault troops are Fearless. Even if they are not Fearless, they generally are able to put a lot of wounds on a Str5 3+sv unit, either with power fists, power weapons, or some other trick like rending. So getting them to lose combat in the first place is going to be tough, and Ld7 is not the hardest roll in the world to pass. It isn't as though a unit of Pariahs is going to be outnumbering much of anything.

In Pariah's defense, I wouldn't want them NEAR my loyalist termies, other than Death wingers, and even then I would be less than excited. Of course, with the speed of Pariahs, I could just walk away and shoot them dead.


In the end, it just seems pretty clear that Pariahs are not good enough at any of their functions to be worth taking for the points. Even in a vacuum they are a bit over costed, but compared to the good things they make you pass up, be it by competing for non-necron spots or elite slots, they definitely just don't get the job well done. That isn't to say they can't perform admirably, but just because something can work a small percentage of the time does not mean it is a strong choice or even an ok choice. When you find you have to tailor your army to make a single unit perform acceptably, it is time to seriously question whether that unit should even be in the army.

well said Wehrkind, I have to say I agree with you, they just aren't elite enough for my liking, I would rather hae Immortals or Flayed ones as elites, although I would be tempted, but only tempted mind you, to take them as a Lord command squad, if they counted as command squads did in the SM codex. I don't know why, but I just would

I love seeing non-necron models on the other side of the table from me when I am playing against necrons. The more the better. Non necron models essentially start the game dead if your opponent is going for phase out. I wish I had kept track of the number of necron armies I have phased out since the current Codex was printed. I'm not going to claim to have played against the best of the best necron players or anything but that's really my point that lots of non-necrons = bad necron army.

The only real exception to this in my opinion is the monlith because it lets you get so much more mileage out of guys with we'll be back rerolls (and because it is ridiculously hard to kill for some armies).

I agree with wehrkind, I3 on an elite assault unit is laughable.

Pariahs mostly give plasma guns a target they can actually kill. It's funny how Necrons have some of the most solid units around, and a bunch of others that really need work. They're a bit like DE in that regard.

Phase out needs to phased out of the next codex, IMO. It's a creative (I guess) but very strange way to balance an army.

If phase out is taken out the army needs to be weakened then because it'll just be ridiculous.

I expect that part of rebalancing and making it easier to play with and against next time will be making the army conform more to the regular rules. WBB will probably be replaced by Feel No Pain. Gauss Weapons will probably get 5th ed Rending instead of their current rules. The whole army will be repriced.

Mannahnin wrote:I expect that part of rebalancing and making it easier to play with and against next time will be making the army conform more to the regular rules. WBB will probably be replaced by Feel No Pain. Gauss Weapons will probably get 5th ed Rending instead of their current rules. The whole army will be repriced.

Pretty much what the current rumors are for their next codex.

Yeah because we need to make all the armies the same and get rid of any flavorful, unique special rules.

False dichotomy. You can make an interesting and unique army, and even give it interesting rules, while making it a darn sight clearer and easier to play with (and less prone to arguments) than the current Necrons.

WBB has a TON of problems and questions associated with it that could be fixed a couple of ways. 1) Change it to Feel No Pain, giving it a nice clear and simple mechanic which non-Necron players will have already seen in the main rulebook. 2) Spend several paragraphs CLEARLY explaining how WBB is supposed to work and how you track the status of dead models which “aren’t really there”. Either way can give you a satisfying and interesting play experience. One is less prone to creating new questions and doesn’t require as much explanation every time you bring your Necron army to a tournament or store and play against
someone new.

Not to mention that if you clean up and standardize those two army-wide special rules, you can then spend more ink and pages on OTHER rules and/or new units.

I posted a 3rd way of fixing We'll Be Back here

the problem with pariahs is simple: they don't actually do anything.

as a shooting unit they are purely inferior.

they are too slow to be an assault unit. they are also too weak to be an assault unit. this leaves them the counter assault role.

in 3rd edition this was actually a good role as they could shoot over the heads of the warriors screening them and actually get some advantage out of their guns. they added point for point the same firepower at range as warriors and made the block more resistant to CC.

but now if you screen them behind terrain you can't shoot. so they just sit behind your lines waiting to be kinda decent in CC. which is the second really big problem: after the charge they're not actually better than warriors by a significant margin because they die much more easily.

besides, and this is in my opinion the biggest issue with them, necron armies DON'T COUNTER CHARGE! if there's a unit in combat with our attackers after we teleport away we can't shoot them, this is bad. what we do instead is use scarabs to tie things up long before they get anywhere near us if we don't want to fight them. if it's a non-teleporting skimmer oriented army there's no place for a slow unit anyway.

in fact, pariahs are the worst CC option in the army. the deceiver beats them in utility, CC punch, mobility and resilience. scarabs and wraiths have the mobility to pick their targets, clearly win on resilience and are comparable in killyness. even flayed ones are better, having deep strike, infiltrate and the teleport option as ways to get into position while having superior combat ability.

and that's all ignoring the phase out question which imo is pretty minor. other non-necron units in the army like scarabs and monoliths are well worth it so i don't see that as necessarily crippling, but when you don't actually get anything for lowering your phase out it is a bit irksome. even if pariahs did have the necron rule it is questionable if the melee abilities would be worth the 8 points over immortals.

I used Pariahs for just about a year in my Necron army. I saw all the scorn heaped on them by other players and decided I was going to white knight for them and prove everyone wrong. I fielded a squad of six of them, and used a Destroyer Lord with Nightmare Shroud along with them.

Most of the time, the Pariahs ended up catching plasma fire in the first couple turns. Most of my opponents ran Tyranids or cult Chaos armies, so I didn't get a whole lot of mileage out of the Pariah-Lord one-two punch. When they got into combat, they would end up putting one or two wounds on a Hive Tyrant or a brick of old-school, two-wound Thousand Sons before getting crushed in return.

As soon as I swapped out Pariahs for Immortals, my list got much more competitive. Pariahs didn't do enough attacks in close combat to be good in assault. I didn't need the warscythes for tank busting, I had gauss weapons to take care of that. It's difficult to use their Ld7 bubble offensively because they're so slow. They were useful to me as a mobile firebase to support my Warriors... but Immortals do that better and cheaper.

I really want to like Pariahs but they didn't work out for me.

They could be used well against daemons in theory. being able to ignore Inv saves they caould be more effective than other units, like flayed ones in combat. But thats only a theory, I've not had chance to play a Daemons army yet.

Storm Lord wrote:They could be used well against daemons in theory. being able to ignore Inv saves they caould be more effective than other units, like flayed ones in combat. But thats only a theory, I've not had chance to play a Daemons army yet.

see, that's the thing, if you actually do the math you'll see that flayed ones are actually better against demons even before you take into account the fact that pariahs cost twice as much.

Ignoring a 5++ is not a huge deal. Do you get excited when you get to use power weapons against Guardsmen?

Erm, as a Necron player I don't get to use many power weapons so i don't really know. And I don't often do the maths behind things, I'm more of a trial and error sort of guy, see if it works and go from there.

But thats just me-I won't try if the common concensus is it isn't worth the effort against Daemons

Bottom line: it's only a 5++ (CSM lessers) or 4++ (Daemon dex). Better to make your opponent roll more saves than pay a premium to ignore the save.

Ok, I'll bear that in mind, I take it the phrase "The weight of the shot is worth more than the AP" comes into play here?

Other than that it seems a blank has been drawn on Pariahs being any good-lets hope a new codex resolves that.

There is no general rule. If Pariahs had their current stats at a small fraction of their cost, you bet they'd be a good anti-Daemon option. The problem is that GW has grossly overvalued those Warscythes, forgetting, it seems, their many horrid weaknesses.

Anyway, the best anti-Daemon measure is shooting, which is what Necrons do, so why muck about with Pariahs?

Thats a true comment on Warscythes, the one thing I don't get is why do Pariahs get better ones than the Lords? Theirs have built in Gauss Blasters afterall, you'd assume HQ choices should get the best option in that respect