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Wrong - Custodes have their own transports. You might want to read Master of Mankind, it is available from Black Library.

If you're bringing Black Library into this, the last book with GK and Custodes had a passage talking of how much better GK were than Custodes.

At this point GW fethed GK so hard you don't know and obviously don't care.

It does not matter which is better just that they are very different.

This is the guy that said the Marine codex was fine, ladies and gentlemen.

What does that have to do with this topic?

If you look at many of the avatars of people posting salty replies you will notice they probably play GK.

 Primark G wrote:
What does that have to do with this topic?

If you look at many of the avatars of people posting salty replies you will notice they probably play GK.

Grey Knights have gradually gone from competitive, to viable, to bad, to bottom of the berral.

I can see why grey knight players are mad. GW has had 3 editions to get it right, and it feels like they’re still being punished for Matt Ward. Please explain why being a Grey Knights player makes someone less qualified to talk about their problems, or why its odd that a grey Knights thread has a lot of grey knight players in it.

IIRC Custodes have been around longer than either Grey Knights or Deathwatch, and while some sources have contradicted each other (welcome to 40k) Custodes have always been held up as superior individual warriors to Astartes, but lacking the cohesiveness to be as effective on a Chapter or Legion sized scale.

Deathwatch are just veterans drawn together from different Chapters given special training and equipment to tackle a specific Xenos target. They aren’t ‘better’ than other Astartes’ First Companies, they’re just more specialised.

Going back to memories of them in 3rd/4th Ed, I don’t think Grey Knights are actually ‘better’ Space Marines either? They weren’t made by the Emperor but by Malcador on the Emperor’s instruction ‘give me something to counter the daemonic menace’. They used the Emperor’s gene-seed because it was pure and uncorruoptible, but I don’t think there was ever an indication that it gave them more physical prowess. They are certainly rarer than other Astartes because they are effectively all Librarians, but they aren’t said to come from physically superior stock. They have all their psyker and daemon-resisting training, but they also lack training in things like seige warfare and infiltration. They do get superior equipment - partially because of their ties to the Inquisition and a dedicated sheltered Forge World, and partially because their particular specialisation requires such ratified and difficult to produce wargear.

Ultimately I don’t think the lore has ever really supported them being ‘better’ Astartes, but rather another branch of more specialised Astartes with expensive equipment and psyker powers. If you stuck a bunch of Grey Knights and Dark Angels in a room with no armour or equipment but a bunch of swords and said ‘no psychics, now kill each other’ I don’t know of any reason why the Grey Knights would be notably more likely to win. I think people just took their more expensive equipment and specialised rules in-game and changed their head-canon to ‘oh ok, they must be more elite than normal Astartes’. The ‘Ward-ian’ era took this idea and ran away with it, but that’s a much more recent development and I think even that stopped short of saying they’re physically superior.

Primaris though are literally just Astartes+1. As I’ve said before, there’s a reason for all the angst about them.

Now that Custodes - who genuinely are and have always been a completely separate and superior breed to Astartes - have been given rules, it’s understandable that GK fans are a bit cut by having their thunder as the ‘elite’ stolen, similarly to how Marines players were cut by Primaris relegating Marines to ‘second-best’. It really adds salt to the wound that GK got a godawful Codex in the same edition as getting trumped by the ‘true elite’ of the Imperium.

Also, unless GW does something abhorrent like Primaris Custodes, I think this genuinely ends the ‘elite of the elite’ arms race. Custodes have always been held up as top dog - now that they have rules, the only thing that could trump them would be Primarchs, but they’re individually named personalities, not an army.

 Primark G wrote:
If you look at many of the avatars of people posting salty replies you will notice they probably play GK.

Hiya. I mostly play IG. In addition to playing IG, I also have DA, Tyranid, Tau, and GK armies. Tau is probably the smallest, at give or take 1750, but probably only 1250-1500 (and probably less still) worth taking. I'm invested in 40k.

I play GK. I play a lot of things though. I've also been one of the more vocal people to argue against IG nerfs. Having that been said, they're making the argument because they know their own armies, and they're not wrong. GK players are unhappy with the GK codex because it is a bad codex. No one else cares that much, because they don't have to live with it. I'm a pretty practical person in that I've been doing this for enough editions that I just groan and grab the army that isn't terrible this edition and run with that for a while. I can entirely understand why someone would be unhappy about it though. Yeah, everyone unhappy about it has skin in the game. I have some skin in the game, though probably less all things considered. Why are you here?

8th edition GK basicly doubled down on the mistakes of 7th, without offering any improvements and even nerfing what they did get in 7th

The reason people compare greyknights and custodes is that they are both elite, low model count armies.

Greyknight players should be upset, but not because of custodes. Thousand Sons are what the greyknights should have been. GW could have fixed many of the codex's problems by making on the sergeants psykers and lowering the base model price for the rest of the squad. They also should have put ordo malleus inquisitors and their retinues back into the codex to give greyknights cheap scoring troops and some more options.

Now Greyknights can't be fixed without ending up too similiar to Thousand Sons or Custodes.

If the GK codex is bad to me that’s not a good reason to hate on Custodes. Maybe GW intentionally nerfed GK so more players feel inclined to play Custodes now but that is purely speculation. The codex has just dropped and there is no empirical data yet to say Custodes are competitive. Combat wombat has given a good account on the background for both. You can’t make a good argument from a background perspective that GK are overall superior to Custodes either.

 Primark G wrote:
If the GK codex is bad to me that’s not a good reason to hate on Custodes. Maybe GW intentionally nerfed GK so more players feel inclined to play Custodes now but that is purely speculation. The codex has just dropped and there is no empirical data yet to say Custodes are competitive. Combat wombat has given a good account on the background for both. You can’t make a good argument from a background perspective that GK are overall superior to Custodes either.

ultimately, and I say this as a GK AND custodes player, Grey Knights where always the "elite terminator army" army. custodes now eclipses that.

It's also worth noting that Custodes have things GK players wanted. before the 8th ed codex hit, GK players where wish listing jet bikes

orkychaos wrote:
GW could have fixed many of the codex's problems by making on the sergeants psykers and lowering the base model price for the rest of the squad.

Every GK is psyker, rubrics are automatons. Background is in fluff here. You can get those troops by putting them different detachments.

Difference of GK and Custodes are that GK are elite psychic marines, Custodes are mini primarchs without psychic (what I know). GK are pretty similar than their chaos counterpart TS, but there is big difference because chaos. It is like saying Iron Warriors are like Imperial Fist, chaos bring differencies.

GK needs improvements but they should be GK.

I have a feeling the fix for Grey Knights is releasing an Inquisition Codex, something with rules that give great synergy between the two. Similar to how the old Daemonhunters Codex was.

In terms of the difference... it's hard to understand, outside the fluff. I know Custodes are tougher right now, but I really don't see much of a difference.

"why do people keep comparing the custodes codex to grey knights?!"

Because it's another imperium elite army made of terminators. GW could have named them Golden Knights.

Exactly there isn't a difference, the only real difference is that Custodes are better in pretty much every way.

Take a single unit of Alarus (Allarus?) Terminators, then use the stratagem that lets them separate into smaller units. You got a very threatening force that has pretty cost efficient shooting at anything that isn't a GEQ or worse. EVEN THEN they are only marginally worse, because BS2+. Support with Jetbikes with Hurricane bolters if you are that worried, don't forget to take the Jetbike HQ unit for rerolls of 1 to hit! These guys also double as anti-air as well, because they have the fly keyword and with that 14 inch movement they will be hitting what they want on T2. Effectively the Custodes have the old Grey Knight Shunt-Punch now. The Dreadknight was replaced with a Jetbike however.

The biggest downside? They have more wounds concentrated on less models, so they bite the dust with D6(4+) damage weapons, ONLY D6(4+) however, because point for point, they are still more survivable against plasma than even GK paladins because for some reason GK pallies are still more expensive.

There is no niche left, psychic is done better by 1000sons, Boots on the ground CQC is done better by Custodes, Shooting is done better by literally ANY other Imperium faction bar Custodes.

But every unit is still paying premium prices to do something in a mediocre fashion.

I feel like the real salt should be in comparison to Thousand Sons who did everything the Grey Knights should have done, far better.

While Custodes basically out elite the Grey Knights, I feel this is because the Grey Knights have a kind of identity crisis going on.

Grey Knights want to be a melee army, while also being an army that can do a fair amount of shooting (albeit at rapid fire ranges), while also wanting to be a strong psychic army, while also wanting to be a specialist MEQ army.

Basically when you throw ALL of that into a single army there are going to be some problems. Custodes took a different approach by focusing on melee, supplementing it with shooting and ignoring the psychic aspect and the whole "be a Space Marine" thing. This is why they do the elite thing better: their concept focus is stronger making it easier to make the army perform properly as an elite army.

For Grey Knights the MEQ aspect will always pull them down a bit if only because it means that they can't feel more elite than regular Marines due to sharing the same statline, and when trying to make them both solid combatants and ranged fighters at the same time, it gives them the same problem Vanilla marines often have: they're too generalist which means they can't really excel at either as much as we feel they should.

And the psyker thing is done far better (for now) by Thousand Sons, though this is in part to having three psychic disciplines to choose from and the game being more developed by the time their development started.

Basically to make Grey Knights work as an army we need to drop this whole "elite" thing and instead just focus on them being specialists. This means lower points costs and higher body counts Splitting the shooting and melee focuses could also allow units to feel more focused and better designed for their respective jobs instead of trying to push two jobs with no benefits for either.

And lastly while I'd love to see Daemonhunters in the same book, with the ability to throw Imperium units into another detachment it's not like the Grey Knights can't go soup to pull quasi Thousand Sons (less massed psychic powers, but they can bring the better guns this way) via Inquisitors (Quarry rule) and/or Guard (I'm actually considering eventually adding some Grey Knights to my Deimos themed Ad Mech army if the Psyker Spam gets too silly. Well that or some Inquistors and their Assassin friends and/or some Sisters of Silence)

Also, I'd expect anything that the internet says is the only competetive thing in an army to probably get nerfed. From what I've seen over the last couple editions (this one included), just about every "competetive" option is the one that's near, if not actually, broken. So yeah, some things are probably going to see a nerfing at some point with some weaker stuff potentially brought up a bit (likely through points drops).

 ClockworkZion wrote:

Basically to make Grey Knights work as an army we need to drop this whole "elite" thing and instead just focus on them being specialists. This means lower points costs and higher body counts Splitting the shooting and melee focuses could also allow units to feel more focused and better designed for their respective jobs instead of trying to push two jobs with no benefits for either.

This. I totally agree. The beauty is that we already have the units, but we do not feel the difference in the rules: we have Strike Squads, which are the generalist squad (just lile Marines), which could be oriented to be more CC-specialized. We have the Interceptor Squads, which should have <FLY> and be our assault unit, and we have Purgation Squads, which should have more punchy weapons.

A solution would be to retcon the grey knights to be custodes. After all, the custodes have been fighting daemons spilling out of the subway on terra. Why not have the grey knights be the more active custodes running around the galaxy all mysterious.

Just a thought.

Vaercathor wrote:
A solution would be to retcon the grey knights to be custodes. After all, the custodes have been fighting daemons spilling out of the subway on terra. Why not have the grey knights be the more active custodes running around the galaxy all mysterious.

Just a thought.

They actually haven't been fighting daemons all that time as the webway was sealed after 5 years of fighting daemons and traitors in the webway.

Vaercathor wrote:
A solution would be to retcon the grey knights to be custodes. After all, the custodes have been fighting daemons spilling out of the subway on terra. Why not have the grey knights be the more active custodes running around the galaxy all mysterious.

Just a thought.

A better solution would be to write the Grey Knights' rules intelligently instead of writing them like idiots.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Vaercathor wrote:
A solution would be to retcon the grey knights to be custodes. After all, the custodes have been fighting daemons spilling out of the subway on terra. Why not have the grey knights be the more active custodes running around the galaxy all mysterious.

Just a thought.

A better solution would be to write the Grey Knights' rules intelligently instead of writing them like idiots.

Or at least having rules and point values in coherency, between regular SM and Custodes.

GW has this problem where the main focus of points balance is internal to a codex and less consideration is given externally.

While this can push some units to be less commonly seen (due to points enforced rarity) in an army, it really doesn't balance the game properly. Hopefully the fact that their paying attention to tournaments (noting stuff like Commander Spam for T'au) will drag points values more in line with each other over the whole range of the codexes instead of the focus being so heavily internally focused.

 ClockworkZion wrote:
GW has this problem where the main focus of points balance is internal to a codex and less consideration is given externally.

While this can push some units to be less commonly seen (due to points enforced rarity) in an army, it really doesn't balance the game properly. Hopefully the fact that their paying attention to tournaments (noting stuff like Commander Spam for T'au) will drag points values more in line with each other over the whole range of the codexes instead of the focus being so heavily internally focused.

It's not just points, the addition of allies has become a bit of an excuse to limit internal options as well.

 Quickjager wrote:
Exactly there isn't a difference, the only real difference is that Custodes are better in pretty much every way.

Take a single unit of Alarus (Allarus?) Terminators, then use the stratagem that lets them separate into smaller units. You got a very threatening force that has pretty cost efficient shooting at anything that isn't a GEQ or worse. EVEN THEN they are only marginally worse, because BS2+. Support with Jetbikes with Hurricane bolters if you are that worried, don't forget to take the Jetbike HQ unit for rerolls of 1 to hit! These guys also double as anti-air as well, because they have the fly keyword and with that 14 inch movement they will be hitting what they want on T2. Effectively the Custodes have the old Grey Knight Shunt-Punch now. The Dreadknight was replaced with a Jetbike however.

The biggest downside? They have more wounds concentrated on less models, so they bite the dust with D6(4+) damage weapons, ONLY D6(4+) however, because point for point, they are still more survivable against plasma than even GK paladins because for some reason GK pallies are still more expensive.

There is no niche left, psychic is done better by 1000sons, Boots on the ground CQC is done better by Custodes, Shooting is done better by literally ANY other Imperium faction bar Custodes.

But every unit is still paying premium prices to do something in a mediocre fashion.

Terminators with bikes are more like Dark Angels than Grey Knight. TS psychic should be better than others (except maybe Eldars).

 Draco wrote:

 Quickjager wrote:
Exactly there isn't a difference, the only real difference is that Custodes are better in pretty much every way.

Take a single unit of Alarus (Allarus?) Terminators, then use the stratagem that lets them separate into smaller units. You got a very threatening force that has pretty cost efficient shooting at anything that isn't a GEQ or worse. EVEN THEN they are only marginally worse, because BS2+. Support with Jetbikes with Hurricane bolters if you are that worried, don't forget to take the Jetbike HQ unit for rerolls of 1 to hit! These guys also double as anti-air as well, because they have the fly keyword and with that 14 inch movement they will be hitting what they want on T2. Effectively the Custodes have the old Grey Knight Shunt-Punch now. The Dreadknight was replaced with a Jetbike however.

The biggest downside? They have more wounds concentrated on less models, so they bite the dust with D6(4+) damage weapons, ONLY D6(4+) however, because point for point, they are still more survivable against plasma than even GK paladins because for some reason GK pallies are still more expensive.

There is no niche left, psychic is done better by 1000sons, Boots on the ground CQC is done better by Custodes, Shooting is done better by literally ANY other Imperium faction bar Custodes.

But every unit is still paying premium prices to do something in a mediocre fashion.

Terminators with bikes are more like Dark Angels than Grey Knight. TS psychic should be better than others (except maybe Eldars).

What are you even arguing?

 Quickjager wrote:

 Draco wrote:

 Quickjager wrote:
Exactly there isn't a difference, the only real difference is that Custodes are better in pretty much every way.

Take a single unit of Alarus (Allarus?) Terminators, then use the stratagem that lets them separate into smaller units. You got a very threatening force that has pretty cost efficient shooting at anything that isn't a GEQ or worse. EVEN THEN they are only marginally worse, because BS2+. Support with Jetbikes with Hurricane bolters if you are that worried, don't forget to take the Jetbike HQ unit for rerolls of 1 to hit! These guys also double as anti-air as well, because they have the fly keyword and with that 14 inch movement they will be hitting what they want on T2. Effectively the Custodes have the old Grey Knight Shunt-Punch now. The Dreadknight was replaced with a Jetbike however.

The biggest downside? They have more wounds concentrated on less models, so they bite the dust with D6(4+) damage weapons, ONLY D6(4+) however, because point for point, they are still more survivable against plasma than even GK paladins because for some reason GK pallies are still more expensive.

There is no niche left, psychic is done better by 1000sons, Boots on the ground CQC is done better by Custodes, Shooting is done better by literally ANY other Imperium faction bar Custodes.

But every unit is still paying premium prices to do something in a mediocre fashion.

Terminators with bikes are more like Dark Angels than Grey Knight. TS psychic should be better than others (except maybe Eldars).

What are you even arguing?

To me Custodians are closer to DA than GK. They are not like GK. They can be better than GK in same battlefield roles, but they are not psychic. Maybe you could use same tactics for GK and Custodians and maybe Custodians will win. IMO GK is still unique but power level of codex is not good in this edition.

GK has their problems but that is not Custodians or TS fault. We could compare GK to DA or Vanilla as Custodians (GK will lose to them too and there is similarities with GK). Point adjustments would be welcome to balance codex (balancing different GK units and balancing codex with others codexes).

Alright look, people need to get over this concept GK players are mad at Custodes or hilariously Thousand Sons. It is a joke to even imagine a GK player mad at someone else for playing a different faction. You do you, now who we actually are mad at is GW. But hey we're almost always mad at GW so nothing new there. Alright? At no point is anyone mad we got "forced" out of our niche. That niche was already forced out with Imperial Knights existing.

 Quickjager wrote:
Alright look, people need to get over this concept GK players are mad at Custodes or hilariously Thousand Sons. It is a joke to even imagine a GK player mad at someone else for playing a different faction. You do you, now who we actually are mad at is GW. But hey we're almost always mad at GW so nothing new there. Alright? At no point is anyone mad we got "forced" out of our niche. That niche was already forced out with Imperial Knights existing.

I don't understand?

Grey Knights are psychic, primarily terminator armoured infantry who "specialise" in daemon-hunting.

Imperial Knights are small Titans, wielding minor Titan sized weaponry.

If it's because Knights are a small model count army, what about the ACTUAL Titans? Or that fact that I could already take an all Tank army (FW Imperial Guard Armoured Battlegroup).

The smallest model count army, How hard is that? If you bring in FW, then... well no one takes FW seriously simply because they aren't in the codex.

No one plays against actual titans for fun in 1500 points.

Or are you proposing GK actually hate the other 2 factions like them? Or 3 if you include ordinary SM.