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Question 1: Can a psyker cast spells which require more Warp Charge than he has Mastery Level?

E.g. can a ML1 Psyker cast a power that requires 3 Warp Charge? BRB says on page 22: "The number of psychic powers a psyker can use each turn depends on his Mastery Level", so a ML1 psyker can attempt to harness only 1; furthermore it says on the same page: "a psyker knows a number of psychic powers equal to his Master Level". But you can just take the extra warp charge needed to cast it from your surplus warp charge pool, right?


Question 2: Can I attempt to manifest the same psychic power more than once per turn?

Say I have 2 Eldar Farseers. Farseer 1 rolls Doom, Eldritch Storm and Fortune and has Guide as Primaris Power, and Farseer 2 rolls Death Mission (chooses to replace it with Primaris Power Guide), and then Forewarning and Misfortune from the Divination table.

To summarize:

Farseer 1:
Doom
Eldritch Storm
Fortune
Guide

Farseer 1:
Guide
Forewarning
Misfortune

Now say during the game, Farseer 1 wants to cast Guide on a unit of Dire Avengers and uses 1 Warp Charge die and rolls a 3, so he fails. He has used one ML worth of psychic power manifestation attempts. He obviously cannot attempt to cast Guide again with his remaining MLs as the BRB says on page 24: "no unit can attempt to manifest the same psychic power more than once per Psychic phase"

But can Farseer 2 (who is a different unit) attempt to manifest Guide after Farseer 1 failed the first time?


Question 3: Can a Blessing be cast when the caster is locked in close combat?

BRB says on p.26 "Blessings can affect units that are locked in close combat and can affect the psyker himself"

Is this understood as 'the psyker can cast a blessing at a unit that is locked in cc' or 'the psyker can cast it even if he himself is locked in cc and on top of that also at a unit that isnt locked in cc, too'?

1) The number of powers a Psyker can use in a turn is dependent on his Mastery Level - a ML1 Psyker with Focus can cast 2 powers (as you cannot cast the same power twice), but a ML3 Psyker with Focus can cast 4 powers, more levels = more casts. The BRB gives no ML=number of powers rule (if it had instead said: "The number of psychic powers a psyker can use each turn is equal to his Mastery Level" then that would be different).

2) As you mentioned, as long as the manifesting unit is different (even if the target unit is the same) then you can cast multiple versions of the same power.

3) Blessings, Conjurations and Maledictions can all be cast when the Psyker is locked in combat, as only Witchfires have a restriction ("and cannot be locked in combat if he wishes to manifest a witchfire power.")

ML has no bearing on how many powers the psyker can manifest or how many warp charges he can use per turn.

The only things that ML effects is how many warp charges he generates and possibly the number of powers he knows(although it is not necessarily equal, a psyker with a force weapon that only rolls on one discipline will always know 2 more powers than his ML)

Question 2: Each psyker can only cast each power he knows once. But a different psyker can cast the same power. So yes, Farseer 2 could try to cast Guide on the same unit of Dire Avengers that Farseer 1 tried and failed to cast on.

Question 3: Yes. You can cast Blessings when you are locked in combat.

Clarification for the first question:

So can e.g. a Mastery Level 1 psyker cast both the power he rolled for, and his primaris power he kept due to psychic focus both in the same turn?

Yes. He could even cast a third power if he knew it(like Force) as long as you have warp charges to do so.

Okay. Another question.

The Tyranid Codex says Zoanthropes are both Brotherhood of Psykers and Mastery Level 2.

Furthermore, it says they always know the Warp Blast power and the unit can generate one additional power from the Powers of the Hive Mind table.

So does this mean the following:

A brood of Zoanthropes can know 3 psychic powers:

- Warp Blast (which they always know)

- The power it rolled for

- and the Primaris power since they make one roll on the PotHM table and thus gain psychic focus?

And they can cast all 3 powers in one turn provided there is enough warp charge in the pool?

 Sir Arun wrote:
Okay. Another question.

The Tyranid Codex says Zoanthropes are both Brotherhood of Psykers and Mastery Level 2.

Furthermore, it says they always know the Warp Blast power and the unit can generate one additional power from the Powers of the Hive Mind table.

So does this mean the following:

A brood of Zoanthropes can know 3 psychic powers:

- Warp Blast (which they always know)

- The power it rolled for

- and the Primaris power since they make one roll on the PotHM table and thus gain psychic focus?


And they can cast all 3 powers in one turn provided there is enough warp charge in the pool?

Warp Blast + Primaris + Randomly rolled one, yes.

"The number of psychic powers a psyker can use each turn depends on his Mastery Level"

I have seen a variety of debates on this point and the sticking point for me on the 'does this mean equal to' debate is:
If I have a ML1 psyker who is given n powers (and does not roll), how is this statement (which is in bold) true? (unless it means equal)

Ackoogin wrote:
If I have a ML1 psyker who is given n powers (and does not roll), how is this statement (which is in bold) true? (unless it means equal)

It would only be problematic, were such a situation to appear in the game. From what I can tell however, no single ML1 psyker is given a bunch of pre-determined powers in any GW publication that isnt already out of date.

 Sir Arun wrote:

Ackoogin wrote:
If I have a ML1 psyker who is given n powers (and does not roll), how is this statement (which is in bold) true? (unless it means equal)

It would only be problematic, were such a situation to appear in the game. From what I can tell however, no single ML1 psyker is given a bunch of pre-determined powers in any GW publication that isnt already out of date.

You mean other than Grey Knights?

Honestly, this is a confusing one, because the intent is not clearly stated. On the one hand you've got "the psyker knows a number of powers equal to his Mastery Level", Psychic Focus, and "If a Psyker has one of more weapons with the Force special rule, that psyker automatically knows the Force psychic power", meaning a ML1 psyker is almost always going to know 3 powers.

As far as manifesting, we've got "If after attempting to manifest a psychic power, tou still have warp charge points left, you can attempt to manifest another psychic power with the same unit, or select another of your psyker units and attempt to manifest a power the new unit know...but no unit can attempt to manifest the same psychic power more than once".

This leaves two conflicting interpretations of the "The number of psychic powers a psyker can use each turn depends on his Mastery Level" rule.

1) It's dependent in the sense that his ML determines how many powers he knows, and he can cast each one only one, thus ML 1 can cast 2 (3 with force), ML 2 can cast 2 (3 with force, 4 w/ PF), ML 3 gets 3 (4/5), etc.

or

2) ML determines how many powers the psyker knows and how many he can cast per turn separately.

The problem is, without clarification or a chart of some kind, there's no way to know which one they meant. If, for example, they said "A psyker can cast a number of psychic powers per turn equal to his ML", we would know exactly what they meant. But unfortunately "dependant on" and "equal to" are not necessarily the same. So it really comes down to interpretation and house rules.

As far as I've seen, most people seem to default to a psyker can cast every power he knows once, provided he has sufficient warp charge.

Thanks for the clarifications. So a Chaos ML3 Daemon Prince who rolls only on Biomancy and has a spell familiar has a 50% chance of getting Iron Arm, a 100% chance of getting either Iron Arm or Endurance, and in any case he can cast 3 Biomancy powers and the Chaos God power he rolls (substituting any crappy ones with the Primaris) each turn, using only the minimum amount of dice to roll for each power and re-rolling any misses.

And people say Chaos is a low tier dex

He most certainly doesn't have a 100% of getting either Iron Arm Endurance

 CrownAxe wrote:
He most certainly doesn't have a 100% of getting either Iron Arm Endurance

Ah crap youre right, my math is wrong. I have to roll once on the Chaos God specific power table, so that only leaves 2 rolls on the Biomancy chart. You have 1/6th chance of rolling psychic power 1 from a list of 1-6 for every warp charge manifestation. You can roll twice, so you can manifest 2 times, so you add 1/6 + 1/6 = 2/6 to get 33.33% chance of getting your power. I didnt take into consideration that you can re-roll if you roll the same number other than 1 twice, so the chance should be slightly greater.

Now of the roll that didn't give you your power, there's a 1/6th chance it was Endurance, so if you roll twice that chance should increase to 33.33%.

So after 2 rolls if you have a 33% chance of having rolled A, and a 33% chance of having rolled B, shouldnt it be 66% chance of having rolled A or B?

 Sir Arun wrote:

 CrownAxe wrote:
He most certainly doesn't have a 100% of getting either Iron Arm Endurance

All crap youre right, my math is wrong. I have to roll once on the Chaos God specific power table, so that only leaves 2 rolls on the Biomancy chart. You have 1/6th chance of rolling psychic power 1 from a list of 1-6 for every warp charge manifestation. You can roll twice, so you can manifest 2 times, so you add 1/6 + 1/6 = 2/6 to get 33.33% chance of getting your power. I didnt take into consideration that you can re-roll if you roll the same number other than 1 twice, so the chance should be slightly greater.

Now of the roll that didn't give you your power, there's a 1/6th chance it was Endurance, so if you roll twice that chance should increase to 33.33%.

So after 2 rolls if you have a 33% chance of having rolled A, and a 33% chance of having rolled B, shouldnt it be 66% chance of having rolled A or B?

Actually it would be 1/6 + 1/5 (because you've eliminated one possibility on the first roll), so 11/30, or 36.66% I'm not sure about the 66% chance of rolling one or the other, I'm trying to think of the right math.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Okay, if I'm getting this correctly, the probability of generating one or the other is equal to the sum of their combined probabilities. So, if the probability of generating either of them is 36.66, the probability that you will draw at least one of them is 73.32%. The probability of drawing both is, I believe 6.66% (15 possible combinations of the six results, of which the desired combination is 1, ergo 1/15= 6.66%). So, chances of getting both are quite low, but from a pure probability standpoint, you should usually get at least one. But, then, my math is super rusty.

Alright, scratch all that crap, I went and did the math the less abstract way, and here's how it breaks down. Let's say we have 6 powers, of which you're generating 2, with no repetition. So, That gives us a list of possible combinations as follows: {1,2}, {1,3}, {1,4}, {1,5}, {1,6}, {2,3}, {2,4}, {2,5}, {2,6}, {3,4}, {3,5}, {3,6}, {4,5}, {4,6}, {5,6}, for 15 total possibilties. Now, you look at the number of those sets that contain one of the powers you want (1, Iron Arm or 5, Endurance). These are {1,2}, {1,3}, {1,4}, {1,5}, {1,6}, {2,5}, {3,5}, {4,5}, and {5,6}, which are 9 of the 15 possibilities. Therefore your chances of drawing at least one of those two powers is 9/15 or 60%. Only one set {1,5} contains both powers, so your cahnces of drawing both is 1/15, or 6.667%.

It's easier to look at the chance of failing to get a particular power.

First roll, 4/6 chance of not getting one of two desired powers.
Second roll, 3/5 chance.

(4/6)*(3/5) = .4 or 40% chance of failure. Thus 60% chance of success.

 Sir Arun wrote:

Ackoogin wrote:
If I have a ML1 psyker who is given n powers (and does not roll), how is this statement (which is in bold) true? (unless it means equal)

It would only be problematic, were such a situation to appear in the game. From what I can tell however, no single ML1 psyker is given a bunch of pre-determined powers in any GW publication that isnt already out of date.

Actually it happens all the time.

Any ML1 psyker with a force weapon who rolls randomly for his power on a table of choice will always have 3 powers. Force, the Primarus, and the power he randomly rolls.

Any ML1 psyker who does not have a force weapon will always know 2 powers. The Primarus and the power he rolls.

Look at Grey Knights Draigo for some crazy 7e examples of how PML definitely does not have a 1:1 bearing on how many powers a Psyker knows.

A Dreadknight with a Hammer or Sword knows Banishment, Hammerhand, Force, and Sanctuary. PML1, 4 powers!

Draigo is PML2, and he is set with Force, Hammerhand, Banishment, Purge Soul, and Gate of Infinity. He knows 5 powers!