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Lurk in the shadows ties nicely with actions though

if there's been some FAQ clarification on this, that's fine, but I thought it was "benefitting from cover" not "wholly on or within terrain".

The strat says "wholly on or within a terrain feature" not just "benefitting from cover." If that's been FAQ'd to something else, I wasn't aware of it.

The latter would make a lot more sense with 9th edition design, I agree.

Now, are hills terrain features? I could've googled that; no.

However, you can use it while in an exposed position, which is neat.

It's a cool strat, but I honestly haven't come across many situations where it's been overly useful. Usually I have far more threatening stuff such that my opponent can't afford to shoot at a back-field unit that is just holding onto an objective. Partially this is because my opponents have had a lot less shooting than in 8th (as 9th rewards brawler units far more), and partially because, as stated, you usually can't flood an objective with models and still achieve this, making using this on a unit close to an opponent's forces not ideal.

I expect to use this strat in my next game vs Admech though, and could see folks playing vs T'au or Eldar getting a lot of use out of this as well.

A lot of missions involve objectives that reward the player heavily for managing to hold on to an objective in their opponent's DZ for a single turn. At least, the last 3 or so I've played have heavily incentivized that - in one I had an action that could burn down an opposing objective that would not only deny that to my opponent the rest of the game but also give me a large number of secondary points, and in the other I had an action I could perform on all the objectives as a secondary, which included the ones in my opponent's DZ.

In both instances I was able to use Lurk to prevent the unit performing the action from dying.

Really? I guess I just haven't been in that situation. Usually stuff in my opponent's DZ is close enough to their units that making my unit be the closest one is trivial to the point of non-necessity, so using the strat on them would've been pointless.

the_scotsman wrote:
A lot of missions involve objectives that reward the player heavily for managing to hold on to an objective in their opponent's DZ for a single turn. At least, the last 3 or so I've played have heavily incentivized that - in one I had an action that could burn down an opposing objective that would not only deny that to my opponent the rest of the game but also give me a large number of secondary points, and in the other I had an action I could perform on all the objectives as a secondary, which included the ones in my opponent's DZ.

In both instances I was able to use Lurk to prevent the unit performing the action from dying.

But were you playing Lurk under your previous interpretation though? Because that makes a pretty big difference going forward.

It really comes down to how much area terrain there is on the board. If there's area terrain within 3" of an objective marker, it's quite a useful strat. And it was great in 8th, because everybody had big blocks of area terrain all over the board. But in 9th, I find people tend to have recategorized those big L ruins as obstacles instead, to avoid the problems with how the obscuring keyword works.

But that really depends on how your playgroup does their boards. If they still have a bunch of ruins that are ruins, not obstacles, it can be very useful.

 Red Corsair wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:
A lot of missions involve objectives that reward the player heavily for managing to hold on to an objective in their opponent's DZ for a single turn. At least, the last 3 or so I've played have heavily incentivized that - in one I had an action that could burn down an opposing objective that would not only deny that to my opponent the rest of the game but also give me a large number of secondary points, and in the other I had an action I could perform on all the objectives as a secondary, which included the ones in my opponent's DZ.

In both instances I was able to use Lurk to prevent the unit performing the action from dying.

But were you playing Lurk under your previous interpretation though? Because that makes a pretty big difference going forward.

no, I guess we just play with an unusual amount of large block area terrain from 8th, because when building the terrain for our tables I tried to make it as game-functional as possible for 8th edition. So we have a lot of large, true-LOS blocking pieces with large areas for units to be able to get wholly into as that was the only way to actually get cover in 8th.

Now that smaller pieces can finally be functional, I'll probably start adding more in as Small Ruin Walls and Forests and whatnot.

By the way, aberrants are just heartbreaking - not, contrary to the memes, because they're terrible, but because they are so close to being what the army needs. It really wouldn't take a lot and GSC would actually have a points efficient objective-holding unit - if they were ~26 points instead of 30, for example, and/or if they got transhuman (which would certainly fit them as well as it fits marines). Their offense is not very good, but IMO that's fine - GSC has plenty of offense, what it lacks is anything that can take a hit in a semi-efficient way, and aberrants are really not far off that.

They do have some good stuff. Refuse damage by 1. That is good. Having a 5+ feel no pain is good. That you can boost to 4+ with 2 CP. Have the banner around to re-roll 1's.

Hammers are good. The pick model has 4 attacks each, quite nice.

Only SM have so much T5 3+ transhuman. Comparing them to say blade guard, attack bikes, outriders or Terminators. They should really not cost 30 points.

They could cost 30 points of vigulus was stil legal. Getting a 3+ to charge with 4 armed emperor would make them good.

Also, why do twisted helix have the fight twice on abberants stratagem? They are the one unit who benefits the least from getting S+1.

the_scotsman wrote:

 Red Corsair wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:
A lot of missions involve objectives that reward the player heavily for managing to hold on to an objective in their opponent's DZ for a single turn. At least, the last 3 or so I've played have heavily incentivized that - in one I had an action that could burn down an opposing objective that would not only deny that to my opponent the rest of the game but also give me a large number of secondary points, and in the other I had an action I could perform on all the objectives as a secondary, which included the ones in my opponent's DZ.

In both instances I was able to use Lurk to prevent the unit performing the action from dying.

But were you playing Lurk under your previous interpretation though? Because that makes a pretty big difference going forward.

no, I guess we just play with an unusual amount of large block area terrain from 8th, because when building the terrain for our tables I tried to make it as game-functional as possible for 8th edition. So we have a lot of large, true-LOS blocking pieces with large areas for units to be able to get wholly into as that was the only way to actually get cover in 8th.

Now that smaller pieces can finally be functional, I'll probably start adding more in as Small Ruin Walls and Forests and whatnot.

Nice, I tend to play with dense tables as well as it makes the game a little more dynamic. It's always tough discussing tactics online when it involves terrain I find so I just firgured I would ask.

yukishiro1 wrote:
By the way, aberrants are just heartbreaking - not, contrary to the memes, because they're terrible, but because they are so close to being what the army needs. It really wouldn't take a lot and GSC would actually have a points efficient objective-holding unit - if they were ~26 points instead of 30, for example, and/or if they got transhuman (which would certainly fit them as well as it fits marines). Their offense is not very good, but IMO that's fine - GSC has plenty of offense, what it lacks is anything that can take a hit in a semi-efficient way, and aberrants are really not far off that.

The problem with Aberrants is that I can't help but glace sideways at a Bladeguard Veteran and think that its everything I wish an Aberrant would be.

 Ordana wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
By the way, aberrants are just heartbreaking - not, contrary to the memes, because they're terrible, but because they are so close to being what the army needs. It really wouldn't take a lot and GSC would actually have a points efficient objective-holding unit - if they were ~26 points instead of 30, for example, and/or if they got transhuman (which would certainly fit them as well as it fits marines). Their offense is not very good, but IMO that's fine - GSC has plenty of offense, what it lacks is anything that can take a hit in a semi-efficient way, and aberrants are really not far off that.

The problem with Aberrants is that I can't help but glace sideways at a Bladeguard Veteran and think that its everything I wish an Aberrant would be.

Bladeguars are not as good VS S8, but otherwise you are probably right.

 Ordana wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
By the way, aberrants are just heartbreaking - not, contrary to the memes, because they're terrible, but because they are so close to being what the army needs. It really wouldn't take a lot and GSC would actually have a points efficient objective-holding unit - if they were ~26 points instead of 30, for example, and/or if they got transhuman (which would certainly fit them as well as it fits marines). Their offense is not very good, but IMO that's fine - GSC has plenty of offense, what it lacks is anything that can take a hit in a semi-efficient way, and aberrants are really not far off that.

The problem with Aberrants is that I can't help but glace sideways at a Bladeguard Veteran and think that its everything I wish an Aberrant would be.

It's tough because so much of our army is paying out the nose for our hyper-reliable deep strike. I definitely agree that durability, rather than damage, should be the defining trait of an aberrant to differentiate it from metamorphs, acolytes, and purestrains, wheras currently they're all just right on top of each other in terms of role.

If you had me design them...

Acolytes: best anti-heavy damage or cheapest, basically I think they're pretty solid as-is in terms of role. I'd probably make them T3 4+ and increase their points accordingly as we have another GEQ troop

Metamorphs: Rather than trying to give every weapon a slightly different statline I'd give them one weapon called "Monstrous Biomorphs" and allow the player to choose 1 profile for them before the game starts to tailor against the opposing army. So similar to now you'd have weapons that aren't quite as good at purestrains at clearing hordes, or quite as good as acolytes at killing heavy stuff, etc, but they'd be flexible. Also they'd be T4 4+ to further differentiate them from acos.

Aberrants: Make 'em the tough guys of the bunch. Hammer aberrants should be less efficient at damaging tanks for the points than heavy weapon acos, and pick aberrants less efficient at clearing elites than purestrains, but they should be solidly tougher than either for the points. give them 'anvil status.'

Purestrains: ffs incorporate them into the army proper but then just have them be the most efficient at clearing out elite infantry. keep the rend on Acolytes the same but make purestrain rending claws AP-4 and D2 on a 6 and give them the attacks to back it up, and then make scythes into a "bonus attacks" item. Scythe purestrains should be the last word in shredding GEQ and claw purestrains in shredding MEQ for the points.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Red Corsair wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:

 Red Corsair wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:
A lot of missions involve objectives that reward the player heavily for managing to hold on to an objective in their opponent's DZ for a single turn. At least, the last 3 or so I've played have heavily incentivized that - in one I had an action that could burn down an opposing objective that would not only deny that to my opponent the rest of the game but also give me a large number of secondary points, and in the other I had an action I could perform on all the objectives as a secondary, which included the ones in my opponent's DZ.

In both instances I was able to use Lurk to prevent the unit performing the action from dying.

But were you playing Lurk under your previous interpretation though? Because that makes a pretty big difference going forward.

no, I guess we just play with an unusual amount of large block area terrain from 8th, because when building the terrain for our tables I tried to make it as game-functional as possible for 8th edition. So we have a lot of large, true-LOS blocking pieces with large areas for units to be able to get wholly into as that was the only way to actually get cover in 8th.

Now that smaller pieces can finally be functional, I'll probably start adding more in as Small Ruin Walls and Forests and whatnot.

Nice, I tend to play with dense tables as well as it makes the game a little more dynamic. It's always tough discussing tactics online when it involves terrain I find so I just firgured I would ask.

Yeah, understandable. Our tables are unusual because we have someone (me) actively trying to manage and keep up our terrain collection. So during early 8th we had a large windfall of sector mech terrain brand new in box, and my mission with it was to try and make it as game functional for 8th as possible, because just straight out of the box it just could not have been more worthless for use as anything but table decoration for 8th. I mounted large chunks together on wide bases to allow units to fit easily both on top of and under the structure, and tried to strategically place the large pipes to create true-LOS blocking zones underneath the structures.

We also had a lot of the old GW ruins that I bought and added bases to in order to increase their impact on the table and make "wholly within" very clear and easy to understand, and I also got a lot of nice looking MDF terrain that both have bases and are big chunky bunkers with zero holes in them.

For 9th, I've created a bunch of themed terrain sets that have their own box and have laminated rulesets with the various terrain traits that go along with each piece. Every table has Obscuring, Light, and Dense cover bare minimum in fairly common supply, with the occasional houseruled trait to make terrain management easier (e.g. our trees are based individually, so Forests on some of the maps have a special trait where any trees placed within 1" of each other are treated as a single Forest entity with a footprint equal to the outer diameter of the imaginary shape formed by the bases, and any gaps between the bases should be ignored)

On the risk of venturing into design philosophy - I agree with a lot of your assessments of wishing that these guys had different roles. However, I think Purestrains are really just held back by not being able to be given cult traits, because otherwise everything else they need is in the dex. +1 to hit from Patriarch, they can intrinsically advance and charge out of a truck, and all the different cult traits are actually useful on them. I think Genestealer Rending Claws should go to 6+'s to hit AND 6+'s to wound are auto-wound, AP-4 and 2dmg (both GSC and Nids version), but that's actually secondary for where I'd like to see them.

I think genestealers should get 6 inch guaranteed advance, fwiw.

After 9th edition dropped a lot of the stuff that made the genestealers good disapeared in the rules. On topp of that they increased to 15 points. Except some very try hards very few take genestealers in tyranid lists any more. The once that do co bine it with the swarmlord, not a broodlord.

Even if GSC stealers had a cult trait (and that would be awsome!) it is very unlikly they would be good. You have no swarmlord to support. On topp of that they are somehow 17 points instead of 15.

Agreed with purestrains actually benefitting from the Cult Creed.

I kinda wish there was a metamorph unit that had options to take ranged bio-weapons like devourers or something - in addition to T4, 4+ to really make them feel like an elite unit, but firmly keeping them focused on anti-infantry. I think this would help further differentiate them from acolytes.

 Yarium wrote:
On the risk of venturing into design philosophy - I agree with a lot of your assessments of wishing that these guys had different roles. However, I think Purestrains are really just held back by not being able to be given cult traits, because otherwise everything else they need is in the dex. +1 to hit from Patriarch, they can intrinsically advance and charge out of a truck, and all the different cult traits are actually useful on them. I think Genestealer Rending Claws should go to 6+'s to hit AND 6+'s to wound are auto-wound, AP-4 and 2dmg (both GSC and Nids version), but that's actually secondary for where I'd like to see them.

The only issue I have with these ideas to fix pure-strains are the abilities procing on 6's for more damage. That would mean technically each wound roll would have to be rolled individually verse other multi wound units. I am sure most folks would compromise on using dice pools, but for competitive play that's a messy call. I honestly don't have a problem with them having single damage but they absolutely should just have 4 attacks, dropping the silly +1 attack on units over 10 models which never made any sense to me. I mean, they have 4 arms lol. I also think they should just hit on a 2+ seeing as they have had a long history of weapon skill stats on level with most characters in the game. Give the patriarch some other buffing ability.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Drakeslayer wrote:
Agreed with purestrains actually benefitting from the Cult Creed.

I kinda wish there was a metamorph unit that had options to take ranged bio-weapons like devourers or something - in addition to T4, 4+ to really make them feel like an elite unit, but firmly keeping them focused on anti-infantry. I think this would help further differentiate them from acolytes.

Yea it was one of the most mind numbingly stupid skullduggery on GW's part when they excluded genestealers from gaining the army bonus in an army modeled around themselves lol.

It makes sense that purestrains wouldn’t have a cult creed, it doesn’t make sense that they are completely outclassed by hybrids and metamorphosis.

Really? Because Tyranid genstealers benefits from their hivetype. You do not think that genestealer DNA contains spesific markers?

Actually, if I where to argue the way you do it would make sence that the purestrains and patriarch has a seperet cult creed identical to that of the parent hiveship. Like how the dark eldar has 3 different creeds within their army at the same time.

I choose hivefleet behemot or kraken for my genstealers.

canonized wrote:
It makes sense that purestrains wouldn’t have a cult creed, it doesn’t make sense that they are completely outclassed by hybrids and metamorphosis.

Is this still an issue? I've been away from the game for basically all of 8th and 9th so far, but this was a big problem for GSC back in 7th - can't believe they haven't fixed this yet lol

Actually this wasn't an issue for 7th ed because we didn't have Cult Creed rules back then.

Purestrains could be very very good in 7th with the First Curse formation, and a lucky roll on the Cult Ambush table of fun.

Purestrains and the Broodlord should get some other sort of built-in trait that's universal across all Cult Creeds (so the fluff makes sense) but helps keep them from being flat outclassed by fleet 'Stealers (not that the Broodlord has this problem but obviously it needs to be consistent).

And of course they shouldn't be more expensive than fleet 'Stealers.

Madjob wrote:
Purestrains and the Broodlord should get some other sort of built-in trait that's universal across all Cult Creeds (so the fluff makes sense) but helps keep them from being flat outclassed by fleet 'Stealers (not that the Broodlord has this problem but obviously it needs to be consistent).

And of course they shouldn't be more expensive than fleet 'Stealers.

Belive it or not they used to be cheaper. And with excelent deployment options. No Swarmlord though.

Seems like a big group of jackals would make a really nice screen for a patriarch.

E: completely unrelated, but I think under RAW you can use Unquestioning Loyalty with vehicles. Could be worth it in some situations to sacrifice a low wound vehicle to prevent a killing blow.

E2:v this is why I shouldn’t be trying to read my codex late

canonized wrote:
Seems like a big group of jackals would make a really nice screen for a patriarch.

E: completely unrelated, but I think under RAW you can use Unquestioning Loyalty with vehicles. Could be worth it in some situations to sacrifice a low wound vehicle to prevent a killing blow.

No because the model you re-direct to has to have the rule. and vehicles don't get it.

 BBAP wrote:

canonized wrote:
It makes sense that purestrains wouldn’t have a cult creed, it doesn’t make sense that they are completely outclassed by hybrids and metamorphosis.

Is this still an issue? I've been away from the game for basically all of 8th and 9th so far, but this was a big problem for GSC back in 7th - can't believe they haven't fixed this yet lol

Every army that's not marines gets meaningfully touched by the attention of the GW design team once per edition. Last edition was a crazy freak edition because every army got 2 (so obv marines got 3, to keep it fair) with the index and codex.

if they don't fix your problems when you get your codex, youuuuuuuuve just gotta live with those problems for 3 years.