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A problem that we've seen has been a 'psychic tide' force, usually wave after wave of daemon summons, or an explosion of assorted psyche councils.

Some have remarked over the unfairness of the psychic phase and how you can create a 'steamroller' effect due to the core psychic methodology.

So, a thought.

What if you set the Psychic Phase to "Each side gets 6 Power Dice", period. The number of Psychers doesn't matter as there's a finite level of power to be drawn from and, with a set number of potential points, spamming psychers prevents a disasterous loss from snuffing out your plans, but it also keeps a steamroller effect under control.

It's *different*, and goes against some of the random nature of the game, but, I think it might reign in a few things while still leaving plenty of fluffy fun for 1-3 psychers per side.

Thoughts? Positives? negatives?

Some units (especially demons) have no guns and are not good at assault. They are built from the ground up to function only in the psychic phase. By limiting the entire army to 6 psychic dice you are nerfing those units into uselessness.

Pink Horrors come to mind. Nice troop choice, no guns, all about psychic shooting.

Zoanthropes for nids are another one. No gun, No weapons. Just psychic dakka. Warp Blast for Nids is a 2 WC power. To cast it reliably I need to roll 5 dice. So if I bring 1 Zoanthrope by your rules there goes all my dice. If I brought 2? well... Guess That unit will never do anything.

The entire psychic phase was a terrible idea, implemented in the worst possible way.

Why does the game let you bring additional psykers as "mana batteries" to ensure you can cast ridiculous powers unopposed?

Why are certain psychic powers so incredibly unbalanced?

Why is it possible to summon entire units you didn't pay for?

This stuff is utter garbage that was obviously barely play tested. The game worked better (and was much simpler) when psykers payed for their powers from set lists and cast them by passing a leadership test.

It doesn't work any better than the current system. Armies that cost one or two powers benefit a lot and armies that cast a lot of powers get nerfed horribly.

 Lance845 wrote:
Some units (especially demons) have no guns and are not good at assault. They are built from the ground up to function only in the psychic phase. By limiting the entire army to 6 psychic dice you are nerfing those units into uselessness.

Pink Horrors come to mind. Nice troop choice, no guns, all about psychic shooting.

Zoanthropes for nids are another one. No gun, No weapons. Just psychic dakka. Warp Blast for Nids is a 2 WC power. To cast it reliably I need to roll 5 dice. So if I bring 1 Zoanthrope by your rules there goes all my dice. If I brought 2? well... Guess That unit will never do anything.

This.

I'd prefer a psychic system similar to (but not identical to) the 5th edition system. One player bringing a Tzeentch army didn't invalidate the other player bringing a single ML1 librarian. Non-random powers meant you could build fluff into your psyker and reduced bookkeeping. Not having to worry about warp charges meant less book keeping too.

My go-to suggestion for the psychic system is...

*Keep a psychic phase for convenience, keep power types ("blessings," "witchfires," etc.), and keep Mastery Levels (sort of).
*Get rid of warp charges.
*Reduce the base cost of psykers.
*Powers are now purchased as wargear rather than rolled randomly. Psykers with built-in powers (Grey Knights) have the cost worked into their profiles.
*A psyker can cast one power per psychic phase per mastery level.
*Redesign any powers that are too powerful in general or too powerful when you can guarantee you'll have them.
*To cast a power, make a Leadership test. If you roll double 6's or double 1's, you perils. If you pass the test (even if you roll double 1s), the power goes off.

OPTIONAL
*Each faction has its own set of rules regarding perils. Eldar can permanently lower their ML to ignore taking an automatic wound. Orks can explode the heads of nearbye orks to avoid taking a wound on the psyker. Chaos daemons don't perils. Chaos marines can intentionally take a wound to pass a psychic test they would have actually failed and cannot die of perils. That sort of thing.
*Give some powers various "levels" at which they can be cast. Declare the level you want to cast at before making the psychic test. Powers get more potent and more dangerous as they go up in level. Level 1 powers work as normal. Level 2 powers make you perils if you roll a 3 or 11 on your leadership test. Level 3 powers make you perils if you roll a 4 or 10. Level 4 powers probably don't exist . So for instance, you might have a Pyromancy power called "Fire Strike." At level 1, you get a heavy flamer if you pass your leadership test. At level 2, you can use it as a meltagun. At level 3, you get something comparable to cleansing flame.

I really don't understand the want to go back to Leadership based Psychic tests.

I played back in fifth ed when that was a thing, psychic powers were quite frankly bland in their use.

The current system is just so much more.. nuanced. It Incorporates risk vs rewards and resource management far more than the leadership based system did. It also gives a better chance to deny than a leadership based system with warp charges being generated for someone without any psykers. Sure it's not that great of a defense, but at the same I'm investing no points into the psychic phase.

I'm not saying that the psychic phase is perfect, far from in fact. It has a lot of room for improvement, but I would detest going back to the boring gak that was 5th ed psychic.

I feel a lot of hate towards the psychic phase is due to two things. The first is simply unbalanced powers, I can't deny it, they exist. Whoever thought invisibility was an okay power (even with the ITC change) needs to have a hard long think about their occupation.

The second is the fact that blessings are extremely difficult to deny, even if my psyker is in CC with a lower ML psyker, I get no bonuses to denying iron armor, endurance, veil of time, etc.,.

IMO the things that really need to change are as follows-
1) Some powers really need to be brought in line, they just do.
2) Blessings should deniable with the same modifiers a witch-fire is
3) All codices should have some latent anti-psyker defense. Tau and Necrons come to mind, even with gloom-prisms. Giving them some sort of unit that helps nullify/gives a basic defense against psykers.

Wakshaani wrote:
What if you set the Psychic Phase to "Each side gets 6 Power Dice", period. The number of Psychers doesn't matter as there's a finite level of power to be drawn from and, with a set number of potential points, spamming psychers prevents a disasterous loss from snuffing out your plans, but it also keeps a steamroller effect under control.

This runs into the problem FB 4th&5th and 40k 2nd had.

ZERO scalability. Basically psykers are more powerful the smaller the game.

Eldar farseer in small 500 pts skirmish in 2nd ed is hell of a lot more influencial than in 3000 pts game. His psychics will be having much more impact.

Basically you are setting up game for certain point level and pity if you want to diverge.

Same issue was also in all those 0-1 units. Sure it makes sense there was only 1 swordmasters of hoeth unit in 750 pts small army. 4000 pts less so.


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 CalgarsPimpHand wrote:
This stuff is utter garbage that was obviously barely play tested. The game worked better (and was much simpler) when psykers payed for their powers from set lists and cast them by passing a leadership test.

Ironically though that meant more powers cast. Not sure how casting even more overpowered spells(as in rather than 1 overpowered spell you get off 3!) more reliably is better...

As the game is, having a psychic phase isn't a bad idea; the old way of having psychic powers going off in different phases often ended up with someone forgetting to use them.

Instead of a set dice per side, psykers should have a Psychic Score of some kind, like a Ballistic or Weapon skill. ML becomes the "# of attacks" stat, determining how many psychic abilities a model gets off in a turn.

The next fix is getting rid of the random roll for psychic powers, slightly reducing the cost of psykers and giving point costs to each psychic abiliity (and tweaking both weak and problematic powers).

Any easy fix (or at least one that does not require re-pointing existing unit entries) is to put points costs within each Psychic Discipline and allowing Psykers to choose their powers (written into their army list)

This might also reduce the "bloat" as the BRB disciplines would not have to have 7 total powers since a D6 + Primaris is not needed.

For Example, Telpathy could only have 5 total powers
Shriek - Free
Domination - Free
Terrify - Free
Shrouding - 15pts
Invisibility - 30pts

In this way, a ML3 Psyker could take all 3 free powers, or 2 free powers and buy Invis, or whatever.

For existing Codex disciplines, the BRB could make a note that any 1 WC powers are free, but any with 2 WC cost XXpts and 3+ WC powers cost YYpts
It would also be important to make each psyker restricted to a single discipline so that no single Psyker can just buy all the "good" powers. This would be especially balancing for Eldar Farseers and Daemon Psykers who often play with multiple diciplines.
It would make sense that a Psyker would be specialized in 1 discipline. Characters like Fateweaver, of course, are special.

-

Fixed psychic dice would be a terrible idea. You'd make the usefulness of psykers dependent on game size and screw over armies that rely on spread-out psychic support or psychic firepower (Daemons, GK, Eldar (at least Eldar played normally, WK/scatterbike tournament forces would be relatively unaffected), Harlequins, Tyranids...).

The most broken psychic powers are all blessings, summon-spam isn't as scary as most people make out (it can get you free stuff, but the feedback loop is (whether by accident or by design) fairly well-controlled, it's almost impossible to actually go out of control with it) and offensive powers aren't usually broken. The shortest fix would be to ban cast-on-2+/cast-on-3+ formations and give all psykers psychic hoods, you'd clear out the dumber deathstar builds and allow armies to at least attempt to control enemy blessings without neutering the armies that aren't broken and yet rely on psychic powers to function.

More comprehensively I'd suggest introducing more non-psyker anti-psychic effects (the Culexis and Sisters of Silence were a start, but I'd rather see more mechanics that give WC for denial only and fewer mechanics that delete powers in general in a wide radius), trimming back the number of disciplines (I think we were at 35ish last time I counted) and consolidating/toning down powers, making psychic powers selectable rather than random, and reexamining the available Warp Charge per detachment problem. Giving one army (Daemons) ML3 psykers in Troops and cheap ML3 psykers in HQ (that can be taken four to a slot) shouldn't coexist with armies (Marines) that can take ML2 psykers in HQ only and armies (Tau) that can't take anything that interacts with the psychic phase at all.

I'd rescale Mastery levels such that ML3 was the limit for normal people, ML4 was there for Farseers, Greater Daemons, and the like, and ML5 existed theoretically for special characters, then capped units at ML1 (maybe ML2 if they were Seer Councils or Grey Knight Purifiers). A minimum Tzeentch CAD (Herald + 2x Pink Horrors) would be sitting on 5-6 WC versus 3 for a minimum SM CAD (Librarian + 2x Tacticals), rather than the 9 to 2 we've got now.

Vilehydra wrote:
I really don't understand the want to go back to Leadership based Psychic tests.

I played back in fifth ed when that was a thing, psychic powers were quite frankly bland in their use.

The current system is just so much more.. nuanced. It Incorporates risk vs rewards and resource management far more than the leadership based system did. It also gives a better chance to deny than a leadership based system with warp charges being generated for someone without any psykers. Sure it's not that great of a defense, but at the same I'm investing no points into the psychic phase.

I'm not saying that the psychic phase is perfect, far from in fact. It has a lot of room for improvement, but I would detest going back to the boring gak that was 5th ed psychic.

I feel a lot of hate towards the psychic phase is due to two things. The first is simply unbalanced powers, I can't deny it, they exist. Whoever thought invisibility was an okay power (even with the ITC change) needs to have a hard long think about their occupation.

The second is the fact that blessings are extremely difficult to deny, even if my psyker is in CC with a lower ML psyker, I get no bonuses to denying iron armor, endurance, veil of time, etc.,.

IMO the things that really need to change are as follows-
1) Some powers really need to be brought in line, they just do.
2) Blessings should deniable with the same modifiers a witch-fire is
3) All codices should have some latent anti-psyker defense. Tau and Necrons come to mind, even with gloom-prisms. Giving them some sort of unit that helps nullify/gives a basic defense against psykers.

Making a leadership test may have been more "bland" than the mini-game that is the psychic phase, but it was also much faster and didn't suffer from a lot of the problems we see today. I really wanted to like the whole risk vs reward aspect of the new psychic phase, and I really wanted to like the interactivity of it. In practice though, after many a game of 7th edition, I've decided that the pros just aren't worth the cons. The current psychic phase takes quite a while to resolve. When someone does shut down a power with deny the witch, it's often because their superior psychic ability is bullying the other guy's less significant psychic presence into the ground,

Basically, I'm not a fan of spending more time on resolving psychic powers, killing off my own centuries-old psykers, having more bookkeeping in general, and psychic-heavy armies shutting down units in psyker-light armies. I'm open to something other than what 5th edition had. I just don't think 7th edition's version is it.

I agree with your first suggestion. Several powers are just way too good. I disagree about having more prevalent psychic defenses though. Sort of. No other changes being made to the game, I'm all for more anti-psychic stuff in armies like 'crons or Tau or dark eldar. But that said, I'm not a huge fan of powerful anti-psychic effects. The psyker's player spent points on being able to generate and use psychic powers. Being able to shut those powers down too easily means that they paid those points for nothing. Ahriman throwing maelstroms of psychic power around mid-battle is much more interesting than Ahriman making grunting noises as he tries and fails to get a psychic power off.