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So the general consensus in 8th edition is that Wraithknights aren't worth it for their points. It's easy to look at units like Hemlocks, Crimson Hunters, and Dark Reaper spam and determine that a Wraithknight can't compare to their firepower or utility.

That said, I spent three months building my Wraithknight, I enjoy fielding it in 8th, and I wanted to share how I've been successfully running my Wraithknight, and see if anybody else has found other ways to make use of them.

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Battle Strategy:
In short, calling a Wraithknight a distraction carnifex is an understatement. Taking one pretty much guarantees you can predict your opponent's first two turns of play. Your opponent WILL try to kill it ASAP, and while a Wraithknight is no Magnus, it's still the type of unit that warps the game around killing it. And unlike Magnus, the Wraithknight (with Cannons) can punch at a 36" range very dependably, while still threatening anything that gets within 12~19" of it.

Once I realized this, it completely transformed how I saw the Wraithknight's place in my army: A Wraithknight with cannons doesn't need to be close for your opponent to need to kill it, and that means you can get tactical value out of it just by making it obnoxious to kill.

I've noticed a huge improvement in my games, even against a few competitive lists, by simply castling the Wraithknight instead of trying to run it up the field. The 12x foot-attacks are tempting, but are a trap in terms of making the Wraithknight worth its points.

Running A Knight in any configuration up the field against most armies just ensures it'll get eaten by smites, counter-charging heroes, and massed small-arms-fire shenanigans. (Even Cultist blobs with Veterans of the Long War).

On the other hand, an Iyanden Heavy Wraithcannon Knight with 2x Scatter lasers, fortuned, and bubble wrapped with a squad of rangers will generally survive to shoot 300~400pts off of the table before dying. What's more, it's much more likely to survive for those two full turns, even if you go second, and will be a constant temptation to bait your opponent out of position for its lifespan.

(It also becomes the perfect unit to use the Phantasm stratagem on. Moving it from one corner of the board to the other, or faking an aggressive placement of it, then castling it after deployment will seriously screw with your opponent's placement, especially vs. infantry based AV that may not be able to draw line of sight to where you've moved the Knight.)

So how about it? Is anyone else out there getting defensive use of the cannon-knights, or some other strategy that helps make them worth fielding?

I don't think I could debate the relative usefulness of 3x Fire Prisms whole-sale after the double-fire change-- but I do think it's not as cut-and-dry.

I agree that you've got to factor it's ability to fight in melee as part of it's points-- but I've come to think it's less about ignoring the Wraithknight's melee capacity as much as using the threat of it to limit opponents options, or punish them for aggressive play.

I think the Wraithknight's melee capacity is the late-game threat/consequence of not addressing the Wraithknight fast enough. If the Wraithknight is still alive by the time you've depleted some enemy firepower, you start to use it to bully units and control objectives.

Even if it can't, or it does get shot off the board, the fact that it COULD go into melee definitely changes how opponents have to play. Because the Wraithknight can operate from range while charging into/out of melee, it has the capacity to severely punish deepstriking attacks behind your lines.

A Fire Prism that needs to put it's firepower down-range couldn't ALSO shoo a unit of cultists off of an objective or blow up a deepstriking unit in the same turn. A Wraithknight parked between two backfield objectives, on the other hand, could.

Well, I just used the 3 Prisms as an example, but to address the above specifically: What?
A dual cannon WK cannot shoot Cultists off an objective, but a double shooting Prism using the disperse setting probably can.

I don't think I was clear- sorry! What I was trying to articulate is just that, in a turn where both the WK or the Fire Prisms were dedicating their shooting phases to shooting at something else (say, a tank), the Wraithknight is unique in that it can also threaten an objective capping or deepstriking anything in the fight phase of the same turn.. Fire prisms, by comparison, could tie up units in melee if they really needed to, but aren't going to remove units that get too close to them in the fight phase the way a Wraithknight could.

I think we're agreeing completely that keeping the WK alive for a Turn 3 charge is the dream, and that it's biggest failing is probably how difficult it is to do that (for its points) right now. All I'm saying is that the Wraithknight isn't a direct comparison to the fire prisms, since even a back-field Wraithknight can still charge stuff that gets close to your lines. Even if you keep the WK back, I don't see it's melee potential as wasted, since that's still something your opponent has to worry about.