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What are each of the Imperial Knight types best used for? What makes one better in a situation than another? Yeah, I know, their stats, but let’s just give them each a quick overview.

If we're just talking about the currently available vanilla Knights GW produce, Knight 'type' isn't all that relevant. Functionally, they're all literally identical apart from weapon loadout. The question then quickly becomes 'Which Knight *weapon* is best for X'. In which case:

Avenger: Best against any form of infantry.
Thermal Cannon: Best against any form of armoured vehicle.
RFBC: ...has good range, falls between the other two in terms of average performance until you meet anything that's T8+, then it simply becomes the worst of the three.

The melee weapons are even more black and white:

Reaper Chainsword: Best against nothing except a few odd edge cases like Crisis suits. Anything bigger and you should have bought the Gauntlet, anything smaller and you'll be better off tap-dancing on them.


For my part, I really think the Forge World Knights with their unique loadouts, are far more interesting largely because of the 'cut and dry' nature of the above. Hopefully, things get shaken up some by the new units and codex! o7

All knights are best at dying. It's a very important role when my Shadowsword is on the other side of the table.

StrayIight wrote:


The melee weapons are even more black and white:

Reaper Chainsword: Best against nothing except a few odd edge cases like Crisis suits. Anything bigger and you should have bought the Gauntlet, anything smaller and you'll be better off tap-dancing on them.

Are you sure about that? With degrading WS starting from 3+ -1 to hit is kinda big liability.

 Peregrine wrote:
All knights are best at dying. It's a very important role when my Shadowsword is on the other side of the table.

This is unfortunately all too true. Unless the Knight in question is say, a Porphyron. Then we get to play a fun mini-game called 'Roll a D6 for first turn', the loser of which, generally then removes their super heavy from play during said first turns shooting phase. Regardless of the result of this exciting mini-game, the Knight player loses the match a few turns later, as they were unable to gain any objective capture VP's

There are only 2 types of knights.

With CC weapon...for CC and maybe some shooting

Without CC Weapon...Shoot a lot

Peregrine is right....they die well.

 Peregrine wrote:
All knights are best at dying.

 Crimson wrote:

StrayIight wrote:


The melee weapons are even more black and white:

Reaper Chainsword: Best against nothing except a few odd edge cases like Crisis suits. Anything bigger and you should have bought the Gauntlet, anything smaller and you'll be better off tap-dancing on them.

Are you sure about that? With degrading WS starting from 3+ -1 to hit is kinda big liability.

You're right - my comment was absolutely based on a non degraded profile. At full functionality math hammer lands clearly in favour of the Gauntlet, but sure, the Reaper (without checking) may well out perform it at some point when you start stacking heavy modifiers.

That said, when you DO start hitting lower WS tiers, I think often you'd also probably be better off throwing more dice (so tap dancing) over the Reaper anyway. Also, if you run your Knight as Questor Mechanicus, Machine Spirit Resurgent means you can always elect to ignore degradation anyway.

My take away is, the Reaper is far from being terrible, but it is really 'meh' in terms of Knight CC weapons. If I have the points it's just almost always worth the upgrade to the gauntlet I feel.