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Post any interesting rules, warlord traits, abilities, wargear etc you think would make GK semi competitive. I understand they might not ever be a solid stand alone choice, but maybe as a decent detachment.

All the changes I can think of just amount to making GK into something more like loyalist TS rules, so I guess my conclusion is to just go play TS instead, as they're an actually functional elite psyker army.

I think they need more reliable ways to get into combat, compared to all the tools Blood Angels have, GK find themselves too often out in the open

Giving them the Space Marine discipline in addition to the one they already have would be a good start; it isn't the singular solution but I really do think the first step to making a psychic army effective should be "give them enough spells to cast".

 Arachnofiend wrote:
Giving them the Space Marine discipline in addition to the one they already have would be a good start; it isn't the singular solution but I really do think the first step to making a psychic army effective should be "give them enough spells to cast".

1) Access to Astartes discipline
2) Regular smite on HQs
3) 4+ save against mortal wounds

Maybe that they would need something more, but i would start from this and see what happens.

meleti wrote:
All the changes I can think of just amount to making GK into something more like loyalist TS rules, so I guess my conclusion is to just go play TS instead, as they're an actually functional elite psyker army.

Not really. Thousand Sons are not competitive. Sure, a Supreme Command with Ahriman/Daemon Princes or two behind a Nurgle-Daemon Screen, maybe the odd pre-FAQ Tzaangor blob still hanging around, are competitive. But that's hardly a "Thousand Sons" army. It's just a few cherries from the book picked for a competitive Chaos-Soup variant.

A GK supreme command/Patrol with deep-striking Voldus throwing out a neat 3D6 psy-test vortex of doom on a unit with a big footprint in the middle of a Tau/Guilliman/Astra-Militarum castle probably is a neat thing an Imperial Soup can do in tournaments, but it's also not "a Grey Knight army".

If Grey Knight characters/HQ would get normal smite, people'd play them just like the TS supreme command. Hide three or four characters behind a cheap imperial screen to throw out smites from un-targetable characters.

From a pure gameplay perspective (though it probably doesn't make sense background-wise), it would probably be better if the normal GK (and TS) troops get the full smite, and not the characters, incentivising taking Strike Squads (or Rubric Marines), etc..

Make combat a viable option.

hobojebus wrote:
Make combat a viable option.

that won't do much for GKs. as a PURE Melee combat army, point for point they're likely going to be outclassed by Custodes, and SHOULD be. as custodes aren't psykers so, assuming all else being equal GKs should have a higher points cost...

actually here's an idea. reduce force weapons to 1 dmg. but make it mortal wounds. Grey Knights use force weapons because they're EFFECTIVE vs deamons. and force weapons dealing mortal wounds would sure do it. course not sure how this might impact the meta of some other units out there. but you could easily make it "Nemisis force weapons deal mortal wounds" instead of all force

Drop down the power of their CC weapons based on rank (i.e. the basic power armoured guys just have +strength cc weapons)

Give them a little protection against excessive moral casualties, make smite an upgrade and give them shrouding instead (ravenguard style)

Lower the costs of the lesser rank and file based on units having less powerful weapons / less smite spam.

Provide access to psychic powers for the units (particularly the more elite units) to suitably buff themselves up through psychic powers, and protect themselves/move themselves around via strategems.

Give them one of those cool army wide rules to interact with, like all the fun armies have.

While your army is Battle-forged, it gains Scatter the Foe

Scatter the Foe - Grey Knight models gain +1 to Invulnerable saves during the shooting phase, or a 5+ if they have none. When a Grey Knight model rolls a 6 to wound in the shooting phase you may choose to deal a mortal wound instead of normal damage. At any time you may choose to lose Scatter the Foe and gain Shatter Their Resolve for the remainder of the battle.

Shatter Their Resolve - Roll a d6 when a Grey Knight model would lose a wound, on a roll of 5+ that wound is ignored. When a Grey Knight unit deals mortal wounds in your psychic phase they deal one additional mortal wound. At any time you may choose to lose Shatter Their Resolve and gain Scour the Remains for the remainder of the battle.

Scour the Remains - Grey Knight models gain +1 to Invulnerable saves during the fight phase, or a 5+ if they have none. When a Grey Knight model rolls a 6 to wound in the fight phase you may choose to deal a mortal wound instead of normal damage.

Something like this would get both players thinking and engaging with the army.

1) Across the board points reduction
2) Give them REGULAR Smite
3) Male the Psylencer an Assault weapon with a profile similar to a Plasma Gun

Done.

The issues with GK are due to legacy problems.

GK as an army use to difficult to target at ranges over 18”, which was a defining design feature that when removed forced GK players to close as fast as possible instead of fighting at close to mid range.

GK don’t have Storm Shields because their Force Sword were suppose to Parry, which gave the model a +1 bonus to their Invul save, but then GW forgot they removed Parry from the game, so didn’t replace it for GK with something similar.

GK use to have strong Deep Strike Tactics based around their various Teleport abilities, unit GW homogenized those abilities without giving GK the specialized tactics other Chapters got to compensate. This particular point is even more indicative of bad game design from GW, because GK had a Special Character name Grand Master Mordrak that could Deep Strike without error with a squad of Terminators, except that GW removed Mordrak and given his ability to Beliel of the Dark Angels.

When GW asked for feed back from the community on what players wanted to see in their favorite factions, the GK community presented GW with a list including Paladins with +1 W, Jet Bikes, Storm Shield units, Contemptor Dreadnoughts (with a Storm Shield), etc.. GW apparently love our suggestions so much, they publish them in Codex Adaptus Custodes, and then stripped most of the uniqueness from the GK codex.

Which means that to fix the Grey Knights, GK needs to go back to the beginning and rethink what they want GK to do, and rebuild them from the ground up. I would recommend specific abilities for each unit that are not tied the a Psychic Power, due to the Rule of One being such a handicap to a Psychic army. Area denial for Strikes was a neat ability back in the day, and could be a good way to differentiate them going forward. Interceptors already have their thing, they are just too expensive. GKT use to have an AoE attack before that was moved to Purifiers, but since GKT are our core Troop choice (Strikes are “Scouts”), GKT could use a points reduction and Hammerhand or Psybolts as an innate ability instead of a power or upgrade, for example.

The GK special weapons are badly balanced for the current rules set. Psycannons use to have two firing modes, then were crippled by Salvo rules; just revert them back to two firing modes, one short ranged assault with the other a much heavier hitting heavy anti-monster/vehicle mode. Psilencers are fine being high output anti-Infantry ranged Force weapons, so let them be so; heavy, high rate of fire, d3 damage, deals an additional MW on a to Wound role of a 6. Incinerators need to be 9”-10”, not 8”. Those changes plus Astral Aim inherent on Purgation Squads will make those viable, given across the board point reductions.

Purifiers need to have more base attacks and a better range on their Cleansing Flame. They also need firepoints on Rhinos.

GK HQ choices all suck. They need to be differentiated into functional roles that are worth taking. GK players should want to take all of them, which forces the players to have to chose between all good options. I am not advocating for points reductions for HQs, no, we should pay for good options. Just give us good options. The GMDK was a horrible mistake, but genie is out of the bottle; just make the other option competitive with the GMDK. We should want to take a Grand Master because he gives us CP and CP recovery. We should want to take a Brother-Captain for cheap re-rolls. We should want to take Librarians because they are a force multiplier that can buff the entire army one unit at a time, or be the artillery. We should want to take a Chaplain to get into melee quicker and to crank up our assault phase to 11! We should want to take a Brotherhood Champion to tie up big models with a guy they just can’t kill. And we should want to take DreadKnights, not just GM DreadKnights.

In the gaming industry, those are called interesting choices, as in, any choice you make is good, but any choice you make means not having access to what you didn’t choose.

SJ

Honestly I'd get rid of them as an army as we understand them, move away from competitive design and make them a small elite force and god damned nightmare vs daemons.

They just don't function like people seem to think they should. And that's the problem.
You're trying to balance them to be competitive vs Orks and marines and tau etc.
They have NOTHING that makes them anything more than space marines vs those.
Vs none daemons they really have nothing special going for them so what can you do for them? Invent bs additions just so they work in tournaments?
Great create a bland army.

Give them buffs vs psykers? Sure.
Give your opponents extra buffs so you get super buffs? Fine
Give them MASSIVE buffs vs daemons? Absolutely.

But none of that will work in competition as it's all adding random elements which today's players cannot handle.

GK to me feel like they need two codex entries each unit.
One for use against every army. The bland boring cookie cutter space marines in silver with a few small extras (reduce shooting range. Power weapons. Deep strike)
And then the vs daemons space marines that are like super heroes that stand alone but with enough power to topple daemon princes (which in the novels seems to be quite easy)

You could probably start by giving them the Primaris Marine Statline at no point increase. Then they wouldn't be so squishy to incoming firepower, nor so pillowfisted in close combat.

See marine fixes.

Currently they can be quite good in a couple of ways.
1. Strikers are good all-rounders with meh durability but nice damage if you factor in both shooting and mellee.
2. They have good hq options. Voldus, champion, Crowe and gm in a dreadknight are all really good.

You got to use this to be competitive.

I like the stormraven/landraider bomb with Voldus, champion and 9-10 strikers with falchions and a couple warding staffs just in case you feel lucky with 5++ or 4++ saves. The rest of the list is deepstriking strikers and a rhino/razorback with psylancer devastator guyz that aim for out-of-los shooting with magic bullets. If you take a lr, you have an option to teleport it turn one. Though, a lr is objectively worse power-wise than a plane, it gives you solid protection against sudden death.

So far, it's been doing good. Haven't played a lot though, but it feels like a decent all-rounder list at 1250-1500 pt games.
There's probably an option for monster-nash with dk masters, paladins and stuff like that but i feel it's weaker in the current meta than a striker bomb.

I wouldn't, but I don't think the smaller armies in 40K need to be competitive with the big top tier armies. I don't think it's necessary to make every army super-tournament-competitive at all.

-Increase attacks on all units by 1 and 2 for purifiers.
-Bring back the Shrouding by giving them -1 to be hit by shooting from units over 12" away.
-Regular Smite on Characters
-Allow them to cast multiple of the same psychic power per turn. Maybe twice instead of once.
-Nemesis swords provide 5++ in combat or +1 invulnerable.
-Psybolt Ammo increases strength of storm bolters by 1.
-Psycannons -2 ap and damage 3
-Psylancer change to assault
-6's to wound from Nemesis weapons cause 1 mortal wound, and d3 mortal wounds against daemons.
-Points decreases where necessary.
-Bring in Primaris Grey Knights

 koooaei wrote:
Currently they can be quite good in a couple of ways.
1. Strikers are good all-rounders with meh durability but nice damage if you factor in both shooting and mellee.
2. They have good hq options. Crowe

You lost any sense of credibility you might have had the moment you made that statement. Crowe is the definition of garbage.

2+/4++ and 5 wounds throwing D6 mw, some second cast, a bit of stormbolter fire and 6-7 wounds before saves vs t4 is really not bad for one of the cheapest avaliable gk hq.
And once again, you're fixating on some negative ideal you've imagined for some reason while there really is a lot of good stuff going on for gk.
Sure, if you adopt the easiest to understand simplistic raw killing power and pts effeciency ideology, stuff ain't great. But there is also a very important scoring and positioning aspect. You don't need to be more effective at killing and surviving to win games handilly. All you need is to get more vp and don't let your opponent grt ahead. And you can do it much easier by denying ground eith a mixed shooty/mellee army. And gk are pretty good at it.

I'm telling you what works. And you're trying to persuade me it's bad and i should feel bad because?..

 koooaei wrote:
2+/4++ and 5 wounds throwing D6 mw, some second cast and 6-7 wounds before saves vs t4 is really not bad for one of the cheapest avaliable gk hq.
And once again, you're fixating on some negative ideal you've imagined for some reason while there really is a lot of good stuff going on for gk.

Crowe takes everything wrong with Purifiers and turns it to 11.
1. He doesn't really benefit his army like other HQ choices
2. The Smite is at 3" unless you want to spend more points to increase its range, at that point why bother
3. Generating an extra attack on a 6 to WOUND is not as snazzy as having a weapon with D3 damage or any AP value.
4. He's stuck with a Warlord trait that's not First To The Fray

No, Crowe is garbage, pure and simple. A regular Brotherhood Champion will serve you better.

 Elbows wrote:
I wouldn't, but I don't think the smaller armies in 40K need to be competitive with the big top tier armies. I don't think it's necessary to make every army super-tournament-competitive at all.

I'm guessing you don't play GKs. every army should have at least some sort of viability. GKs aren't asking to be top tier tourny winners, just to be well.. useful

 koooaei wrote:
Currently they can be quite good in a couple of ways.
1. Strikers are good all-rounders with meh durability but nice damage if you factor in both shooting and mellee.
2. They have good hq options.Voldus, champion, Crowe and gm in a dreadknight are all really good.

You got to use this to be competitive.

WHAT IS THIS CRAP?



You have no fething idea what Grey Knights are. I'm sigging this when I get home.

EDIT: Go look on the first page of the GK Tactica, I know it was written by ME, but I know for a fact every GK player agrees with me on the ratings of every unit; look at Crowe's special category.

I'll explain why Crowe is bad real quick.

1. Crowe has a bad trait
2. Crowe has no AP
3. Crowe has no deepstrike
4. Crowe has only STR4 unless you use a psychic power
5. Crowe offers nothing to the army, 125 points of Purifiers is better and they are literally the 2nd worst unit in the codex.
6. Crowe cannot take relics
7. Crowe is either footslogging up the board, using GoI, or using a transport. If he uses GoI you are using that power to not be able to move any far more useful unit up the board.
8. Since Crowe is not going to footslog up the board if you are using him, you are now paying for a transport, when all the transports are too expensive for GK.
9. He is a psykers, which is actually a downside because there are a lot of anti-psyker things now.
10. In the same thread of reasoniong he is a GK HQ, why would you take a HQ that is not Voldus, Draigo, or GMDK is unknown. Not taking those three is literally shooting yourself in the knee.

Crowe is good at one thing. Melee vs. Hordes that have invul saves. That is literally only Daemons. Even then the Daemons win most of the time, nurgle T shenanigans means that you actually fail to wound, slaneesh rending means that 2+ is useless. I haven't fought tzaangors or brimstones so can't say, but Khorne fleshhounds are mostly a wash, depends how many stormbolter shots he got off.

Maybe try to come off as a little less ragey just because someone has a higher opinion of a unit than you do? You can make a point about why you feel Crowe isn’t worth it without being a dick.

meleti wrote:
Maybe try to come off as a little less ragey just because someone has a higher opinion of a unit than you do? You can make a point about why you feel Crowe isn’t worth it without being a dick.

Maybe don't try and talk up what is objectively, mathematically an /awful/ unit.

 raverrn wrote:

meleti wrote:
Maybe try to come off as a little less ragey just because someone has a higher opinion of a unit than you do? You can make a point about why you feel Crowe isn’t worth it without being a dick.

Maybe don't try and talk up what is objectively, mathematically an /awful/ unit.

Yeah, it’s much better to be an /awful/ person.

Just don’t be a dick. This isn’t difficult.

Give them a new Psychic power chart and rules.

I would LOVE to see them be able to be tactical with there powers, the ability to use the right power at the right time

* Each power can be used more than once =, but no unit can be effected by more than 1 power and goes off on a 5+
* The powers are Pick 1 or roll on D6
1) +1 Atk (Pick 1, range or melee)
2) +1Str (Pick 1, range or melee)
3) +1Tough
4) additional -1 rend (pick 1, range or melee)
5) Pick 1, Re-roll charges or +2 movement
6) +1 to all saves

* Fix smite on them

Put the inquisition back in their codex, and make them Codex: Ordo Malleus.

I think i've explained why i think Crowe is good. You need 2 hq. You're tight on pts. D6 smite is good. He costs a tiny bit more over a champion. I think he's a decent sidegrade. The fact that he has no ds and a 3" smite doesn't matter that much if you're running transports. I've been using a lr/stormraven and Crowe's done good enough.
I've basically run every hq other than Stern and a techmarine and i've listed the ones that i've used AND have seen being used with good results. Simple as that.

 greyknight12 wrote:
Put the inquisition back in their codex, and make them Codex: Ordo Malleus.

This is my fix. I miss my Inquisitorial Stormtroopers.