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I've heard a lot of people put forward ways to improve the grey knights and get them out of the hole they are in currently. Thinking on it the other day I thought of a simple buff when comparing them to their Chaotic counterpart, the Thousand Sons.

Give them access to another psychic discipline.

It doesn't even have to be a completely new discipline, they could simply gain access to the vanilla marines Librarius Discipline. To me it makes sense fluff wise, as they are supposed to be these amazing psykers, and I don't think it would be game breaking either, just a simple little buff that would add more utility and some variation rather than running through several squads and spamming smite. I feel like the 1k sons and their access to multiple psychic disciplines really helps them as they also have baby smites, plus I don't think the librarius discipline is overly strong either. Sure you could get some strong combos with Hammerhand and Might of the Ancients, but I don't think that would be much of an issue considering GK have access to few high strength melee weapons with the exception of baby carriers.

I would love to hear what some of you guys think. Am I crazy, or is this a decent buff?

I think the problem with GK is the same as with other SM troops. There’s no power in powerarmour anymore, and weapons with huge quantity of shots pass invul saves. Lots of things have weapons that do it all: high quantity high quality shots.

That does not correct the issue, they are still far to over costed. dont forget T sons have actually really crappy units. The only good things to come out of the T son codex are their HQs which are amazing. But rubrics, SOT, even with their disciplines are horrible because of their cost. Same issue with Grey knights, they just cost way to much.

Proxy them as Drukhari.

Doesn't help them at all when they're overcosted but still die as easily as normal Marines.

I'll agree, they are still expensive, with that being a large issue, but one that can't be corrected easily without them being too strong. If you gave normal tacticals a power sword and storm bolter they'd only be 2 points cheaper.

Just spitballing for simple ways to correct them without over correcting. A lot of the posts I've seen for how to improve them are incredibly over the top. Sure they could reduce the price of them by 1 or 2 ppm, but I'm not sure it would
solve much. I'd love to say they could improve their T or W characteristics but that strikes me as too much.

Maybe making them a 2+ flat for everyone or give them a rule like rubrics (add 1 to saves for 1 dmg) could help as well.

As far as rubrics go and strikes go. They are both overcosted but IMO. They are the best power armor units you can take out of all the options. Why?

TS are great because they have low AP shooting and stratagems to buff them further for 1 CP and psychic powers that synergize with offense and defense of the rubric. Plus a psychic denial. They probably need to go down in price by 2-3 points and be allowed to take a heavy per 5 and the sorcerer should also be able to take a bolter.

Strike are a mixed bag hybrid unit - good shooting and good CC. 2 Attacks at str 4 ap-2 and d3 damage is pretty good. Storm bolters are good too. The probably cost 3-4 points too much and they should get an additional rule to keep them in the game. If GK got a spell that was an aura + 1 to your save and grants 5++ save I think they could be viable. Plus their smite needs to be changed to work just like the TS rubrics.


Both these units including all brotherhood of psykers type units should also have new rules to help with the perils effect. Like The damage should not spill over to other members in the unit. You could also fix it by just giving them a 3+ to ignore perils of the warp (but if you do this - the spell auto fails) Something like that.

Another thing that could help both armies would be if they were allowed to ignore the psychic focus rule. Cast the same power more than once but at a -1 to successive casts.

TS without psy focus would be broken as hell. People are already horrified on how easily I snipe characters.
At least the HQs would be.

Rubrics and GK need to be improved as part of an overall PA and termi buff, but NOT made cheaper.

And it should be something small too. To many marine buff suggestions are way over the top

Couple of ideas what they can do:

- Amalgamate Inquisition into GK Codex.
- Price drops across the board.
- GK Primaris; not necessarily all Primaris units as they're not mainly Daemon-specialised, but Intercessors and Aggressors would be nice to see.
- They need a big suvivability boost; no point paying for Storm Botlers and Force Weapons if you're still T4 W1, so something like this: "Nimbus of Purity: The aura of faith surrounding the Grey Knights turns aside all but the most grievious of wounds - Units with this rule have 5+ FNP".

The easiest way to make them better is to turn off the computer and stop reading sites like this. Play them in a local scene and they are absolutely fine. Tournament rankings and peoples over-inflated online opinions aren't worth much when you play a few games here and there with some mates in a local store.

 Hollow wrote:
The easiest way to make them better is to turn off the computer and stop reading sites like this. Play them in a local scene and they are absolutely fine. Tournament rankings and peoples over-inflated online opinions aren't worth much when you play a few games here and there with some mates in a local store.

But there is a huge difference in competitiveness against other armies. Some people (like myself) do have GK and would like to play them at tournaments, yet there's no point.

 Hollow wrote:
The easiest way to make them better is to turn off the computer and stop reading sites like this. Play them in a local scene and they are absolutely fine. Tournament rankings and peoples over-inflated online opinions aren't worth much when you play a few games here and there with some mates in a local store.

An example of bad advise.

GK also suffer from being the first codex, there for one of the weakest

 Hollow wrote:
The easiest way to make them better is to turn off the computer and stop reading sites like this. Play them in a local scene and they are absolutely fine. Tournament rankings and peoples over-inflated online opinions aren't worth much when you play a few games here and there with some mates in a local store.

You a GW employee? You sound like one.

 Hollow wrote:
The easiest way to make them better is to turn off the computer and stop reading sites like this. Play them in a local scene and they are absolutely fine. Tournament rankings and peoples over-inflated online opinions aren't worth much when you play a few games here and there with some mates in a local store.

They're bad even in friendly games.

The friendly game has 21 dissy cannon shots instead of 40+. You're still dead as GK.

Make all marines plague marines, and then give plague marines more? Death guard marines and terminators are pretty nice, not competitive, but not the slouches that standard marines are, between 3 plasma per 5, flails and stratagems, I think they are the best marines in the game. Or make ceramite have the special rule that it ignores rend-1?

I'd rather that go to maybe a specific sub faction. That would be better for someone like Salamanders.

I have literally never seen Grey Knights on the table, so forgive my ignorance...
What exactly do they suffer from? Lack of punch? Lack of durability? Lack of speed? All of the above?

Zustiur wrote:
I have literally never seen Grey Knights on the table, so forgive my ignorance...
What exactly do they suffer from? Lack of punch? Lack of durability? Lack of speed? All of the above?

Bit of everything. They are as soft as tactical marines, don't have all that much punch in h2h, shoots hordes ~okayish except there's very few models. Speed wise...Well they are foot slogging though can at least deep strike and teleport mid game but that's not super awesome and with 9" charges required...

Haven't played vs them often but for example last tournament 1.5k I faced them. Now albeit opponent list wasn't optimized(no allies, no grand masters in dreadknight which is the only unit worth anything in the book frankly...) due to what was painted and what not for him but anyway. He had 26 models in total. My orks(which are still index aka "we suck" stage) had 243 models. Basically what happened was I ran over him by sheer numbers. He did nuke one squad by deep striking stuff in and then storm boltered them away and I got slightly lucky succeeding to charge his dreadnought before he could kill my kustom mega kannons(about 52% chance of doing that). He tried to deal with them but despite shooting ~half the squad(which I used to my advantage by removing casualties from front including nob with big choppa thus ensuring his characters couldn't charge) 2 squads of grey knights ended up getting killed with just one lone knight teleporting away(incidentally that shooting was btw I think very bad mistake for him. Apart from characters not being able to charge and thus not kill my boyz that left those characters free to shoot...).

He couldn't score objectives either due to small numbers and the fact I basically ran over the objectives. He was so small numbers that even grots shooting(I had 99 grots incidentally) was serious threat. Yeah only 12" range, BS4+ and S3 but every casualty hurts a lot.

In the end orks which are, due to still being in index, one of the worst armies ran over and wiped out. Generally orks are totally outclassed against codexes(no surprise seeing GW deliberately made codexes trump index in terms of power) but GK are so bad that they are in trouble against index armies let alone proper codexes.

(and it's not like I even had super uber ork army nor was my strategy particularly cunning...Line up, orks in columns rather than line, and march forward into objectives and then start wondering how to kill. Sneakiest things I did was that da jump to charge that dreadnought and da jump unit of grots to provide shooting against one character before charging to get some wounds in to ensure he dies)

GK are the only Codex army that was better in the Index (if only marginally). Their codex removed options and made some choices more expensive (GKT), the Rule of One in the Psychic phase is crippling for an all Psyker army given their limited access to powers, the Beta rules hurt GK more than other armies due to their reliance on Deep Striking, and GK unit’s are too expensive per model to justify their their mediocre stat lines. All in all, GW overcompensated when they decided to tone down the GK going into 8th, and while they learned from that mistake with later codexes, they still haven’t fix their F Up with GK.

SJ