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Hi everyone,

I'm somewhat new to this forum, so forgive me if this isn't the correct place for this post. I'm wondering if, with the increase in points for the Knight Castellan and nerf to rotate ion shields, if T8 3+ vehicles might be more viable again. I'm not sure if less Castellans on the board is enough to shift the meta to less tank-buster (fewer Castellans and fewer anti-tank to kill Castellans) and more horde-buster. Thoughts?

I don't know enough about the eldar/dark eldar nerfs to fully understand how they would contribute to this topic, but feel free to comment on those if they apply.

I'm taking more lascannons now, so i vote no.

Martel732 wrote:
I'm taking more lascannons now, so i vote no.

Yeah, but you're such a huge outlier playing in that weird meta of yours that I'm not quite sure it's relevant what you're doing.

On topic - cheap, or points efficient T8 3+ vehicles are likely to show up more often now. The elite ones with multiple roles or special rules will continue to struggle competitively. They really need more wounds.

Same weapons used to kill castellans are used to kill other T8 targets.

Not every list is geared towards killing castellan specificaly but most lists will have way to deal with high wound T8 models.

Things like other knight variants, wraith knight, wraith lord, leman russ, repulsor, dreds with might of heroes. Those are all targets for same weapons that would be used to shoot castellan.

i'd be surprised if the number of anti-T8 stuff dropped a bit because ONE T8 model is now less common, even if its drastically less common.
T8, even non-knight stuff like my 'naut or wagons, are still durable enough to be a major problem if you do not have the proper big guns around. Nowhere near as hard as a knight to remove, but still hard enough where if you ran out of S8+ weapons with multidamage have fun killing them...

Yeah with people already starting to swap in commander russes, S9+* firepower isn't going to be going anywhere.
* or other lower S with rerolls.

T7 vehicals are still pretty trash unfortunately though for marines.

As a necron player one thing that does interest me is does this shift gear from tons of shots with D2 or similar toward more high AT busting guns like lascannons. As a rule of thumb less autocannon type of weapons and more lascannons the better it's for necrons.

Thanks everyone for the quick responses!

tneva82 wrote:
As a necron player one thing that does interest me is does this shift gear from tons of shots with D2 or similar toward more high AT busting guns like lascannons. As a rule of thumb less autocannon type of weapons and more lascannons the better it's for necrons.

I'm also a Necron player, so this is something I've thought alot about. Do you mean better for quantum shielding? I think with the fall of the Castellana and nerf of eldar soup, we will see 2 big things that make quantum shielding (and DDAs in particular) less effective:

(1) The rise of Tau with their autocannon-like missiles and drone resilience to DDAs and other lascannon-like weapons
(2) The rise of other knights with avenger gatling cannons and perhaps battle cannons, and also less imperial soup/more leman russes with punishers and battlecannons.

The purpose of this post is that I expect to see a fall in tank-buster weapons (i.e. lascannon-like weapons) with the nerf on 3++ knights as well as a rise in other T8 vehicles (perhaps with autocannon-like or battle cannon-like weapons) with the increased cost of the castellan and its tank-busting madness. So, I wonder if Necron T8 heavy vehicles (i.e. monolith, obelisk) could be viable again if we see less lascannon-like weapons and more autocannon-like weapons.

Maybe I have it all backward - its difficult to think that far ahead.

MJBlacko wrote:
Thanks everyone for the quick responses!

tneva82 wrote:
As a necron player one thing that does interest me is does this shift gear from tons of shots with D2 or similar toward more high AT busting guns like lascannons. As a rule of thumb less autocannon type of weapons and more lascannons the better it's for necrons.

I'm also a Necron player, so this is something I've thought alot about. Do you mean better for quantum shielding? I think with the fall of the Castellana and nerf of eldar soup, we will see 2 big things that make quantum shielding (and DDAs in particular) less effective:

(1) The rise of Tau with their autocannon-like missiles and drone resilience to DDAs and other lascannon-like weapons
(2) The rise of other knights with avenger gatling cannons and perhaps battle cannons, and also less imperial soup/more leman russes with punishers and battlecannons.

The purpose of this post is that I expect to see a fall in tank-buster weapons (i.e. lascannon-like weapons) with the nerf on 3++ knights as well as a rise in other T8 vehicles (perhaps with autocannon-like or battle cannon-like weapons) with the increased cost of the castellan and its tank-busting madness. So, I wonder if Necron T8 heavy vehicles (i.e. monolith, obelisk) could be viable again if we see less lascannon-like weapons and more autocannon-like weapons.

Maybe I have it all backward - its difficult to think that far ahead.

Lol, I forgot about Necron players... I just bought a Porphyrion Knight, thinking it would be great against the new meta of lots of Knights, and totally forgot that it's 100% useless against Necrons because it's guns do a flat 6 damage.... Hopefully I never fight a Necron player, because if so almost half my army is useless against them!

I'm still rocking a ton of D2.

Knight armies still exist, any high tier competitive army list will still be looking to kill roughly a Knight per turn.

So no, nerfing the Castellan won't change what other units are viable to bring because the niche that everyone brought the Castellan for (killing Knights/Monsters/Tanks) is still a niche that needs to be filled.
They will just bring a slightly less effective unit for that job.

And I would even challenge the notion that we will see a lot of Castellan's go away. Even at an extra 100 points there are few replacements as effective and easy to slot into any existing Imperial army.

Keep in mind the FAQ did more than just nerf the Castellan. Many of the anti-armour threats became less potent.

 Horst wrote:

Lol, I forgot about Necron players... I just bought a Porphyrion Knight, thinking it would be great against the new meta of lots of Knights, and totally forgot that it's 100% useless against Necrons because it's guns do a flat 6 damage.... Hopefully I never fight a Necron player, because if so almost half my army is useless against them!

Well could be worse. They could be damage 7 when they literally WOULD be useless ;-) Now it's "only" 2++. Well except with stratagem when it is indeed immune.

You would still have autocannons against necrons, those work pretty good against QS.

Yeah, autocannons are probably the most points efficient weapon against QS. They are like 5 pts each? Well that 5 points is giving you 2 S7 AP-1 D2 shots.

You're going to be wounding on 3+, which is the best you're going to get until S12, you are reducing the saves to 5+, which is pretty decent, and you're stripping away 2 wounds at a time, which quickly adds up due to how many autocannons you can field.

I think you will see more personally. The castellan had a way of just annihilating those vehicles, lascannons etc require lots of rolls to achieve same result. If you are going to bring them though, bring many.

People can say "Well whatever we will just bring more lascannons for the same job", except that they forget that the reason that the castellan was taken (and will keep being taken) is the fact that it was by miles the most efficient you could get for that role. Even like this, other outlier lists, like hordes, already were quite good contenders since Castellans ate a good chunk of the army.
Now that the easy mode AT has been neutered, i don't see which lists can achieve the feat of taking down a knight per turn without becoming seriously skewed against those targets and becoming vulnerable to other kind of menaces.

Quick math shows that you would need 20 lascannons rerolling to hit and rerolling ones to wound just for a 24 wound knight.

Actually, i think that the big winners are the T7 models now.
Just above the Endless fury and bursttide strenght, identical to T8 for lascannons, Iontides, disintegrators and doomed reaper launchers.

T7 suffers more from autocannons, plasma and melta, but you see much less of it around lately. The only autocannons were the ones on the castellan. The only serious threat are hive guards.

I woudn't be surprised now if lists with a lot of cheap T7 start gaining ground, like Carnifex spam or rhino rush.