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We have anti- horde, multi Anti-10 or more wounds, a anti- MC/tank MSU spam, anti character, etc.. there are even Secondaries that overlap the same units like 10+ wound MC/Vehicles.

What we are missing is anti-elite, mid size multi wound units, Example Skyweavers, Aggressors, Eradicators, Terminators, Grotesques, etc...

Seeing GW wants to sell those now...no we don't need. Game is working as GW intended.

Oh, they exist already. They're called beatstick psykers. Mephiston says hi.
...oops, didn't realise we were talking Secondary Mission objectives in particular.

That would be very unbalanced vs armies like 1ksons and GK, who already give up the psyker secondary in every game. If there was also an anti elite one, then in all games the opponents of those two armies would be getting max points without even trying very hard.

Karol wrote:
That would be very unbalanced vs armies like 1ksons and GK, who already give up the psyker secondary in every game. If there was also an anti elite one, then in all games the opponents of those two armies would be getting max points without even trying very hard.

And then when Custodes, Marines, and many other armies roll up with 10 units with 10-12 wounds that out kills you and can hold objectives just as easily but also has more options for secondaries compare to almost all xeno's armies. Yeah thats balanced.

Also Vehicle heavy armies gives up 2 secondaries every game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Or modify and tone down some of the other kill secondaries.

Karol wrote:
That would be very unbalanced vs armies like 1ksons and GK, who already give up the psyker secondary in every game. If there was also an anti elite one, then in all games the opponents of those two armies would be getting max points without even trying very hard.

A Purge the Enemy Secondary Objective that is anti-elite would have to compete with Titan Hunter, Bring It Down, and Assassinate. How would that make it any easier to score points against Thousand Sons and Grey Knights?

 Amishprn86 wrote:


Also Vehicle heavy armies gives up 2 secondaries every game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Or modify and tone down some of the other kill secondaries.

or they could just kill off all secondary points and get rid of them?

Maybe they could stop beating about the bush and just give people +10VPs for playing a Marine army.

At the very least, Thin Their Ranks needs to be based entirely on wounds and not models killed. That would at least go some way to allowing players to pick somewhat legitimate secondaries versus MEQ lists.

GW also needs to look into making secondaries not stack, so for instance you couldn't go Abhor the Witch and Assassinate and get 8 points for killing a 2W Warlock. This is especially silly as that unit of 6 Aggressors or 9 Shining Spears gives up 0 VP's.

Not allowing models/units to count for more than one secondary would help a lot, as would something... about busting gangs maybe?

There is one that gives VP for wounds worth of models killed, however to max it out you have to kill 150 infantry wounds or 15 10 wound vehicles.

This is not easy at all. It needs to be about 20% less.

Change it so that instead of dividing by 10 on the tally its divided by 8. Also count total wounds dealt to monsters and vehicles, not just a flat 10 on the tally for any vehicle over 10 wounds.

 Eihnlazer wrote:
There is one that gives VP for wounds worth of models killed, however to max it out you have to kill 150 infantry wounds or 15 10 wound vehicles.

This is not easy at all. It needs to be about 20% less.

Change it so that instead of dividing by 10 on the tally its divided by 8. Also count total wounds dealt to monsters and vehicles, not just a flat 10 on the tally for any vehicle over 10 wounds.

This secondary would be more "fair" if it just counted up the wounds of models you killed instead of the models with those of 10+ wounds being worth 10.

That way killing 5 W2 models would be worth the same as 10 W1 models, which takes about the same amount of effort to kill. Or killing a W8 dreadnought would be worth more than 1 model out of 150 models.

To follow the spirit of the anti-hore and anti-monster choices, the "elite buster" should punish a list made almost solely of 2W and 3W models, without supporting walkers and vehicles.

1 point for every 5 2W infantry/biker/beast killed and 1 point for every 3 3+W infantry/bikers/beasts.

That would give 6 points for killing 30 marines and 9 for 27 Gravis/Outrider/Terminator models of any kind, which makes most of the 2k budget.

Mixing some vehicles, walkers, monsters or chaff could lower the available amount to 10-12 points easily.

Karol wrote:
That would be very unbalanced vs armies like 1ksons and GK, who already give up the psyker secondary in every game. If there was also an anti elite one, then in all games the opponents of those two armies would be getting max points without even trying very hard.

That's a problem with Abhor The Witch, an awful secondary that 100% will be nerfed sooner or later because it's just terrible.

It has nothing to do with the point that the secondaries very conspicuously lack anything you can pick against Space Marines.

This was obviously a deliberate choice, as the ITC secondaries they transparently copied had much better coverage for elite armies. They're not so stupid that they just forgot to copy over gangbusters and just forgot to fix reaper to count wounds instead of models.

yukishiro1 wrote:

Karol wrote:
That would be very unbalanced vs armies like 1ksons and GK, who already give up the psyker secondary in every game. If there was also an anti elite one, then in all games the opponents of those two armies would be getting max points without even trying very hard.

That's a problem with Abhor The Witch, an awful secondary that 100% will be nerfed sooner or later because it's just terrible.

It has nothing to do with the point that the secondaries very conspicuously lack anything you can pick against Space Marines.

It's only available to armies that do not participate in the psychic phase. They can have it.

No. If the psychic phase is overpowered (lol), nerf the psychic phase. Don't handicap psychic factions. Using secondaries to balance basic game mechanics is stupid.

You might as well have an Abhor The Boltgun secondary that gives you 3 points for each unit you kill that has a ranged weapon, as long as no more than 20% of the models in your army have ranged weapons with greater than 12" range.

And we could have Abhor the Close Combat Weapon too, for armies with no more than 20% of their models armed with something with better than S:U AP 0 weapons. 4 points for each unit armed with better than that that you kill.

If we like Abhor The Witch, we like those too, right?

Why would they include a secondary that punishes the models they want to sell?

They want to sell all the models they produce... or they wouldn’t make them.

Oh wait it was soapboxing not actual logic, as you were...

How about having no kill secondaries instead...

Given that 2.25 of 5 groups of secendary objectives are kill objectives, we can safely say that ship has already sailed.

Not having any kill primary or secondary would be a mistake, it'd weight things too heavily towards non-interactive lists.

But there is no valid reason at all to have kill secondaries that punish every army archetype except the space marine archetype.

I think that the game desperately needs something like this too as a counter to lots of the best lists at the minute.

Just, how? How do you write one that doesn't make it an autoinclude against almost every faction?

 McMagnus Mindbullets wrote:
I think that the game desperately needs something like this too as a counter to lots of the best lists at the minute.

Just, how? How do you write one that doesn't make it an autoinclude against almost every faction?

It shouldn't be that hard. We already have Thin Their Ranks for mass model armies. We have Titan Hunter and Bring It Down for the Titanic, Vehicle, and Monster armies. So we only really need to deal with the elite Infantry, Battlesuit, and Bike list. So it could go something like this:

Bleed Their Strength
The enemy forces contains a large number of elite warrior. Destroy them to prevent their ability to prosecute further offensive actions.
If you select this objective, keep a tally of kill points each time an enemy Infantry, Calvary, Bike, or Battlesuit model that has more than 1 for its Wound Characteristic on its model profile, and add 1 to this tally (add 2 to the tally instead if the destroyed model's Wound Characteristic is 3 or more). <stuff about counting a model if it comes back and is destroyed a second time>. At the end of the battle, divide your kill points tally by 4 and round down - the result is the number victory points you score.

To maximize your VP count you need to kill:
* 60 Models with 2 Wounds
* 30 Models with 3+ Wounds
* 40 Models with 2 Wounds and 10 Models with 3+ Wounds
* 32 Models with 2 Wounds and 14 Models with 3+ Wounds

These are all still model intensive armies even for elite forces, so not an auto-take. The winning Space Marine List from Varberg GT (https://www.40kstats.com/varberggt) has 21 3+ Wound models plus 10 (would be) 2 W models that meet the requirement. That's just enough to get 13 VP if you table the non-vehicle elements of the list.

ITC had it figured out just fine, just copy gangbusters the way they copied everything else.

I think it'd probably be better to make it focused on 3W+ models rather than 2W+ models, because if you include 2W+ models then it hits every marine faction and you have to scale it really low accordingly. If you make it only hit 3W+ models (probably excluding troops, for the same reason ITC gangbusters did) you can turn up the scaling significantly.

E.g. 3VP for each unit composed of 3W+ models (plural) destroyed. Suddenly you're thinking a bit more before taking 3 units of eradicators and 2 units of aggressors, because that's 15VP right there for your opponent.

Honestly, I kinda like the idea of "Elites" being powerful, overcosted units that don't award many VP's.


But of course, that involves balancing and GW's gigabrain can't manage to balance some tin men.

I really think it's a bad idea to have secondaries being used as a balance tool, whether to nerf a whole phase (Abhor the Witch) or to boost a faction or archtype (by not having a secondary for elites).

Secondaries to punish skew are fine, but you get into problems when you start using them to try to compensate for unbalanced points values or base rules.

Yeah, honestly, I feel like the real answer is to address this with points. Fixing secondaries doesn't do anything to help people in Open play, for example - and ok, I know Open is supposed to be a bit more lawless, but being run roughshod over because of points imbalance isn't fun for them either.

With that said, if we're dying on this hill - instead of doing it by Wounds, let's make it grant points by wiping units of a certain size. Let's say, a point for wiping each non-Character Infantry/Cavalry/Bike unit that started the battle with 10 models or less - and an extra point if they started at 5 or less. (Not sure how balanced that would be, I'm open to suggestions.)
I'm suggesting this approach because it should give Marine players pause, instead of just automatically taking 5-man squads or immediately combat-squadding their 10-man squads without even having to think about it.

It should also work as a nice replacement for Abhor The Witch, as Grey Knights and Thousand Sons would be a suitable force to use this against - and Tzeentch Daemon armies with big Horror mobs are good to take the existing Thin Their Ranks against anyway.

I don't think we need a secondary to punish MSU, the problem is the lack of secondary that punishes elite multi-model units.

3 VP for each squad destroyed that is made up of at least two models that each have 3+ wounds, exempting troops. Put it in the same category as the anti-vehicle/monster one, so you can't double up with that.

That's all you need. Suddenly those 3 man space marine squads have a downside instead of being pure upside. Also addresses dog spam for ad mech, and spawn spam for chaos. It'd do a number on nurglings and kataphons too if you didn't exempt troops, though I think you probably should.

Do that, remove Abhor (or put it in the same category as the new elite punisher and open it up to everyone but reduce it to 2VP per psychic squad and 3 VP per psychic character), and the secondaries would be in a usable state competitively. Still not perfect, but pretty decent.

 Eihnlazer wrote:
There is one that gives VP for wounds worth of models killed, however to max it out you have to kill 150 infantry wounds or 15 10 wound vehicles.

This is not easy at all. It needs to be about 20% less.

Change it so that instead of dividing by 10 on the tally its divided by 8. Also count total wounds dealt to monsters and vehicles, not just a flat 10 on the tally for any vehicle over 10 wounds.

It's not just "not easy". It's nearly impossible unless it's an army of aggressors fighting an army of grots. Even then the grots would probably win if they went first.

That secondary is really, really bad.

how about not having secondary objectives in the first place. it's a stupid mechanic and yet another way for GW to feth up. if anything they need to reduce the gamey bs and stop adding it in before they get a handle on the core functionality.