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How many characters are you taking? Attaching characters to units can provide many benefits. From fight first, 5+ critical hits, feel no pain, the list of boons is extensive. But how many characters do you take? One for each squad, two for a death star unit, lone operatives to hold back field objectives safely? For an example I'm taking a chaplain for a terminator squad, WGBL for thunderwolves, 3 WGPL Terminator/cyclone ml for 3 grey hunter squads. That's already 5 characters, and I'm tempted to take 3 Librarians for my grey hunter squads to give them a 4++ save!

If my opponent has a lot of characters I can easily max out assassinate. Then I just need one more. (Building for behind enemy lines of instance is nice.)

In both my 10th games my Ork opponent has played 6 characters, making secondaries very easy.

Orks probably just want to bite the bullit. Space Wolves as well.

How many characters are you taking?

How long is a piece of string?

It really depends on the army and then on the list itself.

My LoV rarely have more than 2-3 characters.
My SM maybe 3-5.
My IG probably have 6+ in some lists and then less than 3 in others.

Edit: With that said, I'd say you have "too many" characters when you're reaching a point where your list would perform better with less characters and more units.
Example: Is it better to take 3 squads of X with character Y attached, or would it be better to simply bring 5 squds of X?

It'll depend upon the size of my force & what I want units to be doing.

I've now played 5 games of 10th
The first two I used the same small SM. The only character I used was Chaplain on bike, leading an outsider squad.

Game #3 I used Necrons. I had 5. Technomancer x1 Lord x1, & 3 Lokust Lords.

Games #4 & #5, Necrons. 3 Lokust Lords (it was literally 1/2 the previous list))

We'll just have to see how future lists work out.

A buffing unit needs to buff a certain amount of points to be efficient. Necrons for example have an enhancement which has a 6" aura which gives everyone within range +1 to hit. That ~90 points for buffing 500+ points, maybe even up to 1000 points. Extremely good. In my opinion, the ratio needs to be at least two to three times, thats 50 points buffing 100-150 points to be good, depending on the buff. If thats not the case i just take more units.

For example, a lokhust lord for 85 points gives +1 to hit to a lokhust destroyer unit. Three lokhust destroyer are 90 points. Thats 175 points for the lord and destroyers, for 9 shots hitting on 2s, giving me 7.5 hits. For almost the same points (180) i can take six lokhust destroyers, and i get 18 shots hitting on 3s, giving me 12 hits. In this case i would go with six lokhust destroyers, more hits for pretty much the same points. As a side effect the unit is harder to wipe out, and i can keep the unit alive longer with reanimation.