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I do believe that Fateweaver is extremely powerful and might even be a bargain at 300 pts. In my last few games, I've tried to hammer down a method to using the Warp Storm to first minimize potential damage, then maximize benefit in the correct situations. Here's what I've come up with.

1. Use the Grimoire on whatever you need to be super awesome. Use Fateweaver's reroll here if you fail. The idea is that failing the Grimoire is a death sentence for the target unit. If that unit is important, then that could be a game changing problem.

2. Roll for Warp Storm at the start of your shooting phase.

a) If you don't have your reroll from the Staff, you'll ONLY reroll a 2, 3 or a 4. You are in damage control here, you don't need the best results, you just need to do no harm.
b) If you do have your reroll left from the Staff, examine your roll. If you rolled a 6 on one of the dice and the other die is NOT a 4, 5 or 6, you need to reroll that die in hopes of getting a 4, 5 or 6. Each of those results is potentially game breaking. If you roll a 2, 3 or 4, do a complete reroll per the Lord of Unreality Warlord trait.
c) If you do have your reroll left from the Staff, examine your roll. If one of the dice is a 5 and your opponent has dangerous psykers, reroll that other die in hopes of rolling the 11. None of the other results are bad.
d) Reroll one die if you land on the God inappropriate result that could harm you badly, saving the highest die. In all other scenarios, do no rerolls on the Warp Storm chart and save your Staff reroll.

In my experience, the most lost potential I've seen in my games and others is not rerolling a single die in attempt to get that 10, 11 or 12. Getting one 6 should be setting off alarms in your mind that "I'm about to get a free squad of guys OR about to spawn a herald out of their psyker OR I'm about to improve my entire armies invul save OR randomly damage my enemies OR at worst have nothing happen."

Any thoughts on Fateweaver? What are your experiences with Warp Storm manipulation? Any other advice?

Fateweaver is a boss. He is almost always my Army's MVP.

Don't forget the various other needs for the Reroll. I always rank my rerolls in my head before I use one. Peril's protection (so always do spells in order of importance), leadership rerolls if you have a squad in combat, Daemon Weapon rerolls if you have an allied Prince/Typhus/etc.

My best reroll story happened the other day at the ATC. I was playing a very dangerous Dark Eldar player with my CSM/Daemons Army. He got a beast pack into combat with my Sorcerer (who was my warlord). I challenged out the Beastmaster, the Beasts killed all my cultists, I force weaponed the Beastmater to death. I know I've lost combat by 5 and I'm at risk of being swept. I roll on Boons of Chaos and get a 6 for the 10s and a 1 for the 1s. I reroll the 1, 6....Daemon Princes are fearless...

I wrote this up when the daemon codex came out --- it talks a lot about fateweaver's warp storm abilities.


This post is to talk a little bit about the warp table and how it will effect your army. This post is to also act as a brainstorming session to find ways to make the warp storm work for you.
Warp Calm has no effect on your game, so I will limit discussion in this post on it.

Never Tell Me the Odds
First of all, some parts of the table are just bad, while others are extremely good. A 2-4 will hurt you , while a 10-12 are pretty sweet. As anyone who has played Settlers of Catan knows, that 2-4 and 10-12 are not commonly rolled numbers. They will happen but not every day.


Fateweaver
Fatey is now a support character. His best feature (warlord trait) is that he allows you to manipulate the warp storm table.

You have ~16.66% of rolling a 4 or less on the warpstorm table -- what we define as a 'bad result' Just make it a standard practice to reroll any of those dice. This practice will alter the chances of a 'bad effect' on the warpstorm table from 16.66% to a 2.77% of getting a 4 or less twice in a row.

Secondly he can manipulate the dice results from the warp table itself. You should almost never be rolling a 7 with Fateweaver. Lets say you roll a 1 and a 6. Use Fateweaver's special power to pick up the 1 and reroll it. You have a 83.333% chance of changing a null result to an effective result.

You can do the same thing with a 2 and 5 result or 3 and 4 result. No matter what, there is no chance of you getting a result less than 5, meaning at worst your going to 'null out' again, and are much more likely to get a good result.

The warp storm table is not the 'end all-be all' but its an excellent tool. Fateweaver is the HQ that lets you exploit it.


Bring the Pain!
So the vast majority of your 'hits' will be 5-9, or wraths. This is a good thing, as they will hit your enemy units causing 'free' damage.


Limiting the Return
The balancing factor of the wraths is they also impact your units. This, however, can be mitigated to not impact your army as badly.

Playing the Right Gods
Of these wraths, Rot and Prince are the most common, meaning that Tzeentch and Khorne friendly models are more likely to be hit than Nurgle and Slaanesh. This means if you go mono-slaanesh your going to be hit less often. However, mono builds have a big drawback in that every one of your units are risking a hit when you roll that result.

Instruments!
Adding an instrument to your army dramatically changes the odds, due to the role of rerolls. Rerolling a 1/6 chance means your units go from being hit 16.67% of the time to 2.77% of the time. Those are workable odds. So the idea is simple. Make sure you have one instrument for each god/pair that your going to be working. If your fielding a slaanesh army, have a unit of bloodletters with an instrument in your army.

Who Cares?
With some builds you just won't care. Lets say your nurgle unit are 15 deckchair plague bearers. Those guys will just sit in area terrain/ruins for the entire game. Dropping one blast on them is not that big of a worry. If that's all you have, I would skip the 10 points for an instrument on horrors.

Placing the Blast
You get to place the blast marker. This means place it on the edge of your unit if you have to hit yourself. This can limit the damage that you do to yourself by increasing the scatter distance. In some cases this does not work, like with a soulgrinder.

Fateweaver is an incredible force multiplier and IMO, the best single unit in the entire Daemons codex. I would literally never field a Daemon army without him and would always start the list building process with him. The re-roll on the Grimoire is AMAZING, maybe even a bit too good. His WL trait allows you to use the WarpStorm table as an incredibly luck-based weapon, however, i've noticed that at least once or twice a game I end up with a very good result due to the reroll. As Labmouse mentioned, if you get a 6 and a low number, your chances of rolling something good by rerolling are high.

Despite all the of the praise i've just heaped upon Fateweaver, I do think he requires a deft hand to be used correctly. On his own he can be very fragile and you'll have to be very good at the movement phase to maximize his potential (though I think this holds true for pretty much all FMCs).

Unless your having someone grimiore fatey (which is not a bad idea when you gotta contest that one objective) -- its important to not try and make more out of him than he is.

Hes not a LoC. Fatey is very vulnerable when hes not swooping 20" away from a target. Heck, even then hes farily weak. I can see a strong case for flying him off the board every round you can so he can keep the grimoire reroll going and some occasional nukes.

 labmouse42 wrote:
Unless your having someone grimiore fatey (which is not a bad idea when you gotta contest that one objective) -- its important to not try and make more out of him than he is.

Hes not a LoC. Fatey is very vulnerable when hes not swooping 20" away from a target. Heck, even then hes farily weak. I can see a strong case for flying him off the board every round you can so he can keep the grimoire reroll going and some occasional nukes.

Yeah, in my Daemon playtesting I would fly him off/hide him a lot. He makes for an excellent backfield harassment unit. Psychic Shriek and Flickering Fire and Vectors can all add up to him doing a surprising amount of damage. And as you mentioned, Grimoire on Fateweaver is excellent. It can help you buy time by tying up dangerous units, amongst other things.

The last few games I've played, my opponents have given up trying to hurt him when the Grimoire is up, and knowing that, I used him a lot more aggressively. Also, I had three Princes that seemed a lot more killable/dangerous to my opponents, allowing me to fearlessly get close with Fatey. I also rolled Sunburst as a power, which I have never gotten nor used before my last game. It was actually awesome. (You guys are all going to go look that up now, I'm sure!) He still vector strikes. I was rolling all sorts of Bolts of Change, Prescience, and the like and well, things turned out great! I plan on using him this way a lot more!

I like to save the staff re-roll for grounding tests on my opponents turn.

Question: If FMC shoots 2 weapons it can still vector strike right? I had someone tell me they could not and was curious

I agree with your original post that trying to get the 10+ results is a good idea.

My philosophy in using the staff re-roll is save it until i need it and if at the end of the turn i know i wont I use to get some extra damage etc.

Vector Strikes are in the movement phase, and they count as a shooting attack. MCs and FMCs may fire two weapons, so a vector striking FMC can only fire one attack.

I was worried when the codex first came out about the changes to Fateweaver. Having played some games, I think he's just as good as before. I agree with the using the reroll for warp storm table. Some other things I've used the reroll for are number of hits on a target for warp storm. One game, first turn I got 2 hits on a manticore from the Rending Warp Storm. I rerolled for 4, and ended up destroying it. I also used it to reroll a die for Flickering Fire. When there's a random amount, and it has high odds of destroying the unit, I'll use a reroll.

I don't usually use the grimiore on Fateweaver. I find the opponent targeting the other baddies coming across the table.

Ahhhhhh Vector Strikes count as shooting attacks!

They don't count as shooting attacks. They do make you treat it as having fired one gun already in the next shooting phase. Its close, but not quite the same. Very few things in the game actually care about the difference, but is important vs guys that get a certain save only vs shooting attacks.

Fateweaver was the daemon that brought me to daemons. I read the line "Each head counts as a mastery level 4 psycher" and knew I was playing this guy. I didn't even care if the extra powers he was getting were going to be somewhat unreliable, that line alone made me realize he was going to be awesome.

By the way, you cannot use your staff of tomorrow re roll to re roll one die from the warpstorm, then use your warlord trait to re roll the other die, it is forbidden in the staff of tomorrows rules.

MarkyMark wrote:

By the way, you cannot use your staff of tomorrow re roll to re roll one die from the warpstorm, then use your warlord trait to re roll the other die, it is forbidden in the staff of tomorrows rules.

Why is this forbidden? From what I read it said you may choose one of the two dice to reroll, so that means the otger dice was not reolled hence rerollable as well?

 Makutsu wrote:

MarkyMark wrote:

By the way, you cannot use your staff of tomorrow re roll to re roll one die from the warpstorm, then use your warlord trait to re roll the other die, it is forbidden in the staff of tomorrows rules.

Why is this forbidden? From what I read it said you may choose one of the two dice to reroll, so that means the otger dice was not reolled hence rerollable as well?

It says something along the lines of, if one die out of 2d6 or 3d6 is re rolled you cannot re roll the other dice, the result of the dice rolled plus the others must be used.

Also the BRB says you can never reroll a reroll.

jakl277 wrote:
I like to save the staff re-roll for grounding tests on my opponents turn.

You don't have to save it for your opponents turn. The staff says you get one re-roll per turn, and the BRB is very clear that any time something says 'turn,' if it doesn't specify 'game turn' then it means 'player turn'. So fateweaver gives you one reroll for each player turn, meaning you can use it on the Grimoire or whatever on your turn, and then again for a grounding test on your opponents turn.

TehCheator wrote:

jakl277 wrote:
I like to save the staff re-roll for grounding tests on my opponents turn.

You don't have to save it for your opponents turn. The staff says you get one re-roll per turn, and the BRB is very clear that any time something says 'turn,' if it doesn't specify 'game turn' then it means 'player turn'. So fateweaver gives you one reroll for each player turn, meaning you can use it on the Grimoire or whatever on your turn, and then again for a grounding test on your opponents turn.

Really?! If true this doubles the power of the staff.

This is correct, it is each player turn.

And in the initial post, I did not stipulate re-rolling a reroll. It was using one or the other and when to use them.

I didnt mean save it for your opponent's turn. I meant during your opponents turn save it for the grounding test. Just like during your turn you save it for after you use grimoire to make sure it works. Those are the 2 most important things that the reroll can help with IMO. You already re-roll warpstorm results so you really just need to make sure everything goes smoothly. The hardest part of the daemons codex is randomness and using the staff to reroll the grimoire and other random reroll nonsense like occasional psychic test fails with slaanesh princes or something is nice also.

 Brymm wrote:
This is correct, it is each player turn.

And in the initial post, I did not stipulate re-rolling a reroll. It was using one or the other and when to use them.

I know, I wasn't talking about anything you said

Not entirly related to the warp storm, but remember that Fate is also effectively S10, since his 1 attack means you never lose anything for deciding to Smash. I have thrown him into some baddies before to hold them up with his 2++ rerollable save.

 calypso2ts wrote:
Not entirly related to the warp storm, but remember that Fate is also effectively S10, since his 1 attack means you never lose anything for deciding to Smash. I have thrown him into some baddies before to hold them up with his 2++ rerollable save.

Seems way too risky to me. Even if they can't hurt Fatey, if he's stuck in combat he's not shooting. He's made to buff and mind-bullet things, not punch lonesome characters.

More along the lines of he holds up a shooty unit for one turn, and then 20 Flesh Hounds hit it while not being affected by their lack of grenades because they are charging into an existing combat...

 greg0985 wrote:

 calypso2ts wrote:
Not entirly related to the warp storm, but remember that Fate is also effectively S10, since his 1 attack means you never lose anything for deciding to Smash. I have thrown him into some baddies before to hold them up with his 2++ rerollable save.

Seems way too risky to me. Even if they can't hurt Fatey, if he's stuck in combat he's not shooting. He's made to buff and mind-bullet things, not punch lonesome characters.

I used him regularly to tie things up. I think that sort of versatility is what makes him a single unit tool box. I've held up dangerous deathstars with Fateweaver alone because they didnt have HnR and couldn't get through his 2++ reroll.

I charge things with Fateweaver all the time. To tie up deathstars, as mentioned before, but also to absorb overwatch. I did some serious rambling on the subject here.

http://www.frontlinegaming.org/2013/08/16/guest-editorial-by-anonymou5-fateweaver-versus-the-world-or-a-way-to-fight-tau-a-tournament-vignette/