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With the release of 7th Edition, are psykers now necessary in order to compete? Are you severely handicapping yourself if you don't run them?

Well Tau and Necrons are forced to play without psykers.

Both Tau an Necrons have ways to buff their DtW dices, but we need more than the feeble d6. I'd say a contigent of Eldar/Inq/Tyranids would help a lot with this

Simply put no. People are putting WAY too much emphasis on them.

I would like to put it into perspective, the way I see it anyway, so people can understand it and go about their days.

Perception: It is the new hotness. It has everyone making plans and counter plans and massive list changes to deal with the new phase. Many are saying armies like crons and tau are gonna get left behind due to not having any powers.

Reality: it's actually weaker then before and people are pumping tons of points into it to functionally do what that have already been doing, only now paying more for it. .

Let me explain: a level 2 tzeentch herald. Could cast 2 level one powers at leadership 10. The percentage chance of one spell going off was around 91% (sorry can't math). Based off LD 10 for each spell. Now each psyker gets 1 die per level. So the same psyker gets 2 dice. Now the psyker rolls and needs a 4+ to succeed. This means he has a 50% shot of getting of each spell. So instead of 91% and 91% with NO chance of being denied by the opponent in the case if blessings, he now has each spell being 50% and 50% and the opponent has at least a 1/6 chance to deny it. More if they drop their dispel dice at the right time.

Perception: but you can throw more dice at it for guaranteed success.

Reality: yes. But this has 2 major drawbacks. 1. You have a increased chance of perils. 2. You take the ability to cast from your other psykers. As the dice have to come from somewhere. And now you have entire psykers NOT casting spells but being relegated to being batteries for other psykers who, and here is the kicker, are basically casting what they already did for the most part. Chances are if they plan to actually have a good chance of success they are casting LESS spells army wide. Baring a few that got a major change most are similar in power level to before, barring a few like iron arm and invisibility.

That leaves demons and the summoning clown car. After testing this at 15 dice I will say it's not that great. Cool but not great. Demons power has always come from it's flying monsters. They lost most of their offensive power. Vector strike, smash and having to land for a turn before they assault really takes the teeth out of them. When was the last time you heard of a top tier demon list that was not screamer star or flying circus? Flying circus now summons minor demons instead of using it's offensive power.

Prehaps when you reach 30 warp dice you can break the game but less then that i still feel demons took a hit. Yes they are still good but not sky is falling good as the net has suggested. Time will tell but I really think the panic is unfounded, concerning psykers. Yes, even demon ones (barring 30ish dice, while I know some armies that will destroy it, it's pretty broken).
Truthfully I feel a lot of the high level armies will paste the demon spawn list. I feel its broken at 30 or so dice in pick up games but not in tournaments.

This is my view after a few games, as it stands now. It may change later on.

I think the difficulty of getting off the more nasty powers and the fact that you don't specifically need a psyker to deny the witch will mean that they're potentially nasty, but not essential.

Honestly Denying the Witch is not an efficient strategy. It takes four dice for a ~50% chance against one WC, ten dice against two, and sixteen against three. All average ~50% chance to Deny the Witch.

The question becomes are there any effective strategies that don't require Psychic powers. That answer is absolutely yes.

Adding Psychers for defense is pointless, and against Grey Knights, Eldar, and Daemons who are Psycher heavy having one is more of a hindrance as they can throw Thirty Deny dice against your one or two successful powers.



Ipeople think this edition will be an edition of the Psychic phase and unbound armies, but the truth is those successful armies are going to be the ones who can put out a large number of Objective Secured scoring units and especially those in dedicated transports.

Six wave serpents with DAs for ~1200pts, 12 OS scoring units, six of which are Wave Sepents.

Six Tac Squads in Drop Pods or Rhinos, or Razorbacks for ~1200pts. 18 OS units after Combat Squads.

Three Assault Squads in Land Raiders for ~1000pts. Objective Secured AV14.

Wizards aren't just straight necessary in WHFB, so I can't imagine they will be in 40k now that it has a magic phase. I mean, yeah, some armies might need wizards to play correctly, but that doesn't mean all of them will.

The thing that I think it's easy to miss is that psykers still cost points and slots, and still have a ton of randomness to them. It's not like you get free auto-win buttons, it's just another thing you take in your army that might do some damage, or buff other units. We've had units that do damage and buff other units for quite some time now in 40k.

Of course you can compete without psykers, just like you can compete with an army that doesn't use the assault phase. It might be more auto-win with them than without, depending on how the meta settles out, but even if it does wind up pro-psyker, remember, this is 40k we're talking about. You know, the dice game with player skill. It's never been about bringing the absolute best list or you're just bringing completely non-viable garbage that you should feel ashamed to play with.

No, you can still run without them. However, psykers play a much larger role now, and they cannot ever be ignored. You'll have to know how to deal with them regardless of the army you play.

How is this really different than 6th ed adding fliers? I mean, fliers could be handled by ignoring them as a strategy, and by just killing them with guns you were bringing already. You never NEEDED AA, no matter how much hysteria fliers created.

I mean, psykers score now, so that's different, but what makes them so unignorable now?

Consider the following taken from my game this weekend

I ran a 1500 point Daemons army with Fate Weaver + 4 Heralds of Tzeentch 1 had the portaglyph then 4 squads of Pink Horrors.

My opponent ran Tau, Typical list of 2 tides, 2 troop choices (FWs) 2 Marker Light Pathfinder units, and some Battlesuits with 2 hammerheads.

Now, I don't play on garbage tables with 5 pieces of Terrain, (As NO ONE EVER BLOODY SHOULD) There are LOS blocking mountains, hills, buildings and wreckage. I parked my heralds within a mountain crescent along with my Pink Horrors and had Fateweaver Swoop nearby from terrain to terrain maintaining his Cover.

By turn 3 and with the help of Fateweaver's reroll, I summoned 2 Lords of Change 40 pink horrors and 2 small units of Daemonettes running away to claim objectives when I knew they could get to them uncontested. (gotta love that portaglyph!)

Turn 4 was a bloody straight massacre. Even trying to draw line of sight to my models screwed my opponent when those Lords basically flew by and vaporized all his markerlights in a single turn. His battle suits came on and killed ~ 20 models, without killing a full squad. The survivors during my turn just tickled off some Flickering Fire and dealt with the suits all sheik like.

There was absolutely nothing he could have done during that game to secure the objectives, pose a threat to my army, NOR actually put a dent in my summoning potential. I had opted to bring in Bloodthirsters the next round (5) but my opponent after losing his Markerlights and Battlesuits along with 2 Hammerheads conceded as he had 2 objectives to my 3 with First Blood going to myself along with running a squad of FWs away.

It's not something you will EVER be able to ignore. If you cant Barrage, you're screwed. If you can't garuntee to cut your opponents Warp Charge Points in, at least half by the time he has his first turn, you're screwed.

The game is heavily based on luck, and I took Fateweaver to mitigate that at least once per turn. There was absolutely nothing else to do but run my tide of Daemons across a field of Terrain and shoot at his models he wished to GunLine.

As a Gunline army, if you don't fight them head on, you'll get swarmed. If you try to fight them head on, you'll end up swarmed anyways. What could those two Riptides have done? Without being able to draw LOS to me he had to move closer, putting his models at risk (Which he opted to do in order to shoot) His suits managed to kill their points back easily, but what do you do when the points you make back or even double don't even put a dent into an army that has an almost unlimited supply of reinforcements?

A tau player just sat around without killing anything?

That seems much more likely a matter of your terrain, mismatch of player skill, or how the dice rolled than that psykers are now necessary. With those kind of mitigating circumstances, your opponent likely wouldn't be doing much of anything even if you hadn't brought psykers...

Or, the problem is that its a tau bandwagoner from the time they were the new OP hotness and does not actually know anything about playing tau but sit in a gunline and wait for people to come close, then point-and-shoot.

So once somebody simply doesn't rush in, he's whole game collapses and he does nothing.

There are people like that. they give us a bad name.

 Ailaros wrote:
How is this really different than 6th ed adding fliers? I mean, fliers could be handled by ignoring them as a strategy, and by just killing them with guns you were bringing already. You never NEEDED AA, no matter how much hysteria fliers created.

I mean, psykers score now, so that's different, but what makes them so unignorable now?

I think the assumption is that everyone and their mother is now going to be running daemon factory lists, or at least running some form of summoning. Honestly, the way I'm looking at the psychic phase, psykers got a heck of a lot worse, not better - powers are nowhere near as reliable now, and if you're planning on casting something with high charge costs, you're almost certainly giving up some other potential powers just to get that one off, and not just from the psyker who knows the power.

Bear in mind that in 6th Edition (and back, for that matter), psykers were scary because their powers were virtually unstoppable. Most psykers have LD10, which means (as someone pointed out earlier), they're getting off any given power 91% of the time, and that's not even factoring in the fact that some armies get re-rolls to help with that. Daemons and Eldar were especially nasty at this, since both could run psyker-heavy armies that buffed up units that were already nasty (Daemons get daemon princes and greater daemons, Eldar has the Seer Council), and I reiterate, you could get off virtually every power you want on every turn without worrying about it blowing up in your face. With the new psychic phase rules - and not only that, but with the Daemonology rules forcing a Perils test on every double outside of daemons - anything that's higher than WC1 has a distinct possibility of causing perils, and besides that, every power has a distinct chance of failing to manifest depending on how many dice you throw at it.

I completely agree with Sha1emade here. I'm not sure where people are getting this idea that psykers have been hugely buffed in the new edition, because they really haven't aside from daemons being able to potentially summon tons of daemons with relative safety.

I haven't voted yet as I haven't seen the 7th ed. in person yet and in any case I think I'd need to see some actual games first. It is my impression - correct me if I'm wrong - that if you have psykers, it becomes necessary to have psyker parity with your opponent. Test battles I have seen online seemed to have overwhelming amounts of warp charge on one side (the Daemons' side) which meant they could DtW easily.

Is that accurate to the new rules? That psykers may or may not be necessary now (am leaning toward not, btw), but that if you do have psykers you need to go all in because the occasional librarian vs. a Psyker-heavy army will seldom get anything off?

The merry-go-round goes like this:

Psyker overload can shut down handful of psykers
Handful of psykers got an edge on psyker-free armies
Pskyer-free cares little about psyker overload.

Its a mini rock-paper-scissors inside the bigger game.

With Psykers you either go big or you don't bother at all.

I wouldn't say necessary, but it's a damn good idea to keep them on hand at least for defense.

 Kain wrote:
With Psykers you either go big or you don't bother at all.

That was the impression I got. So basically it's a gamble, like a closed auction. You could spend a lot of points on psykers but if your opponent has spent more (or has cheaper), your points were, well not wasted, but severely diminished in value.

Yep, the single psyker is amazing.
The two, still very good.

The problen is, you get diminishing returns for every one (due to how the generation works), and to top this off, you get even LESS returns for each psyker the ENEMY has.

Its an arms race, but a limited value race-once you hit a point, it was better not to get into the race to begin with, and just go around it.

I think, you either take none, one or you smother youropponent in power dice. Yourpower dice are worth Less the more psykers you have, so you either over compensate or run one guy with up to nine dice to himself.



Sent from pHone, I apologise for any mistakes.

 Kain wrote:
With Psykers you either go big or you don't bother at all.

Entirely not true.

While it true that just one or two psykers will not be able to contain the Blessings that a psyker heavy army can toss about, keeping say a Librarian or similar around to protect against things like Witchfires & Maledictions is still a solid plan since you'll get their bonuses to the Deny the Witch roll.

Played 5 times against a 24power dice demon army . Had 4-7 of my own and I was unable to stop him . The fact that they don't peril on doubles is a huge problem and it is very easy for a demon army to drain the power dice pool. It gets even worse when the roll is low . When I had 6-9 power dice I was only stoping his first two summons and then with the rest of his 16+dies he was summoning 2-3 extra units and just drowning me in troops.

The demon table is also very painful . When you have just one or two psykers and one of them just gets blow up , because of a ranom roll it hurts the ablity to stop summonings or other powers being cast.

But the real problem is that with the new stupid objectives an AM army doesn't have a way to claim half of them

Psykers have actually been nerfed this edition, but several of the BRB powers, are extremely powerful such as the Summoning Powers and Invisibility, so you can abuse the ability to use other unit's warp charges and throw heaps of dice to get these extremely powerful psychic powers, more than offsetting the unreliability of casting powers in the new system.

Unless you also intend to abuse these powers, running lots of psykers just for the dispel dice is likely to weaken your list rather than strengthen it.

Experiment 626 wrote:

 Kain wrote:
With Psykers you either go big or you don't bother at all.

Entirely not true.

While it true that just one or two psykers will not be able to contain the Blessings that a psyker heavy army can toss about, keeping say a Librarian or similar around to protect against things like Witchfires & Maledictions is still a solid plan since you'll get their bonuses to the Deny the Witch roll.

I don't think it's so much about whether a few powers is still useful, so much as that if the enemy has significantly more WC than you, you wont be able to get them off. I'm going off second-hand rules here so if I'm wrong, someone correct me.

Makumba wrote:
Played 5 times against a 24power dice demon army . Had 4-7 of my own and I was unable to stop him . The fact that they don't peril on doubles is a huge problem and it is very easy for a demon army to drain the power dice pool. It gets even worse when the roll is low . When I had 6-9 power dice I was only stoping his first two summons and then with the rest of his 16+dies he was summoning 2-3 extra units and just drowning me in troops.

The demon table is also very painful . When you have just one or two psykers and one of them just gets blow up , because of a ranom roll it hurts the ablity to stop summonings or other powers being cast.

But the real problem is that with the new stupid objectives an AM army doesn't have a way to claim half of them

I find it virtually impossible you were stopping two Summons a turn, actually it would be astronomical to stop two in one turn with only 4-7 Dice, you'd be lucky with that many dice to Deny The Witch on any 3WC Summoning all game, unless he was going for Sacrifice which means there is a lone Herald to be sniped next turn before he generates and WC.


At least when the cast Possession and summon a Bloodthirster or Lord of Change they count as entering via Deep Strike and are Swooping, so it can't switch flight modes until the next turn and can't charge until the turn after that.

Summon Blood Thirster Turn 2, Changes to Gliding Turn 3. Charges Turn 4. Summoning a Bloodthirster Turn 3 or later makes it very likely it won't ever get to charge. At least there is that.

I have the impression that people are overreacting to the new Psychic phase. Previously all you could do when the enemy was casting Blessings was to stare and cross your thumbs that they fail. Now even Necrons or DE have D6 dispel dice to throw at them if they want.

Also, I'm not likely to encounter a Daemon Factory list, so I'm personally not scared.

It will likely be an all or nothing approach by the competitive minded gamers.

 Deuce11 wrote:
It will likely be an all or nothing approach by the competitive minded gamers.

Which makes me think any army where they have psykers that are valuable even aside from their psyker powers will have a subtle advantage - you can enter the pskyer bidding war without risking as much.

Are there any armies where the psykers are valuable in their own right? I mean Warlocks can go on Jetbikes and have Singing Spears. That's something...

Hive Tyrants are good by themselves.
Lots of Grey Knights units aren't all that reliant on psychic powers.

My Black Templars say "Suck it, psychers!"