Opinions on the Psychic Phase in 7th Edition?

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**poolatka**

psychic is meh. They need to allow electing one psyche in your army to choose 1 ability from any chart, and the rest have to be rolled. I don't like how it is all luck, and you can't play tactically around it....but then again I play Nid's for a reason... most my psychers come with an inherent ability

**KurtAngle2**

vipoid wrote:
greyknight12 wrote:
I like the mechanics of how it works, for the people complaining remember that you used to not be able to deny powers at all.

The thing is though, powers also used to be less powerful in general. So, whilst you couldn't dispel them, they also had less impact on the game even when successful.

You must be kidding, anybody could cast twin-linked due to Prescience being WC1 and every Psyker having 80%+ to cast it with LD9 or LD 10, compared to 5 or 6 WC actually needed to cast it with the same odds

**vipoid**

KurtAngle2 wrote:

You must be kidding, anybody could cast twin-linked due to Prescience being WC1 and every Psyker having 80%+ to cast it with LD9 or LD 10, compared to 5 or 6 WC actually needed to cast it with the same odds

Ah, I was actually thinking back to 5th - before 6th introduced a load of OP powers, apparently balanced by random.

**Ghazkuul**

Like so much that games workshop does, it could have been great. But because they can never do anything properly it sucks. 2-3 armies are given a HUGE advantage by the psychic phase and about 3-4 armies are given a huge liability because of the Psychic phase. 7th edition would have been a bit more fun for everyone if they had started the power creep at the beginning of the edition instead of mid way through it. Just like that the psychic phase is broken. Maybe in another edition or so it would be worth something but not now. As far as power creep and psychic phase, it could use a HUGE nerf. Invis and most blessings in general, some of the huge Psychic shooting attacks and such need to be nerfed hard. Overall the developers could have made the game a lot more fun and competitive but what they did instead was made the game a bit more unbalanced. "here you go Eldar, one more thing you can troll over every other faction"

**Mr Morden**

Hate everything about it

The special phase,
The extra time it takes
The mechanics
The "screw armies" without it
Random powers
Invisability

A balanced version of 6th would have been fine - not this horriffic version of the now obsolete WFB Magic phase.

**Formosa**

6th fantasy used the same system, magic users generated power dice, and it was the same all or nothing crap that the psy phase has, if they had just ported wizard levels, casting values etc. Then it would have worked, as it is incredibly stupid that some armies can just get d6 +10 dice, while the opponent get just the d6, also with a straight magic to psy switch some armies could just generate more dispel dice, necrons, tau, orks, adamantly will as magic resistance as it's...the same bloody thing.

**Ghazkuul**

Nothing like playing against an Eldar player with 20+ dice and you get D6.

**vipoid**

I think the other thing for me is that the psychic phase just seems overblown.

Psykers are important, but I don't think they warrant their own phase.

**DaPino**

I'm going to call bs on some people.

If you don't like "random" and "luck", you might want to consider just quitting altogether because I've got news for you: this is a dice game, everything you do is "luck-based". Oh sure you make certain odds be in your favor (and you can do that in the psychic phase as well), but in the end it's always going to be random.

Some armies don't have or have very bad psykers. That has always been the case. But suddenly, when there's a psychic phase, this becomes a problem. Psykers do not dominate these armies any more than they used to. Now suddenly people without psykers are being salty, because there is a mechanic to deny powers, but they don't have acces to it, even tough they didn't have acces to it before either. It does not mean they're screwed. Necrons are a strong army and as you should know, they don't have acces to psychic powers either.

Never heard Tau players complain about the existence of the assault phase because they don't have acces to assault options, nor have I ever heard Daemon players complain about the existence of the shooting phase, even tough they have, like what, 5% of their army has a decent shooting attack. But suddenly, everyone that hasn't got a decent psychic phase becomes salty.

vipoid wrote:
I think the other thing for me is that the psychic phase just seems overblown.

Psykers are important, but I don't think they warrant their own phase.

Look this is a good point. I can understand this.
That said, I believe they did it in order to simplify things. Even tough the phase and mechanics around the psychic phase became more complex, the fact of the matter was that psychic powers were a hassle to remember. You had to remember to cast your blessings in the movement phase, then when your movement was done you had to remember to cast your witchpowers before you shot and if my memory serves me right you also had to remember activating force after shooting.

Now it's just: "Eyyyyy, you cast your powers right here and now or you don't, capiche?". It's easier to remember and organize in my opinion.

**TutorialBoss**

Like a whole lot of of other things in the game right now, it could do with an overhaul to streamline it.

The concept of having a separate phase is good though. Make it quicker and more balanced please GW.

**krodarklorr**

As a Necron player first and a Tyranid player second, here's my 2 cents.

- [Necrons] I have no psykers, and therefor that's a phase of the game where I literally do nothing. I also have such an abysmal chance to ever deny anything that it's hardly worth even attempting.

- [Tyranids] With how the Psychic phase works now, Shadows in the Warp is borderline useless. And Tyranids trying to cast something against, say Grey Knights, has almost no chance of ever going off, because reasons.

I really don't care for the new psychic phase, but at the same time, I don't really care, as it almost never affects either of my armies. (Necrons literally can't do anything, and Tyranid psychic powers aren't worth taking/casting anyway)

**Yarium**

I have Orks, Chaos Space Marines, Tyranids, and Eldar/Harlequins. I like the really cool powers of the Eldar/Harlequins, and the cost of the powers are very well balanced towards their effects. I find that there's always a balance between needing to ration my psychic power pool with whatever I need most. The difference becomes once I throw down a Seer Council, since then I just cast so easily that I'm really not too concerned. I guess that makes sense, since the Seer Council really should work that way.

The book powers, aside from Invisibility, aren't terribly effective for me - but that's mostly because all my other lists are not built with "must dominate psychic!". If I get the right ones, and if I'm able to cast them, and if it isn't denied, and if it then even does anything... then that's cool. As you can tell, most of these fail.

Tyranids, meanwhile, look powerful psychically on paper, but in practice it never works out that way. Since they have middling or low mastery levels, it's difficult to get the powers you want, and certain powers are much more useful against certain opponents than others. Worse still, it feels like the Tyranids are designed for their powers to be working (extra move & shooting, chances at pinning, FnP for big bugs, dominion when you need it, warp blasts), for their non Flyrant units to be effective, but you need to be casting lots of these little powers to make that effective. There's just not a good enough chance at succeeding for this to be the case, and sometimes I find just rolling 1 die to get 50% of the powers off is better simply for quantity of powers than usefulness of any individual power. This cumulates to a psychic phase that's very random for the Tyranids, and does not feel in line at all with what they do.

Ultimately, I think GW is only now starting to iron out the kinks in the psychic phase, but there are many days with my Nids that I wish I could just go back to "pass a Ld test".

**Formosa**

DaPino wrote:
I'm going to call bs on some people.

If you don't like "random" and "luck", you might want to consider just quitting altogether because I've got news for you: this is a dice game, everything you do is "luck-based". Oh sure you make certain odds be in your favor (and you can do that in the psychic phase as well), but in the end it's always going to be random.

Some armies don't have or have very bad psykers. That has always been the case. But suddenly, when there's a psychic phase, this becomes a problem. Psykers do not dominate these armies any more than they used to. Now suddenly people without psykers are being salty, because there is a mechanic to deny powers, but they don't have acces to it, even tough they didn't have acces to it before either. It does not mean they're screwed. Necrons are a strong army and as you should know, they don't have acces to psychic powers either.

Never heard Tau players complain about the existence of the assault phase because they don't have acces to assault options, nor have I ever heard Daemon players complain about the existence of the shooting phase, even tough they have, like what, 5% of their army has a decent shooting attack. But suddenly, everyone that hasn't got a decent psychic phase becomes salty.

vipoid wrote:
I think the other thing for me is that the psychic phase just seems overblown.

Psykers are important, but I don't think they warrant their own phase.

Look this is a good point. I can understand this.
That said, I believe they did it in order to simplify things. Even tough the phase and mechanics around the psychic phase became more complex, the fact of the matter was that psychic powers were a hassle to remember. You had to remember to cast your blessings in the movement phase, then when your movement was done you had to remember to cast your witchpowers before you shot and if my memory serves me right you also had to remember activating force after shooting.

Now it's just: "Eyyyyy, you cast your powers right here and now or you don't, capiche?". It's easier to remember and organize in my opinion.

Random is ok, 20 dice vs d6 isn't random, it's bad design, just as a flat ld test was bad design, 8th ed fantasy magic phase works, it's works very well, but includes all the random nonsense of the current 40k magic Phase, but does it better.

**PandaHero**

I like it, even tho I usually only have a 1-2 Warp charge cuz I run only 1 libby. I like the interaction between player.

**kryczek**

We just stopped taking them as we didn't like them and it's one less phase to bother with in an already long game. It's made me re-evaluate my whole Eldar army which was a good thing.

**Formosa**

PandaHero wrote:
I like it, even tho I usually only have a 1-2 Warp charge cuz I run only 1 libby. I like the interaction between player.

Please don't use text talk...

**vipoid**

DaPino wrote:
If you don't like "random" and "luck", you might want to consider just quitting altogether because I've got news for you: this is a dice game, everything you do is "luck-based". Oh sure you make certain odds be in your favor (and you can do that in the psychic phase as well), but in the end it's always going to be random.

But there's a difference between a degree of randomness that's still heavily influenced by your decisions, and having a phase that's just one load of random after another.

It would be like in the shooting phase if you had to randomly roll how many weapons you could fire, randomly determine the range of each weapon etc.

DaPino wrote:

That said, I believe they did it in order to simplify things. Even tough the phase and mechanics around the psychic phase became more complex, the fact of the matter was that psychic powers were a hassle to remember. You had to remember to cast your blessings in the movement phase, then when your movement was done you had to remember to cast your witchpowers before you shot and if my memory serves me right you also had to remember activating force after shooting.

Now it's just: "Eyyyyy, you cast your powers right here and now or you don't, capiche?". It's easier to remember and organize in my opinion.

I get that, but why did it need it's own phase? Surely you could have done this with the 5th edition powers by just having all powers cast at the beginning of the shooting phase (making some minor changes to duration where necessary)?

**DaPino**

vipoid wrote:

But there's a difference between a degree of randomness that's still heavily influenced by your decisions, and having a phase that's just one load of random after another.

It would be like in the shooting phase if you had to randomly roll how many weapons you could fire, randomly determine the range of each weapon etc.

But the shooting phase is almost just as random as the psychic phase itself. You don't know how many shots are going to hit, just as you don't know how many spells you'll cast succesfully.
I get what you're saying, you can't choose the spells you want to have, you're reliant on random rolls for that. That's different from choosing which weapons your units carry.

However, after you've rolled your psychic powers, you know exactly what you have at your disposal for the rest of the game and how many dice you'll roughly have at your disposal. Seems to me you dislike the way powers are generated rather than the way the phase works.

vipoid wrote:

I get that, but why did it need it's own phase? Surely you could have done this with the 5th edition powers by just having all powers cast at the beginning of the shooting phase (making some minor changes to duration where necessary)?

First of all, I never played 5th edition, so I don't know how they handled powers during that edition.

But what does it matter whether it's in a seperate phase or not? Should they announce the following tommorow: "there's no longer a psychic phase, but now you cast all your powers at the beginning of the shooting phase", how would that functionally change the game? it would still take the same time to actually go through the tests and stuff.
Or do you mean they shouldn't have changed the mechanic of the Ld tests, becauseTHAT was a boring mechanic in my opinion. You might as well have lined up your spells, rolled a D6 and randomly allocated which one spell didn't go through, because most psykers were Ld 10 anyway.

**vipoid**

DaPino wrote:

What's the difference? Should they announce the following tommorow: "there's no longer a psychic phase, but now you cast all your powers at the beginning of the shooting phase", how would that functionally change the game?
Or do you mean they shouldn't have changed the mechanic of the Ld tests, becauseTHAT was a boring mechanic in my opinion. You might as well have lined up your spells, rolled a D6 and randomly allocated which one spell didn't go through, because most psykers were Ld 10 anyway.

So what exactly makes the new psychic phase so much more involving?

**Kap'n Krump**

I generally think it's fine, and quite a bit more interesting than the old leadership-based tests.

My biggest problem with it, though, is deny the witch. When, say, I've got a wierdboy and I'm playing demons or eldar, I get like 8 casting dice and they get like 30 and are almost guaranteed to deny any spell I attempt to make.

Honestly, it kind of makes sense, as the wierdboy is psychicly outmatched, but it's just not fun to have a useless unit.

I feel as if an army's deny dice amount can't exceed their enemy's casting dice (so if I only have 8, you only have 8 to deny with).

Barring that, maybe something like irresistible force from fantasy added to perils would be fine - I'd force a perils if I NEEDED a spell to go off that I knew couldn't be denied.

Yes, invisibility is broken.

My #2 issue is that I feel that super-heavies should not be targetable by psychic powers that don't have a strength value. Things like invisibility, warp speed, fortune, or even prescience really make them over-the-top broken.

I realize that random powers make psykers hard to strategize around, but honestly - in the days when you could pick your spells, didn't everyone always just pick the same broken ones time and time again? (i.e. - "Oh, look, a rune priest in a drop pod. I wonder what spell he knows.")

How would you feel if everyone just picked nothing but iron arm, fortune, invisibility, etc, etc, etc?

perhaps if they attributed points costs to spells, and charged out the ass for the good ones, but even then I'd fear things getting pretty broken. How much more often would you see demon princes on the table if they were guaranteed to get iron arm, endurance, and invisibility - even if the spells came with a points cost?

**DaPino**

You need to ration dice. You can't expect your MLx psyker to just cast all his powers in one turn, bare one. You need to strategize what powers you want to have in effect and which you don't.

Before the psychic phase, I generated my powers and that was it. Every psyker just cast every power at his disposal if they happened to be in range of a valid target. I knew exactly what every turn would look like (the psychic part of it). Right now, I need to think: "Okay I've got 18 dice, but what 3-5 powers (out of my 10+) do I really want/need to go off.

Sometimes, it's going to be an easy choice. "Do I want Iron arm or force before going in combat with a bunch of 1-wound models?" Deuh, it's going to be Iron arm. But the same holds true for the shooting phase. No one is going to think more than 2 seconds about whether he's going to shoot his lascannons into regular guardsmen or the leman russ next to them. At other times, just like in any other phase, the choices are less obvious.

Of course there're people who're going to take it out of proportion, with daemon factories where everyone rolls on malefic and just takes psykers to funnel WC's into 2 or 3 psykers, but that's not the average psychic phase. I think the problem there resides wholy within in the Daemonology(malefic) powers, not the psychic phase itself.
That said I've faced an army of 50 jokaero weaponsmiths back when GK still had their 5th ed codex in 6th, that was not a fun game but it didn't make me hate the shooting phase.

**BassDrum**

CrownAxe wrote:
BassDrum wrote:
Its very hit and miss for me. I usually only take one psycher and have had many games where do get off no powers and die quickly. Even Ezekiel , a ML3 has been having very little impact in games.

It seems very all or nothing.

How many dice are you rolling to cast a power?

2 or 3 for a wc1 and 4+ for a wc2.

But its just a mixture of things I guess, short range powers, rolling less useful powers or just not having the opportunity to use the ones I have.

I'm still looking for a way to keep my Libbys in the army and will continue to use them but refuse to go all out nuts with them in the army section phase and try to get powers that are just silly. Invisible prescisnced super jerks are just not my idea of a fun game. Each to their own tho

**vipoid**

DaPino wrote:
You need to ration dice. You can't expect your MLx psyker to just cast all his powers in one turn, bare one. You need to strategize what powers you want to have in effect and which you don't.

You say that, but I never see it happening. The only time this matters is when an army brings a single psyker. But, when you have several, I don't see people ration dice - because they have more than enough to cast all the spells they want. Hell, our GK player usually has so many excess dice that he starts throwing them on entirely pointless powers (like casting Force/Hammerhand on units that are out of range of any possible assaults).

Sorry but "having to ration dice" is a bunch of BS.

**DaPino**

Maybe in your experience. I usualy have something around ML 8-14 on the field as CSM and I never have enough dice to cast everything I want reliably.

Now I know GK's can get to a ridiculous amount of warp charges, but that's really what I mean when i said "taking it out of proportion". We rarely have excess dice, even among our GK players. Unless they specifically go out of their way to maximize their dice pool.

**SirDonlad**

I hate the 7th edition psychic phase.
I really dislike psychic powers full stop and it's just more crap to remember!

It was fine in 6th because i could wait for my opponent to do his/her psychic rubbish and that was the end of it - 7th edition forces me into psychic warfare that i don't want to be involved in, and i hate it for it.

**Formosa**

DaPino wrote:
Maybe in your experience. I usualy have something around ML 8-14 on the field as CSM and I never have enough dice to cast everything I want reliably.

Now I know GK's can get to a ridiculous amount of warp charges, but that's really what I mean when i said "taking it out of proportion". We rarely have excess dice, even among our GK players. Unless they specifically go out of their way to maximize their dice pool.

Haha such bs, 8-14 dice with the rr from familiers, and you can't cast what you want, I don't buy it mate.

To cast, throw x dice, on a 4+ the charge is harnessed.
To dispel, throw x dice, resist on 6+

Already the phase is skewed towards casting, then we have.

You must stop all the dice that have been harnessed, not just knock them below the casting value, all of the dice, so:

I want to cast invisibility or whatever, I have 12 dice so I'm gonna throw 5 at it, as you only have 2, I roll 4,5,6,1,2, you now cannot possibly dispel that power, but guess what, the other power I have is also amazing so I will throw 5 at that too, awww shame, still can't dispel, for my last trick I'll throw 2 dice at some useless spell, go ahead and stop it, oh, you need a 6+.... Nevermind.

So we have, massive ease of casting compared to dispelling, more dice for casters, no limit on power dice, so it literally is take as many psykers as you want, as your opponent won't be taking part in the psychic phase anyway.

**vipoid**

DaPino wrote:
Maybe in your experience. I usualy have something around ML 8-14 on the field as CSM and I never have enough dice to cast everything I want reliably.

I find that hard to believe.

**CrownAxe**

vipoid wrote:
DaPino wrote:
Maybe in your experience. I usualy have something around ML 8-14 on the field as CSM and I never have enough dice to cast everything I want reliably.

I find that hard to believe.

Why? Under the new system its basically impossible to cast every power you want. In order to have decent odds you have to commit at least 2x+1 dice (where x is the WC cost). That means each spell costs at least 3 dice to cast and that's only for like a ~70% success rate. So even if you had like 9 ML total +d6 you're onyl attempting like 4 spells and probably only successfully casting 3 of them. That's only a 3rd of the total spell pool you know. That's not including casting something that costs WC2 or WC3 that requires even more dice OR your opponent having plenty of psykers to commit to denying one of them. Its very easy to only get one or two powers off even with a lot of psykers.

**vipoid**

I guess I just haven't seen many (or any, for that matter) situations where every psyker in someone's army needs to cast every power he has.

Usually there are several powers that are at best non-essential and at worst entirely unnecessary that turn. Going back to the GK example, there are usually squads that won't see combat in either his turn or the forthcoming enemy turn (so don't need Hammerhand, Force etc.) or which don't need the buffs anyway (Dreadknight againt anything that isn't T6+), or which are out of range of one or more shooty powers etc.

**jasper76**

Don't like it. It doesn't fit with the flow of the game, and more importantly it in my view, it no longer feels like models on the table are popping off psychic powers, but rather the dude in the Led Zeppelin T-Shirt across from you is challenging you to a game of craps or something.

Would rather it was not there at all than there in its current state.