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Original yes. Original =/= best.

They're still just a chapter of Chaos Space Marines who have more than typical number of psykers. But Grey Knights still should beat the pants off of them in number and power of their psychic powers, because 100% of Grey Knights are psykers. Only maybe 5% of Thousand Sons are psykers.

 nintura wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:

 nintura wrote:

 daedalus wrote:

 nintura wrote:

Forget spamming powers. These people are talking about each unit being able to cast a full powered Smite. Could you imagine that? How many smites would you fit into an 1850 list? 6? 10?

Primaris psykers can net you 10 papa-smites. And that's something doable in a two detachment, 1850 point list. Wouldn't even be a quarter of the points.

That's because they are the new shiny marines and they need to sell. All this bitching about not being equal. Imagine being a 300 point troops unit and still ONLY getting smite-lite and NO second power.

No, primaris psykers are NOT marines, they're Astra Militarum. They're like 40 points.

Imagine a 250 point infantry unit with 1 cast that IS smite lite. That's grey knights.

272 point infantry unit with 1 cast that IS smite lite. That's Thousand Sons. You at least get a second power for more options. Oh and all your weapons are force right?

Call me when power armor can reliably make it into melee, then we'll talk about how our force weapons are strong, on our 1 base attack models. Anyway, this is digressing.

Chaos Space Marines are ranked much higher than GK. You simply have WAY more tools.

Just for comparison, a 10 man strike squad is 210 points. A 10 man Rubric Squad is 225. So 15 more points. The strike squad has double the shots. Now the Rubrics have the -2AP (don't call it rend, it is not called that in 40k). Personally I would take the double shots over the -2AP any day, but lets call it a wash. Both squads can cast baby smite. I don't have the codex, but I am guessing Grey Knights smite is slightly worse for some reason now. So small advantage to Rubrics. However, we are 1 move point slower, can't teleport on turn one (that is huge by the way), we only have one force weapon, while your whole squad has them, and your squad gets to cast a regular power, which includes the ability to teleport again all at +1 to powers! We have the all is dust rule, and the 5++, both of which are good for survivablity, but I don't think compete with the ability to teleport, and have all force weapons.

Although I will say that your HQs not getting real smite is a total slap in the face, especially with the rule of one, so I would be pretty pissed about that too.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Original yes. Original =/= best.

They're still just a chapter of Chaos Space Marines who have more than typical number of psykers. But Grey Knights still should beat the pants off of them in number and power of their psychic powers, because 100% of Grey Knights are psykers. Only maybe 5% of Thousand Sons are psykers.

Again, you're trying to argue quantity over quality. You aren't bringing 100% of the legion to bear. You're bringing a company. Again, like I said, 100 white belts does not equal a Chuck Norris.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Original yes. Original =/= best.

They're still just a chapter of Chaos Space Marines who have more than typical number of psykers. But Grey Knights still should beat the pants off of them in number and power of their psychic powers, because 100% of Grey Knights are psykers. Only maybe 5% of Thousand Sons are psykers.

And this while true is still totally irrelevant to the core gameplay problem that our smite is too weak. Cherry picking one chaos space marines unit as proof that GK psykers are strong is nonsense.

 Marmatag wrote:

 nintura wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:

 nintura wrote:

 daedalus wrote:

 nintura wrote:

Forget spamming powers. These people are talking about each unit being able to cast a full powered Smite. Could you imagine that? How many smites would you fit into an 1850 list? 6? 10?

Primaris psykers can net you 10 papa-smites. And that's something doable in a two detachment, 1850 point list. Wouldn't even be a quarter of the points.

That's because they are the new shiny marines and they need to sell. All this bitching about not being equal. Imagine being a 300 point troops unit and still ONLY getting smite-lite and NO second power.

No, primaris psykers are NOT marines, they're Astra Militarum. They're like 40 points.

Imagine a 250 point infantry unit with 1 cast that IS smite lite. That's grey knights.

272 point infantry unit with 1 cast that IS smite lite. That's Thousand Sons. You at least get a second power for more options. Oh and all your weapons are force right?

Call me when power armor can reliably make it into melee, then we'll talk about how our force weapons are strong, on our 1 base attack models. Anyway, this is digressing.

Chaos Space Marines are ranked much higher than GK. You simply have WAY more tools.

yeah, because you're comparing one legion to an entire faction. That would be like comparing Thousand Sons to the entirety of the Space Marines codex.... Your 1 base attack doing d3 wounds at -2 or -3 ap is better than our 1 base attack doing 1 damage at -0.

I don't know the details, but I'm willing to bet GK have all the problems elite infantry has in this game in spades.

 xeen wrote:
Just for comparison, a 10 man strike squad is 210 points. A 10 man Rubric Squad is 225. So 15 more points. The strike squad has double the shots. Now the Rubrics have the -2AP (don't call it rend, it is not called that in 40k). Personally I would take the double shots over the -2AP any day, but lets call it a wash. Both squads can cast baby smite. I don't have the codex, but I am guessing Grey Knights smite is slightly worse for some reason now. So small advantage to Rubrics. However, we are 1 move point slower, can't teleport on turn one (that is huge by the way), we only have one force weapon, while your whole squad has them, and your squad gets to cast a regular power, which includes the ability to teleport again all at +1 to powers! We have the all is dust rule, and the 5++, both of which are good for survivablity, but I don't think compete with the ability to teleport, and have all force weapons.

Although I will say that your HQs not getting real smite is a total slap in the face, especially with the rule of one, so I would be pretty pissed about that too.

Let's not forget another huge advantage. Having access to literally anything that has the Imperial keyword and their 150 codexes.

Indeed. Maybe Rubric Marines are underpowered. It would hardly be a novel thing.

I'd be ok with Rubric Marine Sorcerers getting a real power if we could cast the same power multiple times(just not on the same unit).

Maybe change Psychic Focus to,

Psychic Focus: Psychic powers which do not cause damage may not effect the same target more than once.

Martel732 wrote:
I don't know the details, but I'm willing to bet GK have all the problems elite infantry has in this game in spades.

Except a couple things:

1: They aren't elite. They are troops. And elite. And fast attack.
2: They can teleport turn 1 and every turn thereafter.

Martel732 wrote:
I don't know the details, but I'm willing to bet GK have all the problems elite infantry has in this game in spades.

Pretty much.

The core problem is we pay for a lot of tools (deep strike, psyker) that really we cannot use. Our cheapest troop choice is 21 points per model. You can't even make a Grey Knights Brigade under 2000 points unless you start bringing absolute trash like multiple units of servitors, and heavy weapons squads with no heavy weapons.

We pay an insane price for what we have.

Asking for our smite to be better than it is, truly is not an unfair ask, regardless of the cost of 1 random thousand sons unit looked at in a vacuum.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 nintura wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
I don't know the details, but I'm willing to bet GK have all the problems elite infantry has in this game in spades.

Except a couple things:

1: They aren't elite. They are troops. And elite. And fast attack.
2: They can teleport turn 1 and every turn thereafter.

Are you for real? We can cast Gate of Infinity once per turn. That's 1 unit moving. Once we deep strike we're foot slogging. My current list has only 1 model deep striking, because transports are better.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Backspacehacker wrote:
I'm gonna be real honest here, this entire thread reads like when the rip tide got needed and all the tau players cried. Sorry your powers are not over powered anymore?

First off, you'll have to prove that they were overpowered last edition. Psychic powers were just the one thing Grey Knights were actually strong at doing.

Second, even if they were OP. Thats no excuse for nerfing them below the power curve. If you just disallowed targeting the same friendly unit with the same power it would be perfectly fine.

Grey Knights still have all the strengths of space marines in general, along with some unique units and options of their own, which puts them well ahead of the curve compared to a lot of the other army choices out there. Their current psychic abilities are also better than most other armies, in fact I think only Eldar (and maybe Daemons?) can rival them (which is as it should be).


I did just re-read the Grey Knights powers list though, and you forgot a few things.

1) Your normal Smite is a bit weaker than usual (except against Demons), but your Purifiers have a short range heavy flamer version that *always* does D6 Mortal Wounds. Nothing to be sneezed at.
2) The best psychic power that Orks get access to is Da Jump. You also get access to it, except your version is better. And it's not even your best power. You have a middling-strength power, that is better than everything that Orks get access to. And you're complaining. AdMech don't have access to ANY powers, not even smite, without taking allies (which is a much bigger points tax than grey knights have to deal with).
3) Hammerhand and Sanctuary are both amazing powers. Even if these two were the ONLY powers you had access to, you would still have a psychic school better than most other armies.
4) You can shoot around corners, through buildings, and generally magic bullet your way into the deepest fox-holes, and murder people who NO LONGER GET COVER SAVES from your attacks.


So if you had your way, and could cast spells as often as you wanted, then every model in your army would have -

5++ armour save, or +1 to an existing invulnerable save.
+1 to all To Wound rolls in melee, letting you murder carnifexes / land raiders / Baneblades on a 5+.
The ability to shoot anyone within range, even if they are behind a wall, for full damage with no cover saves allowed.
The ability to instantly teleport to any location on the board. And still advance/charge/shoot. You can cast this on LAND RAIDERS. You can just plop it down right next to your enemy and unleash flaming rapid fire hell on them. For free. And then next turn, pick it up and move it anywhere else. Your whole army would just pop in and out like gophers, totally uncatchable by any pure melee army. And even if they did catch you, you'd get 5++ or better saves, and be able to kill their best fighters on (probably) a 3+ .


This is my quick and dirty interpretation of the rules, so I may be mistaken, but at first blush your psychic powers seem good, useful, and fun. I'm tempted to trade in my Orks for grey knights, just because you get a better version of Da Jump.
BUT if you had your way, and could cast multiple powers multiple times, the game would be hideously, hideously broken.

"Our cheapest troop choice is 21 points per model."

Is that for T4, W1, 3+ ?

 Marmatag wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
I don't know the details, but I'm willing to bet GK have all the problems elite infantry has in this game in spades.

Pretty much.

The core problem is we pay for a lot of tools (deep strike, psyker) that really we cannot use. Our cheapest troop choice is 21 points per model. You can't even make a Grey Knights Brigade under 2000 points unless you start bringing absolute trash like multiple units of servitors, and heavy weapons squads with no heavy weapons.

We pay an insane price for what we have.

Asking for our smite to be better than it is, truly is not an unfair ask, regardless of the cost of 1 random thousand sons unit looked at in a vacuum.

Really? because to make a brigade we have to take cultists or brimstones. Both of which are worse than standard guardsmen. And it's not just our Rubric troops. It's also our Terminators. Our basic troop is 20. Yes our defenses are better, but your offense is better. And you have a second power. You're an elite army. You're going to pay through the nose to play. Welcome to our world. Our cheapest brigade, and that's taking Chaos spawn by the way, and forgefiends, is 2268.

I don't really see that a GK army would be overpowered with full-strength Smite. They're not great as-is even though they've got a codex with stratagems and warlord traits and all that. Aside from a single Dreadknight that you buff with Sanctuary, all their stuff feels too expensive for what you're getting.

I just have a very hard time justifying more than maybe a single GM in NDK and a handful of Strike Squads. At that point why would I bring more GKs instead of just bringing a detachment of Sisters or Guard? Maybe you fill out a battalion or use a spearhead instead but that's it.

This is the big problem with psychic focus -- you're encouraged to work around it by bringing allies, but lots of people don't really want to bring allies. They want to field a GK army, or a Thousand Sons army, or whatever. My little 600 point patrol detachment of GKs is handing out a boosted invulnerable save to all of its dreadknights and is casting Hammerhand and Astral Aim on two-thirds of its regular troops. What's more, all of my GKs can deep strike -- I don't have to have any of them walk, where they're much less effective.

With the points I save by not bringing more GKs who would do much less than the ones I already have, I can easily bring an allied brigade and more, and this gives me enough CP so that most of my GKs are shooting at +1S and -1AP for the first two turns, and I can easily afford to buff the dreadknight's save to a 2++. Having real Smite would at least give me a reason to take more GKs, while not buffing the actually-best way to use GKs currently, since I'd still want to use Sanctuary and Hammerhand and maybe Vortex.

Are you for real? We can cast Gate of Infinity once per turn. That's 1 unit moving. Once we deep strike we're foot slogging. My current list has only 1 model deep striking, because transports are better.

Yeah, I'm quite for real. You deep strike once per turn? We walk 5". oh wait, we can Warp Time. Ok, we can walk another 5".

I agree that Psychic Focus as written is fine, and removing it would make the game, and the psychic phase, totally broken.

But we're not "space marines +1," if you look at the rankings we're actually "space marines -1," fact of the matter is you can make a more competitive space marines army with 0 Grey Knights, than you can with an army including Grey Knights.

And that's because of how force multipliers work in 8th edition. You are rewarded for keeping faction keywords together, so smorgasbording GK into DA would be incredibly unwise and inefficient.

If we accept that Grey Knights should stand on their own as their own army, they could use a boost, and i think smite should be that boost.

You're glossing over that casting a power is not guaranteed. And if you fail to manifest the power, that is your one chance that turn, weather it's successful, fails, or gets denied. It seems only fair, given that each time you cast a power there is a 5.5% chance of suffering D3 mortal wounds and you paid good points for these powers, you should be allowed to cast multiple times.

 Marmatag wrote:


Thank you, a million times this. it's something present in ETC lists.

Well, and if you wanted to go TOTALLY silly, you could include the 15 point baby smites from Astropaths. You can max out the detachments and get a cool 9 of those. 135 points. We're up to 535 now, and we have 10 full smites and 9 baby smites, all on characters.

Oh god, it's happening:

Supreme Command Detachment:
5 Primaris Psykers
1 Astropath
215 points

Brigade Detachment:
HQ - 200
5 Primaris Psykers
Elite - 120
8 Astropaths
Troops - 525
6 GKSS
Fast - 375
3 Interceptor Squads
Heavy - 315
3 Purgation Squads

That's 10 papa-smites, 9 5+ baby smites, and 12 GK baby smites in one (legal) list. It's... 1750 points, on the nose.

You forgot to add one GKSS into your total. 525 is 105 short of 630.

Crap, you're right. That's what I get for not using battlescribe. You could drop an astropath then to fit it into 1850. It'd still work for 2000 though. I genuinely cannot even wrap my head around how effective (or not) of a list it would be.

I suppose at 2000 you could add a couple transports to help all the characters along. Even otherwise, characters alone on foot, that's still 19 characters that could only be shot one at a time. That's gotta be SUPER annoying.

Dunno if this has been mentioned in the 4 or so pages of "who is the worst?" contest, but I have an idea that might be a fix:

For T-Sons, allow them to swap out a single spell for Smite, which can be cast with no limits (well, the 1-per-army limit anyways). As a consequence, the entire detachment loses out on the ability to use Smite completely in exchange for one spell chosen by the player. This is to represent how T-Sons are sorcerors to a fault, maybe mastering a single spell that they can cast with expertise over all others, but losing out on the "basics". If multiple detachments are used to get different spells, it represent different detachments being different "covens" of sorcerors specializing in different things.

For GKs: Still allowed to use Smite, but individual, non-character squads lose it. Instead, each individual squad can cast their specialist spell once each (as in, two squads with the same spell can both cast it in the same turn, but only once per squad). This is to represent how the GKs are a disciplined army of psykers, trained to channel their powers in a different way than other psykers and only really "cut loose" after they have made a name for themselves.

I was a big fan of warp charges. I would have preferred keeping that and preventing psykers from sharing points. Powers that are still too strong could get a one use per player turn on a case by case basis. Problem solved right? Maybe give ties for deny to the defender.

malcontent999 wrote:
I was a big fan of warp charges. I would have preferred keeping that and preventing psykers from sharing points. Powers that are still too strong could get a one use per player turn on a case by case basis. Problem solved right? Maybe give ties for deny to the defender.

Again Monday night quarterbacking here, how it should have happened was every psyker knows force which caused say 3 wounds. Kept all the old powers, made focused witch fire spells do mortal wounds, have the current casting system, turned warp charge 1 powers into casting value 6, 2 charge into casting value 8 and 3 charge into casting value 10. Or make them value of 8 and tone them back.

The one complaint I have about powers this edition is they are super boring, there is nothing really cool

The warp charge system made it pretty difficult to get any use out of just 1 psyker. I wouldn't go with that system again.

I like the streamlined fast psychic phase.

Smite, as a power, doesn't feel balanced though, faction to faction. Grey Knights may as well not have smite. If i could drop smite from my squads and get points back i would do it in a heart beat.

 Marmatag wrote:
The warp charge system made it pretty difficult to get any use out of just 1 psyker. I wouldn't go with that system again.

I like the streamlined fast psychic phase.

Smite, as a power, doesn't feel balanced though, faction to faction. Grey Knights may as well not have smite. If i could drop smite from my squads and get points back i would do it in a heart beat.

Problem with smite as the default power was it gave a way to wound anything with out any save, so you get issues like the blue horror lists

Yes, psychic focus really hurts the Grey Knights as games get large.


This edition has a really bad problem with scaling.

 Marmatag wrote:
The warp charge system made it pretty difficult to get any use out of just 1 psyker. I wouldn't go with that system again.

I like the streamlined fast psychic phase.

How do warp charges make 1 psykers difficult to use? I imagine if we stuck with charges but prevented sharing, everyone would get enough per psyker to cast a power or 2 per player turn.

I'm displeased with all the streamlining. It just becomes samey and boring for me.

I don't mind it. It's basically a free wound on an enemy on a 4+.

malcontent999 wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
The warp charge system made it pretty difficult to get any use out of just 1 psyker. I wouldn't go with that system again.

I like the streamlined fast psychic phase.

How do warp charges make 1 psykers difficult to use? I imagine if we stuck with charges but prevented sharing, everyone would get enough per psyker to cast a power or 2 per player turn.

I'm displeased with all the streamlining. It just becomes samey and boring for me.

Okay, if you have 1 librarian in your army, and I have an army full of Daemons, you'll get what, 2 warp charges, and i'll have like 30. When you try to cast your 1 power, i'll throw 30 dice at you and deny offhand.