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The Volcano Lance and Cawls are in theoryenough (assuming no -1 to hit from Nightshroud psychic power and the Raven companion stratagem) but you hardly want to leave it alive to fire again so I would agree with firing the Siegebreakers aswell.

Or having other units ready to finish it if need be.

Would Armigar spam be effective? You could have 10-12 Armigers on the board at 2k. Don't know how it could turn out but just seems like it could be a nuisance.

So I brought a Castellan, Crusader and the much maligned Valiant as my 1750 army to GW grand tournament and have tabled all three of my opponents on day one.

So yes, you have enough command points without guard, and yes the Valiant is awesome, and the Castellan is an absolute beast. The Crusader with Endless Fury is amazingly consistent at deleting troops

What lists did you face?

 DoomMouse wrote:
What lists did you face?

Primaris and custodes in game one. Deathwatch and guard in game two, and custodes and deathwatch in game three

I am by no means a competitive player but I feel a lot of people are forgetting about something in the Valient vs Castellan thing: terrain. Aren't tournament battlefields meant to have a good deal of line of sight blocking terrrain? In that case, would that not be a point in the Valient's favor?

 GreatGranpapy wrote:
I am by no means a competitive player but I feel a lot of people are forgetting about something in the Valient vs Castellan thing: terrain. Aren't tournament battlefields meant to have a good deal of line of sight blocking terrrain? In that case, would that not be a point in the Valient's favor?

Both are the same size. Both can move where they want. Castellans don't have to hang back.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Godeskian wrote:
So I brought a Castellan, Crusader and the much maligned Valiant as my 1750 army to GW grand tournament and have tabled all three of my opponents on day one.

So yes, you have enough command points without guard, and yes the Valiant is awesome, and the Castellan is an absolute beast. The Crusader with Endless Fury is amazingly consistent at deleting troops

Especially in a big tournament a lot will hang on getting lucky in pairings to avoid bad matchups. At some point you run into someone that just destroys Knights for breakfast.

 GreatGranpapy wrote:
I am by no means a competitive player but I feel a lot of people are forgetting about something in the Valient vs Castellan thing: terrain. Aren't tournament battlefields meant to have a good deal of line of sight blocking terrrain? In that case, would that not be a point in the Valient's favor?

Unless your tournament pack goes for first floor LoS blocking my experience has been that it highly variable

For those with more experience running dominus class knights, are you finding the 2x shield breakers are enough or are your knights still alive turn 3/4 and you wish you had more over the seigebreakers?

 UMGuy wrote:
For those with more experience running dominus class knights, are you finding the 2x shield breakers are enough or are your knights still alive turn 3/4 and you wish you had more over the seigebreakers?

I run a Raven Castellan and am seriously considering upping to 4 missiles. Not sure what I can do with the 10 or so spare points, but with the Raven strat I tend to delete 1 character per turn.

MarkM wrote:

 UMGuy wrote:
For those with more experience running dominus class knights, are you finding the 2x shield breakers are enough or are your knights still alive turn 3/4 and you wish you had more over the seigebreakers?

I run a Raven Castellan and am seriously considering upping to 4 missiles. Not sure what I can do with the 10 or so spare points, but with the Raven strat I tend to delete 1 character per turn.

Really? I've had no luck with the strat, so I've stopped trying. Either I miss, I fail to wound, or I don't do enough wounds and I've spent a bunch of command points for nothing. Compared to spending those command points on sat order of companions and guaranteeing extra kills f ft om the Castellan.

Plus the Siege breaker cannons are workhorses, always adding consistent extra damage over the course of a game. In fact I tend to run my Valiant with two of them too.

YMMV obviously

 Ordana wrote:

 GreatGranpapy wrote:
I am by no means a competitive player but I feel a lot of people are forgetting about something in the Valient vs Castellan thing: terrain. Aren't tournament battlefields meant to have a good deal of line of sight blocking terrrain? In that case, would that not be a point in the Valient's favor?

Both are the same size. Both can move where they want. Castellans don't have to hang back.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Godeskian wrote:
So I brought a Castellan, Crusader and the much maligned Valiant as my 1750 army to GW grand tournament and have tabled all three of my opponents on day one.

So yes, you have enough command points without guard, and yes the Valiant is awesome, and the Castellan is an absolute beast. The Crusader with Endless Fury is amazingly consistent at deleting troops

Especially in a big tournament a lot will hang on getting lucky in pairings to avoid bad matchups. At some point you run into someone that just destroys Knights for breakfast.

I’m there too, and having a much less good experience. Currently 1 win and 2 losses.

I beat up some Tau in game 1. Honestly I was pretty unlucky but I still almost tabled him, leaving just a firesight marksman alive by turn 7. Killing riptides and ghostkeels was tough but they did die eventually, even though my Castellan whiffed spectacularly throughout.

I should have won my second game against DE, and would probably do so again in future. Trouble was the mission: Ascension. He had 9 Talons and 3 ravagers. I should have focussed everything on the taloses but didn’t, and suffered as a result. My Armigers actually held up pretty well here.

I don’t know what I could have done in game 3. 150-odd cultists with Abaddon making them fearless and assorted daemon princes, Ahriman and a Slaanesh sorcerer handing out FNP. Just couldn’t kill them fast enough, especially once a unit trapped my armigers so they couldn’t be attacked at all. It takes a long time to kill 40 guys with FNP!

Army is Castellan, Crusader with TC and ironstorm rocket pod, Gallant and two armigers.

Overall I kind of think the armigers are a liability, because of how they let your opponent swarm over you. If they met something like plaguebearers they’d have no chance whatsoever.

It seems like the meta has changed. I’m seeing loads of invulnerable saves on lots of models, without tons of wounds. Things like Taloses and Ghostkeels with shield generators are really diffficult to get rid of when you have big penalties to hit. My first opponent had Longstrike and 3 other hammerheads, but those were the only good targets for my Castellan all day - and it rolled awfully against them so didn’t do all that much.

The crusader has been solid. A battlecannon definitely would have been better than the TC, by a long way, because every damn thing has an invulnerable save anyway.

The Gallant has been kind of a joke too to be honest. He can kick away at things like Taloses and cultists, but nothing really happens, and then he falls over to mortal wound spam and stuff. Ultimately this guy would be useful against a pure shooting army, but even then you’d be better off with a gun. They’d probably have a screen, and taking a Gallant means having to shoot your way through it when otherwise you wouldn’t have to bother.

Overall it’s been interesting, but tough. Learning a lot about my own army and others. It’s weird how fast the meta can shift around. Knights are in a weird place, because they are so different to what everyone else is taking - and they aren’t very good at dealing with the hordes that everyone else is bringing. So they end up being bad at dealing with the enemy - and the enemy are also bad at dealing with the knights because they took anti-horde stuff. You get match-ups where you auto-win or lose. That’s kind of bad, honestly. It’s not how anyone wants to play.

Mandragola wrote:
Overall it’s been interesting, but tough. Learning a lot about my own army and others. It’s weird how fast the meta can shift around. Knights are in a weird place, because they are so different to what everyone else is taking - and they aren’t very good at dealing with the hordes that everyone else is bringing. So they end up being bad at dealing with the enemy - and the enemy are also bad at dealing with the knights because they took anti-horde stuff. You get match-ups where you auto-win or lose. That’s kind of bad, honestly. It’s not how anyone wants to play.

The meta seems to be degenerating into rock-paper-scissors. 40K has always had an element of this but the flexible detachments in 8th edition seem to have exacerbated it. No one bring balanced lists because it just means every gun in your opponent's army has a viable target. Every list seems to depend on spamming something whether it is armour, infantry or negative to-hit modifiers.

Not sure what the solution is, even shifting back to the old CAD would not necessarily help since the combo of cheap troops and powerful HQs seem to be where its at currently.

The game has always been about how much anti infantry or anti tank you need.

Knights themselves are a HUGE binary army. Either the enemy can beat 3 Knight and you lose or they can't and you win.
There is not a lot of room between the two.

So every game you play looks like a rock-paper-scissors game.

Avenger Gatling Cannons are actually a good all-rounder. Endless Fury is particularly good. So I think that maximising the number of these you have is a good way to make the army less binary. You could take up to four knights with them at 1750, and honestly I think that might be a decent idea.

The revised list I’m low looking at features something like my Castellan, A Crusader and a Warden, plus a battalion of either IG or Admech. The warden is there to take a fist in case there are characters who need death gripping - which I think there often will be. A stormspear pod on the roof is almost equivalent to a TC anyway. I think I’ll drop the Armigers and the Gallant though.

Someone suggested spamming Armigers, which is interesting. There might come a tipping point where you have enough of them that they can start to hack their way through hordes. Maybe you could run a good Krast army featuring tons of armigers. But putting two of them into my army really hasn’t worked at all - at least so far.

It seems like the meta has already adjusted to account for Knights now. Will be interesting to see how they fare say three months from now.

I've just started painting a castellan, hopefully the meta hasn't already obsoleted it heh

Mandragola wrote:
Avenger Gatling Cannons are actually a good all-rounder. Endless Fury is particularly good. So I think that maximising the number of these you have is a good way to make the army less binary. You could take up to four knights with them at 1750, and honestly I think that might be a decent idea.

I ran the numbers of an AGC vs a RFBC. The RFBC is slightly better vs T7 targets but only slightly. Against all other targets, the AGC is the superior weapon. When you consider the RFBC costs more points, you have to wonder if the advantage or range is worth it. If Knights need T8, they have feet and stormspear pods. I do think the Warden has decent claim to be the best all-rounder Questoris.

 Karhedron wrote:

Mandragola wrote:
Avenger Gatling Cannons are actually a good all-rounder. Endless Fury is particularly good. So I think that maximising the number of these you have is a good way to make the army less binary. You could take up to four knights with them at 1750, and honestly I think that might be a decent idea.

I ran the numbers of an AGC vs a RFBC. The RFBC is slightly better vs T7 targets but only slightly. Against all other targets, the AGC is the superior weapon. When you consider the RFBC costs more points, you have to wonder if the advantage or range is worth it. If Knights need T8, they have feet and stormspear pods. I do think the Warden has decent claim to be the best all-rounder Questoris.

This is one of the ways that Renegade Knights get a good option the loyalists don't. Dual avenger gatling cannon knight. You get 2 heavy flamers for your trouble too! I intend to build one such knight to support my Iron Warriors.

So I got two more wins today, and qualified by the skin of my teeth. Phew!!

Today I played against a Tau army and a soup list of IG and BA battalions plus a Gallant. I went first and I had pretty decent luck throughout both games, so I tabled both opponents. Only lost my armigers against the Tau and the Gallant against the IG.

Playing pure knights is odd. They are extremely binary. They kill an awful lot of things but are dreadful in objective games. This leads to games that are lost or won by massive margins.

That said, they are decent overall. My crusader has been rock solid for me all weekend. You can just point that avenger cannon at anything you want to, and it’ll be hurt. I’ve alternated between making it be Endless Fury for the extra shots and giving him the Blessed by the Sacristans warlord trait to make it do mortal wounds. Both are great, so the obvious thing is to take two avengers so that you can have both.

The Castellan was ok, overall. It does have good guns. I’m not sure whether it’s better to have two turrets or one, so you can keep firing missiles. Both are pretty decent. It would have been far, far better as house Raven - though it would have eaten a lot of CPs.

It’s probably worth having a thunderstrike gauntlet somewhere, so that you can death grip things. So I think that my set up in future is going to be a Castellan, Crusader and Warden, plus a battalion of something or other.

There are good arguments for both admech and IG battalions. It would actually be quite handy having a couple of enginseers to put wounds back on knights, though I’d be sorry to increase my drop count. Of course admech have a transport now, with the termite, and you could potentially put 2x5 vanguard and both enginseers in it to keep the drop count nice and low.

Guard have good options too though. I’m tempted by the idea of a blob of 40 conscripts, backed up by the relic bolt pistol that stops them from running off and a psyker to improve their saves. I’ll do some adding up and see what I can afford.

Unlike Mandragola, I had a day marred by calamity, having to concede my fourth game halfway through and miss my fifth game due to a plumbing emergency.

As a result of two forfeits, I missed out on a top 30 spot by five positions, which amounted to a single tournament point.

Congrats to him though. I'll be rooting for you at the finals

Really sorry you went out like that, from such a strong position yesterday. Hope the plumbing situation is fixed!

 ph34r wrote:

 Karhedron wrote:

Mandragola wrote:
Avenger Gatling Cannons are actually a good all-rounder. Endless Fury is particularly good. So I think that maximising the number of these you have is a good way to make the army less binary. You could take up to four knights with them at 1750, and honestly I think that might be a decent idea.

I ran the numbers of an AGC vs a RFBC. The RFBC is slightly better vs T7 targets but only slightly. Against all other targets, the AGC is the superior weapon. When you consider the RFBC costs more points, you have to wonder if the advantage or range is worth it. If Knights need T8, they have feet and stormspear pods. I do think the Warden has decent claim to be the best all-rounder Questoris.

This is one of the ways that Renegade Knights get a good option the loyalists don't. Dual avenger gatling cannon knight. You get 2 heavy flamers for your trouble too! I intend to build one such knight to support my Iron Warriors.

2 HFlamers, that you also pay for. Which make up the pounts difference.

The cost of a RFBC is as high as it is because set up at extreme range from any target and moving normally towards them at knight speed with them movong towards you at infantry speed or gunline standing still; will have that RFBC firing 2-3x before the AGC will make it into range at all, and the Heavy Flamer will still be out of range for a full battle round.

At least; that is the Bad-at-math game designer's reason; they also have never played a game before(why anything non-indirect ever has a range greater than 48-54"). This makes sense in the most extreme situations.

Mandragola wrote:
Really sorry you went out like that, from such a strong position yesterday. Hope the plumbing situation is fixed!

What tournament were you folks involved in?

 Ideasweasel wrote:

Mandragola wrote:
Really sorry you went out like that, from such a strong position yesterday. Hope the plumbing situation is fixed!

What tournament were you folks involved in?

GW UK Grand Tournament heat 1.

 Kommissar Kel wrote:

 ph34r wrote:

 Karhedron wrote:

Mandragola wrote:
Avenger Gatling Cannons are actually a good all-rounder. Endless Fury is particularly good. So I think that maximising the number of these you have is a good way to make the army less binary. You could take up to four knights with them at 1750, and honestly I think that might be a decent idea.

I ran the numbers of an AGC vs a RFBC. The RFBC is slightly better vs T7 targets but only slightly. Against all other targets, the AGC is the superior weapon. When you consider the RFBC costs more points, you have to wonder if the advantage or range is worth it. If Knights need T8, they have feet and stormspear pods. I do think the Warden has decent claim to be the best all-rounder Questoris.

This is one of the ways that Renegade Knights get a good option the loyalists don't. Dual avenger gatling cannon knight. You get 2 heavy flamers for your trouble too! I intend to build one such knight to support my Iron Warriors.

2 HFlamers, that you also pay for. Which make up the pounts difference.

The cost of a RFBC is as high as it is because set up at extreme range from any target and moving normally towards them at knight speed with them movong towards you at infantry speed or gunline standing still; will have that RFBC firing 2-3x before the AGC will make it into range at all, and the Heavy Flamer will still be out of range for a full battle round.

At least; that is the Bad-at-math game designer's reason; they also have never played a game before(why anything non-indirect ever has a range greater than 48-54"). This makes sense in the most extreme situations.

The heavy flamer makes up some of the difference between the avenger and the RFBC, but not all. It’s 92 points vs 104. GW seriously over-values almost all flamer weapons. To be fair, a heavy stubber can easily get more kills across a game than a heavy flamer, because it’ll fire every turn. So here we see GW being bad at maths twice, with an effect that nearly evens out overall.

I’ve been thinking more about how my various units performed over the weekend. Here’s something of a model by model review.

The Castellan is awesome… sometimes. Line up tanks against him and he’ll batter them, at ranges that make him extremely hard for them to kill – especially with the obligatory 4++ warlord trait. This guy only died once all weekend and that was my fault for underestimating Taloses. High point was one-shotting an Y’vahra. Low point was facing ~150 fearless cultists. I had pretty bad luck with this guy’s dice (one wounding hit with its first 12 melta gun shots, for example!) but even so it handed out great damage in some games.

I’m actually starting to think that the Castellan might not be all that good. He does one thing very well – blow up tanks – but you can kill tanks really well already by rushing them with Questoris knights. Against hordes he feels extremely weak, and he can also be stymied by armies with lots of invulnerable saves - as seen in the game against DE. He might be better at 2k.

My crusader was the sleeper hit of my list. He just kept on handing out damage all the way through every game. Mainly this was because of his avenger gatling gun, which I’ve talked about already, but he could pitch in and stomp on Tau when needed too. The ironstorm missile pod was very useful too. I don’t think it used a single CP over 5 games, other than the ones I paid to give it a relic gun.

The Gallant was bad. In fairness to it, it did pretty well in games against shooty armies, where it zerged in and smashed things up. That better WS meant that it could reliably smash up a tank even on its bottom health bracket. But on the other hand it was awful in games where my opponent had scary cc stuff – and that’s a lot of the time! Ultimately a Warden could charge into a Leman Russ with roughly the same effect (the russ probably dies and certainly doesn’t shoot). I won’t take one of these again.

The armigers were a weird one. They give you the ability to threaten a lot more of the board, which is very useful, and they can cut up hordes relatively well. I think an army list with a lot of them (say 6+) could work pretty well. But they weren’t great in my list, except against shooting armies. On the whole, I think my points would have been better spent on more Questoris knights, which would have been better all-rounders. They are decent at fighting hordes in melee, but the fact they get trapped is a significant downside.

The Armigers had several high points, including getting into melee with Tau on turn 1 of a game and killing a charging enemy Gallant before it got to strike, with possibly my best ever use of an interrupt stratagem. They fought well against the Taloses too. Low point was when one of them got surrounded by fearless cultists, allowing a bunch of chaos characters to move up behind in complete safety.

So with armigers I think it’s a bit all or nothing. If you had a lot of them they’d terrorise shooty armies and possibly hand out enough chops to go through hordes – eventually.

Overall my army was extremely dangerous. I killed 7344 points worth of stuff in 5 games at 1750. That's 84% of everything I faced. I didn't play that well, having had only two practice games and no time to refine my list. After that experience I could produce a nastier army and be pretty confident of doing significantly better. I think I'd take four questoris knights, all with avengers at 1750 from now on. They just work.

When you say armiger do you mean warglaive or helverin?
I can see a warglaive having the issues you describe, but wouldn't a helverin have the speed and range to kite while having a weapon that is got enough range to threaten most of the board.

Mandragola wrote:
Really sorry you went out like that, from such a strong position yesterday. Hope the plumbing situation is fixed!

It is, thank you.

I'd also like to add to your unit review. I took the Crusader with a Stormspear pod because I expected to see much, much more armour, but even with that being a bit of a damp squib, the Avenger and RFBC did journeyman work throughout the tournament. It never failed to kill loads of stuff, blowing enemies off key objectives, and if there was no one specific thing it had to kill, it was still killing things every single turn. I was far more impressed than I was expecting to be.

Like you I feel like the Castellan was good, but not great due to having no juicy targets. In four games I saw exactlty three vehicles. A Rhino, a Razorback and a Leviathan, and it blew each of them off the board in one round of shooting (obviously in seperate games). Sure,t he Volcano cannon killed a bunch of other stuff, but I ended up using it to finish off units, rather than as anti-vehicle. On the other hand Cawl's Wrath and the twin Siegebreakers just hammered squad after squad after squad.

And finally, the Valiant. hoo boy. Here's the problem, when the Valiant was on fire, it was an absolute wrecking ball. Despite the handwringing of online commentators, I had something worthwhile to shoot at every single turn. The 28 inch basic threat range is plenty, and when you add in the Raven move, you should never be without targets for at least the Siegebreakers (i took two) and the Conflagration cannon. However, and it pains me to say this, because nothing gives me greater joy than shouting 'MAN THE HARPOONS!!!' in a match, but the problem with the Valiant is that it is wildly inconsistent. 3D6 hits sounds great on paper, and probably does average out at about 10-11 hits, but when the dice aren't hot, and you spend several turns rolling 5 or 6 hits, as I did, it feels like a very expensive waste of points. Moreover, while its range is fine, it does have to move towards the enemy, and it just isn't good in CC against anything that is designed to be good in CC.

So I'm hoping to go to one of the other heats if they release any return tickets later, and I'd probably trade the Valiant for a dedicated close combat knight like the Lancer, or a hybrid like the Atropos. And it genuinely pains me, but I need that consistency in my killing power, the variance of the Valiant is more than i can deal with.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Mandragola wrote:

The Castellan is awesome… sometimes. Line up tanks against him and he’ll batter them, at ranges that make him extremely hard for them to kill – especially with the obligatory 4++ warlord trait.

Interesting, I tossed that on the Valiant every single time, because I was using it as a massive distraction carnifex that actually has to be killed, and as a result my Castellan didn't even get shot at in my first game, and took scratch damage in two and three. I'm fairly sure he was about to get smashed to paste in my game against five captain Smashfuckers and Mephiston, but as both the Valiant and Crusader were dead at that point, it was his only target left.

I'm glad it worked for you

Anyone take SoB as a battalion for their Knights?

 TheMostWize wrote:
Anyone take SoB as a battalion for their Knights?

Nobody I know, but I imagine that they would be a very strong candidate. Sisters of Battle are strong.