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 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

Sterling191 wrote:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:


How many times can they use it? Because if its more than once, I'll be really annoyed.

Once per turn. It's situational as all hell and no substitute for Craftworld or Harlie psyker support, but when it works it's a barrel of laughs.

So they can use it multiple times throughout the game? Because that's still better than anything Necrons can bring.
Necrons get deny on a warlord trait and the gloom prism, which can only be taken by a spyder. Which is not a character, and as such can be shot at will.
Both only provide one deny each turn. No other effect.

Thats a bit disingenuous there. Both the Necron Warlord trait and the Helm of Spite can allow you to deny the witch once per turn, the secondary ability of the Helm is to cause the Psyker to automatically peril whilst the Warlord trait is a fearless bubble. I'd say that WT is far more valuable than the highly situational Helm of Spite.

 Imateria wrote:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

Sterling191 wrote:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:


How many times can they use it? Because if its more than once, I'll be really annoyed.

Once per turn. It's situational as all hell and no substitute for Craftworld or Harlie psyker support, but when it works it's a barrel of laughs.

So they can use it multiple times throughout the game? Because that's still better than anything Necrons can bring.
Necrons get deny on a warlord trait and the gloom prism, which can only be taken by a spyder. Which is not a character, and as such can be shot at will.
Both only provide one deny each turn. No other effect.

Thats a bit disingenuous there. Both the Necron Warlord trait and the Helm of Spite can allow you to deny the witch once per turn, the secondary ability of the Helm is to cause the Psyker to automatically peril whilst the Warlord trait is a fearless bubble. I'd say that WT is far more valuable than the highly situational Helm of Spite.

Overall Immortal Pride is great, and I would recommend it if one is running silver legion.
In terms of psychic defense though Helm of Spite is better, which is as this is a discussion about psychic defenses is, to me, a relevant observation.

Necrons won a war against a powerful race of psychics and know how much of a threat the warp is. They should have better countermeasures, and have had more time than anyone to do it. The entire premise of Forgebane is of necrons collecting blackstone for that very purpose.
They should be like Dwarfs - they don't get space magic, and they are going to try to make sure you don't either.
It doesn't have to be Deny, it could just be a debuff to casting.

You really, really dont want to go down the road of "the fluff says this therefore the rules need to do X".

Especially not in a setting where fluff is hilariously over the top.

Lammia wrote:
Everyone apart from maybe Necrons have access to denial. Though pure Sisters of Battle and Custodes are limited to Stragems. (I don't know what Necrons have, someone who plays them will have to answer. I'll assume they have a Stratagem too...)

Technically Sisters are very psychic resistant since every single model has a DTW. But it's only against powers that kick off on 5 or lower. Every SoB unit can deny Smite on a 6 once a turn.

They can only deny a smite that has been passed with a 5, so essentially useless, just like their 6++ save.

 deviantduck wrote:
Technically Sisters are very psychic resistant since every single model has a DTW.

Sisters have a 1.8% chance of denying the first (and only the first) use of smite each turn.

I'd like to see the witch hunters get better psyker defence TBH. If there ever was an anti-psyker army it'd be them.

More defensive options against psykers in general would be a good idea, I think. At the moment the best defence is to take psykers of your own. Even that isn't really a great defence since you don't have any control over what you Deny - you have to hope the opponent rolls low enough on the powers you want to stop, and if they don't you're pretty much screwed.

Sterling191 wrote:
You really, really dont want to go down the road of "the fluff says this therefore the rules need to do X".

Especially not in a setting where fluff is hilariously over the top.

Factions with no access to a mechanic need some sort of counterplay to not get completely overrun by it. Especially when that mechanic is so powerful and fundamental as to have an entire phase dedicated to it.

Right know the Psychic Phase comes down to "Did you bring a Farseer and/or Magnus? If not, you lose". Necrons at the very least need better defences, as do Sisters of Battle. The whole Deny mechanic to me seems like a vestigial leftover from previous editions. It only works if you happen to have a psyker, happen to be in range, and they happen to roll poorly but not poorly enough to fail to cast.

I get 6th and 7th psychic phase were mountains of hot garbage, but there surely must be some other game that has done it right that 40k can crib off?

I would have loved for Tau Farsight Enclaves to get their own book, and bring back the 7th edition relic "The Talisman of Arthas Moloch" as a psychic denial mechanic. It wouldn't be much, but it would be better than nothing. Sadly that didn't happen, and they rolled Farsight into the same book as the rest of the Tau.

 BaconCatBug wrote:
Right know the Psychic Phase comes down to "Did you bring a Farseer and/or Magnus? If not, you lose". Necrons at the very least need better defences, as do Sisters of Battle. The whole Deny mechanic to me seems like a vestigial leftover from previous editions. It only works if you happen to have a psyker, happen to be in range, and they happen to roll poorly but not poorly enough to fail to cast.

I get 6th and 7th psychic phase were mountains of hot garbage, but there surely must be some other game that has done it right that 40k can crib off?

Yeah, Warhammer Fantasy Battle.

Each player gets a pool of psychic dice and dispel dice at the start of the psychic phase.
Said dice are used to cast and dispel powers. You don't need a psyker or a special unit to dispel, but it helps.

6th and 7th ed psychic mechanics are basically just a gakky version of the magic phase anyway, so they might as well do it right.

But didn't that just lead to spamming multiple weak psykers and one good one?

 BaconCatBug wrote:
But didn't that just lead to spamming multiple weak psykers and one good one?

Even if it is a bit gamey, looking at it in abstract, the weak psykers get dispelled, but the big boy kicks butt.

 BaconCatBug wrote:
But didn't that just lead to spamming multiple weak psykers and one good one?

Eh, not really. In 8th ed they introduced a hard cap of 12 power dice randomly determined by 2d6, which made wizard spam a little harder. When I ran a Slaan mage priest and 2 skink priests, I found I burned through power dice really fast. Having weak mages only really helped with generating more power dice, and that only happened on a 6+.
Even in 7th ed there was a rule where you can't share power dice; you had a set base amount and each wizard provided power dice, but each wizard could only use the power dice they provide + the amount in the base power dice pool.

Not to mention that your opponent always had the ability to dispel. Even if he had not mages he could try to dispel an ability. Its a bit harder without mages, but at least you could do it.
That was a notable dwarven feature; they had no mages, but they got extra dispel dice, and iirc magic resistance was quite common in the dwarven list.

Magic in WHFB was handled a lot better than the psychic phase. The problem came from the spells themselves in 8th ed, not the overall mechanics, imo.

 BaconCatBug wrote:
But didn't that just lead to spamming multiple weak psykers and one good one?

Not in practice, no. The system was actually pretty well balanced. It was the spells themselves that GW messed up on. First of all, WH actually had restrictions on what units you could take. In 8th edition WH it was done by percentages, so the most powerful class of characters, called Lords, could only make up 25% of your army, with Heroes, the lower level of character, making up a further 25%, but you also needed at least 25% Core (the WH equivalent of Troops). That meant maxing out on characters left you very little left over for the good units. Furthermore, there was a diminishing return on investment for magic. The system worked by the casting player rolling 2D6 at the start of their magic phase. They got a number of dice equal to the roll, while the defenidng player got a number of Dispel dice equal to the highest of the 2 dice. You then had a chnace to get an extra dice per wizard, but only ont he roll of a 6. Additionally, spells ranged in casting value from 4+ to 18+ (though some later spells and boosted versions of basic spells required 21 or more). You got bonuses to cast or dispel based on the level of the wizard attempting to do either.

It sounds complicated, but in practice it was pretty easy to pick up, and it worked quite well. The key thing it did very well was made decision-making an important factor in the magic phase. As the caster, you had to manage your pool of dice as effectively as possible, and try to figure out the optimal way to get off the spells you really wanted to cast. There were mind games involved in trying to pull out dispel dice to clear the way for the spell you want to cast, but your opponent was also aware of this too. The nature of the spells also meant some armies cared less about certain spells than other armies did. Elves hated magic missiles and direct damage, for example, because they were expensive and not very tough. Chaos Warriors largely didn't care because they had great stats and armour, so could tank damage spells quite easily. They hated anything that slowed them down or reduced their attacks or WS, though. Contrast that with the Mortal Wound mechanic, where all your stats are useless. Also, WH was much more creative with what the spells did. The 40k psychic phase now feels much more like a Mortal Wound-fest where there's hardly anything you can meaningfully do to prevent your opponent from casting their stuff.

Also, if the natural roll of dice totaled 3 or less, the spell immediately failed regardless of modifiers. Which meant you had to use at least 2 dice if you wanted a good chance of getting the spell off.

The magic system in WHFB was leagues better than the current psychic system.