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Points are not the reason GK are bottom tier right now, it's their rules.

1. Weak special rules. Compared to +1 to hit, +1 to wound, or falling back and shooting, baby smite and +1 to psychic tests isn't great, especially considering most of their powers aren't that terrific

2. Their "best" units are still sub standard. A GMDK is only T6, S6, which is dismal when you compare it to other Army's big hitting options

3. Even with a points reduction, GK still lack RELIABLE ways of getting into CC. And once they are there, at 2 attacks base they aren't stellar to begin with.



I'm a huge GK fan, my first terminators were back in the DAEMONHUNTER days, but I have low expectations for the points drop.

I disagree. The amount of mass dakka that a GK can put out is a great meta counter - being mass hordes.

Nearly every unit has -3AP force weapons and you get and a psychic phase that wrecks daemons.

They have their weaknesses, yeah absolutely, but a mass 20-30% (assuming) decrease across the board will go a long way.

 NurglesR0T wrote:
I disagree. The amount of mass dakka that a GK can put out is a great meta counter - being mass hordes.

Nearly every unit has -3AP force weapons and you get and a psychic phase that wrecks daemons.

They have their weaknesses, yeah absolutely, but a mass 20-30% (assuming) decrease across the board will go a long way.

GK is now the worst faction to fight against Daemon after Daemon got their codex. You just killed a spoky troblesome Daemon units (Bloodletter Bomb, large squad of Flamers, that huge Daemon Prince, etc.) with all your shining smite, stormbolter and force weapon melee attack? Feeling good? Just watch them come back at full strength 9" away from you!!! How is that feel??

And remember, each GK unit is massively over costed compared to Daemon units. And those Daemon units' psychic, high volume of shooting and close combat attacks will wreck havoc on any Space Marine units, GK is no exception and die in the same way. Yet any Daemon units destroyed by them will just come back at full strength.

The entire premise of the thread is wrong. There is no separating balance issues into "points problems" and "rules problems", as if there are underpowered units that can't be made viable with a point reduction. GK at 1 ppm would be utterly broken even without any other rule changes, so the only question is just how much of a point reduction is required to make them competitive.

Neophyte2012 wrote:

 NurglesR0T wrote:
I disagree. The amount of mass dakka that a GK can put out is a great meta counter - being mass hordes.

Nearly every unit has -3AP force weapons and you get and a psychic phase that wrecks daemons.

They have their weaknesses, yeah absolutely, but a mass 20-30% (assuming) decrease across the board will go a long way.

GK is now the worst faction to fight against Daemon after Daemon got their codex. You just killed a spoky troblesome Daemon units (Bloodletter Bomb, large squad of Flamers, that huge Daemon Prince, etc.) with all your shining smite, stormbolter and force weapon melee attack? Feeling good? Just watch them come back at full strength 9" away from you!!! How is that feel??

And remember, each GK unit is massively over costed compared to Daemon units. And those Daemon units' psychic, high volume of shooting and close combat attacks will wreck havoc on any Space Marine units, GK is no exception and die in the same way. Yet any Daemon units destroyed by them will just come back at full strength.

You mean that one stratagem they can only use once a turn, to bring back 1 unit a turn, twice/maybe a third time if they don't use any other stratagems during the game with no ability to farm CP when GK can easily pump out 20+ MW each turn before they even shoot?

GK are bottom tier, but not because they are playing against Daemons.

Absolutely agree, Grey Knights needs rules changes, not point changes, make them the elites they are supposed to be not some quantity power armor spam idiots with a chip on their shoulder whenever the word "Daemons" is spoken.

 Brutallica wrote:
Absolutely agree, Grey Knights needs rules changes, not point changes, make them the elites they are supposed to be not some quantity power armor spam idiots with a chip on their shoulder whenever the word "Daemons" is spoken.

This is the fate of the early codex.
Maybe, if GW had released the codices of GK and Daemons at the same time, the situation would have been better.

GK need both point and rule changes. Stuff like Strikes, Terminators, Stormravens, Purgators can be fixed just by point drop. Sometimes, heavy point drop. Even psycannon at, say, 6 pts doesn't look that bad. And incinerator is one of the best flamers stat-wise. However, no point fixes will save librarian or NDK.

I see the main problems of GK are lack of durability, not enough damage to take out main threats in time and inability to get full force into 24" where they shine. Heavy point drops will resolve these to some extent. But to fix internal balance and make army interesting to play, and to make it competitive, rule changes are obligatory. Most current matched play rules strikes exactly GK (1 psyhic power per turn, deep stike limitations, etc.), so without new codex, there is no hope for making them proper army. Point drops will make them viable at friendly games, but I doubt CA will change anything beyond that.

Don't think it matters much to be honest. If GW just makes GK undercosted the army will work. Powerful rules would be better, because they wouldn't require buying more models. But as long as everyones cost go up and GK, costs go down a lot, there is bound to be some sort of unit that ends up being worth spamed. If out of now here a GK termintor costs around 30 or less points, the army maybe playing a lot smoother.

CorvusFortis wrote:
However, no point fixes will save librarian or NDK.

Oh really? If they were 1 ppm each you honestly think nobody would take them?

Neophyte2012 wrote:

 NurglesR0T wrote:
I disagree. The amount of mass dakka that a GK can put out is a great meta counter - being mass hordes.

Nearly every unit has -3AP force weapons and you get and a psychic phase that wrecks daemons.

They have their weaknesses, yeah absolutely, but a mass 20-30% (assuming) decrease across the board will go a long way.

GK is now the worst faction to fight against Daemon after Daemon got their codex. You just killed a spoky troblesome Daemon units (Bloodletter Bomb, large squad of Flamers, that huge Daemon Prince, etc.) with all your shining smite, stormbolter and force weapon melee attack? Feeling good? Just watch them come back at full strength 9" away from you!!! How is that feel??

And remember, each GK unit is massively over costed compared to Daemon units. And those Daemon units' psychic, high volume of shooting and close combat attacks will wreck havoc on any Space Marine units, GK is no exception and die in the same way. Yet any Daemon units destroyed by them will just come back at full strength.

Gotta say as a LONG old time Daemon player, back in 5th ed Grey Knights had a power which nullified all Daemonic gifts/equipment in B2B with the caster. Seriously, they actually destroyed your WARGEAR you payed points for, and there was no way to stop the stupid power on a 2d6 LD 10 test.

Also amusingly it technically removed bloodthirsters wings, dunno how that works.

CorvusFortis wrote:
GK need both point and rule changes. Stuff like Strikes, Terminators, Stormravens, Purgators can be fixed just by point drop. Sometimes, heavy point drop. Even psycannon at, say, 6 pts doesn't look that bad. And incinerator is one of the best flamers stat-wise. However, no point fixes will save librarian or NDK.

I see the main problems of GK are lack of durability, not enough damage to take out main threats in time and inability to get full force into 24" where they shine. Heavy point drops will resolve these to some extent. But to fix internal balance and make army interesting to play, and to make it competitive, rule changes are obligatory. Most current matched play rules strikes exactly GK (1 psyhic power per turn, deep stike limitations, etc.), so without new codex, there is no hope for making them proper army. Point drops will make them viable at friendly games, but I doubt CA will change anything beyond that.

Sure 6 pts psycannon wouldn't be bad. For 1 pts you would have extra shot, 2 point of strenght, extra AP and 2 points better BS compared to ork big shoota.

Oh really? If they were 1 ppm each you honestly think nobody would take them?

But they never will, won't they? I was talking about realistic scenarios. If cost balance in the codex will be left pretty much the same, other units will outclass these ones. This was a problem since the start of the codex and only GK problem.

CorvusFortis wrote:

Oh really? If they were 1 ppm each you honestly think nobody would take them?

But they never will, won't they? I was talking about realistic scenarios. If cost balance in the codex will be left pretty much the same, other units will outclass these ones. This was a problem since the start of the codex and only GK problem.

The point is that there is clearly a cost at which they would be massively overpowered, and clearly a cost (the current one) where they are weak. Therefore somewhere on the scale is a point cost where they would be balanced and the problem can be fixed by point changes alone.

Interesting topic. The problems people complain about with Grey Knights break down into 3 areas:

- Points
- Stratagems / Psychic Powers
- Special Weapons (which could be taken to mean rules)

Points is probably the best place to start fixing them. Just filling out a single Battalion is very expensive and the lack of CPs makes it almost impossible to use of any of their Stratagems in a typical game. You end up with too few bodies on the field, those CPs get used in low-reward rerolls trying to salvage your army against mediocre lists. You really can't even soup them, they're too expensive to run with Guard.

That said... changing the rules to give Grey Knights normal smite would be a very good thing. The bonus against Daemons doesn't mean much and the penalty against everything else cripples them.

 Peregrine wrote:

CorvusFortis wrote:

Oh really? If they were 1 ppm each you honestly think nobody would take them?

But they never will, won't they? I was talking about realistic scenarios. If cost balance in the codex will be left pretty much the same, other units will outclass these ones. This was a problem since the start of the codex and only GK problem.

The point is that there is clearly a cost at which they would be massively overpowered, and clearly a cost (the current one) where they are weak. Therefore somewhere on the scale is a point cost where they would be balanced and the problem can be fixed by point changes alone.

I really don't understand why more people don't get this. GK could be made into the new top tier army via points alone if needed. It's not like they weren't top tier in the past.

 DoomMouse wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

CorvusFortis wrote:

Oh really? If they were 1 ppm each you honestly think nobody would take them?

But they never will, won't they? I was talking about realistic scenarios. If cost balance in the codex will be left pretty much the same, other units will outclass these ones. This was a problem since the start of the codex and only GK problem.

The point is that there is clearly a cost at which they would be massively overpowered, and clearly a cost (the current one) where they are weak. Therefore somewhere on the scale is a point cost where they would be balanced and the problem can be fixed by point changes alone.

I really don't understand why more people don't get this. GK could be made into the new top tier army via points alone if needed. It's not like they weren't top tier in the past.

One issue though is that with current rules being rather unscalable...As it is GK's work better in smaller points and go worse as points go up. If you reduce points so that they are good at one point level they still will be worse at higher point level and will become absolute broken in lower levels.

So rules are problem in being very unscalable. GW can't get their rules scale even if the existance of earth dependent on it.

 Peregrine wrote:
The entire premise of the thread is wrong. There is no separating balance issues into "points problems" and "rules problems", as if there are underpowered units that can't be made viable with a point reduction. GK at 1 ppm would be utterly broken even without any other rule changes, so the only question is just how much of a point reduction is required to make them competitive.

Not always true. Points don't exist in a vacuum and 'viable' doesn't inherently mean 'healthy'. It's possible to lower one units cost enough that it has a knock-on effect that accidentally breaks another unit in the book. You also have weird breakpoints for units with poor damage output. Sometimes you lower a units cost 1 point and it's still worthless because it doesn't have very significant output. Then you lower it another point and it's still worthless. Then another and another and another until it's still totally worthless offensively but becomes a completely unshiftable horde option. Raise back up one point and now it's terrible again. These breakpoints make some units that are extremely low damage very difficult to deal with because once they're cheap enough to not be held back by their poor damage, you can take enough of them to create meat walls that can't be killed.

The best example I ever saw of this was in AoS. There was a unit called black knights that were skeletal horseman. Dealt basically 0 damage in combat but were 12" move and 10 wounds across 5 models with a 6+ 6++(a usable statline in Sigmar) and could regenerate models every turn for 80 points. At 80pts they were completely useless, skeletons were a superior option. At 60pts you still probably wouldn't take them. Same at 59-51. At 50pts though you'd take 100 of them in big units to completely shut down your opponents ability to do anything because that's 200 wounds they'd have to cut through BEFORE regeneration and it would still leave you 1000pts for heavy hitters. The warscroll was so difficult to balance that GW just completely rewrote it to give them better damage output, and while they're still not great, they could actually be balanced by point changes now.

 Peregrine wrote:

CorvusFortis wrote:

Oh really? If they were 1 ppm each you honestly think nobody would take them?

But they never will, won't they? I was talking about realistic scenarios. If cost balance in the codex will be left pretty much the same, other units will outclass these ones. This was a problem since the start of the codex and only GK problem.

The point is that there is clearly a cost at which they would be massively overpowered, and clearly a cost (the current one) where they are weak. Therefore somewhere on the scale is a point cost where they would be balanced and the problem can be fixed by point changes alone.

That is all nice and good, but lets say the librarians cost is glued to what other marines have to pay for their and the termintor armor cost. GW would have to point options different for different factions, depending on stuff inside the codex to balance it. And then there would be an uproar that someone playing black templars has to take a librarian from the GK codex, because he is 5 pts less then the vanila codex one.

 DoomMouse wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

CorvusFortis wrote:

Oh really? If they were 1 ppm each you honestly think nobody would take them?

But they never will, won't they? I was talking about realistic scenarios. If cost balance in the codex will be left pretty much the same, other units will outclass these ones. This was a problem since the start of the codex and only GK problem.

The point is that there is clearly a cost at which they would be massively overpowered, and clearly a cost (the current one) where they are weak. Therefore somewhere on the scale is a point cost where they would be balanced and the problem can be fixed by point changes alone.

I really don't understand why more people don't get this. GK could be made into the new top tier army via points alone if needed. It's not like they weren't top tier in the past.

A monkey could make a top tier army. Making a balanced army is much more complicated.

It's not necessarily that there's a magic golden number between their current cost and 0 that will make them 'balanced' partly because of the whole 'defensive power gets weird on cheap units' thing I touched on earlier, but also because the nature of the game means that every time you change the points of a unit, what constitutes a 'balanced' state changes with it. That's what a 'meta' is.

The question is not if GK could be uber powerful being undercosted, but what has a higher chance of happning. GW making a unit too powerful by giving it good rules. Or GW playing around with points for GK, which are glued to other imperial armies and other marines points costs, and GW somehow giving GK top discounts that make them top tier.

IMO the BA example shows us that the chance of getting very powerful rules, by mistake or not, is much higher, then GW pointing at a strike and saying he is 14pts.

While you can technically fix any underpowered units with points, the main problem is retaining the character and feel of the army. If GK are supposed to be elite, then even if they are balanced at, say, 6ppm, that's not a desirable cost for them so you'd want to adjust their power level up using rules changes rather than just lowering their points. That said, I'm pretty sure the balance point for GK in their current form would still retain at least something of an elite feel to them.

Well, luckily it seems at least some rules content is changing in CA (rumor about GK getting full smite which IMO makes total sense, even a bare minimum sized strike squad is the cost of another army's basic psyker character. Just give them full smite and subject them to the smite degradation rule).

Therefore somewhere on the scale is a point cost where they would be balanced and the problem can be fixed by point changes alone.

To make something overpowered by cost, you need it to be stupiditly cheap. GK Librarian will never be cheaper than a Brotherhood Champion. And if it is, this will render Brotherhood Champion useless, because Librarian is a better HQ-slot filler. If cost balance in internal codex will be the same, no one will ever take Librarian over Voldus or Grand Master for effectiveness. And no one ever will take him over Brotherhood Champion for Cheap HQ. Lirbarian is a unit, that doesn't give anything to an army. It doesn't fight better, doesn't cast better, isn't more survivable, doesn't empower other units in a way other units don't.

Same is true for NDK. GMNDK is better, Paladins are better. It doesn't kill, it isn't protected. And if it is very cheap, than Paladins becomes useless, but not because NDK is strong - simpy because one can spam it.

Making Grey Knights cost as much as guardsman won't make them good army - just broken.

the_scotsman wrote:
Well, luckily it seems at least some rules content is changing in CA (rumor about GK getting full smite which IMO makes total sense, even a bare minimum sized strike squad is the cost of another army's basic psyker character. Just give them full smite and subject them to the smite degradation rule).

I like the idea of GK getting full Smite back but if it's getting subjected to degradation I'd like to see GK get a +2 to cast Smite, instead of their flat +1 to cast. I think that would give them a little better chance to be the psyker elites they are in the newest lore.

Gir Spirit Bane wrote:
Also amusingly it technically removed bloodthirsters wings, dunno how that works.

They could be weakened by "anti-warp-stuff" enough that they no longer have the strength to fly.

I hate to say it, but the combination of Soup, GW's basic imbalance of Horde forces being more durable than elite forces,makes a back and forth problem GW doesn't seem to want to solve.

GK can't be dropped enough to cost correctly as then they will be the soup de jure, and they can't be made durable enough to meet their point cost as it stands, as than they would invalidate Custodes.

the_scotsman wrote:
(rumor about GK getting full smite which IMO makes total sense

I disagree.
I know it's not going to happen, but I'd have rather GKs lose Smite across the board (except Purifiers/ Librarians)

And each unit gains a "signature buff" power instead to further their role
Strikes help reduce distance for Deep Striking GK units
Interceptors get Warp Quake to further the distance enemy units can deep strike
Etc.

I worry that GK getting full smite just turns us into Loyal Thousand Sons.

I've always seen it as GKs using Psychic Powers internally (to buff themselves) while Thousand Sons use Psychic Powers externally (to cast magic missiles, aka Smite)

 Trickstick wrote:

Gir Spirit Bane wrote:
Also amusingly it technically removed bloodthirsters wings, dunno how that works.

They could be weakened by "anti-warp-stuff" enough that they no longer have the strength to fly.

Sisters and imperial saints do stuff like desoloving demons, by looking at them. And most of them are no where as pure, or knowladgable about chaos as a single GK.
The sole existance of GK should make demons blink out of existance when faced by GK.

Karol wrote:
Sisters and imperial saints do stuff like desoloving demons, by looking at them. And most of them are no where as pure, or knowladgable about chaos as a single GK.
The sole existance of GK should make demons blink out of existance when faced by GK.

GKs only get sent against the worst daemon incursions though. The effects of the warp spilling into the materium in such large amounts probably anchors the daemons somewhat, counteracting the effect of the GKs.