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Like i said, these rules are great. They are only problematic when you attach them to Imperial Guard. Because every assassin will be using their awesome stratagems without considering the cost. And adding assassins to Guard doesn't reduce your footprint in game, which is a big concern for space marines. Less bodies on the table means its flatly more difficult to win.

When Imperial Guard has a double shooting Wyvern, a double shooting Vindicare, every single turn, and that still doesn't impact their CP in a meaningful way, that's a problem. It's absolutely nuts that for an investment of like 700 points they have 20 cp. NUTS.

 Marmatag wrote:
Like i said, these rules are great. They are only problematic when you attach them to Imperial Guard. Because every assassin will be using their awesome stratagems without considering the cost. And adding assassins to Guard doesn't reduce your footprint in game, which is a big concern for space marines. Less bodies on the table means its flatly more difficult to win.

When Imperial Guard has a double shooting Wyvern, a double shooting Vindicare, every single turn, and that still doesn't impact their CP in a meaningful way, that's a problem. It's absolutely nuts that for an investment of like 700 points they have 20 cp. NUTS.

For an investment of 700pts they have 20cp....how?

You're talking about a battalion and a brigade, right? And because a guard list needs to have itself a castellan, you probably want battalion, brigade, assassin with the stratagem.

I get (rough math) 640 points for a brigade, estimating 30 points for an elite slot because it's the only one I don't know off the top of my head what their cheapest option is.

Throw a battalion on there for 180, loyal 32. Probably have to do some slightly more expensive HQs because you did three company commanders.

600 for your knight.

85 for your assassin.

We're going to do the emperor's wrath detachment, so swap out the usual mortar teams for wyverns, add 2 basilisks, and then you've got 70 points of something.

20 points to start

1 for emperors wrath
1 to get the warlord trait from emperor's wrath on one of your CCs
1 to get the relic for emperor's wrath
1 to make the knight a character
1 to get cawl's wrath
1 to get the assassin in your list

So that's 14CP to start off with, realistically. In most situations, the knight wants to rotate ion on your opponent's turn and order of companions on your turn, costing you another 6. If both the assassin and a wyvern/basilisk want to shoot twice, you're down to 4. call it 5, because you probably regen'd one with grand strategist/aquila.

This seems to add up pretty quickly to me, and seems to follow the pattern I've seen with imperial soup lists in competitive games, they tend to be down to the wire by the end of turn 2 if they're not totally stomping or getting stomped (If the knight gets alpha struck top of turn 1, yeah, you've got a lot of CP to sling around). At the very least, I am not seeing how both the wyvern and the assassin go to town every turn with no impact on the CP pool. Maybe you save a pre-game CP here or there and you end up being able to run the knight at full power another turn, but I don't think the double taps are happening more than once.

Assuming a Castellan, that does change things. However, with nerfs coming for the Castellan, the lists will change.

You're also assuming emperor's wrath WL trait and relic, which is silly. People do not always take these.

And you don't rotate ions every turn. If you actually played games against guard you'd see that it is wholly different from how you're selling it. Also, let's not forget, they are also regenerating CP. So you should add 6 to that total.

If your argument is that 26 CP isn't enough, I would argue that is fething insane, no other faction can dream of spending that much CP, and would instantly be better if they could.

I go off to paint and come back to some seriously lengthy replies here. Listen everyone, I'll not derail the thread further. This topic isn't just about the impact of these Assassins on Orks.

I don't think I need to reiterate what my opinion is.

Let's just wait and see for the meta to accommodate them, the possible/likely/inevitable proof that I was correct and we can revisit this topic then. I notice that the Long War have released a podcast that seems in sync with my thoughts (though I haven't listened to it yet, this is just going off the title). Similar to what we've done with all those who maintained that Orks would smash the meta at LVO.

Orks did very well at LVO.

 Marmatag wrote:
Assuming a Castellan, that does change things. However, with nerfs coming for the Castellan, the lists will change.

You're also assuming emperor's wrath WL trait and relic, which is silly. People do not always take these.

And you don't rotate ions every turn. If you actually played games against guard you'd see that it is wholly different from how you're selling it. Also, let's not forget, they are also regenerating CP. So you should add 6 to that total.

If your argument is that 26 CP isn't enough, I would argue that is fething insane, no other faction can dream of spending that much CP, and would instantly be better if they could.

I just hope that the nerf is actually targeted at the problem and not just a sweeping change that makes knight's unplayable while allowing guard to just swap in assasins and custodes or whatever they decided to.

 Marmatag wrote:
Orks did very well at LVO.

According to what metric? There's no stats I've seen or heard that show Orks performing well at LVO.

Marines did better. But we can discuss this further in another thread if you like.

Ambulls.. Assassins for the rest of us?.. Ohh wait, I play Imperium.

Ambulls... Assassins for those who play the hard way.

70 points, regen, pretty good beat stick. Thoughts?

Ice_can wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
Assuming a Castellan, that does change things. However, with nerfs coming for the Castellan, the lists will change.

You're also assuming emperor's wrath WL trait and relic, which is silly. People do not always take these.

And you don't rotate ions every turn. If you actually played games against guard you'd see that it is wholly different from how you're selling it. Also, let's not forget, they are also regenerating CP. So you should add 6 to that total.

If your argument is that 26 CP isn't enough, I would argue that is fething insane, no other faction can dream of spending that much CP, and would instantly be better if they could.

I just hope that the nerf is actually targeted at the problem and not just a sweeping change that makes knight's unplayable while allowing guard to just swap in assasins and custodes or whatever they decided to.

You're asking for balance changes to guard. Which are absolutely needed. However, GW rules team is lead by the guy who loves guard, so they'll nerf the Castellan and not address Imperial Guard. At all.

 Marmatag wrote:
Assuming a Castellan, that does change things. However, with nerfs coming for the Castellan, the lists will change.

You're also assuming emperor's wrath WL trait and relic, which is silly. People do not always take these.

And you don't rotate ions every turn. If you actually played games against guard you'd see that it is wholly different from how you're selling it. Also, let's not forget, they are also regenerating CP. So you should add 6 to that total.

If your argument is that 26 CP isn't enough, I would argue that is fething insane, no other faction can dream of spending that much CP, and would instantly be better if they could.

So...do you have some kind of insider information on nerfs to the castellan that are coming? Do you also have this information that indicates that guard and guard CP generation is not being nerfed? Because until I see those, yeah, I think it's fair to assume a Cawl castellan to be a standard feature of a competitive imperial soup list.

Do you want to assume that you're not taking the relic that makes your double shooting wyvern/basilisk ignore cover and the warlord trait that improves the AP? Ok then.

1 for emperor's wrath
1 for assassin
1 for knight character
1 for cawl's wrath

16cp to start. I think it is EXTREMELY safe to say that in most situations a person playing against an imperial soup list will do their best to draw out rotate ion and force their opponent to spend 3CP turn 1, unless they have a way to alpha strike it down with mortal wounds and you'd be seeing the nearly as expensive 5++ strat used. And it is also extremely safe to say you'd use order of companions turn 1. And you yourself said you want to double tap the assassin and wyvern every turn where possible.

So that's 7CP left at the end of turn 1, call it 8cp because you'll almost certainly regen your 1 that battle round.

Even if you don't have to rotate ion turn 2, if you just order of companions and double tap and you still regen battle round 2, you are down to 3cp.

I do not see a world where you can double tap your assassin and your emperors wrath piece more than twice in a game with current competitive list structure.

It is pointless to "add 6" because you don't get those 6 unless you regenerate every battle round, which becomes exponentially less likely with each round that goes by. You are only basically guaranteed to regen battle round 1. battle round 2, you are likely to regen. Battle round 3 onward it is more likely than not that you will not regen, even with a 5+ roll for both you and your opponent. It is frankly hilarious to me that in one breath you accuse me of never having played competitive matches, and in the other you fantasize that there are regularly competitive games with guard armies going out to turn 6 still regenerating CPs, so reliably that you want to tack that on to the total and screech "they have 26CP ehrmegerd".

If you want to posit some fantasy situation where the castellan is nerfed and the meta becomes nothing but guard and assassin allies, then, sure. Whatever. They can have a double tapping assassin and wyvern every turn. If your CPs are spent on double shooting a single 85-point assassin (who can't even hit the same target twice) and a single 103-point artillery piece, I gotta say I'm unimpressed by that level of efficiency. I would super duper extra specially rather face a list that is a guard battalion+guard brigade+Assassin vanguard than I would a list that is Guard battalion+Guard Brigade+Knight.

Reemule wrote:
Ambulls.. Assassins for the rest of us?.. Ohh wait, I play Imperium.

Ambulls... Assassins for those who play the hard way.

70 points, regen, pretty good beat stick. Thoughts?

Lol the Ork groups are going wild with thoughts of taking this monster.

Kinda says more about our codex IMO but yes I think you're right

Yeah, but you have a relic gun that lets you one-shot a Knight, so there is that.

 Marmatag wrote:
Yeah, but you have a relic gun that lets you one-shot a Knight, so there is that.

...Is there that?

Is this one of those situations where the gun *can* one shot a knight, the same way 4 lascannons *can* one shot a knight?

Just have to roll nothing but 6s.

 Marmatag wrote:
Yeah, but you have a relic gun that lets you one-shot a Knight, so there is that.

Someone please work out the probability of this.

E-things like this are why nobody takes what you say seriously.

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
Orks did very well at LVO.

According to what metric? There's no stats I've seen or heard that show Orks performing well at LVO.

Marines did better. But we can discuss this further in another thread if you like.

Several ork players won 4 or 5 out of 6 games. You don't go WWWWWL with a bad army.

So my thing, is this might be GW's way of deleting problematic soup? Hear me out...

If you are only allowed three detachments per list, it's a lot to sacrifice one of your detachments for potentially 4 models. Unless you are going pure guard, this kinda stunts the Guard/Castellan/BA lists, right?

 FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
So my thing, is this might be GW's way of deleting problematic soup? Hear me out...

If you are only allowed three detachments per list, it's a lot to sacrifice one of your detachments for potentially 4 models. Unless you are going pure guard, this kinda stunts the Guard/Castellan/BA lists, right?

Not really. It does take away from certain aspects by making people reserve points for assassins and bodyguards.

Whether or not 3 vindicares becomes common remains to be seen.

It wont be very common. Loosing a detachment and a CP to bring 3 vindicares and possibly 2 other assasins will be pretty rare.


Since you can only use the "summon assassin" strat once per game, you will see it very often however.

Right, but to "summon assassin" doesn't it have to be on the list? And if it's on the list, it has to be in it's own detachment.

Dear me the writers require a good sacking.

 FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
So my thing, is this might be GW's way of deleting problematic soup? Hear me out...

If you are only allowed three detachments per list, it's a lot to sacrifice one of your detachments for potentially 4 models. Unless you are going pure guard, this kinda stunts the Guard/Castellan/BA lists, right?

Except most of those lists have already dropped the BA part of that as it was CP intensive and hit with the fly swatter nerf.

Most of the top LVO lists were Guard,Emperor Wrath,Castellen.
Followed by Ynarri because free double activations is still strong.

Those Emperor wrath Castellen lists can probably afford to take the 1CP hit for the switching process as they have the CP and really benifit from being able to pick CP costing vrs a CP intensive faction or anti psykic or just whatever they feel like for a given match up

I think the assasins look OP compaired to what they were but the GSC models look to be about on par with them, hence why GW probably felt they needed to give them updated rules as they would have been really bad in comparison otherwise.

nope its not on the list. You just reserve 85 points and use the strat when deploying your army.

 FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
Right, but to "summon assassin" doesn't it have to be on the list? And if it's on the list, it has to be in it's own detachment.

Dear me the writers require a good sacking.

Why do you think it needs to be on the list?
You rest of your army has to be less than 1915 points but thats about it afaik.

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
Yeah, but you have a relic gun that lets you one-shot a Knight, so there is that.

Someone please work out the probability of this.

E-things like this are why nobody takes what you say seriously.

It's more about potential damage than average damage here. Safe to say if that the relic shock attack gun gets an 11 or 12 for str. The knight is going to be destroyed that turn more often then not. It's beyond insanity that this 65 ish point unit has this much potential damage. ESP with character protection. It's idiotic in fact.

I talked to a 4-1 ork player at LVO after he lost his first game. Game 5. His dice just went cold and he couldn't roll any 5's or 6's. He had 3 shock attack guns with the relic. Heck - I went last in all my games at LVO. What are the chances of that? Anything that can happen WILL happen. So insane potential damage can not be discounted because it is a long shot.

Talk to anyone that knows anything. Orks are a top tier army.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

the_scotsman wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
Yeah, but you have a relic gun that lets you one-shot a Knight, so there is that.

...Is there that?

Is this one of those situations where the gun *can* one shot a knight, the same way 4 lascannons *can* one shot a knight?

Just have to roll nothing but 6s.

Nope - that also requires he fails 3++ saves too. Relic Shock attack gun can kill you with no saves (except for 5+ fnp from a stratagem) Lets get real though. This weapon is multiple lascannons that deal mortal wounds if they hit and costs about as many points as 2 marines with a las cannon.

There is something like a 20% chance to get an 11+ with a reroll.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Xenomancers wrote:


I talked to a 4-1 ork player at LVO after he lost his first game. Game 5. His dice just went cold and he couldn't roll any 5's or 6's. He had 3 shock attack guns with the relic. Heck - I went last in all my games at LVO. What are the chances of that? Anything that can happen WILL happen. So insane potential damage can not be discounted because it is a long shot.

...you can't duplicate relics...or have I missed something?

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
Yeah, but you have a relic gun that lets you one-shot a Knight, so there is that.

Someone please work out the probability of this.

E-things like this are why nobody takes what you say seriously.

Someone on my team one shot a knight at LVO with it. It literally happened. So i guess you just label it "fake news" and go on about your day.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Heck - I went last in all my games at LVO. What are the chances of that?

I also went last in all my games. I won the roll off once and got seized on :(

 Daedalus81 wrote:
There is something like a 20% chance to get an 11+ with a reroll.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Xenomancers wrote:


I talked to a 4-1 ork player at LVO after he lost his first game. Game 5. His dice just went cold and he couldn't roll any 5's or 6's. He had 3 shock attack guns with the relic. Heck - I went last in all my games at LVO. What are the chances of that? Anything that can happen WILL happen. So insane potential damage can not be discounted because it is a long shot.

...you can't duplicate relics...or have I missed something?

Nah I'm just saying he had 3 shock attack guns. 1 was a relic.

Yeah the over all are pretty low. If you roll a 6 with 1 dice though. Your chance is now 33%. Plus your rolls of 8 and 9 10 aren't terrible ether. ESP when shoothing at vehicals without invo saves. The weapon is freaking AP-5. You could still 1 shot the knight without rolling an 11. Could roll a 9 with 12 shots and hit 24 times. Really though the average damage there is still pretty high with More dakka. 5 lascannons with ap-5 for 65 points if you get 12 shots.....This weapon is absurd.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Anyways back on topic....I think the 1 cp assassin summoning thing is kinda okay. Though It would be cool if they didn't have that option because it might force some list design limitations without it. To me that is more interesting.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Marmatag wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
Yeah, but you have a relic gun that lets you one-shot a Knight, so there is that.

Someone please work out the probability of this.

E-things like this are why nobody takes what you say seriously.

Someone on my team one shot a knight at LVO with it. It literally happened. So i guess you just label it "fake news" and go on about your day.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Heck - I went last in all my games at LVO. What are the chances of that?

I also went last in all my games. I won the roll off once and got seized on :(

Exact same result for me - haha. Your army doesn't mind going second as much as mine though.

OK, I am real curious about this one.

4 lascannons on let's say a BS3+ platform one shotting a knight is a .00004% chance, roughly - all hitting, all wounding, all getting past 3++ save, all rolling 6 for damage to deal 24 wounds.

Doing the math on the souped-up shokka is tougher, because of how many random bells and whistles it has, but you start off needing to roll an 11 or 12 - 8.3% chance.

To simplify the math, let's say a hit with the supa-shokka with the mortal wound power up does an average of 2.776 damage. meaning we need 8.67 hits, rounding to 9

Compounding the probability of this for a 2d6 roll for the number of shots of 9 (.000046), 10 (.000064), 11 (.00085) and 12 (.0032) and any other result (0) the probability of getting those 9 hits is .0000093%, multiplied by the 8.3% chance to actually get the 11 or 12 in the first place, I get a 7.7*10-8% chance to one-shot a knight with the supa-shokka (assuming average damage roll results)

I think it's safe to say you're solidly more likely to oneshot a knight with a quadlas pred.

Can you do that with a cp reroll on strength?

Also the d3 mw is in addition to normal damage.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
Orks did very well at LVO.

According to what metric? There's no stats I've seen or heard that show Orks performing well at LVO.

Marines did better. But we can discuss this further in another thread if you like.

Several ork players won 4 or 5 out of 6 games. You don't go WWWWWL with a bad army.

Got ya. A Necron player went WWWWWL. You claiming they're a good army?

 Xenomancers wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
Yeah, but you have a relic gun that lets you one-shot a Knight, so there is that.

Someone please work out the probability of this.

E-things like this are why nobody takes what you say seriously.

It's more about potential damage than average damage here. Safe to say if that the relic shock attack gun gets an 11 or 12 for str. The knight is going to be destroyed that turn more often then not. It's beyond insanity that this 65 ish point unit has this much potential damage. ESP with character protection. It's idiotic in fact.

No, this is completely wrong. It's not 'Safe to say that if the relic SAG gets an 11 or 12 for str the Knight is going be destroyed that turn more often that not'. This is completely wrong.

The SAG Mek still has to roll for number shots, roll to hit (5+), roll to wound (3+) the Castellan gets its 3++ or even 4++ if it decides not to RIS then the SAG has to roll damage (D6).

The average damage the weapon does to a knight is (get ready fort this) 0.68 without it using RIS and without accounting for the 8.34% chance of MW from a roll of an 11 or 12 for strength.

I talked to a 4-1 ork player at LVO after he lost his first game. Game 5. His dice just went cold and he couldn't roll any 5's or 6's. He had 3 shock attack guns with the relic. Heck - I went last in all my games at LVO. What are the chances of that? Anything that can happen WILL happen. So insane potential damage can not be discounted because it is a long shot.

Lol the odds of you going last in your whopping 6 games are a lot higher than the damage output you think a SAG Mek can manage. I think when the odds of something happening fall into the millions you can discount it. Across all those 40 odd Ork players who competed at LVO we have yet to hear of anyone one shotting a Castellan with a SAG Mek. I have yet to hear of it happening at all. Ever. Trust me when I say an Ork player would talk about this, if it had ever happened.

Talk to anyone that knows anything. Orks are a top tier army.

Please provide proof to back this up. According to what metric? I don't need to talk to someone who knows because I am one of those people. I regularly play the army. I dare say I know more than you.

As I said earlier - vanilla Marines outperformed Orks at LVO, without beta bolters. They must be top tier.

 Marmatag wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
Yeah, but you have a relic gun that lets you one-shot a Knight, so there is that.

Someone please work out the probability of this.

E-things like this are why nobody takes what you say seriously.

Someone on my team one shot a knight at LVO with it. It literally happened. So i guess you just label it "fake news" and go on about your day.

Yea I'm calling bullgak. Prove it. Name and game please. Was the Knight a Castellan or an Armiger?

 Daedalus81 wrote:
Can you do that with a cp reroll on strength?

Also the d3 mw is in addition to normal damage.

Are you joking? Have you all lost your minds?

Look at the odds. They're in the millions.

This is the problem with dakka. So many of you have a massively uninformed opinion that you actually believe things that are completely untrue.

E-formatting.

Daedalus: Let me give the benefit of the doubt in a massive way.

Let's say, the fact that I didn't actually calculate out the odds with above-average damage, and the fact that I didn't factor in a CP reroll, and the fact that I didn't factor in Dakkadakkadakka made my numbers off by a factor of 10. it is 10 times more likely than I thought to oneshot a knight with a supa-shokka.

It is still over five hundred times more likely to oneshot a knight with four bs3+ lascannons. It is 21000 times more likely to go second in six straight games.

I'm responding to this little bit of incredulity: "Nope - that also requires he fails 3++ saves too. Relic Shock attack gun can kill you with no saves (except for 5+ fnp from a stratagem) Lets get real though. This weapon is multiple lascannons that deal mortal wounds if they hit and costs about as many points as 2 marines with a las cannon."

You need to start off rolling in the 92nd percentile to even consider this weapon to be "multiple lascannons that deal mortal wounds when they hit" - you are exactly, EXACTLY as likely when you fire the supa-shokka that it ends up either strength 2 or strength 3 as you are to go into "mega lascannon territory". And even when you do, you have to remember this is on a BS5+ model. Of course it costs as much as two space marines with lascannons. It burns a relic and at its average strength it does exactly as much damage as two bs3+ lascannons against standard vehicles.

It is laughable to complain about a relic sitting in a specialist detachment you have to pay an extra CP to get into when gak like cawl's wrath and endless fury exist in the game.