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I’ve been playing Thousand Sons for a bit, and the feeling that I should shelve them goes up every time I play. I figured out it’s because it doesn’t matter how awesome my spells are if I can never manage to cast them. It didn’t help that my space marine opponents all seem to have warp charges of 5 and 6 for everything. So I checked, and yes, it’s one more thing space marines are just better at. As opposed you, you know, those guys who are actually made of warp energy.

Anyway, here’s what I did. I went through most of the codexes (don’t have white scars or dark angels) and took note of what warp charge every spell is and how many there are of each charge.

Marines
4-1
5-12
6-34
7-11
8-2
Total-60

Chaos(thousand sons, death guard, chaos marines, chaos daemons)
4-1
5-8
6-15
7-12
8-5
9-1. Stupid doombolt.
Total-42

This of course leaves out how much easier it is for marines to get +1 to psychic stuff as well.

That’s all, just wanted to share.

Edit: adding Eldar

5-3
6-8
7-13
Total-24

Personally I think marine spells are pretty meh except for a select few. Sure they got a lot but I think many are too situational. The Ultramarine specific ones are really nice though

That's nice. But which of the spells are better? Ideally, the higher Warp Charge of the Chaos spells is because they are more powerful given range, targeting ability, and effect.

 alextroy wrote:
That's nice. But which of the spells are better? Ideally, the higher Warp Charge of the Chaos spells is because they are more powerful given range, targeting ability, and effect.

Ideally yes, but I’m not so sure that pans out.

As an example, Infernal Gateway, warp charge 8. Select the nearest visible enemy within 12”. That unit, and every unit within 3” of that MODEL take D3 mortal wounds. So in order to pull this off well, you need to be within 12”, the closest enemy model to you needs to somehow have other units crowded around it without being any closer, and you need to roll an 8.

T'au = 0

Necrons, also 0

Necrons still get psychic powers that cause mass death, they just don’t cause perils and can’t be denied.

As a marine player I'd kill for access to spells anything like as good as the chaos spells. Warptime... would just be so awesome.

Also, if you're not dominating psychic with 1k sons, you're definitely doing something wrong. My regular 1ksons opponent just beasts me with mortal wound spam and now he even gets +1 damage from PA. Brutal.

So TL/DR, your list is a bit pointless. We could have 500 spells with WC4 but if they're completely gak then they're not much use.

 ewar wrote:
As a marine player I'd kill for access to spells anything like as good as the chaos spells. Warptime... would just be so awesome.

Also, if you're not dominating psychic with 1k sons, you're definitely doing something wrong. My regular 1ksons opponent just beasts me with mortal wound spam and now he even gets +1 damage from PA. Brutal.

So TL/DR, your list is a bit pointless. We could have 500 spells with WC4 but if they're completely gak then they're not much use.

If I want to cast nothing but smite all day, then sure I do great. I just have this naive notion in my head that the other spells I pick should also be able to do something.

Trade you null zone for your death hex? There a difference of 1 WC but the difference of usefulness is night and day

Or how about temporal corridor for your wartime? Warptime cost 1 less isn't restricted to a specific psyker and to specific units that don't want to be advancing unless they're trying to grab an objective which they should already be on or near cause they also have infiltrate.

I kinda miss generic psychic tress...

 fraser1191 wrote:
Trade you null zone for your death hex? There a difference of 1 WC but the difference of usefulness is night and day

Or how about temporal corridor for your wartime? Warptime cost 1 less isn't restricted to a specific psyker and to specific units that don't want to be advancing unless they're trying to grab an objective which they should already be on or near cause they also have infiltrate.

I kinda miss generic psychic tress...

I would gladly take null zone if it meant there was a chance I could successfully cast it.

Crackedgear wrote:

 fraser1191 wrote:
Trade you null zone for your death hex? There a difference of 1 WC but the difference of usefulness is night and day

Or how about temporal corridor for your wartime? Warptime cost 1 less isn't restricted to a specific psyker and to specific units that don't want to be advancing unless they're trying to grab an objective which they should already be on or near cause they also have infiltrate.

I kinda miss generic psychic tress...

I would gladly take null zone if it meant there was a chance I could successfully cast it.

You know you gotta get within 6" for the same effect right?

 fraser1191 wrote:

Crackedgear wrote:

 fraser1191 wrote:
Trade you null zone for your death hex? There a difference of 1 WC but the difference of usefulness is night and day

Or how about temporal corridor for your wartime? Warptime cost 1 less isn't restricted to a specific psyker and to specific units that don't want to be advancing unless they're trying to grab an objective which they should already be on or near cause they also have infiltrate.

I kinda miss generic psychic tress...

I would gladly take null zone if it meant there was a chance I could successfully cast it.

You know you gotta get within 6" for the same effect right?

Yep. Sorcerer suicide bombers for days.

There are many scenarios that are preferable to “My chaos sorcerer casts (rolls).... nothing. And then he does (rolls)... nothing”

Crackedgear wrote:

 fraser1191 wrote:

Crackedgear wrote:

 fraser1191 wrote:
Trade you null zone for your death hex? There a difference of 1 WC but the difference of usefulness is night and day

Or how about temporal corridor for your wartime? Warptime cost 1 less isn't restricted to a specific psyker and to specific units that don't want to be advancing unless they're trying to grab an objective which they should already be on or near cause they also have infiltrate.

I kinda miss generic psychic tress...

I would gladly take null zone if it meant there was a chance I could successfully cast it.

You know you gotta get within 6" for the same effect right?

Yep. Sorcerer suicide bombers for days.

I suppose you can get away with that when you can give powers to your "Sgts", fair enough.

Crackedgear wrote:

 fraser1191 wrote:

Crackedgear wrote:

 fraser1191 wrote:
Trade you null zone for your death hex? There a difference of 1 WC but the difference of usefulness is night and day

Or how about temporal corridor for your wartime? Warptime cost 1 less isn't restricted to a specific psyker and to specific units that don't want to be advancing unless they're trying to grab an objective which they should already be on or near cause they also have infiltrate.

I kinda miss generic psychic tress...

I would gladly take null zone if it meant there was a chance I could successfully cast it.

You know you gotta get within 6" for the same effect right?

Yep. Sorcerer suicide bombers for days.

There are many scenarios that are preferable to “My chaos sorcerer casts (rolls).... nothing. And then he does (rolls)... nothing”

If you are not using Thousand Sons and preferably Ahriman to cast Death Hex, Warptime and Infernal Gateway, you are doing something seriously wrong. If you want to take generic CSM for their great units like Possessed or Obliteraters, just soup in Thousand Son Supreme Command Detachment. Done.

Neophyte2012 wrote:

Crackedgear wrote:

 fraser1191 wrote:

Crackedgear wrote:

 fraser1191 wrote:
Trade you null zone for your death hex? There a difference of 1 WC but the difference of usefulness is night and day

Or how about temporal corridor for your wartime? Warptime cost 1 less isn't restricted to a specific psyker and to specific units that don't want to be advancing unless they're trying to grab an objective which they should already be on or near cause they also have infiltrate.

I kinda miss generic psychic tress...

I would gladly take null zone if it meant there was a chance I could successfully cast it.

You know you gotta get within 6" for the same effect right?

Yep. Sorcerer suicide bombers for days.

There are many scenarios that are preferable to “My chaos sorcerer casts (rolls).... nothing. And then he does (rolls)... nothing”

If you are not using Thousand Sons and preferably Ahriman to cast Death Hex, Warptime and Infernal Gateway, you are doing something seriously wrong. If you want to take generic CSM for their great units like Possessed or Obliteraters, just soup in Thousand Son Supreme Command Detachment. Done.

Who said I didn’t have Ahriman with death hex and warp time?

You can get like 5 sources of +1 to cast between tzdaemons and tsons. I've never had any problem getting pretty universally successful psychic phases with my rubric heavy army.

If your complaint was about pure tzdaemons id be with you all day. But souped up its wicked easy to cast tons of gak. Ahriman, Termie Sorc, WL trait/relic prince, Lord of Change, and if you want to get really crazy clump up and use the cabal strat, and make sure to drop Gaze of Fate first for a free reroll on your first fail.

+ to cast is a huge huge deal on 2d6 rolls.

the_scotsman wrote:
You can get like 5 sources of +1 to cast between tzdaemons and tsons. I've never had any problem getting pretty universally successful psychic phases with my rubric heavy army.

If your complaint was about pure tzdaemons id be with you all day. But souped up its wicked easy to cast tons of gak. Ahriman, Termie Sorc, WL trait/relic prince, Lord of Change, and if you want to get really crazy clump up and use the cabal strat, and make sure to drop Gaze of Fate first for a free reroll on your first fail.

+ to cast is a huge huge deal on 2d6 rolls.

I’ve definitely kept gaze of fate for just that reason, but I suppose I’ve never gone all in on +1 to cast abilities.

Successful casting of infernal gateway is easy with daemons. A changecaster is put in the warp for 1CP, then deepstrikes, uses the stratagem from engine War for 1CP where the first spell he casts is automatically manifested on a 9.

The Psychic Phase is fun, smite trains are fun, having no pychic defence is double plus fun.

There was me thinking that Thousand Sons psykers were one of the top competitive units in the game right now and that Ahriman has been in dozens of winning Chaos lists in the last 2 years. But I guess this guy can't make them work so they're bad and Space Marines, who often don't even take Librarians, are better than them. The things you learn on Dakka.

Crackedgear wrote:


I would gladly take null zone if it meant there was a chance I could successfully cast it.

Give it a try and let's see how enthusiastic you are afterwards

I have tried to make it work A LOT and it's a brutal time waste. The investment of getting a librarian within 6" of a juicy target his huge and then you have a roughly 25-30% (I would guess? haven't calculated it properly) chance of failing to cast, after using your command re roll, then not being denied through a psyker or strat.

Any opponent with two brain cells can screen this out easily and Magnus/Mortarion can fly to avoid the little librarian and then your plucky hero gets eviscerated.

If you're struggling to cast your awesome spells you've just been unlucky with the dice. But to be fair Thousand Sons rely heavily on certain key powers going off and if they fail you're gonna struggle.
All that being said most armies have a key unit or play that relies on dice, if the luck isn't with you you're gonna be in for a lousy day.

If you are really frustrated about flubbing psychic rolls, take the Capricious Crest from Cult of Change. That relic literally makes your odds of failing a WC5-6 spell feel like almost nothing (any roll of a 1 on either die results in an auto-success).

Cult of Knowledge has a better power but only a warlord trait that allows rerolls of 1 to cast on 1 guy.

I typically roll with Capricious Crest for relic, +1 to cast WL trait on my Prince, Ahriman, and a Termie Sorc, prince gets the crest. But I don't run my prince as a suicide missile, so YMMV there.

There was me thinking that Thousand Sons psykers were one of the top competitive units in the game right now and that Ahriman has been in dozens of winning Chaos lists in the last 2 years. But I guess this guy can't make them work so they're bad and Space Marines, who often don't even take Librarians, are better than them. The things you learn on Dakka.

Yeah, honestly, Ahriman on a disk is crazy fun and good. He may also be *slightly* undercosted for what he can do, but he's essentially Darth Vader riding a demon. Doesn't get much better than that. For me, he alone is worth playing the faction.

That said, they do need help. I think the OP is off-base a little, but there are many powers that aren't worth their warp charge. That said, I'm not sure those powers would be good anyway. We have access to some very strong stuff otherwise.

It's not just that we have a lot of powers, we also have the ability to completely shut down an opponent's psychic phase. Positioning is key, but when most armies only bring one or two (or maybe 3 max) psykers it's easy to shut them down.

I play TS almost exclusively, sometimes mixing in CSM or daemons, and yea psychic powers can be swing-y but I get most of mine off the majority of times. Are you going to have a bad psychic phase once per game? Probably. But I have also seen shooting armies have a bad shooting phase etc. I do think Doomsbolt at 9 is stupid, and glamor should be 6 like Magama of pestilence or however you say it which does the same thing but cheaper. But overall if you want to complaint about something with the TS, I wish we had more than 3 elite choices and more than 2 fast attack. Also when the psychic phase goes off perfectly for TS, which also happens about once per game, it is usually pretty devastating.

Glamor is wc5 isn't it? I thought it was like better miasma.

the_scotsman wrote:
Glamor is wc5 isn't it? I thought it was like better miasma.

7 actually

 xeen wrote:
I play TS almost exclusively, sometimes mixing in CSM or daemons, and yea psychic powers can be swing-y but I get most of mine off the majority of times. Are you going to have a bad psychic phase once per game? Probably. But I have also seen shooting armies have a bad shooting phase etc. I do think Doomsbolt at 9 is stupid, and glamor should be 6 like Magama of pestilence or however you say it which does the same thing but cheaper. But overall if you want to complaint about something with the TS, I wish we had more than 3 elite choices and more than 2 fast attack. Also when the psychic phase goes off perfectly for TS, which also happens about once per game, it is usually pretty devastating.

Yeah, it's pretty clear a lot of our WC costs were written before they really got a handle on Psychic Powers. I'm sure a lot is going to be readjusted when we get our 9th edition dex.

 Corrode wrote:
There was me thinking that Thousand Sons psykers were one of the top competitive units in the game right now

And you would be wrong.

Thousand Sons psykers are one of the top competitive units in game right now.

In a soup.