So, uh, what's the third secondary you take against elite infantry armies?

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**yukishiro1**

rbstr wrote:
What a load of nonsense. Even besides the clear sample size issues, you rightfully point out, you've also miscounted and attributed all lack of psykers to skew even when some armies can't take psykers to begin with.
Lets pretend it's a useful sample size and actually look at why there aren't psykers? You still don't have good evidence.

Of what I see, at Vanguard Tactics and Adelaide (these are the only two on 40kStats even though it says they added three, where are you finding the third?) 3 of the 8 top 4s contain psykers. You clearly missed the Rune Priests in the 2nd place Space Wolves list. You've said "but these armies need them to be competitive" Space wolves certainly can build a lot of lists without them.

Of the remaining 5 non-psyker lists:
One simply can't have any - Drukhari
One is Custodes who only has the option by bringing an Inquisitor. They took an Assassin, that's a lot of flexibility to have now that you can't change as much pre-game.
One is a troops-less and awesome Ork vehicle-only list. They could have taken a wierdboy I guess, but non are on a bike so that would clearly be a theme violation.
One is a Salamanders Successor list - I feel like a librarian might be decent in this one. Only two HQs so he had ForceOrg space if he cut something to make room for one. Abhor could have mattered.
One is an Ultramarines Sucessor - they brought a Primaris Chaplain and are full-up on HQs. Have to find 5-10points someplace to take a flavor of Librarian instead. But Recitation of Focus fits well in this very shooty army.

So, If I'm being generous, like 2.5 out of 5 psyker-less Armies might have had Abhor the Witch be a decision point but the lists themselves certainly don't make much of a case for it.

I don't know what you're reading, but the Space Wolf list I'm looking at right on 40k stats takes wolf priests (chaplains), not rune priests (librarians). It even lists their abilities, which are clearly chaplain abilities, not librarian powers. Unless that list is wrong, you're the one who has, rather embarrassingly, accused me of "clearly missing" something that you were in fact the one missing.

The third tournament doesn't have 40k stats uploaded, but you can find the link on 40k competitive reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/WarhammerCompetitive/comments/i17uvl/first_gt_of_9th_edition_has_been_played/ They only linked the top 3 lists, not the top 4, for some reason, which is why I mentioned 11 lists rather than 12.

It's obviously a small sample size. But the fact is that only 3 out of 11 lists had psyker representation, and every one was a faction where you have to run psykers to be vaguely competitive. It doesn't prove my point, but it does support my point. You might want to read a little more carefully next time before throwing out terms like "load of nonsense." We could get more into the weeds here (e.g. you're wrong about Drukhari being unable to take a psyker), but I don't see much point in twisting the knife.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Spoletta wrote:

Those rules cannot deny a psychic action, since it is not a psychic power.
Only a psyker can attempt to deny a psychic action.

Oh, good catch. I knew the strats didn't work, but I assumed the "grants Deny The Witch X" relics and rules (e.g. Karanak) did work. But it looks like you're right, RAW they don't work because they grant the ability to Deny The Witch only against "powers," so they'd need a FAQ to work on psychic actions too, even though it's the same Deny The Witch test being made.

**Daedalus81**

the_scotsman wrote:
So, this is a wild and unusual situation I know, because nobody plays an army like this, but let's say just hypothetically you end up in a situation where your opponent has an army list that's like this:

~40 elite infantry models
A really durable, character protected, super obnoxious to kill HQ smack dab in the middle of his army, basically making warlord kill as hard as it possibly can be to achieve
2-3 vehicles, only allowing Bring it Down to be 8 or 9 victory points

What third secondary objective do you take against an army like that?

You're going to take Battlefield Supremacy because everyone always does, and you're going to take Shadow Operations because it's something you might be able to actually achieve. And let's say you're playing one of those weird factions that doesn't have psykers or whose psykers are all 100+ points so wasting their turns trying to do psychic actions removes a large lynchpin of your strategy and losing that psyker means losing 15vps if your opponent focuses fire and takes them out.

What in No Mercy, No Respite or Purge The Enemy do you take against an army like this? Thin Their Ranks is going to be worth 4-5 points max. Grind them Down is going to be obviously difficult, since they probably have 1/2 to 1/3 as many units on the table as you do unless you're also playing elite infantry. While we Stand We Fight maybe, if you're in a situation where you think you can protect your 3 most expensive figures, or bring it down maybe and just suck up the fact that you're not going to get 15 points from that objective.

You could just rely on the mission specific secondary being a good one, I guess.

But we have killing secondaries for opponents spamming vehicles, spamming bodies, spamming MSU, spamming characters, spamming psykers (or not having a choice to not spam psykers RIP tzeentch and GK armies lol) - how did GW forget what is the single most common army type in the entire game - 2000 points of elite infantry/bikers?

I think people concern themselves on what they can score max too much and miss the forest for the trees. You go for the secondaries you know you can score well while still being able to deny theirs. Lots of people aren't maxing engage on all fronts. Very few games go to 100. If someone scores > 90 we can assume they were battle ready. That means they really scored in the 80s. Someone with a 93 likely maxed primaries and missed out on 7 for secondaries. It really isn't a huge tragedy.

**yukishiro1**

The average score for a top-4 player in the first three tournaments is around 85-90. That's not a lot of unmaxed secondaries. If anything, we're seeing higher scores relative to the max than we did in ITC 8th, not lower. Though admittedly in ITC people typically maxed their secondaries, and it was the primary they'd score lower on. I don't think there's a data breakdown for the first three tournaments on how many of those dropped 12ish points were primary vs secondary, though obviously anything that isn't a multiple of 5 must involve at least some secondaries being dropped.

If anything, the results from the first three events seem to suggest that a big part of winning is selecting secondaries you can get a bare minimum of 30 points off.

**rbstr**

Yup they are Wolf Priests not Rune Priests, I was chatting with someone about it who said Rune and just didn't double check. That's my bad.
Change my number to 3.5 out of 5.
And I'll even say: maybe Marines are susceptible. If any faction is, it would be them.

But attempting to claim 3/11 is any kind of real number, given the rest of the armies that make it up, is absolutely a load of nonsense. It says nothing other than "most armies that don't often take psykers don't often take them and also a single Ork list is obviously skewing for an entirely different reason."

The fact that people are scoring high on secondaries is, however, evidence that skewing psykerless wouldn't be useful. It means the expected return from doing so is very small.

**Daedalus81**

yukishiro1 wrote:

If anything, the results from the first three events seem to suggest that a big part of winning is selecting secondaries you can get a bare minimum of 30 points off.

Which is where people might trip up. A secondary that is a sure thing at 9 points may be better than one that could get you 15, but requires a strong deviation away from objective control or blocking opponent secondaries.

**vict0988**

Elite infantry should be balanced purely through pts, there isn't anything degenerate about spamming Intercessors and Aggressors if they have fair pts costs, both lasguns and lascannons in a balanced Guard list will have their part to play against such a list. Conscript spam renders lascannons useless and Hellhound spam renders lasguns useless, therefore to make fewer games end before turn 1 vehicle/horde spam lists should be disadvantaged in the missions. The worst thing a secondary system can do is encourage spam and discourage branching out and taking a variety of different units since that is already disadvantaged by the core mechanics of the game since you will not overload your opponents anti-infantry by taking 60 Boyz and you will not overload your opponent's anti-tank by spending half your pts on vehicles.

**Tyel**

Daedalus81 wrote:
Which is where people might trip up. A secondary that is a sure thing at 9 points may be better than one that could get you 15, but requires a strong deviation away from objective control or blocking opponent secondaries.

Yeah... but that's why we are talking about the "grab 15 points for killing stuff" options.
While We Stand has an interesting tactical implication - because you might have to direct fire towards units you'd rather ignore in terms of the primary - especially if they make it through to late game.

But "kill some characters" isn't a skew if its a faction that depends on lots of characters. Or "kill some monsters/vehicles". Or psykers. They are there, you want to kill them during the game.

The meta implication is that lists will *tend* towards having no more than 3 characters, no more than 3 vehicles/monsters with 10 wounds, and probably 0/1 psyker. There could be some debate over grind them down/attrition versus domination and I'm not entirely sure how that will develop.

Ultimately it doesn't matter *massively* right now because I think a lot of people are still getting to grips with the primary. If you have a fast army - and your opponent is a bit oblivious - its relatively easy to get 40+ points while they may be left getting 20 or even less. (I'm having World of Warcraft Arathi Basin "fight at the flag" flashbacks if that means anything to anyone.) Which goes a long way to making up for any skew. But that will probably change as people learn. While the above army composition problem won't.

**the_scotsman**

yukishiro1 wrote:
None of the warpcraft objectives are very good, even if your opponent has no denial at all (and lots of armies now have psychic denial that doesn't come from psykers). They're all balanced around the assumption that your opponent can't deny them; if they can, you'll never, ever take them because it's too risky, but even if they can't, they are set up to not be auto-takes the way that abhor is against any psychic army.

If people start taking psykers again outside the dedicated psyker factions it will only be because abhor has so skewed the meta that you never encounter those lists any more and therefore never get to take it for the free 15 points against them.

The whole warpcraft section is just abysmal from a design perspective. Encouraging people not to take cool parts of their armies is bad design. Locking secondary points behind a simple roll-off mechanic (the deny roll) is bad design: dice shouldn't be so central to scoring. Requiring you to keep your opponent's characters alive to score points is frankly just downright bizarre. And that's not even getting into the questionable location requirements and the requirement on psychic ritual that your psyker survive at the center of the board for three whole turns while never being denied in order to score the points.

I think psychic secondaries are good BASICALLY only for factions that have access to guard psykers, mayyyybe inquisitors. Eldar cheap psykers are all stuck in the HQ slot, which for Eldar has gone from "annoying" to "crisis mode oh god how do we fit them all". Daemons and GSC cheap psykers aren't cheap, they just have the stats of a 50pt primaris psyker or warlock but cost like a librarian that's twice as good.

I think more people might take them if you could do the psychic action as one of your multiple casts. It seems like psychic actions are doomed so long as they're your WHOLE TURN rather than something you can do as a powerful psyker as one of your two casts.

**Ice_can**

Well definataly seems that marines are the hardest to beet at scoring 90-100 point scores which is just mental.

Definataly seems that marines followed bt custodes are the armies to beat and they have a massive leg up on designing armies to avoid giving up any kill secondarys at max score.

**yukishiro1**

the_scotsman wrote:
yukishiro1 wrote:
None of the warpcraft objectives are very good, even if your opponent has no denial at all (and lots of armies now have psychic denial that doesn't come from psykers). They're all balanced around the assumption that your opponent can't deny them; if they can, you'll never, ever take them because it's too risky, but even if they can't, they are set up to not be auto-takes the way that abhor is against any psychic army.

If people start taking psykers again outside the dedicated psyker factions it will only be because abhor has so skewed the meta that you never encounter those lists any more and therefore never get to take it for the free 15 points against them.

The whole warpcraft section is just abysmal from a design perspective. Encouraging people not to take cool parts of their armies is bad design. Locking secondary points behind a simple roll-off mechanic (the deny roll) is bad design: dice shouldn't be so central to scoring. Requiring you to keep your opponent's characters alive to score points is frankly just downright bizarre. And that's not even getting into the questionable location requirements and the requirement on psychic ritual that your psyker survive at the center of the board for three whole turns while never being denied in order to score the points.

I think psychic secondaries are good BASICALLY only for factions that have access to guard psykers, mayyyybe inquisitors. Eldar cheap psykers are all stuck in the HQ slot, which for Eldar has gone from "annoying" to "crisis mode oh god how do we fit them all". Daemons and GSC cheap psykers aren't cheap, they just have the stats of a 50pt primaris psyker or warlock but cost like a librarian that's twice as good.

I think more people might take them if you could do the psychic action as one of your multiple casts. It seems like psychic actions are doomed so long as they're your WHOLE TURN rather than something you can do as a powerful psyker as one of your two casts.

That's another issue with them, which layers yet another limitation on top of the psychic actions, and moreover one that interacts terribly with the other requirements - you don't want to waste a powerful character's psychic actions on them, but by the same token, you don't want to start doing psychic ritual on an easy-to-pop astropath.

They're just terribly designed. Far too many limitations layered on top of one another. You'll basically never take a psychic secondary if the opponent has a psyker because then whether you gain points just comes down to a stupid roll-off, and good players don't bet the outcome of games on roll-offs. It'd be like if they made recon require you to have units in table quarters AND if your opponent had a unit in that table quarter they can do a roll-off with you to prevent you from counting as in that table corner.

But even if your opponent doesn't have a psyker, you probably won't take them either, because you either (1) will have only a single psyker, in which case they just kill the psyker and you're screwed, or (2) if you have multiple psykers, they'll take abhor against you, and therefore it will be suicide to expose them in the places they need to be to score.

It's just a complete mess of a section. If GW doesn't address it in the next 6 months I firmly expect that the main tournaments will take the psychic secondary section out of their mission packs entirely because it is going to become clear what a bad section it is.

**Eldarain**

I'm sure we'll be seeing a deja vu inducing sequence of mission and point adjustments to end up where ITC missions and CA 2019 points already were. To thunderous applause after each monetized patch I'm sure.

**Not Online!!!**

Eldarain wrote:
I'm sure we'll be seeing a deja vu inducing sequence of mission and point adjustments to end up where ITC missions and CA 2019 points already were. To thunderous applause after each monetized patch I'm sure.

Ding dong Ding
.
The sad truth of the matter.

**nekooni**

I'm still confused why my sisters plus Greyfax are unable to abhor witches. Not on the rules, just on the design choice that lead to this. Why are they banned from that objective, they're witch hunters through and through..

**buddha**

This should probably be retitled to a general secondary discussion as it is certainly needed.

Won't beat a dead horse but abhor the witch is a near game breaking secondary as it punished those armies who can't not take psykers and also encourages those armies that can from skipping a phase of the game. That's just poor design.

As someone else posted, it feels like they ignored the years of ITC tweaking and balancing they took with secondaries. I love secondaries and I think make the game much more tactical but GW definitely did not balance them correctly.

**alextroy**

Abhor the Witch punishes armies that can’t take Psychers? Explain that to me, please.

**a_typical_hero**

Read again, he says "who cannot not" take psykers.

Like Grey Knights for example. Every HQ and most (all?) units are psykers.

**Daedalus81**

a_typical_hero wrote:
Read again, he says "who cannot not" take psykers.

Like Grey Knights for example. Every HQ and most (all?) units are psykers.

Honestly I think GK should avoid running MSU if they're concerned about that.

**yukishiro1**

Let's put in another secondary that gives you 5 points for killing each 3-man unit of 3 wound or more models. If people are concerned about it, they should just avoid taking MSU of those squads. This balance thins is easy!

Abhor is bad for the game. It's like they went out to design the worst possible secondary with the most bad effects they could find.

**alextroy**

a_typical_hero wrote:Read again, he says "who cannot not" take psykers.

Like Grey Knights for example. Every HQ and most (all?) units are psykers.

Ahh. It would help if he used the clearer “must” instead of “can’t not”.

I guess that is the price of playing lots of units that can play in all three ‘combat’ phases of the game.

**yukishiro1**

No, it isn't the cost of that, just like it isn't his fault you misread what he wrote. Armies are still based off the 8th edition codexes, which were balanced without a handicap system.

If you think GW wants to move to some balancing paradigm where certain armies are fundamentally overpowered compared to others and it's made up for through secondary objectives - i.e. a handicap system - that sounds like a truly terrible idea to me. But it's an even worse one to put in the handicaps before you do the rebalancing.

Also, if they're trying to handicap powerful armies, the lack of a secondary to punish the elite infantry spam that space marines love is particularly puzzling. It's hardly as if throughout 8th edition everyone was complaining about how overpowered psykers were.

There's no grand plan here. Just the typical GW "throw a bunch of stuff at a wall and see what sticks."

**oni**

The new mission design is pathetically bad.

First... It's one dimensional. It's literally the same mission every game. The only things that change are deployment zone shape and objective location.

More on point, Secondary objectives are being chosen based on how easily they are to achieve. How easy they are to achieve is solely based on your own army construction.
With few rare exceptions, there is actually very little influence on secondary objective selection based on the army you're playing against.

Faction specific Secondary objectives I'm quite sure will be laughable. I don't think it's far fetched to predict that some will be OP AF.

This will all get old and stale very fast. Thankfully, GW can easily change course and release a new mission pack. One that is hopefully more akin to the previous 8th edition Eternal War missions.

**Ice_can**

Eternal war wasn't well balanced either.

The fundamental issue with a balanced competitive mission pack is if they are properly balanced then yes they do tend to feel very samey.

The more imediat issue is that certain armies are by basic unit construction in their codex making scoring maximum secondary mission scores against them impossible.

When the winner of events are scoring 90-100 VP per game you have a problem if you cannot maximum score.

**vict0988**

The mission pack should be done before pts balancing is done, the mission pack decides whether the most important things in the game will be holding ground, killing units, mobility, etc. Then pts can make every unit and faction viable based on how well it does at winning the missions you are balancing the pts against. Trying to balance missions around a set of pts is almost impossible to get right, ITC struggled a lot because of this and when SM 2.0 came out their pts were completely insane for ITC (not that they were fair for any mission set, just less extremely OP).

If GW wanted to they could have said spamming Psykers gets punished by the mission set, GK would be weak but their pts could be fine-tuned for balance. But no effort has been made to balance the pts, they seem deliberately imbalanced in lots of cases, they have kicked over the sandcastle to upset the status quo. No mission set could ever fix the endless list of issues with CA20 pts because units are not internally or externally balanced and factions and sub-factions are not externally balanced, nothing is balanced so the missions were always going to fail to some degree.

**Spoletta**

I actually expect for GK and TS to receive as their specific secondary, something that runs counter to that. Like:

"If the enemy army has no models with the PSYKER keyword,...."

That would balance it someway I guess.

**Jidmah**

A classic would be gaining VP for successful casting

**harlokin**

Spoletta wrote:
I actually expect for GK and TS to receive as their specific secondary, something that runs counter to that. Like:

"If the enemy army has no models with the PSYKER keyword,...."

That would balance it someway I guess.

feth that, in Drukhari, Necron, and Tau. Just keep rolling those Psyker spamming tears.

**Arachnofiend**

Abhor exists for almost entirely fluffy reasons, so to match that it should only be valid for armies that can't take psykers, not also ones that just choose not to. So Black Templars could take it but the Ultramarines can't pretend they hate psykers when they choose to leave their libbies at home.

**Jidmah**

Meanwhile, my DG and orks are taking exactly one psyker, making abhor the witch worthless to my opponent and enjoy not being hindered by denies.

**Crusaderobr**

Its pretty simple, dont play with secondary objectives.

**Lemondish**

the_scotsman wrote:
Karol wrote:
I don't think GW forgot the elite infantry/biker army even for a second. Maybe, before corona etc, in prior years when they were doing the testing, someone decided that it would be good to have 3-6 months of marine players having it real good. And that changes to secondaries may come with extra books. Doesn't really matter, for GW at least, if those books are going to be CA, codex or special mission books, the way AoS has books for spells and relics. It does matter that people are going to want to buy them to fix their armies.

Yeah, I'm sure every army is going to get their own "here's a subcategory of secondary objectives that are real real easy for your army to do and they'll be named things like "Waaaaagh the enemy!" and "Zoggin' Gitz!" in their codexes."

And armies that have codexes will have a significant advantage in doing the missions as well as having the best most up to date rules, because of course they will, if you don't power creep why will people buy codexes?

Silly, silly me.

There is absolutely zero indication that these will fit into the GT2020 picture.

All through 8th, this community and many many others used tournament suggestions as rules even when they weren't actually part of matched play. You all ignored maelstrom cards, and the Stratagems that affected them, opting instead for rule of 3 and ITC missions, even though those weren't actually in the rules.

The same will happen here. GT mission packs will likely not allow codex secondaries. It will be once again a decision the community makes as to whether we all want to play every game as if it were a tournament.