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Were armies with Psyker units and with lots of small vehicles really that overpowering in 8th that GW decided to murderize them in 9th's mission structure? or is it more likely that the killer Character+Psyker combo objective was just not particularly well thought out?

I think the small vehicle thing is GW over-reacting to things like Razorback spam while also not at all understanding what actually made that list dangerous (because it WASN’T the Razorbacks), but the psychic thing? I don’t think they thought that through at all. Looking at the rules for a lot of this, you would think Tsons were the absolute most devastating army of all time in 8th because 9th has hit them with a nerf bat so hard they are just a stone’s throw away from being unplayable (unless you build for total cheese aka Lannigan and his “Tsons” list with almost no Tsons), but they aren’t the only army hurting in this regard. Even with the play testing, so much about this edition just isn’t working. It’s almost the ultimate “haves and have nots” edition so far. Hopefully the missions get a proper overhaul at the next chapter approved. I don’t actually think it would take much to fix them, but they do need fixing.

I don't think there's any way you can argue they didn't intentionally not make a kill secondary for elite multi-wound infantry/bikers because they wanted to promote that archetype. It is such a glaring omission, and there is no way they didn't realize what they were doing, because it exists in ITC, and it is 100% obvious that the system took ITC as its base. When you combine it with the fact that most of the Indomitus releases were elite infantry and/or bikers , it can't be a coincidence. People tend to overstate the degree to which GW deliberately shuffles the pack to get people buying different models, but in this case it's absolutely fair to say they put their thumb on the scale to favor the new releases.

Stuff like Abhor strikes me as more incompetence than evil plan, though. I doubt they actually thought psykers needed a big nerf. They just decided it would be "cool" to have psychic secondaries, and then someone was like "but what about non-psychic races?" and then they threw it in without really thinking about it.

the_scotsman 794892 11015030 wrote:

Were armies with Psyker units and with lots of small vehicles really that overpowering in 8th that GW decided to murderize them in 9th's mission structure? or is it more likely that the killer Character+Psyker combo objective was just not particularly well thought out?

It is more like GW "forgot" that they have two armies where the majority of units are psykers. And the whole psychic objective things was writen down by one of those narrative folks, that like to do some forging and who write the odd books for some armies in AoS.

There's definitely some issues with secondaries. Honestly my only real complaint is that some armies can easily build to deny them, while others cannot function without giving up major secondaries. It's like GW learned nothing from the lessons ITC learned, when the testing group is a bunch of ITC regulars. It just punishes certain armies for no reason. IG for example isn't terrible as far as units go, we weren't doing that bad tail end of 8th, even if you ignore Vigilus. But when we came to 8th, we give up tons of secondaries but really struggle to score against the most common armies out there. The opponent can kill 200 pts of characters and max points on my army but I can kill a single character worth 200pts in the enemy army and only get 3.

I don't understand why it's so difficult for people to do math. Killpoints have been terrible ever since implemented. Kill secondaries need to be calculated on value lost, not units. It makes no sense that an IG company commander worth 35pts gives up the same points Ghazgkull does at 300pts. You wouldnt look at a battle in the books and say "it's ok guys, our chapter master died but we killed two guard platoon commanders and a tech priest engineer, we definitely came out ahead!"

"But math is hard, I can't possibly add up the points of all the units I've lost!"

You're joking right? Almost everyone carries a calculator in their pocket called a phone and even if you didn't, it takes 30 seconds to pull up your list, and scribble some napkin math in the margins. Kill secondaries need to be calculated on the points worth of unit destroyed, or else were going to continue to punish non elite armies that are already disadvantaged due to how 9th works.

Unless the entire of 9th was written in that small window between the Castellan nerf and Marines 2.0, I'm not really sure how it can be seen as a "reaction to hordes."

As is usually the case with GW, I think some designers had a plan, and others had "this sounds cool do it lol". So the relative power of objectives - in terms of ease of maxing them out - are all over the place.

This is unfortunately something that is almost certainly going to get worse as every faction acquires 3 extra secondary objectives. Some of which are good, some of which are so awful they will never see the light of day.

I guess CA may pick up the skewed ones - but I'm not sure I'd trust GW to cope with this ever evolving mess.

Well the reaction to GW fixing of marines, and the horde problem was a radical points drop and influx of rules for 2.0 marines, which kind of a changed marines from an elite army, or an army that should have been kind of a elite, in to a swarm of infantry.

What did the marines list run back in the end of 8th, 60 or so, intercessors and other units. With 2 wounds each that is a bit like playing with 120 wounds worth of models.

Tyel wrote:
Unless the entire of 9th was written in that small window between the Castellan nerf and Marines 2.0, I'm not really sure how it can be seen as a "reaction to hordes."

As is usually the case with GW, I think some designers had a plan, and others had "this sounds cool do it lol". So the relative power of objectives - in terms of ease of maxing them out - are all over the place.

This is unfortunately something that is almost certainly going to get worse as every faction acquires 3 extra secondary objectives. Some of which are good, some of which are so awful they will never see the light of day.

I guess CA may pick up the skewed ones - but I'm not sure I'd trust GW to cope with this ever evolving mess.

Honestly from my perspective - those secondaries were written with Marines in mind.

Anything more than mission specific objectives is a stupid mechanic.

Secondaries need to be removed from the game like a tumor, else they grow and grow.

Racerguy180 wrote:
Anything more than mission specific objectives is a stupid mechanic.

Secondaries need to be removed from the game like a tumor, else they grow and grow.

Disagree. I've really enjoyed the Secondaries, whether its tourney play or Matched Play. They give you different paths to victory, adding more variety to the gaming experience. They allow you to salvage something from a game you are otherwise getting smoked on. They can also add an narrative aspect. A few weeks ago I took an Inquisitor with an Astra Militarum force. Facing Harlies I knew I was in for an uphill struggle, so I took Psychic Ritual for a Secondary - the Inquisitor was trying to seal a portal to the Slaneesh (and unintentionally working at cross-purposes to the Harlies). It made the game more fun for me and added a narrative twist.

Mezmorki wrote:We just stopped using the secondary objectives entirely, with the exception of the mission specific secondary that everyone automatically has. In fact, we made the points for the 'primary' objective locations gradually ramp up as well, so the mission specific secondary has a bigger impact on the score. Works better.

Kind of punishing for some armies that already can't really win; like Knights and the like. I guess it's an interesting game mode but takes a lot of the overall play away in that you can't alter your game against opponents by choosing different secondaries. Makes it more like early 8th Edition which isn't terible but still not a fan.

Tycho wrote:

The secondary system is very good...some of the choices need to be executed better, granted, but they're FAR and away better than ITC's garbage system from early 8th and still better than their revised system in late 8th.

I found the marine/custodies player!

Really though - much like Yukoshiro, I had some issues with the secondaries early on (and also with the fairly obvious first turn advantage) and we see the issues playing out. A big part of the problem is that if you play an army like marines or custodies, they’re great. Makes sense that you would see no issues. If you play Tsons, Tau, or GSC it feels like whomever designed the secondaries had a personal grudge against you! Abhor the witch and assassinate in combination with how Look Out Sir now works, makes Tsons really difficult to use without giving up at least 16 almost every time, and there are far too many examples of codexes that can easily be built to give up hardly any secondaries while other books just have to live with the fact that yeah - your stuff was pretty much targeted here and there’s nothing you can do about it. Hopefully you go first?

As far as the codexes go - no. I don’t see them helping this. We know now that “perform an action while shooting” is going to be the new rule everyone gets in order to ignore the “actions” rule, but we aren’t going to get anything to fix the issues that exist here.

In particular, there needs to be at least one secondary that targets elite infantry lists. I don’t see it happening, but that alone would go a long way towards smoothing some things out.

Ork player actually.

MSU Deffskullz; thus I "give up" a ton of stuff easily. Hasn't been a problem for me ever.

Elite armies have tons of drawbacks. They give up board control which, in general, loses them the game automatically. For an extreme example; Knights should never be able to win. They can't hold objectives so any army that is built to play objectives will always beat knights. Yet if you're elite and have just enough to squeak by then Knights will stomp you everytime since every loss keeps you from holding the board by a much large degree than a larger MSU army...which you say is hindered heavily under the new system.

That said; I already agreed the Secondary Objectives could use some refinement. A "gang busters" option would be great: For every unit of 2+ wound models killed you score 2-3 points...for example. This would "punish" marine players for spamming Combat Squad units and give them more incentive to take larger marine squads. Maybe add the requiremnt of 3+ armor save as well so that some other armies' don't get hurt by it...though not sure that's necessary at all.

The biggest change has to be hard-locking the secondary types more; or (and probably the better option) leaving them alone and adding the rule: "You may never apply destroyed units and/or models to two different objectives." Like ITC had. This would stop Grind and Bring-Down from stacking for instance. As well as assassinating psychers in a Grey Knight or Tsons army.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

Karol wrote:
Well the reaction to GW fixing of marines, and the horde problem was a radical points drop and influx of rules for 2.0 marines, which kind of a changed marines from an elite army, or an army that should have been kind of a elite, in to a swarm of infantry.

What did the marines list run back in the end of 8th, 60 or so, intercessors and other units. With 2 wounds each that is a bit like playing with 120 wounds worth of models.

Who did that (60 Intercessors)? I mean I did...but I'm a weirdo and run bonkers stuff...The biggest Investment i've seen is 30 in those goofy Iron Hands tank bomb lists. Even in 8th points that was over half your points.

Bitharne wrote:

Karol wrote:
Well the reaction to GW fixing of marines, and the horde problem was a radical points drop and influx of rules for 2.0 marines, which kind of a changed marines from an elite army, or an army that should have been kind of a elite, in to a swarm of infantry.

What did the marines list run back in the end of 8th, 60 or so, intercessors and other units. With 2 wounds each that is a bit like playing with 120 wounds worth of models.

Who did that (60 Intercessors)? I mean I did...but I'm a weirdo and run bonkers stuff...The biggest Investment i've seen is 30 in those goofy Iron Hands tank bomb lists. Even in 8th points that was over half your points.

I ran an all infantry list for my only ITC game, but that mostly because I knew I would have to park a long ways from the FLGS and didn't want to have to carry two cases.



It wasn't anywhere close to 60 dudes though. The spoiler has most of my army while I Infiltrated 2 5 man squads of Infiltrators and place two 6 man squads of Reivers in Deep Strike. It looks like I had something like 15 or 20 Intercessors from the photo. What I can remember about that game, from more than a year ago, was it didn't go well for me. I was playing an armored/artillery guard list that tore me a new one.

IDK, I've said in other threads that playing Guard feels like I am playing a different game from an opponent and not for the better this edition. Because of difficulties with secondary's I've been pigeon holed into playing increasingly more infantry to the near point where that is all I take beyond the Valk/ Scion drop and some Bullgryns. Even then it feels like hard mode and I'm not sure how you could fix it even with a new Codex.

 Saturmorn Carvilli wrote:

Bitharne wrote:

Karol wrote:
Well the reaction to GW fixing of marines, and the horde problem was a radical points drop and influx of rules for 2.0 marines, which kind of a changed marines from an elite army, or an army that should have been kind of a elite, in to a swarm of infantry.

What did the marines list run back in the end of 8th, 60 or so, intercessors and other units. With 2 wounds each that is a bit like playing with 120 wounds worth of models.

Who did that (60 Intercessors)? I mean I did...but I'm a weirdo and run bonkers stuff...The biggest Investment i've seen is 30 in those goofy Iron Hands tank bomb lists. Even in 8th points that was over half your points.

I ran an all infantry list for my only ITC game, but that mostly because I knew I would have to park a long ways from the FLGS and didn't want to have to carry two cases.

Spoiler:

It wasn't anywhere close to 60 dudes though. The spoiler has most of my army while I Infiltrated 2 5 man squads of Infiltrators and place two 6 man squads of Reivers in Deep Strike. It looks like I had something like 15 or 20 Intercessors from the photo. What I can remember about that game, from more than a year ago, was it didn't go well for me. I was playing an armored/artillery guard list that tore me a new one.

Haha...nice.

I went out of my way to make all infantry. Like I said; Triple Battalion in 8th for those Juicy CP (which I promptly spent all of before the game). This afforded me 86 Marines IIRC. 6 were characters. The torrent of bolter-fire was absurd. I only lost one game, my first, in an ITC mockup against Morty before I had had any experience with it. I have yet to field it in 9th. I drop some models but am bolstered with Heavy Intercessors and Blade Guard Vets...but still rock nothing but Power Armor: 45 2w models (4 With Storm Shields), 15 3w (10 T5 and 5 SSs), and 5 Characters.

I give up Assassinate with 5 characters. I actually have enough MSU style to give up Grind them Down to a fair few opponents. I've no (like all marine armies) ability to play Banners or much other action things. I do have more than most to hold objectives and to go for Domination or Engage (though I'll never max it). I'd probably be better taking Linebreaker and rush for turn 2 Charges into their deployment.

Power Armor armies have, contrary to most whingers on this thread, have tons of issues scoring in 9th. There's some outliers in build and chapter to boost you with lots of speed; but that also can hinder you so it's not a strict advantage. If you go TOO far too fast in power armor you're liable to slingshot other armies farther into your field and it won't be a good day for you. I've done this to quite a few people and they thing they're doing well until I capitalize on their little tactic that was ill concieved.

Again. 9th Scoring is great. Has some issues that will be ironed out. I'm just glad ITC jumped on GW's balls for this so we're not using their crap scoring anymore.

 BaconCatBug wrote:

ccs wrote:

 BaconCatBug wrote:
It's almost like, after an edition where hoards ruled the roost, GW deliberately made those armies unviable, causing everyone to buy new elite armies (and push more Primaris sales), and then will swing the mer in the other direction in 10th edition, thus necessitating another round of arm
40k isn't a Miniature Wargame anymore, it's a TCG now.

Well, once you have a hoard army, and then you buy an elite army, you'll be set for future pendulum swings.
Unless your stupid & do the buy/sell/buy routine....

If you're keeping up with the Joneses and don't have Elongated Muskrat as your dad, you're probably selling the old army to finance the new one.

if you're selling an army that's on the out you're proably getting pennies on the dollar dude. how much do you think a 2000 point grey knight army was going for in 7th or 8th edition? (just for example)

Bitharne 794892 11015325 wrote:

Who did that (60 Intercessors)? I mean I did...but I'm a weirdo and run bonkers stuff...The biggest Investment i've seen is 30 in those goofy Iron Hands tank bomb lists. Even in 8th points that was over half your points.

they were popular here, both the IF and IH lists spamed the heck of interecessors, combined with dreadnoughts. The RG lists played localy were running a ton of infantry too, although in their case the on consisted of large units of teleporting centurions poping up at opponents door turn 1.

Was not a fun time for people that tried to matched that with same cost models with half the wounds, Or same number of wounds, but much lower stats and rules base.

@Bitharne, the problem is not that your list gives up secondaries, but that most marine lists, and I'd wager all competitive ones, give up almost no secondaries. You can take a pretty goofy army and do well with it. Meanwhile with my guard I need to run the absolute try hardest list I can to break even with you and I'll still give you max secondaries.

The problem is you are not given any disadvantages in secondaries for how you build your army, but I am. Yeah you've got 5 characters, but those are marines. One of those guys is easily worth 2-3 of mine in points, both in their abilities and fighting ability. Yet when I kill your character, it's worth no more than mine. That's the issue here. A wet behind the ears guard platoon commander at 25pts has no business giving up as much VP as a Chapter Master, I don't care what anyone says.

What's even more insulting, my Tank Commanders cost the same as your marine characters, yet they give up a guaranteed 7pts depending on secondaries. And tank commanders are key units in my codex that I have to take if I want Russe's to work. I'm being punished for taking a unit I'm supposed to have. And unlike a librarian that can give up 8pts, you know you'll max the objectives that make a tank commander 7 points. If you take the combo to squeeze 8 out of a librarian you're not maxing it because most space marine lists are never going to have 3 pyskers

I really enjoyed the Maelstrom scoring cards. You could use them in all sorts of ways, from random to planned decks, to choosing specific types of objectives.

Power Armor armies have, contrary to most whingers on this thread, have tons of issues scoring in 9th. There's some outliers in build and chapter to boost you with lots of speed; but that also can hinder you so it's not a strict advantage. If you go TOO far too fast in power armor you're liable to slingshot other armies farther into your field and it won't be a good day for you. I've done this to quite a few people and they thing they're doing well until I capitalize on their little tactic that was ill concieved.

What? No. Loyalist Power Armor armies score fairly easily. Hell, even CSM can score somewhat well on primaries.

You don't even have to take my word for it - just look at loyalist win rates. lol

Plus, not all Power Armor armies are equal. Tsons again are a good example here. Who cares if you have Tzangors for banner raising when you have somewhat squishy characters that are A. necessary for your army to function, B. difficult to protect, and C. will give up not just ONE, but TWO secondaries each time they die. Since they're all Psykers, a good player is going to take both Abhor the Witch AND Assassinate.

Marines are in a crazy good spot this edition. I don't understand what you're talking about with "going too far too fast" w/power armor? What games are you playing that this becomes a thing? 90% of the action happens at mid field where marines excel. Tough enough to kepp the secondaries they take, shooty enough to kill you off of the ones they can't get to, and they give up almost no secondaries what-so-ever, so you can't really make up ground in that way. It's even worse now that they have a codex with the "shoot while performing an action" strat. They def. got toned down a good bit and I'm happy they didn't get nerfed into oblivion, but I'm not sure where you're coming from with these points.

Who did that (60 Intercessors)? I mean I did...but I'm a weirdo and run bonkers stuff...The biggest Investment i've seen is 30 in those goofy Iron Hands tank bomb lists. Even in 8th points that was over half your points.

So you DO play marines ... lol

 BaconCatBug wrote:
It's almost like, after an edition where hoards ruled the roost, GW deliberately made those armies unviable, causing everyone to buy new elite armies (and push more Primaris sales), and then will swing the hammer in the other direction in 10th edition, thus necessitating another round of army buying.

40k isn't a Miniature Wargame anymore, it's a TCG now.

I assure you, sir, that no armies made of piles of gold, jewels, fine art and artifacts were ruling 8th edition, despite the dragons they had as HS or FA.

Now, horde armies may have been an issue, but hoards weren't.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
@Bitharne, the problem is not that your list gives up secondaries, but that most marine lists, and I'd wager all competitive ones, give up almost no secondaries. You can take a pretty goofy army and do well with it. Meanwhile with my guard I need to run the absolute try hardest list I can to break even with you and I'll still give you max secondaries.

The problem is you are not given any disadvantages in secondaries for how you build your army, but I am. Yeah you've got 5 characters, but those are marines. One of those guys is easily worth 2-3 of mine in points, both in their abilities and fighting ability. Yet when I kill your character, it's worth no more than mine. That's the issue here. A wet behind the ears guard platoon commander at 25pts has no business giving up as much VP as a Chapter Master, I don't care what anyone says.

What's even more insulting, my Tank Commanders cost the same as your marine characters, yet they give up a guaranteed 7pts depending on secondaries. And tank commanders are key units in my codex that I have to take if I want Russe's to work. I'm being punished for taking a unit I'm supposed to have. And unlike a librarian that can give up 8pts, you know you'll max the objectives that make a tank commander 7 points. If you take the combo to squeeze 8 out of a librarian you're not maxing it because most space marine lists are never going to have 3 pyskers

How do you get a TC to be worth 7? Character Killing and Vehicle Killing are exclusive secondaries. The entire reason Abhor+Assassinate is such a problem is that Abhor is (stupidly) in the "Warpcraft" category which means you can take it at the same time as you take Assassinate.

Abhor+Assassinate is such a problem is that Abhor is (stupidly) in the "Warpcraft" category which means you can take it at the same time as you take Assassinate.

Exactly, and it's not the only example of that. There are a few that stack like this that shouldn't. At the very least, Assassinate should say something like "Cannot be taken with Abhor the Witch". Cleaning up some of the over-lap would really help a lot of the issues. We would still need to address the fact that elite armies are still essentially "secondary immune", but at least some of the other armies wouldn't be getting penalized simply for existing.

What's the status with the ITC secondaries? Are the current ITC secondaries the same as what's in 9th? Where are they listed if they are different?

Vehicles are particularly interesting because when the first 9th info was starting to come out basically everyone was calling this edition a Vehicle-heavy edition. Shooting into combat? Moving and firing without penalty? Guaranteed numbers of shots vs horde units? Sounds good, right?

But then the actual realities of playing and scoring in-game are very unhelpful to Vehicles and monsters and the like.* Which, honestly, feels like intended design. With the Core keyword stuff too I absolutely think making units like that a lot better at killing stuff and giving them more functionality while reigning in their ability to play the mission well and also giving up kill points was 100% intended. However there still exist two problems with that:

1) Vehicles are still far too easy to kill because average lethality in the game is still far too high (which is primarily a Marine issue and their prevalence skews the numbers here).

2) And related to that; most vehicles and monsters are massively overpriced, especially for how fragile they can be. And this overpricing is likely related to the above changes that 9th edition made. They almost all suffer a giant extra points tax for changed core rules that are not good enough to justify the expense.

While removing Bring it Down might encourage more vehicle use, at the end of the day why bring a giant target along that can easily get one-shot for little effort by units that cost less?

*This is similar to how people exclaimed that Close Combat was dead pre-release. Then you played one or two games of 9th and you realised this is the most combat-encouraged edition of the game since early 3rd Edition.

Bitharne wrote:
Elite armies have tons of drawbacks. They give up board control which, in general, loses them the game automatically. For an extreme example; Knights should never be able to win. They can't hold objectives so any army that is built to play objectives will always beat knights. Yet if you're elite and have just enough to squeak by then Knights will stomp you everytime since every loss keeps you from holding the board by a much large degree than a larger MSU army...which you say is hindered heavily under the new system.

This hasn't been my experience.

For starters, board control isn't critical to primaries when there are only three midfield objectives on the board. You probably won't be able to claim board-control-focused secondaries, but if there's one thing obsec elite troops are good at, it's hunkering down on an objective and just not shifting.

Taking three sizable units of, say, Plague Marines isn't 'just enough to squeak by'; it's better objective-holding than nine squads of Guardsmen. They just don't go anywhere, you can't assault them off of an objective, and anyone with the numbers to beat them on obsec lacks the durability to outlast them. In short, it's not the number of models or number of units that matters, it's durability for the points (particularly in melee) and force concentration, both of which generally favor elites in 9th.

Struggling against Knights has very little to do with the army archetype and a lot more to do with the fact that expensive, tough, multi-wound, high-save infantry are exactly what strong, multi-damage, high-AP Knights eat for lunch.

Some marines dreads love the new vehicle rules. unloading with your weapons in melee, greater resiliance thanks to rules stacking and an always on -1D, big enough stats to not just killed with regular weapons on avarge.

Who at the start of 8th would have thought that primaris dreads are going to be considered good, specialy the plasma version.

 Bosskelot wrote:
But then the actual realities of playing and scoring in-game are very unhelpful to Vehicles and monsters and the like.*

Leaving durability and scoring aside, the #1 thing that has killed vehicles and monsters for me in 9th has been that this is a terrain-focused edition in which vehicles and monsters cannot interact with terrain at all. Your board is supposed to have a significant amount of LOS-blocking ruins/woods/jungle and your vehicles simply can't enter it. With how big 40K vehicles and monsters are relative to the board, it's frustrating enough to set up the board such that they can fit between terrain features, let alone such that they can actually move around the board and do anything useful.

Designing your list to avoid "giving up" Secondaries is a valid strategy, but at the end of the day if you need five big vehicles or monsters to make your list work then so be it. I find you also need to think about how your list is going to score Secondaries that are not based on killing. You might face an opponent who does not give up many by design, or you might be in a 1000 or 1500 point game where there might not be many vehicles/monsters etc. There is no scaling for the Secondaries, so if your opponent in a 1000 point game has thought through during list design how to score Engage on All Fronts each turn and Deploy Scramblers and you've only thought about killing then you might find yourself far behind on Secondaries. I like that.

It is very punishing for armies that always give up 3 secondaries, specialy when they play vs armies that go first and give up one or two.

So it is kind of a like, if my army is good this edtion the rules feel good, but if the army doesn't fit the 9th ed rules it feels really bad to play.

Designing your list to avoid "giving up" Secondaries is a valid strategy, but at the end of the day if you need five big vehicles or monsters to make your list work then so be it. I find you also need to think about how your list is going to score Secondaries that are not based on killing. You might face an opponent who does not give up many by design, or you might be in a 1000 or 1500 point game where there might not be many vehicles/monsters etc. There is no scaling for the Secondaries, so if your opponent in a 1000 point game has thought through during list design how to score Engage on All Fronts each turn and Deploy Scramblers and you've only thought about killing then you might find yourself far behind on Secondaries. I like that.

The problem though, is that some armies (like Tsons for example) almost auto-give certain secondaries pretty easily and there's nothing the player can really do about it. Great - I'll use my big Rubric blob to Raise Banners. So ... that's 1 point. Meanwhile, every time one of my sorcerers bites it, that's 8 points ...

With the exception of a few of the mission specific secondaries, a lot of the non-killing secondaries really don't stack up well, so if your army gives up some of the killing secondaries, it almost doesn't matter what you pick for your secondaries as you're simply going to be behind on them regardless.

Not to mention the fact that a lot of the armies that don't really give up secondaries also tend to be ideally suited for the easier non-killing secondaries like Engage and it just snowballs.

This hasn't been my experience.

For starters, board control isn't critical to primaries when there are only three midfield objectives on the board. You probably won't be able to claim board-control-focused secondaries, but if there's one thing obsec elite troops are good at, it's hunkering down on an objective and just not shifting.

Taking three sizable units of, say, Plague Marines isn't 'just enough to squeak by'; it's better objective-holding than nine squads of Guardsmen. They just don't go anywhere, you can't assault them off of an objective, and anyone with the numbers to beat them on obsec lacks the durability to outlast them. In short, it's not the number of models or number of units that matters, it's durability for the points (particularly in melee) and force concentration, both of which generally favor elites in 9th.

Struggling against Knights has very little to do with the army archetype and a lot more to do with the fact that expensive, tough, multi-wound, high-save infantry are exactly what strong, multi-damage, high-AP Knights eat for lunch.

It really hasn't been anyone's experience. A lot of Bitharne's posts feel less like posts based on experience and having followed "the scene" for a bit and more like someone who's done a ton of theory hammer and drawn the wrong conclusions.

It's hard to plan around secondaries when the army you play just gives them to the opponent on a silver platter regardless.