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yukishiro1 wrote:
Psychic ritual is definitely the best of a bad bunch now. But it's still a bad pick against anyone with a deny strat almost all the time, because leaving it up to RNG whether you score a secondary is not a competitive choice, and there's a wholly plausible chance you get only 2 from it if you do pick it against someone with a 4+ deny strat.

Competitive players don't leave it up to RNG whether they score 2 or 12 on a secondary.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Daedalus81 wrote:


This, I feel, is really oversimplified.

You are welcome to feel it's oversimplified, but that's a content-free comment to which there is no meaningful response, essentially akin to "nuh uh, you're wrong," which people usually make because they have nothing else to say. So I assume the discussion is over.

I'm not stating "nuh uh, you're wrong". I think both of us lack concrete evidence so I will opt to not push further until that point. Whether or not I use Ritual will also depend a lot on the TS secondaries.

Then what you are really saying is "I disagree, but I don't want to discuss it any more," not "that's really oversimplified." The latter is a way to save face by claiming victory while heading out the door.

It's totally fine to say you disagree but you don't want to discuss it any more. But if so, just say what you mean, it's more respectful to everyone.

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
Chosen down 1 PPM to 14 PPM (the same as standard CSM, weird)

I foresee a new "Veterans of the Long War" strat to make a unit of CSMs into "Chosen".

And they're still bad at 14 PPM too.

yukishiro1 wrote:
Then what you are really saying is "I disagree, but I don't want to discuss it any more," not "that's really oversimplified." The latter is a way to save face by claiming victory while heading out the door.

It's totally fine to say you disagree but you don't want to discuss it any more. But if so, just say what you mean, it's more respectful to everyone.

No, I still think it is oversimplified based on games that I've played and scenarios I've encountered using a deny from my own army along with recognizing how painful it was to reserve that CP when I needed it for other things as well as waiting for the spell I needed to tackle the most not knowing if it was going to succeed anyway.

Well, Chosen have one unique role (sort of). You can "spam" special weapons with a squad of them. And this just made them cheaper by a bit if you want such a unit. Like a unit of 6 flamers or a unit of 6 plasma guns or a unit of 6 meltas. Chosen are the only unit that can do that. Such a unit just got 6 points cheaper. Not gonna be gamebreaking. But I guess its better than nothing?

Terminators can also do that, and they're actually good at it, since they have a delivery mechanism. Chosen just die before they can do anything useful unless you put them in a rhino, and at that point, terminators cost the same but are way better. There is no reason I can think of that you'd ever actually want to take Chosen from a competitive point of view. Which doesn't mean you shouldn't do it if that's what you want to do. It just means they're pretty much the definition of a bad unit.

Hmm, ok I forgot about terminators lol. Well, you can put them in strategic reserve and save the Rhino points. If you are strapped for points. But I have never seen a competitive list using Chosen, so its probably not great. lol

Well I just commented in the Skiitari weapon thread but Terminators might lose their ability for so many special weapons. Not sure how the SM codex handles it, but DG terminators are now far more limited as to how many ranged special weapons they can take. CSM might follow suit, leaving Chosen with a unique niche within that codex.

Eldenfirefly wrote:
But I have never seen a competitive list using Chosen

Yep, there's a reason for that.

Honestly I am having trouble off the top of my head thinking of a worse multi-model unit.

H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
Chosen down 1 PPM to 14 PPM (the same as standard CSM, weird)

I foresee a new "Veterans of the Long War" strat to make a unit of CSMs into "Chosen".

And I fear you're right.

yukishiro1 wrote:

Eldenfirefly wrote:
But I have never seen a competitive list using Chosen

Yep, there's a reason for that.

Because gw won't give up that second wound? 2 wound Chosen would be just as tough as Intercessors, either standard or Assault, but with chainswords and combi-bolters would shoot like the standard variant and fight like the Assault variant. But at this point it's a crapshoot whether or not they'll even exist in the new codex considering they don't have models.

Well, I don't want to criticise GW about what they will do to Chosen before the 9th ed CSM codex is even out. That's kind of jumping the gun.

Well, except for not having obsec or transhuman, i.e. pretty much the reason to take intercessors.

Honestly, I don't really see how chosen will ever be anything other than bad as long as they have neither obsec nor any kind of in-built delivery mechanism (DS, pregame move, whatever).

yukishiro1 wrote:
Well, except for not having obsec or transhuman, i.e. pretty much the reason to take intercessors.

Honestly, I don't really see how chosen will ever be anything other than bad as long as they have neither obsec nor any kind of in-built delivery mechanism (DS, pregame move, whatever).

You mean like INFILTRATE? The ability they used to have before gw took it away for "reasons"? Chosen, like most other CSM units, have been gutted by three successive garbage codexes. We make due with what we've got.

 Castozor wrote:
I dunno, never having played against such a psyker heavy list, but if you gave me a 1CP 50/50 of "deny your enemy 2/3VP" every turn I'd bank 5CP every game just for that.

Yeah, but then when the next psyker vaporizes someone, you've got no deny left, because you can only use the strat once per turn. And if I don't have enough psykers to play that trick, I probably wouldn't be trying to score a psychic agenda in the first place.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
Yeah it's just fundamentally a stupid secondary. That they still haven't realized after a whole year is a real indictment of their development process. If you couldn't use deny strats on psychic secondaries there might be justification for a special anti-psyker secondary, but the fact that you can makes them impossible to plan around, so there's no compelling reason to have an anti-psyker secondary either.

All the armies that "spam" psykers do so because they have NO CHOICE. Psykers by their nature are anti spam.

If I play tsons my opponent gets 6vp for killing ANY HQ CHOICE IN MY ARMY. its just asinine.

I see the flaws, but at the same time it is a balancing secondary that keeps psychic army from grabbing at a secondary with no opposition. Now, more and more armies have access to a 4+ deny for 1CP, but those are usually locked.

What I'd like to see is Abhor move to 'Eliminate the Enemy' or 'No Mercy' to make the choices less clear cut.

There is plenty of opposition to psychic secondaries, kill the psykers, just like you would kill the non-character infantry for Scramblers and all the psychic secondaries are for CHARACTER psykers, so you can just pick Assassinate. There is literally no reason for it to exist, the bonus points for killing non-character psykers is asinine. I pay nothing for not taking psykers, it's simply not an option for Necrons. I have wargear that gives me a small chance to deny and a Strat on the anti-MW dynasty that lets me deny on a 4+.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
Are people going to dumpster their only deny for a 50/50 chance at blocking points? Let alone at least 3CP to make sure they don't fully succeed the whole game....on top of letting the opponents best spells ride?

I don't think so. Maybe if you go veil and they block a cast, but that's about it.

Interesting question, I would say yes. How much is Warptime worth in terms of VP? Are you really going to get 5VP or at least stop your opponent from getting 5VP off that one cast alone? Now if we are talking 3VP then you are probably right. But then, you've got some success with psychic secondaries and I've only have one of them used against me once, it went poorly for my opponent, especially because I happened to be playing the anti-MW Dynasty that game. I did deny a 3VP cast because I expected it to be a low-point game where 6 points might matter (4CP over 4 turns). Tournaments change things a bit because you don't just want to win, you want to win by as much as possible, at least in smaller tournaments, I guess in a 5-rounder you can torpedo your way up by getting a low-scoring win and facing an easier opponent round 2.

A good player doesn't cast warptime from a location you can deny it, whether with a strat or otherwise, if it's important that it goes off; if they can't cast it out of range, they're not going to go for a play that relies on it if they have a 50% chance to fail it. 4+ deny strats are more about space denial than actually denying powers; it's pretty rare you get to use them on something that really matters. They're good against things like Ezekiel trying to remove your ob-sec...but competitive DA lists only take Ezekiel, so there's not going to be a case of having to choose between denying that or denying a psychic action.

Using the 4+ on a psychic action is almost always a no-brainer for that reason. You can come up with theoryhammer examples where it wouldn't be, but they don't change the fact that taking a psychic secondary against a competent opponent who has denies is almost always a bad idea.

There are just way too many limitations on psychic actions right now to make them remotely viable as something to build around.

Interesting. I just saw a leak on the secondaries in the new Chapter Approved. Titan Hunter is now only 4VP for killing 1 Titanic and 9 for killing two.

Its not even going to be worthwhile taking Titan Hunter against one titanic model now. I think this will help all faction that want to soup in a titanic and even Knights too, since they can choose to run 2 Titanics and wardogs/amigers.

Eldenfirefly wrote:
Interesting. I just saw a leak on the secondaries in the new Chapter Approved. Titan Hunter is now only 4VP for killing 1 Titanic and 9 for killing two.

Its not even going to be worthwhile taking Titan Hunter against one titanic model now. I think this will help all faction that want to soup in a titanic and even Knights too, since they can choose to run 2 Titanics and wardogs/amigers.

Yes, it's 4/9/15 for 1/2/3 titanic units killed. Still an autopick vs knights or lists with 3 superheavies, but lists with only 1 can ignore that risk now.

Yep.
The monolith just went from actively detrimental to just cumbersome and non competitive.

yukishiro1 wrote:
Psychic ritual is definitely the best of a bad bunch now. But it's still a bad pick against anyone with a deny strat almost all the time, because leaving it up to RNG whether you score a secondary is not a competitive choice, and there's a wholly plausible chance you get only 2 from it if you do pick it against someone with a 4+ deny strat.

Competitive players don't leave it up to RNG whether they score 2 or 12 on a secondary.

Unless this book changed something, you can't use most/all deny strats on a psychic action because it doesn't manifest anything.

They FAQed that months ago to make clear that anything that can be used to deny a power can be used to deny a psychic action too. The only ones that don't work are the ones that require a specific unit to be targeted; I think Custodes and maybe one other faction has those (Custodes also have a generic one too). The generic 4+ to deny a power cast w/in 24" works just fine.

yukishiro1 wrote:
They FAQed that months ago to make clear that anything that can be used to deny a power can be used to deny a psychic action too. The only ones that don't work are the ones that require a specific unit to be targeted; I think Custodes and maybe one other faction has those (Custodes also have a generic one too). The generic 4+ to deny a power cast w/in 24" works just fine.

I had no clue what you were talking about so I checked the GT book FAQ, which contains a copy of the rules and a definition of Psychic Actions, and there is no such FAQ or Errata.

Figuring you didn't make this up out of nothing, I checked BRB and the errata appears to be in there.

So now there is a bit of a fun academic question regarding which 'psychic action' you are doing but that's about it.

It wouldn't surprise me if GW screwed up and didn't put it in all the FAQs it should be in, that strikes me as par for the course.

It also wouldn't surprise me if it's missing from the new GT2021 book because they forgot to update the rules they put into it, again that would be classic GW.

Well, the thousand sons codex is coming "soon". So, maybe they will get such a devastating psychic list that if you had one or two denies, you absolutely have to use it to try and deny those or you would get wrecked. That's always a possibility.

Now I feel that against players with only one deny. Taking something like psychic ritual is a "guaranteed they will not interfere with your other psychic casting". This might backfire either ways of course. It could result in me losing the game on secondaries. Or it might backfire on my opponent too, because he might lose because he failed to stop my most devastating psychics.

PenitentJake wrote:

 Castozor wrote:
I dunno, never having played against such a psyker heavy list, but if you gave me a 1CP 50/50 of "deny your enemy 2/3VP" every turn I'd bank 5CP every game just for that.

Yeah, but then when the next psyker vaporizes someone, you've got no deny left, because you can only use the strat once per turn. And if I don't have enough psykers to play that trick, I probably wouldn't be trying to score a psychic agenda in the first place.

Well you can only do it with characters, and the dude who does the ritual has to be in range and not do anything else. If your entire army rule set is build around characters casting multiple psychic powers, you may not have a second or third character to try to do it. At this is assuming opponent can't just kill some of your characters.


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Eldenfirefly wrote:
Well, the thousand sons codex is coming "soon". So, maybe they will get such a devastating psychic list that if you had one or two denies, you absolutely have to use it to try and deny those or you would get wrecked. That's always a possibility.

Did they say soon, or did they say later this year. Because I think the article says later this year. And later this year can be many months. From what I understand chaos marine players are waiting for their soon legion books ,for multiple editions now.

Given that the only other list (Orks) we know is coming does not have its values printed in the MFM, I would place money on the fact that "soon" will mean "after sisters".

 the_scotsman wrote:
Given that the only other list (Orks) we know is coming does not have its values printed in the MFM, I would place money on the fact that "soon" will mean "after sisters".

And it seems like Sisters are imminent.

It looks to me like GK and TSons were supposed to come out after sisters but before Orks, but they switched the order a while back. It would be downright bizarre for them to have been doing previews for Orks for almost a month now, while doing none for GK or TSons, only to then release GK and TSons before Orks.

Well they don't really have much to preview for either. Orks are getting a ton of new stuff. For 1ksons/GK it is just one character model. Maybe 1ksons get really lucky and their stuff is linked to some sneaky AoS tzeench demon model release.

 Daedalus81 wrote:


I'm not stating "nuh uh, you're wrong". I think both of us lack concrete evidence so I will opt to not push further until that point. Whether or not I use Ritual will also depend a lot on the TS secondaries.

They would have to be really horrible for Ritual to be considered an option, and I mean like really bad. The only way I can imagine it to happen, is if it either required the use of multiple characters or sacrificing high cost units.