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Perplex a telemon and nuke the other.

Zorninsson wrote:
Cultists can be playable in any way? I didn't see any of you talking about that unit (like predator, the other that had no mention at all) and I have 30 anvil industries converted cultist that I want to play.

The only thing they can do is swarm objectives. There isn't much to boost their killing power.



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dreadlybrew wrote:
Perplex a telemon and nuke the other.

They were dead center. Anything they wanted to shoot would be within 24". Especially the assets trying to take them out.

They both died, but not with forcing through their mw fnp shrugs and a spectacular shot from the vindicator.

Zorninsson wrote:
Cultists can be playable in any way? I didn't see any of you talking about that unit (like predator, the other that had no mention at all) and I have 30 anvil industries converted cultist that I want to play.

The "best" way to play cultists is as a big blob buffed by Weaver of Fates. There are, of course, still a number of problems with this strategy and it is not recommended. If you really want to put the cultists on the table its probably best just to bring 1-2 minimum units as backline objective holders/action bots. They don't compare favorably to tzaangors or chaos spawn in this role but they can do it.

I think cultists have the problem of not being worth their points.

They don't provide and active role in your army and you can litterally pay for a legion command to action and shoot for like 10 points on a better unit.

They have 0 defensive strats and cant cast spells.

The only reasonable way to take them is if you are bringing 30 scarab occult terminators and need to fill out min troop slots

I agree. Cultists are not really worth bringing unless you are trying to keep the compulsory troop choices as cheap as possible. But even then Tgors are only 20 points more have a better T and 5++ and if push comes to shove, the ones with blades actually have at least some potential for damage in CC. So unless you really need to cut points somewhere and are using Tgors so want to save 20 points by downgrading to cultists, they really don't have any other use.

It is a shame as I have 20 of the original cultist models from like the 90's who look really good with TS. But I would not use them except in the friendliest of games, not even in like a semi-competitive list.

I definitely wanna try a bunch of monofaction lists, but I do wanna soup too. I just thought of something hilarious and fun fluff wise because Ahriman and Fabius Bile are my two favorite characters. But Fabius Bile's Enhanced Warriors ability on Scarab Occult spam sounds fun. Infernal Master gives me a reroll in command phase, Fabius gives +1S/T/A at the end of movement phase to SOT in 6 inches, psychic phase I can launch them up with Duplicity. Enhanced Warriors applies to Heretics Astartes Infantry, it was never FAQ'd to add the <Legion> keyword, and they had plenty of opportunities so far. But 10 man SOT's with T5 or 40 attacks sounds very fun, plus all the other buffs. Plus pink horror split chaff and Tzeentch Daemon buffs on T-Son daemon engines both also sound tantalyzing.

Does taking an auxiliary support Detachment of Fabius bile get you access to veterans of the long war?

 xeen wrote:
I agree. Cultists are not really worth bringing unless you are trying to keep the compulsory troop choices as cheap as possible. But even then Tgors are only 20 points more have a better T and 5++ and if push comes to shove, the ones with blades actually have at least some potential for damage in CC. So unless you really need to cut points somewhere and are using Tgors so want to save 20 points by downgrading to cultists, they really don't have any other use.

It is a shame as I have 20 of the original cultist models from like the 90's who look really good with TS. But I would not use them except in the friendliest of games, not even in like a semi-competitive list.

It seems like thier 1 general use is going to be for them. Which would be zoning. You can still throw the 4++ on them and make the opponent expend a lot of small arms fire on them. Having a cheap disposable screen for SOT or Rubrics is never bad.

Would like to talk about secondaries for Tsons. We have great Tsons secondaries but we can only take one. And the best amongst them is Wrath of Magnus.

So leaving the Tsons secondaries aside, Warp Ritual is another one we should always seriously consider. We have ways to force psychic action through, and we have ways to make our psychic action roll very high by taking the seeker of shadows warlord trait. Its a relatively easy 12 VP.

The last secondary is the tricky one. Honestly, I don't like ROD for Tsons. I feel our units are too valuable to waste their turn doing actions and wasting their opportunity to shoot, etc. warp ritual is different because we have tons of castors, and psychic ritual doesn't prevent us from shooting. But a normal action does. Another reason I don't like ROD is that Tsons units are generally expensive. I hate the idea of throwing away a unit of Rubrics just to do ROD. Because that unit of rubrics could have done much more, and they are not cheap. We do have cultists we can use to do ROD of couse... but given that all the workhorse units in Tsons are relatively expensive, even setting aside 100 points for 2 units of throwaway cultists for ROD feels like a waste of points to me. (Plus they will take 1 CP to put into reserve). At that point, I rather explore another secondary rather than expending so much effort trying to do ROD.

Raise banners is something we can consider despite what I said about ROD. This is because we usually only do banners on turn 1, and the rest of the game, we can just let the banners rack up the VP. Turn 1, often is about moving into position anyway. And stuff is often out of range of shooting. So, I would consider raise banners if the scenario and opponent is one where we are unlikely to be attacked on our home objectives and there are two or even three within easy reach on our side of the board.

Kill secondaries and possible engage are others I would consider. But it all depends on the opponent and the scenario we are playing, and the cult and army we are playing as well. Basically, our third secondary is a lot more fluid and depends a lot on the map, the scenario and our opponent.

As for those taking secondaries against us. We can't do much about Adhor the witch. But I think warp ritual balances out Adhor the witch. We can also have ways to design our list so that it is not that easy to kill our psykers (like take demon prince). This also applies to assassinate as well. Both of these reasons are why I rather not go overboard on characters in a Tsons army. I would draw the line at 3 characters, one of which would be an infernal master that is either kept well back within or near my deployment zone or will be within by big bloc of Occults. And one of the other I would make a demon prince so that he is not an easy kill. This is also why I favor the big block of Occults. It provides protection to our characters. You want to target them, you have to kill off ten Occults first, which would take some serious effort plus I can rezz and heal Occults. In fact, its possible for a Tsons army to be very defensive. Have a large deathball supported by most of our units. Come close and you get blasted by MW plus shot to death with tons of inferno shots and warpflamers, plus charged as a finishing blow by Occults wielding Kopeshs. In that kind of setup, you would literally need to go through the majority of our army before you can get to our characters.


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So, my preference going into a game for secondaries would always be take.

1. One of the Tsons secondaries (Wrath of Magnus if possible as a top choice).

2. Warp Ritual from warpcraft

3. Raise the Banners High from shadow operations.

I think these fit in the best with the way Tsons move and play their army. I would always take wrath of Magnus as long as I can. Even against a psyker heavy or deny heavy army. Even against grey knights. Nobody, not even grey knights lean into psychic MW as heavily as we do.

I don't think I'm quite as high on Warp Ritual as you are; the fact that your Aspiring/SO Sorcerers can't perform the action is pretty rough. Don't get me wrong, it's still one of our better choices, but I'm going to be very upset if I ever need to commit Ahriman to a psychic action despite available Rubrics.

An opponent you can't take Wrath against is gonna change your analysis significantly; Mutate Landscape is significantly better than the baseline psychic actions IMO so I'm quite happy to simply take that instead, but it does lock us out of taking other warpcraft secondaries. I definitely like the idea of using Ardent Automata to make performing actions less painful - probably on Scarabs?

 Arachnofiend wrote:
I don't think I'm quite as high on Warp Ritual as you are; the fact that your Aspiring/SO Sorcerers can't perform the action is pretty rough. Don't get me wrong, it's still one of our better choices, but I'm going to be very upset if I ever need to commit Ahriman to a psychic action despite available Rubrics.

An opponent you can't take Wrath against is gonna change your analysis significantly; Mutate Landscape is significantly better than the baseline psychic actions IMO so I'm quite happy to simply take that instead, but it does lock us out of taking other warpcraft secondaries. I definitely like the idea of using Ardent Automata to make performing actions less painful - probably on Scarabs?

Well, if need be, I think there is a strategem that lets us perform a psychic action and then still be able to cast a psychic power. But I would always try and have my seeker of shadow Infernal master perform the action on a 3d6+1 (pick highest 2 dice).

Yeah, I understand there will be opponents with no psykers where we can't take wrath of Magnus. In which case we will just have to consider the other Tsons secondaries in its place then. Although if I can't take Wrath of Magnus, then warp ritual seems like an easy choice because that mean I should have little problems getting that done. I am not sure if people will specifically avoid psykers in their tourney list though. just because of Wrath of Magnus. That seems too much tailoring for an army you might not even face at a tourney.

There are armies in the meta right now that just naturally don't have psykers, Drukhari/AdMech/Sisters all have to soup for them if they want them.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
There are armies in the meta right now that just naturally don't have psykers, Drukhari/AdMech/Sisters all have to soup for them if they want them.

Well, we can't do anything about those.

On the other side of secondaries - how worried are we about getting tabled? TSons as a faction generally seem poor on durability point/wound. Range isn't stellar and neither is melee for the most part. Expecting to heavily trade most of the game and end the game with little or no units remaining - but hopefully ahead on points.

Should we be concerned about running 5 or more characters? This would make abhor and assassinate a slam dunk by cutting edge armies and easy to max out.

Is To the Last worth building around from a character perspective? Do we have enough chaff?

MortarionsFriend wrote:
On the other side of secondaries - how worried are we about getting tabled? TSons as a faction generally seem poor on durability point/wound. Range isn't stellar and neither is melee for the most part. Expecting to heavily trade most of the game and end the game with little or no units remaining - but hopefully ahead on points.

Should we be concerned about running 5 or more characters? This would make abhor and assassinate a slam dunk by cutting edge armies and easy to max out.

Is To the Last worth building around from a character perspective? Do we have enough chaff?

I think running too many characters raises the risks of us getting tabled because we then have too few points into proper units that can protect our characters. You can make a list with quite a lot of wounds to protect your characters if you run like only two or three characters. And you need some melee capable units in the list too, because there will be lists that get units into melee no matter what we do. Like if something deadly deepstrikes in or comes in from reserve and makes that 9 inch charge, how will we deal with that? If all of our units cannot fight or at least overwatch well with warpflamers, just one deadly unit into our ranks will cause our entire army to fold. So, whether you have one or two Hellbrutes with fists/scourges, demon prince, Occults or Chaos Spawn or Mauler Fiends or Defilers. You need some melee capable units to at least counter charge.

Grind them down is also a big consideration secondary for us, as we will often be out-numbered by quite a bit by enemy units (at least with "elite" builds rather than mini rubric spam)


Spamming chars is just too risky.
Assassinate, grind, abhor. too many VP to harvest.

Eldenfirefly wrote:
Like if something deadly deepstrikes in or comes in from reserve and makes that 9 inch charge, how will we deal with that? If all of our units cannot fight or at least overwatch well with warpflamers, just one deadly unit into our ranks will cause our entire army to fold. So, whether you have one or two Hellbrutes with fists/scourges, demon prince, Occults or Chaos Spawn or Mauler Fiends or Defilers. You need some melee capable units to at least counter charge.

There are a few ways in the codex to reduce an enemy's movement and/or charge range, but you have to build for them. I agree completely with your larger point that some CC-capable units are probably necessary. Based on their point-value and the work they can put out, I'm really liking how Spawn are looking right now (especially when buffed by Presage and Fated Mutation).

Played my first game with the new book vs my buds GSC, 1250 points, forget which mission but it was a hold 2, hold 3, hold more iirc.

I took an Exalted Sorcerer on disc, DP, 4 squads of 5 rubes, 2 dreads with double fists, and 5 termies. Honestly just having full smites on all aspiring sorcerers felt huge. I played cult of magic and the amount of mortal wounds i was tossing out was pretty brutal. Love the new powers and cabal point mechanic, lots of planning involved in the psychic phase now, really was a lot of fun

 BoomWolf wrote:
Grind them down is also a big consideration secondary for us, as we will often be out-numbered by quite a bit by enemy units (at least with "elite" builds rather than mini rubric spam)


Spamming chars is just too risky.
Assassinate, grind, abhor. too many VP to harvest.

Yes, grind them down is definitely also something to consider depending on the matchup and army. Interesting enough, again depending on the matchup, we might be able to go Stranglehold (Domination) as well if we take the crystal relic and have a big block of Occults with Cult of Duplicity. These are obsec and can be made as resilient as DG (though that costs CP). Against certain armies that are not quite that melee capable. Using crystal to plop ten Occults onto a midboard objective on turn 1 could place a lot of pressure on such opponents. Given that occults and rubrics are both teleport capable and both are obsec. We can quite easily do a turn 1 stranglehold and then apply a lot of pressure from there on. Admech are not very good at melee, Tau and Astra Militarium is another example. Like I said, its army and list dependent. But the option is there. Not every list is built to take out 10 Occults in melee. Like a Skitari vanguard block of 20 ? Their main option is to shoot. They won't want to charge a ten man Occult termie block.

What do folks think of this loadout for characters in a list:

Duplicity Characters
Thrall Sorcerer - Presage, Temporal Surge
Ahriman - Glamour, Twist of Fate, Weaver
Exalted - Temporal Manip, Temporal Surge, Prism of Echoes (no disc bc of pts)
Prince - Dark Blessing, Swelled, Conniving Plate relic, Otherworldly Prescience trait, Wings

Time Characters
Rehati Exalted on Disc - Firestorm, Doombolt, Devolution, Scrolls relic, Lore trait
Master - Temporal Manip, Imps and Malestrom

The thing that I'm still puzzling over is whether the Rehati is a great build. Giving him the Time trait would let him cast four times, but he would only know three total powers.

Ahriman has the powers with higher WC, which are therefore more difficult to go off, so his reroll will help there. I know some people push for him as a witchfire caster, but the Rehati is doing that job for me, since the Scrolls makes him very reliable.

 Elric Greywolf wrote:
What do folks think of this loadout for characters in a list:

Duplicity Characters
Thrall Sorcerer - Presage, Temporal Surge
Ahriman - Glamour, Twist of Fate, Weaver
Exalted - Temporal Manip, Temporal Surge, Prism of Echoes (no disc bc of pts)
Prince - Dark Blessing, Swelled, Conniving Plate relic, Otherworldly Prescience trait, Wings

Time Characters
Rehati Exalted on Disc - Firestorm, Doombolt, Devolution, Scrolls relic, Lore trait
Master - Temporal Manip, Imps and Malestrom

The thing that I'm still puzzling over is whether the Rehati is a great build. Giving him the Time trait would let him cast four times, but he would only know three total powers.

Ahriman has the powers with higher WC, which are therefore more difficult to go off, so his reroll will help there. I know some people push for him as a witchfire caster, but the Rehati is doing that job for me, since the Scrolls makes him very reliable.

Switch the Rehati's cult spell out with another at the start of the first psychic phase. Personally I am much more fond of the Immaterial Echo trait, which when combined with scrolls is all but guaranteed to go off and gives you an undeniable extra cast.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 Elric Greywolf wrote:
What do folks think of this loadout for characters in a list:

Duplicity Characters
Thrall Sorcerer - Presage, Temporal Surge
Ahriman - Glamour, Twist of Fate, Weaver
Exalted - Temporal Manip, Temporal Surge, Prism of Echoes (no disc bc of pts)
Prince - Dark Blessing, Swelled, Conniving Plate relic, Otherworldly Prescience trait, Wings

Time Characters
Rehati Exalted on Disc - Firestorm, Doombolt, Devolution, Scrolls relic, Lore trait
Master - Temporal Manip, Imps and Malestrom

The thing that I'm still puzzling over is whether the Rehati is a great build. Giving him the Time trait would let him cast four times, but he would only know three total powers.

Ahriman has the powers with higher WC, which are therefore more difficult to go off, so his reroll will help there. I know some people push for him as a witchfire caster, but the Rehati is doing that job for me, since the Scrolls makes him very reliable.

Switch the Rehati's cult spell out with another at the start of the first psychic phase. Personally I am much more fond of the Immaterial Echo trait, which when combined with scrolls is all but guaranteed to go off and gives you an undeniable extra cast.

You can't swap the cult spell or smite for any other spells. They have to come from the same discipline. Since neither of those spells are attached to a discipline they can't be swapped for anything else.

Nah, that's not a requirement of the stratagem. The stratagem just says pick a psychic power from a discipline you have access to, and replace any power you currently have with that power.

You can swap out smite or a cult power...what you can't do is then swap smite or your cult power back in once you've swapped it out, since they aren't from any discipline.

yukishiro1 wrote:
Nah, that's not a requirement of the stratagem. The stratagem just says pick a psychic power from a discipline you have access to, and replace any power you currently have with that power.

You can swap out smite or a cult power...what you can't do is then swap smite or your cult power back in once you've swapped it out, since they aren't from any discipline.

Your right just looked it up. Could swore it was restricted by discipline. Guess not though.

 Elric Greywolf wrote:
What do folks think of this loadout for characters in a list:

Duplicity Characters
Thrall Sorcerer - Presage, Temporal Surge
Ahriman - Glamour, Twist of Fate, Weaver
Exalted - Temporal Manip, Temporal Surge, Prism of Echoes (no disc bc of pts)
Prince - Dark Blessing, Swelled, Conniving Plate relic, Otherworldly Prescience trait, Wings

Time Characters
Rehati Exalted on Disc - Firestorm, Doombolt, Devolution, Scrolls relic, Lore trait
Master - Temporal Manip, Imps and Malestrom

The thing that I'm still puzzling over is whether the Rehati is a great build. Giving him the Time trait would let him cast four times, but he would only know three total powers.

Ahriman has the powers with higher WC, which are therefore more difficult to go off, so his reroll will help there. I know some people push for him as a witchfire caster, but the Rehati is doing that job for me, since the Scrolls makes him very reliable.

I think Arrogance of Aeons is an alternative warlord trait you can put on the Rehati as a witchfire castor. Lets you stack 2 cabal rituals on him. That's useful if he is a witchfire castor.

I am more concerned that you have like 800 points of characters, which means you will only have 1200 points of units defending these characters plus doing missions (primaries and secondaries). Doesn't seem like a lot honestly. You could easily end up having too few wounds and units to do that plus protect your characters. I don't think you would lose much if you replaced the Exalted and the Thrall sorcerer with rubric marines squads. You lose two casts but given your characters, you probably have too many casts anyway. As a smite source, an exalted or thrall is exactly the same as a rubric squad unless you plan to take one witchfire spell on him so that he can cast that witchfire and smite. If its buffs, well, two less buffs in your whole army isn't going to make or break it honestly.

So how do you peeps deal with -1Dmg abilities and the like? I've played orks against my Tsons mate and sadly it's sort of a struggle for em to chew through anything with ramshackle or squigosaurs. Any advice on decent anti tank options?

just smite the gak out of them. i cant imagine orks have a lot of psychic denial

I read this thread as cannibalistic

Fava beans and chianti hehe

 odorofdeath wrote:
just smite the gak out of them. i cant imagine orks have a lot of psychic denial

Eh, an ork list can have a decent amount of denies if it wants. We do have 3 different types of casters and 10 or so spells worth taking. Besides, 6d3 mortals isn't really enough to deal with 5 or so models, many of which may not be on the very front lines.

He tried taking a pair of vindicators, but got a bit unlucky and tried to put them on the squig riders first.

After playing with them I'm a bit down on vindicators; our army is so short on shooting with reach that making your big vehicle-mounted anti-tank gun also be 24" range isn't great. Doesn't much matter how durable they are if they can't shoot the plagueburst crawlers at all.