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So read the new Imperial Armour for Heretics and Renegades. Here’s a summary.

New and cut units:

Veterans are now cut – disciple time now. Also mitigated by the fact that militia heretic troopers can now be in squads of 20 with 4 special weapons in them.

Chaos cultist are now in. New unit, they're basically buffed conscripts, but 1 per army. Unit of 50, 4 points each, 4+ WS and BS. special weapon per 10, can take shotguns, autogun, lasguns or ccw with pistol. Yeah, they’re good, they’re really good, they’re so, so good.

Changes you need to know


No more Demagogue devotions

Probably the worst change. Renegade commander is now just generic Lord Commander. No blood handed reaver, no master of the horde. This gave renegade so much thematic strength that really got me into the army to begin with, and now it’s gone.

All armour and ordinance got buffed

All Renegade vehicles and batteries no longer are different from Guard versions, they are now both identical – cost and all. So no more -5 points for B2.

Change to Uncertain Worth

Tied with Demagogue for worst thing happening. Instead of rolling D6+4 like last edition, its D6+2 (3-8). So yeah, morale is now an ever bigger issue and you need to dish out even more points to mitigate it. Vox casters and chaos sigil are kinda a must now, especially for infantry armies. This is made worst by …

Infantry are now more expensive

You ‘renegade infantry’ has now become ‘militia squad’, and it’s now 4 points instead of 3. Flamers also cost 7 to buy instead of 5. Marauders and got a slight increase, disciples got a slight decrease, heavy weapons team got a big decrease (squad is got 9 points instead of 25, but heavy weapons also cost more – but I don’t know how this scaled with other armies). But these don’t matter much because …

Heavy hitters hit HARD

Spawn is now only 33 points, 7’, D6 attack, 5 save and mutations. Also removes 1 Ld to units within 1’ of it. Also still keep mutated beyond reason. Cheaper and get more things.
Ogryn is now only 30, 6’, 3 attacks (+1 on charge), 5 save. Start of assault phase, you can roll D6 – 1 and a dude is instantly dead, 2-5 +1 attack, 6 +D3 attacks.
Holy sht did these guys get buffed hard. This editions wants you do destroy your enemies with these guys. Ogryns on the charge statistically get 5 S5 attacks each. Ogryn are the superior shock unit in Renegades imho, but they contest the elite slot whereas spawn don’t.

Rogue Psyker Coven

These guys are the best glass cannon in the game right now. Groups of 1-5. They have a Pysche power called Warp Flux – warp charge 7, choose enemy unit within 12’, immediately suffer D3 wounds, if vehicle, D6 wounds. Kill termies, assassinate lord, and destroy armour. Unfortunately you don’t really have a great way of getting them within 12’ safe, but if you do, you gonna kill stuff.

Summary

I really don’t like what they did. Nerfed demagogue and nerfed infantry will really hit infantry armies. Buffed up the more heretic elements of the army, which sucks if you’re a renegade player. Heavy weapons, armour and ordinance bit be a bit better – but no by much.
All in all, an uncompetitive army has got nerfed, hard.

What are you're thoughts. How have you run your Heretics and Rengade armies, and how has these changes altered your play style. Do you think its a positive thing? Penny for your thoughts.

Still holding for the book here I ran a heavy tank list with bear bones troops and a psychic leader (follower of change here so all beast-men)
I used them rarely as a surprise mix if other players started to build lists just to counter me or as a add on force if I ever got that super big game

Cultists don't get shotguns and aren't limited to 1 per army, they're identical to CSM cultists but with crappy leadership (uncertain worth) and no options for taking CSM character buffs.Same price too which I'm not sure about, because in the CSM list you can justify them being more expensive than guard, but in this list I don't think you can. They should be 4 ppm. And the other R&H troop choices (militia and mutants) should be 3 ppm.

The loss of Demagogue is annoying, though I can still get out of the list what I want (more-so now with the changes to Marauders and the addition of cultists as troops). It's replacement (the 4 god covenants) is ok but that ridiculous stipulation on your R&H Lord being your Warlord is annoying as all hell. It completely breaks immersion if you run these with CSM allies because there's no way the traitor legions are taking orders from some jumped-up guardsman. Picking a covenant should be independent from your warlord choice.

With the changes to force orgs in 8th I can field the units I want better than could be done in 7th, so as a list I can pull some thematic units from it's ok, but I don't think I could justify running a full R&H list with this. You can't just shave stats off a GEQ, deny them the same army mechanic of the GEQ army and charge the same points for units. You can argue for units having unbalanced costs side-by-side, if you can balance that against the advantages and buffs they both provide, but the R&H list is giving out nothing that compares it to other armies and charging more for it to boot. The militia squad is 1pt more a guar squad with lower stats across the board, and pays the same for weapons it's much worse at using. Meanwhile, the buffed troop units of the other two lists in the same book - DKoK and Elysian DT, basic guard squads that both get army wide buffs (DKoK get more leadership mitigation and better WS, EDT get universal DS) cost the same as the militia squad. And they get orders too (including unique orders for their list only). I guess having overwatch on 5+ is good (the other covenants are crappy) but it's not good enough to justify being the same price.

Best thing to do IMO is take cultists as troops, they're a point more than militia but can actually hit stuf. Don't waste points putting 4 specials on a militia squad unless you intend to give them flamers and charge them as sacrificial lambs. Take the cultists (they're interchangeable with CSM units being the exact same unit) and fill out your list with the better stuff.

I think at 6pts disciples are pretty good. They hit as well as MEQs and can be fielded in small squads so you can field a bunch of them with some plasma and do some actual damage. A couple squads of disciples and a HQ in a chimera can take 3 plasma pistols and 2 plasma guns between them and make up a single unit footprint for deployment. You'll need to play with your force org charts to balance all the elites you'll be taking but you can manage it.

Other than that vehicles are ok as they can operate outside of your leadership issues. though they're flavourless. Baneblades lost that interesting leadership bubble thing they had in 7th. Shame.

The plague ogryns look funny, they're a frickin suicide bomb squad that explode and spews out mortal wounds when they die in combat. They seem great for crating gaps in screens and castled up units.

One last thing, I'd have liked the covenants to have linked up to the wider chaos faction by giving units a god keyword as marks of chaos do for CSM. It'd be nice if they could be meta-buffed across the wider chaos faction, but as thigns stand they get zero buffs from anything (they don't even have character buffs within their own list other than the rather unreliable command vox net). The list looks rushed and shoehorned into the book. I'd like to see a revised and much more detailed list in a campaign book or something. With the coming GW campaign and all the chaos focus we'll see in the coming couple years there's an opportunity there to re-release this as a more robust and flavourful list in the future.