This is gonna be short, and a much longer article is coming soon.
For those of you who have not seen the announcement for War Zone: Arks of Omen, GW has just released the first teasers for its next mission pack.
There are a lot of things to unpack from this, and I’m going to touch on the three most important ones.
First, you need to see the new Arks of Omen Detachment:
This is a new hyper-flexible detachment that lets Knights bring 3 – 6 Lords of War slots for zero CP.
This is huge for a couple of reasons.
First, the ability to play Titanic Knights in games 1000 points and smaller just became much more possible. Previously, the detachment would have either been impossible to play due to costing six CP and refunding zero or it would have left no CP left for important Warlord traits and Relics to keep the big knight alive.
In the new Arks of Omen Detachment, a player can field an Abhorrent-class Knight and some War Dogs together for 0 CP regardless of point level.
Second, the Tyrants are now not absurdly cost prohibitive to play from a CP perspective. Their normal restrictions on list building made them very difficult to put into a list, and this new detachment changes that.
This probably doesn’t make them good enough to see competitive play without some serious points drops or other changes, but it is very nice to not feel completely punished for taking one.
Third, the Abaddon list got much better as the best possible version is now a Supreme Command Detachment with Abaddon (0 CP) and an Arks of Omen Detachment with all 11 War Dogs in it (0 CP). You’ll still pay for the Helm of Dogs, but then you get to start with FIVE CP, which feels like an absurd luxury after six months of Nephilim.
Finally, between a Super-Heavy Detachment (5 Lord of War Slots), this new Arks of Omen Detachment (6 Lord of War Slots) and a Super-Heavy Auxiliary Detachment (1 Lord of War Slot), Chaos Knights players could in theory put 12 Favours of the Dark Gods onto the table.
This is actually something I’m going to put some serious thought into shortly.
Strategic Reserves are Free:
At first I was fairly “enh” on this, but the more I think about it the more I like it. Against an army like T’au or Votann, being able to hide a big knight turn 1 and potentially even turn 2 can be game changing, and force the opposing player to play more conservatively. I like this change a lot for Knights and I expect to see this cropping up in my games more and more.
Battle Brothers Likely Means Dreadblades for Other Factions are Free
This is a big buff to many of the other Chaos factions that would really like to take the Dreadblades I’ve been writing about (Brigand Dreadblade article coming as soon as I have time to take some pictures). This should also mean that we can still take a Super-Heavy Auxiliary detachment for free as mono-Knights.
Secondaries are Changing
We don’t know exactly what this means. My personal wishlist would look something like this:
Storm of Darkness adds “or at the end of the game” to its scoring timing.
A Fitting Challenge gets rid of the “cap at six” part of its scoring.
Path of Destruction changes to “score 1 for one of these, score 3 for any two of these, score 4 for all of them”. (This might be too much, it would be a really good secondary suddenly).
I’d also really like to find some sort of compromise for Knights on some of the mission tertiaries that made them less punishing for the faction. Currently, we’d have to lose an entire War Dog worth of output to perform the action – see Data-Scry Salvage for an example – and that just never seems like the right play.
Points and Stats Changes are Coming with Chapter Approved
We don’t know what this means either, but I’d wager Knights get very few to zero changes. If we did get some, I’d like to see Tyrants get either much better and stay the same cost or much cheaper and stay the same stats – wise. I’d also like to see the Magaera’s points go back down to sub 500, and make the weapons on the Despoiler generally cheaper. It would also be nifty to let the Tyrant take some relics.
This is Exciting!
List building for Knights just got a whole lot more interesting, and our ability to keep big Knights safe just got much stronger. Look for much more in-depth analysis of this set of rules updates as they roll out officially in the next few weeks!
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