Good day fellow Dark Lords.
It’s been a while. I haven’t played a competitive game with my Knights since May of this year, when I took them to a GT, went 4-1, and had an absolutely miserable time playing them.
I have, however, been actively theory crafting with the faction, paying attention to the updates, and chipping away at painting my Porphyrion. We’ve had a couple big changes since then and I thought I’d put my thoughts down on paper. Part 1 will cover the December 2024 update to our rules and points, Part 2 will cover the new Detachment from the Grotmas releases, and Part 3 will cover my thoughts on the faction going forward and what I think we need to fix some internal balance weirdness.
Part 1: Dec 2024 Update
We had a major rules change in the Dec 2024 update here, with our Detachment rule now reading as follows:
This is a fairly substantial boon for the faction, as removing the need to get to round 3 for the actual detachment benefit to kick in makes our knights both killier and tankier.*
*Sometimes.
I’m glad to see this change, I still don’t think this is a viable detachment rule without massive amounts of battleshock triggering rules in the rest of the faction. I will touch on this more in the “what I’d like to see” section, but this is not a strong enough detachment ability with most of the game passing battleshock 58% of the time.
The second rules change we got is to the Traitor’s Mark enhancement, which formerly gave the bearer the new version of the detachment rule and now lets you force a battleshock within 12″ of the bearer anytime during the movement phase. At an eye-watering 30 points, this is a great enhancement – crucial to the way the army wants to play – but it’s also massively overcosted in my eyes. This is the kind of thing that the army desperately needs if GW wants us to be the second battleshock faction, but it needed to be something like “pick up to three enemy units within 12” for 30 points for me to be truly excited about it.
As far as points go, we can now bring the Stalker and Huntsman for the same price as a Karnivore (and probably will opt to not do that most of the time) and GW continues to refuse to make the Executioner playable with rules and instead is pushing it closer and closer to the point where being T10 with 12 wounds is good enough to play for whatever it costs. It’s 130 now, I still don’t think I’d play it.
Notably, this does absolutely nothing for the big knights, and that’s a crying shame. The coolest models GW produces (not biased) are resigned to shelf pieces for the vast most part, and that sucks.
Overall, if the index had launched like this, I think we would still be getting buffs today, but it would have been a more enjoyable 18 months of 10th edition so far.
Side bar – that means we’re already halfway through the edition.
Anyway, these are great changes but they don’t go nearly far enough. I appreciate that GW is trying to make this idea work, and this is a good first step, but to make this a functional detachment rule it still needs a lot of work.
Part 2: Iconoclast Fiefdom
You can find the full detachment rules here.
This is an interesting Detachment. It allows you to bring keyword Damned units from Chaos Space Marines (Cultists, Accursed Cultists, Traitor Guard, and their attachments) and then do mortal wounds to them to give models sustained or lethal hits.
It also gives the titanic knights a big aura of rerolls 1s to hit and wound for the Damned units.
This is a really cool concept, and I have to give the rules team props for going for something so off the wall.
I like being able to take cheap action monkeys (you can scout with three of the units for an enhancement) in knights, and I like hurting something that isn’t one of my knights to make them better.
The enhancements are “okay”, with one giving three Damned units scout, one giving a model sustained AND lethal when they hurt their cultist buddies, a third letting you pop any cultist unit you can see rather than one in range, and the last gives the thing a 6+ FNP and ignore modifiers for movement and such. I think the Scout, Lethal/Sustained, and 6+ FNP are quite good, but they’re also pricy and that’s unfortunate.
The stratagems are weird, and this is where the detachment starts to fall apart for me.
Avenge the Masters (1CP) – Pick a unit that killed a Knight, the Damned units get Lethal hits against it for the rest of the game.
Situational and kinda cool, but definitely not what I want to see here. The focus should be the knights and this is focused on the cultists. I want to pay minimal points for my additional bonuses and action monkeys, not play wannabe CSM. Accursed Cultist with Dark Commune are great in CSM and if I wanted to spam them I’d play that.
Unrestrained Rage (1CP) – Advance/Fall back, shoot, and charge on a single knight unit
HECK YES, this is the kind of thing I wanted desperately in the index. Losing full tilt in 9th edition was my one complaint with the 9th codex, and being able to fall back and shoot with Tyrants is a huge deal, love this one.
Wretched Masses (2CP) – bring back a dead Damned unit with no characters.
Again…this is cool and all, but why are we spending so many resources on the chaff units?
Worthless Chattel (1CP) – for the low, low price of probably hurting your unit, you can shoot into combat with things engaged by the Cultists.
This is a great stratagem because the scenario in which your cultists are engaging something you want to shoot will come up a LOT and sometimes falling back isn’t an option.
Soul Hunger (1CP) – if a Chaos Knight kills something, regain some wounds. Regain more wounds if the thing is battle shocked.
This is a rule that I want to see in Knights, but I’m not a fan of paying CP for this. If anything, I would have liked to see it attached to a stratagem that pops during any phase and lets you force an enemy unit to take a battleshock test, healing you for some or healing you for more if they fail.
Preserve the Idols (1CP) – A reactive move that allows cultists to move in the way of things going after a knight.
Again, cool idea, but couldn’t we just reactive move the Knight instead?
Notably – hugely – Diaboli Bulwark/Rotate Ion Shields is gone from this, meaning that the faction is going to be much more vulnerable to guns than the index detachment.
List composition wise, this Detachment feels really strange. It can’t really spam War Dogs because your Cultist pool will die VERY quickly, and frankly if we wanted to get a bunch of Sustained Hits on something the index detachment has a great stratagem for that already.
On the other hand, big knights don’t have any real survivability, and aside from one enhancement this doesn’t change that. They also tend to have the right number of attacks for sustained or lethal hits to actually matter, especially as knights lack re-rolls to hit in any real capacity.
I’ve built two lists that I kind of want to try out, but I don’t think either of them is any better than spamming War Dogs in the index, especially now that the index Detachment rule might actually function.
List 1: Three Abominants, a Tyrant with Plasma and Volcano Cannon, six units of Cultists.
The enhancements here are scouting Damned units on an Abominant, pick any unit on an Abominant, and sustained/lethals on the Tyrant.
List 2: Double Tyrant with Plasma/Volcano, one has Scouting Damned Units and the other has Sustained Lethals, a Porphyrion, and a mix of Cultists and Traitor Guard.
I think some numbers of big knights plus a bunch of chaff is the direction this Detachment wants to play, enhancing the output of the big guys, providing cheap action monkeys and fodder, and giving the innumerable blast weapons the ability to kind of function when the lines close.
Overall, my feeling here is similar to the index detachment – GW is either afraid of making this idea work properly, or doesn’t know how to do it. Too much of the focus of both enhancements and stratagems is on the models we don’t actually care about as a faction, and the lack of survivability from losing Bulwarks is a big problem. It also doesn’t fundamentally fix the problems that Titanic Knights have.
Part 3: So What Do We Actually Need?
I’ve held off on a wishlisting post for the entirey of this edition, so I’m going to let myself off the chain a little bit here and pontificate about what I think the faction actually needs. I’m going to break this into two sections.
The first will be rules that I think the faction needs regardless of specific detachment rules.
The second will address what I think the faction needs to make this weird battleshock idea that GW really wants to happen work. Although, and in fairness, I’m actually starting to think that this is not the direction GW wants to take this army, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a different army rule in the codex. The Grotmas detachment doesn’t key off battleshock hardly at all, and I would like to see that kind of thing continue into the future.
Changes we Need
First, the Wraith Knight is well and truly dead and Eldar are losing fate dice as their army rule as soon as their codex drops. Give titanic units back the ability to fire overwatch please.
Second, Super Heavy Walker needs to allow Titanic Knights to fall back, shoot, and charge again. Too many of the weapons we have on the big knights are blast, so tying them up with chaff and hiding the rest of an army means they often cannot shoot at anything. These two changes would make a substantial difference to the viability of big knights without making them too oppressively tanky.
Finally, we need something to make big knights survivable enough to tangle with things. The game can handle T12 2+ save blank one damage rogal dorns with more ranged output than a tyrant for half the points, it can handle a couple big knights on the table. Make them more expensive to compensate, but give me a thing that, if I position well and force my opponent to deal with it on my terms, will survive stuff.
Making the Battleshock Thing Work
In order for a battleshock focused army to work, it needs to trigger battleshock a lot of times. Most relevant units have leadership six, so at -1 they need to roll a 7 to pass which they will almost sixty percent of the time. This means that in order to get a successful battleshock through with more than a coin flip to succeed, that same unit has to take two battleshock tests, and then they will fail 64% of the time which is more likely but still not guaranteed.
In other words, we need our models to be forcing battleshock tests. I’m going to run through some of the egregiously bad models in the faction here and give them an extra rule or a rule change to make
Abominant – Give this guy something to increase its output against battleshocked units. Its the only thing in the faction with an appropriate amount of “forcing battleshocks” already, so I would give it something like “When this model makes a ranged attack against a battleshocked unit, it ignores cover and gains -1 AP”.
I’d also drop it 30 more points, but hey.
Executioner – this model is the best place to put forcing battleshocks that I can think of. Simply give it a rule on the autocannon that says “After resolving attacks with this weapon, choose one enemy unit that was hit. That unit makes a battleshock test as if it were within the Despair aura of a Chaos Knight unit from your army.” Pop it back up to 140 points, I’d play 2 or 3 of these in a heartbeat.
I would also change its ability from +1 to hit things under half strength to +1 AP against units not at starting strength.
Huntsman – This is supposed to be the anti-monster and vehicle guy, so I’d give him a once per turn force a monster/vehicle to battleshock test within 12″ ability. I’d also love to see something like “improve the attacks and strength characteristics of this model by 1 for each monster or vehicle unit it has destroyed this game”. It takes trophies, the trophies make it stronger.
Porphyrion/Asterius – these guys are the sickest “miniatures” out there, and I want them to be good. I’d drop them 50 points apiece, make them characters, and give them full rerolls to hit against battleshocked models. In the context of an army where you can force 3-4 battleshocks on an important target before your big guy shoots, that would bring their ranged output in line with their points and let them take important enhancements.
Conclusion
The best way to play Chaos Knights is still spamming Brigands, Karnivores, a Stalker, and some Daemons. Without major shakeups, the best way to play Chaos Knights will continue to be that way for the rest of the edition. I’m going to give the new detachment and the revamped index some time over the next month, but ultimately I don’t think there’s a good reason to pick my first love and bring her to tournaments again until GW decides to give the army some of the tools it actually needs to compete at a high level.
