Goatboy’s 40K: How To Fix Grey Knights
We all know the next Psychic Awakening is going to come out with Grey Knights, Dark Angels, and Thousand Sons. Here’s what the boys from Titan need.
We all know that for Dark Angels the update is most likely going to be like Blood Angels which means a new Doctrine, a boatload of new stratagems, and I am sure something else neat like a few Warlord traits/Relics. The Thousand Sons update most likely will just focus on the schools of magic and maybe some distinct relics/warlord traits for those schools. The Grey Knights themselves are the weird one as they don’t match the current Marine build out as they are not focused on Primaris and instead focused on expensive old school marines. So what would they do?
I don’t think we’ll see Primaris Grey Knights as it doesn’t fit the current thought process on these Marines being specially cultivated to produce psychic warriors. You can’t just give their Intercessor squad a psychic power, a force sword, and say go on and defeat chaos for the god Emperor. So you have to rethink how they can update Grey Knights in a way that doesn’t invalidate the current points and instead fulfills their own design for that army. Tough super psychic heroes who hate Chaos.
Master Psykers
The idea I have is to push the psychic angle on this army. This should be the group of guys that all can casts spells to do interesting things. They should have more than the 6 spells and instead look at building things into specific army style functions. This would mean looking at building small little groups to cover the different aspects of the army. Also these things should not follow the rule of only being cast once a turn as well.
I Smite Thee!
I know that is the bigger issue that could happen – but these guys are just a ton of single wound marines that don’t have a ton of attacks. This means every loss is terrible for the army so we need to amp up their damage potential to make that investment worthwhile. Thus we need to make them better psychic warriors. Why does Thousand Sons have powerful psychic abilities that work? They have a ton of options to cast them and can just rely on the smite spells to pull them ahead. This brings me to my next thought – each Grey Knight unit should be able to cast a smite that can’t go d6 wounds – but will always be d3 wounds (3 when cast vs daemons). This just needs to happen to make those Strike Squads worth it. If we had a ton of units that could throw out a Smite means the Grey Knights now have an interesting set of answers for armies. They also still need to ignore the +1 to casting each Smite just to allow the army to have a really interesting edge versus the other armies.
This psychic prowess is what the army should have always had. They are supposed to be the Psychic bad asses and keeping them like this would be really interesting and powerful. They don’t have a ton of models anyway and while yes – 6+ smites could be devastating versus some armies but a lot of them are going to be like – cool I lost a few models here and there. It is why I think we just remove the big smite from the option and just let a ton of mortal wounds pour out as needed. If the book has more psychic spells then seeing armies utilize just smites won’t be nearly as much of an issue as you are fighting to get your spells off. I think make these spells that can be duplicate like cantrips or simple boost spells. Things like move and fire heavy weapons, a single reroll per unit, just little things like that when they are not in smite range and lets the army be unique and function differently than the others.
After that type of change I think push some of this hero hammer options in the Stratagem section would also be good. There are a few marine ones that fit well within the range of powers – like the Trans-human one to ignore wound rolls of 1-3 and some of the other protect options. These things all make sense and I expect Grey Knights to get another page or two of Strats to help them out (another mean jab at Black Templars and their lack of Stratagems).
Overhaul Time
I think the book does need a complete rework to get up to speed – which includes rethinking units and armies “themes”. These idea I have are just small little things that would take a few sets of new rules and could breathe some life into the Grey Knights. Heck the whole ability to copy spells could be a their “doctrine” for being pure Grey Knights as well. Force that lack of soup ability to truly bolster their army into something that might be feared on the table top.
I just miss some of the easy to build armies from the old times when compared to the new easy armies of these days? Grey Knights could be the home of old marines instead of switching over to the new Primaris hotness. Heck painting things silver was the old easy army and it would be nice to bring some of those models to the desktop instead of those people wanting to play on super hard mode.
~ What do you think GW will give the Grey Knights to help them out?
