Warhammer 40K: FAQ Winners & Losers
Hey everyone! Adam here to help you make some sense of all the new 40K FAQ rules we got this week.
Wow, it has been another super busy week here in the competitive 40K community. Once again there is a lot going on. More rules previews, surprise stats on models, and codex releases have a lot of people’s heads spinning just trying to process it all. Just when we figured it all out, Games Workshop decides to drop a FAQ bomb for 21 codexes. supplements, and other books related to the game. It really is a lot to take in for those that need to know every little change to all the armies. Let’s be honest, you probably don’t need to know every little change but there are a few things to be aware of. This week we will look at a few of the changes that will be felt in the tournament and matched play scene.
Drukhari
Let’s start with the obvious. There is really one change that will jump out at you right away. The big one is the change to how Dark Technomancers works. The wording is the same for the most part but they added the caveat that liquifier and twin liquifier guns do not benefit from this special rule. This is huge as these guns have been tearing up the meta the last few weeks. The change basically gives you almost no reason to take Wracks because, although the guns are okay, the liquifiers were much better with the auto-hit combined with the weapon stat boost. We will have to see what players choose to replace the Wracks in their army.
Other rules that may change the composition of the army is that attacks that generate additional attacks cannot generate even more attacks (page 99 of the rare rules) and the increase in cost to Raiders. These aren’t really big changes but could be enough to change if these units are added to the army or on how many are used in the army. Don’t celebrate the demise of the codex just yet, as there are still some viable builds in the army to make the codex a deadly opponent.
Chaos Space Marines
It seems that Chaos, and Chaos Space Marines in particular, got a mixed bag. One of the big things is that the psychic power “Warptime” is limited to <Legion> units. This kills a lot of armies that still had Mortarion with a detachment of Chaos Space Marines. Because of the <Legion> restriction, a Chaos Space Marine Sorcerer can no longer use Warptime on Mortarion. Now he just has his normal move speed to get to where the action is. To be honest, I am not sure how bad this is as I rarely see that combo nowadays, but it’s not even an option now so that is a moot point.
If you like summoning, or at least thought about it, then rejoice. Previously, summoning basically negated any bonuses you would receive for having a pure detachment. Now summoned units no longer affect your army in that way. You can summon whatever daemonic units you want and have no downside. This is good news for all those Word Bearer players out there… somewhere.
Lastly, and this one is basically just for me, they fixed how the Dreadclaw and Kharybdis drop pods work. They added the wording so that units that are inside can get out on the turn they arrive. Now my guys won’t be trapping in their flying coffins of doom for a turn waiting to the opposing army to open the doors for them by way of destruction. This actually has me thinking of using my Dreadclaws again. I mean I only have 7 of them.
Fight First/Last
So there was also some clarification on the Fights First/Fights Last rules. They give step-by-step examples and even include an illustrated example to help you understand how those rules work and interact with each other. I had read the clarification a number of times now and I think I have a good grasp of it. I will not be surprised if people are still confused by it just by reading it, so I suggest that people just play out a fight phase with the different abilities in place and it should, hopefully, all come together in your mind. The pictured example helps and is probably something that I would always have on hand, especially if going against anything Slaanesh or Eldar related. I really hope they don’t come up with anything else that muddies the fight phase waters.
~That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed the article. Let me know what you think, and what parts of the FAQ helped or surprised you, in the comments section below.
