Warhammer 40K: Octarius Critical Mass Is The Weirdest Warzone Book Yet
Let’s take a look at why Critical Mass is a weird weird 40K campaign book.
The second book for Warzone Octarius book, Critical Mass, is out. As the 4th Warzone campaign book we’ve seen we thought we had a good idea of what these books were. Octarius however throws a bit of a curveball and ends up being a weird book. Let’s take a look at a few weird things.
The Weird Weird Rogue Trader Section
So Rogue Traders get an index here giving them some rules. Well not all Rogue Traders, just a section of them Astra Cartographica. In essence, this is the Elucidean Starstriders and some Rogue Trader units from Blackstone Fortress given new rules for use in 40K. So… is it good? Well no, not really. The Rogue Trader has a couple of kind of interesting weapon options, but none of them are really great. Yeah, you can get 3 S4 aP-2 D3 close combat attacks…wee? Nor do they come with any really great special rules. In fact, most of their rules just work to slightly buff the Voidsmen unit.
This unit is also pretty horrible. At 8 points a model, they have stats that effectively make them Tempestus Scions, but they are stuck with lasguns. Since the Lasgun is pretty much the most useless weapon in the game right now and they don’t even get orders, they aren’t going to do much. At best they are a cheap infantry unit, but they also only get Obsec if you have a Rogue Trader with the right Warlord Trait nearby. Overall this Index is just pretty weak. What’s sad is this could have been a lot more. Make the Voidsmen troops, make rules for the other Blackstone models and allow them to take some units from existing armies (maybe even some xenos –HERESY), and you’ve got a full little army here. So who is it for? Well, no one really. I guess if you have the models already and really want to field them in a game you can do this, but honestly you’re better off just using them as counts as for a Guard Army or something. This is something 99% of players will ignore.
A Book Only Orks Care About 
The other Warzone books have all catered to a few armies. Critical Mass however really only helps out Orks. And Orks do get some decent help. Not of course that they really needed it. Orks are doing pretty well in the meta right, with buggy lists snapping up wins. They might not quite be as dominant as Drukhari or Ad-Mech were in their turn, but they are real contenders in the meta. So I mean obviously they needed more buffs. After all, they did just get a nice new codex, and you gotta have some fresh DLC to go with a new codex these days, right?
So Orks get two things from this, a Codex Supplement for Blood Axes and an army of renown for Speed Freaks. Both of these are really solid and give Ork armies more viable options. Speed Freaks kind of worries me as they double down on the already very annoying buggy heavy lists, but it’s not so much clearly better than Freebootaz as to make me think it is busted. These are pretty good rules here, and if other armies got stuff on par with these I’d be fairly happy. But weirdly they don’t. Aside from the Rogue Trader stuff, which no one will care about, Orks are the only faction to get stuff from this book. If you don’t play Orks you can straight up skip the book.
A Strange Book
At the end of the day I don’t know what to think about Octarius Critical Mass. It’s probably got the least matched play rules out of any of the 4 warzone books so far – odd for a book called critical mass. It’s got a section of bad rules for units no one has. Rules no one asked for and that no one will use. It’s a book that really only affects one army and feels less like a warzone with a bunch of armies fighting in it and more like a patch for the Ork Codex. Ultimately while Ork fans might like this book, I’m left hoping the other War Zones are pretty different and spread out the love around for more factions at a time.
Let us know what you think about Critical Mass, down in the comments!
