Goatboy’s Warhammer 40K: We Have Knight Problems
Chaos & Imperial Knights have serious problems competing in 40K right now. Here’s what GW needs to do.
As you can tell from the preview video on GW’s site – Imperial and most likely Chaos Knights are coming after the bugs get into our walls. This has me excited as I have both armies and anything that breathes a bit of life into an army I already have I am excited for. Heck the only thing I don’t have right now is a crap ton of Armigers to really give me all the options I need. But this isn’t a woo is me story about my lack of plastic crack it is instead a discussion of what can they do to let them compete.
The Knight Problem
Knights are in a weird place right now in that all the new armies have gotten exceedingly more deadly for the army. In fact the best versions of the army right now are a ton of baby Knights who worship the dark powers of the warp. This doesn’t feel too Knight like but that is the way the competitive cookie crumbles. You have to go with the flow to keep up with the meta wave of damage.
This has me pondering what could GW do to make Knights viable in this new edition? What could they do to help shore up their weaknesses? Do they even need to do anything as having these giant robots as gatekeepers for other armies is not always the best thing? Do we need to have another few months of the best army being some kind of awful combo of hard to kill monsters?
That I can’t answer for you as I am a Knight player and I like to run around with big stompy guys. There is something fun about having a small army that you push around the table top. Rolling a few dice that do a ton of damage is an exciting. Plus it is a fast army and my kid addled brain can handle all of those models.
Make Them Tougher
First thought I had was to think how they could make a Knight tougher. I thought this might be an option they look towards as the game has gotten very deadly. With Damage 3+ showing up all over the place it becomes very hard for a spunky robot of destruction to survive. Heck the Stormsurge can just knock out over half of the life of a Knight easily and Tau players can easily field 3 and still have enough room left over to do missions a Knight player can never do. I get the feeling will have a 3 pronged approach to keeping Knights on the table a bit longer.
The first thing is I expect some kind of Damage reduction. Things like a bulk -1 damage would be helpful a bit but simple enough to not increase too much of the point cost of a knight. This feels like a no brainer and if chatter shows correctly is something will see. From there I am wondering if they also look at other ways to mitigate damage. Either some kind of Relic combination, warlord trait, or even CP you can burn to keep your guys alive. A few turns of cut damage in half would let your big bad voodoo daddy live a bit longer.
I hope we don’t see the whole – only take 3 wounds a phase type of rule as while powerful it can lead to a lot of unfun interactions. You will have some armies that don’t give a crap like the Farsite Tau who end up ignoring that and melting you down with Melta. Maybe they could leave it as a specific Warlord Trait or Relic so one Knight is boosted up. Will just have to wait and see.
Make Them Deadlier
If they don’t make the Knights tougher per say they could also look at just making the Knights more deadly. Things like Splash damage like the Tau have with the Railguns would be interesting so you could have single shot guns power out a ton of Mortal wounds to a unit. This would allow it to be deadly to single units or big units of things. I always thought Damage should go the AOS route so we could have high damage guns be just as rough as massed low damage firepower. Age of Sigmar lets damage flow over from model to model which would also let having more wounds be better to mitigate damage a bit more.
I could see more ways to have them just hit more or attack more. While you might lose a Knight to firepower each one would be a massive threat to an army. The trade in how much it can shoot would help mitigate losing one quickly. At this point most armies just do more attacks so having a Knight keep up with the Jonses’ and just become a true murder machine might be for the best. It always felt weird when they came in and barely did anything with their firepower.
Change How They Score
Finally I wonder if another way to make Knights more viable is to look at how they score during a game. Maybe they could find ways to front load some points quickly and the opponent has to catch up. This way the Knight player can still be in it while they are losing models on the battlefield. This could be done in terms of a decent secondary they can score 15 in the first 3 turns quickly or ensuring they hit the max in 4 turns. You could also look at ways they could control an objective over an opponent in either counting as a lot of models or just removing some things from an enemy if they are nearby and scared.
I always worry making the models too tough ends up creating an unfun environment. Not every army has the updated gun profiles to deal with a big threat and you start to see how Knights gatekeep other armies from having a chance. Sure having a paper/rock/scissors format can be ok but when they create very stale match ups it does become an issue. It is a hard dance and Knights haven’t always done it well. I don’t want to ever bring back the stomps of doom but sometimes it feels like those needed to be there to keep stuff locked down.
What do you think? How should GW update Knights to make them fun, unique, and still a challenge to play?
