Goatboy’s Warhammer 40K: War Zone Nephilim’s Top 5 Changes Shake Up the Game
Goatboy here with the top 5 changes coming to Matched Play with the War Zone Nephilim update. The Game is Changed!
This book should be showing up this weekend and it shakes up a LOT of things in the current Match play 40k landscape. I don’t agree with all of it but I do think a ton of it is good. I am all for a shake-up and hopefully some much-needed point adjustments to help curtail some of the rough books out there. There are too many dang bugs on the table top let me tell you. Will leave that point discussion for hopefully the end of the week with an update.
In no particular order as each change is pretty important.
Starting Command Points Overhaul
Command Points has been flipped on its head. We all have seen the update with a starting total of 6 Command Points for armies to initial use. This is huge as a lot of lists are spending 5+ to create their army in the specific way they want to play. This can be multi-layers of Warlord traits, Relics, Drugs, and other bits of nonsense within their levels of stratagem usage. Heck, a ton of armies had to use these to work correctly so it is going to be a big hit to them. We also saw armies that would blow 5+ in the first turn to wreck the opponent. I think that is the bigger reason to change it from GW’s side of things as they saw a ton of games quickly decided by who went first and who had the Command Point Cash to spend on killin.
This is one of the changes I am mostly ok with as any kind of movement to the AOS model of Command Points can be a good thing. It feels a lot better for allowing games to get to turn 3 with some viable army options still left on the table. It does give a lot of power to any army who has some kind of native reroll ability. Things such as piles of rerolls to use, Faith to take advantage of, or Fate to manipulate. I doubt there will be usage of random rerolls early in games now with limited starting Command Point pools.
CP Addition Mid-Game
On the flip side of the above change players now get 1 Command point during their player turn and then another during their Opponents player turn. This can be huge as it doesn’t affect the whole gain a CP other armies my have with either extra rules to gain them or refunding some when spending them. I like this change a lot more as you can hopefully have a chance to survive a bit when knowing to play with your protection abilities up. This means trying to keep your CP at a certain level during a turn and most likely not just burning as much of it as you can. Again this sort of thing benefits those armies that have some kind of increase of CP regeneration without having to rely on your opponent spending theirs.
All New Secondaries
All Secondaries got updated and hopefully balanced. GW rules designers looked at some of the too-good ones and tweaked them a bit. They also removed some of the no-brainer ones utilized by some of the better armies. The two big removals are To the Last and Stranglehold. I always hated To the Last because it incentivized lack of engagement. For the armies that had expensive little units that could easily move out of the way as needed (Aeldari and Swooping hawks) it became a very unfun style of play.
Stranglehold does hurt too as I used it a lot in my armies. It was one of those objectives you could quickly score and control but again – it was way too easy. Purifying Ritual also got a tweak too. While it is still a go-to for Grey Knights it is a lot less easy to do. Things like having to control it now to purify it. There are also a ton of secondaries in the book too for every army so you can see the what kind of future is coming to Astra Militarum and Chaos Daemons.
Goodbye Free Warlords & Relics
Your initial Warlord Trait and Relic are no longer free. This is a pretty big one and something I don’t really agree with. It also brings a ton of questions. There are two new Stratagems available that are 1CP each and basically state you can assign someone a Warlord Trait and assign a Relic. These are usable just once and the ones listed in your book can be used. The big question I have to ask and others is what about those named Characters that get 2 warlord traits? Do you have to pay for the initial one and then the stacking one for your army? Morty currently doesn’t really work as he gains 4 and there is no way to stack that many within the Death Guard book. I expect it will just be 1 CP and the special character gets the warlord traits they would have to get as part of their Dataslate.
Multiple Secondaries
Finally, you can now take more than 1 secondary from your Codex. This is a strange one too as it really doesn’t matter to a lot of codexes. But some have some powerful options. Space Marines might benefit as they have some powerful choices they can stack on themselves. But we will see. This is a weirder one but it could be good and something to think about as you build your armies. I would say this is how you should look at any army just to ensure that you have the options to score.
The Other Stuff
Beyond any of this listed above the book does have the full set of rules of 40k and all the missions updated with a few tweaks. This means that it is most likely a needed book if you want to play competitive 40k. I do wish it was spiral bound and will most likely do it to mine when I get a hold of my real boy copy. Really this is just one half of the equation to matched play. I bet there will be a lot more point adjustments coming soon. Due to the fact its going to be a digital release and not dependent on printing to show up in our greedy little hands.
What do you think of the changes?
