Apparently....we might NOT be next

teriba1 wrote:

http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2018/02/40k-the-tau-codex-whats-wrong-with-them.html

an article from yesterday still says we are next so im keeping my hopes up

Maybe but BoLS articles are also sounding like a bunch of jerks too. There have been some discussions on here about how they don't seem to understand how several armies work, ours included, or them being extremely salty about Ynnari (and that our next codex will be trash except like 3 units that will be absorbed by Ynnari lists...). Regardless, I do hope it releases soon or as some others are saying, at least one of those 3 previewed because seriously...their preview is generating a lot of discussions, sure, but the "hype" is already wavering.

Unfortunately I'm not sure that's all that helpful, BoLS said we were next weeks ago so don't see why they'd change their tune.

The order is Necrons, Tau, and then Drukahri. My buddy works at a FLGS and his rep is saying that's the order it's coming down in. The BoLS article was a knee-jerk reaction to the release news.

Take that with a grain of salt if you must but, given that the community article only covered AoS and Necrons in any sort of depth one would think necrons are at the top of the 40k release pile. Not to mention I think it's widely known they ended up being the worst faction out of the index.


Edit: I hope I'm wrong and we are next.

lament.config wrote:

... Not to mention I think it's widely known they ended up being the worst faction out of the index.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I am curious what makes Necrons as bad as people say? I can see that they're expensive, sure, but what makes them "the worst?"

Expensive, seems like low damage output, and their reanimation protocol is easy to work around.

Ubernoob1 wrote:

lament.config wrote:

... Not to mention I think it's widely known they ended up being the worst faction out of the index.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I am curious what makes Necrons as bad as people say? I can see that they're expensive, sure, but what makes them "the worst?"

They have 2 main rules to make them what they are, very survivable. Both those rules can be completely render unless by good players.

Quantum Shielding: If you do more than 1 damage (2, 3 ,4 ,5 ,6) on a dice roll LOWER than that number you 100% ignore the damage.
*So if you do 1 damage to it they dont get their rule, if you do 2 damage they need to roll a 1 on the dice.  Since HB's, Assault Cannons, Plasma Guns and other similar weapons all do 1 damage, wounds on a 3/4/5 + remove some armor, you can easily kill them.

Reanimation Practicals: At the "Start" of your turn on a 5+, "unless the unit was Slain" you gain those models back.  
*As you can see there is a huge problem.. if you kill the unit you dont get to use the RP rule.

These 2 rules are suppose to give Necrons that different survivability they are known for, Necrons are a "mid-range" army, they need to get close to you. B.c Necron players cant stop the opponent from Ignoring their own rules, they are extremely weak.


Then to make it even worst there are 2 more problems.

1) Ghost Arks are bad
1a) Their Ghost Ark isnt Open top anymore (Thats literally like if GW said Raiders/Venom lost open top)
1b) Ghost Ark is only 10 man transport (Warriors are 10man, so no HQ) and b.c the unit is so small they can be full killed off easily again removing the RP rule

2a) Their very long range units/weapons are over costs
2b) Being over costed AND players dont care about the QS rule, means they die to fast for 150-200pt units




Let me add, the most viable list currently is playing some large units of Destroyers with HQ's that give them 4+ RP, 5++ and another HQ that will once per turn fully let you get RQ, then you keep 1 of the Destroyers in LoS blocking cover, so when the other 7-8 dies you get them all back.
The unit is 3 wounds T5, 3+ save, with a Heavy 2, S5 -3ap D3, they move and fire w/o penalty and re-roll 1's to hit. Very good unit.

Its actually a good list, just not against Tournament meta that is either full LoS Ignore 3D weapons or Melee that will literally kill 3 Knights in 1 turn.

Hmm. I mean, those points make sense to me. I just figured being able to negate 5 and 6 damage pretty easily was enough to make up for not making saves against plasma gun shots, but I guess it depends on the meta.

And yeah, I am aware RP did go back to 5e version which is technically worse but I wasn't sure if anyone was succeeding with the "can keep rolling next turn" since that seemed to be a fairly big deal to me.

As for ghost arks specifically, I didn't know too many people who were still using them last edition when necrons were really good so I didn't think that became a make or break unit.

That and the change to gauss (extra ap) and even stuff like the immortals tesla carbines (assault 2) combined with a necron overlords buff to proc on 5s or 6s? Yes I also understand all of the penalty to hit stuff messes with that badly, but again I didn't think it made them a bad index army, just not up to par with codexes. I probably just have enough fears from necrons that I don't see them as "that" bad and the one time I played against 8e necrons I killed absolutely no units and barely any models in a 1500 point game before being blasted (or stabbed even) off the table.

You HAD to use 2 of them Last edition, it was force part of the Decurion. And they were good AF. GW sold out of them for over 9 months ( i have necrons and couldn't play b.c i couldn't get my Ghost Arks, i waited for a year and then rumors of 8th came out).

Everyone that plays against necrons wont shoot 3+ damage at QS units, they will kill Immortals, Destroyers, etc... with Lances/Melta type weapons. They will shoot 1/2D weapons with some AP at the vehicles.

The other problem is point costs, but that will change with a codex, just like DE.

The main problem with necrons is that they scale very badly.
I usually play smaller games (since I do not have much painted yet). Necrons are quite good then. In smaller games most people use some big guns (d6 dam weapons) to harm vehicles which the necrons protect against and you need multiple rounds of shooting. This means that the vehicles will heal themselves. Also if you have 750 points taking out a unit of 20 warriors is not a sure thing, even when you throw everything at them.
That said I agree if you build a list against necrons (expecially at higher point values) they are quite easy to kill.

Sorry, stkll not seeing that Necrons are worse than Deathwatch. And no, most deathwatch players do not use deathwatch as an ‘add on’.

DW and Necrons are both at the bottom for sure. I never said they were worst or better, to me about the same.

Necrons are one of the only armies in a worse spot than us right now.

- They scale really badly. Units only reanimate if at least one member survives, so at anything over low points levels the opponent just needs to focus fire and you never get a chance to reanimate.
- They're overcosted, because they pay heavily for aforesaid reanimation that doesn't happen.
- They have zero mobility. Now that you can't disembark after moving, the Night Scythe is a liability: it leaves the transported unit in reserve rather than drop it off when it gets destroyed, and if all Night Scythes and Monoliths are destroyed all remaining units in reserve die as well. In addition, the Ghost Ark costs more than a Wave Serpent while being worse in every way (speed, armour, weapons), and only being able to transport one kind of unit.
- Their traditional anti-tank weapon, the tesla destructor, is now one ninth as effective as it used to be: it stayed AP-0 Dmg 1 while tanks got 3+ saves and triple the HP.
- Their only pyschic defence (spyders) aren't characters and can be killed easily.
- They have very little ability to generate Mortal wounds, with only expensive C'Tan shards spitting d3 a turn.

Necrons were my main army in 7e. I switched to Dark Eldar this edition because I wanted an easier time of it.

Necrons have some cool concepts and gear, but are painfully overpriced and their rules are not well thought out. I really feel for them, and honestly would be happy to give them the next codex over ours because they need it more than we do.

lament.config wrote:

The order is Necrons, Tau, and then Drukahri. My buddy works at a FLGS and his rep is saying that's the order it's coming down in. The BoLS article was a knee-jerk reaction to the release news.

Take that with a grain of salt if you must but, given that the community article only covered AoS and Necrons in any sort of depth one would think necrons are at the top of the 40k release pile. Not to mention I think it's widely known they ended up being the worst faction out of the index.


Edit: I hope I'm wrong and we are next.

So, assuming one week per 40k release, the earliest that we'll see our Codex released will be the 17th of March. If anything else gets released (cough Daughters of Khaine cough) then we could very easily slip to April.

Ah well, I guess a February release was too much to hope for.

amishprn86 wrote:

Let me add, the most viable list currently is playing some large units of Destroyers with HQ's that give them 4+ RP, 5++ and another HQ that will once per turn fully let you get RQ, then you keep 1 of the Destroyers in LoS blocking cover, so when the other 7-8 dies you get them all back.

Just a point, but you can't have more than 6 Destroyers in a single unit.

Also, be careful with that LoS trick - your opponent can kill models he can't see if he does enough damage to the unit.

They seem to run a 2 week notice on the codexs, day 1 announce Pre-order, and 14 days after codex release and they only announce pre-orders on sundays.
Now unless they do a double or even triple release (i wouldnt be surprised if they did that with the 3 xeno codexs), the first codex will earliest be announced on sunday, meaning the 3th March will be the earliest release date.
They could then announce the next pre-order the day after sunday the 4th, meaning the 2nd codex will release the 17th, and the 3th codex release the 31th March.
Thats the earliest i could see them release the codexs without doing a double or tripple release.

Why they would skip a month of codex releases as soon as they hit Xeno... Well we all know GW is Xenophobic

The Shredder wrote:

amishprn86 wrote:

Let me add, the most viable list currently is playing some large units of Destroyers with HQ's that give them 4+ RP, 5++ and another HQ that will once per turn fully let you get RQ, then you keep 1 of the Destroyers in LoS blocking cover, so when the other 7-8 dies you get them all back.

Just a point, but you can't have more than 6 Destroyers in a single unit.

Also, be careful with that LoS trick - your opponent can kill models he can't see if he does enough damage to the unit.

I meant when that many dies in general, most are only taking 3 units of them from what i've seen.

The Shredder wrote:

amishprn86 wrote:

Let me add, the most viable list currently is playing some large units of Destroyers with HQ's that give them 4+ RP, 5++ and another HQ that will once per turn fully let you get RQ, then you keep 1 of the Destroyers in LoS blocking cover, so when the other 7-8 dies you get them all back.

Just a point, but you can't have more than 6 Destroyers in a single unit.

Also, be careful with that LoS trick - your opponent can kill models he can't see if he does enough damage to the unit.

Only if it's from the same shooting phase, from the same unit.

Ubernoob1 wrote:

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I am curious what makes Necrons as bad as people say? I can see that they're expensive, sure, but what makes them "the worst?"

Just wanted to answer this in a bit more detail. There are several issues with Necrons at the moment:

- Their main defences scale badly. Especially at 1500-2000pt games (which is what most people play), it's trivial for most armies to wipe out an entire Necron unit, this preventing them from even rolling RPs. They also suffer severely from morale - even with Ld10. Warriors in particular basically have to be taken as 20-man blobs in order to be remotely survivable, but any casualties they suffer from moral can't come back with RPs.

- Their HQs heal a little every turn, but no longer revive when killed (which is nonsensical given that Necron Commanders are supposed to be better at reviving). It means they suffer from the same issue as their troops - in that if you kill them outright, they never get a chance to heal up.

- There's also a related problem when it comes to melee. Since you only heal up or roll RPs in your turn, you have to survive two combat phases before you're allowed to try and recover.

- Low damage-output, relative to their cost. Because Necrons pay so much for RPs, it means they end up having poor damage output, compared to their cost.

- No special or Heavy weapons on cheap units. I think the cheapest source of anti-vehicle weapons are Heavy Destroyers - which basically get S9 Dark Lances. But they cost 75pts per model. That's as awful lot to pay for a single shot.

- Inflexible troops. Necrons have two troop choices - a mid-range shooty unit and another mid-range shooty unit. One has an upgraded gun and a slightly better armour save. There is no option for faster troops, no option for melee troops, no option for long-range troops (or even a single long-range gun in either squad).

- Dubious synergy. Whilst nowhere near as bad as ours, Necron HQs aren't great either. Perhaps the worst example is the Destroyer Lord - a fast, melee HQ that can only buff two dedicated ranged units.

- Terrible transports. Outside of the Ghost Ark (which can only transport Warriors and apparently isn't open-topped anymore, in spite of looking like a floating rib-cage), Necron transports don't actually 'transport' Necrons. Instead, models are put into reserve in the 'Tomb World' and then brought into play from the transports. Also, you can only disembark one unit per turn. So:
- If a Necron transport is destroyed, its cargo isn't disgorged.
- If every Necron transport is destroyed (and you probably won't have many, given that one costs ~175pts and another costs ~380pts), then every Necron unit on the Tomb World is destroyed.
- Each character you 'transport' uses up an entire turn of disembarking.
- Any units that haven't disembarked by Turn 3 are automatically destroyed (and since there's rarely any point to disembarking on turn 1, you've basically got just 2 turns to offload everything).

- Because of the above, and because RP basically demands that you use maximum-sized units, Necron armies tend to be very slow and unwieldy.

- Their basic weapons have largely lost their functionality against vehicles. Gauss weapons used to inflict an automatic glancing hit (or strip a hull point in later editions) on a roll of 6+. Now, that rule has been replaced with AP-1. However, especially given the number of wounds vehicles have now, this is only really effective against Infantry. Which is a problem because of the aforementioned lack of heavy weapons. What's more, because of their mobility issues, they often struggle to even bring their firepower to bear.

- Another example - the Tesla Destructor has been largely de-fanged. Because of various changes, S7 shots with no AP just aren't very effective in this edition (they wound marines on 3s instead of 2s, vehicles get saves against them and have far more wounds etc.). Because a lot of Necron stuff can't swap weapons around, this has basically removed one unit from the game (the Annihilation Barge - which was just a platform for that weapon), and hurt one of their transports even more.

(This is not an exhaustive list.)

Honestly, I think Necrons are one of those armies that looks really good (even strong) on paper, but really doesn't play well on the table.
- "Wow, you mean all your models can just keep coming back? That seems way OP!" Then they see that they can kill a unit and it won't even get to make a single RP roll.
- "Wait, so if I do 6 damage, you can just roll 1-5 on a d6 to negate it, *and* your vehicles heal up each turn. BROKEN!" Then they see that Necron vehicles can be brought down just fine by stuff that deals 2-3 damage.
- "You mean your basic troops have better weapons than marines, can come back from the dead but still just cost 12pts? That's insane!" Then they see that Necron Warriors can't really do anything besides waddling across the table, plinking ineffectually at enemy units (with no special/heavy weapons to help against key targets).

It's a shame because I think there are a lot of good ideas in the Necron book and many attempts at flavour. It's just that a lot of them are either poorly-executed or else look good on paper but don't really work in practise.

Necrons are very asymetrical, and mostly a matter of match-up. It's pretty simple : do the Necrons have the range advantage on their opponent (and does the opponent have to walk to them) ? Yes ? Necrons win. No ? Necrons will have a hard time.

They are extremely difficult to beat for Orkz or CC-Nids, for example, but extremely easy to kite and nuke with Dark Eldar, Imperial Guards or the likes.

IMO they have the best basic infantry (post - multiplier) in the game, but heavy very few viable support, especially with anti-tank.

But their infantry... a squad of 20 warriors with Anrakyr will shoot you 40 times (BS 2+, S4, AP-1), charge you, and hit you 40 times (WS2+, S4). Combined with T4, 4+ (with easy access to 5++ and RP4+) for a meager 12pts stock, they are for me the greatest infantry in the game.

Keast Kannegaard wrote:

They seem to run a 2 week notice on the codexs, day 1 announce Pre-order, and 14 days after codex release and they only announce pre-orders on sundays.
Now unless they do a double or even triple release (i wouldnt be surprised if they did that with the 3 xeno codexs), the first codex will earliest be announced on sunday, meaning the 3th March will be the earliest release date.
They could then announce the next pre-order the day after sunday the 4th, meaning the 2nd codex will release the 17th, and the 3th codex release the 31th March.
Thats the earliest i could see them release the codexs without doing a double or tripple release.

Why they would skip a month of codex releases as soon as they hit Xeno... Well we all know GW is Xenophobic

I think you missed a Sunday there. The earliest Sunday announcements are the 18th, 25th, and 4th, meaning the earliest pre-order dates would be the 24th, 3rd, and 10th, so the release dates would be the 3rd, 10th and 17th. However, unless they double up one week, then I highly doubt all three will be out by the 17th.

Mppqlmd wrote:

Necrons are very asymetrical, and mostly a matter of match-up. It's pretty simple : do the Necrons have the range advantage on their opponent (and does the opponent have to walk to them) ? Yes ? Necrons win. No ? Necrons will have a hard time.

They are extremely difficult to beat for Orkz or CC-Nids, for example, but extremely easy to kite and nuke with Dark Eldar, Imperial Guards or the likes.

The only thing that surprises me is that Necrons are good vs melee nids. Since they tend to be poor at combat and have no means of withdrawing from such while retaining their ability to shoot, I'd have thought they'd be weak against such lists.

Mppqlmd wrote:

IMO they have the best basic infantry (post - multiplier) in the game, but heavy very few viable support, especially with anti-tank.

I think Immortals are very good. Warriors... not so much. As I said before, I think they look good on paper, but on the table you really do appreciate their weaknesses.

Mppqlmd wrote:

But their infantry... a squad of 20 warriors with Anrakyr will shoot you 40 times (BS 2+, S4, AP-1), charge you, and hit you 40 times (WS2+, S4). Combined with T4, 4+ (with easy access to 5++ and RP4+) for a meager 12pts stock, they are for me the greatest infantry in the game.

The thing is though, why is your opponent letting you do that? Given that they're amongst the slowest infantry in the game (and there's no transport that can carry 20 warriors plus characters), why is your opponent allowing them to not only get into rapid-fire range but also into charge range? If he plans to fight them, shouldn't he be killing some of them first? Yes, a cryptek can give them a 5++, but it's still not difficult to inflict large numbers of casualties on a unit of T4 models with 5++ saves. Even if your opponent can't kill the entire squad, he should have no trouble killing enough to force a morale test. And with 20 models, Ld10 doesn't make a great deal of difference. That Necron player is either going to have to use CPs to auto-pass morale or else suffer extra losses that can't ever revive.

What's more, in addition to shooting the blob, most armies outside of Tau would want to get into a position where they could assault the warriors. Yes, they'll take some overwatch, but they'll also completely negate both the Warriors' shooting *and* the invulnerable save they're getting from the Cryptek. Even with Anrakyr, their damage output has been halved and they've lost their AP advantage. They also have no sergeants or other melee abilities.

In their turn (assuming they even survive), the Necrons have to choose between falling back and doing nothing that turn, or else suffering at least 2 more combat phases (potentially another shooting phase as well, if the opponent falls back) before they get to roll RPs again.


To be clear, I'm not saying that Warriors are bad. I just think that they're a bit overrated. I'm also just not a fan of having to pour huge numbers of buffs into a single unit to get them to work. I mean, those 20 warriors are 240pts base. By the time you add in Anrakyr and a cryptek, you're up to 511pts. If you're playing 1500pts, that's over a third of your army sunk into buffing that one squad.

That said, my dislike of Warriors might be due to them running counter to my preferred playstyle, in that I prefer MSU armies and dislike big, expensive units.

The Shredder wrote:

That said, my dislike of Warriors might be due to them running counter to my preferred playstyle, in that I prefer MSU armies and dislike big, expensive units.

Ha. That doesn't sound very Necron-y at all. ;P

"We shall trample the younger races underfoot with our deathless legions of... small groups of 5 each!"

krayd wrote:

The Shredder wrote:

That said, my dislike of Warriors might be due to them running counter to my preferred playstyle, in that I prefer MSU armies and dislike big, expensive units.

Ha. That doesn't sound very Necron-y at all. ;P

"We shall trample the younger races underfoot with our deathless legions of... small groups of 5 each!"

Fair point. Though, given that Necrons have no sergeants or such, I'm not sure there'd be much difference between 1 group of 20 and 4 groups of 5.

Anyway, my excuse is that Necrons were the first army I ever picked up, before I knew much (read: anything) about the rules or the different playstyles.

Quote :

The thing is though, why is your opponent letting you do that? Given that they're amongst the slowest infantry in the game (and there's no transport that can carry 20 warriors plus characters), why is your opponent allowing them to not only get into rapid-fire range but also into charge range? If he plans to fight them, shouldn't he be killing some of them first? Yes, a cryptek can give them a 5++, but it's still not difficult to inflict large numbers of casualties on a unit of T4 models with 5++ saves. Even if your opponent can't kill the entire squad, he should have no trouble killing enough to force a morale test. And with 20 models, Ld10 doesn't make a great deal of difference. That Necron player is either going to have to use CPs to auto-pass morale or else suffer extra losses that can't ever revive.

To prevent them from rapid firing you, you have to either keep at more than 17", or engage them. For ranged armies, this is easy. For cc-infantry... not so much. Covering 20" in a turn isn't easy for everyone.

IF you can destroy a squad in a turn, they are easy game. But for an Ork army, destroying a squad of 20 necrons at range takes a lot of ressources. So orkz face 2 problems :
- your shooting attacks are recovered through RP
- you'll probably take the rapidfire fire-phase before you can attack.


So when you fight necrons, you easy have

- more range and mobility then they do, with enough power to destroy a few units per turn, in which case : "Haha, looks the measly skeletons trying to reach us, it's hilarious"

or

- less range then they do, in which case you have to put YOUR mobility in going TOWARDS them... which is exactly what they want.


So in short Necrons suck at long range, and definitly are not good in CC (especially since CC is a big counter to RP), but they have a devastating middle-range AI power (which is very niche, hence why I called it a "match-up army").