Imagifiers in 8th

[CaptainMarsh]

They'd still make sense, at least to me. If you brought multiple Sister detachments that were from different orders (like an allied multiplayer game, perhaps), Celestine could grant someone else's Sisters unit an Act of Faith. The Imagifier only works on yours- your Order, your Sisters. Of course then we get into, "yeah but we're in the same order" which is the same can of worms as Space Marines of the same Chapter.

[Gen.Steiner]

Imagifers grant Acts of Faith on a roll of a 4+ to any unit that shares the same <Order> keyword with the Imagifer.

e.g. an Imagifer from the Order of RAW gives an Act of Faith to an Order of RAW Exorcist to fire twice, or to a unit of Order of RAW Seraphim to move twice, or whatever.

 

The unit performing the Act of Faith only requires the same <Order> keyword. It does not require the Act of Faith ability.

[Sister Rosette Soulknyt]

personally i think the whole idea that you can only use one AOF on one squad with the potential for another with an Imagifier or Celestine, limiting and unfair.

Are we going to see Space Marines limited to how many Pschic powers you can use, or IG limited to how many Orders they can use, or Tau abilities?? ofcourse not.

These limitations is what was wrong with 3rd ec SoB. Limiting them to once only.

 

This is worse than the 7th ed version, atleast you could use them once per squad in any givin round. Now regardless of the size of your army, whether its 1850 or like me up to 10k, you still can only use one AOF, plus a 50/50 chance to more.

GW really don't like sharing power bases that would conflict with the SM's and the money army that it is. I mean if any other army could be better than SM's thats not on.

 

It's really say to see that after all this time GW still doesn't do justice to Adepta Sororitas, i mean they've renamed them again as Adeptus Minostorum.

[Ficinus]

I think a lot of this rests on how we interpret the word "different" in the third sentence of the Acts of Faith rule. Does it mean literally any unit in the game aside from the ones already chosen or is it governed by the above restrictions (i.e. the second sentence of the rule). I would argue that the clearest reading of that rule is to read the third sentence as providing an additional restriction (which units can perform second or more Acts of Faith) on top of the second sentence's primary restriction (who can perform Acts of Faith at all). I think that this is naturally a means of how language can work.

 

I'll agree that the RAW is ambiguous, but to say that the alternate interpretation is purely based on assumptions and not the words on the page is wrong. It's based on reading the Acts of Faith rule as one single, cumulative idea/set of restrictions as opposed to two separate ideas and sets of restrictions, both of which could be valid based on broader context (which is lacking).

[Servant of Dante]

They haven't renamed anything. They've just changed the name they use on their webstore :D

 

The Sisters are the Adepta Sororitas, and are (and always have been) part of the Adeptus Ministorum. Using that name for the army actually makes more sense, since penitent engines, priests, crusaders, Argo-flagellants and death cult Assassins aren't part of the Adepta Sororitas, but they are part of the Adeptus Ministorum.

[Beams]

We're the action-economy faction, something the game hasn't had before.

Which is awesome. Space Marines will have buffs, but we'll do more per turn than them.

 

 

As for AoF: they didn't give the AoF rule on vehicles so that you cant have a rhino move 25-30" in the last turn to get line breaker without the opposing player having a chance to deny, (kill your imagifiers, who are squishy)

[taikishi]

If there was no intention for Imagifiers/ Celestine to work on the Exorcist, then the keywords <Order> and Adepta Sororitas are completely superfluous, as not a single rule other than these refer to them.

 

Edit - realised that the Canoness special rule also refers to <Order>, but my point still stands. Imagifiers are specifically referencing a different rule/ keyword to the special rule.

 

While it's not an official ruling, I discussed this in GW yesterday and my local store (the flagship London store) read the rule the same as me.

 

That's not entirely true: Crusaders also have the Act of Faith ability. <Order> and Adepta Sororitas prohibits you from using Imagifiers/Celestine to give Crusaders an Act of Faith.

[Daimhin]

 

 

If there was no intention for Imagifiers/ Celestine to work on the Exorcist, then the keywords <Order> and Adepta Sororitas are completely superfluous, as not a single rule other than these refer to them.

 

Edit - realised that the Canoness special rule also refers to <Order>, but my point still stands. Imagifiers are specifically referencing a different rule/ keyword to the special rule.

 

While it's not an official ruling, I discussed this in GW yesterday and my local store (the flagship London store) read the rule the same as me.

That's not entirely true: Crusaders also have the Act of Faith ability. <Order> and Adepta Sororitas prohibits you from using Imagifiers/Celestine to give Crusaders an Act of Faith.

Thanks for pointing that out - I hadn't noticed Crusaders had the rule (I don't use them in my army).

[sedibear]

^^ yup, the only way for crusaders to perform an act is via the army-wide rule.

 

Also note that Celestine does not have the <ORDER> keyword, so she cannot be given an Act of Faith via the Imagifier.

 

EDIT: Point being, the different ways to get AoF all have different restrictions that are not readily apparent on a single read-through.

[ERJAK]

We're the action-economy faction, something the game hasn't had before.

Which is awesome. Space Marines will have buffs, but we'll do more per turn than them.

 

 

As for AoF: they didn't give the AoF rule on vehicles so that you cant have a rhino move 25-30" in the last turn to get line breaker without the opposing player having a chance to deny, (kill your imagifiers, who are squishy)

First of all, word salads aside, they pretty clearly did give vehicles the ability to use AoF; they just might not of meant to. Secondly, without being able to put them on vehicles imagifiers become rather poor options compared to priests or canonesses.

 

Retributors getting double shoot is nice, but if you're not using multi-meltas it's more points efficient to just bring 2 squads of HB Rets(mathematically you gain 8ish points for having the imag but 2 squads of rets gain a lot in terms of additional wounds, board coverage, reliability etc). HF don't get any benefit because they can't use AoF on disembark.(Unless someone deepstrikes on top of you and either kills your transport or you were on foot anyway, which is a caveat for most of these things.)

 

Dominions can't use imagifiers for a whole bunch of reasons. Too short range guns, can't vanguard, disembarking etc. Double move has some niche uses but only if you either didn't bring a transport or it already died.

 

Repentia don't benefit from imagifiers because they'll never survive long enough to get the double attack, disembarking, being too slow to really benefit from the double move footslogging, not needing them if the enemy comes to you, never surviving long enough to be revived, etc. Both a priest and a Mistress of Repentence are far more useful.

 

Blob squads of battle sisters see some decent gains but aren't really good enough in and of themselves for it to matter much if they do get two actions per turn.

 

Celestians are just expensive battle sisters that take the hit for characters. The heal is nice on them but ultimately you only really take them to protect imagifiers/canonesses and taking an imagifier for celestians for imagifiers is circular and a bit silly.

 

Celestine is a monster and AoFs make her insane but she does her own thing and don't need nobody else.

 

Seraphim probably get the most out of imagifiers outside of multi-melta rets but they still hit like soggy noodles so firing them 30+ inches turn one isn't super game breaking and they outrun an imagifier so bad you can only ever hit them once.

 

Why the farting hell do crusaders have AoF? Doesn't matter, they're not good enough to spend 40 points buffing them up anyway and if you did a priest would be better.

 

So basically if your opponent is in your lines turn 1 with most of his army, and either you were on foot or most of your vehicles get exploded, imagifiers will let whoever survived sock them back pretty hard. If you have large blob squads, imagifiers will be good; if you use Multi-Melta retributors, imagifiers will be good, if you have 40 points left over...just drop a pistol somewhere and bring a canoness instead.

 

If the AoF system really doesn't affect vehicles then the Turn AoF and Celestine's AoF will be awesome but imagifiers will be fringe picks at best. Any army with 5+ vehicles will bring at most 1. Armies that are at least 2/3rds infantry might still bring 3/4 but may well see better results with priests and hospitallers. 

 

Imagifiers make us about the best anti-deepstrike+betastrike army in the game but in any lists with significant numbers of rhinos/immolators/exorcists won't see much value out of taking more than 1, just because there will almost never be any good targets for them.

[Beams]

My point was that a vehicle doesn't have the innate rule and that it needs an imagifier to make it balanced.

 

Hence the difference in rules.

[ERJAK]

Posted this over in tactics already but Frankie and Reece confirm no AoFs on vehicles and that spamming dominions is once again the way to go only this time Exorcists aren't very good!

18 minutes on. Frankie said he took 3 total AoFs 1 imagifier per army. That's how they got around the whole 'it doesn't scale' problem. By leaving you no targets.

[Eddie Orlock]

Posted this over in tactics already but Frankie and Reece ...

Just because they've got the internet equivalent to a PA system doesn't give them any more authority in a rules debate than you or I.

 

Now, if they issued a faq that got enforced in some event they ran it'd have implications for that event, but it wouldn't be definitive over all.

 

Also, if these gits are on the play test team, this is the kind of ambiguity they should've prevented during that process.

[Noeh]

So you're saying the guys responsible for writing a lot of the faction focuses that GW themselves endorsed do not have more authority than a regular joe on the internet? That's really quite a :cuss argument to try and abuse rules...

 

Edit: can't spell today

[Beams]

Also, who are those guys?

 

A passing remark != Rules faq.

That said, if they were lead designers than id take it as a sign, but would still ask for a clarification on how exactly these rules work, all things considered they aren't phrased great.

 

Also, I'm currently building my fourth penitent engine, and can't decide if I use them as 4 independent operators, 2 teams of 2, or just 1 and 3....

[Noeh]

Also, who are those guys?

 

A passing remark != Rules faq.

That said, if they were lead designers than id take it as a sign, but would still ask for a clarification on how exactly these rules work, all things considered they aren't phrased great.

 

Also, I'm currently building my fourth penitent engine, and can't decide if I use them as 4 independent operators, 2 teams of 2, or just 1 and 3....

 

If you look at basically every faction focus released on the GW community site, those guys wrote them.

[Beams]

But who are they to GW?

 

sometimes playteaters get rules wrong, because there are so many versions of them. Just look at how many times they had to look up the exact rules there.

[Servant of Dante]

Yeah, a playtester is just a player with early access to the game. While I'd look to them for experience playing, they can't speak for the designers.

 

If this was the people who actually wrote the rules, then we'd have a definitive answer as to what the RAI is. That would still leave the question: do you play RAW or RAI when RAI has been reliably defined by the person who wrote the rule?

 

As t stands, it seems we have an opinion from some playtesters. If the wording was more ambiguous I might be persuaded to play how they say, but RAW it's very clear that an Imagifier can affect a vehicle . . .

[Servant of Dante]

Well, I suppose if these are the people GW are putting forward to answer rules questions, we should maybe listen to them.

 

It's just distinctly un-fun gameplay. Sisters are a mechanized army, usually, so this means that early game we will have minimal use for our 1 defining game mechanic. Business as usual, I suppose.

[Eddie Orlock]

So you're saying the guys responsible for writing a lot of the faction focuses that GW themselves endorsed do not have more authority than a regular joe on the internet?

In a word: Yes.

 

It harks back to the old days of the mail-order rules question hotline. They were renowned for trolling callers with deliberately bogus responses to their questions. These two blokes are just some external marketing mercenaries they've brought in to try to cover for their own shattered credibility. Which means they're even less on the inside than ordinary Citadel marketing  employees who might even work in the same building as the design team.

 

The text is paramount over most things. Youtube celebrities included.

[taikishi]

To emphasize the fact that the FLG guys could be wrong about vehicles and Acts of Faith:

 

Several times while going over Xenos 2 they mentioned bringing back models from the dead by any means (apothecaries, Tervigon, etc) requires you to spend points. The rulebook says otherwise. Don't have it in front of me, but we were going over the section on matched play and it spells out that you pay for summons, you don't for replenishing models.

[ERJAK]

Also, who are those guys?

 

A passing remark != Rules faq.

That said, if they were lead designers than id take it as a sign, but would still ask for a clarification on how exactly these rules work, all things considered they aren't phrased great.

 

Also, I'm currently building my fourth penitent engine, and can't decide if I use them as 4 independent operators, 2 teams of 2, or just 1 and 3....

They playtested the game, if they played them without the getting to AoF vehicles then I would put money on that being what the day 1 FAQ that they better already be working on end up saying.

 

So you're saying the guys responsible for writing a lot of the faction focuses that GW themselves endorsed do not have more authority than a regular joe on the internet?

In a word: Yes.

 

It harks back to the old days of the mail-order rules question hotline. They were renowned for trolling callers with deliberately bogus responses to their questions. These two blokes are just some external marketing mercenaries they've brought in to try to cover for their own shattered credibility. Which means they're even less on the inside than ordinary Citadel marketing  employees who might even work in the same building as the design team.

 

The text is paramount over most things. Youtube celebrities included.

 

Cool, wanna play my 9 celestine list?

[taikishi]

@Erjak

 

1. Sure. Bet I manage to win ;)

2. See what I said about their erroneous comments about restoring models to existing units vs adding/creating new units.

 

Just because they play tested the game it doesn't mean they automatically know designer intent or that they automatically know every rule by heart. And it wouldn't be the first time play testers might have interpreted a rule one way and designers another.

[Beams]

As someone who did playtesting, it's super difficult to have every rule memorized, or even to have a complete grasp of each army and what they do, considering you have to keep Sob, IG, Eldar, Deldar, Ynnari, T'au, Chaos Demons, Chaos Marines, Death Guard, Thousand Sons, Space Marines, Admech, did I forget any? I'm sure I did... There's a lot of armies. Try keeping all the rules for every army, plus keep up with all the different versions. We had a different version every so often depending on how close to the deadline we were, and I'd be surprised when the opponent had a list that, up until two days ago, was illegal, and then a few changes were made and boom!

New unexpected power list due to a weird interaction, and then we'd have to dial that back, or increase the cost signifcantly, then we'd find that none of that matters because the leads decided to go in a new direction.

[Gen.Steiner]

Well, I'm happy to play it as Imagifers not affecting vehicles - although it's a bit rubbish; because the crews are still Sisters of Battle and you would think they would be affected by faith etc. Ah well.

Multi-Celestines are still a-go-go though! :P