Local Escalation League

[Shadow Captain Vyper]

1. Long Range Gunline:  Then the GK player is not properly leveraging Astral Aim, Gate and their OMG EVERYBODY teleports strengths.

 

 

 

The GK has fair shooting options, but not great ones, and they are most effective at a closer range (12-24"). Don't get me wrong, Astral Aim is a great spell, but its typically on a Dev squad (Purgation?) or a Dread. Hardly a game breaker when you can cast it once. You can only Gate one unit a turn. The handful of units with shunt abilities are good as well. At the end of the day though the Deep Strike beta rules did hurt them a good chunk.

 

2. Lots of Ablative Wounds: Agreed, but everyone struggles with this. GK are not alone here.

 

 

 

While everyone struggles with this, it effects GK more so. GK players need to rely on Mortal Wound spam to take out tougher units, and tougher units screen by cheap fodder will soak up that Smite spam and then lay down withering counter fire that will wipe them off the board.

 

3. High Mobility Lists. To an extent, yes.

 

 

 

To add on to this, once the first/second turns are passed, if the GK hasn't completely crippled a fast army (all eldar flavors as an example), they will just perpetually kite them and stay out of their range for the remainder of the game.

 

4. My experience is that it does little good to try and out-psyk psyker armies.

 

 

 

While as a general rule this is true, with the changes to the way Smite works now, if you can manage to Deny just one Smite, it has a cascade effect making the remainder more difficult. At the end of the day though, its as you said, its inconsistent. If they roll well, trying to Deny can be a futile task from the start.

 

And the 4 armies you named (Eldar, Nids, Guard, Chaos Soup) are the bane of everybody.  I don't buy into the (anti) hype that GK suck. It doesn't match my experience or my theory crafting when I look at my GK codex.  I just think those other 4 armies are very good right now.

 

 

 

I think saying they suck is a bit of an exaggeration, but I think if you look at tournament data, you will see that they are part of the "bottom tier", along with Orks (and probably Space Wolves).

 

I would struggle to find an army with a Codex that performs worse than they do.

 

That all being said, I am a strong proponent that generalship is what makes or breaks the game, the majority of the time, and not Codex balance.