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What are people's experiences with the various defensive Enhancements in the new Codex? On paper, Artificer Armour looks like a pretty good buff adding a 2+ and a 5+++ to Marines' already decent defensive profile. But how often do those defences come into play?

 

Characters are normally fielded in units these days which means any armour Enhancements they take will only come into play against Precision weapons or when attacked by something powerful enough to slay their bodyguard. Are offensive Enhancements better simply because they can start earning their points bac as soon as the Character gets into combat and not when they are o the brink of death?

50 minutes ago, Karhedron said:

What are people's experiences with the various defensive Enhancements in the new Codex? On paper, Artificer Armour looks like a pretty good buff adding a 2+ and a 5+++ to Marines' already decent defensive profile. But how often do those defences come into play?

 

Characters are normally fielded in units these days which means any armour Enhancements they take will only come into play against Precision weapons or when attacked by something powerful enough to slay their bodyguard. Are offensive Enhancements better simply because they can start earning their points bac as soon as the Character gets into combat and not when they are o the brink of death?

personally prefer the Blood Angels one at 2+ save and -1 AP on all weapons. But Artificer Armour is still decent on the right character, something like a gravis captain gets pretty disgusting IMO

I generally leave them at home, but sometimes they're fun because they fill the last 10 or 15 points you have sitting around at the end of a list that nothing else will fill. If you play in a meta with a lot of snipers I could see it being worth the investment, or on characters who don't join units.

I think they are useful, yes.

 

I don't think any are mandatory across all situations and lists, but they are cheap.

 

It's also very easy to fill the last 10 points left over when building a list by making a character more durable.

I've attended, I think, three local tourneys in this edition so far and in all of them I have fought an Imperial force with a Vindicare Assassin at least once.  For context, in each scenario their first target to eliminate was the Master of Possession running with my big 10-man Possessed hammer.  Possessed are decently durable but they draw a lot of fire, and losing that FNP hurts just enough to matter.

 

My point is that Precision weapons can be a game changer, and defensive enhancements can help keep that character alive long enough to effect the battle.

I feel it will depend on what you face. If your characters aren't really important and are more "they are nice to have, not needed" then it won't really matter too much however if you have characters you want to keep around then you need to assess your own local meta or tournament metas, depending on what you are going to. Is your character going to be in the front-lines, getting things done then in that case the defence boost comically doesn't help. Mainly because being exposed to extreme damage output numbers often just means the fringe cases are when it matters. A ton of damage still does a ton of damage even through damage reduction measures, that includes the most durable bodyguards.

 

Arguably the best one is the Vanguard Ghostweave as noted by some others. This one does the ultimate defence: you can't take damage if you can't be attacked. Normally we achieve that by just murdering the opposition to nothing before they can do the same to us but adding lone-op to various characters is quite interesting. This immunity has a lot of interesting benefits that don't show themselves immediately.

Some like the Chaplain on Bike with the enhancement for a very fast flanker that opponents can't just casually deal with junk units. Gravis Captain with the mantle is surprisingly fun as since you don't lose any unit buffs on him (his unique rule is for himself only and I argue rites of battle isn't really a unit buff, just a perk he has) and can be really annoying to have this dude getting free armour of contempt and normal answers to such a unit (melee monster with a rather powerful damage reduction ability) isn't open to the opponent, just shoot him a bunch.

 

Personally speaking, other than the mantle the other ones are more what I consider fillers. The main issue with them imo is they assume precision is a problem...which it isn't as most times the best way to kill a character is just to nuke the unit they are a part of because the character is already nine out of ten times more durable than the unit so the choice is often better to as is standard procedure in any game: get rid of the adds firsts and handle the boss on his own. If characters were more commonly less durable than their units individual models in some form these boosts may be valuable. Again though, milage may vary but sadly a lot of the boosts don't do much as in most cases you invest in a bodyguard unit to both benefit from the characters boons, be a damage dealer and soak a few hits for the character to get some work done. Yea, a 4+ FNP is nice from Ironstorm but...-looks at target augery, Adept and master of machine war- these other enhancements let me do something that ALSO mitigates damage: dealing damage. Something I think the design team needs to consider is the idea that dealing damage is akin to pro-active healing. If I remove a threat thanks to an enhancement, that enhancement has already gave me a massive damage reduction not just for my character but for my entire army because now the damage that unit I removed could of done is just gone and now I have a whole unit more worth of damage to deal out.

 

Ghostweave does become the outlier here, as it isn't so much that it gives the character a defence boost but it alters the character's role entirely, going from being a buffing unit to now being a lone-op threat that can't be handled by casual gun-fire.

Chaplain on bike, Gravis Captain, Jump-Pack Captain. These guys get some major boosts from it and in another view-point, its like giving them a unit for 15pts. Could even give it to the Phobos Lieutenant (no...not the reiver one...no...not the combi-weapon one he already has lone-op...YEA, the shadowspear one) to have combos with the detachments Guerilla Tactics stratagem since he is a Phobos unit and he has the deep strike keyword.

I don't think Adamantine Mantle is great by itself, but it does have a pretty hilarious synergy with Gravis Captains halving incoming wounds: Tanking D3/D4 attacks to the face and only suffering 1 single wound every time? *Laughs in Vulkan*

But generally speaking, I find defensive enhancements on characters that have a unit that needs to die before the character themselves are actually in harms way pretty meh - unless your local meta loves Precision. Obviously defensive enhancements that affect the wearers unit are an exception.

You can come up against some annoying stuff where the defensive option makes sense. The ever present assassins, of course. But even stuff like 3x 3-6 Tzaangor Enlightened can do a number on some squads, including their characters, and are almost common enough in 1kSons that a bit of anti-precision protection can be worth it.

 

Snipers rarely make their points on character kills alone, but they do surprisingly good chip damage to units and occasionally insta-kill a character. Damage 2, -2AC and S5'ish is simply a good weapon, let alone all the annoyance-value rules these squads usually come with. I tend to run 12-18 Enlightened with bows in my 1kSons list these days, and they never feel "bad", even if they're not murder machines (their movement and action monkeying is amazing though).

  • 2 weeks later...

Im in the characters are there to buff units category. If they arent buffing then they are a waste of points. That said, if you have spare points, which due to the silliness of the current points system, many lists will have a decent amount of points left over. Thus in this case, provided other needs are taken care of then add defensive enhancements wherever you feel like although I tend to have a "Best defense is a good offense" philosophy and go with more offensive oriented enhancements. 

The enhancement which provides defensive buff exactly only to the bearer model itself is less attractive, since you must put losing wounds on bodyguard model first. 

 

The enhancement which buff the bearer's unit is very attractive. See: Tannhouser's bones.

Edited by Tokugawa

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