Dark pacts and overwatch with chaos?

[Galron]

Just because it makes chaos the most insanely efficient shooting faction in the game by far, does chaos get to use dark park for sustained hits while doing overwatch?

[Kaiju Soze]

Yes, because Dark Pacts does not specify a phase. Therefore it is not an out-of-phase attack.

[TrawlingCleaner]

As Kaiju says, Dark Pacts as an ability is whenever a unit is chosen to shoot or fight:

 

The only stipulation that I see a few people trip up on is that the 4 God Marks are only activated in the Shooting or Fight Phase so do not work in Overwatch (Overwatch cannot be improved above a 6+ unless specifed anyways) but the Undivided one does work in Overwatch:

[Galron]

How is chaos not the top of the scene? They have the most efficient shooting in the game both in and out of phase regularly hitting more than they are shooting with.

[TrawlingCleaner]

I think it's mainly down to the tools other top armies bring to the table. Crons, Guard, Eldar and others all use tools that Chaos find difficult to counter like speed, bodies and quality shooting. Terrain matters a lot too for such a shooting focused army, a lot of current CSM lists are midtable "Stat-checks" where they're putting a lot of shots down range and trying to table you rather than play objectives.

I think 2x Vindicators and 3x Predator Destructors are likely to be the new focus of lists, Abaddon is such a points sink now as are Chosen and Forgefiends.

 

Competetive games and normal friendly games are much different though and can be difficult to deal with

[Galron]

I played a guy this weekend with an artillery/infantry focused guard list. He had the vindicator and three forge fiends and the only thing that kept me in the game was the Reinforcments strat. Each fiend was almost clearing a 20 man squad itself each round, long after I killed his command deathstar which wiped a single kasrkin squad(who came back). The overwatch question came up because I had 8 dudes left of a squad making a run for his home objective which he had stickied on turn one and he overwatched with a forgefield and killed all eight thanks to exploding 6s. They arent the joke they used to be, 

[Dr_Ruminahui]

It sounds like you weren't playing with the change to Devastating Wounds - they now simply remove a save rather than becoming mortal wounds, which means excess damage no longer spills over to other models.  Without that mechanic, forgefiends are a lot weaker and there is really no reliable way they can be mowing down large squads as seems to have happened in your game.

Edited April 15 by Dr_Ruminahui

[Galron]

d3+1 x3 shots with sustain vs 8 guardsmen, rolls 4 6s.  wounds with all = 8 dead guardsmen. This was a weak volley.