First off, if you’d rather, I did a live video review that you can watch here. Or don’t. Continue reading instead. I’m cool with either, and you can be too.
Second. Drukhari is my second army. I love them. A LOT. but not as much as I love my stupid green fungus bois, whose preview was an absolute letdown. I try not to be negative about it, but it seems GW is hell bent on stripping every ounce of fun from the army, and just making it the army you play if you simply like raw-dogging core rules.
I went into this faction focus with little-to-no expectations, but I was definitely pleasantly surprised. You can read it here, but I’ll do my best to cover it adequately in as few words as possible. I can get wordy, so…….
Power From Pain
Let’s start with the Army Rule, in all of its glory.
Now, the basement-dwelling “competitive” players that spam Reddit with nonsense but never actually show up to tournaments have already begun lamenting the trash that is Power from Pain, however I see a lot of positives. I didn’t expect a continual and cumulative bonus, as most previews have shown very simple versions of what armies already have (marines have 3 doctrines, can only use each one 1 time, so 2 turns no doctrines for example). Replacing what is arguably one of the most powerful turn-based bonus schemes in the game with something a bit more toned-down makes sense. So lets dig into it.
In standard 2k games you start with 3 Pain tokens, which is also how I start most Friday nights. Every time an enemy unit dies, gain a pain token. Every time a unit fails a battle-shock test; gain a pain token. Pretty easy and straight forward.
But Chris…. What are Pain Tokens for?
Well, aside from wild nights with your mom, pain tokens can be used for:
You can spend them in the movement or charge phase, and if you do, for each token spent you can pick 1 unit and that unit can re-roll advances or charges (obviously depending on when you spend it)
OR, you can be a real piece of trash and spend them in either the shooting or fighting phase and:
That unit gets to reroll hits.
Being able to pick any single unit on the table and allow it to reroll its hits in either the shooting or fighting phase is extremely powerful if used correctly, and there are some units that we will discuss later that allow it to layer quite nicely.
Is it a downgrade from old Power from Pain? Absolutely. Does that make it bad? Not at all. Army-wide advance and charge, coupled with army-wide invulns that get better is extremely good, and from what I’ve seen from army rules, GW is at least pretending like they are trying to avoid oppressive army-wide rules. Also keep in mind that this in an Index. So who knows what the actual codex will bring!
Index Detachment Rule
The Space Raid detachment teased is….. Okay. Getting a bonus pain token for each of those characters is neat, though I’m not sure how “good” it is yet. It does promote people to take an actual space raid, which I was doing already, so arguably I may not have to adjust much. Without the context of the full index and some table time, its hard to see how good it is, but I can’t imagine starting the game with 7 Pain tokens is going to be bad.
Venoms and Kabalites
Transport rules allow for kabalites and wyches to effectively combat squad. It will be interesting to see if they both get bumped to a 10-model minimum squad size. Regardless, still super cool.
The Venom loses 2″ of speed, which I found interesting, as the kabalites will end up gaining an inch. Not a bad choice, just interesting. They did get bumped from t5 to t6, which means an open-topped Drukhari transport is now as tough as the biggest and baddest warboss the 41st millennium has ever seen. Which is genuinely a bunch of bullshit, if you ask me, but you probably didn’t.
Splinter Cannons take a side-grade, losing the ability to work on anything EXCEPT infantry, but gaining anti-infantry 3+ (Auto wounds on 3+) and Sustained Hits 1 (6s count as 2 hits instead of 1). While they don’t inherently work on monsters any more, they still look really good for killing marines, which is one of my favorite passtimes.
The Twin splinter rifle, which is different than the infantry-based splinter rifle, is now assault, AND rapid fire (1 extra shot within half range), and twin-linked (reroll wounds). Not terrible, but I think in most situations I’ll just pay for the extra cannon.
Bladevanes take a hit by losing AP, and we don’t know if Chain-Snares, Grisly Trophies, and the like still exist. if they do not, the melee output on a venom is definitely reduced.
(Most of the melee previews I’ve seen so far are pretty lackluster, anyway).
The most intriguing part of the Venom is the Athletic Aerialists ability. It allows you to embark an infantry unit into the transport at the end of the fight phase, as long as the infantry unit isn’t engaged. (You can read it for yourself if you want all of the stipulations).
This means if your positioning is good, you can really do some neat things with this army, and it gets me excited to see them on the table.
Oh. and it has a 6++. I am pretty sure the PfP invuln is just shifting to datasheets, so everyone can calm down.
I’m not going to dive too deep into kabalites, other than to say that they have sticky objectives, as do any transport they are embarked in. The preview doesn’t tell us how big the units are, but it does show the weapons options.
Hopefully wych cult will just have advance and charged as a datasheet rule, as I don’t see how this army will interact without some way to increase their mobility.
Talos Preview
Talos looking pretty solid with Haywire, which interacts exactly as I thought it would. Are you a vehicle? Take mortals. No? Okay. maybe some wounds.
It is consistent 2 shots instead of d3, but also loses blast. The main thing here is that the Talos can get a pain token to reroll its 2 hits, which really increases its accuracy, and twin-linked means it also rerolls wounds.
If you’ve got 3 talos, a total of 6 dice are being rolled, netting 3 hits. Rerolling your three misses means you are going to average 4.5 hits (either 4 or 5, depending). Into a vehicle, you will net 2 wounds, rerolling those 2 extra dice to get 1 more, meaning you average 3 wounds. That’s 9 Mortal Wounds to a vehicle. The damage output is definitely there for Talos!
The also previewed Lelith’s attacks, but they didn’t change enough to warrant anything other than a mention.
Overall, I think the changes to the codex are good, and the army looks fun, if nothing else!
Courtesy reminder: I won’t be around for at least a week, as I travel to Kansas City to work the KC Open for Games Workshop. I’ll take lots of pictures!
Chris