Goatboy here with the latest 40K Meta. What’s a player to do to deal with with the current menace of big Knights and stinky Death Guard Vehicles?
Right now, 10th Edition 40K has a pretty rough meta for some of those armies and while I expect game plans to shift a bit will see if GW might do something. Today I want to talk about the things I would hope could be done to right the ship a bit especially with some new codexes coming down the pipeline.
Against the Knights
The big burly bully in the room right now is the return of the Knight Chassis to the forefront of everyone’s hate list. The good guy knights and the bad guy knights are here to stay and both present very rough things to deal with on the tabletop. Can your army deal with a pile of wounds coming at them fast and wrecking your stuff? Can they quickly dispatch a knight chassis each turn with some kind of ease, and have enough redundancy to deal with some of the other armies that are there? What can the poor little plastic toy soldiers do when the play yard bullies are on the tabletop?
I expect the shift we will see to Knights will be a points tweak from GW in some kind of nature. There is a new Imperial Knight codex coming one of these months, that will probably tone down the good guys a bit with changes to their rules and tweaks. The Chaos version is still an issue mostly due to just being too dang cheap. I wonder if the correct avenue is to price things for an average army to allow 3 big knights and some small ones or just 4 big ones. I think as armies adapt will see this knight issue die down a bit. But the real big problem is there are some armies that are just not designed to kill that many wounds in a single round let alone trying to get it done in the first three turns.
The other big thing with the Knights is they can easily spike the score in the first turn by utilizing their ability to shoot/action and high OC on objectives. This lets them get out there, start scoring, and just lock the game down before the other army can respond. We’ll see as the game goes on, GW looks at what they can tweak, and if it will work. I expect points to go up on the bigs in a method to remove at least one from most armies. The bigger shift will be if anything is done about the Feel No Pain options and other damage potential. Heck if they couldn’t action/shoot it might be enough to tone them down or force them to have more chaff which then removes a big.
Stinky Death Guard Vehicles
From there the next issue is the Death Guard and their extremely aggressive codex. We haven’t had any real tweaks to them yet even though GW did have a few chances to sneak something in. I fully expect GW will hit them with points increases and try to remove 20% of the current armies from the game. This would be a big help as it feels like when watching any Death Guard game they have so much they can “sacrifice” and still be deadly. Just look at some of the Daemon Engines and how their toughness and shooting potential makes any push an opponent does into your army a deadly thing as you can’t take the slap back.
Right now I think most armies either need to attack the way the DG army scores their primary quickly or figure out units that can spike high damage in a single round of interaction. This would be anti-tank weapons or piles of single wound damage options that can overwhelm an army. You will see armies that can easily turn on Lethal Hits with a pile of attacks and you can start to see how armies will compete. Those big units also do another thing beyond just killing the model – they also push the objective with a ton of bodies and OC which makes it hard for these big knight and death guard armies.
What does that mean for a World Eater player like me? Right now I just went and found my Magma Cutters for 2 Maulerfiends I plan on adding to the army. Between the Melta damage I can push through the Maulers hit with a d6+2 attack that can easily spike in high damage into a giant robot or a stinky daemon engine. Do we all need to go find our Lascannon units?
Good hunting out there friends!
Thomas Reidy, aka Goatboy, the ever-evil member of BoLS. I do arts, play 40k, and even paint a lot of stuff. I have been playing Warhammer 40K since the 1990s, and have won multiple national events including Adepticon and GW GTs. I’ve been writing for BoLS for 15 years. Look at my Instagram to see what I am working on – or working on for someone. I am always doing something hobby related.