GW released a bombshell of new FAQs on Friday, covering errata for the core book and lengthy FAQs for each faction. And as always, we’ve got you covered with the rundown of what’s changed and what it means for your games. In this series of Hot Take articles, we’ll be covering the changes and our initial reactions to them but for more detailed analysis, check back over the next two weeks as we dive deeper into how these changes affect the game and its factions.
Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the- ah screw it you know the line. The Warriors of Khorne are a notoriously angry bunch, to say the least. Why are they mad? Probably their terrible codex! Stuck in early codex Hell, they haven’t really performed well in the past few years. Hopefully third edition will be a baptism by fire for them. For now, we have an FAQ to keep them going, let’s take a closer look.
The Good
- Mage Eater now unbinds an extra spell – If your General can already unbind a spell, they can now unbind a second spell, though only the first does the mortal wounds.
- Herald of Khorne on Blood Throne got a Totem – If you missed it, the Totem keyword lets a Hero use a command ability from 18″ away as if he was a general. Very cool and gives him a decent role in lists now.
The Bad
- Coalitions: Already covered in the other mono-god lists, but in short you can include 2 in 4 Slaves to Darkness units (with the Khorne keyword), 1 in 4 Beasts of Chaos (who gain the keyword) and Archaon can be chosen to lead. This is “bad” because it’s slightly worse than your old rules, where anything with Khorne was fair game as part of the army. It’s not meaningfully worse though, and gaining Beasts of Chaos is potentially pretty cool. So file this under “meh”.
- Poor Skulltaker – Lost his reroll saves, now it’s a +1, which still feels ok on his base 4+ save. Could do worse, and Heroes’ Bane remains as it was!
- Poor Valkyia! Her command ability was reduced from 16″ to the miserable 6″. Not even the thematic 8?!
The Ugly
- Priests hit with a bat: While not directly affected by the FAQ, the priests really feel the heat here. The wording has been updated for 3rd and while it’s functionally the same, the changes around it such as priests only getting one prayer per turn really hurts them. Khorne units are often sub par for the price and require you bring lots of buffs to bring them up to par. Priests are part of that and with only one prayer they have to be fickle about casting buffs or the Invocations. This likely means Invocations will sit out more. They cost more and are prone to exploding if you roll well now.
Ah well, not so much good news for Khorne. The two positives are outshined by the core of their army kind of collapsing, and not even to get into the fact that an army of 35 mm based chads suffers under the yoke of the new coherency rules. Well give it time, maybe things will improve.
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