State of the Meta

Over the last couple months of play the meta has somewhat stabilized around a strong core of Astartes, Aeldari, and 10-wide Melee menaces. With many of the hordes that dominated 2nd edition Kill Team left to the periphery of the metagame. While the metagame was mostly in stasis the power creep felt by the Blood and Zeal release has really kicked the meta into a froth. Sanctifier’s ability to swing 14” forward on turning point 1, and the Goremonger’s incredibly flexible faction ability have been the talk of the digital town square. (Check out the patch notes here.) Here’s a snapshot of the extremely large weekend metagame before the patch notes!

If you want to listen to Can You Roll a Crit and HappyRaccoon talk about the changes over at Just Another Kill Team Podcast check out the player below!

Core Rules Changes

• A couple of teams have some new standardized wording around actions like Fall Back. “before or after it performs an action” Which removes some of the discussion around timing these ploys.
• Heavy now explicitly takes effect during a counteraction, which generally shouldn’t make a difference. Unless you are playing Stalker Bolt Rifles on Angels of Death, in which case rip.

• Small Operative rule standardization, “‘It’s also ignored for victory conditions and scoring VPs if either require operatives to ‘escape’, ‘survive’ or be incapacitated by enemy operatives […]’”. No more implantation on these distraction pieces, however most of them barring Mutoid Vermind can still be used to contest objectives.

Buffs

Vespid – Large

10 Bugs and a Drone! The Drone’s ability no longer requires visibility, and the flamer gets an 8” move when it flames people. Sting also improves hit stats for melee now. While neutron fragments now add damage per fragment.

HappyRaccoon: Extra operative, longer flamer move, and better melee with a CP all fold up nicely into a very powerful buff. Vespid players are now punished less for sending in an operative to go blasting, and the drone provides an even easier area of death. This should push the team into some relevance, but Astartes can still defend well on the upper end of the meta.

Tempestus Aquilons – Large

Tempestus Aquilons get a major glow up here. Firstly, the team can now take eleven operatives, ten dudes AND the servo-sentry, and the servo-sentry no longer conflicts with the special weapon guys the team can take. Alongside this change is an update to the firefight ploy Hot Drop, which now can be used while wholly within your opponents territory, making Tempestus much more threatening outside of the turn an operative drops. Finally, the Tempestus Dagger on the Precursor picks up ceaseless, which is more a cute change than anything else.

Swiftblade: The fact the team can always take the servo turret and bumps up an extra guy is the star of the show here, but I think the most impactful change here is the update to Hot Drop. The biggest problem that this team has is that a clever opponent will know that Tempestus are most dangerous on the turn they come in, so the opponent will simply wait out the Tempestus drops and then pick the team apart. Now, Tempestus can threaten big damage with their operatives at basically any point in the game, as long as they’re positioned to get into enemy territory. It’s going to catch some players off guard, and is the exact shot in the arm the team needed.

HappyRaccoon: Welcome to the metagame in a big way Aquilons, make sure to wave at all the Kasrkin players as y’all rocket up the ranks. Relentless easily, and an extra operative seem great, especially since you still have the benefit of dictating if you want to get shot at all on turn 2. The counterplay of hiding in your drop zone remains as relevant as ever, so we’ll see how big this glow up really is.

Pathfinders – Large

Markerlight step 1 is changed to Balanced and Saturate, with step 2 improving the hit stat of ranged weapons. Point Blank Fusillade now allows your operative to go first if you are ready and on an Engage order.

HappyRaccoon: A massive, massive change, that brings Pathfinder shooting in line with the rest of the shooting centric teams. Structurally Astartes still present problems, but with the nerfing of the Aeldari the gunline of the Greater Good is in an excellent place.

CYRAC: WE GOT THE GUN BACK IN KILL TEAM! Elites are still problematic but the big issues are still Fellgor and Goremongers for Pathfinders. Everything else? Pew pew time.

Hernkyn Yaegir – Large

Masterful Bladework is better while retaliating on conceal orders, granting an extra attack to a maximum of 4, and upgrading existing Balanced to Ceaseless. A reasonable buff to the Bladekyn’s melee profile. Stalwart Defense no longer suffers a hit penalty, and the Plasma Knife equipment gives existing Knives Balanced.

HappyRaccoon: The identity of Hernkyn Yaegir as the anti-melee team has been improved in a massive way. Being able to rely on getting chip damage defensively when being charged and threatening kills while retaliating is great stuff. While the tac op game has left the team behind, kill and crit op are back in play in a big way.

Death Korps – Minor

Clear the Line strategy ploy now grants Accurate 1 always, and Severe often.

HappyRaccoon: With the massive number of bodies and the changes from January, the Death Korp are now always a threat. Gunners can reasonably expect kills on 7-8 wound operatives, and the number dorks with Hand Axes can threaten just about anything with some preparation. Good stuff.

Gellerpox Infected – Large

Vermin got standardized and turned into a singular equipment selection. Drawn to the Hum gets a range boost moving to 2”. Blessing of Infection has a new rider if you land 3 successes letting you discard a failure to push a normal to a critical success.

HappyRaccoon: This is a huge buff on paper, pushing up melee reliability across the big hulks, and giving everyone more movement. Mutoid Vermin moving to a singular equipment choice means the Gpox pilots are getting a whole equipment choice to play with.

Hunter Clade – Minor

Each leader gains a new ability that allows the Command Override ploy, which lets you change imperative on a friendly operative visible to your leader.

HappyRaccoon: Not enough for a team that has been struggling long term. It somewhat feels like some life support for a team where the tricks are strong, but not strong enough to overwhelm the deprecations. The team now does have some more flexibility, but remains a fair team against less fair opponents.

Kasrkin – Large

The Recon Troopers Auspex Scan now properly triggers a bevy of changes that are aimed at making Kasrkin as a whole more effective. The Auspex Scan ability is now an 8” aura around the recon trooper that stops obscurity and grants “scanned”. Scanned enables Elimination Pattern and Neutralise Target ploys with an “or” rider, meaning your Recon Trooper effectively grants Piercing Crits 1 and Relentless. Meanwhile the Long-Range Scope equipment grants Saturate against all targets more than 6” away from friendlies. Lastly the Skill at Arms ability has been adjusted granting Severe more easily, reducing combat damage of 3 by 1, or granting a bonus pip of combat damage.

HappyRaccoon: This is a huge rework of a team that has been languishing in the corner. While the faction still seems hard to play, you can think of your specialist weapons as all having Ceaseless, Severe, and Saturate. This should allow the team to take reliable shooting actions that will almost always bite. Meanwhile the Sergeants Tactical Command ability to super charge an operative with another Skill at Arms can lead to some new tactical scalpels, and I’m personally excited to take em back out for a spin.

Imperial Navy Breacher – Minor

Deck Hand ploy no longer has APL limitations, letting your 3APL boosted operatives charge fight and shoot with 8” of charge range.

HappyRaccoon: Uhhh certainly helpful, can’t see this moving the needle whatsoever.

Scout Squad – Minor

Emboldened Aspirant now grants a normal upgraded to a critical, which triggers crit rules. While Combat Blades have been upgrade to ⅘ instead of ⅗ damage. Along with a flatter number of attacks and less of the odd rules.

HappyRaccoon: Overall a buff and a minor one, for a team that has been struggling. One wonders if in 3 months they’ll be back to 10 operatives and a menace again.

Nerfs

Chaos Cult – Minor

A very straightforward change here, Torments can no longer use weapons not on their datacard. Gone are the days of whipping a krak grenade at a guy with your mutant tentacles.

HappyRaccoon: Solid nerf that keeps the focus of the Chaos Cult on the melee, not the shooting.

CYRAC: A minor nerf which doesn’t really…do anything? In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of players didn’t realise they could even do that with their Torments. Very shocked Accurate 2 or limiting how many Torments per TP wasn’t touched instead, otherwise Chaos Cult players breathe a sigh of relief with this change.

Fellgor Ravagers – Large

These changes are mostly a return to the end of Kill Team edition 2 form. With all operatives dropping back down to 10 wounds, Ambush losing its fail to crit line, and Reckless Determination only allowing a singular save. The Shaman lost its ability to Seek with its ranged profile going down to Seek Light. The largest nerf is that Frenzy can now end during a counteraction, meaning an outnumber Fellgor player can be meaningfully ran away from.

HappyRaccoon: Sweeping nerfs that hit on the large set of buffs that Fellgor received coming into the new world. Ultimately a defensively minded Fellgor player can still use the combination of Frenzy, strong melee, and consistent output to good effect. However the rush down play of full send Fellgor has been hit pretty hard.

TheArmorOfContempt: A slew of smaller changes meant to make the team more manageable without upending their core team ability. I am unsure if this is enough to bring them to heel, but it is better than nothing.

Corsair Voidscarred – Large

Shade Runner eats a pair of nerfs, no longer able to perform a Dash action in an activation where it uses the Blink Pack rule. Additionally, Slicing Attack now requires visibility at the start of the action for you to be able to deal damage. Kurnite Hunter’s ability to resolve attack dice first no longer cares about Faolchu and only cares about the hunter operative being ready. Warding Shield has been changed to a normal Just a Scratch effect.

Swiftblade: Poor Corsairs, the first victim of the Elf-pocalypse.

HappyRaccoon: This set of changes hits a team that looks about middling as far as broad statistics go. However the Shade Runner and Kurnite Hunter offer some of the better anti-charge pieces. Able to make approaching the incredibly fast hard hitting team really painful. This drops the team’s overall power level, quite a bit.

TheArmorOfContempt: Honestly, I am still trying to figure out why they made these changes, but the Shade Runner can still teleport through Gallowdark walls.

Hand of the Archon – Large

Hand of the Archon suffer two big hits to their offensive power. Firstly, Stimulated Senses only allows you to reroll one dice when used, becoming quasi-balanced instead of quasi-ceaseless. Secondly, the Razorwing weapon on the Skysplinter Assassin dropped from 5 attacks to 4. Cruel Deception’s fallback wording was also brought in line with other similar abilities.

Swiftblade: A eulogy for my beloved Razorwing, aka the Raging Demon bird, who was a menace to society. My special little guy didn’t deserve this. (HappyRaccon editors note: He did)

Hand of the Archon is a team who’s biggest strength is it’s terrifying offense, so the hits here hurt. The loss of an attack makes the Razorwing no longer being the reliable damage machine, and not having on demand ceaseless puts the team at a much higher risk of wiffing when they decide to go loud. I don’t think these changes will put HoA in the dumpster, but it takes them down a few pegs for sure.

TheArmorOfContempt: While this doesn’t seem like a massive change, it is in the context that I think GW overvalues this team’s strength based on their strong winning percentage, while most experienced players are going to tell you this team falls significantly short of the other elf teams. If anything I think they needed some sort of buff given how weak Power from Pain looks when compared to Gore Tanks.

CYRAC: The Razorwing nerf was fair considering how damaging the bird can be when spiking, but Stimulated Senses nerf hurts a lot. Definitely depowers the team a lot with this change, at least it still stacks with Balanced.

Hearthkyn Salvagers – Large

Jump Pack warrior to 7” of movement instead of 8”, while Writ of Claim has been turned into an initiative re-roll if you hold 2 objectives.

HappyRaccoon: For Hearthkyn Salvagers who have been relying on 2 uninterrupted Krak Grenades to knee cap the opposition, this nerfs for you. Everything else that makes the team flexible in shooting, fighting, and long term blasting remains in place. This will hurt the team, but the team has plenty of tools to continue playing especially with some opposition eating nerfs this dataslate.

TheArmorOfContempt: Hark! What do I hear? For that must be howls of agony from Dylan Gill, who placed 2nd at Adepticon with this team. To be fair both of these changes are proper without knee capping the team. All the team’s core strengths remain untouched.

Nemesis Claw – Minor

Nemesis Claw gets away with a slap on the wrist, as Return to Darkness now ignores wall terrain on Gallowdark when determining if you moved farther away from enemy operatives.

Swiftblade: Nemesis Claw once again dodges big nerfs in the dataslate, love that for my little skin flaying bozos.
I think Nemesis Claw ends up in a very strong place following this balance shakeup, on principle that it was already a very strong team who’s biggest predators, like fast elves who can get inside your bubble with big piercing damage quick, got hit hard. I still don’t think that they’re going to be as oppressive in the meta as other elite teams like Legionaries and Warpcoven were, but they’re in a great spot.

Plague Marines – Minor

Plague Marines have the effective radius on Cloud of Flies reduced from 3” to 1”.

Swiftblade: Man, am I happy to see this change. The huge radius on Cloud of Flies meant that Plague Marines could just waltz up the board and be almost immune to most shooting, since the radius was large enough to cover basically as many operatives as you wanted. Having it brought down to the radius of a normal smoke grenade means Plague Marine players will have to be much more careful on the approach, and shooting will be much more effective into them.

CYRAC: This was a confusing nerf. I expected the healing to be hit but Cloud of Flies is still strong. I would have liked it to be a 2 inch radius or move with an operative, but currently GW have effectively made it another Firefight ploy that can only really be used defensively.

Ratlings – Large

Tripwire’s match the other equipment set up restrictions. Needing at least 2” of distance from access points, and accessible objects.

HappyRaccoon: Pour one out for Ratling players, as the free wins on a handful of ITD maps have been removed. Overall a good change that removes the most feel bad moment when learning what Ratlings can do. I suspect Ratlings will need some number of buffs to manage their model height.

CYRAC: Gasp Ratling players must learn how to properly play on Gallowdark now! This shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone considering how general mines work, and Ratlings will continue to do well on GW Gallowdark maps due to their large rooms.

Sanctifiers – Large

Lead the Procession can’t be used on Turning Point 1.

HappyRaccoon: A solid nerf on a team that everyone wants to see brought down. Needing some time to see where the team needs to be hit is a reasonable view, and this bridges the gap in the meantime.

TheArmorOfContempt: Agreed, perhaps not the only nerf this team will ever see, but this is in line with what seems to be a desire to cut down on Alpha Strike capabilities that teams can’t possibly respond to.

CYRAC: A needed nerf but still keeps Sancs at the top of the meta. Now we must all fear Sanctifier players actually learning how to play their team properly and using LTP to easily lane-switch to any side of the board while applying tons of pressure with ease.

Void-Dancer Troupe – Minor

Epic (the melee performance) now only applies its benefits on fighting, not retaliating.

HappyRaccoon: VDT remain a strong offensive team, especially since the peppering of elites with shuriken pistols can overwhelm 3+ saves reasonably efficiently. However, when coming up with a gameplan against the VDT, this offers melee as a weaker part of the VDT’s defensive profile. Giving melee focused teams new avenues to crack the aeldari clowns.

Warpcoven – Minor

Capricious Plan now only allows a Dash OR an order change, but not both.

HappyRaccoon: A good small nerf to a team that remains quite flexible and strong still. It does trim the most abusive gameplan from Warpcoven as the free-ness of old capricious plan is gone.

Functionally No Changes

Blades of Khaine, Elucidian Starstriders, Exaction Squad, Farstalker Kinband, Kommandos, Wrecka Krew.

Swiftblade: I think walking away from this slate with no real meaningful shakeups is a pretty big deal for most of these teams, as they were already dark horses in the overall metagame. I don’t think its going to suddenly make any of these teams monsters on the scene, but this will help the strong results that BoK, Starstriders, Exaction, Farstalker, and Kommandos have been able to put out.

Wrecka Krew probably needed a little help with getting their team’s momentum going, its so swingy, but hey dawg just roll sixes and win.

TheArmorOfContempt: Probably should’ve done something to prevent the Sanctifier Drill Abbott from completely negating the team’s core ability.

No Changes

For those of you who are playing Angels of Death, Goremongers, Phobos Strike Team, Novitiates, Wrymblade, Mandrakes, Blooded, Hierotek Circle, Brood Brothers, and Legionary you’ve all escaped the patch notes unchanged! For better or for worse.

Swiftblade: I’m a little surprised they didn’t touch Goremongers at all, but only a little bit. I’d at least expected their healing abilities with their Sanguavitae rule to get toned down a bit to bring it in line with other oppressive healing abilities that got nerfed, like Heirotek’s reanimation. Still, the team is very new, so I guess GW is very, very reluctant to make changes to them.

Also, Mandrakes are out here pretending they aren’t elves in order to dodge the elf-pocalypse. “We aren’t elves, we’re shadow creatures, no relation to elves. Please stop asking.”

Conclusions

HappyRaccoon: Overall I’m excited, and think these are generally moving in the right direction.

CYRAC:Overall I like the balance dataslate as a lot of the mid-tier teams are far more playable and a lot of the toxic interactions have been toned down. Sanctifiers remain a huge problem but we were lucky they got touched in the first place, they will still continue to dominate the game. I would have liked counteracts being limited to universal actions only, but overall I think this is a great balance dataslate.

Swiftblade: I’m overall very pleased with this dataslate, especially the focus here on bringing up struggling teams, which were largely focused on shooting in a melee meta. Everyone’s favorite Houstonian Hero of the Imperium, Andrew, has been stubbornly clinging to Kasrkin, which gave me a first hand look at just how much that team struggled. It was bad, y’all. Now I think those once bottom-tier teams might have some real play in them, especially Tempestus and Kasrkin, who can get some really nasty shooting going.

As for the larger meta, I predict that the parting on the left is now the parting on the right, just in a more interesting way. I think Astartes and melee 10 man teams like Goremongers are still going to be very strong, and even though Aeldari got hit hard this slate I still think most of those teams are still good. And even if they can’t do movement shenanigans TP one anymore, Sanctifiers can still get crazy threat ranges the rest of the game, so the team hasn’t gotten the ol’ yeller treatment yet.

But I think that the boost that shooting teams got this time around will allow them to much better punish a player for moving up too aggressively, and melee teams will need to be smarter about how they move up the board against teams that they could once just overwhelm without thinking. It’s good stuff, I’m very optimistic about the next few months of the game!

TheArmorOfContempt: I detect no misses here. All the changes made will make the overall meta better. There are a few changes that I hoped were present, but GW seems hesitant to make any positive changes to teams that display a winning record even if they might have abilities or operatives within their rules that are never used by their players.

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