Detachment Focus: Banishers

The new Grey Knights Codex provides the Knights of Titan with five detachments to play with. In this article, we’re looking at the Banishers detachment.

Nemesis Force Weapons are an iconic part of the Grey Knight aesthetic, and the Banishers Detachment is (mostly) about whacking the opponent with them as hard as possible. It also brings along some strong tools to counter the kind of teleporting and Mortal Wounds shenanigans beloved of Chaos forces, making this Detachment especially optimised for striking down servants of darkness. In this article, we’ll break down what makes this Detachment tick.

We’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with a preview copy of these rules for Review purposes.

Note: Where this article references points costs, these are provisional costs provided to us by Games Workshop to support our review, and may be subject to change until they are published on Warhammer Community.

Detachment Overview

Banishers provides you with powerful offensive boosts in melee (via the Detachment rule) and at range (via Enhancements), and supplements these with some defensive tools tailored to specific enemy tricks. It’s a potent mixture of toys, though maybe held back from true greatness by the Detachment rule requiring a Leadership Test to trigger. Let’s start with that.

Detachment Rule: Channelled Force

Each time a Grey Knights unit is selected to Fight, you can take a Leadership test, and  if you pass it that unit’s PSYCHIC weapons get your choice of Lethal Hits or Sustained Hits. Basically, through force of will your units can become a bit like the Adeptus Custodes, and when this hits it’s a very useful ability.

The problem, of course, is that it doesn’t always hit. Almost all of your units sport Leadership 6, so at baseline you’re going to activate this about 72% of the time, which is fairly reliable, but definitely bears the agonising risk that you’ll throw a charge into something like a Knight, and miss on that key roll. Surprisingly, there’s nothing in this detachment that interacts with this test at all, which is hilarious on some level – this is literally the first time in the entire of modern 40K where you would strongly consider taking an Enhancement Aura of +1 Leadership or re-roll Leadership tests and it isn’t here! There were so many of those we graded F in 8th Edition. This was their chance!

At baseline this is still good enough (combined with the fairly strong kit the rest of the detachment has) to make you interested, but the biggest issue with it is that as soon as you run into enemy Leadership debuff auras, the reliability goes straight out the window, and this is a problem because the two places you will encounter those (Chaos Knights and Chaos Daemons) are two of the places where you will be most relying on nailing Lethal Hits. Quite legitimately, it would be on theme for this Detachment if you appended “ignore Leadership modifiers from CHAOS units when making this roll” to the ability, and then I’d be much happier with it. The army loves anything that gives it output boosts, so you this still feels worth trying, but a bit of support from the Detachment or consideration of where Leadership modifiers might come from would have gone a long way!

Enhancements

Where the Detachment rule boosts melee, the Enhancements here mostly focus on the Shooting Phase, which is a mixed blessing – it stops you doubling down on going hard up close, but realistically you’re going to need to use guns for some of your heavy lifting, and some of the boosts here are decent.

• Sigil of the Hunt (10pts): The bearer’s unit re-rolls hits of 1 in your Shooting phase. Not flashy, but it’s so cheap I can’t see you ever not taking it in this Detachment – it’s literally fine on rate just as a way to give a single GMDK re-roll 1s on their guns, and you could certainly try it on a big Paladin unit.
• Ephemeral Tome (15pts): Infantry only. At the start of the shooting phase, the bearer’s unit can make a Normal Move of up to d6”, and is not then eligible to declare a Charge. This is a slightly weird one, but it does a few things for you. First up, you can think of it like being able to Advance/Shoot, because this is equivalent to an Advance that doesn’t stop you shooting/performing an Action, and if you suddenly need a lot of move to reach an objective you can Advance then use this. More subtly, it also allows you to shuffle a unit after bringing them in from Deep Strike, letting you get a bit closer than 9”, albeit without then being able to smash face. I guess on a 2+ it lets you get close enough to toss a Grenade, which can be funny. The main challenge with this usage is the reliability element – a lot of the time if you roll a 1 on this it’s going to do basically nothing. At least it’s fairly cheap, making it a fine way to use up floating points.
• Sixty-sixth Seal (25pts): +1AP for the unit’s shooting attacks (in your Shooting Phase). Once again, you might consider taking this on a GMDK (and sticking to the more conventional heavy incinerator rather than the flashy new melta), but it’s a bit pricier than Sigil of the Hunt for less definite benefit, making that a harder sell. Instead, this is probably the one to take if you’ve decided to go all-in on ten Paladins decked out with five psycannons, where it makes a compelling difference to their output almost all the time.
• Pyresoul (20pts): At the start of your shooting phase, pick a visible target within 24” and whack them for d3 Mortal Wounds. The upside of this is that Mortal Wounds are always good, and it’s extremely rare to get them without any sort of roll attached. The downside is that the start of the Shooting Phase isn’t usually when you want this kind of effect most – you want them to finish off something you swung for and narrowly missed. Nevertheless, guaranteed damage (and the occasional option to get something out of a combat they’re stuck in) is probably too good to pass up, so you want to find a slot for this.

Stratagems

The Stratagem sheet here is quite unusual, in that theoretically plenty of it is quite niche, but the situations they address are important enough that you’re pretty happy to have them.

• Hexwrought Reprisal (1CP): Also, we’re getting weird with it. This Stratagem creates a bunch of state tracking headaches that I don’t look forward to seeing on the table, but it is pretty good. At the end of any phase, you can select a PSYKER unit that is on the Battlefield (i.e. that is still alive, this will be important) and suffered any Mortal Wounds this phase. You then pick one of the units that inflicted one or more of those wounds, and then roll a dice for every MW you suffered this phase (so all of them, not just the ones from that unit), and do a Mortal Wound back to them for each 2+ (max 6). Got all that?So – the obvious issue here is that this means theoretically whenever you have a CP up, you have to track all of your units Mortal Wounds suffered each phase, and who was responsible, because you don’t pick who is activating this till the end of the phase. In practice you’ll probably have a clearer idea of when you might plan to use this, and there’s a built in limitation that you have to suffer lots of Mortal Wounds and survive, so you can hone in on situations where your usage of it is likely and track those. Still – there’s a reason we don’t normally see unbounded state tracking like this, because it’s a huge headache. Oh, also, the fun really begins if you have a Feel No Pain against Mortals, because you have to start slow-rolling them one at a time against each Mortal Wound, because if you pass a FNP you still “suffered” that wound and it counts, but if a multi-wound model dies to a Devastating Wound part way through its total damage, the leftovers don’t count. This is going to cause so many rules arguments.

  Arguably that’s worse because this is very much not a bad Stratagem, quite the opposite. It’s an effect that is both powerful when it hits, and powerful in how it will affect what your opponent does – maybe it’ll discourage them from popping a Grenade or Tank Shock when they really should. Even if they’re being cautious, there’s a reasonable amount of flat three damage Devastating Wounds out there, and sometimes your opponent will tee you up to do something horrendous to them almost by accident. Baffling but a net draw to the detachment in the end.

• Warding Chant (1CP): In the Shooting or Fight phase, a PSYKER unit gets Feel No Pain 5+ against attacks with unmodified Damage 1. Very situational, but strong in the situations it’s good in, which is mostly against Orks or some popular units from Blood Angels.
• Chaos Bane (1CP): They couldn’t resist it folks – the one specific Anti-Chaos stratagem in the book. Specifically, this gives Anti-Chaos 4+ on shooting for one of your PSYKER units, and narrow as this is, in the metagame of late July 2025 (when this was written) this is an extremely good Stratagem, because it lets either a big Paladin unit or Crowe’s Purifiers put a massive amount of hurt on a big target, forcing a foe to be far more conservative with big threats than they’d like, and making the army effective against them in multiple phases. It is probably not a healthy sign that this is very powerful, but it is!
• Celerity (1CP): Advance/Charge for PSYKER Infantry. Good clean fun for your Paladins.
• Circle of Sanctuary (1CP): At the start of your opponent’s Movement Phase, pick one Character from your army, and the opponent cannot set up Reinforcements within 12” of them that phase. Note that the timing of this means your opponent can make their plans around it, but that doesn’t stop this being a massive gut punch to Daemons, burrower Tyranids, Genestealer Cults and more. Pushing this out from a GMDK’s hefty base is spectacularly disruptive to Deep Strike armies, and it also has a secondary use of allowing a lone Character to babysit your backfield in an emergency, something you can set up mid game via Gate of Infinity if your other screening needs to go do something else. Very welcome.
• Shadow of Anarch (1CP): When your enemy ends a Normal Move, Advance or Fall Back within 9” of a PSYKER in their Movement phase, that Psyker can either make a 6” Normal Move, or pull into Strategic Reserves. Mists of Deimos is back, and it’s still a top tier 10/10 Stratagem that will be the constant bane of your opponents’ attempts to kill your stuff – and it’s in a detachment with some force multipliers now!

Playing This Detachment

This Detachment is about boot-on-neck pressure with forces that mix Infantry and Dreadknights – if you just want the latter you can go Sanctic Spearhead, but if you want to get the most out of big units of Purifiers and Paladins as well, there’s a bunch on offer here. Your shooting boosts from Enhancements will force the enemy to be cautious about what they expose, especially if they’re a Chaos army, while Circle of Sanctuary can be used to shut out some angles of counterplay. Then, when the time is right, Paladins can rock into combat with Celerity, and smash faces, then bug out of danger using Shadow of Anarch.

Strengths

• Good output boosts up close and at range.
• Strong Stratagem toolbox with some situationally exceptional tricks.
• Surprisingly relevant Anti-Chaos Stratagem.

Weaknesses

• Detachment Rule not reliable.
• Very vulnerable to Leadership debuffs.
• Wants you to take very pricey units, so hard to squeeze everything in.

A Sample List

Putting all the coolest tricks you can do with this Detachment together gives you something like the following:

Banishers - click to expand

As with all Grey Knights lists, the low drop count you end up on if you want the cool stuff is fairly bracing, but this build is set up to do a lot of damage in multiple phases. The big Paladin block with all the psycannons and boosted shooting AP does real damage to most targets, and maximises their chances of hitting melee with a Chaplain. Crowe’s big Purifier unit provides a second alpha infantry threat, able to smoke any other Infantry target out of Deep Strike, and a complete nightmare for any foe packing CHAOS units. A trio of Dreadknights (one a tooled-up Grand Master) rounds things out, making sure that the list has enough heavy lifting to be getting on with.

Final Thoughts

This detachment feels like it’s right on the edge of getting there, with a bunch of cool things and powerful Stratagems going for it, and if any of the combined arms options in the book are going to compete with Warpbane, it’s probably this one.

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