Detachment Focus: Hallowed Conclave

The upcoming Codex: Grey Knights features a number of new detachments for the army, giving players multiple ways to play the secretive chapter in Truesilver armor. In this article we’ll be looking at the Hallowed Conclave Detachment.

Let’s be real: When you think about Grey Knights, you aren’t thinking about baby carriers or guys in power armor, you’re thinking about Terminators. For anyone who misses the days of running thirty Paladins with attached characters, teleporting around the table and just generally being implacable, the Hallowed Conclave Detachment has you covered.

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

Detachment Rule: Duty Before All

GREY KNIGHTS TERMINATOR units in your army can shoot and declare a charge in a turn in which they Fell Back.

This is better than it looks. Yeah, you’d want advancing and charging to be on the table as well, but the simple ability to disengage from any combat you don’t want to be in without giving up your ability to shoot and charge again is huge, particularly if you’re running large units of terminators who can otherwise get bogged down with less expensive tarpit units. This also lets you continually refresh your ability to fight first against major threats like Knights and Greater Daemons, and the ability to pull back, shoot something full of holes, then re-charge it really helps push through extra damage and also mitigate your small unit counts.

Enhancements

Two of these are exclusive to Terminator characters, and there’s value in looking at the two that don’t. These are mostly just OK.

• Eye of the Augurium: Grey Knights model. Once per battle round, the bearer can activate this Enhancement to target their unit with the Fire Overwatch or Heroic Intervention Stratagem for 0 CP, and you can do this even if you already targeted another unit with those stratagems. This is very nice to have – they flashy (but unnecessary) play is to drop it on a unit of Incinerator Purgators but it’s just fine on Terminators, where your ability to threaten free intervention all the time makes for an effective anti-charge bubble around friendly units. On terminators the free Overwatch is whatever.
• Inescapable Judgement (Psychic): Grey Knights model. Each time an enemy unit falls back from the bearer’s unit, you can use this Enhancement. If you do, roll a D6; on a 2-5, they take D3 mortal wounds. On a 6, they take D3+3. These are considered psychic attacks. If you’ve always wanted a real punishment for units trying to fall back well, you finally have one. This is a pretty solid deterrent, as it’ll often mean losing a model or two for smaller units and makes it very dangerous to fall back with bigger units sitting on 1-2 wounds. That said, just be mindful that the likely outcome of this enhancement is “opponents no longer fall back,” and not “you do a lot of mortal wounds to them.”
• Sanctic Reaper: Terminator only. Add 3 to the Attacks characteristic of the bearer’s melee weapons. Your options for this are the Brother-Captain, the Grand Master, Brotherhood Chaplain, and the Brotherhood Librarian. Of those, you want this most on a Grand Master, where having 8 attacks all the time gives him a lot more hitting power and the Might of Titan ability lets you go up to 11 attacks when you’re trying to take down a big threat.
• Nemesis Rounds: Terminator only. Each time you target the bearer’s unit with Fire Overwatch, they score hits on unmodified hit rolls of 5+. This is generally a pretty good ability, but it’s limited by the fact that terminator shooting is just not particularly great. It’s a nice to have if you have the extra points, but it’s not as useful as the other three.

Stratagems

Surprisingly, only two of the Stratagems here require a TERMINATOR unit as their target – the other four just require an INFANTRY target to work with, making them more versatile than you might expect. They’re all priced at 1 CP.

• Giants of the Battlefield (Battle Tactic, 1 CP): Used in the Fight phase when one of your Terminator units fights. They get +1 attack on their melee weapons. This is really good, and taking them to 5 attacks each really helps shore up the challenge of only being S6 on their attacks. You’re going to use this one often, especially if you’re doing split charges with a big unit of Terminators or running 5-model units.
• Unending Fidelity (Strategic Ploy, 1 CP): Used in your opponent’s shooting phase or the fight phase on a Grey Knights Infantry unit being attacked. They can fight on death on a 4+. This is the standard 1 CP version of this Stratagem, giving you a 50/50 shot per model. It’s fine, and helpful for pushing through that last 1-3 points of damage.
• Point-Blank Purgation (Strategic Ploy, 1 CP): Used in your Shooting phase on a Grey Knights Infantry unit to give their Storm Bolters [PISTOL] and [TWIN-LINKED] for one phase. This is fine, though your ability to fall back and shoot/charge means it’s only useful if you’re trapped in a big multi-charge or are worried about getting overwatched on the fall back move. Twin-linked is a nice bonus
• Grind Them Underfoot (Strategic Ploy, 1 CP): Used in the charge phase, just after one of your Terminator units finishes a charge. Pick an enemy unit within engagement range of yours, then roll a D6 for every model in your unit that’s within Engagement rage of the enemy unit. For each non-4+, they take a mortal wound. This is pretty solid for a unit that can’t get grenades, and your biggest challenge is going to be getting more than 6 bases in engagement range with your target, where 40mm bases don’t make that easy. This means this is best for big targets like knights and greater daemons, where you need more help anyways.
• Precognitive Strikes (Strategic Ploy, 1 CP): Used in your opponent’s Movement phase, just after they end a move within 9” of an INFANTRY unit in your army that isn’t also within Engagement Rage of an enemy unit. Your unit can make a normal move of up to D6”. Reactive moves are always great, and having access to one on your OC 3 terminators is huge as well, letting you take aggressive moves to protect objectives or block movement when opponents try and move in or by you.
• Shining Resolve (Strategic Ploy, 1 CP): Used in your opponents shooting phase, on an INFANTRY unit they picked as a target. Until the end of the phase, if the strength characteristic of an attack is greater than the target’s toughness, that attack gets -1 to the wound roll. This is great, and a solid improvement over AP reduction. You need this to help keep your terminators on the table against big 3-damage weapons on vehicles like Rogal Dorns and Bloat-Drones.

Playing This Detachment

This Detachment is focused on getting the most out of your TERMINATOR units, though it’s not necessarily the best detachment for running them. That said, there’s a lot of good melee support here for Terminator units to help make the most out of Brotherhood Terminators and Paladins. Paladins in particular really need the Detachment’s Fall back and charge ability to get the most out of their Attuned Onslaught/+1 damage on the charge ability.

This ends up being the detachment where you run 3×10 Terminators, and for my money the play is more likely to be two units of Paladins and one unit of Brotherhood Terminators, each with a Narthecium and Banner to give you three units of 30 OC insanity to hold objectives at mid-table. That triple brick is a lot less threatening without Draigo however, but it’s likely still worth it to give two of them Grand Masters and one Grand Master Voldus. That leaves you with about 400 points left to work with, which isn’t amazing, but you can likely look at filling that with cheaper Imperial Agent options over trying to fit in some of your more expensive elite Grey Knights infantry.

Strengths

• Flexibility. Being able to fall back and shoot/charge means your big, expensive terminator units can’t be trapped in tar pits and can always drop back and shoot in a pinch.
• Melee support. Between extra attacks and mortal wounds on the charge, you’ve got some solid support for your terminator units to take down bigger threats in melee.
• Overwatch. With two Enhancements to give you extra ways to get improved Overwatch, including free extra overwatch with a non-Terminator unit.

Weaknesses

• Terminators. The Grey Knight Terminator datasheets are just kind of underwhelming. They lack the durability of Deathshroud or Deathwing knights, and their melee attacks lack the strength of power fists.
• Shooting. Terminator shooting isn’t particularly good, and that’s also a challenge for the Overwatch abilities.
• Speed. Terminators are slow, and this Detachment doesn’t do much to fix that. You get lots of versatility from being able to Fall Back and shoot/charge, but that won’t help you close the distance with opponents.

A Sample List

If you’re taking this Detachment, it’s to re-live the glory days of 30 terminators. And while I don’t think the current meta moment is the right place for such a list, especially stripped of Paladins’ older -1 to wound ability, the list has some beefy legs to it and a bit more offensive capability thanks to +1 damage

Sample 30 Terms List - click to expand

Your basic goal here is to scrap on two or three objectives with a massive unit of terminators, hoping that your regenerating 30 OC brick is enough to stall and kill anything contesting that objective. Is it good? Enh, not really – your 500+ point bricks of terminators aren’t nearly as good as the knights they’ll be going up against which are 100+ points cheaper. You could theoretically work on a lesser version of this with something like 8-model units, where with a character you’re only barely going over 400 for Brotherhood Terminators and more like 470 for Paladin + character, and shaving those 240 points to make room for another Nemesis Dreadknight is probably the right call. At that point you’re dropping from 36 wounds down to 30 and you’ll be just fine with 24 OC, but every terminator you lose is going to feel terrible.

Final Thoughts

It doesn’t feel like right now is the correct time for a terminator-heavy list in the meta; that said if you’re playing Grey Knights you definitely have at least ten of these guys and the idea of being able to field them all at once has to at least make you feel some kind of excited. The buffs here aren’t amazing, but +1 attack and fight on death will help you do more with less and mitigate the temporary losses and small model counts.

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