The Grey Knights hunt down the most terrifying threats Chaos can conjure, using arcane wargear, big glowing swords, and powerful mobility from teleportariums and psychic tricks. In 10th Edition, they are the original users of continuous re-deployment abilities (or “uppy-downy”, as our Editor hates to read in a serious technical article), allowing them to appear where most needed on the battlefield and unleash their fury. Their new Codex provides some interesting new Detachments (which is good), but falls a bit short in reviewing and tuning datasheets, potentially leaving the Grey Knights reliant on a few crucial pieces to get things done. We unpack the good and the bad in today’s review.
We would like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with a review copy of the Codex.
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.
Army Overview
Grey Knights are a highly mobile army of very elite generalists. All their units are pretty good both at range and in melee, meaning that if you outmaneuvre your opponent and force their army to confront you piecemeal, you’ll tear them apart. Where the Grey Knights can struggle is against solid, concerted opposition, forcing them to adapt and redeploy or unleash their heavy lifting pieces like Dreadknights to try and power on through.
We think the following are four standout features of this book:
- Teleport Strike. Grey Knights retain their powerful army rule, and a full Codex brings along new synergies to go with it.
- Paladins. The elite of the Grey Knights are properly terrifying, armed to the teeth with special options and hitting ultra hard in melee.
- Dreadknights. Still great, especially Grand Masters, who get new weapons and better rules. Also, a whole detachment that just wants you to run six. Naturally.
- Purifiers. Better than ever.
Unfortunately, as will become clear, we’re not massive fans of this overall, and there are some standout things we dislike:
- Too Cautious. Look – we’ve come off a run of Codexes where improvements to Datasheets were maybe a bit too generous, but this goes the other way; there hasn’t been enough attention paid to making sure all Datasheets in this book can really thrive, meaning that spamming the same old staples is likely to continue. In particular, not reviewing the Infantry special weapons is a weird choice.
- Redundancy. There’s too much contention for too little design space, often leaving some options just outclassed by similar, better ones. It very much feels the three Detachments that aren’t pushing a specific unit type should have been condensed down to two, and there still not being any “double attach” Character options relegates some to the bench permanently.
- No Draigo. Many factions have suffered losses of resin Characters in 10th, but this is easily the most egregious across the entire game, and it’s a wild decision to have done a new Dreadknight sprue instead of a plastic replacement. His role from the Index is also glaringly absent in the book, leaving them short a key delivery mechanism.
Army Rules
The Grey Knights are famous for launching lightning strikes from teleportariums, arriving in the midst of Daemonic Incursions to unleash the Emperor’s judgement. Once a threat is dealt with, they either activate personal teleporters or tear passages through the warp itself, allowing them to move swiftly on to the next foe, never staying in one place long enough to get bogged down in protracted combat. On the battlefield, this is represented by the Gate of Infinity army rule.
Gate of Infinity
Credit: Pendulin
If your army Faction is Grey Knights, then at the end of your opponent’s Fight Phase you can remove a number of units with this ability from the Battlefield and place them into Strategic Reserves. Since every unit with this ability also has Deep Strike, they are then available to appear wherever they’re needed in your subsequent Movement Phase.
The ability appears on all units except the “conventional” vehicles in the book, and the number of units you can activate it on varies by game size, with three being able to do it at Strike Force level.
By this point in the edition, everyone knows that this rule is great – it keeps your army mobile, forces your opponent to consider screening much deeper into the game than they normally might, and makes you very good at achieving Tactical Objectives. The Grey Knights are the original and best to ever do it, and retain a full power version of this rule even as other factions with access to it have had parts of it chipped away over the Edition. It does come at the cost of a fairly considerable proportion of their putative “power budget”, which hurts them in other places, but this is never a rule you’re going to complain about having, and shapes every game played with the army.
It is also subtly improved from the Index version – you no longer have to bring units down the following turn after pulling them with this, they’re just in Strategic Reserves. This has the key impact that you can now hold a unit through to Rapid Ingress them rather than being forced to deploy them in your turn. This can help further turn the screws on an opponent, and really keep them second guessing at all times, and does at least help with the loss of Kaldor Draigo.
Mike P: A subtle but big change is the new Gate Of Infinity rule requires every model in that unit to have the ability for the ability to function. No more doing things like attaching an Inquisitor to a Strike Squad and teleporting the Inquisitor too.
It’s also very cool to see the classic “Boxnaught” gain the faction ability and be able to teleport with his brothers. Whether you’ll want to run one is a separate discussion, but it’s cool to see more support for it.
Detachments
Grey Knights armies have access to six Detachments, five in this book and the powerful Warpbane Task Force from Grotmas.
An all-rounder Detachment that leans into the Army Rule, powering up your units as they arrive from Deep Strike, and providing additional ways to leap into Reserves.
A Detachment centered around the Grey Knights Terminators, the elite of the elite.
A high-pressure Detachment designed to keep foes on the ropes and annihilate them in melee.
A Dreadknight Detachment for running Dreadknights. Other vehicles as well, but mostly Dreadknights.
A finesse Detachment that increases the flexibility of the Army Rule, and adds a few additional tricks to thwart your opponents plans.
A hard-hitting Detachment that amplifies the power of your units, especially Purifiers and those around them.
Datasheets
Unusually for a 10th Edition Codex there are no completely new Datasheets here, as the kit release alongside this book is a new sprue for Dreadknights. That means we’re looking at a mixture of updates and unchanged Datasheets, and the roster is small enough that we’re going to skim through everything.
We should also say that as well as Kaldor Draigo vanishing into the warp, Brother-Captain Stern is also missing in action.
Characters
Grand Master Voldus
The most senior Grey Knight present is a powerful combatant who can lead either flavour of Terminators, adding substantial durability via giving them -1 to be hit, and providing quite a bit of killing power. In melee he has some spicy D3 attacks and does Mortal Wounds to one enemy unit, and at range he now fires fairly potent mind bullets that hit at S12 and pack Devastating Wounds. He’s also tough, with a standard Terminator defensive profile and 7W. If you want a really nasty leader for a squad of Terminators he’s now your pick, and adding substantial ranged damage makes him much more appealing than he was in the Index. He has, however, also gone up in points, and I suspect the 110pts ask is a little steep right now.
Grand Master
Grand Masters are your Space Marine Captain equivalent, capable of leading either sort of Terminator, and conform much more to a “default” template of what that looks like than in the Index. This has upsides and downsides – on the upside, one of these nows get to use a discounted Stratagem once per Battle Round via Warrior Strategist rather than once per game, which is great in light of the army being able to reset for Rapid Ingress now, but the downside is they lose their old ignore modifiers ability, instead getting a once-per-game bump up to S9 and 8A in melee. These are good effects, and it’s very likely that you want one of these in a lot of lists, either leading a squad or maybe just riding solo as a utility piece – they also have 7W and Terminator defences, so they’re quite a threat by themselves. The biggest issue they have is that Warrior Strategist also appears on Dreadknight Grand Masters, which you’ll almost always have one of, so you’ve got quite a bit of contention for where to drop the discount.
Brother-Captain
Brother-Captains are another Terminator Leader, this one adding Lethal Hits in melee, which is fairly potent for Paladins. They also get to re-roll their own wound rolls both in melee and at range, and can bring a special weapon, so add a little bit of extra killing power to the unit. You may legitimately just end taking these by default because the ability to punch up into T12 stuff is so vital that you can’t go without.
Brotherhood Librarian
Brotherhood Librarians are a dakka Character bringing a decent mid-weight shooting attack in Vortex of Doom, and mitigating reprisals by granting a unit they lead 18” Lone Operative and resilience against Mortals. Sadly, the days of them dropping Mortals on foes are past, and there’s a definite tension between the short range of Vortex and their abilities.
Brotherhood Chaplain
Brotherhood Chaplains provide Charge re-rolls and a once-per-game option to remove Battle-shock from a nearby unit, both of which are good, but suffer heavily from not ever being able to double attach – you are going to be quite constrained on the number of units you can take, and the army needs force multipliers to get its damage lift going, so not providing that is really tough. They do have two things going for them however, which is that they’re the cheapest Character in the book at 65pts, which means they’re very likely to see some play as solo objective guys with upside, and that they probably are the best Leader for a big Paladin unit on Banishers, where making the Detachment Rule more reliable and allowing for Deep Strike charges with re-rolls is good.
Castallan Crowe
Crowe is a Leader for Purifiers, giving them an additional shot each with their Purifying Flame shooting attack. Since this improves to AP-2 in this book and Purifiers get good access to Wound re-rolls, Crowe with ten of them is likely to return to lists with a vengeance. He personally also gets to re-roll hits against Characters, which is a nice synergy with the Wound re-rolls that the unit can provide and his Devastating Wounds – it means he hits reliably and hard, and adds value to taking him with just a five if you cannot quite fit the full squad.
Brotherhood Champion
A Leader for Strike Marines and Purgation squads who provides Advance/Charge and gets slightly better and rewards a CP each time he destroys an enemy Character in the Fight Phase. Cute, but not actually filling a slot that the army needs, and is also glaringly missing some sort of rule to allow him to pick up Scouts 6” when leading a Strike Squad – errata that in (it’s been pretty standard for similar Leaders recently, so it’s odd to not see it here) and we’ll talk, because at that point he’d provide great early threat projection.
Brotherhood Techmarine
The Grey Knights Techmarine buffs and heals Vehicles, and is also quietly upgraded to the Primaris loadout, gaining a forge bolter. You can run him solo, as he gains Lone Operative near friendly Vehicles, but there’s also some reason to run him as a Leader – he provides a free Heroic Intervention against an enemy that Charges a nearby Vehicle, so if you’re running tanks other than Dreadknights, he can help protect them (gimmicky as it is).
Grand Master in Nemesis Dreadknight
Your favourite large robot son, now with new weapon options, slightly reduced penalties for taking multiple, and CP reduction. You’ll still be taking lots, is what we’re saying.
The GMDK is your primary tool for dealing with enemy heavy targets, as they can bring along some hefty guns, the punchy Nemesis Daemon Greathammer, and in melee they re-roll hits, wounds, and damage against Monsters and Vehicles all the time. That latter bit is a major improvement from the Index, where one of these could do that once per Battle Round – now it’s just re-roll city in both turns, and for as many as you like. They also have the Warrior Strategist ability, so one can get a CP discount once-per-battle round (unless a Grand Master has already done it). That’s a small penalty for tripling up, but given it’s replacing an ability that barely mattered, it’s still an improvement.
GMDKs also have a lot of weapon options, getting to pick from a sword, mace, hammer or flail in combat, and at range can take heavy versions of any of the Grey Knight special weapons, plus an option on the sublimator, a souped up Psychic multi-melta with Twin-linked and Melta 4. For melee, the maths still just works out that you should take the hammer every time, while at range the heavy psycannon is a lock, and you probably now want to take the sublimator as your second gun, given that these will be hunting enemy Vehicles. You also get a fragstorm grenade launcher for free, which you will definitely remember.
Infantry
Strike Squad
Your humble Strike Squad is completely unchanged, providing you with a Scouts 6” Sticky Objective battleline unit that hits a bit harder in melee than most. You will continue to put exactly one of these in every list. If the Brotherhood Champion changes to work with Scouts, you might start seeing 10s tried out.
Brotherhood Terminators
Both Terminator flavours for Grey Knights get a weird win out of the 10th Edition convergence towards exactly modelling what a box of them provides, which is that you can take them in four or eight model units (because you could be building one in five as a Character) in addition to the normal five or ten sizes. In both cases, going for the four cuts you out of some wargear options (you get special weapons per five), but you can still take a Banner guy with a Special Weapon, and still get an Apothecary. For Brotherhood Terminators, four-model units at 160pts feels potentially quite real – you still accumulate OC12 thanks to the banner, they’re great against other elite Infantry in melee (their unit ability now boosts their AP against non-Vehicle/Monster targets), and there’s significant pressure to kill all of them at once lest the Apothecary start reviving models. Being able to take a model out to make this unit more affordable is genuinely pretty good for list building flexibility, and seems likely to show up. Larger units probably won’t, because of…
Paladins
Your bigger, nastier Terminators can also be taken in 4s, but you won’t here because that loses you two special Weapons. Fives and bigger, however, are off to the races, because it’s all upside here. Paladins now get +1D on the Charge, making them considerably better at killing large targets, and good into the army’s bane of damage reduction. In line with the box builds thing, they also now get to take an Apothecary, so if your opponent doesn’t push back hard and fast, they start re-growing models. There’s very likely still some use cases for taking a full ten of these, but here the odd size that might see play is eights – you lose a couple of psycannons, sure, but it cuts 90pts off the full price tag, which is pretty closely analogous to being able to cut two models to take a Leader for free. That seems like it should seriously help get more big units of these out into lists, and 5s are also just generally strong. The only sad part is that the +1D doesn’t apply to Leaders that join them, which is definitely one of those weird things here that feels over-cautious; I get that you have to be careful with that ability, but this is an army where almost every melee profile is the same!
Interceptors
Speedy Infantry with a 6” Normal Move after shooting, allowing them to juke in and out of transports or just make a nuisance of themselves. Very useful to have a unit of kicking around.
Purifiers
Possibly the biggest winners in the book, Purifiers are elite power armoured infantry who get an extra Purifying Flame shooting attack and access to the “good” version of elite Wound re-rolls (1s all the time, full re-rolls against a target within range of an objective), replacing their old bonuses for taking casualties. Purifying flame is a single shot each (or two with Crowe leading them) at S4 AP-2 Anti-Infantry 2+ Ignore Cover, which is legitimate chip damage on regulars, and terrifying from Crowe’s squad, and adding Wound re-rolls helps them put serious damage into anything. You can’t really go wrong starting with 10/5/5 of these in any of the Detachments that aren’t Vehicle/Terminator specific, and in Warpbane where they’ll also have full hit re-rolls all the time they’re wild.
Purgation Squad
Special Weapon units, and big casulaties of the combination of the Infantry special weapons needing a review to not be anemic, and the fact that we aren’t doing big Indirect any more. These now stick a -2” movement/charge debuff on a non-Vehicle/Monster unit they target, which is maybe cute for one unit given you can zap them around the board, but the damage potential isn’t anywhere near high enough to take more than that.
Walkers
Nemesis Dreadknight
Your regular robot son, slightly less wise and with fewer options, but angrier and faster. The Nemesis Dreadknight can still only take the old weapon options, but they still Advance/Charge and are still just as durable and dangerous as the GMDK in most situations. Stick your hammer/psycannon/incinerator Dreadknights on the board and get smashing. The main challenge now is working out the balance between GMDKs in the four Dreadknight builds that have broadly been most common – historically one GMDK and three regulars has been the norm, but maybe you’ll end up with two and two now.
Venerable Dreadnought
After years of practice the Vendread has learnt how to teleport, which we love for him. He has a bit of a weird buff ability which is that he provides +1 to Hit for other shooting against a target he hits, which isn’t irrelevant given Dreadknights are mostly shooting on a 3+, but feels a bit out of nowhere. He’s very much more pricey than you want him to be (140pts, which looks deeply suspect next to the recent Helbrute prices), but if he drops considerably there’s probably room for one in the whoops all Dreadknights Detachment.
Other Vehicles
Grey Knights get a selection of Space Marine Vehicles imported into their Codex, most of which function exactly the same as they do in the Marine book. The two Dedicated Transports, however, work differently, so we’ll look at them first.
Rhino
Rhinos transport your power-armoured units around, and provide any friendly units wholly within 6” with a token 6+ Feel No Pain against Mortal Wounds. Weird to see a Wholly Within aura outside of Age of Sigmar, but you often will want one Rhino for some Purifiers, so occasionally this will save a wound on a nearby Dreadknight or something.
Razorback
The Razorback offers a unit that disembarks from it +1 AP against a unit it hits until the end of the turn, which is a new spin on Fire Support-style abilities. Finding the exact right unit to use it is a little awkward, but maybe five Purifiers with a couple of incinerators does well enough out of it between their purifying flames, the guns, and their melee that it actually matters?
Land Raiders
The various Land Raiders are identical to their Marine datasheets, giving you the choice between cheap, not very shooty and lots of seats (Crusader), medium-priced, anti-tank, and the fewest seats (regular) or expensive, flamey and with a medium number of seats (Redeemer). The most relevant thing for all of them is that the Sanctic Spearhead Detachment provides a Stratagem that lets these drive clean through walls, letting them unleash a cargo of angry Terminators right in the enemy’s face. You will most commonly be looking to do five Terminators and a Character, so the difference in capacity between the regular and the Redeemer largely doesn’t matter, but the new Terminator squad sizes do open up some mildly interesting things you can do with a Crusader, most notably sticking eight Paladins in one, but also squeezing in 2×4 Brotherhoods for threat projection. The relative weakness of the Crusader’s shooting means that’s a tough sell, and you probably stick to the other variants, both of which are good as a one-of in Spearhead, and might have a role in Banishers due to the strong reactive move that they have.
Stormraven Gunship
You could also consider a Stormraven Gunship for your Transport/shooting needs, and it’s also pretty good in Sanctic Spearhead, as allowing it to punch through terrain in Hover mode provides it with gigantic reach, and the massive number of guns it packs gives it strong synergy with the Abominus-Class Targets stratagem, especially given it has kept its comically extra powered missiles compared to the regular Marine one. This feels legitimately very good in the Spearhead detachment, and they’ve already seen occasional use in Warpbane which still feels plausible too.
Other Planes
These exist. They do not see play in Marines, which can assemble decent synergy for them. You do not have that synergy here. That means they will not see play.
How They Will Play
This book doesn’t change a massive amount about how Grey Knights play, so the basic answer here is that it’s the same as it ever was. Apply pressure with Dreadknights/the threat of a big Terminator unit, score with cheap power-armoured stuff, and keep a few hammer blows in reserve to smash through anything that needs special attention. A huge amount of the power budget in this book is wrapped up in Dreadknights, Paladins and Purifiers, and those are going to be the core of most lists. Warpbane Task Force’s reliability may well keep it as the standout detachment, and it’s flexible enough that you can build around any of those units in it, but there should also be Dreadknight-heavy builds out of Sanctic Spearhead, and maybe some more all-rounder experimentation with Banishers and Brotherhood Strike.
Final Thoughts
Wings: Whoof, this is a bit of a disappointing one – there are some cool ideas here, but the Grey Knights needed a massively more thorough review of their Datasheets than they got, and the end result is an army that’s going to be very samey on the battlefield. To be clear, Grey Knights are not an out-and-out bad army after this, because there is still a good amount of power in their army rule and a few of their datasheets, but they’re still going to be propped up by the same datasheets as always, and there’s a lot of stuff that feels anemic or unexciting. The weak datasheets make some of the Detachment rules feel less exciting than they could (which is a shame because there are some cool new ideas in there), but there are also rules that are just bafflingly cautious – who wants to pay CP to shoot in combat with just Storm Bolters?
Something that really struck me while finalising this is that Grey Knights, the Daemon hunting army for hunting Daemons, have exactly two datasheets that can meaningfully interact with a Great Unclean One (Dreadknights), and the entire rest of the army just folds when colliding with anything that hits T12. I don’t think we should be going back to the old edition way of giving them a bunch of specific anti-Daemon rules, but I’d expect some thought to go into whether their elite warriors could defeat one of the most common centrepiece models from their favoured enemy.
I think the root of the issue here is that simplified weapon profiles have screwed over the ability of Grey Knights to tool their Infantry for bigger things. I’m normally a defender of this kind of simplification, but for Grey Knights specifically, losing the ability to put hammer profiles in their Infantry units means those Infantry just don’t have the heft to go after larger targets (especially as their unit-level special weapons also aren’t great for those). If I were trying to fix it, I think I’d start with adding army-wide sweep and strike profiles for nemesis force weapons and work from there.
For Grey Knights players – paint more Purifiers and keep your Dreadknights close. For everyone else – Dreadknights aren’t going anywhere.
Wrap Up
I never love having to write a less enthusiastic Codex review, and I’m hopeful that either some of the things here that look fun (such as the cool Banishers detachment) manage to get the book over the line, and if they don’t then an Tyranids-style look at the weaponry, which is what is really holding the army back, is eventually on the cards.
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