While Chaos Knights have gotten their full fledged codex, Imperial Knights received some small changes to their index. While these changes are small, they’re majorly impactful to how this army will play, and the state of the meta going forward.
We would like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with a review copy of the Index.
We will also have a review of the updated Imperial Armour rules for Forge World Imperial and Chaos Knights later today!
The Video Version
If you’d like to watch a video version of this Index update, we’ve got you covered here:
What’s New?
There are only a few updates here, but they’re substantial, and they mirror what we saw for Chaos Knights – and if you haven’t read our Chaos Knights review, you should! It’s good. But if you’re hurting for time, here’s the short version:
- Durability Changes. Every knight lost a point of toughness on its statline, while at the same time gaining some wounds to compensate – this is +2 to Armigers and +4 for everything else. That helps offset some of the loss of toughness, but as we examined in Hammer of Math on Monday, this depends on the weapons you’re using.
- Dominus Saves. Similar to the Knight Tyrant, Dominus knights went from a 2+ to a 3+ save.
- OC changes. The OC characteristic on Armigers dropped to 6, down from 8.
- Bracketing for Armigers. Armigers now “bracket,” i.e. they lose effectiveness with a “Wounds Remaining” rule – when they have 5 or fewer wounds remaining instead of 4. More importantly, bracketing now also halves their OC to 3, so an Armiger clinging onto life on a single wound is less likely to be a back breaking OC swing.
The long and short of this is that Armigers are overall more survivable in most situations while your bigger knights are a bit more vulnerable to a few important breakpoints – primarily S6 attacks. That said, the extra wounds help you tank additional damage from things like the Grenades Stratagem and abilities like Doombolt.
The change to OC is in many ways a bigger deal – at OC 6 (and degrading) you can’t just out-OC most units in the game by throwing an armiger on an objective and barely surviving. This means you’ll need to play a bit more conservatively with those units, but that’s less of a change for Imperial Knights than it was for Chaos Knights, since that army had a heavier reliance on War Dogs.
It’s worth noting that there’s one very large difference here between Chaos Knights and Imperial Knights when it comes to these changes and that’s the fact that the Imperial Knights’ Noble Lance Detachment gives their models the Feel No Pain 6+ ability. This makes the extra wounds you get about 20% more effective, and for big knights will almost amount to an entire additional effective wound. That helps offset even more of the decrease in durability from a lower Toughness.
The other major angle here is the points. While Armiger costs didn’t move, all of the TITANIC knights did – and they all went down to the mid 300s with the exception of Canis Rex at 380, and the Dominus frames at 395. That’s a 115-point discount from before. These changes open up a list that can easily fit 5 big guys in it.
What Does This Mean For the Meta?
Well, if you’re not an Imperial Knight, nothing good. (TwoHorse: Also it means that list construction for Imperial armies probably starts at 1620 now, because Canis at 380 is such absurd value that it probably outcompetes anything you were considering from your own codex.) These steep discounts were effective and edging on too good with Chaos Knights, but they’re even better on Imperial Knights, where you have good access to re-rolls on your big knights and your durability drops are offset by your 6+ feel no pain from the Noble Lance Detachment. That access to re-rolls does more than you’d think, helping ensure you make the most of your low-volume/high-quality attacks which tend to hit on 3s. This means your knights are very prone to just whiffing and can feel anemic when attacking. Re-rolls fix this problem, adding consistency where you need it. These changes don’t necessarily improve that, but they do put you on an even more aggressive footing with access to an additional big knight to torment opponents.
Wings: Yeah, this is going to hit the metagame like a freight train. Brace for impact.
Final Thoughts
Get ready for Big Model Summer everyone. This feels like a knee jerk reaction to CK getting similar points drops and does not account for the fact that these are very different armies, and that Imperial Knights had a far more powerful set of Army/Detachment Rules in their Index. Imperial Knights players will be hooting and/or hollering with the list options available to them now. Obviously you can just improve on the previous Canis formula, but you can shove so many dang knights in these lists now. Time will tell how this all shakes out.
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