In Hammer of Math, we look at statistics and math-related problems in Warhammer 40k, talking about how they affect games and how you can use them to your advantage. Today we’re talking about changes to datasheets in the 10th edition release of Codex: Chaos Knights.
Codex: Chaos Knights finally saw a tenth edition release and if you missed our coverage of the new book and its Detachments, you can find those here. The biggest change in the new book is the change to the datasheets for Chaos Knights themselves – each unit in the book has lost a point of toughness and instead gained wounds to compensate. We’ve talked both in the review and our Patron-exclusive podcast about this change and how it feels, but it’s worth digging deeper into the change mathematically and talking about how this impacts those units.
War Dogs
Let’s start with War Dogs, which have dropped from T10 to T9 and gained 2 wounds, going from 12 to 14. On the surface, this seems like a significant breakpoint – moving to T9 makes you more vulnerable to S5 weapons like heavy bolters, S9 weapons like multi-meltas, and S10 weapons like Entropy Cannons. But for everything else – weapons S4, S6-8, and S11+, nothing has changed from a wound standpoint.
- For Heavy Bolters and Other S5 weapons, your output against a war dog has basically doubled on a per-attack basis, since you go from a 1/6 chance of wounding to 2/6. This means each Heavy bolter shot will do an expected 0.22 wounds instead of 0.11 when firing. This amounts to a negligible improvement – those weapons are still not suited or ideal for taking on T9 threats.
- For Multi-Meltas, this is where your big fear is. Your expected damage per shot here jumps from 0.52 to 0.78 as your chance of wounding improves from 1/3 to 1/2. As a result you’re more vulnerable. But this is also where you find an interesting break-even point: Outside of 9″, a single Multi-Melta cannot kill a 14W war dog, while it can conceivably kill a 12W dog, albeit with a 1/36 chance. Inside that 9″ melta range, the odds of losing your War Dog to two unsaved melta wounds is about 42%, while the 14W dog only dies 17% of the time.
- There’s a similar dynamic going on with S10 weapons like the Entropy Cannon and the Heavy Blight Launcher, where the increased chance of wounding is somewhat (but not entirely) offset by the need to score an additional hit in order to actually destroy the war dog, in part because the jump from 12 to 14 wounds takes you past a multiple of 3 or 6. A Heavy Blight Launcher jumps for 0.67 expected damage per shot to 0.89 with the toughness drop, but you need to convert 5 instead of 4 to actually destroy your target. That will be easier, but given you’ll average 5-6 shots with your Bloat Drone and max out at 8, your chances of scoring a kill from a single bloat drone haven’t improved much – you need an average of 16 shots to bring down one War Dog with those guns.
The biggest drop here is against Multi-Meltas, where they become 50% more effective when it comes to dealing damage against you in a way that’s real (doubling the effectiveness of S5 weapons isn’t really something you should be too worried about), while you’ve only gone up 17% in terms of wounds with your war dogs. That said, against everything else, nothing has changed and you’ve become 17% more durable. This notably includes lascannons and other S11+ guns.
Big Knights
When it comes to the TITANIC knights in your arsenal, those knights drop from T12 to T11 and gain four wounds each, going up to 26. The drop from T12 to T11 isn’t nearly as big a deal for ranged weapon breakpoints – Lascannons at S12 are the most dangerous threat here – but it is an area of concern when it comes to melee threats, where many units have a way to get to S6. Most notably Blood Angels and World Eaters. Let’s take a look at those two scenarios and see how things have changed.
- For Lascannons, the drop isn’t as significant as you might expect. Lascannons do an expected 1 damage per shot to big knights, since they wound half the time with 4.5 expected damage per unsaved wound. That increases to 1.3 against a T11 knight target, dropping your expected shots to kill from 22 to 19.5. It’s easier, but not as much as you’d like.
- For those Blood Angels and World Eaters, it’s a different story. They double their effectiveness and output when they jump from wounding on 6+ to wounding on 5+, and when you factor in [LANCE] via a Stratagem and re-rolling wound rolls, even an Assault Intercessor Squad equipped only with Chainswords can drop 5+ damage on a big knight. Again this is an area where they are doubling their output against your knight only gaining a 18% increase in durability from the extra wounds.
So if you’re running big knights, your biggest threat are likely to be S6 weapons, which have doubled their effectiveness into you. But for most other situations, you’re more durable.
Harbingers of Dread
Finally let’s take a look at the Chaos Knights army ability, Harbingers of Dread. At the start of the first, third, and fifth battle rounds you can either roll 2d6 for two random abilities on the table or select a specific one you want. You always start with the Deathly Terror aura which worsens the Leadership characteristic of models within 9” by one. Otherwise the table breaks down as follows:
- Despair: While a unit is within 9”, worsen the leadership characteristic of models in that unit by one (this stacks with Deathly Terror).
- Doom: While a unit is Battle-shocked, add one to the wound roll against it.
- Darkness: If a ranged attack targets a knight outside 18” or if the attacking unit is Battle-shocked, subtract one from the hit roll.
- Dismay: Units within 9” must make Battle-shock tests in their command phase if they are below starting strength instead of if they are below half.
- Delirium: While a unit is within 9”, if a unit fails a Battle-shock test they take D3 mortal wounds.
- Dominion: Add 3” to all of this knight’s Aura abilities.
Rolling a result that’s already active does nothing for you, so you want to generally avoid doing that. This means that the best times to roll are going to be on rounds 1 and 3 when you have fewer active abilities. If you choose an ability in the first round (we recommend starting with Darkness most games), then generally when you roll for abilities in round 3, your odds look like this:
- A 2.8% chance (1/36) of getting double 3 as your result, and no new abilities.
- A 42% chance of getting one new ability, i.e. you roll a 3 and something else (28%), or you roll non-3 doubles (14%)
- A 56% chance of getting two new abilities.
That’s enough upside to suggest you should just plan on rolling two new abilities on round 3, unless there’s something specific you really want to hit – and none of the abilities listed tend to cry out for that specificity, save maybe Doom in the situation where you’re going first and have a battle-shocked target in mind to take on when the round starts.
Final Thoughts
Taken in the context of the weapons players use, the drop in toughness for Chaos Knights isn’t nearly as bad as it looks; there are ample situations where it’s offset in whole or in part by the extra wounds, and it’s difficult to overstate the impact of clinging to life in annoying fashion with 1-2 wounds remaining. This is particularly helpful when you go up against mortal wound output from things like the Grenades Stratagem or Doombolt, where having extra wounds just means that the first use of those abilities has been completely offset by your added wounds.
Where you’re really going to feel the heat here is from S6 attacks against big knights, but those are going to be some very specific situations in which you’ll need to be careful to avoid exposing yourself to those threats – and being mindful that they’re now nearly twice as effective against you.
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