Our review of the new 10th edition Codex: Black Templars dropped this past weekend and if you missed it you can find it here. This week in Hammer of Math we’re looking at some of the new oddities and abilities from the book and how they affect the army in games.
Let’s start by looking at what Black Templars lost from their Index incarnations, then we’ll look at what they gained, and we’ll finish off by talking about how these things compare.
Trading Oaths for Vows
One of the big things we pointed out in our review was that Black Templars lose the Oath of Moment ability that defines Space Marine armies in Codex: Space Marines, instead replacing it with Templar Vows, a set of four abilities chosen at the start of the first battle round. These abilities are:
- Re-roll charges and melee weapons gain [PRECISION] when targeting PSYKER units
- Each time you make a melee attack with strength equal to or less than the target’s Toughness, get +1 to wound
- Pile-in and Consolidate moves can be made toward the closest enemy unit (instead of model)
- Sticky objectives and the ability to perform actions after advancing
Only one of these offers an offensive buff, and it’s one that’s more conditional and less broadly useful than Oath of Moment, which lets you choose one enemy unit to re-roll all hits against each battle round. Broadly speaking, Oath of Moment ups your accuracy to 89% against targets when you hit on a 3+ (an increase of 33%), and to 97% when you hit on a 2+ (a 17% increase).
The Loss of an Attack
Many Black Templars units lost an attack on their primary weapons. Chainswords for Crusaders and Master-crafted power weapons and Chainswords for Sword Brethren. To compensate, these units gained [SUSTAINED HITS 1] on their chainswords and [LETHAL HITS] on the Master-crafted power weapons. Statistically speaking, +1 Attack is the same as Sustained Hits 1; five models with 5 attacks each will generate an average of 16.7 hits, while five models with four attacks each and Sustained hits 1 will generate the same number, and this is true for any number of models. There are some variance considerations here, but you can think of this as a wash.
The Buffs
Alright let’s talk about the buffs. Black Templars have access to a few different character-specific buffs they can apply to units:
- Chaplain Grimaldus gives his unit full re-rolls to hit with melee attacks, and can improve the AP of melee weapons for the unit by 1
- The Marshal gives his units Critical Hits on 5+
- The Castellan lets his unit re-roll hit rolls with a successful Leadership test, or hit rolls of 1 with a failed test.
Sustained Hits 1
OK let’s start with ten Crusaders armed with Chainswords. Previously, our group of Primaris lads would drop 50 attacks, hitting on 3+ to land 2/3 of those, averaging 33.3 hits, or 44.4 with full re-rolls to hit from either Oath of Moment or Grimaldus.
With SUSTAINED HITS 1 in the mix, 40 chainsword attacks will average that same expected number of hits in the baseline – 33.3, and 44.4 when you have full re-rolls to hit from Grimaldus or a Castellan. If you’re only re-rolling 1s to hit, this will drop to 38.9 expected hits. If you decide to fish for 6s, your expected value drops to 41.1 hits – save that for when you’re hitting on 2s.
With the Castellan giving you critical hits on 5+, your chance of generating an extra hit increases to 1/3 per attack (up from 1/6), and on 40 attacks you can expect to generate 40 hits; better than re-rolling 1s, but worse than re-rolling everything.
Finally if you combine the effects for the Castellan and the Marshal, getting critical hits on 5+ and full re-rolls to hit, your expected hits value jumps up to 53.3, and as much as we’d like to get extra value from fishing for 5s, the reality is that’s the break-even point – it doesn’t do you any good, and your expected hit count is the same whether you fish for 5s or not.
Lethal Hits
On the other side of things, Sword Brethren lost an attack on their master-crafted power weapons but gain LETHAL HITS to compensate. This complicates things a bit more because now we have to consider wound math in the mix, but let’s look at attacks into the three most common types of targets for our S5 weapons:
- Marine-equivalent threats (T4, so 3+ to wound)
- Plague Marines (T6, so 5+ to wound)
- Knights (T11, so 6+ to wound)
Against Regular Marines, I can expect a unit of five Sword Brethren to deliver 9.2 wounds per activation on 15 attacks. With re-rolls to hit that’ll jump to 10.7 wounds, and if I fish for 6s that’ll drop to 10.1 (even with 2+ to hit, I don’t want to fish when the odds of a wound are 2/3 on non-Lethal hits). If I am scoring critical hits on 5+ with a Marshal, my expected wound count is 10. That’s enough to wipe a five-man Intercessor Squad most of the time, given they’ll only save 3-4 of those, and the two-damage attacks will do them in.
Note: This is a little worse than having an extra attack – with 4 attacks per model, I’d expect 11.1 wounds per activation against targets where I’m rolling a 3+ to wound.
Against Plague Marines and other targets with T6-9, I’ll be rolling 5+ to wound, and that’s where Lethal Hits does a lot more work. Here a standard volley of 15 attacks will result in an average of 5.8 wounds. 6.8 if I’m re-rolling 1s, 7.4 if I’m fishing for 6s, and 7.5 with critical hits on 5+. That’s just enough to kill five Plague Marines after saves, but it’ll be close.
Note: This is a little better than having an extra attack, where 4 attacks per model gives me an expected wound count of 5.6 wounds before adding in buffs.
Against Knights and other targets with T10+, Lethal Hits does the most work. A standard activation of 15 attacks does 4.2 wounds, and that jumps to 4.9 with re-rolls, 6 when you fish for 6s (always fish for 6s in this situation), and 6.3 when you crit on 5+. That’s still only likely to be 8.4 damage on a knight after it rolls its saves, so you’ll want to make sure you’ve chipped some damage off before rushing in.
Note:Â This is substantially better than having an extra attack, where 4 attacks per model gives you an expected wound count of 2.8 wounds before adding in buffs.
Final Thoughts
That +1 Attack and Sustained Hits 1 net out to the same result is one of the fun statistical oddities of Warhammer 40k, but it’s fun to see how that interacts with other abilities like the Marshal’s ability to give critical hits on 5+, something that has more value when you combine it with the LETHAL HITS ability on the Sword Brethren. For their part, Sword Brethren lost a little bit of utility against weaker targets but are better at punching up; in that sense their roles have been more clearly defined in the new book.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
