Whilst there are lots of new things to grapple with in the advent of the new edition of Horus Heresy, one of the sleeper hits is the revolutionary change from Pinning in second edition to a suite of new Tactical Statuses in third. Pinning was a relative boogeyman in the last edition; the ur-status that functionally turned off a unit for an entire turn. However with the evolution of Leadership into four Mental Stats (Intelligence, Cool and Willpower), there’s a lot more levers to play with. Or rather it’s now two levers. I’ll explain:
I’m Pinned Down!!!
Like second edition’s Pinned mechanic, Tactical Statuses are usually applied to units that are hit or wounded by weapons with a ‘status’ rule; Stun and Suppressive on hit, Pinning and Panic on wound. You test for this specifically only at the end of a Shooting phase (in the same way you’d check for morale after losing >25% casualties). There are other ways to force a test (losing a fight, getting hit by Mind-Burst etc) but the Shooting Phase is where you’ll most likely encounter it.
Whilst you can only be forced to test once, each Status is unique. This means you could be left with multiple different tests to make at the end of a Shooting phase (put a pin in this). It’s also worth pointing here again that these checks can only be applied in your Shooting phase (or rather it’s the Morale Sub-Phase). You cannot Status your opponent’s units with Return Fire, Volley and Overwatch attacks.
To test for a Status, you roll 2d6, aiming for the same or under your stat (Leadership for Panic, Cool for the rest) to test to see if they suffer its effects. Status rules can have modifiers attached to them (e.g. Suppressive (2) ), indicating that the initial test is with a negative modifier (in this case -2). If they pass, nothing happens. If they fail they suffer the effect.
Having a Tactical Status is bad news. It adds a load of negative modifiers to a unit. All Tactical Statuses grant you these lovely debuffs in addition to any other effects:
- All their Charges count as disordered (No Set Up Moves or Volleys etc)
- All their attacks in combat are at Initiative step 1 (regardless of ANY modifiers)
- They can’t hold/claim/contest Objectives (terrible for Line units)
- They don’t count as Stationary (bad for anything with armed with heavy or ordnance weapons)
Plain and simple these are going to ruin your day, reducing your effectiveness on the battlefield and making you very vulnerable to getting completely dunked on in combat. The only upside to this is it stops your opponent from scoring any Vanguard points from your units as they can’t hold objectives with a status (ha ha ha).
Once you’ve got a Status it’s going to stick with you until you can pass a test to remove it (it does not go away automatically at the end of your turn like last edition). You normally only check for this in the End Phase of your turn, so, if your opponent shoots you and you fail the first test, you’ll have to deal with it for your full turn before getting rid of it. Importantly this check happens before any Victory points are scored, so if you can pass the Status Check at the end of your turn, a statused unit may still be able to recover, control an objective and score some VP.
Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered
So what do these things actually do?
Pinned (Cool Check on wound by Pinning (x) weapon)
What: Representing your unit getting bogged down under precision shots, artillery or simply having their own mass turned against them.
Effect: Units that are pinned can’t Move or Charge as you’d expect.
When: Expect to test for this after getting wounded by Nemesis Bolters, Needle weapons or anything with Grav in its name.
Suppressed (Cool Check on hit with a Suppressive (x) weapon)
What: Representing your unit getting hit by saturation weaponry, making returning fire more risky.
Effect: Units that are Suppressed resolve all shots as Snap Shots (halving most units shooting effectiveness).
When: Expect to test for this after getting hit by anything that looks like it produces a high volume of shots (Rotor Cannons, Heavy Bolter Rapiers, Arquitor with Spicula Rockets etc).
Stunned (Cool Check on hit with a Stunned (x) weapon)
What: Representing your units getting the sense knocked out of them by high explosive or Sonic weaponry.
Effect: Units that are Stunned can’t react.
When: Expect to test for this whenever someone fires a big cannon at you or if someone’s brought Kakophoni.
Routed (aka ZOINKS, Let’s Get Out Of Here)
Being routed is a different beast than the other three and it would feel a bit weird lumping it in with the rest, so it gets its own special section. It’s pretty similar to the old Routed mechanic with some subtle tweaks. Units will have to make a Panic check in a couple of circumstances:
- Losing more than 25% of models of a unit in a single Shooting Phase.
- Receiving wounds from a weapon with the Panic (X) Special Rule (e.g. Flamers/Phosphex)
- Losing Combat
Routed is a horrible combo of all three Statuses:
- You can’t React.
- You can’t Charge.
- Your Shooting is Snap Shots.
- You can’t Move. You only Fall Back.
A Fall Back move is a I+d6” move towards the nearest point on the battlefield edge that’s in your deployment zone. Normally this is only in your Movement phase or at the end of a lost Combat (you don’t run away after gaining Routed from Shooting anymore). Similar to all other statuses you only test for this at the end of your turn, so effectively a unit that Falls Back from combat in your enemy’s turn, will Fall Back again before you ever do another Leadership test. Worst case for most marines is running 20” away (that’s almost half the board). Bleak.
If a model in a unit ever hits the board edge, it stops, whilst you continue moving the rest of the unit. They then immediately make a Leadership test. If they fail, they flee and count as dead. If they pass they stop and become Suppressed instead.
If this sounds incredibly brutal but unlikely, just wait until you get hit by Phosphex for the first time. Finally becoming the true horror it’s described as in the Lore, getting wounded by this (which will happen) is going to hit you with a Panic (3) test. This might not sound like a lot of paper, but, 2d6 probability curves being what they are, this makes your Praetor as stalwart as a regular Marine, cutting your chances of passing from 91% to 58%. And that’s someone who’s Leadership 10, just imagine what this does to your normal dudes. Expect to see a lot of Siege Breakers on the table soon.
Calling in (Morale) Support
Now there’s one piece of Wargear you’re absolutely going to need to know about. With Blasts now being insanely accurate, Voxs (Command or Nucio) have got a new, more thematic battlefield role: Battlefield comms.
Instead of waiting until the end of your turn to make a status check, a unit with a Nuncio-Vox can pick any friendly Command model and, using their mental stats, perform a check at the start of your turn. This can be incredibly powerful. Not only does it allow weaker units to use the much better stats of their leaders, it allows any unit to start their turn unburdened by a status. And because it’s any friendly Command model, you can utilise the high Cool/Leadership of any Allied Detachments as well; an allied Overseer in Auxilia or Militia list suddenly becomes very helpful. Whilst you might want to prioritise using these to de-status scoring units or key blocks of firepower in your list, this is also a great way to rescue Routing units before they run off the board.
One additional thing for Marine players is the passive buff from Apothecaries. Whilst they may have lost a bit of utility after losing their constant Feel No Pain from last edition, their Narthecium now gives you a handy way to ignore negative modifiers (up to -2) on your initial Status checks, meaning your key units are less likely to start accruing Statuses in the first place.
Chasing Status
Like I touched on earlier, Statuses stay around until you clear them. Each requires a separate failed check to apply and a separate check to remove, so stacking multiple Statuses in a shooting attack is a really good idea; Nuncios can only remove one status a turn, so sticking multiple on one of your opponents key units can really bog them down. One expression of this that I’ve been playing around with recently is the Veteran Tactical Squad. It is technically possible to make your opponent make 5 checks when being shot by this unit (though it does require a bit of luck and being within 8” of something you probably don’t want to be):
- Rotor Cannon hitting gives you Suppressive (1).
- Astartes Shotgun hitting give you Stun (0).
- Combi-Grav wounding gives you Pinning (1).
- Heavy Flamer wounding gives Panic (1).
- If you can do 25% casualties, they then have to make another Panic check.
This is pure jank and I don’t think it’s reliable, but just imagine having to take this many checks. Pure Sicko Shit. Perfect for aspiring Night Lords. And speaking of those spooky boys, Fear (x) is also another incredible tool for Status, creating a 12” bubble around a model that debuffs all of your enemies mental stats by (x), making any Status check even harder to pass. Dropping a Herald in the right place at the right time can be very spicy.
So this is how Statuses work for the majority of units in the game, but there’s a couple of carve-outs, specifically Automata, Vehicles and Walkers.
Fully Automated Luxury Statuses
If you’ve played Heresy before, you’ll know that Mechanicum players are playing their own separate, more complicated, version of the game. Third edition is no different. Your attempts to apply Statuses to Automata will be fruitless as they cannot gain them (their programming did not include fear). This might apply to a decent chunk of stuff a Mechanicum adept is likely bringing to the table, but there are some interesting exceptions.
Whilst the cyborgs of the Mech list (Thallax, Ursurax and Tech Thralls) are not Automata, they are ostensibly too Cool to be worried about Statuses (Cool 12). They are however not immune to burning and can definitely still be routed as easily as Marines if you’re using Flame weapons (Tech Thralls will be running at the mere whiff of Promethium with Ld 4).
Mech players will also be sticking Tech Priests and other characters in Automata units to give them buffs through High Tech Arcana. This opens them up to a weird rules interaction. Rules as Written, you have to take characteristic checks with the model with the worst stat in the unit and because Tech Priests are so dreadfully uncool compared to their Robot friends, you use theirs. Once they have a status, the whole unit does. This means that those previously unstatusable Automata, now can be bestatused. This can really mess with Mech player scoring, as they might be relying on Cybernetica’s Benefice to let them hold objectives, so it’s one to watch out for. As a Mech player the best way to counter these sorts of shenanigans is to instead use the Paragon of Metal Prime Benefit to independently grant your Robots scoring or simply use your Arch Magos on Abeyant; they’ll have an effective Cool 11 thanks to being Heavy.
There’s also a whole suite of cyber-magic statuses we’re just going to gloss over here; that’s another article for someone with bigger cogitator implants than me.
Driving Me Crazy
Vehicles can also take Statuses, but they interact with them in a completely different way. Lacking a CL/Ld stat, the two main ways to get Statuses on a Vehicle are by Glancing it (when your weapon’s Penetration total is equal to its AV) or hitting it with weapons with the Shock (x) rule.
Vehicles also clear Statuses differently. In the End phase, the same as Infantry, Vehicles can make one Repair test to clear one status by rolling a ‘6’ on a D6 (though some Vehicles have better Auto-Repair, see Rhinos, Mech Tanks etc). You can also speed this up, near the start of your turn by using units with the Battlesmith(x) trait to clear Statuses. In the Movement Phase, a unit with Battlesmith can make an INT check to remove (x) many Statuses, before or after it moves (actually a pretty good use for Tech Priests).
Glancing a Vehicle is pretty straight forward, but is reasonably hard to pull off as you’ll only ever have a 1 in 6 chance of doing it per hit. Also as its effect is randomised (being one of three potential options) you can’t really reliably neuter the impact of big fuck-off annoying tanks. Whilst you could try to ping them with Autocannons to do this, generally your best course of action is just blowing them up (I hear Meltas are quite good at doing that).
That being said, there are some handy anti-tank weapons that can do both. Any hit roll of a 5 or 6 with a Shock weapon confers its Status immediately to the Vehicle. These include (but are not limited to):
- Grav for Pinned (for trapping Tanks out of line of sight)
- Neutron and other big Lasers for Suppressed (for reducing shooting effectiveness)
- Obscure Mechanicum Rad weapons for Stunned (for arcane reasons)
It’s worth noting that Walkers (Dreadnoughts and Aethon Sentinels) are also affected by this rule. This is important to remember if your opponent has (somehow) brought a Fury of the Ancients list, and your usual status-inducing methods won’t overcome their Cool 10. Though, again, it’s often simpler just to destroy them.
Final Thoughts
So that’s Statuses. In all honesty I think it’s one of the most interesting changes in 3rd Edition. Having different Statuses that embody different battlefield conditions is a really immersive addition, but it also adds a tonne of strategic depth to gameplay. In our test games we were really surprised by how often these sorts of checks mattered. The ability to inflict or withstand these conditions, like a critical Line unit being denied a turn of scoring, can be the razor’s edge between victory and defeat. I’m super interested to see how everyone starts utilising this system and the depraved lengths Night Lords players will go to in order to proc their Legion ability.
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