New Warhammer! Excitement! Terror! Skies falling out of the sky! What’s a Necron to do? Fortunately for you, you’ve got Requizen here to take a look!
New 40k is on the way, and it’s gearing up to be a massive shift in lots of ways. Movement profiles! Fixed hit values! No more templates! So much going on! And the burning question on everyone’s mind – how will this effect the coolest army in the game, Necrons? Let’s break it down based on what GW has shown us so far on their Community Page. Also, this is all speculation, so bear that in mind!
Movin Slow
Unit Profiles will now have Move stats on them. This means our Warriors won’t necessarily chug along at the same speed as a Space Marine just because both are Infantry. Given that our schtick is slow but implacable, I’m guessing our moves will be something like 5″ at the fastest for foot units, maybe 4″ for things like Lychguard or Immortals. I hope we’re faster than that, but realistically it would fit with the fluff.
However, it also gives room for other things to have different Moves. Flayed Ones that move 8″*? Destroyers that move faster than foot dudes? Come on, they’re on giant antigrav engines! Wraiths and Praetorians will still retain their quick moves, no doubt, given that they’re our fast shock troops, but who knows for other units? I think it’s a great chance for our individual units to get some personality. Tomb Blades should move faster than Wraiths, though neither are slow. Scarabs maybe shouldn’t move as fast as Wraiths or Praetorians, but still faster than other foot units. Lots of places to play around with this!
My big hope is that C’tan are quicker than 6″, but I’ll talk about them later.
Tearing up the Shooting Phase
Shooting is changing quite a bit. First off, with the removal of AV and the “anything can hurt anything” update, Gauss is going to have to change by necessity. Now, they don’t necessarily need to give us a special rule to replace it – but do note that the Gauss weapons in Shadow War: Armageddon re-rolled all failed wounds. Army-wide Shred would be SICK.
Similarly, looking at Shadow War: Armageddon, Tesla gets Sustained Fire, which essentially gives it extra shots per turn. That’s different from exploding 6s of today, but similar.
With AP shifting to an armor modification rather than a straight up ignore, I think we can expect many of our weapons to change to match. Our weaponry has been designed more around attrition rather than straight up destruction, so I would imagine most Gauss and Tesla weapons to be Rend -0, maybe Rend -1 at best. However, we do have some heavy hitters. Destroyers, Monoliths, and Doomsday Arks have the possibility of taking advantage of the new Rend system to be quite scary at Rend -2 or Rend -3*. Very likely if Heavy Destroyers follow the same style as Lascannons, making them not only cool looking, but a very solid choice for all the big things people will no doubt end up taking.
Goodbye AV, I won’t miss you
AV vs Wounds is such a sensitive topic, and people are still, ahem, discussing heatedly about it’s removal in NewHammer. However, my stance is a simple one.
Bugger off AV, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
I LOVE my Necron vehicles. LOVE THEM. We have a giant floating brick. We have a massive cannon. We have a sweet spider-esque walker with a gun underneath that buffs the dudes around it. We have floating thrones that dudes can swing Warscythes off of. But every time, EVERY TIME I bring one to the table it just gets exploded or Immobilized in Turn 1 because the Damage Chart is so freaking brutal.
Well guess what now, suckas? What you gonna do about a Monolith with 20 wounds*? Or a Catacomb Command Barge with a 2+ save*? Even Stalkers will be worth taking* now that they can’t get instagibbed by some random Guardsman with a single Lascannon.
I have 3 Monoliths. If they’re good in a few months, I’ll be putting them all on the table at the same time. YOU DON’T KNOW HOW EXCITED THAT MAKES ME.
On top of that, the Catacomb Command Barge is such a cool concept. A leader, hanging out on front lines, giving commands but also taking the time to smack a punk down with his weapon of choice! Currently, they’re so hard to justify because they just get blasted off the table, but I would love to have one or two leading my army in a big way. If vehicles look as good as the current Dreadnought profile, I can’t wait to put lots of Necron armor on the table and dare my opponents to fight me.
Do the Monster Mash
You know what’s another thing that’s awesome and you don’t see that often? C’tan.
And that’s a shame, because C’tan are awesome thematically, the models are bitchin, and they really should be scarier on the tabletop than they are. But with only a 6″ move, 4 wounds, and a 4++, you don’t get much out of one. They go down to small arms fire super fast unless you take an Artifact from a supplement that everyone forgot about, for crying out loud.
No more. With a bump up in wounds* and the ability to have a different move characteristic, there’s plenty or room for our favorite space demi-gods to come back and be a real threat on the tabletop. I have no idea what they’re going to look like in the new edition – we can only hope they lose the terrible random shooting table and gain enough Wounds and durability to be worthy of the terror they supposedly bring. They’re supposed to be giant aliens who ate suns and doomed an entire race to lose their bodies – and they have the same wound count as a Chapter Master on foot. No way man. No way. I hope beyond hope that putting a C’tan on the table fills your opponent with dread and causes him to shoot his entire army into it out of fear.
Flyers
Heck dude I dunno. We’ll find out soon I guess?
Hack and Slash
New damage profiles are cool and all for guns, but you know what are totally dope? Warscythes. YEAH BABY.
Doing 1 wound worth of poking on a swing is way too weak for our patented deathsticks. I’m hoping to see Rend -2 (at the very least) and Damage d3 or heck, even Damage 3! These things are supposed to be able to slice through all but the toughest armor in a single swing! I’d love to see these iconic weapons get an update and be a real scary thing to see across the table.
Death from Hyperspace
The scatter dice is also dead! Long live the Scatter Dice! In Age of Sigmar, “Deep Striking” units don’t scatter, but only have to start 9″ away from any enemy model, which seems like a reasonable tradeoff, and one that would work quite well for 40k as well! You gain mobility and surprise, but your opponent can at least somewhat dictate where you can come down.
Not only does this make the Monolith even more awesome, it also makes Deathmarks potentially even better. If we don’t have to scatter on Deep Striking, everyone’s favorite metallic assassins could make a comeback as true terrors to backfield units. It would be amazing to see armies incorporate multiple units of Deathmarks to create a really reactionary and terrifying beta-strike force that forces the opponent to huddle up and hide his important units. Which is exactly what Deathmarks are supposed to do!
I think if Deep Strike no longer has the randomness of scatter associated with it*, Deathmarks may become a real mainstay of the Necron force!
Excitement!
I can’t wait for NewHammer. Even just from a game perspective, it sounds fun and interesting in a way that 40k hasn’t been to me in a while. But as a Necron player, I’m super hyped. This is a chance for GW to make thematic units like the Monolith and C’tan into something not only worth putting on the table, but that elicit the response from the opponent that the fluff would suggest. It’s also a chance for them to look at the balance issues that have made Necrons problematic in these past few years (impossible for some armies to kill, helpless against others), and create a force that is centralized around the idea of durability but has the capacity to make great games in most matchups. I can’t wait, and only wish it were here now!
I want to do another one or two of these when we have more info, but feel free to leave your thoughts as well! Necrons are clearly the best, coolest, and most manly of factions in the game, so it’s only reasonable to speculate rampantly about their future.
*rampant speculation, do not take seriously**
**or do, but don’t blame me
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