Necrautopsy FAQ Updates

Well, the Necron FAQs are out and have, rather annoyingly, invalidated a bit of I’ve written in the Necrautopsy series, most keenly with the Deathmarks.  When discussing them, I worked on the assumption that attached members of the Court could teleport down with them and a lot of the things I was talking about relied on finding nice Cryptek matches to make the most of this.  We can (almost) ignore this now, which is a shame.

First, a bit of an explanation as why I came to my now erroneous conclusion.  I thought that the Court would work kind of like Wolfguard.  When you attach a Wolfguard to a unit of Scouts, then he doesn’t make the squad lose the ability to outflank and in fact gains it to keep up.  I therefore thought it was going to be the same principle with the Crypteks and Lords.  Whoops.

There is good news for the Deathmarks though, if you don’t mind losing the ability to piggyback onto your opponent’s reserve rolls.  The Marking ability of the Deathmarks also carries over to their attached characters, which opens up the nasty combo of the Harbinger of Despair, whose AP1 flamer template now wounds on 2s against the marked unit.  Add that to the fact that you can teleport about the board with the Veil of Darkness, then you have a tight and potentially devastating assassin squad for 155 points.  You’d need to be bold with the Deep Strike placement, but at only 155 points, it shouldn’t be crippling if you lose them.

Anyway, enough about Deathmarks.  There are more horrible things the FAQ opens up for the discerning robot Overmind.  The official seal of approval for Writhing Worldscape stacking with Tremorstaves and Orikan’s Temporal Snares is blood-pressuring-heightening nastiness to abuse (if rather expensive to lay the groundwork for).  For those who don’t know, Tremorstaves are blast weapons that force any unit they hit to move as if though they were in difficult terrain for their next movement phase, whereas Temporal Snares inflicts this on the opponent’s entire army during the first turn.  Writhing Worldscape upgrades difficult terrain to dangerous terrain.  You can see the horror implicit in such a combo.  Won’t hurt shooting armies much, but an assault horde? Nasty.

You can also now attach two member of a Court to the same squad, provided they come from two different Courts.  This brings up some nice 1-2 punches, giving the attached squad the advantages of say, a res orb and a warscythe along with Cryptek equipment. 

One combo that I like quite a lot (given my affection for the anvil squad of warriors) is packing two Harbingers of the Storm both with Lightning Fields.  What this means is that any unit that assaults the unit will have to suffer 2D6 S8 AP5 hits before landing a blow!  It also significantly increases the quantity of short range fire (8 haywire shots within 12”) without breaking the bank. The Harbingers of the Storm are only 25 points base and the Lightning field is a snip at only 10.  Bung a cheap Overlord or regular Lord in there with a Res Orb and you have a unit that will pose a risk to any approaching unit.  Bitching.

Spyder spawning and Ghost Ark repairs have been downgraded a little, no longer being auto-successes, which isn’t too much of a shock.  The Entropic Strike rule vs vehicles has been cleared up a little so that we now know that, yes, you roll to reduce Armour values on vehicles and then you roll to pen on the new values.  This was something that I’d pretty much assumed was the case (after a GW staffer and I went through the rules for it), but it’s nice to have it in black and white.  Most of the stuff in the FAQ are things that we had figured out (res orbs increasing the Everliving roll as well as Reanimation, for example).  By clearing this up in an unambiguous fashion, the Necron FAQ has done what an FAQ is supposed to do, so I guess I’m happy with it.

I just have to rearrange my Deathmark squads.

And buy a C’tan…