Games Workshop - Warhammer 40,000 - Necrons Canoptek Doomstalker

Product Information

We’ve already chatted through the Dynasty traits, so that just leaves the generic ones. These are mostly pretty similar to what they were before, and honestly several of them end up looking like a bit of a downgrade. Wings: This strat is incredible, especially once you bring Cryptothralls into the mix as we’ll get to, and in test games it’s been where the majority of my CP have ended up going. Leaders are Crucial: The Command Protocols detachment rule (plus the stratagems) reward you for having a Leader in as many units as possible and/or bringing along the Sovereign Coronal to substitute for it. Don’t skimp on including these.

Next up, shooting. This is an area where the Q3 2023 Dataslate hit the best Necron options quite a bit, so there’s a few ways you can go with this. Lokhust Heavy Destroyers and Doomsday Arks are your top quality choices, but you definitely pay for them. Doomsdays are just all-round good and durable, but hard to hide, a little swingy and run you 210pts each. Lokhust Heavies, on the other hand, are extremely good at killing whichever target you build them for, and fairly easy to hide, but way, way more fragile than you’d normally expect from a 150pts “heavy shooting” unit. You generally need something that can kill enemy tanks, so either three Gauss Lokhusts or a Doomsday is a fine place to start here, which you can either supplement with the choices below, or a second unit of the same (with the option on Enmitic Lokhusts on a second unit). Immortal Pride gets re-written and is, sadly, way less good. It now gives the model a 5+++ against Mortal Wounds and gives CORE units nearby immunity to combat attrition modifiers. A substantial downgrade on both halves sadly, and probably not that great. Finally, Implacable Conquerer (re-roll charge aura) also gets the CORE treatment, making it way less useful as it can’t be comboed with Ophydians or Flayed Ones, both of whom want this effect a lot. One such fear ability, we got to see during the preview. Nightmare Shroud is simple enough if enemies are within 6 inches of this unit they get -1 leadership and -1 to combat attrition. Solid and simple, hopefully, its points/datasheet will justify taking him so we can see more of that spectral goodness. Chronomancer You only get one shot but at S10 -4AP and 3D3 damage, it hits almost like a Castellan volcano lance. If you want to go for screen-killing, you can also throw on the enmitic exterminator for 3d3 S7 -1 AP shots. Just taking a complete shot in the dark on this one…but we feel like the gauss destructor is going to be wildly more popular. If you do take a squad of 2-3, it also says that any number can take whichever weapon (they can be mixed). In case you want an all-around decent firebase, you could do something like two gauss destructors and one enmitic exterminator.Honestly, I’d say Warlord Traits are the one real area of disappointment in the book. I expect you mostly take either the Sautekh, Nephrekh or Szerakhan ones on your Warlord, buy your biggest melee nasty Enduring Will and maybe throw out Thrall of the Silent King when you have a use for it. Relics At the start of each battle round, if any NECRONS CHARACTER units from your army are on the battlefield, the command protocol that you assigned to that battle round becomes active for your army until the end of that battle round. Each command protocol is made up of two directives. When a command protocol becomes active for your army, reveal it to your opponent and select one of its directives. Until the assigned command protocol stops being active, while a unit that is eligible to benefit from this ability is on the battlefield, that unit benefits from the selected directive. I’ve definitely already noticed this impacting my list-building choices, and it’ll also have a big impact on positioning during games, as there’s going to be a real trade-off in some turns between staying in range for protocols or going out hunting. You Have Some of the Toughest Units in the Game: Fully buffed Lychguard and Warrior units are exceptionally tough to kill, while some of your higher-end Characters like C’tan shards, Szeras and Catacomb Command Barges with the Sempiternal Weave die harder than the vast majority of stuff in their weight class.

If all models in that unit have their starting number of wounds, but that unit is not at its Starting Strength, one destroyed model is returned to that unit with one wound remaining. With the flavor of time-bending, their special ability helps to make it easier for them to get into combat as well as soak up fire. If a unit is within 9 inches you can choose it to re-roll charge rolls and get a 5+ Invulnerable save until your next command phase. Flayed Ones Enough CHARACTERs dotted around to spread the effect. Here, being able to take two Crypteks in a single HQ slot helps, as does the option of the Hexmark Destroyer, a cheap non-HQ character who can drop in wherever needed. Command Protocols: A set of special rules that activate one-per-turn and grant your characters buff auras if certain conditions are met. After both sides have deployed, but before you have determined who will have the first turn, you must assign a different one of the command protocols below to each of the first five battle rounds, and note this down secretly on your army roster.

Heavier hits to the top four Factions left Necrons better able to compete with them, and the removal of 10-model Custodes units and reduction in Thousand Sons’ power were particularly welcome. The other big advantage of going this way is that many of the strong board control lists running as custom dynasties make use of many of the same tools, so buying in this direction gives you quite a bit of flexibility. When a unit disembarks from a TRANSPORT model, set it up on the battlefield so that it is wholly within 3" of that TRANSPORT model and not within Engagement Range of any enemy models. If, for any reason, a disembarking model cannot be set up, that model’s unit cannot disembark.

Protocol of the Hungry Void: Additional -1AP on 6s to wound when fighting OR +1S in the first round of combat. Favoured by Novokh. Obyron can tag-team with Zandrekh, and provides Fight First for the attached unit. Fight First is super good in 10th, but my vibe is that it isn’t quite needed on any of the units you can join, and you’d rather have a durability buff. Right up front, the substantially increased breadth of Reanimation Protocols and Living Metal is great. We’ll dive into the specifics of the new version of Reanimation in a second, but it just being everywhere without you having to think about it now is great. Same goes for Living Metal – with lots of multi-wound options having received a big glow-up, this applying to all of them is a nice minor upside. It’s also wild on C’tan shards thanks to their Necrodermis rule preventing them from losing more than three wounds in a phase. That’s all that really needs to be said about that, and Dimensional Translocation is just a consolidation of a bunch of effects that would otherwise have been printed on lots of sheets, so again we don’t need to go deep on it. Let’s look at the two big hitters from this section. Reanimation ProtocolsLet’s imagine that you’re now into the game and want to start flensing the galactic usurpers into nothingness. Are there tools to help with that? Yes – especially if you like using rapid fire gauss weapons. There seems to be a general trend in this book that rapid fire gauss is being positioned as the “default” weapon setup, and you get a few options for this. When a CORE INFANTRY unit shoots with rapid fire weapons, you can spend 1CP for Relentless Onslaught, giving you extra hits on unmodified 6s. With any gauss weapon, including the new reapers, you can also pop Disintegration Capacitors, auto-wounding on unmodified 6s to hit. Put them together and each 6 is one auto-wound and one extra hit – spicy stuff if you’re running Mephrit especially. You can combine this further with the upgraded Solar Pulse, which now strips a target of cover for the whole phase rather than just against one volley. Overall, I am pleased about this change. While it hurts some units, most notably the large Destroyer squads that were staples of older builds, I’m reasonably convinced that the payoff in making the core 1W infantry much, much better is worth it, and it being rolled out for free to a bunch of Canoptek stuff is just gravy. Command Protocols Targeting Relay - Triarch Stalkers are equipped with advanced targeting relay systems to transmit targeting data and enhance the accuracy of other Necron units shooting at the same target as the stalker. Repair Subroutines – Not needed now that all Canoptek have RP by default. The best kind of missing stratagem! One is my homage to BSG. The other is a collection of Troops bits. All credit goes to others. The base images were all free on the web (either Thingiverse or MyMiniFactory or 3DCult) and all I can take credit for is cutting pieces I liked from one image and rescaling and adding them in an ascetically pleasing manner to another in MeshMixer. There are bits from about a dozen or more bashed into these STLs and if you see a piece that is yours and you want me to take it down, please say so.

Having these powerful, workhorse effects available immediately makes it more likely these will get used, but obviously the second half needs to pay off as well. The Circumstances of Awakening list is a lot more out-there, providing flashy effects that align well with certain playstyles, and for my money the reason you’re going to choose to take a custom Dynasty over a named one is if you can come up with a strategy that uses one of these well in combination with one of the flat buffs from the first half. Necrons feel like they’re going to reward players who really get to know their army. There’s enough raw power and toughness here to be forgiving in early games, but a deep understanding of how best to use your forces is going to be needed to get the most out of them. The faction also has a lot of support for themed armies – powerful options are available that will reward going deep on either Canoptek constructs or Destroyer Cult units. This is also great news for existing Necron players – pretty much whatever set of tools you have access to, there will be a way to put them together that leverages the new book. The update is especially exciting if you favoured Warrior or Canoptek-based lists, both of which look vastly more interesting compared to 8th, where Immortals, Destroyers and vehicles were the main game in town – and on that note, let’s look at what the book covers. What’s in the Book? Purge Corps Deltic-9 is led by a Tech-Priest Manipulus by the name of Skand, who goes to war protected from enemy fire by a squad of 10 Skitarii Vanguard . Manipulus Skand can choose to deploy with the Aspergilla of Tarentum Enhancement to mist his allies with an energy-diffusing oil that improves survivability, or he can boost his bodyguards’ weapons with extra range and cover-penetrating capabilities using Overcharged Electropositors . Each time a unit's reanimation protocols are enacted, make Reanimation Protocol rolls for that unit by rolling a number of D6 equal to the combined Wounds characteristics of all the reassembling models. Each Reanimation Protocol roll of 5+ is put into a pool. A Reanimation Protocol roll can never be modified by more than -1 or +1.First up for new(ish) relics is the Voltaic Staff. This has been moved out from Mephrit to be a generic relic staff of light, and it’s basically just really good – it fire lots of AP-2 D2 shots at range, and is +1S and D2 in melee as well. One of the huge gaps in the old relic list was a way of tuning a character for range and melee, and this immediately closes that gap and I think becomes one of the faction’s best relics. I expect to take this on my Catacomb Command Barge (the ideal wielder) pretty much every game. The other new toy is more of a comedy option, being a relic Tachyon Arrow. You can still only fire it once a game, but when you do it’s S16 AP-5 and flat damage 6. Is it worth your slot? Probably not. Is it the funniest possible thing to do to a random character who’s strayed away from LoSir? Absolutely.