So where am I with the Grey Knights? Still figuring this out, but two core concepts that I know are mission critical are using FIREBASES and BLOB units. My own terminology, feel free to offer your own nomenclature.
The way I see it, is basically you have two camps of Grey Knight players- the purists and the spearhead players. The spearhead players follow the usual trends of 5th edition and build on it with the strengths of Grey Knight psybolt ammo- small groups of purifiers to max psycannons, razorbacks, and henchman spam chimeras backed by 3-6 psyrifleman dreds.
No need to write any articles on this build or even talk about it- set it up, and roll lots of dice. Leafblower on steroids, I’ll let the BOLS guys come up with a new name for this type of list. I really hope that the rumors of us being in the final days of 5th edition is true as this is the pinnacle of boring for 5th.
If this is the type of army that you are playing I’m not personally crapping on you for playing it, it does maximize the best of rules for 5th, and once again marines take it to a new level, but is it challenging to play? Tournaments won’t be a problem where you are matched with opponents, but in pickup or club games it will get old playing against said lists real fast.
On the other hand we have pure Grey Knights were all your units are GK- no inquisitorial henchman or ‘Guard inducted vehicles.
Given that Grey Knights are now the strongest book to play hands down, why would you want to gimp yourself right out of the box and not go with spearhead spam?
Good question.
Maybe it’s a fluff thing or a personal bias, OR maybe you want an army to play that is still strong enough but doesn’t play into the money grubbing hands of GW. Pure Grey Knights is a small, effective, elite, low model count army, and low model count means less to buy.
I’ll leave the reason up to you.
About blobs and firebases.
Blobs first, firebases to follow.
An elite army needs to say together, close and compact, to maximize its footprint and killing power, while having other units close by incase things go south and you need a little backup. Problem with this, is the fact that you have to navigate the entire board. As much as you want to say in your little corner all castled up, you have to move out to get objectives and accomplish mission goals.
You don’t have enough units to spread out like horde armies, or even regular marine armies, so instead you create “no-fly” zones projected across the board. Check out this setup…
So I’m on the right camping on an objective and I want to get the one on the left, but so does my opponent. Other armies might send out a unit to intercept anything incoming, kill it, speedbump it, tarpit, whatever you call it, but the ‘Knights can’t. What they can do is put a large unit in the way that you really can’t shoot to death, don’t want to assault, and a unit that can dish out some serious firepower pain.
This is the blob unit and terminators do it best.
Take a large group of terminators and add a librarian for some flavor- side note here- ANY GK list you are playing must have a libby in it- these guys are like Farseers in an Eldar army- you would never ever think of not playing one.
Push them to the center of the table in cover and pop off the shrouding so now you have a 2+/3+ save or a 2+/2+ if you go to ground. Add master crafted psycannons and regular psybolts and that is a LOT of mid range hurty shots, on top of halberds and sanctuary for the assault. I’m also here to say that halberds are 100% mandatory and psybolt ammo on stormbolters DOES have its place with certain GK builds.
Paladins only make said blob unit all the more ridiculous and more punishing with even more psycannons. Pushing mid field to deny sections of the table with what you project also means an incinerator might have some use, and not just for stupid wound allocation tricks on your Paladins- which hey if it worked for nob bikers, and thunder wolves, it’s good to go for the ‘Knights also.
We have the blob, now just need the firebase…
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