Warhammer 40K: Imperial Knights Extra Beef Is a Hot Mess
Goatboy here with a chat about the new Imperial Knight Index update, and what it DIDN’T fix – all that beef.
Yes the Imperial Knights army needed to get in line with all the Chaos Knight chassis changes. This meant using their new Index update to bring their toughness down and their wounds up. It also meant the army gets updated to match their points as well with the Bigs dropping a lot. What it didn’t bring with it is the rules tweaks to help justify the bigs dropping so much. Be ready for a Wet Hot Knight Summer coming to your table top near you until we see the new Imperial Knight Codex drop later this year.
Feel No Pain – A Nagging Problem
So why is it going to be bad? Well if you remember GW seems to be moving the game away from massive amounts of Feel No Pain. It adds time to games and is really hard to balance properly. This has them really pushing to either put the Feel No Pain at a stock 6+ or just removing it from armies all together. What this index update does is leave this in the game.
Remember Feel No Pain is very powerful on something with a large pool of wounds. A 6+ Feel No Pain grants that giant Pile of wounds an extra wound for each 6 they have. This can be huge especially when you have giant knights sitting on 26 wounds. This basically gives them an extra 4 wounds on top of their 26 and if they get Honored it becomes even more wounds – around 8 more. That is a whole lot of beef to try and dig through.
Can you imagine coming to a table that has 4 of these Imperial Knight jerks with basically 30 wounds each and a whole lot of attitude? Speaking of Attitude how insane is Canis Rex going to be? He shows up in every army now and he is going to be even bigger of a jerk. He will come at you so fast, throwing out free strats, and wrecking you with Sustained 2 hits. It is wild to think something thus powerful is under 400 points. Really it is just nutty to see how many bigs will show up and cause problems.
Everyone Has to Deal With the Beef
Will this be enough to put a damper in the Death Guard party will also be living thru? Maybe and I wonder as Chaos Knights do have some play will we see a return of a pile of anti vehicle firepower from armies that can bring it? Will we see two Giant Knight armies per 8 man team for a few months? Is it time to find all your Imperial Knights and get ready to throw down on the tabletops?
It is going to be an interesting time for a bit so will see. I do feel it is wild to have such a large pool of wounds on the table top and have an opposing army have to dig through them. I also like giant monster robots so at least giving them some play might be fun. It will at least force armies to rethink their design and either go towards a massed lethal front or find some other way to “dig” thru the 26+ pile of wounds on their neoprene objective.
So Imperial Knights, Enjoy your extra beef…while it lasts.
