Chapter Approved Analysis - Necrons

OVERLORD WINGS HERE, PATHETIC MORTALS. TIME TO BE IMPRESSED BY MY NEWLY MIGHTY LEGIONS.

WHAT'S THE SAME ABOUT EVERYTHING IN THIS PICTURE? IT ALL GOT CHEAPER! COWER FOOLS! Credit: Wings

OK, no, we're not going to do that because this is a serious analysis piece.

Welcome to our second Chapter Approved analysis. Following on from last week where I covered Craftworlds, this week we'll be looking at Necrons, the other army I play on the regular. By next Friday the elaborate system of nets and trip wires I have strung around the office should have captured at least one other Goonhammer writer and forced them to talk about their favoured faction, but for now you get me again, channelling my inner Overlord Wings to bring you all the hot news about evil robot skeletons.

The way we're going to do this is as follows:

1. Look at what our baseline - pick out some recent, successful lists and identify how many more or less points they have now.
2. Tour through the most significant units that changed and what impact that might have on strategies.
3. Come back to the lists we covered and examine how we might change them based on the update.
4. See if there are any whole new lists that might arise thanks to the changes.

Current Lists

Dino Ng's Tomb Blades

 

Eulis Sanders' Arks and Scythes

 

Some Idiot's C'tan Spam

Transcendent C'tan. Credit: Wings



 

Unit Changes

The Big Miss - Troops

Necron Warriors. Credit: Wings

We'll get the downer out of the way first - Necron Warriors desperately needed a one or two point cut, and didn't get them. I appreciate that their various quirks makes them something of a nightmare to properly balance, because the tipping point on them going from "bad" to "way too much", especially for smaller games (which GW are balancing for too) is razor thin. However, I feel like tossing traditional Necrons a bone and trying them out at 10ppm would have been reasonable and unlikely to smash anything too hard, especially as a bunch of other armies have picked up cuts to core units.

Immortals were much more reasonably priced and probably didn't need to move, but it really hurts the flexibility of list building that the cheapest troop unit comes in at 75pts. Cheaper characters (as we'll see in a sec) makes the option of trying some battalions ever so slightly more appealing, but I don't expect the drift towards running mostly vehicles and monstrous stuff to really slow down thanks to the lack of a cut here, and I think it's a missed opportunity to get the old silver tide back up and running.

Characters

Necron Overlord. Credit: Corrode

Damn near all of the Necron HQ choices (named and otherwise) went down in points, some of them pretty heftily, with only vanilla Crypteks (by far the most popular HQ in serious lists) and Trazyn the Infinite (already quite cheap) staying the same. This is just good news all round, as one of the most crippling problems for Necrons has always been how much of a tax including characters just to make legal detachments has been.

Pretty much all of the drops to the "generic" characters are highly relevant. Lords get ever closer to having a price tag that reflects how utterly pathetic they are, while filling mandatory slots with Overlords instead of Crypteks is now a real consideration thanks to their cut. Destroyer Lords and Catacomb Command Barges both get hefty enough cuts that they're a pretty interesting option if you want to take a character that actually does something, and Destroyer Lords with Voidreaper are a pretty neat threat to anything that flies in the direction of your lines. Catacomb Command Barges are basically just good now, and I expect to see people trying to slot them in to places where Overlords used to be.

Catacomb Command Barge. Credit: Wings

The final useful thing for the generic characters is that the price on resurrection orbs has finally come down to one where you might actually add them occasionally. If you're going in on big squads of Tomb Blades, Wraiths (which can gain reanimation through Repair Subroutines) or Destroyers it's definitely worth considering one to really punish your opponent if they narrowly miss a unit kill.

Over in Named Character land, the relevant cuts are probably:

• Imotekh
• Orikan

With "maybes" on:

• Anrakyr
• Szeras

Imotekh. Credit: Wings

Imotekh already features in top lists, especially ones that do feature an Immortal battalion. He has a good suite of abilities, is personally quite nails, gives you an extra command point and now he's cheaper. I expect to see him out and about a lot. Meanwhile, Orikan now clocks in at only 5PPM more than a regular chronometron Cryptek, so if you were going to take one of those in Sautekh you probably want him instead. I can plausibly see a list that's very heavy on Destroyers both existing and wanting him, as the extra radius on his Chronometron-equivalent will help the list be more mobile. Occasionally getting to turn into a C'tan and punch stuff is merely nice upside.

Anrakyr probably won't show up, as his on-paper most powerful ability (Lord of the Pyrrhian Legions) wants you to be heavy on Necron INFANTRY at a time when the metagame very much does not want you to do that. However, he has some other nice things going for him (being much better in combat than other overlords and being able to mind control vehicles), is a "wildcard" Overlord if any armies that want to play fast and loose with mixing up dynasties arise, and with big cuts to both Flayed Ones and Triarch Praetorians I guess there's the tiniest chance that melee INFANTRY actually gets there, at which point he's suddenly very good.

Szeras has been a pet unit of mine for a while, but despite getting a cut goes down in my estimation a bit thanks to the cut to Orikan. I'm pretty hot on Heavy Destroyers, as we'll see in a bit, and with those you really want a Chronometron effect around, which Szeras can't have. However, he's a very cost efficient package, and you're pretty much never unhappy to have him about.

Zandrekh and Obyron follow up the rear as sadly still being way too expensive to justify their inclusion. I feel like GW is (probably not unreasonably) very shy of pushing too hard on their cost because of the combo potential, but with everything else coming down in price around them I just don't think they'll ever get there.

Still, overall there's an absolute tonne to like here and I hopefully this will encourage people to at least try mixing list building up a bit.

C'tan

I am extremely hyped for this, let me tell you. All "character" C'tan got a big cut, with the Deceiver leading the charge by dropping an astounding 45pts to 180, the Nightbringer going down another healthy chunk to land at 155 and Transcendants going to 180. I think the latter could maaaybe have gone to 170 but whatever, I get to smash face with star gods with vastly increased efficiency and I love it.

The Deceiver is probably the most notable, as he's already an occasional include in "real" lists, providing a Phantasm-like effect attached to a decent body. With the cut I expect this to be a vastly more common choice, especially as having a source of Time's Arrow can give you a real high-roll out against armies leaning heavily on some Marine characters. I'll be obtaining one in the near future.

The Nightbringer is just a really good deal on "rate" now and potentially sneaks into lists on that basis. However, he doesn't super fit in to any currently popular strategies, so while the package is now a bargain it might turn out that no army actually wants it, especially because of how much more the Deceiver adds to regular strategies.

Realistically, a "normal" army is rarely going to pick a Transcendant C'tan over either of these and I don't think slotting three into one of the standard lists in the flex slots is that likely to be a winner even with a 20ppm discount, but I'm certainly very happy to be supported in being On My Bullshit and will be taking full advantage of this tasty cut as soon as possible.

Elite Infantry

Credit: Merton

There are a whole bunch of point cuts to various types of infantry, and for most of them I'm pretty confident in asserting that they aren't going to break through. Flayed Ones and Deathmarks are both a lot cheaper than they were but still don't really...do anything? Flayed ones suffer terribly from there really only being one way to boost charges from Deep Strike for the army (Implacable Conquerer, and it isn't an especially reliable one), while Deathmarks just don't really have a niche at the moment. I guess they're cheap enough now that if Genestealer Cults become top dog again including one unit as a "spoiler" is OK, but you're very unlikely to ever be happy you took them over two min squads of immortals against anyone else.

Lychguard are maybe closer but still too expensive for a unit that has all the aformentioned problems with delivery.

Of all of this category, Triarch Praetorians are the ones that maybe someone makes work. At either 200 or 220 for a full squad (depending on loadout) and a built-in 10" fly speed which helps actually deliver them, I don't think it's outside the possiblity that someone could do something with these?

I still don't think they will because of the two problems that have plagued this unit all the way from the Codex - no <dynasty> tag (so no Chronometron, most importantly) and no way of getting multi-damage melee weapons. Based on some of the more recent books, I'd expect if Judgement of the Triarch was written today it would probably give +1D, and that would fix a lot of their issues, but as it stands you put a lot of points into a unit that can do some damage but struggles to get either tough enough or vicious enough to really justify their cost. Also, if you want to make Necron melee work at this point, you probably just take Wraiths, as we'll see.

Good Vehicles

The Triarch Stalker and Ghost Ark both added more cuts to the already hefty ones they got last year. The former is now a really compelling thing to sneak one of into any shooty Necron list, and I think it's one of the more plausible options for actually making tweaks to the tournament lists featured above. At the price, I'd usually want to look at the twin heavy gauss or heat ray.

Ghost Arks got even cheaper and are now outrageously well priced for what they do, which is fly around being a nuisance and flaying hordes to death.They suffer the major issue of being pretty weak to Marine shooting, but at the price there's a degree to which you care, and if any Necron players actually want to use Warriors 3x10 in Ghost Arks is absolutely the correct way to start the list.

Bad Vehicles

Night Scythes, Monoliths, Obelisks and Annihilation Barges all got cuts, and across the board I very much still don't care. All remain fundamentally unsuited to the current state of 40K and beyond fixing with any point change they're likely to get.

Wraiths

Wraiths Devour some Harlequins. Credit: Wings & Flavivirus

I love Wraiths very much and it's clear that someone at GW does too, as they're really trying to make them good, and might have got there this time? Unlike a tonne of other Necron stuff, Wraiths are pretty OK against what current Marine lists are bringing. They don't love being shot with Thunderfires, but all that AP is going nowhere, and they're happy to tank stalker bolt rifle shots all day. They're also very good at eating most flavours of popular Marine ground forces, going through intercessors with extreme efficiency and not even being too terrible against Centurions.

252 points for a full squad is a serious draw, and is easily the most likely route to a melee Necron list that actually works. Current armies tend to be vicious killing machines, but there's really nothing that won't struggle a bit to go through three squads, and they give Necrons a degree of board control that no other options really give them. The challenge to making them work in lists is that they don't instantly fit with any other strategies that Necrons are packing. The lists that work do so through overwhelming firepower, and while adding in some flexibility can help and is something I expect to see tested, I'm not instantly convinced that it'll go anywhere, especially as in the lists that are packing Destroyers it also opens up Gangbusters as a secondary choice.

Still, expect to see these tested, and they're now at the power level where they could just open up whole new archetypes, although list building in Necrons is so "clunky" that I'd expect the options to leap out a bit more. Still, it's a very nice buff for lists like mine that are mixing it up a bit more, and that's an encouraging sign for their potential.

Heavy Destroyers

Destroyers. Credit: Wings

Saving what I think might be the sleeper hit out of the mainline units till last. Heavy Destroyers get a surprisingly massive cut, going to 37ppm including when you put a single one in a Destroyer squad. I think if you need to free up any points swapping out the model is an extremely obvious way to do it, but having had more time to digest the changes than were available for our initial review I think squads of these are serious contenders now. One of the perpetual problems of Necrons has been not really having cost effective ways of sticking Lascannons on the board, and 3x3 of these run you 333pts and stick nine such shots on the board that are mobile, easy to hide in deployment, pretty resilient to no-LOS shooting (as they're T5 and your opponent has to carefully wipe whole squads or risk a blowout) and can easily re-roll 1s to hit and wound all the time.

That's...almost exactly what "normal" Necron lists needed some way of taking that didn't mean going all in on Arks or whatever. the fact that they benefit from all of the INFANTRY buffs like Chronometrons and Lords means there's a reason to use those in lists. The rate is also so good that I can see armies currently in on the vehicle plans testing switching out to these in some of the slots, but much like with the Wraiths I think the fact that that sacrifices the consistent threat profile might keep them out.

Still, for people (including me) trying to make "off meta" stuff work this is an absurdly good gift, and obtaining nine of these is very high up my shopping list.

Forge World

Ugh they buffed Forge World stuff so now I have to learn what they do. Please wait while a happy hold jingle plays.

♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫

page flipping sounds

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Turns out that Canoptek Acanthrites and Canoptek Tomb Stalkers are still terrible, but maaaybe you can have some fun with Tomb Sentinels? They've very swingy, but they're pretty cheap and running them as Sautekh so they don't get hit penalties when they pop up probably makes them at least OK? Not, like, kicking the meta stuff out of lists levels of good, but at least fine.

This has been an important Forge World update.

Tweaking the Lists

So, with all of these new toys to play with, what changes about the two tournament lists we included.

Not...not a whole lot?

Getting no points back is a contributing factor here, but although Necrons got lots of buffs all about, as I've tried to communicate during the review, none of it really fits into the current lists. Dino's list I would expect to just leave straight alone - find something to spend the refunded points from Imotekh on and otherwise don't tweak it.

Eulis' list is a little more amenable to trying some stuff out in, and there are a few packages you could look at. The easiest change would be to do something like 2 Tesseract Arks out in favour of three Triarch Praetorians with twin Gauss and finding some way of then massaging the rest of the units to use up the 55 you've got left without opening up Gangbusters as secondary, though I'm not immediately clear how you earth those extra points without doing that or giving your opponent easy kills in ITC. Not having access to small "building blocks" of actually worthwhile stuff is a real problem for Necrons in general. I guess a unit of four scarab bases isn't a horrible objective grabber and if your opponent wants to kill them it does at least divert shots. That might be worth trying just because the re-roll 1s from the Praetorians soup up the Doom Scythes, but I'm skeptical at best.

All in all - I expect successful Necron players to keep doing what they've been doing, but I can't see big changes coming for them immediately.

For me in my dumb bullshit corner however...

Another Route

Necron Horde. Credit: Wings



 

Now obviously you're going to have to take my word for this, but the C'tan spam list gets so absurdly better between the Heavy Destroyer package, discounts across the board and (most notably) the Deceiver getting a spectacular cut that I will be open palm slamming this bad-boy into the next major I go to once LVO is done.

The two problems I've had with the list when I've run it out before are:

1.) Not enough ways to score a kill turn one or capitalise on it. This is a problem that I think 9 efficiently priced, hide-able Heavy Gauss shots solve pretty much immediately.

2.) Slightly too fragile on the board. Well, now there's just more - the Wraith squad is max sized, there are more destroyer platforms and they can hang back more, and my warlord is flying around on a near indestructible bumper car, cackling all the while.

Finally, in some matchups (notably, anything when they castle) the Deceiver gives you a shot at just a ludicrous alpha strike with a good roll on his redeploy. If you land a 3 on his ability you can bring up the Wraiths and two more C'tan, use power swap to ensure you have Cosmic Fire on all three and just vomit a nightmare, army-deleting torrent of Mortal Wounds onto some smug Tau. That'll show em.

I...want to be playing this list now, but I also have so many elves to paint.

God dammit GW.

 

Wrap Up

So that's the Necrons. Probably not as immediately exciting for tournament players as Craftworlds were, but still plenty of boosts going round especially (and I think this is important) for people trying to make more off-meta stuff work in a tough world.

If you think I've missed anything out, want to tell me how to actually break the meta with Wraiths (genuinely, please, I want to know) or want to complain about me making fun of Forge World yet again (keep screaming at me, it will only make my opinions worse) hit us up at contact@goonhammer.com or via our Facebook Page.

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