No, it’s not an April fools joke, Kill Team fans. It looks like Games Workshop went in and brought us a balance update for Kill Team early, bumping up what everyone expected at the end of the month by a couple of weeks.

We’re going to break down the changes here for you, but there' s a big ol’ elephant in the room to address before we do. As of this writing, it looks like some of the PDFs on the rules download page are the exact same PDF as before, despite the fact that it says that these items were updated today. Right now, we don’t know if that's because of some weird glitch in the system, or maybe GW meant to update those items but didn't, or perhaps even a cruel cosmic joke on April Fools day. Right now, the teams updates in limbo are:

Wolf Scouts
Battleclade
Approved Ops 2025

The team here is going to keep an eye on these items, and if they do update with actual changes, we will be sure to make the proper changes here.

With that out of the way, let's get into the meat of this. Right now, we have updates for Murderwing, the Approved Ops Tournament Companion, and a small update to Plague Marines.

Murderwing

Raven Guard Murderwing. Credit: NotThatHenryC

I don’t particularly enjoy being negative when I write about things. I think it sucks to read, and no one walks away happy, particularly me. So, I’m going to start with Murderwing and get it out of the way, because boy I’m frustrated with these changes.

The most minor change is that the Chaos Lord’s Boons of Damnation rule has been clarified so that it only gives extra damage when you strike with an attack dice, so you can’t try to be funky and add extra damage to something like Clawed Armor
The Depredator can only use his Carving Blow rule once per activation, and cannot use it if he uses the Clawed Armor boost action.
Malicious Narcissism no longer guarantees you activate last with your last guy. Instead, you can now use it if you have less ready operatives than your opponent, and then delay that operatives activation until there's only one ready operative left.
If you boost with the Jump Pack rule during the charge action, you don’t get the extra 2” of move.

Prior to this, Murderwing was in a very odd balance spot where depending on the map you played against them, you had a very different experience. On Volkus, the team was too strong, as Murderwing was able to hide all game on vantage and abuse Malicious Narcissism and boost to score easy points without much counterplay. On close quarters maps, the team couldn’t rely on this game plan, so it struggled much more than it did on Volkus. This led to Murderwing having a really unfun play experience on Volkus and performing well on winrate, but also failing to really win very many big events. They clearly needed a nerf, but its a tricky nerf to pull off, requiring a precise scalpel rather than a sledgehammer.

Credit: Robert "TheChirurgeon" Jones

Unfortunately for Murderwing, they didn’t get the scalpel. They got the sledgehammer.

The Depredator change and Narcissism change are good changes, especially the Depredator change, since throwing out 4d3 of damage in combat without fear of retaliation was too good. The Boost change here is just brutal though. It hampers Murderwing’s ability to not only get into combat, where almost all their offensive potential lies, as well as making it hard for the team to get consistent access to their offensive tricks like Clawed Armor and Predators Above. The change also doesn’t do anything to stop Murderwing’s uninteractive game plan of hiding on vantage with boost, probably making MW players rely on it even more than before since it’s much harder to set up non-reciprocal charges. Murderwing playstyle on Volkus will likely now lean on the team engaging their opponent even less while playing keep a way to score flank, while their Tomb World/Gallowdark plan gets even worse.

Put together with the other changes, my feeling is that Murderwing is going to lean even more on the things that made people frustrated with them, while causing the team to struggle harder on any map that isn’t Volkus. Again, this team needed changes, but I don’t think this is it.

Approved Ops 2025 Tournament Companion

We can now dispel the dark clouds and return to being excited about things with the update to the Approved Ops 2025 tournament companion. Octarius maps are back!

Ork Kill Team Octarius Terrain by Crab-stuffed Mushrooms

The update to the tournament companion now includes official rules support for the Octarius terrain that was first released with the initial second edition release set, providing keywords for each terrain piece and six new official layouts. Now, there was no one who said you couldn’t use this terrain in your games of KT prior to this update, but the official support for Octarius terrain is very welcome all the same, especially for event organizers who want to add more table types to their events.

It's nice to have a second open terrain option that isn’t Bheta-Decima. The layouts and ruin style of Ocatrius draw a quick comparison to Volkus, especially since both have plenty of vantage terrain to take advantage of, but Octarius makes itself unique in a few ways. The first is that there is considerably less heavy terrain, as the ramshackle barricades all have the light keyword, making seek light or sniping from high places much more threatening. Additionally, Octarius’s lack of strongholds means it’s much harder for melee teams to stage up and threaten the middle with little threat of getting shot. Both of these are real boons for shooting teams, who have struggled this edition where melee is king, though theres still enough staging areas on these maps for close combat teams to still have play.

As for the rules themselves, there does seem to be one issue with the Oil Pump terrain where the actual terrain piece itself doesn’t have any attached keywords outside of clarifying the second story is vantage and the pump head and spigot are both exposed, so hopefully that gets fixed real soon. Until then, you’ll need to be clear with your opponent as to the keywords for the Oil Pump.

Missing keywords aside, I’m very excited to see these maps added in an official capacity, and I hope that we see Octarius layouts quickly enter the wider tournament circuit.

Plague Marines

Plague Marines (Photo Courtesy of Musterkrux)

Last thing to touch on is Plague Marines, who got a buff to the Poison Vents equipment piece. The rules have been rewritten so that now, if you activate within 3” of a Plague Marine operative, they roll a D3 and on a 3+ you get a poison token. If you already had a Poison token when you activate within 3”, you take D3 damage instead of 1. I’m unsure if this will push Poison Vents into being good enough to make regular play, especially with how strong the other equipment options are, but it’s a nice buff to what was traditionally Plague Marines worst equipment choice into something that will probably see play.

Final Thoughts

It’s hard to give final thoughts on this update right now, since as of this writing it’s unclear as to what's going on with Battleclade, Wolf Scouts, and Approved Ops. Looking at what we have though, I’m both elated and annoyed with the update.

As I’ve already grumbled about at length, the Murderwing changes seem like a bridge too far, pushing the team further into the playstyle that made people want to pull their hair out while at the same time making the close quarters gameplan even worse for the team. While I think the team will still do fine in tournaments -- the Astartes chassis is inherently good enough to take you pretty far -- I now think it’s one of the weaker marine teams unless you abuse boost to play keep away all game long on Volkus. In the words of Roger Daltry, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

On the other hand though, I’m really excited to see Octarius make a comeback here. There’s a few warts as far as the keywords go that need to get patched up, but what we already have looks pretty fun already. It’s going to be a nice breath of fresh air to go to events and see open terrain layouts that isn’t Volkus.

Tempestus Aquilons. Credit: Rockfish

As far as the wider metagame, knocking Murderwing down a few pegs does help open the field a bit, which is nice since the meta was already in a pretty nice spot prior to this. If we can bring Wolf Scouts into line as well, I think we will see a diverse meta and the rise of more midrange and horde teams as the winrates for elites mellows out.

That's (maybe) all for this time, gang. If we do see updates with the “updated but un-updated” stuff soon, we will update this article to reflect those changes, otherwise go out and enjoy those updates and get some good games in!

And hey, you go Plague Marines. Enjoy that buff, that little Poison Vents treat and keep on rocking in the plague world y’all.

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Tags: Kill Team | Plague Marines | Octarius | balance update | Murderwing