There are thousands of Warhammer events being held around the world every year, and this produces a huge amount of data for the Warhammer Studio about the games and how they are being played. The rules teams in the Studio are then able to make changes to improve the playing experience for Warhammer players everywhere, whether they’re battling it out at a Grand Tournament, or across their mate’s kitchen table.
We know that when a certain army is a little too powerful and overbearing, they can become prevalent in casual pickup games too. So when an issue arises, we aim to fix it as soon as possible to improve things for everyone, whether your battlefield is at an event, club, store or home.
In the last few weeks, it has become apparent that three factions – Imperial Knights, Chaos Knights, and Death Guard – are having the run of the field.
Updates to these factions were originally scheduled for next month's balance dataslate, however the release of Codex: Leagues of Votann and its points update gave us the opportunity to address these now, ensuring a return to a more harmonious matched play experience right away. Of course, there’ll be the usual updates for other factions next month.
Targeted changes
The primary challenge is points across the Knight codexes went just a little too low on average, enabling too many large knights and vehicle chassis to be present on the battlefield. This creates a punishing experience if you aren't explicitly building your army to deal with that many lethal threats with high toughness and wounds.
As a result, we've changed the points of the bigger Chaos and Imperial Knights by between 15 and 30 points each, to bring the total number of big Knights down. The Cerastus and Questoris Knights have gone up by between 30 and 40 points, with Canis Rex receiving a 35-point increase. The Warp-borne Stalker enhancement has been raised by 15 points.
Similarly, we’ve felt the current costs of the Death Guard, combined with their Toughness and damage output, has allowed too many units onto the tabletop lately. We’ve tweaked the costs of various units and characters to counterbalance that.
The Biologus Putrifier, Deathshroud Terminators, Foetid Bloat-drone, Foul Blightspawn, Lord of Virulence, Myphitic Blight-haulers, Plagueburst Crawler, Poxwalkers, Tallyman, and Typhus have all had increases by between five and 20 points.
By making these smaller increases across the breadth of units in the codex, it will reduce the number of units in a typical Death Guard list by one or two in the size of games you normally see at tournaments. This will bring them more in line with the rest of the field without overly downtuning any single unit and causing too harmful an impact to the average Death Guard player.
These updates will also go live on the Warhammer 40,000 App today.
Stay tuned to Warhammer Community next month for the next quarterly Balance Dataslate.
