Quote: New 7th Ed. Psychic phase
Posted by MarkyMark

So, Psychic phase, something close to my heart as I tend to run psychic heavy armies. Now there has been a massive change in the way psychic powers are manifested in 40k, no longer are we doing the ld test on 2d6 to get a power off, it is now following the route of Fantasy.

So basically it is all about how many psykers you have on the table, these contribute towards your Warp Charge pool. Lets take a nice simple situation of a Mastery lvl 3 Librarian versus a Mastery level 2 Librarian.

Player A with the lvl 3 gets 3 dice then he rolls a d6 and adds that many dice to his Warp charge pool, Player B gets 2 dice from his lvl 2, and also adds the amount of dice from the result of the d6 player A rolled. So lets say he rolled a 3, player A ends up with 6 dice, player B with 5 dice.

So lets take the perspective of Player A, these 6 dice are his Warp Charge pool. Assuming he rolled on Biomancy at the start of the game getting Iron Arm, Warp Speed and Endurance (he will also auto get Smite, more on this later). So Iron Arm, Warp Speed, Smite are all warp charge 1 powers, Endurance is warp charge 2. So what you need to do in order to cast a psychic power is use your warp charge dice in order to meet the warp charge value on the power you want to use, so if I want to cast Iron arm I need to get 1 successful warp charge from my dice, how you get succesful warp charges is by rolling a 4+. So If I want to cast Iron arm, it is plausable I would roll 3 dice to get at least 1 4+ to be able to cast it, if I want to cast Endurance being warp charge 2 I would need to get at least 2 4+ to make the power work.

The odds on these working is here

WC 1:
(Dices rolled vs chance)
1 - 50%
2 - 75%
3 - 87.5%
4 - 94%
WC 2:
1 : 0
2 : 25%
3 : 50%
4 : 69%
5 : 81%
6 : 89%
WC 3:
1 : 0
2 : 0
3 : 12.5%
4 : 31%
5 : 50%
6 : 65%
7 : 77%
8 : 85%

So to get a warp charge 1 power off, your looking at 2 dice really, to get a warp charge 2 power off 4 dice or 5 dice is what you want, to get a warp charge 3 power off, you are looking at 5 or 6 dice.

Now perils of the warp, if you roll double 6 when doing a psychic test you suffer perils of the warp, these mostly involve you taking a wound but could buff you (6) or make you take a leadership test (1) failure means you are removed from play pass means you take a wound.

So lets say player A cast iron arm and rolled 3 dice getting two 4+ (but not dbl 6). Now it is time for player B to deny the witch. As it wasnt cast on player B;s units he wont get any bonus to deny the witch, if it was cast on his unit then he could get bonus's based on being a psyker, adamtium will, having a better masterly level then the casting psyker.

Any way, to deny the witch you need to deny the warp charges generated by the opponent, so above player A got two successful charges so player B needs to match that. To deny you need a 6 for each warp charge so in this case you will need two 6's. Player B has 5 dice to chose from but player A still has 3 dice left to cast another power, so it becomes a balancing act for both players to chose what powers to cast or deny. Say Player B decides to try and deny and throws 4 dice at it, he gets only one 6 which isnt enough to stop the power going through.

So that is now how you manifest and deny powers. It is sort of similar to Fantasy but at least now you can deny blessings your opponent has, it does add another tactical element into the game as its bluff and double bluff by throwing out useful powers to try and get your opponents deny dice out or you can go all out and throw loads of dice at one particular power to try and get it off, but risk perils of the warp.

There is also a upper limit IMO of how many spells you will be getting off, due to needing 2 dice to get one spell off there is a much reducded chance of a lvl 3 psyker getting 3 warp charge 1 powers off per turn, also is you have mulitple pyskers (say screamer council) they will have a lot of dice but I honestly think they will only be manifesting powers with 70% of their psykers now.

There is also the restriction that once a unit attempts, successful or not, a power that unit cannot attempt to cast that power again that phase, so no blobs throwing out 2 or 3 presciences, no screamer council shooting with all 4 heralds etc.

IT will make for a interesting addition to the phases and can neuter some of the deathstars as most rely on psychic powers to achive death star status.

I will do a run down later of the new tables, a few subtle changes but a few big changes in there as well! (there is now a str D weapon psychic power, no more gate of infinity etc).

(22-05-2014, 09:07 AM)manrogue Wrote: Just been reading more and a Level one can cast all the powers, just less likely to be successful.

AS far as i have read, no changes to flyers rules for shooting. You choose whether to use skyfire or not at beginning of shooting phase.

Just as a note though, you planning to Run a single vendetta?

I find they get taken out very quickly when you run just one, i ran triple Vends very successfully at the start of 6th. Just food for thought.

(22-05-2014, 01:18 PM)Agent0range Wrote:

(22-05-2014, 09:07 AM)manrogue Wrote: Just been reading more and a Level one can cast all the powers, just less likely to be successful.

AS far as i have read, no changes to flyers rules for shooting. You choose whether to use skyfire or not at beginning of shooting phase.

Just as a note though, you planning to Run a single vendetta?

I find they get taken out very quickly when you run just one, i ran triple Vends very successfully at the start of 6th. Just food for thought.

Ahhh good, no changes then? Yeah I currently run just the one. I might see if I can get another off eBay at some point and try two.