Tales from Titan: Warp Shaping

Hail fellow Brother Captains and welcome back to the Vault! This week I've played a game of 40K against James's Deathwatch force resulting in a narrow defeat for the Grey Knights. It was great fun, and I learnt more subtleties of playing the elite Sons of Titan.

In particular the Warp Tides are key to successful play, and understanding when to change the Tide (or not) is an important skill. In this post I'll recap the Tides (and some thoughts on when to use them).

The Grey Knight Player selects an active Warp Tide at the start of the game from the following list:

• Tide of Fury: Grey Knights Infantry re-rolls 1s to wound with Nemesis force weapons.
• Tide of Convergence: Infantry Psi Weapons add +1 Strength and +1 Damage.
• Tide of Shadows: Grey Knight units count as being in cover. Grey Knight units on or in terrain are at -1 to be hit by shooting attacks.
• Tide of Escalation: Smite spells cast by units with the Rites of Banishment ability inflict an additional Mortal Wound.

A Grey Knight Psyker who casts the Warp Shaping Psychic Power can change the active Tide.

9th edition has been very kind to Grey Knights with the "Benefits of Cover when not in terrain" Rare Rule. In summary, the "counts of being in cover" benefit of Tide of Shadows is treated as being on or within terrain with the Light Cover rule; this means that the Grey Knights gain +1 to saves against shooting, and are -1 to be hit. That's fantastic, and adds a lot of survivability to Grey Knight units.

It's so valuable a buff that a Grey Knight Commander needs a very good reason to shift out of it. The two main reasons I can really think of are when you want to spam Smites or shift shooting up a gear via Psi Weaponry.

Psicannons are very lacklustre at the moment; Tide of Convergence helps but the -1 to hit for moving really hampers them. I'm in love with Psibolt buffed Stormbolters however, each Termie chucking out 4 shots at 2 damage apiece is fantastic. I'm considering boosting one of my Termie squads to 10 men just to maximise the storm bolter output!

The Grey Knights mini-Smite cast under Rites of Banishment (1 Mortal Wound as opposed to D3) becomes much more effective under Tides of Escalation. In today's game I needed to shift a 5 man squad of Deathwatch Veterans wielding Storm Shields off an objective. 2 Escalated Smites later there was one man left to deal with as the Mortal Wounds bypassed the To Wound rolls and Invulnerable Saves.

A dumb mistake in the same game also highlighted the importance of when to change Tides. A squad of Grey Knight Terminators used Gate of Infinity to redeploy near a squad of Deathwatch; I knew the veterans would use Auspex Scan to shoot them, but I swapped out of Tide of Shadows prior to the deep strike! Silly Varchilde; I could have benefitted from Shadows for that attack prior to Warp Shifting and shooting the Veterans under Escalation. 

Hopefully I won't make the same mistakes next time (but of course no guarantees). As always I'll be sure to share what happens.