Detachment Review: The Unforgiven Task Force

Hello battle brothers! When our codex supplement dropped, I'd intended to review the detachments, and I reviewed the Company of Hunters pretty quick. Since then, I got distracted by other things, such as reporting on all the Dark Angels Ironstorms that are placing high in big tournaments. However, I sort of reminded myself I meant to review the other two, so having covered the Company of Hunters already, I decided it was time to review the OG of our unique detachments, the Unforgiven Task Force. 

Unless, like a member of the Fallen, you've fallen through a hole in space-time, you're probably aware the Unforgiven Task Force is considered a pretty bad detachment - a contender for the worst detachment in the game. Statistics bear this out. According to the Meta Data Dashboard at Stat-check.com, the UTF is currently sitting at a laughably bad 19% win rate, which means players are only winning about 1 in 5 games. There's no getting around the fact that's pretty abysmal. 

A considerable part of the reason why the UTF is so bad is the detachment rule, Grim Resolve. Grim Resolve grants OC 1 to models in a Battle-shocked unit. What this tells me is the game developers wildly overestimated how often Battle-shocked units would exist on the table. In practice, players don't distribute their offensive power across all of their opponent's units and gradually whittle them down over the course of the game. Instead, players focus their offensive power to destroy whole units in a single turn. This both removes threats and removes units that could potentially hold objectives or score secondaries. I'm not saying there are not circumstances under which one might fail to pick up a whole unit, but they're rare enough to make taking a Battle-shock test pretty unlikely. On top of that, Space Marine units have Leadership 6+, so they're likely to pass their Battle-shock test even if they have to make it. That makes Grim Resolve pretty useless. I can understand GW thinking it would have been a better rule when they released the Indexes, but by the time our codex supplement came out it was pretty well established how bad this rule is. They should have given us something else.

Things don't improve much when we move on to the Enhancements.  The Shroud of Heroes is a stands-back-up strat, which seems good in theory, I'm just not sure who we'd put it on where it would be worthwhile. I'm not saying Space Marines don't have good characters, but most of their value is in buffing the squads they join. There aren't really any that can function like a Smash Captain of earlier editions. About the only thing I came up with would be to put it on a combi-weapon Lieutenant just to troll your opponent, and while that could be funny, funny doesn't win games. 

The rest of the enhancements struggle with having conditional modifiers that rely on the unit the character is in being Battle-shocked, which as previously mentioned is nigh-unto-worthless. Of the lot, Stubborn Tenacity might be the best, granting +1 to hit of the attached unit is below half strength and +1 to wound if the unit is also BSed. I could see some value to putting that on a Lieutenant or Apothecary and attaching them to Hellblasters with Azrael. At the very least, you'd get Hellblasters hitting on 2+ for most of the game, which is decent.

Weapons of the First Legion is a character fighting buff, and it's probably one of the better ones in the game because included in the effects is increasing the character's weapon damage, which can let you have a character swinging 3 damage attacks. While that's pretty good, melee buffs tend to be among the least valuable enhancements.

Then there's the Pennant of Remembrance, granting a 6+ Feel No Pain, increasing to a 4+ if the unit is BSed. The Pennant would be the best if it didn't also include the opportunity cost of having to include an Ancient in your list. As it is, I could see sticking an Ancient with this onto a big brick of Assault Terminators and making them ridiculously hard to shift, but with that and the Captain you'd likely want to include as well, you're putting a quarter of your list's points into it, and you're unlikely to get that much value out of the unit.

Moving onto stratagems, there's Armor of Contempt, which I don't think I need to discuss. We all know it. It's good. 

Next down is Unforgiven Fury, which is decent. It grants a unit Lethal Hits, and if there's a unit in your army that's BSed, the unit you play this on scores Critical Hits on 5+es. What I like about this strat is that the unit you play it on does not itself need to be BSed in order to get the boosted effect, and that it states Critical Hits on 5+, not Lethal Hits. That means if you, say, play this on a unit of Hellblasters you attached Azrael to, Sustained Hits is triggering on a 5+ as well. It's a Battle Tactic, which is nice, but unfortunately, with the best use of the strat involving attaching Azrael to the unit, you're probably not getting it for free by using a Captain.

Intractable grants shooting and charging after falling back for 1 CP. Nothing wrong with it. 

Fire Discipline is pretty good. For 1 CP it grants all of a unit's guns Assault, Heavy, and Ignores Cover for a turn.  Honestly just Ignores Cover by itself is probably worth spending the CP on, so it's nice to be able to selectively plan to be able to shoot after advancing a unit, or if you happen to have a unit you don't have to move to draw LOS on your preferred target you can grant them +1 to hit with their Ignores Cover.

Grim Retribution is a shoots-back strat, but it specifies that the unit you're playing it on has to lose models to trigger it, which limits it to just Infantry and Mounted units, and I can't think of any units we might play it that can be big enough to absorb the casualties and shoot back with meaningful firepower besides Hellblasters, and they already have shoots-on-death as their unit ability. I suppose that could be funny, and maybe even effective, but you'll piss through your Hellblasters in a hurry that way. Other than Hellblasters, who would you use it on? I could see pre-nerf Desolators, maybe Devastators if you want to spend an extra 80 points on them to get the 5 ablative bodies in the unit. However, outside of Hellblasters, we're talking edge cases, and a strat that is only useful in edge cases is basically not useful.

Unbreakable Lines is undoubtedly the worst of the lot. For 2 CP, it debuffs a charging enemy unit, inflicting -1 to wound on it. That's pretty niche and very expensive, and I think most of us would agree it's objectively worse than the Index version, where the debuff was -1 damage. About the only upside is that it's a Battle Tactic, so a Captain could play it on his unit for free. If you're playing that big Terminator brick with the Pennant of Remembrance I described earlier, you might get some play out of it, but then you'd likely be paying for AoC instead.

Going in, I was predisposed to hate on all the stratagems, but really looking at them changed my mind somewhat. To be sure, Unbreakable Lines is pretty terrible, and Grim Retribution suffers from only being targetable on Infantry and Mounted units, but Unforgiven Fury, Intractable, and Fire Discipline are all pretty good. I say that with a caveat though: you can give a unit almost all the benefits of Unforgiven Fury and Intractable just by assigning a Lieutenant to it, and Lieutenants are both good and cheap. There are some units you can't attach Lieutenants to though, so those strats do have a place, but they're not as useful as strats that grant bonuses you can't get by attaching a secondary leader to a unit.

So, the big failing of the Unforgiven Task Force is that the detachment rule, Grim Resolve, is mostly useless. On top of that, a number of mechanics revolve around boosting Battle-shocked units, which is outside of the player's control and unlikely to trigger for the reasons stated above. If GW's intent was for the UTF to be a detachment that encourages Dark Angels thematic army lists, it failed. It encourages players to build around Azrael and Hellblasters, but Azrael and Hellblasters are good in every detachment, and arguably better in some (cough*Firestorm*cough). 

To do we players and the lore of the Dark Angels justice, Games Workshop should rework the Unforgiven Task Force, eliminating the emphasis on Battle-shock, and designing it around some other aspect of the lore instead. Traditionally, Dark Angels codexes have encouraged building armies with both Deathwing and Ravenwing elements, so if it were me, I'd base it around that, with a detachment rule that would benefit every unit with an extra benefit for Ravenwing and Deathwing units (say, advance and shoot for all units, Ravenwing also fall back and shoot, Deathwing also advance and charge), and enhancements and strats that have conditional improvements based on Ravenwing and/or Deathwing units. That's just me though, and quite frankly I'd be happy enough with a detachment I about which I could truthfully say is at least as good as the Gladius.  Until that happy day, well, we have the Gladius, and all the other Codex: Space Marine detachments to tide us over.