5 Best Edition 10.5 Changes
1: Lion Dad can walk through walls.
One of the great tragedies of 10th edition has been that Lion El'Jonson has not seem much play. He started off seriously overcosted, then got nerfed when we got our codex supplement. GW did reduce his price in the previous Munitorum Field Manual, but he was (and is) still more points than any of the C'Tan while being objectively worse than them. We've had pretty good reason to leave him brooding on the shelf.
That said, he's still a beast in combat. You can pretty reliably put him into anything in the game and expect to be picking up the other model instead of him. One of the things holding him back from reaching his true potential has been that enemy units could exploit terrain to avoid facing his wrath. Well, those days are no more. Now, Lion Dad can move through terrain just as easily as Infantry, so hiding on the other side of a ruin's wall won't save traitors/heretics/xenos anymore. Plus, now it's easier to use terrain to protect him till he's ready to pounce on some soon-to-be-dead fools. This one change changes Lion Dad from a difficult to use/borderline liability unit to one worth building around. (Page 9 of the Core Rules Updates and Rules Commentary document) This isn't the only change that makes Lion Dad worth building around, but I'll get into that below.
2: Deathwing Knights remembered how to slap.
At the beginning of the edition, Deathwing Knights did some work for me. They reliably killed almost anything I put them into. I had unit of 5 of them with an attached Chaplain pick up a Abaddon and 5 Chaos Terminators on a charge. The one thing I had them bounce off of was a Redemptor Dreadnought. Good times.
Then we got our codex supplement, where Games Workshop gave them rules that suggested that they didn't actually want to sell any of them, in spite of having released a spiffy new box set for them. They nerfed the maces, and the sword profile they added was objectively worse than the sword profile for the less-elite Bladeguard Veterans. Plus GW reduced the max squad size to 5 models, eliminating their objective-holding utility. As a result, DWKs mostly disappeared from competitive lists, only occasionally appearing when GW dropped them down to 215 points a squad.
The changes in the Balance Dataslate have brought Deathwing Knights back not just as a unit to sit on objectives, but as a unit to go forth and slay all before them. The mace profile gained a pip of AP and Anti-Vehicle 4+/Anti-Monster 4+, and the sword profile gained a pip of Damage. Now both profiles are valuable, making our most-elite Terminators a force to be reckoned with. A list with 3 squads of DWKs won a GT over the weekend, and lists with multiple squads also went 4-1 at various events. You can read about them here.
I'm inclined to think the mace profile is the better of the two by a smidge, but when I assembled my Deathwing Assault DWKs this week, I gave them the swords. I do already have the pre-10th DWK squad, and I'm in the process of assembling another I bought secondhand, so I'll have 2 squads with maces and 1 squad with swords when I'm done.
3: Inner Circle Companions sharpened their swords.
The big new unit we got with our supplement release was Inner Circle Companions, but they landed with a thud when they arrived. The models are gorgeous, but, once again, Games Workshop gave these super-secretive and highly elite warriors a weapon profile that was objectively worse than that wielded by Bladeguard Veterans. What a difference a pip of AP makes! Like with Deathwing Knights, ICC units appeared in the lists that performed well over the weekend, including the GT winning list I mentioned above. ICCs (and Bladeguard) have also been helped by the next item on this list.
Unfortunately for me, I didn't go out of my way to pick up any Inner Circle Companions when they were released. I was focused on putting 18 Ravenwing Knights on the table, okay? Don't judge me! It does leave me having to play catchup ball though. Those of you who did pick them up and get them painted based on their aesthetic quality are now well positioned to gain a leg up at competitive events.
4: Techmarines squeeze an extra seat into Impulsors.
This one is simple but significant. The transport capacity for Impulsors went from 6 to 7. As a result, now they can carry a full squad of our 6-man power armored assault units plus an attached character. That really increases our ability to use those units, and gives us more reason to use Impulsors, which are actually pretty neat units in their own right. It'll be nice to see them on the table shuttling murder squads back and forth.
5: Hazardous tests became less hazardous.
We're likely all familiar with Hazardous tests. Hellblasters aren't a Dark Angels exclusive unit, but we sure use them more than anybody else. If you're going to use Azrael for something more exciting than hiding in a corner and generating CP, you're probably going to join him to a unit of Hellblasters.
Now there's even more reason to do so. When a model fails a Hazardous test, instead of just dying if it's an Infantry or Mounted unit, now it takes 3 Mortal Wounds (page 7 of the Core Rules Update). That may not sound like a big difference one way or the other, but we have some options for mitigating that most other Space Marine players don't. For one, Azrael is accompanied by his handy little Watcher in the Dark, who we can trigger to give his unit a 4+++ against Mortal Wounds. If we have a turn where you spike on Hazardous failures, we can trigger the Watcher to save some of the Hellblasters.
This is also another reason to use Lion Dad. One of the aura abilities we can choose is No Hiding From The Watchers, which gives a 4+++ against Mortal Wounds. If we're building a list around plasma units like Hellblasters or Ravenwing Knights, then there's a real argument to be made for including Lion Dad to mitigate Hazardous tests. The argument is likely stronger with Ravenwing Knights, because they don't have a shoots-on-death ability like Hellblasters do, and it only takes one success on a 4+++ to save a Knight instead of two to save a Hellblaster, but it wouldn't suck to support Hellblasters either.
It's also worth mentioning that if we're playing with a Ravenwing Knight+Command Squad brick, the Ravenwing Ancient can eat 2 Hazardous failures for the squad and be brought back by the Apothecary in our subsequent Command Phase. I swear, he was already my most frequently killed-and-brought-back model in those units. The amount of time he's going to die-resurrect in games now is just going to be comical.
Honorable Mention: Tanks got better at Tank Shock
For the general playing population, this is probably more of a sidegrade our outright nerf, but for the list I've been playing it's an improvement, so I'm pretty happy with it. The amount of dice we roll for a Tank Shock attack is now based on the attacking unit's Toughness instead of it's Strength. Prior to this, Tank Shock was best used by vehicles with a beastly close combat weapon, such as a Redemptor Dreadnought. I would use Tank Shock with some regularity with my Firestorm list, where I'd use it with my Land Raider or Impulsors. Now those units get to roll more dice than they used to. The only vehicles in my current list are a Darkshroud and a Thunderstrike, and Tank Shock is much improved for them. They're close combat profiles are only Strength 4, but they are Toughness 8 and 9 respectively, so they are rolling double the dice on a Tank Shock attack they were before. It's reasonable to expect 2-3 Mortal Wounds from a Tank Shocking Darkshroud or Storm Speeder now. So, less good if we're using a lot of Dreadnoughts, better if we're using any other vehicles. I'll take it.
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