DarkLink
03-31-2012, 08:28 PM
I’ve heard, fairly frequently, that Grey Knights are broken/over the top/overpowered/some variation thereof. While they’re certainly a top tier codex, aside from rad/psykotroke grenades this is untrue. And while there are a number of extremely good options that really shouldn’t be as good as they are (Psyrifle Dreads, Death Cult Assassins, etc), there are just as many super point-efficient things in some of the other books that I could point out.
For qualifications, I play Grey Knights. I’ve played them, almost exclusively, since before they were cool. Or before they were uncool, depending on what side you’re on. Since 5th ed came out, I’ve gotten in maybe three or four games with various other armies, but everything else has been GKs. I’ve even found myself in the top 50 on rankings HQ by solid performances at a number of tournaments in California. For a while I was even the top ranked GK player, though I’m not any more. Moral of the story, I know the ins and outs of Grey Knights. Other armies, not so much, my biggest weakness as a player is making small mistakes against other armies because I have little experience facing them and it keeps me from being a truly top-tier player, but Grey Knights I know very well.
There are some pretty tough matchups out there when facing Grey Knights. I’ve personally never even come close to losing to Dark Eldar, for example. But in general, most armies have the tools to deal with Grey Knights. I've lost enough to 'nidz to just laugh to myself when people claim it's an unwinnable matchup. The trick is figuring out what the Grey Knight’s weaknesses are and exploiting them, and this is where I see people run into trouble.
See, the usual complaint about how GKs are overpowered is usually immediately followed by the comment “they have no weaknesses”. False. They have weaknesses. Thing is, the weaknesses are subtle ones that require a good understanding of the game to fully exploit. Crunching numbers on a calculator won’t reveal most of these weaknesses and misleads many less experienced players into thinking there are no weaknesses. This is an effort to elucidate these weaknesses and help struggling players.
Weakness #1 – Shooting
The most obvious weakness comes in spite of the GK’s notoriety for massed storm bolters, psycannons and strength 8 autocannons. Believe it or not, there’s actually a pretty big gap in GK’s shooting abilities.
The big one is the lack of high AP weapons. Aside from rending psycannons, absolutely none of the GK’s “optimal” firepower is better than AP 4. Unless you take some uncommon units/configurations, like a Dreadnought with a plasma cannon or a Godhammer Land Raider, the closest you can get to good AP shooting is henchmen with melta/plasma (which makes for a mediocre suicide unit considering how fragile they are and their poor BS3) or lots of Razorbacks with las/plas, and frankly Space Wolves and Blood Angels do that sort of Razorback spam better than Grey Knights do.
This actually matters in a couple of ways. For one, it makes dealing with enemy deathstars outside of assault very difficult. To kill, say, Deathwing Terminators, GKs have to focus their entire army of Storm Bolters onto the squad in an attempt to force wounds. Alternatively, GKs have to get their own deathstar into assault in an attempt to trump their opponent’s nasty units. It also makes dealing with certain other units very difficult. GKs struggle to kill units Tyrannofexes at range. And even with lots of psycannons, a Land Raider fielded by an aggressive player is almost certain to deliver its cargo. Battlewagon Orks can be a nightmare for some GK lists because those stupid Battlewagons are so absurd when your opponent is making every single KFF save.
The second part of this is range. Aside from Psyrifle Dreads, which find their way into almost every GK list for a reason, almost everything is 24”. Razorbacks are the only exception, but TL Heavy Bolters aren’t that intimidating even at str 6 to a lot of armies and I already mentioned that GKs don’t really do las/plas razorbacks that often. GKs have to mass their army in the center of the board and carefully focus fire while slowly maneuvering into position in order to effectively engage many enemy armies. It’s actually fairly limiting, and a skilled opponent can take advantage of this. Effectively deploying and maneuvering a GK army is actually very difficult to master when you get to higher levels of competition. Non-linear threats, like outflanking or deepstriking units, can be used to great effect to mess with a GK player not prepared to deal with them, especially if you can take out those Psyrifle Dreads.
Conversely, Grey Knights are very good at killing small, fragile units and/or low AV vehicles. Razorbacks and 5-man MSU squads get mowed down quite easily.
All of this means is that a lot of common builds play right into the GK’s shooting strengths and avoid their weaknesses. It’s not that most other lists out there can’t make competitive lists that play to the GK’s weaknesses, it’s just that ‘common knowledge’ about 40k meta makes people move away from that. Most codices have the means to face GKs, but many people don’t do an effective job of designing their particular lists to take advantage of this. Since GKs seem to be the most popular army now, you might want to keep this all in mind when writing your next list. Think outside the box a little, and try and find things that make shooting stuff that much more difficult for the GK player.
Weakness #2: Attrition
The next thing, also kinda obvious, is that Grey Knights cannot take attrition very well. It sounds stupid, like “duh, if you kill your opponent’s army then they can’t win”, but it needs to be emphasized.
GKs cannot stand up to any significant amount of attrition nearly as effectively as other armies. Nidz and Orks don’t care if you kill a couple squads, they’ve got more. Grey Knights don’t.
Most Grey Knights aren’t Fearless. Tank Shock them. A failed Morale test can easily win you the game. It’s happened to me several times. I have to take a test for some stupid reason, fail it, and suddenly the game become a huge uphill battle for me rather than my opponent.
Gang up on the weak. Try and separate a GK unit from the rest of the army and wipe it out. Don’t inflict casualties, destroy it. Force the GK player to spread his forces out, and once they’re spread too thin start rolling them up.
Alternatively, a smart GK player will recognize that he can’t spread out too much in some circumstances, so use that to your advantage. Force him to stick together, because it limits his sphere of influence and allows you to operate in the far corners of the board relatively unmolested. This is particularly true for Ork or ‘nidz players. Genestealers and Kommandos with a Warboss popping up out of nowhere can really mess with a GK player, and splinter his force just enough for your main army to smash his lines.
Weakness #3: Board Control
This ties in with the previous points. Grey Knights can only effectively control a small portion of the board at any given time. Because they don’t take attrition very well and thus have to concentrate their forces, have a relatively small footprint, and generally have a small range, the GK army can generally only be one place at once. Take advantage of this.
Outflank. Draw your opponent one direction with bait, and then go the other way. Present him with unsuspected threats from multiple directions, or threats that can pop out of nowhere like deep strikers and other reserves. It can be difficult for a GK army to effectively split itself to deal with multiple threat angles.
The GK’s greatest strength is perfectly true to their fluff. They are the ultimate hammer. They can smash their way through basically any other army in the game if you give them a straight fight. So don’t play to their strengths.
Weakness #4: Linear Thinking
In case you haven’t read them, Reece from Frontline Gaming is doing a series of articles on non-linear thinking in 40k that are very relevant to this point. This is actually more a weakness in the opposing player than in the GK list itself.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an opponent do exactly what I wanted them to do, while they were thinking it was their only chance at victory. I’ll use an example.
Last year, ‘ard Boyz round 1, facing CSM. My opponent had a pair of Daemon Princes, a bunch of Chosen, Plague Marines and Berzerkers, and some mixed fire support units. I had a Grand Master, Coteaz, 10 Paladins, and about 40 GKSS/Interceptor/Purifiers, plus a few other toys.
I won’t go in depth because I don’t have any photos and don’t have a detailed recollection of the game, but here’s the relevant part: my opponent was convinced he had to kill my 10 Paladins. He lined up his entire army and attempted one massive assault, and I let him. Just marched my Paladins right up as bait. I did shoot his Daemon Princes and a few other things to death first, but he assaulted me with maybe 50 Berzerker/Plague Marines first. About 10-15 lived long enough to get attacks in, and only 2-3 were left standing after the first round of combat. I think I lost maybe one Paladin to a power fist.
My opponent had severely underestimated my Paladins. I didn’t even have an Apothecary or Stave, but the multiple Hammerhands, tons of high initiative attacks, Rad/Psykotroke/Blind Grenades, Sanctuary, there was so much going in my favor that my Paladins were basically unstoppable. He literally handed me his entire army on a silver platter.
So how could he have won?
Well, CSM are a pretty outdated codex and GKs are a very tough matchup for them. About all they can do is power armor spam with a handful of decent things like lash and obliterators, but against any new codex that can deal with that sort of thing it’s a big uphill battle. That’s more due to the CSM’s out-datedness than GK’s power, though.
But step one to victory is not playing right into my hand.
My opponent was stuck in the mindset that he had to destroy my army to win. Now, I don’t remember the scenario mission, and knowing ‘ard Boyz it could have been something stupid that stacked things even more in my favor, but in normal game missions he should have rearranged his priorities to “avoid Paladins”, not “hand my opponent my entire army”. We’ll look at the various standard missions for these purposes.
Killpoints: He’s going to have a tough time keeping stuff alive if I give him the chance to ram my Paladins down his throat. But Paladins are slow. So, reserve his army. My Paladins now have no targets to aim at. All I can do is march them towards his board edge and hope they can get stuff as it trickles in. But the unit is only so big, so as my opponent brings things on he can play keep away from the Paladins while engaging my other units in a much more fair fight. It’s still a big gamble due to an outdated codex due to a lack of reserve modifiers, but it allows him to negate over a third of my army and gives him a shot at grabbing a few kill points and playing keep away for the win.
Capture and Control:
Naturally, he’ll try and place his objective as far away from mine as possible. Then, my Paladins will be either marching towards his objective, or defending my own, depending on what he does. They’re too slow and too limited in range to do both. He can then refuse flank and make me make the difficult choice between the two. And depending on my choice, he can either send the bulk of his army to grab my objective, or stay put and defend his, while making liberal use of reserves and outflanking to give him the opportunity to claim/contest objectives late game. Again, clever deployment and play can negate a significant portion of my army so long as he keeps a sharp focus on what his objectives are.
Seize Ground:
This one’s trickier because the objectives are more clustered, but it has essentially the same strategy as Capture and Control. This is a very poor matchup here, and is basically like Capture and Control but tougher to win. This is where I advocate layered mission objectives like at the Bay Area Open, where he could let me take Seize Ground but try and contest/win Capture and Control and Victory Points as discussed earlier. If he’s good, though, he still has a shot of at least tying here, he just needs a bit more skill and luck in this mission.
So even an outdated, below average codex has a shot at victory in 2/3 of the standard missions against one of the most notorious lists in the game, and it all comes down to skilled deployment and a laser-like focus on the mission objectives. Yes, his outdated codex lack some of the tools all the newer books have to give him little advantages, like reserve modifiers. But so long as his reserve rolls don’t screw him, he had a decent shot at victory. With any of the newer books, he would have had all the tools necessary to effectively pull off strategies like these for an even better chance of victory. In the end, it comes down to player skill and the dice gods, and that’s all that anyone can ever ask for in this game.
Anyone have questions, or anything else to add?
For qualifications, I play Grey Knights. I’ve played them, almost exclusively, since before they were cool. Or before they were uncool, depending on what side you’re on. Since 5th ed came out, I’ve gotten in maybe three or four games with various other armies, but everything else has been GKs. I’ve even found myself in the top 50 on rankings HQ by solid performances at a number of tournaments in California. For a while I was even the top ranked GK player, though I’m not any more. Moral of the story, I know the ins and outs of Grey Knights. Other armies, not so much, my biggest weakness as a player is making small mistakes against other armies because I have little experience facing them and it keeps me from being a truly top-tier player, but Grey Knights I know very well.
There are some pretty tough matchups out there when facing Grey Knights. I’ve personally never even come close to losing to Dark Eldar, for example. But in general, most armies have the tools to deal with Grey Knights. I've lost enough to 'nidz to just laugh to myself when people claim it's an unwinnable matchup. The trick is figuring out what the Grey Knight’s weaknesses are and exploiting them, and this is where I see people run into trouble.
See, the usual complaint about how GKs are overpowered is usually immediately followed by the comment “they have no weaknesses”. False. They have weaknesses. Thing is, the weaknesses are subtle ones that require a good understanding of the game to fully exploit. Crunching numbers on a calculator won’t reveal most of these weaknesses and misleads many less experienced players into thinking there are no weaknesses. This is an effort to elucidate these weaknesses and help struggling players.
Weakness #1 – Shooting
The most obvious weakness comes in spite of the GK’s notoriety for massed storm bolters, psycannons and strength 8 autocannons. Believe it or not, there’s actually a pretty big gap in GK’s shooting abilities.
The big one is the lack of high AP weapons. Aside from rending psycannons, absolutely none of the GK’s “optimal” firepower is better than AP 4. Unless you take some uncommon units/configurations, like a Dreadnought with a plasma cannon or a Godhammer Land Raider, the closest you can get to good AP shooting is henchmen with melta/plasma (which makes for a mediocre suicide unit considering how fragile they are and their poor BS3) or lots of Razorbacks with las/plas, and frankly Space Wolves and Blood Angels do that sort of Razorback spam better than Grey Knights do.
This actually matters in a couple of ways. For one, it makes dealing with enemy deathstars outside of assault very difficult. To kill, say, Deathwing Terminators, GKs have to focus their entire army of Storm Bolters onto the squad in an attempt to force wounds. Alternatively, GKs have to get their own deathstar into assault in an attempt to trump their opponent’s nasty units. It also makes dealing with certain other units very difficult. GKs struggle to kill units Tyrannofexes at range. And even with lots of psycannons, a Land Raider fielded by an aggressive player is almost certain to deliver its cargo. Battlewagon Orks can be a nightmare for some GK lists because those stupid Battlewagons are so absurd when your opponent is making every single KFF save.
The second part of this is range. Aside from Psyrifle Dreads, which find their way into almost every GK list for a reason, almost everything is 24”. Razorbacks are the only exception, but TL Heavy Bolters aren’t that intimidating even at str 6 to a lot of armies and I already mentioned that GKs don’t really do las/plas razorbacks that often. GKs have to mass their army in the center of the board and carefully focus fire while slowly maneuvering into position in order to effectively engage many enemy armies. It’s actually fairly limiting, and a skilled opponent can take advantage of this. Effectively deploying and maneuvering a GK army is actually very difficult to master when you get to higher levels of competition. Non-linear threats, like outflanking or deepstriking units, can be used to great effect to mess with a GK player not prepared to deal with them, especially if you can take out those Psyrifle Dreads.
Conversely, Grey Knights are very good at killing small, fragile units and/or low AV vehicles. Razorbacks and 5-man MSU squads get mowed down quite easily.
All of this means is that a lot of common builds play right into the GK’s shooting strengths and avoid their weaknesses. It’s not that most other lists out there can’t make competitive lists that play to the GK’s weaknesses, it’s just that ‘common knowledge’ about 40k meta makes people move away from that. Most codices have the means to face GKs, but many people don’t do an effective job of designing their particular lists to take advantage of this. Since GKs seem to be the most popular army now, you might want to keep this all in mind when writing your next list. Think outside the box a little, and try and find things that make shooting stuff that much more difficult for the GK player.
Weakness #2: Attrition
The next thing, also kinda obvious, is that Grey Knights cannot take attrition very well. It sounds stupid, like “duh, if you kill your opponent’s army then they can’t win”, but it needs to be emphasized.
GKs cannot stand up to any significant amount of attrition nearly as effectively as other armies. Nidz and Orks don’t care if you kill a couple squads, they’ve got more. Grey Knights don’t.
Most Grey Knights aren’t Fearless. Tank Shock them. A failed Morale test can easily win you the game. It’s happened to me several times. I have to take a test for some stupid reason, fail it, and suddenly the game become a huge uphill battle for me rather than my opponent.
Gang up on the weak. Try and separate a GK unit from the rest of the army and wipe it out. Don’t inflict casualties, destroy it. Force the GK player to spread his forces out, and once they’re spread too thin start rolling them up.
Alternatively, a smart GK player will recognize that he can’t spread out too much in some circumstances, so use that to your advantage. Force him to stick together, because it limits his sphere of influence and allows you to operate in the far corners of the board relatively unmolested. This is particularly true for Ork or ‘nidz players. Genestealers and Kommandos with a Warboss popping up out of nowhere can really mess with a GK player, and splinter his force just enough for your main army to smash his lines.
Weakness #3: Board Control
This ties in with the previous points. Grey Knights can only effectively control a small portion of the board at any given time. Because they don’t take attrition very well and thus have to concentrate their forces, have a relatively small footprint, and generally have a small range, the GK army can generally only be one place at once. Take advantage of this.
Outflank. Draw your opponent one direction with bait, and then go the other way. Present him with unsuspected threats from multiple directions, or threats that can pop out of nowhere like deep strikers and other reserves. It can be difficult for a GK army to effectively split itself to deal with multiple threat angles.
The GK’s greatest strength is perfectly true to their fluff. They are the ultimate hammer. They can smash their way through basically any other army in the game if you give them a straight fight. So don’t play to their strengths.
Weakness #4: Linear Thinking
In case you haven’t read them, Reece from Frontline Gaming is doing a series of articles on non-linear thinking in 40k that are very relevant to this point. This is actually more a weakness in the opposing player than in the GK list itself.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an opponent do exactly what I wanted them to do, while they were thinking it was their only chance at victory. I’ll use an example.
Last year, ‘ard Boyz round 1, facing CSM. My opponent had a pair of Daemon Princes, a bunch of Chosen, Plague Marines and Berzerkers, and some mixed fire support units. I had a Grand Master, Coteaz, 10 Paladins, and about 40 GKSS/Interceptor/Purifiers, plus a few other toys.
I won’t go in depth because I don’t have any photos and don’t have a detailed recollection of the game, but here’s the relevant part: my opponent was convinced he had to kill my 10 Paladins. He lined up his entire army and attempted one massive assault, and I let him. Just marched my Paladins right up as bait. I did shoot his Daemon Princes and a few other things to death first, but he assaulted me with maybe 50 Berzerker/Plague Marines first. About 10-15 lived long enough to get attacks in, and only 2-3 were left standing after the first round of combat. I think I lost maybe one Paladin to a power fist.
My opponent had severely underestimated my Paladins. I didn’t even have an Apothecary or Stave, but the multiple Hammerhands, tons of high initiative attacks, Rad/Psykotroke/Blind Grenades, Sanctuary, there was so much going in my favor that my Paladins were basically unstoppable. He literally handed me his entire army on a silver platter.
So how could he have won?
Well, CSM are a pretty outdated codex and GKs are a very tough matchup for them. About all they can do is power armor spam with a handful of decent things like lash and obliterators, but against any new codex that can deal with that sort of thing it’s a big uphill battle. That’s more due to the CSM’s out-datedness than GK’s power, though.
But step one to victory is not playing right into my hand.
My opponent was stuck in the mindset that he had to destroy my army to win. Now, I don’t remember the scenario mission, and knowing ‘ard Boyz it could have been something stupid that stacked things even more in my favor, but in normal game missions he should have rearranged his priorities to “avoid Paladins”, not “hand my opponent my entire army”. We’ll look at the various standard missions for these purposes.
Killpoints: He’s going to have a tough time keeping stuff alive if I give him the chance to ram my Paladins down his throat. But Paladins are slow. So, reserve his army. My Paladins now have no targets to aim at. All I can do is march them towards his board edge and hope they can get stuff as it trickles in. But the unit is only so big, so as my opponent brings things on he can play keep away from the Paladins while engaging my other units in a much more fair fight. It’s still a big gamble due to an outdated codex due to a lack of reserve modifiers, but it allows him to negate over a third of my army and gives him a shot at grabbing a few kill points and playing keep away for the win.
Capture and Control:
Naturally, he’ll try and place his objective as far away from mine as possible. Then, my Paladins will be either marching towards his objective, or defending my own, depending on what he does. They’re too slow and too limited in range to do both. He can then refuse flank and make me make the difficult choice between the two. And depending on my choice, he can either send the bulk of his army to grab my objective, or stay put and defend his, while making liberal use of reserves and outflanking to give him the opportunity to claim/contest objectives late game. Again, clever deployment and play can negate a significant portion of my army so long as he keeps a sharp focus on what his objectives are.
Seize Ground:
This one’s trickier because the objectives are more clustered, but it has essentially the same strategy as Capture and Control. This is a very poor matchup here, and is basically like Capture and Control but tougher to win. This is where I advocate layered mission objectives like at the Bay Area Open, where he could let me take Seize Ground but try and contest/win Capture and Control and Victory Points as discussed earlier. If he’s good, though, he still has a shot of at least tying here, he just needs a bit more skill and luck in this mission.
So even an outdated, below average codex has a shot at victory in 2/3 of the standard missions against one of the most notorious lists in the game, and it all comes down to skilled deployment and a laser-like focus on the mission objectives. Yes, his outdated codex lack some of the tools all the newer books have to give him little advantages, like reserve modifiers. But so long as his reserve rolls don’t screw him, he had a decent shot at victory. With any of the newer books, he would have had all the tools necessary to effectively pull off strategies like these for an even better chance of victory. In the end, it comes down to player skill and the dice gods, and that’s all that anyone can ever ask for in this game.
Anyone have questions, or anything else to add?