Psychic phase numbers...

[ChahDresh]

TL;DR version: According to MATH, the new psychic phase results in fewer powers being cast, more selectivity over which powers you will push through, and substantially more danger for the casters. Also, Denying is hard, if non-zero.
/TL;DR

As we know, Math-hammer gives us a base of knowledge which, along with experience, informs our tactics. Since 7th hasn't been out long, and the psychic phase seems to be the big hullabaloo, some numbers about the psychic phase would appear to be in order.

I checked both the probability of getting a cast off and the odds of getting Perils of the Warp for one through seven dice. I'm sure other people have done some of this work, too, but I aimed to be comprehensive. After that will be some discussion on the implications, and the real changes between 6th and 7th.

All numbers rounded to the whole percent.



#dice
Success (1)
Success (2)
Success (3)
PERILS


1
50%
0
0
0


2
75
25
0
3


3
88
50
13
7


4
94
69
25
13


5
97
78
47
19


6
98
88
64
26


7
99
94
77
33



For reference, pass rates for psychic checks under the previous regime were:
Ld8: 72%
Ld9: 83
Ld10: 92
Perils: 6

What does this tell us?

--Fewer overall psychic powers will be getting cast relative to the old regime. Let's put this in familiar terms: say, an AM army with a brace of Primaris psykers. (Familiar to me, anyway.) At mastery level 2, casting 2 powers a turn, my expected return on psychic powers was 3.3 successes (Deny attempts notwithstanding). Under the new regime, with an assumed roll of 4 for warp charge, casting level 1 powers, I can throw two dice at each power and get off 3 with minimal Perils risk, or toss three dice at two powers and two at a third and get off 2.5 with a larger Perils risk. Throwing three dice lets me beat my Old Regime reliability, but at increased Perils risk; and however I do it, I'm getting noticeably fewer powers off. The limiting factor on casting is no longer the number of spells you know or your mastery level; it is now Warp Charge.

--You have more selectivity in which powers get cast. As part of my example above, I'm able to beat the old reliability numbers for my Ld9 psykers on two of my casts. Doing so, of course, drains me of other options. The real winners here are the Astropath and the Eldar Warlock, low-Ld psykers that previously struggled to get reliable casts. These days, by pumping additional Warp Charge into the Warlock from the other psykers in the Eldar army, you can easily up the chances of getting the low-cost Warlock powers off... if you don't mind the increased risk of frying his brains.

--Perils is substantially more dangerous, particularly if you're going for big-ticket powers. Any serious attempt to get a power off with either a) reliability or b) a Warp Charge cost of 2+ now invokes a serious prospect of pain. While there are ways to work around some of the lesser Perils effects, Mental Purge and Warp Drain are both consequential problems for psyker-spam armies.

For illustrative purposes, let's conceive of a daemon-spam list that can generate 28 Warp Charge a turn. To get the summoning powers off, all of which are Warp Charge 3, and devoting seven dice to each power, you'd expect him to get off 3 of his 4 casts and get 4/3s Perils. I think that can be dealt with.

Finally...

It's hard to Deny Blessings, but it can be done... ...just don't bother with half-measures. The odds of Perils, incidentally, are the same odds of Denying an enemy blessing that got two successes. As you can see, the numbers don't really start to get respectable until you get up to 7 dice, and even then it's only 1-in-3. Unless you're playing psyker-spam yourself, the way to go would appear to be to select the power you really, really want to Deny (say, Invisibility...), and throw all your dice at it. It also appears that Conjurations, which by necessity require three Warp Charge to go off, are going to be quite difficult to counter.

[Charon]

Actually the warlock is not a winner. While yes his chance to get a power through did increase if you take enough dice, you probably WONT generate enough dice.
To cast "Conceal" you need 1 WC, Warlock generates 1 WC.
With ld8 you had a 72% chance of succeeding.
Under the new rules you need 2 dice to get about the same level of success.
Thats 2 warlocks needed to get one power off. That means one unit you buy the warlock for goes unbuffed, thus you invested double the amount to protect just one unit.

"Winners" are low cost psykers who just fuel bigger psykers who have access to powerful schools.
While the eldar runes are good, they contain too much bad powers (Death mission is even worse than befor now) so you will end up with one or two keypowers.
I can see people skipping them for Divination.

[DarkLink]

I think to put it more precisely, the winners are psykers with access to the crazy powers who happen to have an army that can generate a lot of warp charges for cheap. Grey Knights and Daemons are the big winners there, since both can generate an absurd number of dice and Daemons get Malefic Daemonology (along with everything else) while GKs can get Divination and Telepathy.

[ElectricPaladin]

I think to put it more precisely, the winners are psykers with access to the crazy powers who happen to have an army that can generate a lot of warp charges for cheap. Grey Knights and Daemons are the big winners there, since both can generate an absurd number of dice and Daemons get Malefic Daemonology (along with everything else) while GKs can get Divination and Telepathy.

I think that armies who can field psykers who are also formidable in their own right come in a close second. The fact that Daemons can bring a couple of different kinds of monstrous creatures who are also warp charge generators is part of why they're on top. The fact that pretty much everything in a Grey Knights army generates at least a single warp charge is part of why they vie for that spot. Psychic cheerleaders are force multipliers for whichever psychic has the power you need and the speed/durability to be where you need it.

[Mr Mystery]

Maths. Not math.

Tsk.

[Blood Shadow]

I heard a great comment on the 11th Company Pod Cast where they mention how Daemons are limiting their damage output by going solely with conjurations.... If your main ranged damage dealer is witch fire powers then spamming new units won't help, in my mind this makes Daemons much worse than GK who can call on a host of ranged support without needing witchfire powers.

[ElectricPaladin]

I heard a great comment on the 11th Company Pod Cast where they mention how Daemons are limiting their damage output by going solely with conjurations.... If your main ranged damage dealer is witch fire powers then spamming new units won't help, in my mind this makes Daemons much worse than GK who can call on a host of ranged support without needing witchfire powers.

I don't think Daemons are bad, but yes, that's been my read of the situation as well. As a Blood Angels player, I would much rather see a squad of pink horrors optimized for summoning creeping up on me. That I can handle. My chances of killing them before they can do much harm aren't really all that bad. But, on the other hand, a pink horror squad with two witchfires - both of which they can theoretically use thanks to the change in how psychic shooting works - actually kind of scares me. I think that a Demon build where the pink horrors are optimized to actually do something, while the heralds and greater daemons and daemon princes, are optimized for a mix of summoning, shooting, and support, is much stronger.

[ChahDresh]

The warlock is a winner inasmuch as, if you *need* a warlock power to go off, you can gain reliability in that roll by force-feeding him dice. You are exactly correct in that you’ll often end up in a rob-Peter-to-Pay-Paul situation—that’s the complementary point to the reliability issue, that the *total* psychic output ends up dropping. That’s the main dynamic at work in the new psychic phase (and why it seems to me that it works as a game design): pick your spots.

Cheap psykers like the Astropath are part supply, but also part demand. If you have a single Primaris, for example, he’d have 2+d6 warp charge points to play with, which is enough to cast probably two powers. Add another Primaris, say, and you have enough to cast… maybe three? Because now you’re at 4+d6; a Mastery 2 psyker barely adds enough charge on his own to fuel a single power even while he knows 2-3, while an Astropath is totally dependent upon tapping the shared d6 pool to cast. And if he's not casting, he's just a battery.

Is one Warp Charge worth 25 points? That’s what an Astropath runs. Well, most AM players leap at the chance to go from Mastery 1 to Mastery 2 on a Primaris…

It’s only partially the additional Warp Charge generation that’s what you get from these cheap ancillary psykers; it’s the option to cast their powers if the situation demands it, knowing that it’s detracting from your total pool.

Really, the biggest gain that Grey Knights get is efficiency. It did individual squads little good to have Hammerhand if they never got into combat; they were psykers with untapped potential, as it were. The fact that those extra units (which are, as mentioned, useful in their own right before psychic anything comes up) contribute to the shared pool now means that, even though they might not be casting any more than before, they’re still contributing to the army’s total psychic might.

ALL of which means: psychic powers are overall less powerful than before! An AM player who buys an additional Astropath to feed his two Mastery 2 Primaris psykers is still casting three, *maybe* four powers a turn, at a lower overall chance of success with a higher overall risk of Perils. Even our Grey Knights, who are "winners", feel the burn: a level 3 psyker of theirs can only match his previous output (three powers at mastery 1 with 92% success) if he's fed nine Warp Charge more than he generates, which, by definition, can't be used by the rest of the army, with a minimal but non-zero chance to be Denied and a dramatically enhanced chance of Perils.

For all the cries of psychic apocalypse, the overall power level of psykers appears to have been toned down, but the process is now one of thought and strategery rather than a succession of mindless leadership checks. Sounds good to me.

[ElectricPaladin]

...the overall power level of psykers appears to have been toned down, but the process is now one of thought and strategery rather than a succession of mindless leadership checks. Sounds good to me.

Thank you - this is what I've been trying to say.

[Charon]

Thank you - this is what I've been trying to say.

Yes its toned down. Agree her 100%.
But I disagree on the "thought and strategy" part. If your school has just one or 2 keypowers there is no "thought" involved. You need to cast them anyways and your opponent needs to deny them anyways. No matter what you try to "feint". Thats no strategy. You could do that with stupid leadership checks as well.

[DarkLink]

Yeah, I'm not sure how much the new system actually brings to the game. It's kind of novel to have to sit and think on how much you're going to throw at a power, but it's very abusable and it's one more rather clunky arbitrary mechanic to a game filled with clunky arbitrary mechanics. It would have been better to just write balanced psychic powers in the first place, and allowing you to Deny blessings and the like in some way.

[Charon]

Yeah, I'm not sure how much the new system actually brings to the game. It's kind of novel to have to sit and think on how much you're going to throw at a power, but it's very abusable and it's one more rather clunky arbitrary mechanic to a game filled with clunky arbitrary mechanics. It would have been better to just write balanced psychic powers in the first place, and allowing you to Deny blessings and the like in some way.

Actually I think the system of former fantasy iterations would have been very good.
Set difficulties for powers, make powers hard hitting, generate Warpcharges according to mastery levels, roll dice -> add them -> number you rolled + ML is difficulty to dispel -> add in items and USR helping to cast/dispell so you can bring each army at around the same level.

[John Bower]

Maths. Not math.

Tsk.

That depends where you're from mate, US call it Math, we in UK put the s on the end.

[Anggul]

Yeah, I'm not sure how much the new system actually brings to the game. It's kind of novel to have to sit and think on how much you're going to throw at a power, but it's very abusable and it's one more rather clunky arbitrary mechanic to a game filled with clunky arbitrary mechanics. It would have been better to just write balanced psychic powers in the first place, and allowing you to Deny blessings and the like in some way.

Yeah, it's silly to completely overhaul a simple and effective method (roll Ld check, get on with it) in an attempt to balance a few powers which could have just been changed themselves rather than the entire system. Or just not made obviously abusable in the first place.

[Power Klawz]

I think it would have been better to allow such things as psychic hoods and relative mastery levels to affect deny rolls on blessings when the appropriate psyker is in range of either the caster or the target. Also might have been more challenging if deny successes simply removed successes from the attempt instead of having to roll as many denials as the opponent had successes, however that would have likely nerfed psychic powers into nigh-uselessness.

I do think there is a sliver of strategy to it now though. There isn't always "One Power to Rule Them All" and its very situational which power is the one you do not want happening on any particular turn. Maybe you're lining up a game winning charge and don't want your intended target to fire overwatch at full BS, or maybe you really don't want that buffed out unit of conscripts to go all predator on you. I'll agree that in most circumstances some powers will be scarier than others, but that won't always be the case. Especially if you are playing WH40K:Schizo Edition. (By which I mean maelstrom missions, as they are ridiculous and will have you running around doing the most random stuff for almighty points.)

[Charon]

There isn't always "One Power to Rule Them All" and its very situational which power is the one you do not want happening on any particular turn.

Most of the time there is a "one power to rule them all" cause you only have access to a selected few and out of the entire school there are most often only one or two really useful powers. So its very obvious whats going to hurt you and what not. If you are especially unlucky you end up with no "superior power" at all.
Witchfire for example is rarely wort it. First you have to successful cast it (with the rare possibility of a deny), then you have to actually hit, then ou have to wound and then your opponent gets his saving throws. While on the other hand buffs never suffer the handicap of beeing directed at an enemy unit (thus no deny bonuses) and are "fire and forget".

[DarkLink]

That depends where you're from mate, US call it Math, we in UK put the s on the end.

You mean the UK isn't the center of the universe?

[Lord Asterion]

You mean the UK isn't the center of the universe?

Its short for Mathematics, so it should be a plural

[Andrew Thomas]

You mean the UK isn't the center of the universe? I think you mean India, if you follow the 40k canon.

[sfshilo]

I think people forget that there are trends to odds as well. With 2d6 the success curve as you dropped leadership was much less drastic until you got below ld7.

Now? There is a VERY good chance of failure no matter what amount of dice you throw.

Think about ld 9 or 10.
You had few roll combinations that would fail. Now it is very much possible for 4 dice to roll under 4 even with the odds in your favor.

[Dennis Harrison]

But, on the other hand, a pink horror squad with two witchfires - both of which they can theoretically use thanks to the change in how psychic shooting works - actually kind of scares me.

Based on what people are telling me Horrors can only ever attempt to manifest one power each turn because they have a Mastery Level of 1. Even with three warp charges, they are still not able to fire more than one witchfire.

[ElectricPaladin]

Based on what people are telling me Horrors can only ever attempt to manifest one power each turn because they have a Mastery Level of 1. Even with three warp charges, they are still not able to fire more than one witchfire.

I've been seeing that around, but it's not true. I just reread the section, and nothing limits the number of powers a given psyker can use, save the warp charges you have available.

[daboarder]

people are wrong, while the number of powers you can cast is dependent on your mastery level (after all it determines how many powers you have) the only limitation is that you may cast each power once.

Horrors have 2 powers, they can therefore attempt to cast 2 powers

[Moriar52]

Maths. Not math.

Tsk.

Mathematics actually ;-p

[Mr Mystery]

Well indeed.

And a random follow up question.....

We know that the dice results of any given game are statistically insignificant, as we just don't chuck enough. Not even Orks or IG.

But how many games would a single player have to play for their personal efforts to be considered statistically significant?

[daboarder]

Well indeed.

And a random follow up question.....

We know that the dice results of any given game are statistically insignificant, as we just don't chuck enough. Not even Orks or IG.

But how many games would a single player have to play for their personal efforts to be considered statistically significant?

You'd be surprised how few tests are required for statistical significance.

[Mr Mystery]

That's mostly why I'm asking :)

[deinol]

Actually the warlock is not a winner. While yes his chance to get a power through did increase if you take enough dice, you probably WONT generate enough dice.
To cast "Conceal" you need 1 WC, Warlock generates 1 WC.
With ld8 you had a 72% chance of succeeding.
Under the new rules you need 2 dice to get about the same level of success.
Thats 2 warlocks needed to get one power off. That means one unit you buy the warlock for goes unbuffed, thus you invested double the amount to protect just one unit.

"Winners" are low cost psykers who just fuel bigger psykers who have access to powerful schools.
While the eldar runes are good, they contain too much bad powers (Death mission is even worse than befor now) so you will end up with one or two keypowers.
I can see people skipping them for Divination.

People seem to be forgetting the d6 warp charges you get a turn. Sure, if you are spamming a dozen psykers, that extra couple warp charges don't matter.

But from my perspective, running a ML1 Shadowseer and a Farseer, I will have 2 WC to use with my Shadowseer and 1d6+2 WCs to use on my Farseer. Will the Farseer get off three powers each turn? Probably not. But he's likely to get two, which works for me.

The game works best when you aren't trying to be extreme. If a seerstar requires spending too many points on psykers just for "reliable" WCs, I'm ok with that. It means they probably aren't putting enough troops on the board.

[Dave Mcturk]

not to be too picky but the modern usages of 'math' / 'maths' are only attested since 1911. before that math was just a simple noun.

- - - Updated - - -

what i really want to know is if i can have back 10 warlocks with destructor without 50% of them suiciding to perils? - even if they are the most 'powerful psykers in the known universe'. [makes nob bikers with skorchas look puny!]

or if i just nd to lv them as 10 anti-tank locks and not bother with powers [ie as in 6th ed./]?

[DarkLink]

Don't worry, the psychic p h ase is still plenty abusable, mainly because there are a few broken powers.

[Kristopholes]

I think to put it more precisely, the winners are psykers with access to the crazy powers who happen to have an army that can generate a lot of warp charges for cheap. Grey Knights and Daemons are the big winners there, since both can generate an absurd number of dice and Daemons get Malefic Daemonology (along with everything else) while GKs can get Divination and Telepathy.

In games i've played in 7th ed. I've found this to be quite true so far. I'm a CSM player for the most part with some Chaos Daemons so even in a 1500 pt match I can have my primary detachment with Huron (a lvl 1 psyker) and some merry fellows and then add an allied detachment of a Herald of Tzeentch at psyker level 3 and a squad of 10 pink horrors for less than 200 points. This gives a chaos player 5 ML's for less than 400 pts. Throw the Herald and Pink Horrors behind an Aegis and they can conjure in some baddies or throw out some blessings with 6+ WC's with a 2+ cover save when they go to ground

[LostAlone]

I'm not a fan of the new psychic system at all simply because it opens the doors to a whole new world of spammy, min-maxed armies. You either spam warp charge or you don't get any psychic powers. If the only downside was that you didn't get to use a librarian in competitive games, then no worries. But it's not just that. If you don't spam WC right back then you are surrendering the phase to your enemy, letting your opponent freely and reliably make use of some of the most powerful effects in the game. So no only do you lose any psychic buffs of your own, your opponent always gets to use his and since GW has in recent years abandoned the idea of pricing casters to reflect their max potential, they get a lot of bang for very little buck.

The idea of wizard wars is fun and all, but it belongs in RPGs and Fantasy games. In fantasy shooting is terrible, armor saves are different and on average offer much less protection than in 40k, and the vast majority of people can't move quickly. That's why magic works there. It's a replacement for the shooting phase. Resolving a few dozen arrows doesn't take long and isn't at all complex. Resolving magic takes longer, filling in the same role that shooting does in 40k in terms of complexity and creating interesting situations.

40k does not need another equally complex phase added to the game, nor does anyone need any additional desire to spam units that have a high power to cost ratio.

Also - It is perhaps a little too cynical of me to put it in these terms but... GW think the grey knights are so awesome that the old game structure was insufficient to express how special and awesome compared to everyone else they are so they made a whole new phase for the grey knights to utterly dominate. I mean... Yeah, it's not really true, but it feels like that sometimes.