So the Blades of Khorne update for the Scourge of Ghyran landed and, well, it’s a bit of head scratcher. I’ve been at this caper way too long to expect much from Gee Dubs when it comes to my favorite faction, and with the option of actively making things worse being off the table, this one is a blend of pointless and OK. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that the Mighty Lord got his Axe back, but unless the new GHB involves massive changes there is nothing here that would cause you to restructure a competitive Khorne list. The whole thing feels like it was written a year ago by someone who had never played a real game of 4th edition. The best value in the document is comparing the breathless hype from the Warhammer Community teaser article to the finished product, which I’ll include in italics. Anyways, lets get to it.

(All rules credit and article quotes to GW.)

Battle Formations

“Tournament of Skulls gives your Mortal and Daemon heroes more attacks as they compete to claim more skulls”

Uh, no it doesn’t. Not even close. Doesn’t work on heroes, doesn’t give bonus attacks. I don’t know what the hype article is referring to but it’s not this pile of shit. To be fair this one seems good on paper, but unfortunately this is Warhammer and not origami.

If you knew nothing about the faction then a +1 to wound buff sounds pretty good, except for 3 things:

1. There is no unit of Daemons that derives a significant benefit from +1 to wound. They just don’t have the volume of attacks. 20 Bloodletters do OK but you’re fishing for mortals anyway. The units that could use it, namely Flesh Hounds and Blood Crushers, have their output tied up in Companion attacks that won’t benefit from it.
2. Khorne Mortals get a better buff from elsewhere. If you are looking to boost your output for Mortal units there is a battle formation that hands out +1 to hit buffs (see below) for multiple units that hit on 4’s.
3. If you want to run a Mortal/Daemon hybrid list, this battle formation is worse than the hybrid Formation we already have:

Khornate Legion gives you a lot more by letting you fuck around with fight activation orders, and it works on Blood Thirsters. In case you are as unfamiliar with Khorne as the folks who wrote this update appear to be, Blood Thirsters are the honking big monsters that Khorne players love to run.

On top of which the units involved have to be alive and wholly within 12 inches of each other to benefit from the new ability. Lose a unit and you get nothing. I suspect if you tried this you’d end up running multiple units of Fleshhounds to try and keep + 1 to wound on a reinforced Mortal murder blob, and you wouldn’t try it more than once.

Next offering.

“The Goretide have been even more motivated to get stuck in and start chopping stuff up ever since Korghos Khul ascended to Daemon Princedom. You’ll be surprised (or terrified, depending what side of the table you’re on) at how fast they can move.” 

An extra 2 inches, for 3 units. As fast as the whole damn infantry blob moves right now with a Field Sergeant (see what I mean about this one feeling like it was written a year ago?). There are plenty of situations were an extra 2 inches would be a surprise, but this isn’t one of them. Sadly we will be losing Field Sergeant so I guess this formation could come in really handy, assuming you have a battle plan that involves defeating another infantry army in a foot race. In the meantime there is this:

The pre-existing default for Khorne Bloodbound units hands out +1 to hit bonuses like awkward conversations about real-life matters between strictly-gaming friends at a Tournament. “So how’s your ….. ah ….. kids? Job?” Assuming you want to do some damage with your entire army that mainly hit’s on 4s you are never going to take Tide of Savagery.

Not to mention the new ability sucks. Why within 12 inches of a hero? Is an extra 2 inches of movement so powerful that it needs restrictions, but moving goddam Skink units in the shooting phase doesn’t?

The thought process behind these new Battle Formations is bewildering. Battle formations are typically built to support units or builds. Khorne has formations for Mortals and Mortal/Daemon hybrids. Why provide two obviously inferior ways to do things we have already? These aren’t even worth experimenting with. I could come up with 2 better options in about 3 seconds:

1: Tyrants of Blood. Fight with a non-unique Blooodthirster one after the other.

2: Hunters of Khorne. Choose two units of Bloodcrushers or Flesh Hounds. Remove the Companion keyword from their melee profiles until the start of your next hero phase.

Neither would be more game breaking than half the stuff we’ve already seen in Scourge of Ghyran but they would give Khorne players a chance to get some use out of units they love. What is the point of these formations?

Prayer Lore

Up until now, the Prayer side of Khorne has proven to be mediocre at best. The Prayers aren’t bad but with a bunch of 1-cast Priests (without much in the way of bonuses), they aren’t worth planning around and the Manifestations range from lacklustre to useless. In practice Khorne players take Priests for their other abilities (Blood Sacrifice or Marking Terrain) and treat Prayers as a nice bonus. Well those days are over as Scourge of Ghyran has served up an all-new, all-different Prayer Lore. Let’s have a look.

Not bad. Like all of this new Lore it lands on a 3+ and doubles on an 8+, so you can often land it in one turn. A few units in the game have this ability and it can be pretty useful if you are going to take a battering across multiple phases. Bloodthirsters are the obvious candidates for this one. It’s the unlimited Prayer of the lore, and while you aren’t ever likely to be running more than two Priests, I guess it does give you something to do turn one.

Another decent prayer that seems best-suited to keeping Bloodthirsters alive. It’s a bit situational but when you need it, you need it, and it has a low enough Prayer value to consider as a counter cast against the right opponent. A 3-up ward against the damage of Manifestations is pretty unusual. I would mount an argument that the entire army merits a ward against spells, prayers and manifestations as an allegiance ability, but whatever.

“Lastly, Gift of Apoplexy enrages your opponent’s units so much that they start hitting each other if they use an ability that isn’t Move, Charge or Fight. Those Jezzail teams and Freeguild Fusiliers are going to have an awful time.”

Straight off the bat, why is somebody’s go-to shooting threat Jezzail teams and Fusiliers? I haven’t seen a Jezzail team this edition. It’s like advertising a helmet as insurance against falling space debris. And a reinforced shooting unit isn’t going to lose any sleep over a couple of mortals. These things really are written by people who don’t play the game.

A heal or a Bronzed Flesh would have made a lot more sense in this slot, but Gift of Apoplexy is the star of the new Lore and can make life seriously miserable for the right target, either shutting down a unit or forcing it to cop a wave of chip mortals. The right target is a unit with a complicated warscroll that uses a lot of abilities, and having a Priest live long enough to shut down a Kroak or Nagash could be interesting.

This isn’t gonna be game breaking as people won’t obligingly kill themselves using abilities, nor choose not to use a crucial ability because of a few mortals, but it does seem like a lot of fun and will have its applications. Get ready for arguments about what is or isn’t classed as using an ability. Does a failed spell count as using an ability? Probably. I’m not going to bother looking it up when we have a Swede in the Craichouse discord to outsource our pedantry to, but it might be a problem for people without Scandinavian acquaintances.

I hop this counts as using an ability every time, because Fuck Be’Lakor!¹

So the Prayer Lore is ok. Definitely more useful thanks to low casting values and buffs that you can use out of range of the opposition. I wouldn’t say we’ve got a full divine power build that’s worth spamming Priests for, but you can plan around it and it is good for keeping Thirsters alive. Best of all it seems uniquely suited to the task of fucking with Kroak.

I will say that whoever is writing the Khorne flavor text has knocked it out of the park with the word-of-the-day purple prose here. Glistening steaming blood, coagulating, guttural, antithetical, sympathetically manifest. Stirring stuff. Calling a prayer Gift of Apoplexy is worth a payrise by itself.

The Warscrolls

I did not see this one coming. As one of the more useless units in AOS, Bloodcrushers were the obvious choice for a new scroll, but I didn’t pick the Mighty Lord. There was some talk about the silliness of having a once-a-game ability that counts as a Command, a Flesh Hound with one less attack and no anti-wizard rend, but they can all shut the hell up because ….

It’s back baby. The original and best rule in all of Khorne. The greatest source of triumph and frustration in AOS. Removing the Axe was a grievous insult to the faithful. The AOS 3 and 4 version kind of sucks because it occurs at the end of the turn, meaning if you stick a powerful Hero with it they will inevitably kill your Mighty Lord before they die, so you will rarely get a chance to replicate my feat of putting down both a Lord Celestant on Dracoth and a Stardrake back in the 2018 Measured Gaming Club Championships.

That said, they have added a caveat that destroyed units cannot be replaced, which as near as I can figure works on only three things: Wight Kings, the old Black Coach that no Nighthaunt player will ever field and Allarielle’s stupid ability to bring back whatever she likes including herself. Pretty situational but if you hate tree elves as much as I do, it’s a nice buff.

Is it a competitive choice? Not especially. For all that the presence of this guy in a list will trouble nervous opponents with high value heroes, at 180pts the Mighty Lord doesn’t do enough. Too chancey and situational. Unless there is some sort of Field Sergeant-type buff for taking support heroes in regiments you probably wont see this guy in winning lists, but who cares? The Axe is back!

Bloodcrushers have goaded their brass steeds to even greater heights of violence. Put simply, don’t stand in their way because they will go right through you!

On a 3+, one unit in the army can try to move their giant bases through a screen to get into something else, where they will do sweet fuck all damage relative to other models in their class. Huzzah! In fairness this scroll is a considerable upgrade on one of the most useless warscrolls in the game, but at 180pts they still suck.

What are these things meant to be? Screening, tarpitting units? Well Skullcrushers arrive at 220pts with a 2+ save. Damaging units? For the lols I will put them up against the all-new 200pt Gore-gruntas on the charge:

That’s without even considering the bajillion buffs that can go on Gore-Gruntas and the nothing-but-All out Attack that can go on Skullcrushers. They do have all those sweet Daemon abilities along with really good recursion, so if you are allowed to run them in Legion of the First Prince then that’s the place for them². Hopefully someone will prove me wrong with Bloodcrusher spam, but on the face of it these things suck.

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So there you have it. A handy alternative Prayer Lore, a sweet Axe for the fun builds and a whole bunch of nothing at all. Honestly not bad for a Khorne update. I am nursing a secret hope that the Scourge of Ghyran update was so uninspiring because the forthcoming battletome will bring all the good stuff: Tyrants of Blood for Bloodthirsters, actual damage output for Daemon troops, a relevant warscroll for the Khorgorath.

Either way, I’m pretty pumped for the AOS 4.5 GHB. At least we won’t be paying points for Khorne manifestations.

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1. Apparently not? Git GRAAL’d cunt. ~Pete ↩︎
2. Thanks to Xander for pointing out that this seems to be a No: the LotFP units have their own distinct warscrolls. Now can I please be the one to tell him? ~Pete ↩︎