If you think Grey Knights are broken

[Cuddy]

Old DH weren't exactly the most balanced either, in a really different way :P. Those are some good tactics for that though.

[wormark]

I've never heard anyone try to argue that Grey Knights are unbeatable. To even waste time arguing against that point is a straw man argument of the worst kind.

There is a valid argument to be made that Grey Knights are overpowered. I could see a tyranid player arguing that they were a bit broken. Tyranids had a rough go of it in tournament play anyways, Grey Knights only made it harder.

The top tier armies are IG, SW, and GK (some might add BA as well). You just get more value for the points.

The 3++ data tells us nothing. We don't get any information about the experience level of the GK players or the builds. Almost any Draigowing will mop up lower tiered competition, while a properly built list in the hands of a mediocre player will outperform almost any army outside the top tier armies and hardened vet players.

There are hard counters to a lot of common GK builds, which is why it can also perform poorly. I rarely ever see a list that takes advantage of what GKs do best, which is cheap scoring/melta units (henchmen with Coteaz) and brutally efficient Uber-Elite units (Purifiers, Psyflemen, etc).

[Grovel]

Personally, I think the 3++ article proves the opposite - to me it says Grey Knights ARE broken.

Overpowered? No.
Broken? Yes.

For results to skew to that extent based compared to other armies says that they're 'not quite right'. As above I don't think they're overpowered, just that their balance is not quite right.

[Tiberian]

I started playing GKs after I found that vanilla marines just weren't quite what I was looking for. I play a pure GK list and try to stay away from the obvious henchman shenanigans. I think the GKs are a bit overpowered but I show my buddies (oponents) how to better counter the GK strengths so we can keep the games exciting and down to the wire. Between good tactics and smart builds GKs can be taken down I assure you it just takes persistence.

[ComradePenguin]

The GKs are not broken, but they certainly are sitting pretty in competitive play. They are the easy button for 40k, if you are struggling in normal games you can pick up a GK army and expect to do reasonably well. They have things like purifiers to eradicate hordes, psych and rad grenades to neuter deathstars, and forceweapons galore for those monstrous creatures. They can stack strength buffs, increase their I, and still dish out buckets of storm bolter fire. Their only real weakness, low numbers, can be mitigated with henchmen or hiding in transports. They have the tools to counter what any other army can throw at them.

That being said, SW and IG can give them a run for their money. Unfortunately, if you are not using one of these books you will usually find yourself facing an uphill battle.

[DarkLink]

SW are the kings of 40k. They have won more tournaments worldwide than anything else. It's actually much closer than most people seem to think, though. I can't seem to find the site that had tallied up the results from a bunch of major events over the last year or so, though.

For results to skew to that extent based compared to other armies says that they're 'not quite right'. As above I don't think they're overpowered, just that their balance is not quite right.

No, and here's why.

Grey Knights, individually, are extremely powerful, thanks to all their wargear, psychic powers and special rules. An incompetent opponent who hasn't mastered target selection or any tactics beyond rolling dice and hoping it works will be pretty easily defeated, because the Grey Knights have a hard mathematical advantage.

To beat Grey Knights, you require a bit of subtlety. You don't beat Grey Knights by facing them head on and trying to out-assault or out-shoot them. One on one like that, you'll lose. You beat them by out-deploying and out-maneuvering them. Take apart small chunks of their army, and they will fall apart. For all the talk about how awesome Grey Knights are, they cannot deal with attrition very effectively. But doing that takes experience and skill, something that noobs and poor players don't have by definition.

Good players, however, are fully capable of weighing their options and understanding the subtle implications of different deployments and moves. Thus, it becomes a much more balanced matchup, because the game comes down to which player can deploy and maneuver better. So Grey Knights are only broken against incompetent opponents.

[PaperclipBadger]

DarkLink, you talk a lot about the 'subtle flaws' of the grey knights that advanced players can exploit to claim the victory. Would you care to divulge them?

[DarkLink]

It's kinda tricky to explain simply, that's why it's subtle.

There are a couple different aspects.



The first thing to establish is that, generally, if you just line up a squad of GKs against a squad of just about anything else and march them straight towards each other, the Grey Knights will probably win. That's where the general idea that GKs are broken comes from, and why inexperienced players had trouble beating GKs.



When you get to more skilled players, however, you can still out-deploy and out-maneuver each other. This comes down purely to player skill rather than army list. This is something particularly important for Grey Knight players, and why GKs are actually difficult to master. GKs typically have a very limited number of units compared to other armies, and those units spend a lot of points on expensive upgrades like all those power weapons. A GK player needs to get his units into a good position to take advantage of his better wargear, or the game will end before he can kill his opponent.

At the BAO, I came up against a Driagowing player in my first game. He had Driago, 10 Paladins and 5x 3 Acotlyes in razorbacks with Coteaz and a couple Dreadnoughts. I didn't have anything that could face the Paladins in a straight fight, though my combined army could still threaten him. So I reserved a bunch of my stuff and deployed a squad or two on the far side of the board.

Because of my deployment, my opponent had a difficult choice. He could either sit his 1000pt unit on an objective for the whole game and do nothing but take potshots at anything that got in range and hope I didn't contest. Or, he could chase after my units that were scattered across the board. He might have been able to catch one, or at least shoot it to death, but he'd be so out of position he'd be lucky to even get back to an objective with that squad.

So by scattering my army, I almost completely negated 1000 out of 1750 of his points. It would then be easy for me avoid the Paladins and shoot the rest of his army to death, then contest some objectives and go for at least a tie if I had bad luck. By out-deploying my opponent, I had effectively dealt with his deathstar unit that nothing in my army could stand up against.

Of course, my dice failed me horribly that game, so it ended up being impossible to win after turn 3, but even then his Paladins didn't really contribute to the game much. I just had a series of freak accidents where half my army ran off the board for absurd reasons (his two Dreadnoughts, both psyrifle dreads with no close combat weapon, killed half my army in close combat, plus every single unit I held in reserves came in turn 2. In fact, that whole tournament I think I rolled a 6 for every single reserve roll).



Related to this is the matter of cohesiveness. As a general rule, I keep my entire GK army together at all times, only splitting off for objectives at the last minute. Because if I don't, then my opponent can create a local numerical superiority and slaughter me one squad at a time. It doesn't matter how OP a unit of 10 Terminators is if my opponent infiltrates his 40 genestealers, protects them from shooting with FNP and assaults my Terminators with them while the rest of my army is busy trying to deal with guant hordes coming from a different direct, a squad of Ymgarl genestealers that popped up out of nowhere, and three or four other threats coming from all directions.

If you can force a GK army to split up, either by deployment or by throwing them a lot of threats from different directions, you have a chance to focus fire on one portion of the army and take it apart. You have to be careful you're sacrificing less than you're killing, of course,

The one thing that GKs do not do effectively is take casualties, so if you can bypass that and start inflicting casualties the GK army will go downhill quickly.


And there are a few things in the game that GKs have trouble dealing with. This depends a lot on the specific GK list, but Ghazz with his 2+ invulnerable save is nasty for anyone in the game. Land Raiders and Battlewagons are tough to deal with when you get cover and the GK player only has psycannons to rely on. And some units, like Blood Crushers or Thunderwolves, can cut through smaller power armor GK squads in the right cases.


Like I said, there are a lot of little things that you can do to counter GKs, but most of them require a lot of experience to know how to effectively pull off. You have to know how both your and your opponent's armies work, you have to have an instinctive knowledge of a lot of advanced tactics and strategies, and you have to keep your mind on the objective. If noobs could do all that, then they wouldn't be noobs.





Now, there are a couple of bad matchups where the GKs have an easy victory. I've curbstomped DE so ruthlessly every time I've played them that I literally can't imagine how it's possible for DE to beat a good GK player/army. GKs do stormbolter spam better than Deathwing, and can shoot the Deathwing player off the board without too much of a contest, though a good player with a bit of luck can still pull off a win. But every army has good and bad matchups with someone, and there are a lot more extreme "auto-lose" matchups in the game, so that is little proof GKs are broken.

[bfmusashi]

A lot of this reminds me of the broken character debates from fighting games. While there are broken characters they aren't usually the ones people think are broken. For example, Capcom's Wolverine and Tekken 3's Eddy Gordo were widely considered over-the-top combo machines. They are easily taken apart by players as they have huge weaknesses apparent when you've played a while. I think Grey Knights fall into the same category. It varies depending on your army build vs. your opponent's.

[Chumbalaya]

Different armies have different learning curves and plateaus. I feel like GKs are similar to Orks in that they have a shallow learning curve (hence the noobslayer moniker) but reach their ceiling sooner.