10th Edition Competitive Faction Focus: Grey Knights

With the release of 10th edition now firmly behind us and more than a month of competitive games in the books it’s time to start taking a deeper look at each of the game’s factions. In this series we’ll talk about each faction, what they have to offer, how they play, and talk about a few list concepts to consider.

You can find all the Faction Focuses that we’ve published here.

In today’s article, we’re taking a look at the Grey Knights. They’ve got some extremely exciting rules in 10th Edition, but also a couple of serious challenges they need to overcome. Keen players of the faction have started to find some builds that manage to solve these, so let’s dig in to how!

Why Should You Play This Faction?

Grey Knights provide an ultra-mobile, ultra-elite fighting force. You’ll generally not have as many models as your opponent on the table, but you have unparalleled flexibility in navigating the board and bringing your forces to bear. You can also participate in the Fight Phase and expect to do some real damage, and have some cool tricks to thwart your opponent’s plans. The tradeoff is that every model is precious, and you need to be constantly thinking about how to keep your forces alive so that they can return to Titan for medals and cocktails. Definitely a thinking-player’s army in 10th Edition, and probably not one for the faint hearted (especially as they struggle with hull-heavy lists), but they provide a unique and dynamic play experience that does a great job of embodying their fluff.

Five Things You Need to Know

• Mobility is Key: Teleport Assault allows you to pick up and redeploy three units each Battle Round (and you have other tricks to boot), allowing you to launch lightning strikes from anywhere, and quickly adapt to the situation on the table.
• You’re Great at Tactical Objectives: Constant teleportation gives you a lot of options for landing position-based Secondaries, and if you have a unit chilling out in the backfield and aren’t using all your teleportation slots for a turn, it’s worth picking them up “just in case”.
• Herohammer Matters: Brotherhood Librarians are one of the most commonly used solo Leaders currently, and your toolbox of Terminator Characters provide a lot of different ways to buff up those units.
• You’re Very Elite: Good for getting an army on the table (especially because the paint scheme is pretty tractable), bad for staying power if you let your opponent get a good hit in. You definitely want to be bringing cheap Imperial Agents to bulk up your board coverage, and need to prioritise using your Stratagems to keep stuff alive.
• You Suck at Killing Tanks: No nice way to put it – right now, Grey Knights really struggle with killing vehicles and monsters, especially ones with either T12+ or Damage Reduction. This means that right now, given the metagame, there is a chance you’re just going to get DPS-checked out of a game sometimes, and there won’t be much you can do about it.

What Are the Must-Have Units to Start This Faction?

The core of successful Grey Knight armies right now tends to be pretty consistent. You want:

• A full squad of ten Purifiers with Castellan Crowe.
• Multiple Terminator units of various flavours.
• One Character per Terminator unit, plus a solo Librarian.
• A couple of Strike or Interceptor units for objective play.
• Some Imperial Agents.

Purifiers with Crowe (usually taking four incinerators in the squad) are your roving ranged damage dealers. You’ll pick these up most turns and drop them somewhere that the volley of various flavours of fire that they unleash can obliterate the enemy. They’re certainly not bad in combat either, but they’re for dropping in, burning stuff, then getting out of dodge once more. Don’t be afraid to use Prognosticated Arrival to drop them in close and Mists of Deimos to pull them out again before the Opponent can do anything about them.

Your reliable options for getting stuff done past that are Terminators. Basic Brotherhood Terminators are good all-rounders (and can revive a model in each of your Command Phases, providing staying power), while Paladins are a bit more ranged-focused, but get a bump in melee from having base BS2+, useful in a Faction without access to many re-rolls. Lots of Characters work well with these – basic Grand Masters let you ignore penalties and provide a free strat, a good combo with Paladins, Kaldor Draigo is great for getting Terminators into combat reliably, and a Chaplain can create a unit that can actually inflict some pain on high-toughness targets. Fives with a Character can do plenty, and aren’t too expensive, and you can definitely build around ten-model units, particularly of Paladins. You can also use a squad as a place to stash a second Brotherhood Librarian, if you want one.

Speaking of Librarians – Vortex of Doom is very legit, and means that a solo teleporting Librarian is something your opponent is going to have to constantly worry about, as they’re easy to slot in somewhere. This unit ends up doing a tonne for you – they’re tough enough that real killing power has to be pointed at them to take one down, and can use Vortex at the same time as doing an Action-like objective, as it’s not a Shooting attack. Also – don’t forget that targeting Vortex ignores Lone Operative, so if you need to roast an Autarch, go wild.

Past that, you want a couple of small power armour units (Strikes or Interceptors) to squeeze value from Teleport Assault, and Imperial Agents to get some cheap utility into the list. Exaction Squads provide cheap value, while Callidus or Eversor Assassins offer even more mobile utility.

If you want something a bit chunkier, you can also get some value out of a Dreadknight or a Land Raider. Land Raiders give you a few big guns, and let you push some Terminators into the opponent’s face, potentially then using the Sigil of Exigence to bug them out and reload them for a second pass. A Dreadknight, particularly a Grand Master one, offers you something that can actually murder enemy tanks in melee, and they benefit a lot from the changes in toughness scaling in 10th. Neither of these chunkier options are mandatory, but both are functional.

How Does This Faction Secure Objectives?

Ah, yeah, see this is the tricky bit – as a faction built around hit-and-run tactics, standing and securing objectives for a prolonged period can be tough. Obviously Terminators are your best bets here, and sticking a squad down then using Haloed in Soulfire to reduce the number of enemies that can shoot at them is a powerful trick. You can also potentially use Mists of Deimos to sneakily move a unit onto an objective when your opponent isn’t expecting it. Finally, if there are objective on the board that are easy to hide on (or you’ve got player-placed terrain, so can ensure one exists), putting a Strike Squad there long enough for them to use Sanctifying Ritual to lock it can force your opponent to divert resources to deal with it, providing you with opportunities to pick them off. Don’t forget that they have Scout 6″, so can reliably reach mid-field objectives straight away.

Failing all that? You are, ultimately, a force with army-wide 2+ saves and access to a Armour of Contempt equivalent in Truesilver Armour. Sometimes you need to take stock of the board and work out what hit a unit is about to take, then gamble on that rather than pulling them out with Mists or other tricks.

How Does This Faction Handle Enemy Hordes?

Remember that teleporting Purifier squad? They are the worst nightmare of hordes. 24 shots of Purifying Flames plus four Incinerators (all with Ignores Cover) will annihilate most horde targets, and taking the Incinerators means that you can double dip by then Overwatching. The fact that the unit gets +1 to wound below half-strength also keeps it relevant even if it ends up low on bodies – save the Incinerators for last, and you’re still smoking 8-12 horde models with each overwatch.

More generally, most hordes can’t face you down in melee,and your Terminators in particular will go through them apace. Hordes are just fundamentally not the targets this army struggles with, even when they have some slightly crunchier mid-size things seeded among them.

How Does This Faction Handle Enemy Tanks and Monsters?

Ah, damn yeah this.

Grey Knights are not good at killing big stuff. Things that are T11 or lower you can gradually chip through with a mixture of psycannons, Vortex of Doom and melee, but stuff that’s tougher than that is a big challenge, especially with Damage Reduction on top (so uh, Wraithknights).

There’s a degree to which knowledge is half the battle here – knowing that you’re bad at this lets you structure the game plan accordingly when the enemy is heavy on this sort of target. You need to focus on killing the stuff you can remove, or where a large target must die, committing hard enough to give yourself the best shot of making it happen. Grey Knights are very good at Secondary play, so stripping away the opponent’s ability to do the same can give you a route to victory even where you can’t outkill the opposition. If your metagame is particularly heavy on Knights or Tyranid monsters, going down the route of a Land Raider or GMDK will help you out too. Don’t forget that the biggest shooting output many Knights have is from a Crusader, and a Land Raider or GMDK in cover popping Truesilver Armour is going to be saving on 2s against all of its big guns, letting you keep them active longer than you might expect.

What Combos Should You Build Around?

As outlined above, your bread and butter unit combos that you should be using a lot are:

• Crowe with 10 Purifiers
• Draigo with Brotherhood Terminators as a melee hammer.
• Paladins with a Grand Master to ignore penalties.

A couple more esoteric tricks you can do are as follows

Shooty Paladin Alpha Strike

Add the First to the Fray enhancement to the Paladin/Grand Master unit above to allow them to drop in and start causing problems right out of the gate. They can even go hard on one flank and pop Haloed in Soulfire for free from the Grand Master to minimise the enemy retaliation, and if they haven’t planned around it and/or you land a charge, the opponent can suddenly be in big trouble.

Reloadable Terminators

Stick five Brotherhood Terminators with a Character bearing the Sigil of Exigence in a Land Raider. Assault Ramp into the fray, cause some chaos, then when the opponent tries to shoot back? Teleport away and prepare for a second strike. This lets you play very aggressively with them without it being a sacrifice, getting more mileage out of the unit. Works well with a Brotherhood Chaplain or Brother Captain to increase damage output, and you can also do this with the latter and Paladins to deal some of the damage in shooting as well.

Paladins in a Stormraven

It’s way closer to legit than you’ve probably assumed, particularly because after swooping in and unleashing the models, you can bip them away with Mists of Deimos if the opponent tries to counterpunch.. Don’t, like, buy into it hard if you haven’t already, but if you’ve got one…

Army Lists

David Timms – 2nd Place – Arch City GT

Army List - Click to Expand

This build maximises the ability to launch lightning strikes wherever requires, then reload and do it again. Terminators in a Land Raider with the Sigil get to engage in multiple rounds of bullying opponents, while the healthy contingent of Strikes and Interceptors provides board coverage. Ten Purifiers (a fixture in pretty much every well-performing singles list, I cannot stress this enough) round things out, providing continues hit-and-run shooting pressure.

Stefan Robertson – 4th Place – North East Open

Army List - Click to Expand

This build goes a bit more top-heavy, centred around a full Paladin bomb with a couple of different Characters that can be joined to it depending on exactly what the matchup demands (and when the Librarian doesn’t, he’s more than happy using First to the Fray to give the opponent a headache solo). Strikes provide most of the support for this, alongside the requsiite Purifiers, and I like the use of one Brotherhood Champion with Inescapable Wrath to ensure one of the Strike units is slightly more reliable out of the Warp.

Wrap Up

That’s it for today – tomorrow we’re continuing the power armour theme, but it’s going to be considerably more bloodstained. Guess who?