The 2024 Edition of Kill Team has overhauled the game, changing rules, datasheets, and bringing with it an updated set of rules for every team in the game. In this series we’re taking a look at each team, how they’ve changed, and what it means for how they play in the new edition.
Welcome back Kill Teamers to the re-review of the Hearthkyn Salvagers Kill Team. Definitely released in a rough shape, much of Kill Team 2021 wasn’t too kind to the votann’s first outing. Needing a bevy of buffs, and unique rule additions to get them into a playable space. However there was a strong team buried in the sand, and the new edition has been kind to them.
In this re-review, we’ll be going over the broad strokes of the changes, and trying to recontextualize the team in the new edition. Especially noting any larger changes, that are coming down the line.
Before we dive in, we’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing a preview copy of these rules for Review purposes.
The Video Version of the Review
We have a video version of this review courtesy of Can You Roll a Crit?
Team Overview
This team gives you ten stouty kyn, clad in their finest void armour and sent into the killzone to finish the Recon or Security archetypes. The team has a veritable smorgasbord of choices operatives wise with some fun pieces, alongside more serious threats.
Team Ability: Grudge
When an allied operative is incapacitated, you add a Grudge Token to the enemy that did them in. Whenever a friendly operative shoots, fights, or retaliates against an enemy with a Grudge Token you can retain a normal as a critical for each token on that enemy.
This means your operatives generally get better as the game goes on, and makes everyone with a Plasma Knife even scarier. With Piercing Crits 1 on our standard weapons, this means we’re well set up to manage the coming wave of Astartes threats.
The Operatives
Good news everykyn! We’ve kept the pep in our step, hitting 5” of movement along with the editions other slow operatives, we still commit violence on 4s, with a tanky 3+ save, and 8 wounds. This makes us an extremely hard to shoot down team, especially with the loss of piercing 2 across the board.
Hearthkyn Warrior
Our humble warrior hits on 4s, with our 3/4 damage, Accurate 1 autoch-pattern bolters, or Piercing Crits 1 ion blasters. We’ll never leave home without some Plasma-Knives, so you can just bake in the 3 attacks, on 4+s, Lethal 5+, 3/5 damage melee as well, backed up with defensive Secure Salvage ability to knock 1 damage off of the first damage die in any given sequence while you’re on an objective or mission marker. Those 8 wounds are going to be mighty hard to shift, while still presenting a solid threat.
Hearthkyn Theyn
Our swiss army knife of a leader, able to take almost any combination of ranges from the armoury. It turns out he was sporting a pre-nerfed plasma pistol all along, which still seems pretty poor with the 4+ hit target. You’ll generally take the plasma weapon, but you can take a fist against 7-wound operatives who could use a concussion. Meanwhile the Eyes of the Ancestor strategic gambit continues to let you apply killzone-wide grudges, sometimes even two, if three or more kyn are down. Letting you get extremely spicy turning point 3 and onwards. Defensively our Weavefield Crest lets us dodge the first attack dice that deals 4 or more damage during a game. A strong melee piece, that we keep alive to grudge for at least the first two turns.
Hearthkyn Dozr
Our dozr returns to this edition without the teamwide damage mitigation which is now in purview of our warriors. Knux Smash keeps its old buff, letting you shove someone 3” and follow up. Use this to extend your threat range and lock yourselves in combat with more enemies. This lets your Brawler ability ignore assistance, and let you isolate your targets. Do note that if we get a kill with Brawler, we can probably hit the Worth It ploy, to let us steal control of an objective!
Hearthkyn Field Medic
Melee-centric murder medic specialist, the field medic returns to bring life and death in equal measure. As far as the healing side, he’s much the same as everyone else nothing to write home about. Our medic is particularly good against grudged up targets, seeing as we have a flat 5 crit damage in both ranged and melee spheres. Otherwise we shouldn’t be bringing this guy all that often outside of shooting match ups.
Hearthkyn Grenadier
One of the better Grenadier abilities, letting our boy take frag, krak, stun, and smoke in infinite amounts. The utility grenade is now nerfed to only making mission action/pickup actions harder while within 3” of the token but with the 20mm token the range is larger. The C8 HX charge has lost Seek much like other grenades but still packs a huge wallop. Make sure to remember that if you can land it inside a Volkus stronghold you get lethal 5+!
Hearthkyn Gunner
The bread and butter of our ranged DPS, the Gunner can take three of five possible weapons and the experienced Votann player will know which three are best for the given task. Always take the Plasma Beamer; it’s hard to go wrong with 5/6 Piercing 1 and Beam — take extreme care to always look for a grudge target as our primary target to lance people with that beam line. Missile Launchers are another reliable choice, letting us project blast 2” and another 5/6 Piercing 1 threat. The Rotary Cannon has lost the ability to shoot through Obscurity, which devalues it somewhat, while the Auto Rifle keeps us mobile with a solid Ceaseless, Rending profile, letting us ramp up the damage against grudged targets. The Magna Rail Rifle comes in against Astartes but has lost its mobility cheats, now being restricted to Dash only.
Hearthkyn Jump Pack Warrior
Our jump pack warrior lost the ability to yeet itself 13”, but has moved to a spritely 8” move stat. Considering the rest of his loadout is much the same with a plasma weapon, 4 attacks, 3+ hit, 4/6 damage, with lethal 5+, and oftentimes Brutal when you finish a charge. He’ll still do an excellent job of changing control of objectives, and reacting to opponents movements. An excellent choice for an Ancestors Are Watching ploy, keep him towards the back of your activation order to react to opponents.
Hearthkyn Kinlynk
Our first support specialist with dual weapon choices with Piercing Crits 1 ion blasters doing more work with our grudge system. Able to boost someone’s APL within 6”, and System Jam an opponent. The ability of System Jam to force a valid target to move last in the turning point is an incredibly flexible ability. Being able to send your kinlynk into an overwatch position to stall an opponent, while handing out action points is incredibly flexible!
Hearthkyn Kognitaar
Our second support specialist, with the same weapon loadouts as the kinlynk. The Kognitaar is instead focused on its Tactician strategist gambit ability, lets us get re-rolls for attack dice, or re-rolls for defense dice depending on the token placed. With the Accelerated Appraisal ability to move the token during the turn, you’ve got some dynamism on those re-rolls, though with our choices for operatives you’ll be judging whether you want this or some other tech piece.
Hearthkyn Lokatr
Our third support specialist, with the same loadouts as above, the Lokatr makes it into this edition as a new operative. We’ve got the auspex variant with Spot granting seek light and no obscurity to a friendly within 3”, while Pan Spectral Scan still lets us drop a token that gives off a 3” scan bubble. When shooting at targets in that token’s range, we get the Accurate 1, and Saturate rules. Don’t forget that accurate 1 doesn’t stack, so don’t expect this to match up well with autoch-pattern bolters.
Hearthkyn Lugger
Our last support specialist, with the dual loadout situation. The lugger is commonly a must take, as I’ve Got it lets us perform mission actions for 1 less once a turn. While Well Supplied lets us take an additional equipment option which should be quite potent with the advent of universal equipment. Losing the ability to change out friendly loadout weapons mid game.
The Ploys
We’ve got a spread of ploys that remain mostly unchanged in purpose in this edition, with some notable upgrades now that tac op mission markers can be used to originate some of these. Need Keeps lets us select an objective marker or mission marker that we get 1 more APL for control, and importantly +1 attack in melee to a maximum of four. This lets us perform the counterpunching on a single objective, with our plasma knives. Toil Earns lets us treat all enemies within 3” of an objective or mission marker as having an extra grudge token, which is brutally efficient in terms of space. This ends up being a reasonably large buff with the range going up an extra 20mm. Wrought Defence sees some reworks, letting us re-roll a defence die if we miss two saves, this is probably better than looking for crits. However it’s more of a sidegrade. Proximate Firepower returns with the same 6” range, letting us boost our hit by 1, while shooting. Luckily all our ploys should be obvious when we want to pop them, and they’re all quite powerful. Spoilt for choice truly!
Firefight ploys make return mostly whole, with Rampart, being replaced with a new one. The Ancestors Are Watching remains a favorite basically letting 1 operative act with a free fight or shoot, which is obviously powerful. Worth It lets us perform a mission action before we are incapacitated, and is important to keep in mind when getting aggressed on. Notably in shooting match ups, being able to flip control before you die, or letting the dozr steal an objective on a suicidal charge is pretty nice. Sturdy fills in a pretty solid spot letting us turn an opposing shoot action into all normal dice, leaving the retain critical hit rules in place. Another strong back pocket option, when opponents try to shoot you to pieces, extremely potent with the rise of Severe keywords across the game space. Engage to Acquire is new, letting you re-roll all attack dice against an enemy operative that currently controls something you want. Notably the target needs to be the one controlling that objective, and you can see your first dice before hitting the Relentless button. With so many tools it’s up to the commander to know when to pull out the correct tool for the job!
Equipment
Plasma Knives
Everyone gets an additional melee weapon, with 3 attacks, 4+ hit, 3/5 damage, and lethal 5+. Excellent when paired with Need Keeps, or grudge tokens, to let you really threaten with almost any operative at any threat range.
Climbing Rigs
Everyone treats vertical distances during climbs as 1” less to a minimum of 2”, outside of ladders. This is excellent movement enabling, letting us clamber up terrain as 6” movement models.
Excavation Tools
Friendly operatives can perform the Pick Up Marker action for 1 AP less, and don’t have to control the marker when doing so. There aren’t an incredible number of uses for this right now, but if a mission lets you pick stuff up, then this is pretty potent. Use it when you need to!
Writ of Claim
Once per battle after rolling for initiative you can add 1 to the roll for each objective you are contesting and/or controlling, basically letting you take initiative on any turn once a game. I suspect you’ll always take this as getting or giving initiative on an important turn seems incredibly potent.
Take Down the Chaos Hordes
Against horde match ups, we’ve got 2 nice boosts. Plasma knives, and warriors that ignore damage. Along with re-rolls and other rules that care about objective markers. We’ll be taking confirm kill, and choosing that as our primary op. This means we can set up defensively onto the midboard early. Letting opponents focus on our far afield warrior, who’s taking chunks out of his opponents with that plasma knife.
Our goals are to frustrate the opponent with our surprisingly tanky operatives, so on tp2, focus on scoring the midboard with a warrior, while our dozr lies in wait. We can send our jump pack warrior as a quick backup piece if a flank falters, all while building up opposing grudge tokens. Just know that you have multiple comms abilities, that can rubberband a poor position in a target rich environment, so long as you have grudge in high supply. With Need Keeps, and a free fight from Ancestors Are Watching, any operative going in on a confirm kill marker can chop down almost any foe, while laying down a withering fire. Getting used to those big plays is critical for dwarves!
Final Thoughts
The hearthkyn had some big changes in the makeover of the edition, while mostly staying true to the most popular playstyle of KT21. They’ve lost the focus on terrain manipulation to refocus on shooting, knives, and counter punching. Overall we’re expecting they remain a fun off-meta team that has some particularly powerful shooting against non-Nurgle Legionaries, which are still brutally efficient against Piercing 1 shooting.
Luckily for them the rising tide of the Astartes has elevated the kyn’s best match up to common status. With Plasma Knives able to chip off 33% of an Astartes wound pool with 1 crit, the end game can become a true nightmare scenario for opposing elite players. Against the wider teams, the newer counteract lets your 10 operatives get some extra movement, or offense. This makes the whole situation seem somewhat rosy for aspiring votann players! Best of luck to those who take up the role of local short king!
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
