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.
Novitiates are trainees who, for some reason, get sent to perform essential missions rather than fully qualified Sisters of Battle. They’ve tended to do fairly well since their introduction in Chalnath, perhaps thanks to having a small-ish following of players who knew their rules well. It may also have helped that usually only Novitiate players could understand their core Act of Faith mechanics, meaning their opponents could sometimes be taken by surprise by what they could do.
The team has seen an unusually thorough rewrite for KT ‘24. In very general terms their base damage output has gone up but they have fewer unique abilities, or the ones they have are a bit toned down.
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 This Review
If you’d like to watch a video version of this review, we’ve got the following, courtesy of Can You Roll a Crit?:
Team Overview
This is a 2APL, 4+ save team with 7 wounds for most operatives. The team is led by a Novitiate Superior, who is a full Sister of Battle with 3APL (up from 2 last edition), a 3+ save from power armour and a choice of impressive weaponry – from which you will almost always choose a plasma pistol and power weapon.
The other operatives mostly specialise in melee, religious administration or burning people. You also get a medic and the condemnor, who is a sniper with a crossbow. Other than the Superior, Condemnor and flamers, ranged attacks are limited to autopistols. They’ve got short-ranged weaponry and aren’t particularly durable. But the good news is, their faith is their shield. Speaking of which, let’s talk about their team special rule:
Special Rule: Acts of Faith
Novitiates generate Faith points, which can be spent to miraculously modify dice results on attacks and saves. Many of the team’s other abilities, ploys and equipment interact with this rule, such as by generating extra points or triggering additional effects when they are spent.
You get a Faith point for every two operatives (rounding up) in the Ready step every turn. Some operatives bring you more points when they do stuff, so you’ll get more during the turn. This is somewhat simplified from the previous version, in which points were generated by operatives doing different actions based on their individual archetypes. Operatives don’t have these archetypes any more so instead operatives have specific abilities that generate points. For example the Pronatus gives you points for doing mission actions, while the Superior gets one per kill, or two for targets with 12+ wounds. This ought to be a bit simpler than the old system of trying to remember which operatives had the relevant orange triangles on their datasheet.
Faith points persist if not used and you shouldn’t use many in TP1, so you’d expect to have a decent pool of them when the action kicks off.
You can do one Act of Faith whenever you roll attack dice for shooting or melee, or when you roll defence dice against enemy shooting. The actual acts you can do have been streamlined dramatically: There are now only three, and they either let you re-roll one of your dice (1 Faith point), retain a normal success as a crit (2 Faith Points), or retain a fail as a normal success (3 Faith points). This is still plenty powerful while being much easier to remember and just a lot less bonkers than the prior version, with its table of eight different effects and costs.
Team Composition
A Novitiates team consists of one Novitiate Superior, who comes with either a plasma/relic bolt pistol and power weapon or a relic boltgun, plus 9 additional Novitiates. This is unchanged from Kill Team 2021, and your list of additional operatives is the same as before, with ten specialist operatives to choose from, plus your generic Militant option. As before, you can’t take each operative more than once except for Militants (any number) and Purgatus operatives (two). The Purgatus operatives are your gunners, carrying flamers into battle.
Novitiate Kill Teams have access to the Recon and Security Archetypes.
Playing This Team
Acts of Faith have been streamlined and dialled back, but they’re still a powerful piece of the puzzle for this Kill Team. Managing your Faith Points throughout the game is going to be huge, particularly since you’re going to generate more points during early Turning Points, before your operatives become incapacitated. On that note, it’ll often be worth spending Faith Points to keep your operatives around, as doing so essentially refunds them.
It’s also worth pointing out that Blessed Rejuvenation has been moved from being an Act of Faith to a Strategy Ploy this time around – while the ploy is active, whenever you use Faith Points on an action, the operative you spent them on can regain lost wounds (D3+the number spent). This is massive, and is going to be the way you pull off a lot of wacky plays, healing back damage you’ve taken to help make up for your lower health totals. If you can afford the CPs to combine this with Defenders of the Faith, another Strategic Ploy which halves the damage from one incoming success, you could make your operatives surprisingly tough against incoming fire.
Combat-wise, Novitiates specialise in short-range engagements; although the team has access to some full-range options, most of the guns the team can take are 8” range, such as the Purgatus’ Ministorum flamers or the autopistols carried by most of the team. This puts them in a bit of a tricky position, as they have to move in close to engage enemy teams effectively but only have 4+ saves and 7 wounds. This can make the team very tricky to play well, and so you’ll want a Hospitaller around, and you’ll need to make good use of your Faith points and Blessed Rejuvenation.
What’s Changed?
You have all the same operatives so if you had a team in the last edition you won’t need to change anything. However, nearly all operatives have seen their abilities change somewhat, while often seeing their damage increase.
The Purgatus have lost their Burning Advance ability, which used to let them dash before or after firing. But their flamers now do 4/4 damage, meaning they kill a lot of operatives with two successes. Like all flamers they get Saturate, as well as 8” range, partially making up for losing that dash. If they retain any crits they can use the Purge with Flame ploy for free, causing the target an extra D3 wounds whenever it activates unless it sacrifices an AP to put out the flames.
The Penitent has a terrifying Eviscerator, doing 5/6 Brutal as before. Zealous Rage now makes it Ceaseless all the time (we don’t know why they didn’t just give the weapon Ceaseless) rather than Relentless the first time you fight each turn. Absolution through Destruction is basically the same, letting her fight twice for one AP – or none if she’s been subject to the Exactor’s Whip into Frenzy ability. That now adds 1” to any operative’s movement (other than the superior) and lets them do two fight actions, one of them for free, but that’s not quite as good as the bonus APL it used to grant. The Dialogus has kept the ability to hand out bonus APL, however.
The Condemnor has had a bit of a boost, now getting 3/3 damage instead of 2/3. Her attacks (including the crossbow) now do 1 extra damage and get Lethal 5+ against psykers, which is particularly nasty with Devastating 2.
Your Pronatus and Reliquarius have had their abilities swapped around a bit but are mostly the same. Their job is performing mission actions and fuelling your Faith points while doing so. The Reliquarius has lost the Icon of Purity ability, which used to let your nearby operatives shoot when they die. She now just sits on objectives, waving her stick and generating Faith.
The interaction between the Hospitaller’s Medic! ability and Blessed Rejuvenation is not totally clear. It looks to us like if you spend faith points on your defence dice, get incapacitated anyway and get saved by the Hospitaller, you may then regen health. If it does work that way you could end up with an operative on close to full health, when they’d otherwise have been dead. It will be quite hard for your opponent to get rid of her thanks to the Blinding Aura Firefight Ploy. This makes your operative not a valid target unless she’s within 2″, causing the enemy to lose their action if they can’t select any other target.
Three Cool Things About This Team:
- Acts of Faith. The new version does 80% of what the old one did, but it’s now much easier to remember and play with. And it’s still a very powerful ability, letting you get away with all kinds of nonsense.
- Blessed Rejuvenation. This Strategy Ploy is huge, and a lot of your play is going to revolve around using this to heal up your operatives in key moments. A Superior being able to charge, fight, heal, and overcharge a plasma pistol without worrying about the consequences (because even if she burns herself she can just heal) is a powerful threat. The Penitent may well kill two opponents and emerge unhurt, while operatives who get saved by your Hospitaler can spray and pray with their autopistols to heal themselves.
- Setting Things on Fire. In addition to their flamers, the team’s Purgatus operatives can also have the Blazing Inferno Firefight ploy used on them free once per Turning Point. This lets them set a target on fire, hitting for additional damage until they opt to remove the status by spending an APL..
Final Thoughts
On the whole, Novitiates appear to be a bit weaker than they were in the prior edition, though it’s worth noting that the team came out of the gates swinging when they were first released and had to be nerfed multiple times via Dataslate. This new version of the team is at least an improvement in the sense that they seem easier to play and work with, and even a reduced version of Acts of Faith is still plenty powerful, helping you push through extra damage and make saves that keep your operatives around and harrying the enemy.
It looks like Blessed Regeneration will make Novitiates really effective into hordes, but do little or nothing against elites or anyone who can one-shot them. There will certainly be times when even quite big guns get a poor roll and end up doing little or no damage. That adds a level of unpredictability for your opponent, which could make things a bit tricky for them.
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