Just when we were talking about the meta, Games Workshop dropped a number of new FAQs, errata, and Designer’s Commentary docs for Kill Team, giving us a new set of updates and clarifications to work with. As always, we’ve done the hard work of poring over them and identifying what changed (not always easy!), and what it means for your games. So strap in and follow along.
You can find today’s updates here.
Core Rules
Author’s Edit 8/11/22: From the Errata we have a significant change to Vantage Points, where as before operatives could not gain either Cover or Obscured from the floor, OR the lower parts of the vantage points, they now only lose the benefits of Obscuring. This is a significant change to Vantage Points where as before a vantage point that lacked any walls or other terrain features on top left operatives completely exposed from enemies on the ground. This made using them nearly suicidal, but they now are significantly more useful. Thank You Reader David Garcia for spotting this mistake.
The Designer’s Commentary for the Core Rules has a number of Question and Answer updates including:
- Confirmation that operatives are indeed visible to themselves.
- All re-rolls do not need to be declared at the same time; for example, if you have two misses and need them both to be successes, you may command re-roll one and view the result before re-rolling the second and potentially wasting more command points.
- Abilities that require you to roll dice “as if that operative were in combat” gain bonuses from combat support AND can trigger abilities that take effect if an operative were incapacitated in combat, HOWEVER the target is not considered to be fighting in combat. This one is a little tricky, highly recommend you read it yourself, but the rationale is basically being “in combat” and “fighting in combat” are two different things.
- Abilities that interrupt enemy activation, such as Track Target (1 AP), can still activate even if it is the target’s last action of that activation.
- In the course of explaining that Psychic Power Weapons can’t be upgraded with Rare Equipment it was revealed that Psychic Power Weapons don’t suffer the penalties from being injured. This is a minor buff to WarpCoven that seems almost unintentional based on where it was placed in the Commentary.
- Bonuses that effect a single Shoot Action effect all the shooting attacks generated by that action, meaning those caused by Blast or Torrent. A rather obvious, but important clarification.
- When using Equipment Drop Requisition in narrative play on an item with a split cost the lower cost is used.
- The Scrap Pile Terrain feature’s unique movement actions Scramble Over (1 AP) and Charge Over (1 AP) may be substituted for free Normal Move or Charge Move actions such as those provided by the Wyrmblade Locus’s Quicksilver Strike (1 AP) ability. A very minor change unless players and organizers begin making greater use of the expanded terrain rules from White Dwarf.
Corsair Voidscarred
A minor wording change has been added to the third bullet under the Faolchu (1 AP) action for the Kurnite Hunter. Specifically the mention of Heavy Cover has been changed to Heavy Terrain simply because Heavy Cover is not a thing in the game.
Kommandos
Vantage Points and other abilities that treat the target as having a Conceal Order for the purposes of shooting don’t negate the ability to automatically retain a save provided by the Skulking About strategic ploy.
Legionary
Designer’s Commentary has been added to the Legionaries Kill team, answering a few questions. Specifically, Disgusting Vigor can be used to change the retained save from cover into a critical save, BUT it must be declared prior to rolling defense dice. Additionally, invulnerable saves are effected by the defense dice reduction of Malignant Aura.
Novitiates
Three changes here:
- This one was hard to spot but the Keyword from the previous Errata 1.1 for Faithful Blessing had Novitiate bolded in black, which is an incorrect format as Novitiate is not a keyword found on any datacard, but is instead the Faction Keyword and thus was changed to orange font with a skull.
- Enemies incapacitated by Inferno tokens do not count towards the Purge with Flame Tac Op. It is unclear how people have been playing this up until now, and thus hard to comment on whether this is a nerf or not.
- More than one Act of Faith may not be used during an operative’s activation, even if that activation is interrupted by abilities such as Track Target.
Veteran Guardsmen
The Demolition Veteran now requires the spot he is using the Plant Mine action on to be visible. Basically no more planting bombs through walls, a minor, but understandable change.
Wyrmblade
Clarification that Cult Ambush applies to all shooting attacks caused by a single Shoot Action such as those caused by Blast or Torrent; this basically repeats the designer’s commentary from the Core Rules.
Blooded
Apparently the Diabolyk Bomb was listed as a melee weapon in the printed rules? This has been changed. Holy shit, even I missed that one.
Phobos Strike Team
A number of small changes have been made mostly in regard to the Minelayer and Saboteur. Both now require visibility to the spot that they wish to place their explosives, the former’s Proximity ability now ignores ballistic skill modifiers, while the latter’s Detonate special rule has been clarified to effect both enemy and friendly operatives.
The Designer’s Commentary further clarifies what the word “finish” means for some moron, and then answers more reasonable questions, such as:
- Track Target counts as the single Overwatch action an operative may take during a Turning Point.
- Grapnel Launchers and the Vanguard ploy do in fact stack when it comes to reducing vertical distance, which basically means they have a pseudo-Fly if nothing on the table has a height greater than 4 inches. This is actually pretty important and makes taking a Reiver more enticing.
- In rare narrative situations where both the Voxbreak (1 AP) action and the Umbra Shroud are used, both take effect, so opponents must be re-roll any crits, but they can’t re-roll anything else.
On the whole these don’t really change much from a balance standpoint, but the game’s balance is in a pretty good place right now, as we saw in the meta analysis we put out earlier today. There are likely still a few balance tweaks to be made, but on the whole we’d prefer to see those addressed in a dataslate over the FAQs/errata, where we want to see more corrections and actual FAQs.
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