Adapting List(s) to Warzone Nephilim

[Frosty the Pirate]

Yes, this thread is a little early given the book itself it only in pre-order this week, but I wanted to put a place where those of us who endlessly ponder these things could discuss or think-tank various ideas about how your list might be changing to adapt to the new missions and secondaries.


My first "useful" thoughts I had were about updating my "anti-kill-secondary" template I use as a guide to form a list as soon as I have a full-copy of the new secondaries in my hands. (basically how many of each type of thing can I take before my list gives up 10+ points on a secondary like No Prisoners, Bring It Down, or Assassinate).

Previously, this list came down as:

Take 2 or less Characters
Take 3 or less units/characters with the Psyker keyword (Abhor)
Take 99 or less total wounds of non-character non-vehicle wounds
Take 9 or less VP worth of Light/Medium/Heavy vehicles (as per the value when killed on Bring It Down)
Take 0 or 1 Titanic-Keyworded unit

I'd be curious if or how this needs to be adjusted, with Titan Slayer being rolled into Bring It Down, and the slight tweak to Assassinate.


I'll be adding more pieces to this thread as we get more info and the book itself over the next few weeks.

Feel free to add your own thoughts too!

[raceygaming]

I think the biggest list adaptation is going to be the balance between what Relic/Trait combos do you NEED to have, and what were utility picks. A lot of the relic/ trait combos are going to be lost but a lot of lists use them as a tech ability.

I know I will be the first to lament the fight last armour for orks that will never see play again.

[lightcavalier]

Jun 20, 2022 13:00:26 GMT -5 raceygaming said:

I think the biggest list adaptation is going to be the balance between what Relic/Trait combos do you NEED to have, and what were utility picks. A lot of the relic/ trait combos are going to be lost but a lot of lists use them as a tech ability.

I know I will be the first last armour for orks that will never see play again.

I know with my BT that I likely will just use Grimaldus + the Emperor's Champion more, and will likely not bother with WL Traits or Relics on HQs, but will still likely throw 2 CP at Champion of the Feast and Revered Repositories.....if I spend it on anything at all.

On the flip side my eldar will pretty much always spend 2 CP to get a WLT and a Relic IOT have Natural Leader and the Spirit Stone of Anathlan

[Frosty the Pirate]

tabletoptactics.tv/2022/06/18/war-zone-nephilim-faction-secondaries-warhammer-40000-state-of-play

Table top tactics put together a nicely formatted version of the same info released by goonhammer on secondary objective changes, sorted by alliance/faction

Should help you plan to adapt if you built your list(s) around secondaries.

I know I'm already looking at some very different secondaries than before as my mainstays.

[Frosty the Pirate]

So I've been mulling around and watching/listening to a lot of what the community is saying about list design in Nephilim, and I came across a really interesting speech/rant/brain-dump by Nanvanti buried in an AoW video from a couple weeks ago.

I'm paraphrasing/misquoting a little here since there no transcript from the video, but the gist is here:

Nephilim really has hit the tipping point on army-interaction. With the removal of To The Last and Stranglehold, there's no longer a path that exists where you can just pick three secondaries that work ~90% of the time for your games, you have to be much more fluid and actually plan to interact with your opponent. However, this presents a huge problem, because the way you want to interact with a Death Guard army featuring 30 terminators is going to be completely different than the way you might approach an MSU Drukhari army.

You need to be much more fluid with your army construction, and have adaptation built-in, you'll still need to build around secondaries, but you'll need to plan them in a much different way. You'll need to know which ones are good for your army, and against what type of opponents those work best in. Previously you could take a set of secondaries like Stranglehold, To The Last and then maybe something like Warp Ritual or a codex secondary like Stubborn Defiance that just allows you to sit there and execute your plan. That's all gone now.

Armies will need to figure out their identities. Some armies have very set identities like Aledari, where they are really fast and really fragile but they are also very deadly. Other armies like Tyranids have multiple identities, a list that is centered around monsters is going want to play fundamentally differently than one intending to flood the board with gants or that has a lot of mid-bugs.

My read between the lines on this is, the meta is so fluid right now, that the competitive players can't figure it out anymore. They can't pre-do the calculus of matchups and mathhammer and interactions to boil armies down to a template you need to follow. You can actually design a list basically how YOU (literally you as an individual) want to play the game. We may finally have hit that tipping point where list building becomes as much an art as a science, and there's no "right answer", only a "right for your playstyle" answer.

I can only hope this doesn't last three weeks before the next broken army emerges. Because the game seems to have finally hit a special place. I'm curious what those who have gotten in a couple Nephilim games think of this.

[Jack Shrapnel]

well Navananti not being able to hit the "spam" button on a couple units then not interact with his opponent and win games seems like a good change to me.

I've been playing with the Nephilim changes now for a couple weeks (even if I'm still technically waiting for my printed book I pre-ordered weeks ago!) and it truly does change things alot. Secondaries are quite different now, and if you don't have access to good codex options, the generic ones seem a bit more difficult to choose between now.

I'm a fan of the changes. Even if they did kick my daemons pretty hard.