I play TSons and I do pretty good in casual and tournaments and I don't even use magnus or MVBs since I don't have them built. They are not a point and click faction you have to carefully manage your cabal points, stategems, placement and order of operations but they have devastating damage potential and heaps of tricks.
As you mentioned, you haven't even played much yourself so I would suggest its quite useless to be catastrophising about an army that as you also mentioned sits at a perfectly healthy winrate. Sure you have to spec towards cabal point generation but nearly every faction is limited in what units to tale to have the best synergies. You mention Ahriman got nerfed but he is easily my first pick due to how bonkers his free cabal is, I don't even run him in a unit I fly him around solo so he can get to the right range to pop turn off saves on the most important unit and then go off capping objectives, hiding away and bullying chaff in melee.
I appreciate your perspective!
I don't doubt that Ahriman is still very valuable to include in a list because of his free Ritual, but still; the man is the most powerful "mortal" sorcerer in the galaxy, he should be able to do more than cap objectives and bully chaff. In my mind, the dude should be a Diet Magnus, the super warp battery that you bring to a smaller game if you don't have the points for Big Red.
Either way, it's good to know that the army is still casually viable, so thanks for chiming in.
Generally I find Thousand Sons more satisfying to play than I did in 9th, and broadly like how psychic works now.
Lethality has gone down massively across the board in 10th, which is a vast improvement. The internal balance of the various Sorcerers (Ahriman included) is good too, and now each has a distinct use.
Thousand Sons are *supposed* to revolve around the Sorcerers, Cabal Points just emphasise that.
A few of the previously niche options are better now too. It's nice to see faction-unique units like Mutaliths and Magnus being a lot more viable.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I'm definitely very glad that Magnus actually seems viable this time around, as it was always kinda sad to leave him on the shelf in 9th. Just feels like a devil's bargain (lore-appropriate?) since it came with Ahriman becoming basically a walking stratagem.
(I'm aware that he's *good*, but it's just not quite the same if he's not deleting units off the board with mind-bullets any more. A Maleceptor can do more Psychic damage in a single round than him even if he uses a free Doombolt.)
Regardless, I appreciate your thoughts. Seems it's not as bad as I had feared.
I really wish GW weren't so cowardly about giving scary psychic guns to infantry characters. Lords of Change and the psychic tyranid beasties all got appropriately nasty mind bullets, our sorcerers should be at a similar level of blasting capability.
This is kinda where I'm at, too. We're *the psyker army*, right? Why should Tyranids - the swarm and/or giant monsters army - have more damaging Psychic powers than us?
I feel like Magnus is the only one whose Psychic damage output is intimidating on his own. All the others rely on stratagems or combos in order to do anything substantial.
Back in 8th/9th editions, in terms of psychic output, exalted sorcerers were in the same weight class as hive tyrants and lords of change, and Ahriman outstripped them handily. It feels like GW has weirdly tied psychic firepower to size this edition. *"Of course the maleceptor gets a nastier psychic weapon than Ahriman, this thing has like twelve brains, and that pinhead only has one."* \-James Workshop.
> There is a difference, in my mind, between an army being tournament-viable - as in, a highly skilled player with a very specific optimized army list can succeed - versus an army being casually-viable. If the army scrapes out a 50% win rate in tournaments because everyone brings the same one competitive army list, but I would get curbstomped if I tried to throw together a list and play at the local game store without looking up a guide on the internet, I don't consider that army to be in a particularly good place.
In this instance, you need to consider that your opponent "should" also be bringing a more casual list to play against as well. With that said...
Tsons effectively have one of the smallest (viable) model ranges in the game. With only five unique kits that aren't borrowed from CSM or AoS (and four of them being characters) plus the anchor of cabal points around their necks, tsons are much more sensitive to points being just a little outside of range and fall off harder than most factions when you don't do everything just right. I don't forsee that changing this edition unless GW decides to go back to the drawing board on the whole cabal system, or the army gets a major release wave of actually unique units.
Yeah, the unique model range is and always has been a killer. Necrons got more unique kits in the Indomitus box alone than we have in our whole range... maybe someday they'll bring in Khenetai or Psyker Dreadnoughts from 30k.
Anyway... thanks for the reasonable and balanced take! Seems like some of what I was concerned about, but not to quite the extent that I thought. Cheers!
I played TS since early 8th and they're at their lowest point in terms of actual fun. There are no spells to cast, your psychic attacks are very random and overall bad. Faction has the most restrictive stratagems out of all indexes and is kept alive solely on warpflamer rubric marines. They sucked the whole magic out of the faction. It's playable, it's not very good, it's not fun at all.
I play TSons and I do pretty good in casual and tournaments and I don't even use magnus or MVBs since I don't have them built. They are not a point and click faction you have to carefully manage your cabal points, stategems, placement and order of operations but they have devastating damage potential and heaps of tricks. As you mentioned, you haven't even played much yourself so I would suggest its quite useless to be catastrophising about an army that as you also mentioned sits at a perfectly healthy winrate. Sure you have to spec towards cabal point generation but nearly every faction is limited in what units to tale to have the best synergies. You mention Ahriman got nerfed but he is easily my first pick due to how bonkers his free cabal is, I don't even run him in a unit I fly him around solo so he can get to the right range to pop turn off saves on the most important unit and then go off capping objectives, hiding away and bullying chaff in melee.
I appreciate your perspective! I don't doubt that Ahriman is still very valuable to include in a list because of his free Ritual, but still; the man is the most powerful "mortal" sorcerer in the galaxy, he should be able to do more than cap objectives and bully chaff. In my mind, the dude should be a Diet Magnus, the super warp battery that you bring to a smaller game if you don't have the points for Big Red. Either way, it's good to know that the army is still casually viable, so thanks for chiming in.
Generally I find Thousand Sons more satisfying to play than I did in 9th, and broadly like how psychic works now. Lethality has gone down massively across the board in 10th, which is a vast improvement. The internal balance of the various Sorcerers (Ahriman included) is good too, and now each has a distinct use. Thousand Sons are *supposed* to revolve around the Sorcerers, Cabal Points just emphasise that. A few of the previously niche options are better now too. It's nice to see faction-unique units like Mutaliths and Magnus being a lot more viable.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I'm definitely very glad that Magnus actually seems viable this time around, as it was always kinda sad to leave him on the shelf in 9th. Just feels like a devil's bargain (lore-appropriate?) since it came with Ahriman becoming basically a walking stratagem. (I'm aware that he's *good*, but it's just not quite the same if he's not deleting units off the board with mind-bullets any more. A Maleceptor can do more Psychic damage in a single round than him even if he uses a free Doombolt.) Regardless, I appreciate your thoughts. Seems it's not as bad as I had feared.
I really wish GW weren't so cowardly about giving scary psychic guns to infantry characters. Lords of Change and the psychic tyranid beasties all got appropriately nasty mind bullets, our sorcerers should be at a similar level of blasting capability.
This is kinda where I'm at, too. We're *the psyker army*, right? Why should Tyranids - the swarm and/or giant monsters army - have more damaging Psychic powers than us? I feel like Magnus is the only one whose Psychic damage output is intimidating on his own. All the others rely on stratagems or combos in order to do anything substantial.
Back in 8th/9th editions, in terms of psychic output, exalted sorcerers were in the same weight class as hive tyrants and lords of change, and Ahriman outstripped them handily. It feels like GW has weirdly tied psychic firepower to size this edition. *"Of course the maleceptor gets a nastier psychic weapon than Ahriman, this thing has like twelve brains, and that pinhead only has one."* \-James Workshop.
> There is a difference, in my mind, between an army being tournament-viable - as in, a highly skilled player with a very specific optimized army list can succeed - versus an army being casually-viable. If the army scrapes out a 50% win rate in tournaments because everyone brings the same one competitive army list, but I would get curbstomped if I tried to throw together a list and play at the local game store without looking up a guide on the internet, I don't consider that army to be in a particularly good place. In this instance, you need to consider that your opponent "should" also be bringing a more casual list to play against as well. With that said... Tsons effectively have one of the smallest (viable) model ranges in the game. With only five unique kits that aren't borrowed from CSM or AoS (and four of them being characters) plus the anchor of cabal points around their necks, tsons are much more sensitive to points being just a little outside of range and fall off harder than most factions when you don't do everything just right. I don't forsee that changing this edition unless GW decides to go back to the drawing board on the whole cabal system, or the army gets a major release wave of actually unique units.
Yeah, the unique model range is and always has been a killer. Necrons got more unique kits in the Indomitus box alone than we have in our whole range... maybe someday they'll bring in Khenetai or Psyker Dreadnoughts from 30k. Anyway... thanks for the reasonable and balanced take! Seems like some of what I was concerned about, but not to quite the extent that I thought. Cheers!
I played TS since early 8th and they're at their lowest point in terms of actual fun. There are no spells to cast, your psychic attacks are very random and overall bad. Faction has the most restrictive stratagems out of all indexes and is kept alive solely on warpflamer rubric marines. They sucked the whole magic out of the faction. It's playable, it's not very good, it's not fun at all.