Oh the horror!

Wrath of Magnus has only just been released today (though I still haven't gotten my copy yet) and already an FAQ is out. Warhammer Community has posted an FAQ for Wrath of Magnus and you can read it here.

Okay, I haven't gotten the book yet, but I'm sure everyone has been aware that Pink Horrors have undergone a radical change from their current incarnation in the Chaos Daemons codex. One of the new rules that most Chaos fans are getting excited about (I'm generalizing here, of course some find it meh, some don't like it, etc.) is the Splitting Rule. Apparently whenever you kill a Pink Horror, it splits into two - yes, TWO Blue Horrors. And it's not unit, by the way, it's each Pink Horror MODEL. So have fun killing that unit of 10 Pink Horrors over there...unless your opponent gets bad Daemon Instability rolls, you'll be staring at 20 new Blue Horrors.

As if that wasn't enough, the 20 new Blue Horrors have the same rule. For each Blue Horror model killed (yes, MODEL, not unit), replace them with 2 new Brimstone Horrors. So you might be seeing potentially up to 40 Brimstone Horrors if you try wiping them out. Fortunately, Brimestone Horrors no longer split so if you kill those guys, you don't have to worry about anything else. I'm pretty sure the armored tanks of the Imperial Guard with their blast weapons will obliterate them without any worry. Oh, and wounds spill over, so even if you overkill the unit of Pink Horrors with 20 wounds against their 10, you can spill over another 10 to wipe out another 10 of the 20 new Blue Horrors. Except that you'll get another 20 Brimestone Horrors in their place, but I digress.

In other words, don't worry about their Split, spam blast and template weapons, which the Imperial Guard thankfully have a lot in supply. YAY! Not to mention, these Horros aren't so tough. The Pink Horrors are basically Imperial Guardsmen with no lasguns (they have Flickering Fire and psychic powers though), with only Toughness 3, and Blue Horrors have Toughness 2. Brimstone Horrors? Toughness 1, which means any weapon will Instant Death them, making their 2 wounds absolutely pointless - unless your opponent is using tons of Strength 1 Poison weapons, which you can laugh at.

Now here's the kick in the teeth. Do you remember the popular meta where people spammed Pink Horrors to have access to Malefic Daemonology powers? Apparently a few trolls had lists where they spammed lists of Pink Horrors and had them Psychic Focus Daemonology (Malefic) powers to get the Primaris Summoning power. Whatever for, you may ask? Well, to spawn more Pink Horrors, of course! Increase the number of warp charges and bodies on the tables. Double the size of your army in just one psychic phase! So in the end you'll get an infinite list of Pink Horrors that drown the table in sheer numbers...

...except that it doesn't always work in reality. On paper, that sounds cool, but on the table, it doesn't really execute very well. For one thing, it costs 3 warp charges, so casting it is quite the bitch. Ugh.  Additionally, using your entire army to create more army doesn't really accomplish anything, unless you want to swamp the objectives with bodies to score them and even then I don't think the Pink Horrors you just summoned have Objective Secured - probably only your original troops choice have that. Anyway, you also need to kill your enemy, or they'll just wipe out both your original army and the reinforcements you summoned with blast, templates or sheer weight of dice. No kidding. So yeah.

The problem is none of that matters now. No more horrifying Horror swarm list. No more doubling your army size in a psychic phase. Nope. You know why? This latest FAQ just expliclty states:

Q: Do the new Pink Horrors get Malefic psychic powers?
A: No, they do not get Daemonology (Malefic) Powers.

So there you have it, folks. Pink Horrors no longer get Daemonology Malefic psychic powers. That Pink Horror list you just built in order to spam summoning is no longer legal. UGH! DAMN IT! Or in retrospect, praise the Emperor because it means we don't have to face such a list. Yay. It's kind of sad, I wanted to run a Brimstone Conflagration list with 9 units of Brimstone Horrors. No, not to summon more Pink Horrors, but so that I can roll on the Daemonology Malefic table and hopefully get Possession. Using the 9 warp charges they generate, I wanted to spam Possession as much as possible because why the hell not? Imagine the look on my opponent's face when one of my Brimstone Horror squad explodes into a full-grown Bloodthirster.

However, it's unfortunate but Horrors only have access to the Psychic table of Change. The horror! Yes, how horrifying. I think. I guess. No more trying to summon stuff or Possession shennigans, though if you really want that I guess I would rather take the Psykana Division from the Cadian Battlegroup. That's all I can say, but it makes for a fun and somewhat fluffy (HERESY!) list. I mean, just ally a Psykana Division, call them heretics or traitors - which is likely because dabbling in the occult and psychic powers beyond Man is heresy after all - to your Daemon list and BOOM! You can roll on the table and pray that your Wrydvane Psykers roll Possession, and proceed to transform them into a Greater Daemon or something. Except that you only have a 1/6 chance of pulling it off, and the rest of them become deadweight. Plus they're not as cheap and spammable as Brimstone Horrors (still affordable somewhat, since the Wyrdvane Psykers are only twice their cost), so there's that to consider. Oh well. Anyway, we shall see. For the Emperor.