The greater good

So it has come around to the turn of the guard to get some goodness from the Psychic Awakening series. To be honest I haven't taken much interest in this series, as I don't really like supplements and the whole extra rules and such that come with them. I liked the whole point that 8th was going to be a streamlined system with out needing 20 thousand books to play. Ok, so that's a bit of an exaggeration but at the rate were going it won't be for long.

For this review, I'm not going into the full details, which are up on many sites and YouTube as well (check out Winters SEO for a good review on YouTube). This will just cover the Warhammer Community page releases and my own thoughts in the new stuff. Also this post will just cover the main guard releases and not the Scions, which will be in the next post.

First up the new Regimental Doctrines. We saw this in the Space Marine codex, where you could customise your chapter tactics and we all expected the system to get rolled out to all armies eventually and here are the guards version. While not as numerous as the marines, the guard have 12 options to choose from and the two that were previewed we're Gunnery Experts and Disciplined Shooters.

Gunnery Experts effects vehicles from your army and enables you to re-roll the dice when determining the number of shots a weapons has, such as the LR Battle cannons D6 shots.

The other doctrine we get is Disciplined Shooters, which enables units to effectively rapid fire out to 18 inches, weather than the standard 12 inches and as is pointed out in the Community article, combined with the First rank, Second rank order could see an Infantry unit shoot four shots out to 18 inches, so somewhere between 24 and 36 lasgun shots for a regular Infantry squad. 

Both of these Doctrines have been seen before, one with the Catachan and the other with the Armageddon Steel Legion, so are not new but being able to swap and change the two parts does make quite a difference.

We also get previews of some of the new options, namely Jury-rigged Repairs and Combined Auspex.

Jury-rigged is a nice little option, giving your units some more durability but I'm a little underwhelmed by this doctrine. Gaining back one wound will not make that much difference in most cases and I expect there to be better options out there

Combined Auspex allows you to fire overwatch on a 5+ for vehicles that are close to other vehicles. However, I'm not sure planning your whole strategy around getting vehicles charged is a particularly good idea.

So far these are a mixed bag, I would like to see what the rest have to offer as I think that these could be very useful indeed. I run a very Infantry based army, so having a doctrine tailored purely to Infantry would be better than what is out there at the moment. However, whether it's worth loosing the other bonus's such as warlord trait and stratagem, I'll have to wait and see.

Another addition to the tool bag are Tank Ace's. These can be used instead of a traditional warlord or for a 1CP stratagem you can include a tank ace in addition to your warlord (or have two tank Ace's). Now from other sources I know that there are different types of Ace's, from tank to support and super heavy Ace's, so lots of choice.

Again, we got a taste of some of the options with Weapon Expert and Steadfast Leviathan. 

This option is for one of your Leman Russ variants and could be useful on pretty much all of them, however I think it will be most useful on the likes of the Punisher, to give it some AP or the auto cannon to push it up to ap-2 and in to battle cannon challenging range. This may sound odd but a battle cannon is S8 AP-2 Dd3 and with this the auto cannon would be S7 AP-2 D2 plus the battle cannon is d6 shots vs the auto cannon is 4. I don't know how it will mathhammer out but it looks good to me.

Steadfast Leviathan is another good trait for a super heavy tank ace. If your running an armour heavy list, this could be very useful for boosting your super heavy to new levels, think of a Valhallan baneblade spitting death in all directions right up until the moment it dies itself. How this ties in with the new Doctrines we will have to wait and see but there is a lot of potential here.

Last up are a couple of new stratagems, I don't remember seeing how many there were going to be but there are three here, two from the Warhammer community post and one from their Facebook page.

The first, splash damage, looks like a good one. Yes, it's a bit situational, as the target unit needs to be in cover, but when your auto hitting, being able to re-roll wounds is great and can really pile on the damage.  

Next up is Strike First, Strike Hard and for me this really shouts to be used on a unit of scout sentinels. I say this because I see it going something like this; take 3 lascannon scout sentinels, deploy the unit last, in a position towards the front of the line, as close to a target as possible. Use the scout move to get the unit in to a perfect firing position and then stay still turn 1 movement. Open up in the shooting using this stratagem, taking the hit roll from a 4+ to a 2+. Yes wounding can be a problem but pick the target carefully, say a rhino or a squad of 3 aggressors, and you've a good chance of a kill. Armoured sentinels could also be used but they suffer from the -1 to hit for moving, meaning they would be hitting on 3's. Not a massive difference but enough. 

Lastly, we have this from Facebook.  Shield of Flesh is used when a Infantry squad is the while it is next to a squad of bullgryns. If the bullgryns are closer, then a -1 applies to the hit roll, as though you've got to shoot past\through the bullgryns and their Shields. The best use for this I can see is to protect a valuable unit, either a character being sniped or something like a plasma command squad, which you don't want to loose early. Combine this with "get down" for a bonus on a save and the target unit could become quite hard to shift.

Overall there looks to be a number of good options in this book but there also looks to be some not so good options. I think until we actually see all the option for the new Doctrines, relics and warlord traits that are in the book it's had to say if this will be a must buy for people. I won't be buying it, regardless of how much of a must buy the book is, as I will just wait until the new guard codex comes out. Next up are the new Scion rules that are also in the book and in my view are the more important and exciting bit of the book.