SISTAZ of Battle Part 1: A Crisis of Faith

The new Sisters of Battle codex hit the news stands about a month ago now. This has given me some time to really find out what the book does and doesn't have going for it.

It seems like many people have given the book a very rough handling.

(like Games Workshop! -Rimshot- )

It's true the book, is a lot different than it used to be. But people yelling

"OMG SELL YOUR SISTAZ NOW OFMG!"

is really uncalled for, especially when they were doing that before the 2nd part of the codex was even out...

An informed opinion I'm sure.

Also, people seemed to gain a lot of knowledge about how bad sisters were NOW, even though they had exactly ZERO previous experience with the Codex...

An informed opinion I'm sure.

Well now that that's out of the way..

Instead of going and drilling to death individual unit reviews I'll stick with making a general list of Pros and Cons in-relation to the old book addressing the biggest complaints I've seen circulating.

Biggest News First

Acts of Faith

Previously Acts of Faith were a way for Sisters of Battle to go into "Limit Break" mode and go far and beyond what they were normally capable of doing. The number of different Acts of Faith was more limited than they are now, but each unit could choose to use ANY of the Acts of Faith for the whole army. Instead now each unit is pigeonholed into only getting their own specific Act of Faith.

This change sounds like it's really really limited the units themselves from going "berko" and doing whatever they want.

Well yes, and No.

While only being able to use a singe unit specific Act of Faith isn't as versatile as having the army wide list of Acts, ANY seasoned Sisters player will tell you there were Acts of Faith they never used in the old book.

Like the bonus initiative one...

Or the bonus strength but strike last one...

Those bad ones are nice when you had extra faith points to throw down, or you really needed to try to wound a Carnifex. But they were really just to add insult to injury or an ineffective version of the "oh shit!" button (as in my whole army is dead and I have 20 Faith Points and 7 Sisters left, lets make this game last another hour).

When it really came down to it, the Witch Hunters book could have cut it down to 3 Acts of Faith, and really not lost anything. And they would unanimously be:

-Armor Save becomes Invulnerable Save

-Fearless/Auto-Rally

-Rending

Now, as I said before your squads each have their own Acts of Faith (except for Battle Conclaves and Preachers, though they still have the Acts of Faith rule) which limits the flexibility of the army. But they made some new Acts of Faith which range from pointless to VERY good. Also, they gave the units the appropriate Acts of Faith you'd want them using anyway. Some of them just aren't great but neither were all the ones before. Not having Rending Bolters on regular Battle Sisters is a loss but your making it up on Retributors having Rending Heavy Bolters and Heavy Flamers.

The best new acts of faith are:

-Dominions Twin-Linked on all their guns.

-And of course Command Squads getting Relentless and Move Through Cover for a turn.

By putting specific acts on each unit it really reduces how often you'll NEED an Act to go off. Do you need to your Battle Sisters to rally under 50% or re-roll 1s to hit every turn? Nope. Save the Faith Points for Dominoes and Retriboes! Which leads us to our next topic...

Faith Points

Before you were gaining 1 Faith Point per "faithful" unit in your army. Which means each unit would provide up to 1 Faith Point to your total at the start of the game (Except Cannoness and Seraphim which added 2). Most armies had between 4-12 Faith Points to start the game. These points could then be spent during either players turn to try to attempt the Act of Faith you wanted. Which often meant you were maxing out on faithful units because you would get into situations were you needed a unit to use up 2-3 Faith Points a turn, for example:

Get Rending in your turn.
Get shot at use use Act to have a 3+ invuln.
Get charged by gits with Power Weapons use the 3+ Invuln, again.

Meaning your faith points could go pretty quickly, and would only be replenished when your faithful squads were wiped out completely, running sisters didn't count.

Also there were only 2 units that were inherently faithful Cannonesses and Seraphim every other unit would have to add a veteran sister to the unit to contribute a Faith Point.

I never liked this system, since it required you to throw some units away in order to generate late game faith points. Cannonesses were great for this since they were cheap and could have a 2+4++ and would contribute 2 Faith Points when she died. However, the acts of faith were mainly to turn your sisters from Really good Attrition-ists into LUDICROUS Attrition Fiends, giving your girls a 3++ every turn for round after round of combat and/or shooting phase would cost a lot of Faith Points and since you'd have to roll equal to or over your current squad size it might not come into play until the squad was too small to matter or already dead.





The new system basically reverses the whole system. Now your units are always "Faithful" which gives them a bonus to their attempts to use Faith Points. You generate D6 Faith Points every turn. Which means in a 6 Turn game your averaging 18 Faith Points a game, which is a bit more than you'd start with in the old book. Obviously, rolling randomly every turn you can get screwed into a Faith Point draught and the old Mana Faith Screw on your Sisters can be painful. BUT, because of how specific the Acts of Faith are, you're not going to be needing as many Acts of Faith every turn especially since ALL of your Sisters have a 6++ save ALL the time.

After you generate your Faith Points for the turn you can spend these points to attempt an Act of Faith, each unit has a natural 5+ required to pull off an Act of Faith, but the following bonuses apply:

+1 If Your squad has an Independant Character attached

+1 If Your squad has a surviving squad leader

+1 If Your squad is under it's starting number of models.

So basically it's always a 4+ since your squads always come with a squad leader, and Could go up to 2+ in the perfect storm. Every Sisters squad also has access to a Simacurlasrium Imperialis which lets you re-roll failed Acts of Faith tests. Which basically means that with your Smackulum from the gate your squads are getting their Faith tests off 75% of the time, [editor's note: Ooh, look at Mr. Math!  I bet nobody got a text message asking him how to calculate odds while writing this post...] though the Simaculraiaralm is 20 pts. per squad, so you're not going to be handing them out to everyone.

This brings us to the last point for this part of this analysis:

Points

The biggest "problem" (Remember things in quotes are meant ironically or are quoted from another source) [editor's note: shut up] people are pointing out is:

"SISTERS ARE 12 POINTS! GREY HUNTAZ ARE ONLY 15 POINTS!"

Very true, if there's one thing I can't argue with it's numbers. But if we compare everything to the Space Wooves book you know what we'll find? Space Wooves are the best Codex, and that's not the point of this analysis. And you don't need a Space Wooves analysis because I already wrote it for you:

"Space Wooves are the best Codex" -Ginocoolowski

Now that we're past the cape with good morale let's talk about points for a moment.

Previously a Battle Sister (From the Troops section) was 11 Pts. in Codex: Not Space Wolves, I mean Witch Hunters. The 11 pts. Gave you 3+ armor save, a Bolter and too much mascara. That's ALL. Frag and Kraks would cost you another 3 points, and the Sister Superior who generated the army a Faith Point was 14 more points. Also due to the fact that many Sisters players previously relied on a particular wargear item to give their squads a free Act of Faith without paying a Faith Point or making the Faith Test. This particular item ran 25 points, and could only be taken by a Sister Superior and used 1 time a game.

This means a Squad of 10 Sisters and a Sister Superior was 154 pts.

Now a 10 Sister squad with the same equipment is 125 pts.

Neither of these totals is including special weapons of hoogibs or imageinators.

But the new ones are cheaper. True they can't get a 3++, but they have a 6++ all the time.

It's really a hard call to make, cheaper Sisters means better Sisters armies. Since the best Sisters forces focused on the prudently priced and non-flashy Battle Sisters and didn't take terribly bad units like Penitent Engines and Celestines.

The Faith Points DO NOT scale with the size of your army, but with how the Acts of Faith are locked into each squad it's hard to need so many Faith Points all the time.

And the Faith Points being locked onto each unit is a big negative. But it seems to focus each squad a bit more, making them better than they used to at their particular role, while losing a lot of their all aroundy-ness. Though, Dominoes having twin-linked on ALL their ranged attacks making them a very interesting all-around unit. But, we'll talk more about all this some other time.