Developing the discussion about Force Barrage against the Lord of Change: I'd just say, that since Telekinetics is transforming mental energy into physical force, it IS A PURE PHYSICAL FORCE, only generated differently. Ok, this is a psychic power so according to RAW it ignores Daemonic Toughness, but according to logic it's purely like a Force in Star Wars. You don't push something through the Warp (because Warp is anti-physical) but only use Warp to gather and amplify the physical energy to your push on reality. But still this is a normal physics-driven push. The same is with Force Barrage. I don't see why Daemonic Toughness should be negated since Telekinetics is a physical force against which Daemon is protected.
For those that would argue that Pyrokinesis is also a physical flame - no, it's not. It's a flame generated purely via Warp, and although it can flame up objects, it comes directly from the Warp. It is not amplyfying or gathering a real flame through the Warp, but it's creating the Flame out of the Warp. The same case is with other powers like Bio-lightning. It is created specifically via Warp but only conducted through the body. So they normally affect Daemon's body, since they are of the same Warp matter as Daemon's manifestation.

I'd like to ask what is your opinion on that matter. C&C welcome. It'd be good to settle this matter once a for all.

As I understand it, you are using a warp-created effect against a warp creature. since that creature's protection against normal physical harm comes from his warp nature, then the telekine negates that effect.

Now, if you want to go for pure physical terms: the telekine won't be pushing the daemon, buth crushing its internal organs, and that hurts. And no matter how hard your muscles are, if Darth Vader crushes your lungs you will suffocate. Painfully. And also is more easy to pull those muscles from the inside out than to try to push them inside of the body.

Several options to solve your doubt, but too few of them aren't gory ^^.

But I doubt that Force Barrage directly affects your lungs - it rather breaks your ribs. It's very speculative. There is Crush Power but still - it affects the target from the outside. Even precision telekinesis must see its target like Grenade's pin. All Telekinetics powers affect target from the outside by means of physical reality. That is why I touch upon this topic. Daemon's body is protected against such attacks, not even mentioning Nurgle or Tzeentch Daemons whose bodies rather lack normal physiology. The question is: would telekinesis work in the Warp? If yes, it negates Daemon's Toughness as it is from the same source as the Daemon. If no, then the case is still open.

I think the only Telekine powers that wouldn't directly affect a Daemon through the warp would be Fling - everything else is, quite literally, a Psyker directing sheer force of the warp through the power of his will. If you disallowed Force Barrage, you'd porbably have to disallow most Pyrokinetic powers, too. And really, Biolightning isn't shooting the warp itself, it's just manipulating the body so it shoots a blast of electricity in a certain direction...

This really strikes me as a "Whaddya mean a Lord of Change can get 1-shotted by a full-power Primaris Psyker? Uhhhh, Daemonic ignores Telekinetic power effects, that'll fix it!"

Maybe that was a trial to logic it out. It seems just plain stupid that a Greater Daemon of Tzeentch takes to the face just like a minor Plaguebearer as it is clearly 10 times tougher than lesser Daemons, because psychic powers negate big guy's toughness.

As for the Bio-lightning - where the electricity comes from? From the life energy of the body amplified by the Warp. It's not a normal electric energy.

But we may argue endlessly of how to perceive the telekinetics and affecting the real world. I'm trying to solve the situation in a different way than was already proposed. And concerning the fact, that Force Barrage is so effective that any other offensive power is pretty useless, it's another issue that it would be good to look into. There is nothing wrong in proposing different solutions - that's what the forum is about, isn't it?

And if you have better idea how to fix it, Unusualsuspect, then I'll be glad to read it.

Mmm... You know, putting a Lord Of Change in the vanguard of a WH40k battle will end in a destroyed demon (so much points, if I focus ALL my army's fire on it, ñaaam); the solution? The casters don't go to the first line of combat. And if they are there, then they should better find a workaround (like counterspelling the other caster's tricks).

And what do you mean they have a strange physiology? Just snapping the neck must do something. And once you snapped the neck, ripping it and separate it from the body shall make the trick to kill the demon. Or you can always resort to the Jedi Solution with Telekinesis: take the biggest and heavyest chunk of whatever at hand, and levitate it just over the target. Stop levitating and enjoy the pizza (for example, a Chimera... or even better, a Predator or Leman Russ). If you can't kill it, then the best option is to do things that can either maim, kill or paralyze the enemy.

With strange physiology I meant no actual vital spots in their bodies. It's very difficult to harm a Horror or Flamer of Tzeentch. Only that. But I agree with you. My only concern was that Force Barrage was jack of all trades - players having such a weapon won't think of more inventive solutions to use with telekinesis.

"With strange physiology I meant no actual vital spots in their bodies. It's very difficult to harm a Horror or Flamer of Tzeentch. Only that. But I agree with you. My only concern was that Force Barrage was jack of all trades - players having such a weapon won't think of more inventive solutions to use with telekinesis."

Are you kidding? I love Push, Precision Telekinesis, and Tempest; these are some of the strongest, most flexible and interesting powers in the game, and have obvious applications where FB's sheer killiness does not.

Also, it's worth noting that even if you did count the LoC's Daemonic resistance against Force Barrage, Force Barrage would still **** it by virtue of sheer overwhelming, well, force; it's just that powerful. May as well break out the Akira soundtrack and stare in sheer awe at its unsurpassed might.

Ech, ok. No way to nerf that Power with logic. <surrender>

You guys are aware that one of the uses of the Psyniscience skill does EXACTLY what you are looking for here...

Diminish Psychic Attack

Psyniscience allows you to percieve the intricate weaves of power involved in the manefestation of a Psychic Power. Whenever you are the target of a Psychic Power, you may make a Very Hard (-30) Psyniscience Test. If you succeed, you negate the effects of any of the power's Overbleed.

Inquisitor's Handbook P. 235

Force Barrage without Overbleed is just a single telekinetic impact roughly the same as a large caliber non-sniper rifle.

Or are you going to tell me that a Greater Daemon of TZEENCH does not have access to a skill that governs psychic awareness?

Of course a retardedly overpowered mega-Overbleed invocation of Force Barrage can still paste a Khornate daemon, but then sheer overwhelming raw brute force is EXACTLY what SHOULD destroy a daemon of Khorne! It is just one of the many reasons the Lord of Skulls hates psykers...

ZillaPrime said:

Unless said deamon had a collar of Khorne. (Although I can't actually remember the rules for it now.)

ZillaPrime said:

Umm, no, it's not.

As a base, before OB is taken into account, you're slinging Willpower Bonus shots that do 1d10 plus Willpower Bonus damage. The contention seems to focus on when characters get access to unnatural willpower, at which point a half-way decent psyker is shooting at least 12 shots that do 1d10 +12 or more damage. Are you confusing Force Barrage with Force Bolt, perhaps?

Face Eater said:

Collar of Khorne adds +10 to the TH of psychic powers targeted at the wearer.

Now, I've had a set of Bloodthirster stats written up for a couple of years now; it's my "in case of emergency, break PCs" monster, and is the kind of creature you need seriously well-equipped Ascended/Deathwatch characters to bring down (my estimates are that a squad of Grey Knight Terminators will triumph only with greater than 50% casualties). I've just looked at the numbers. A Rank 16, WP 70 (Unnatural x3) Primaris Psyker cannot so much as scratch that Bloodthirster with a Force Barrage - the telekinetic salvo simply patters from its warp-forged armour like rain. It doesn't matter, at that point, that the Primaris puts out an average of 27 bolts (TH increased to 31 reduces available overbleed; as a Daemon, the Bloodthirster is entitled to possess the Psyniscience skill as well, so it could negate 6 of those bolts), the fact that it can only deal 31 damage at most (10+WBP of 21) means that it cannot touch the Bloodthirster's combined Toughness and Armour, even after removing the Daemonic trait (Toughness 56, Unnatural x3, Daemonic - TB 30 against mundane attacks, TB 15 against psychic/blessed attacks; armour 8 to all locations, equivalent of Hexagrammic Warding which doubles AP vs psychic bolts).

Personally, I could've done with the Ascended adversaries in the book being a little tougher...

The answer on what to do with force barrage is rather simple: just ban it from your Ascended games. I think it's pretty obvious that a base psychic power that far outshines the pure damage powers from Ascension is unbalanced and needs to be dealt with.

"Now, I've had a set of Bloodthirster stats written up for a couple of years now; it's my "in case of emergency, break PCs" monster, and is the kind of creature you need seriously well-equipped Ascended/Deathwatch characters to bring down (my estimates are that a squad of Grey Knight Terminators will triumph only with greater than 50% casualties). I've just looked at the numbers. A Rank 16, WP 70 (Unnatural x3) Primaris Psyker cannot so much as scratch that Bloodthirster with a Force Barrage - the telekinetic salvo simply patters from its warp-forged armour like rain. It doesn't matter, at that point, that the Primaris puts out an average of 27 bolts (TH increased to 31 reduces available overbleed; as a Daemon, the Bloodthirster is entitled to possess the Psyniscience skill as well, so it could negate 6 of those bolts), the fact that it can only deal 31 damage at most (10+WBP of 21) means that it cannot touch the Bloodthirster's combined Toughness and Armour, even after removing the Daemonic trait (Toughness 56, Unnatural x3, Daemonic - TB 30 against mundane attacks, TB 15 against psychic/blessed attacks; armour 8 to all locations, equivalent of Hexagrammic Warding which doubles AP vs psychic bolts). "

Soul Killer says hi. Also Inferno, Holocaust, Blood Boil, Banishment, Purgatus, and Word of the Emperor.

Lasers said:

Soul Killer arguably shouldn't ignore Hexagrammic Warding, but due to specific wording of the power and the Hexagrammic wards, I'm already aware you'll take the RAW that it would ignore it (the RAW I won't argue). Inferno's damage per round seems fairly unreliable - depending on the psyker, it could do 14ish damage that doesn't ignore armor or Toughness, or at best it could do 270 wounds. The rest, of course, would remain very nasty, though Holocaust would probably require the target to already be wounded (I can only guess a Bloodthirster has an ungodly number of wounds, such that even 27d10 [average 148.5] wounds won't kill it outright - Lords of Change are 180, after all), Blood Boil probably has at best a roughly 50/50 chance of happening (56 Toughness +20 for Hexagrammatic Warded armor with Unnatural x3 is hard to overwhelm for all but the most tricked-out ascended psykers), and the rest I'm too lazy to actually look up.

"Soul Killer arguably shouldn't ignore Hexagrammic Warding, but due to specific wording of the power and the Hexagrammic wards, I'm already aware you'll take the RAW that it would ignore it (the RAW I won't argue). Inferno's damage per round seems fairly unreliable - depending on the psyker, it could do 14ish damage that doesn't ignore armor or Toughness, or at best it could do 270 wounds. The rest, of course, would remain very nasty, though Holocaust would probably require the target to already be wounded (I can only guess a Bloodthirster has an ungodly number of wounds, such that even 27d10 [average 148.5] wounds won't kill it outright - Lords of Change are 180, after all), Blood Boil probably has at best a roughly 50/50 chance of happening (56 Toughness +20 for Hexagrammatic Warded armor with Unnatural x3 is hard to overwhelm for all but the most tricked-out ascended psykers), and the rest I'm too lazy to actually look up."

Even if Hexagrammic Warding was ruled to work against Soul Killer, the problem is it does such ungodly damage (several bolts each doing 59.5 damage on average apiece, for a pimped out 90+ WP, Unnatural 3x Psyker), that the protection is overwhelmed. By Blood Boil, I am referring to the Ascended power, which merely requires a Challenging WP Test; this would average ~132 damage for a 90/3x WP Psyker that ignores Toughness and Armour. As for Inferno's damage, on average it'll do ~117.5 damage after reduction is applied. Granted, these two powers may not be an instant kill, but they will make short work of such a heavily fortified Bloodthirster.

Banishment has a very real chance of instagibbing, as does Purgatus (which will reliably reduce the Thirster's WP to 0, thus completely incapacitating him and virtually instagibbing). Word of the Emperor deals damage and incapacitates.

Lasers said:

You'll note that I never claimed that the Bloodthirster was invulnerable, or even that it was immune to the wrath of a psyker, merely that it was essentially dismissive of Force Barrage. However, the true potency of many powers comes from their overbleed as much as anything else, a factor which becomes far less reliable against any creature with Psyniscience... such as this Bloodthirster (it's a greater daemon; of course it can see into the Warp).

Yeah, a rank 16 Primaris Psyker that has been absolutely maxed out (because frankly, under normal circumstances, how often do you think WP90 with Unnatural WP x3 is likely to appear? Hypothetical extreme characters tend, in my experience, to exist primarily to prove a point) with the right powers can bring down a Bloodthirster like this (remembering of course that Daemons are far from consistent in form and nature; as creatures of Chaos, why would any two greater daemons be identical?)... good for him. Someone needs to be able to stop them... because failure to kill it quickly enough will result in it obliterating everything in its path and recovering swiftly from the not-quite-fatal-enough injuries dealt to it before its rampage.

Seems to me that Telekinesis should work just fine against Daemons. Anything except Fling. If we were to assume that all Telekinesis did was to produce a manifested physical force which then acts like any other, we'd also have to presume that Force Bolt wouldn't be much better than fisticuffs and might even be Primitive. Because, in this case, how is it much superior to a hammer? Or even a sword/axe that isn't mono-edged?

The one real problem with Force Barrage is that Armor and Toughness are applied to every dang bolt. I would say a good fix to Psyker's abusing this power to the exclusion of all others is exceedingly high armor enemies. Those PC's swinging about Power Weapons may chuckle at all but the densest armor at high levels, but the points can add up for someone with zero penetration. Now, admittedly, you'd have to have a total of 27 or more Armor+TB to appreciably reduce the damage of 27 bolts at 1d10+27 each, and even with a total of 27 you're still looking at an average damage of 148.5 which is flippin' nuts, (average goes down by 27 for each additional point) but these things happen when you're buffed in extremis...