Take a look at the height and weight tables of Dark Heresy then.

While most people don't think of this kind of widespread technological use, when it comes to 40K, it's entirely likely that humanity's genenome is pretty stable, despite all the trouble with mutations. With less concerns over the negative effects of lack of nutrition and disease than modern folks would have, not to mention facilitating the adaptability that resulted in Abhumans.

As the previous era's of human extra-solar expansion probably laid the groundwork of this. Simply put, I've always envisioned that most of humanity descended from people who recieved basic amounts of genetic modification (ala Mass Effect 3, eliminating defects, and in the case of military personel, recieving basic biogenic upgrades) to prepare them for their lives as colonists, contributing to an overall robustness that lasts to 'this' day, as a more or less hereditary trait (with some additional fudging assumed cause the Imperium is so large).

Being able to get Warp Time for Unnatural BS, WS, and Agility +10 at friggin char generation kind of makes me inclined to think the regular unbound psyker is better than the regular sorcerer. Its not just the unbound, its also the corpus conversion. Sorcerers have decent defense, but the best defense is an Unnatural WS 10+ bolstered Lightning Attack with a force sword.

The ONLY time I'd consider a sorcerer worthwhile at all is the Thousand Son Sorcerer, since they get a lot of extra stuff.

Deinos said:

I might be the n00b of all n00bnes, but did you put it down wrongly ? ant it the sorcerer that get all the nicetyes and force sword?

chals said:

I suspect the poster is talking about the higher Psy rating and and benefits from Pushing that you get as an Unbound Psyker. Since the Force Sword is paired with a Lightning Attack, I assume it's something they're talking about picking up later in the game.

Personally, I'd find WS10+ with Lightning Attack a rather poor defense against my character, but that's to be expected if you're flying and fielding MIU'd multilasers

Kiton said:

Dodge & Unnatural Agility 10+ can be foolproof against one full auto burst per round (like, ANY successful dodge is guaranteed to be a complete dodge with unnatural agility like that) and a jetpack gives you such completely insane movement with unnatural agility 10+. Unlike the Lightning Attack, this is chargen-available stuff.

Sad that they nerfed the charges, except it doesn't particularly matter since instead of charging, you now… do a move action and a lightning attack. With the unnatural agility chaos PCs should have from Warp Time, it should be easy, as far as I can tell. There is also the very nice fact that with all that unnatural agility you're likely to go first errytime.

But anyway, its not just about tooting your own horn, thine allies also benefit from the crazy high psy skill.

What about force weapons being near unique? That makes them fairly hard to get (barring the confusion in the Force Weapon Quality)

Cymbel said:

But a psyker shoud not eve think about going into close qauters combat in the first place..

Let him. It'll work once, maybe twice. But getting PR10 with a freshly created character means he's one or two rolls from a critical existence failure, one that could very well take the party with it.

One thing to remember when dealing with high dodge characters is that you can force them to choose [unless of course you're dealing with the bloody 'temple assassin', and nine different attacks per round are getting dodged against before you even get to check against his shields but let's leave that horrific set of classes out of here]. Do you dodge against the highly accurate but easy to evade 3d10+5ish from that angry overcharged Long-Las? Or do you save it against the Legion Plasma also tracking you? You're relatively certain that Champion with the power-fist is also about to come your way, are you going to parry?

Though really, accurate weapons need to at LEAST get themselves a -10 to dodge for every bonus die of damage; as it is they're kind of unimpressive.

Besides force weapons being better than power weapons for strong psykers? Besides powers like warptime? Why, nothing of course

Cymbel said:

I am not to keen to the RULES - Can I get it cut out in Rules/briks why it is so?

I have spoken to a freind of mine, that is clealy much more into the Rules, he made it sound like thereis only 5% bigger chance of getting nasty things to happen (Like eaten by the worp/deamon host and alike)

chals said:

It depends on how you think about it.

An Unbound Psyker can Push for 1-5 points of Psy rating, and each point adds an extra 5% to the Psychic Phenomena roll.

So it's true that each point you Push only increases the chances of Perils of the Warp "by 5%" in the sense that it increases it by five percentage points , but that's actually a misleading way to look at it.

Ordinarily, every roll on the Psychic Phenomena table gives you a 25% chance of suffering Perils of the Warp. every point you Push increases that chance by five percentage points, but that's actually a twenty percent increase in the chance of Perils occurring.

If you push the full five points, you get a +25 to your Psychic Phenomena roll, which fully doubles your chances of getting Perils of the Warp. To put it another way, your chance of getting Perils of the Warp increases to 50%.

Any result on the Perils of the Warp table greater than 90 is almost-certain death for the Psyker (and possibly their party). Every time your character Pushes for +5 they have a 50% chance of getting Perils of the Warp, which in turn has a 10% chance of killing them. Basically pushing for +5 has a one in twenty chance of killing you every time you do it.

By comparison, using an Unfettered power has a 10% chance of causing Phenomena, then a 25% chance of causing Perils, followed by a 10% chance of causing Instant Death, for a total of a one in 400 chance of killing you.

Chastity said:

That is quite ALOT!

How do you create force weapons? (can you?)

How do you taint weapens(surely you can!)

Tainting a weapon from its pure and happy state is certainly possible, but beyond as part of the ritual to create a Daemon Weapon, its not actually covered. Of course, "holy" damage is more of a realspace-reinforcement thing, and the "unholy" equivalent is basically warp weapons…

Creating a force weapon should be no different than any other weapon: No actual psy powers are involved in creating it, but the weapon is crafted with/around warp/psy-sensitive conduits. Other weapons have mono-chainsaws, some have power-fields, its just a different type of weapon.

If you taint 100+ lastguns in a hive - surely it will spreed corruption like a wirldfire.. Or even better if its something puplic, like a bus/train or alike..

If you taint 100+ lastguns in a hive - surely it will spreed corruption like a wirldfire.. Or even better if its something puplic, like a bus/train or alike..

chals said:

Why not? They're great at it, beyond a doubt the best (a Khornate CSM is probably going to be better early on tho, but that will not last forever). If Perils are a problem, use Sacrificial Slaughter. Unless you want a sweet, innocent, noble, nice guy chaosdude who would NEVER stoop to such lowness as killing a helpless person for power.

Its a real tossup between a highly destructive channeled burst from a force weapon, or, if you've got all that unnatural on you, twin lightning claws. But one way or another, powerful, powerful melee.

but If you use psy-power much- will you not easyly end up incresing the chances for nasty things from beyond?

chals said:

That's actually an argument *for* playing a melee psyker.

You stand much less chance of being eaten by Daemons if you cast one, long-lasting power on yourself and proceed to rip your enemies to shreds in melee than if you try to blast them with Doombolts every round, you can even - as somebody pointed out - prebuff yourself with the Ritual Slaughterer talent, that way you can Push all you like and the Perils will only affect your sacrifice.

Chastity said:

I listen, I realy do, I read the Rule book - and have fund the thing your talking about - Just seams like an sorceror is wastly Suprior in all ways vs a psyker.. and that there are no real Gain to play a psyker at all(+1 start psy rating). You can push more, but it is with your life at odds.

Chastity said:

Uh, do be careful. Sure, technically, its happening to your sacrifice, but sometimes the sacrifice explodes… or explodes into a very annoyed bloodthirster, and then its affecting you a little more.

I forgot about the twin lightning claws -- I was rather despairing as to how one would make a Khornate that can compete with a psyker in melee. Of course, you'd still want your Khornate to be tricked out with Profane Symbols of Warptime +20… this may seem unfluffy, but there is a specific passage saying that Khorne "only" approves of magic used to enhance his warriors with symbols of power and what not.

As to the sacrifices… my understanding was psychic phenomena = 1d10 + PR (or whatever) as soakable damage, perils of the warp = 1d10 + PR as unsoakable, armor and toughness skipping damage, or what not. You don't roll for the specific Peril, as far as I know, you just get sizzled.

Even if you did, though… just have your buddies stand ready in case there'll be a good fight.

Deinos said:

So when I and my team is fightin 4+ space marine and I use some psykisk power - and somehoe sommen a Greator deamon or The Great Unclean one, We will surely all survice?? Might even be a horde of Imp. Gard and I sommen a blodletter - the Odds or killing body´s and my self are quite big.