I conducted a combat test of the Untouchable talents this past weekend with my regular gaming group. We ran a combat against the same cell of cultists twice with two almost identical parties of Acolytes: one party was composed of four 5000xp characters with no Untouchable, while the second party included one character who had purchased multiple Untouchable talents in place of some non-combat skills.
We were primarily interested in the current iteration of the Untouchable talents, but we ran into several other rules oddities/issues along the way -- I won't post them all here but will be reporting them in the Proofreading section of the forums.
The party consisted of:
- Feral Arbites Warrior -- very shooty (boltgun + ranged talents) and durable
- Highborn Ministorum Heirophant -- primarily a social character, but with respectable CC skills and a hand flamer
- Hive Outcast Assassin -- resident CC monster and chainsword-wielding nutcase
- Voidborn Mechanicus Sage -- just an autogun and no combat talents whatsoever. The Sage was the Untouchable during round 2 of the combat test.
The parties were pitted against: 1 warp-priest, 2 warp-caller, 2 strain initiate, and 1 pestilentant. This gave a fairly psyker-heavy encounter but still presented several non-psychic threats.
I won't bother to transcribe everything that happened, but the Acolytes did significantly better in the second round. In round one, a particularly nasty Smite dropped the Warrior to 1 crit damage from full health (17 wounds) -- if the warp-priest had been affected by Warp Anathema, as he was in the second round, the Warrior would've had 5 wounds remaining. In round two, the bonus from Null Field caused the Heirophant to pass an opposed test against Hallucination which he would have otherwise failed. The second round came to a close very quickly once the Untouchable got within 10m of the warp-callers -- they could back away for a round or two and continue their casting, but once cornered they were reduced to angry men with little sticks and died easily to the Assassin's chainswords.
Some Perils of the Warp did alter the combat flow somewhat, but as this occurred once each round and the cultists fared far worse than the Acolytes in both circumstances I feel this did not affect the final results of the test.
Impressions of the Untouchables:
- The Warp Disruption line of talents are certainly powerful enough -- when in range of the Untouchable, the Warp-priest had his effective power level halved and Warp-callers could not use powers at all. However, the range is extremely short (even with Warp Bane) and could be increased to make the talents more usable -- my group felt that a base radius of 2*WpB and a Warp Bane radius of 3*WpB (or possibly even 4*WpB) would be a good value.
- As a counterpoint, the group felt that the Untouchable auras should not extend very far past 20m. They enjoyed the tactical aspect of maneuvering the Untouchable close to psykers to bring the PR-reducing aura into play, and liked balancing the risk of being shot by non-psychic enemies with the advantage gained by hindering their psychic opponents. If the Untouchable could hide behind a wall 50m away and still shut down psyker powers, that tactical element would be lost.
- Psychic Null/Null Field could use some tweaking. In their current form, the talents provide a bonus on Opposed tests to resist psychic powers, but do nothing to protect against Psychic Bolts and similar powers. Perhaps they should also grant their bonus to Dodge tests made to avoid psychic powers.
- Alternatively, maybe another talent could be created to help shield Untouchables and their allies against psychic powers. Just as an idea, maybe it would grant bonus armor equal to WpB against psychic powers only.
- I feel the benefits of Soulless Aura should be included in the Untouchable elite advance. Soulless Aura is by far the weakest of the Untouchable talents, and none of my players could picture themselves spending ~300xp for a talent that penalizes enemy Charm and Deceive tests. Including it as part of the Untouchable advance would fit the fluff nicely (IIRC all Untouchables make others uneasy, even if the weak ones don't affect psykers much) and make the advance more worthwhile at lower levels.
- The player controlling the Untouchable found it very confusing to have multiple auras of different radii. He occasionally placed his character where allies could not benefit from Null Field because they were still in range of Warp Anathema and he had mixed up the two talents. I feel that the talents should be reworked so that all auras have the same radius, and talents like Warp Bane that increase the radius of one aura should affect all auras equally.
- Overall, the group felt that the talents were too expensive for the benefits they provided. They would have been more willing to pay for the talents if the range were slightly increased. They also felt that tuning up the PR-reduction strength of Warp Anathema would be unwise -- shutting down powerful psykers like the warp-priest completely would be a little too strong.
These impressions were collected from a discussion among the party and myself following the test. Nobody in my gaming group played an Untouchable in DH 1.0 -- these are based solely on their experiences in our test session and not on how the DH 2.0 rules compare to the old ones. Forum members, how do you feel about these results? Have your tests yielded similar impressions, or did you have another experience entirely?
