Post by bolk on May 25, 2014 17:17:58 GMT
]You run an army with 3 mastery levels against an army with 30 mastery levels and I guarantee that the psyker-heavy army beats you hands down in each and very psychic phase. What people seem to be missing here is that you don't want each of your psykers casting all or often any of their powers every turn. They are there to a) have a wider variety of powers available and b) provide warp charges to allow you to cast the powers you actually need.
Having shedloads of mastery levels is also a double whammy as, not only do you get to force through the powers you need, you also get to shut down any powers that your opponent wants to cast. Your 5.5-6.5 (average) warp charges let you cast a couple of WC1 powers per turn with a reasonable chance of success. My 33.5 warp charges per turn mean...well, you basically don't cast anything cos I just throw 16-17 dispel dice at each of your powers.
The new psychic phase is a boost to the psyker-heavy army and a kick in the balls to most others.
The trouble that you're failing to address here is that ultimately, psykers are still less effective now, especially in numbers, than they used to be. Armies that were balanced to rely on psykers as heavy weapon/support platforms are now much less able to rely on those platforms, devaluing those choices.
Let's take your 30 mastery level army. Say they're 15 solo zoanthropes, each with Warp Blast and some ML1 power of ~moderate~ utility. Previously, you could reasonably assume you'd use each one as best suited on the battlefield, with the forward guys blasting away, 2nd rank debuffing with their greater range, and rear lines buffing using cata/onslaught. Every one of these things is useful, and every one used to have a 91% chance of happening each turn. Sure, some were more critical to my strategy, but every additional Catalyst was one I was happy to have.
Now, in order to achieve better than 90% reliability and "force through the powers you need" you'll need no less than 4 dice per ML1 power, and 7 dice per ML2 power. Were you hoping to rely on those zoanthrope warp lances to punch some tanks? Okay, you've got just enough dice for about 5 castings of warp lance at a 93.75% chance of success (and negligible chance to be denied). So 5 of your zoanthropes shoot, and the other 10 do nothing for the turn. So much for buffing or debuffing. If you sacrifice some lance reliability, you could go down to 89% odds on 6 dice and squeeze in 2-3 buffs at 75-81% success.
Do you get that? My 750 points of psykers is performing as ~300 points would have under 6th ed (5 successful shots plus 1 Deny the Witch roll). Even if you also factor in shutting out the opponent's psychic phase (which you're at ~90% odds of doing), you're only nullifying ~75 points worth of their psykers. So my 750 points of zoanthropes is worth roughly 375 points, or half it's former value.
Meanwhile, your opponent has spent his points on lascannons. How often do those fail to cast? Oh, right.
I know you feel like the new phase is more visceral and dynamic (it is) but the brute math behind it is awfulfor psykers. The only thing balancing this reduction in 7th ed is the fact that a lot of psykers can summon daemons, potentially dropping hundreds of extra points worth of minis onto the battlefield.
Of course, tyranids do not get this discipline.
What really ticks me off about the new psychic phase is that you still have to roll for which powers you get in a game. If you atleast could choose which powers you wanted, I would find it worth it to cast powers considering the new Perils system. Any double 6s? That might not be so often with WC1 powers, but that also depends on how many DtW dice the opponent has. Ofcourse opponents will try to Deny your Warp Blast targeting that superscoring Land Raider, and say you put 8-9 dice into that Warp Blast to pull it off? Then it starts being quite big odds for double 6s.
There`s just no strategy in our psychic powers, just pure luck.