The Decaying Doctrine

I'll admit that was a sneaky effort to lever the title of a particularly solid Kiuas track in, but it's sort of relevant, as is Kjeldor Thricecurse up there, and not just because he's all Nurgley. The recent reveal of the new Havocs for Chaos and the Warhammer Community tactica piece has got me thinking about something in 40k that gets less discussion than it possibly should- the subject of Decay.

Not these guys

The Havocs are a particularly interesting example of this mechanic, which boils down to models and units getting weaker as they take damage. In the game, it happens to basically any unit with more than one model in it, or which is a single model with 10 or more Wounds, but it's quite a bit more complicated than that. The new Havocs, with their Toughness of 5 and ability to fire on the move, have got quite a few people excited about power-creep and auto-take units. Whilst I don't really see why the Havocs are T5 (unless they're supposed to be wearing a Chaos Armour version of Gravis Armour*) I think people are missing a more important change in the grand scheme of things.

Havocs, as modelled in that image from the Community article, are capped at five models strong. On top of that, their default equipment is either a Heavy Bolter or Lascannon. Taken together, this means that the very most Wounds a unit of Havocs can take before its firepower begins to be reduced is one, and that assumes you're prepared to remove the Champion first. As an aside, being the Champion of a Havoc squad seems to be one of the worst jobs in a CSM army now. You don't add anything to the squad unless it gets very close (unlike, say, a Devastator Sergeant with his Signum) and you're almost certain to either spend the game doing nothing, or get killed. Compared to the old version of Havocs, who could have up to five bolter-armed chaff models added to the squad, the firepower of the new ones is very fragile.

Now of course, adding those bolter marines costs points, points which you could now spend on something else, like, say, more Havocs. But those guys don't simply add survivability to the unit, they can actively discourage an enemy from shooting at it at all. I recently saw a game in which an Iron Warriors force with two units of ten Havocs (Slaanesh of course) sat them in ruins blazing away at an oncoming Khorne force, and lost barely any of them for the entire game. The reason was that the Khorne army's firepower was limited, and whilst it could have killed a few Havocs each turn it couldn't remove enough in one round of shooting to reach the big guns, which were the only things doing anything. You will often see this in other units, too- players will ask how close a model is to the next stage of its decaying profile, and then try to damage it enough to reduce its effectiveness.

I know they're the wrong scale, but hey

Decay is even more complicated than that, though, because different models decay in different ways. The general rule-of-thumb is that a model starts to lose some level of effectiveness once it's lost half of its Wounds, but this only holds true up to a point. A Stompa, for example, starts to decay having lost only 10 Wounds of its 40 (25%) whereas a Warlord Titan similarly takes 10 Wounds to reach its first break-point but has 70 of them (~14%). An Imperial Knight, on the other hand, has the more common three levels to its profile, meaning that in the case of a Castellan it has to take 14 Wounds before it begins to suffer. Just as 8 Wounds is the 'sweet spot' for a Character where they can't be targeted but are reasonably tough (9 would be even better but is rare), for Vehicles it seems to fall somewhere near 30, meaning the Castellan is in a good place and the Stompa takes it in the shorts.** This also leads to the odd situation with light vehicles where a Dreadnought or Buggy with 8 Wounds 'feels' more durable than one with 10, since the 10-wound versions start to decay very fast- 5 Wounds will weaken a Contemptor but have no effect on a basic Dread.

But wait, there's more! Even when a model or unit does decay, the significance of that decay varies massively. A Morkanaut, for example, loses Movement, WS and Attacks as it's damaged, but if it's being used as an anchor for a Freeboota gun-line doesn't much care, since its (bad) BS remains unchanged. The same effects are far more pronounced on the more assault-minded Gorkanaut. Infantry squads of course lose models to Wounds, which reduces their overall effectiveness, but a Combat Squad camping an objective with a Lascannon marine can be reduced to a single model and still play a significant part in the proceedings.

Overall then, decay is something every player needs to be thinking about, both from the point of view of their own forces and that of the enemy. It makes certain abilities and Stratagems that inflict or repair relatively small amounts of damage potential game-winners when used to cross a break-point in one direction or the other, and can make some units less of a bargain or game-breaker than they might appear. It's also a mechanic, like much else in 40k, with some serious oddities that could possibly use a tweak.





* Or to SELL MOAR MODELS!!1

**No change there, then