Daemonic Instability
Fun little rule that kicks math into effect after you lose a close combat. It also makes you fearless for all shooting attacks which is a huge benefit but at what cost? Let's see
Double 1's
You regain all wounds and any units that died in this round of combat come back to life.
Pretty Sick
Double 6's
Everyone dies. The entire unit is removed from the board.
Pretty awful (and, in fact, if you've lost units to shooting or this is the second round of combat it's actually not the opposite of the above rule since those units cannot be recovered, it's worse. Only if Reality blinks restored everyone in the entire unit no matter when they were lost would the two abilities be equal so already off to a bad start.)
Now the rule says that in a CC (close combat) loss you roll leadership but not to see whether you flee (you can't apparently) but how many wounds you take in addition. So pretty much this rule IS 5th ed Fearless. Reading this before getting into the list you think, "Hmm, okay, this won't be that bad, most daemons have to be leadership 9 or 10 so you have a low chance of getting a wound". You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. The majority of them are leadership 7! Wow! And the HQ's? 9. Heralds? 8. Fantastic. They have lower leadership scores than goddamn space marines.
Having a leadership of 7 makes the math easier however. Getting a 7 on 2d6 has a probability of 1/6 meaning that ~16.7% you can expect to roll exactly 7.
Now 5/12th's of all the rest of the results are higher and 5/12's are lower. This means that overall you have a ~41.7% chance of taking a wound. But remember! double 6's have their own effect so we'll discount them. So rolling a double 6 has a 1/36 probability or roughly 2.7%. This means that you have a ~39% of getting additional wounds after combat. Reading further you see that these wounds may not be saved. With any method: cover, armor or invulnerable. Awesome.
You do not, however, fall back from failing one of these tests. So, in essence, it is an overall worse version of 5th Ed fearless. In 6th Ed fearless just makes it so you can never fail any leadership test that doesn't involve psychic powers. Since this would be good on Daemons they removed it and replaced it with this.
Overall the rule isn't too much worse than 5th Ed fearless unless you roll double 6's. And double 6's being much worse than double 1's are good the rule is overall a bad deal for Daemon players.
Warlord Traits
These will be easier since most of them are just special rules. Sad to say: they aren't the good ones.
1: CC Instant Death (meaingless against anything other than ICs (independent characters) and MCs (monstrous creatures).)
2: Hatred (since most HQ's are higher than the average WS of 4/3 in most armies they'll get 3+ and a reroll of 1. This means their close combat attacks hit, on average 2/3 + (1/6 * 2/3) = 7/9 or ~78%. Not bad, an increase of 18%, just under 1/5 more. And it extends to his unit. Hmmm, that means only Heralds can have a unit benefit from this trait. Awesome.
3: Fear tests become harder. How much harder? Well for Marines none at all harder since they don't take them. So far so good. For IG and filthy XenosImean other armies? Well most are Ld 7 so they had only a ~58% chance of passing already. Now they have a ~42% chance of passing. But if they fail their already horrible WS gets reduced further. So they go from a 5+ to hit to a...5+ to hit. Literally no effect on the majority of units in the game. Fascinating rule. Most of your HQ's have a great WS anyways (6+ for most) so many enemies will be hitting on a 5+ no matter what. Hence my saying they go from a 5+ to a 5+.
4: Re-rolling instability can be good. Let's see how good: you now have a 1/1296 chance of getting double 6's awfulness. You also have a 7/18 chance of losing additional wounds with a normal unit but with the reroll you have a 49/324 chance or ~15.1% chance of bad things happening. But, again you realize this is still not that good of a rule. Why? In an army dedicated to CC (with extremely little shooting you'll find) if you are losing enough CC to take these tests constantly you're doing something wrong. Also your chance of double one's increases to ~4%. Up from 2.7% I guess. (The calculation is 1/36 + (5/12 [chance of failure] * 1/36 [chance of reroll being double 1's])
5: This is the big one. Rerolling warpstorm table results is huge and I won't be able to tackle it in a blurb. I'll include it in my warpstorm table calculations further down. Needless to say this is what you want.
6: No scatter within 6'' if deepstriking is strange. It's a teleporter homer. As a warlord trait. So literally a 15 point upgrade as a warlord trait. Nothing else to say really. If you love teleporter homers you'll love this.
Warpstorm
This rule comes into effect every shooting phase! For the whole game! Regardless of what's happening in game! Meaning first turn, without you shooting, you can have ruinous effects on your army...or your opponents.
The most common result (1/6) is nothing. A good bargain if you look at the rest of the table.
5,6,8,9 are all individual god's effects. If you worry about these effects then mono-god builds are for you. You benefit greatly from having only one god represented as 3 of the other effects will do nothing. 5,6,8,9 though are the most common numbers other than 7 to be rolled. 6's and 8's both have a probability of 5/36 while 5's and 9's have a probability of 4/36. If every god is represented in your army then there is a 18/36 chance (half) of you getting a bad result with just these rolls. You also have to worry 4 or below as they are all truly terrible; causing you losses or making EVERY unit weaker (with no test/save of any kind). You can even lose your HQ before the end of turn 1 with a 3. Great :) You can also have an enemy psyker explode turn 1 (before he gets to act if you go first). A greater level of dickery I've never before seen in 40k. But remember this is every turn, so there's the possibility of these horrible things happening every turn. Your army can be killed without the participation of your opponent.
So let's get to the math. 7, 10, 11 and 12 are 'good' effects. 2,3,4 are bad (no quotes) effects and, depending on your build, so are 5,6,7,8. The odds of your getting nothing bad, even in a monogod army, are sliiiiim without rerolls. How bad?
With a Nurgle or Slaanesh only army you have 2,3,4 and 5 or 9 (respectively) to worry about. That's 1/36+1/18+1/12+1/9 = 5/18 chance of bad. Every turn. So what's the chance of getting no bad? (1-5/18)^5 for a 5 turn game or ~19.6%. So 1/5 of a chance. Not bad odds at all. Guess I lied.
With Khorne or Tzeentch only army you have slightly worse chance. Instead of 10/36 chance of bad you have 11/36 (or 1/36+1/18+1/12+5/36). Same math as above over 5 turns you have a ~16.2% of getting no bad. About 1/6. Again not bad odds.
With two gods you get from 14/36 to 16/36 chance possibility of bad Warpstorm results. Which puts your 5 turn, no bad, probability at 8.5% for 14/36 down to 5.3% for 16/36. Those are bad odds. With every god represented you have 2/3 chance of bad every turn. So .4% chance of no bad. Which seems weird: You get penalized for taking more units from your own codex. What a load!!!!! Even in the fluff you'd have battles where every type of daemon fought against Man. Guess diversity isn't what the codex writer wanted.
Now here comes in the warlord trait from earlier: Re-rolls Babyyyy!
Those odds from before change drastically. You have in first example a 10/36 chance of bad. With re-rolls you have 26/36 (chance of good on first roll) + 10/36*26/36 (chance of bad followed by good re-roll) or ~92% chance of good! Nice! That means you have a ~67% of getting no bad in a 5 turn game. Better than 2/3 (but only very very slightly) Great! You've mitigated a huge amount of the 'bad' randomness in this codex. You also up your chance of getting new units popping into the game to 4% and lower your chance of having horrible things happen to all units to .4% in a 5 turn game. And the chance of having your entire army's save being reduced is itself reduced to a probability of 2.3% instead of 8.3% per turn. Over the course of the whole game though you still have the probability of ~11% of getting this result. Down by far from the 35% you can expect in a normal game ( the math: 1-[1-(1/12)]^5, 100% minus the probability of any result but Warp Ebb happening without re-rolls). Re-rolls are practically required because of the nonsense of this table. But if you're willing to have random bad things happen to your army every now and then and don't think it will hamper your fun because good things can happen as well then hey, more power to ya. This rule is also pretty heart-pumping too and if you're in it for excitement, this is the roll that will do it every game. I should say however that the specific god's 'murder my own guys because HATE' effects only happen on 6 so it's 18/36 probability you'll have one of these rules and only 1/6 probability for it to go off on any unit it effects. Unexpected benefit though: two of them are templates and scatter and can scatter into enemies. Also any enemy units with the Daemons of whatever god rule are effected by these Warpstorm effects. Giant Enemy Flying Nurgle Daemon Prince? Possibility this table can shoot him down without anyone even looking his way. Kinda neat.
Thus ends part 0. The beginning is...disappointing? It's set up to look like you have 50% chance of good 50% chance of bad. But the effects of bad are much worse than good (single new unit of troops, not a full troop unit either, versus your entire army having to make leadership tests and take wounds for failing or you regain wounds lost this round versus your entire unit dying) the odds are in your favor if you have re-rolls but without re-rolls you're gonna get hosed at least once per game. Plus, with Warpstorm, you can lose units without playing the game. HQs can explode turn 1 without having shot or assaulted anyone and without your opponent having even moved. That's just bad design.
PS: Chance of your 300 point HQ exploding turn 1? 1/18 chance of having the effect happening to them. We'll assume it hit your pretty HQ since it's randomly put on any character in your army. So ~5.5% chance of it happening ie: a critical fail on a d20. The average total you'll get is 10.5 and since all of them are ld 9 you'll get ~2 wounds. Sweeet. What's the chance of getting those 5 wounds though? 14-18 are the only results that'll kill your HQ's so what's the chance of you getting that? 35/216 or 16%. So a crit fail followed by a confirmed crit. In the end the chance is pretty slim 1/18*35/216 or ~1% but hey, it can happen. And if the opponent's HQ's happen to be Grey Knights? Better probability of them blowing up. 1/18 chance that the effect happens to them instead. And they just have to fail by 1 and they explode into a new unit for you. With leadership 10 they have a 50/50 chance of exploding (108/216). Worse odds with 9. Lolzy indeed.
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