Games Workshop - Warhammer 40,000 - Adepta Sororitas: Celestian Sacresants

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For 1CP, you can ignore any or all negative hit modifiers in either the Shooting or Fight phases. Probably the most significant place this is going to come into effect now is for Retributors, which no longer ignore the move and shoot penalty with Heavy weapons naturally, but may also come into play for Repentia. In general this has been way less relevant in 9th, so it’s nice to see it given broader use cases. Warlord Trait – Impervious to Pain

The Emperor’s Grace is also a great buy for 20pts – your model heals d3 wounds at the start of each of your Command phases, and then once per game, for any CORE or CHARACTER unit that is within Miracle range, an opponent cannot re-roll hits, wounds, or Damage rolls. This is a powerful ability to have available, especially since Paragon Warsuits are CORE – a Canoness babysitting a set of these and turning off re-rolls on turn 1 or 2 can potentially keep them alive and firing a turn longer. As standard, there’s six Warlord traits on offer here, and while the names are all the same there’s a reasonable number of changes on offer.A reasonably strong trait, Shield Bearer reduces Damage taken by the Warlord by 1 (uncontroversially it specifies a minimum of 1 – more on this in Units later), and also makes the Miracle dice an automatic 6 if you either gain one for Vengeance when the warlord kills something, for Sacrifice in general or a the end of any phase in which the Warlord was destroyed. Relic – Martyr’s Vengeance A Palatine is a welcome presence in any Sisters of Battle army, her Fury of the Righteous ability bolstering the combat efficiency of those under her charge. Celestian Sacresants And then we have the highly versatile Battle Sisters Squad. You have a lot of weapon options, but read your datasheet carefully – there are caveats to having multi-meltas or heavy bolters, as you can only have 1 special or heavy weapon per 10 models in a unit. However, it is worth customising your squad to maximise their damage output – both far and close ranged. The Incensor cherub gains you a miracle dice – which gives the ability to perform one Act of Faith, which again is worth a read as their rules and abilities are legion. A Miracle dice is not a modifier or an inherently modified dice (so, for example, if you use a Miracle dice with a value of 1 for a Morale test, that is considered to be an unmodified roll of 1). A Miracle dice that has been used for a substitution can never be re-rolled. This means that if any re-rolls occur, the number and values of any Miracle dice that have already been substituted in the dice roll remain the same for the re-roll (for example, if a single Miracle dice was used to substitute one of the values of a charge roll, and the charge roll was re-rolled, only the unsubstituted dice can be re-rolled).

Closing out Heavy Support we have two flavours of Tonk, the classic Exorcist and the new fangled Castigator.A fair number of the relics from the last codex return unchanged, or with only minor tweaks – most confusingly, the Blade of Admonition is now a Crusade relic, but there’s an identical weapon in the regular relics section called the Blade of Saint Ellynor. There’s a mix here of buffs and nerfs; Wrath of the Emperor goes down to AP-1 and Litanies of Faith becomes once per battle round instead of once per turn, but the Iron Surplice now gives +1 wound on top of its previous effect. Now, the leaders of your armies can take on one of these blessings and bathe the battlefield in divine light. At just 45 points, this pious heroine is quite a bargain and the perfect lieutenant for your Canoness when she’s got other duties to attend to (namely, crushing skulls in the Emperor’s name). Seraphim get a very cool buff – their hand flamers are now Ministorum hand flamers, the same as regular ones but with S4 instead of S3. This is almost certainly a way to justify the 5pt cost per gun (see also artificer-crafted storm bolters elsewhere), but at least if GW are going to insist on a minimum 5pt cost for a weapon they’ve gone the right way about it by making the gun actually worth 5pts. It’s not all bad on the cost front, either, as the base Seraphim cost 14pts instead of 15 now, and get boosted to 2A and WS3+ base, giving them a little more of a chance at finishing something off in combat (and making the sergeant power sword more attractive) For more buff-focused choices, you have the Dialogus and the Dogmata. Re-badging the Dialogus as a Priest was an extremely smart move – she keeps her ability to alter a miracle dice used by a nearby unit up or down by one (and with no CORE limitation, is now actually better for protecting a Rhino than the Triumph is), but stapling Hymns of Battle (of which she knows War Hymn and one more) on top of that suddenly gives her real purpose. The Dogmata brings a heftier melee statline and a different set of buffs to the table, allowing nearby CORE units to shoot while performing an Action, and letting her grant one CORE unit a turn ObSec (or double counting if they already had it). That’s some spicy stuff, and she works extremely well with large Sister squads or Sacresants.