August White Dwarf part 2: Sisters of Battle

Well part Uno of the new sisters White Dwarf has appeared with very little for us to run with...

TANGENT ALERT: First off let me say that I am no sisters expert, I have only ever played 4 games against them myself in my career, all were competitive games against our local Girls Guru Simon Leen, our top GT playing member, ranked the #1 American Sisters player for those who care about RHQ, and top finisher at the BFS, Colonial GT as well as many other GT's....He's no push over and I am .500 with him so far. He Runs an 8 Immolater list with guard allies for scoring and about 20 melta guns....a very simple list that does one thing very well, get across the field, pop smoke, melta and then burn the insides.... anyway back to the WD....

...this is why you are not seeing any reviews or anything really about it covered online...it really only gives us the front half of the book which is just the army wide rules and unit descriptions....hooray fluff...

Yet it does give us an overview of every unit, leading me to believe this is everything in the codex army list so nothing else is hidden...There are a few key things that we can conclude from this dex so far...

GDubs seems to be streamlining and simplifying all of their systems to make them more new player friendly. In my oppinion the faith system was weakened overall by being simplified. Units can only be given faith that they personally have which differs between units. The most common faith being a 6+ invulnerable save which I do believe is weaker than an older invul save=to armor.......a major decrease

Another weakness is the extreme lack of guard....of course allies would be dropped yet the only guard currently included in the book are henchmen....yet the only henchmen listed to be allowed in thier squads are arco-flaggelents, death cultists, and crusaders......not that you needed acolytes for melta like the GK book but come on.....the lack of reliable heavy seapons support really shines in this book posting a lot of relience on Excorcists or Retributors....or in Simons case melta guns....now to be fair weapons options are not shown except for in pictures....Retributors, as always, can have multi-melta's so I see a huge relience on melta in this book.....What is good is with the inclusions of death cultists and Confessors allowing reroll to hits I see a couple death cult bombs tearing apart almost anything in the game in future games....so they do have an excellent death star...

What is also nice about Retributors is that thier act of faith gives thier weapons rending....this is of course great if they can include missile launchers being able to penetrate Land Raiders....or heavy bolters for that matter....yet with the meta shifting from grey knights forcing a lot of multi-raider lsits I believe the heavy ammount of melta Sisters have streamlined in thier army should let them do fine against an average build of today....

A Dominions faith makes thier weapons twin linked, so those multiple melta units of dominions are extremely deadly and efficient

No new units to my knowledge and all old models which is kind of depressing, hopefully more plastic than finecast.....

Only 3 special characters, nope there isnt Coteaz, Saint Celestine, Kyrinov, and Uriah are included......Nothing to great or new in that section....

Penitent Englines look fun, 11/11/10 armor makes them what Dreadknights should be...equiped with heavy flamers and Dreadnought CCW's make them quite useful if you can get up close, thats a big if...they do ignore shaken and stunned results automatically which is a cool ability that everyone in the game now has.... yet a random D6+1 attacks and I3 can hurt them....also they are open topped....ehh they still look freakin awesome in my oppinion....

One cool thing the army has is all the vehicles have the Act of Faith shield of faith so a only slightly worse than DE 6+ invulnerable save.....meh the faith still sucks....

Overall the army got more basic and streamlined....they still can turn out awesome Immolater lists full of way too much melta....not too many extreme changes just enough annoying ones to piss off the current Girls player....now if the whole "everyone takes land raiders to combat GK meta" actually happens you can expect multi-melta and twin linked melta lists backed by twin linked heavy flamers and angry dreadknight wannabe's can be very effective... But who knows with the army list section still in the dark, we could be looking at a lot of key elements missing to make them especially effective as wlel as some cool new weapons options, hell mabye they have super psycannons we don't know about yet....I still expect Simon to win a GT one of these days with this army....Good luck all of the Sisters players, I have faith in you (cost one faith point XD)...more on this later next month....