The “Beneficence” Relic has been improved quite a bit with better Strength and some additional attacks too! That’s especially true because, while you probably take a Dialogus or a Dogmata as your primary priest, having a spare War Hymn caster is going to be extremely valuable in a melee-focused list as it lets you use Fiery Conviction to buff up a unit after it jumps out of a transport.

They now function as a unit of two models on the battlefield, with a special rule that means Kyganil always has to take wounds first, and essentially that unit has all the special abilities each had separately before combined plus a key boost for each of offense and defence.

Which you take depends on what you think you need from your chaff – Crusaders are a bit tougher at a 3+/4++, but Assassins now always fight first and have gone to WS2+, giving them at least some chance of punking an enemy trash unit. Sisters had one of the best Stratagem sections in 8th edition, with a great mix of possibilities which enhanced units across the army. Possibly the most likely combo coming out of the book is Guided with Raging Fervour, which treats all Pistol and Assault melta weapons as always being in half range, and Heavy ones as being in half range at 18”. Coming after Celestine with anything less than overwhelming force probably isn’t going to stick, and watching the light die in your opponent’s eyes as you undo 3VP of Assassinate scoring on turn 5 is probably quite good fun. The lower damage sucks, but you’re marginally more likely to land a wound in the first place and can potentially pick up greater numbers of attacks against hordes, which isn’t nothing.

If you play this faction, get this model – pretty much every competitive list we’ve come up with uses her, to the extent that she kind of leaves Canonesses or Palatines looking a bit purposeless unless you want access to Blessings of the Faithful (which to be fair you sometimes will).Earn 10 or more Saint Points and you receive the Saintly Reward associated with that Trial (and are then free to pick a new Trial). It now provides Light Cover to Adepta Sororitas units wholly within 6”, which is not nothing for Paragons or Sacresants (and there isn’t really any other source of this in the book), but is a bit of a pain to keep set up and impractical on larger units. Sanguinius faced Fulgrim and won, Dorn charged Horus Ascended…and soon regretted it whilst Sigismund took not one, but two heads (Eidolon and Abaddon). That makes it vastly tougher to remove, but the trade off is that the magnitude of buffs it brings has diminished. The main losses for them come in surrounding changes – not being able to easily boost them to a 4++ means they’re fully locked in to being glass cannons, and losing access to an Advance and Charge stratagem means their reach out of a Rhino is considerably smaller.

Dominions are good again: They’re cheap, they pack a ton of guns, and most importantly they once again allow you to scout move their transport – and now they can bring other units inside of it with them, giving your melee options (like those shiny new Celestian Sacresants) some great forward momentum. Potentially spicy stuff, though possibly a little hard to set up – though you get your own turn’s worth of movement and fighting to get in place for it. It now adds 4″ to the range of all flame weapons in the unit and any 4+ to wound inflicts a mortal wound (to a maximum of 3 mortal wounds). There are six generic Warlord Traits in the new Codex and most of them have changed slightly from the previous edition.

With basic Battle Sister squads going up to a maximum of 20 models in this book (yes, really, check out the Units section below), this is a potentially powerful option for shoving a brick of Sisters onto an objective and giving your opponent a significant headache when trying to remove them. Each time you gain a Miricale dice at the end of a Phase as a result of this Warlord being destroyed, that Miricale dice is changed to a 6.