Special Characters

[The Odor]

Good.

[scottyde]

Well I play both orks and tau competitively and use absolutely no SCs. I named all of my orks however so to me they are all SCs to me.


On topic though. IG, orks, nids, tau and dark eldar can all be played competitively without any Sc in your lists.

[Farseer Macleod]

As for the Eldar, alot of their SC's are overppriced (phoenix lords), while their overall statline and wargear is good it is the sever lack of invunerable saves for IC's that can be picked out in CC by power weapons combined with the points cost that nerfs them.

Other SC's eldar have are good, eldrad, yriel and the avatar, decently priced. Better than their non-named counterparts but not affecting the army much more than their counterparts might. No special builds.

Grey Knights have a whole host of special Characters, a couple of which you'll see quite often as they let you take certain units as troops choices. Other ones get a special rule/ability or two over their non-named counterparts but that doesn't nessessarily make them the best choice as their non-named counterparts have a large range of tasty weapon upgrades some of which are various types of grenades that can really change the tide of a battle.

[Bdoydie]

SM for really need SCs to get a really great list but the one saving grace if you dislike SCs is you can make your own chapter and use stand ins, like Im doing a deathwatch army using vanilla marines with Pedro Cantor as the general but I made a stand in to represent him.

[experiment 626]

Newer books, (starting with Daemons), tend to revolve around the idea of SC's granting an army-wide buff and/or various special abilities. Older books such as Chaos Marines, Tau, Eldar, Templars, Dark Angels and to an extent Orks tend to view SC's in the old light of 'fun to muck about with but not really any better than their generic counterparts'.

Some of the 5th ed books have of corse taken SC's well beyond what others have. Dark Eldar, IG & SW's can be just as, if not more competitive without SC's than they are with SC's. GK's on the other hand become rediculously filthy with the inclusion of their 'big 3' SC's, and it can even be argued that they're far less competitive without their SC's.

Personally I don't hate/like SC's, but rather the player using them...
Someone using for example Kantor and theming their rules to play a Deathwatch army is just plain cool!
Someone using Crowe so he can simply roflstomp everyone in a non-tourny environment with Purifyer spam is boring and completely unimaginative.

[A.T.]

Newer books, (starting with Daemons), tend to revolve around the idea of SC's granting an army-wide buff and/or various special abilities. Older books such as Chaos Marines, Tau, Eldar, Templars, Dark Angels and to an extent Orks tend to view SC's in the old light of 'fun to muck about with but not really any better than their generic counterparts'.

Templars and Tau are throwbacks to 3rd edition as far as special characters go. The Eldar, Orks, Daemons, and Chaos Marines have a whole bundle of characters but they are mostly self contained.

Dark Angels is a slightly odd one as it's caught between 4th and 5th, only three characters but two of them significantly alter the army. Since 5th edition characters have generally had much a wider influence, be it army altering chapter tactics, FoC switching, or wide-ranging effects. The exceptions being the SoB codex which has 4th edition style characters, and nids to a lesser extent.

[whitewolf1984]

CSM are great without using SC's. Hell besides Karn they mostly suck. Personally I play 1k sons and there is no way in hell I would fiel Arimah

Hope it helps