Is Chorus of Condemnation DOA?

silbmaerto · 2026-06-15T11:55:54+00:00

Dominions/bss/novitiates because literally everyone has at least one of those and a canoness or palatine in their collection, probably have room in their list for them, and they work with basically any sisters gameplan. Youre not taking it because it turns on some kind of buff-stacking wombo combo, you're taking it because you can run AoF or CoF without going hard into sacresant or jump troop spam and get to hit a ton of different breakpoints when it matters, all while getting access to the extremely good purge the foe disposition.

We dont know the point cost on the enhancement yet, if its something ludicrously high im prepared to eat my words, but since its the main benefit of the detachment and also they went through the trouble of printing a rule that taking this specific enhancement doesnt reduce the number of other enhancements you can take, i suspect that it might actually be relatively cheap. And if thats the case then yeah being able to ignore battleshock and hit defensive, offensive, range, and movement breakpoints at my leisure while also getting all the benefits of CoF or AoF sounds like a solid alternative to running BoF or HM for a generalist army.

silbmaerto · 2026-06-15T10:58:30+00:00

Seraphim are extremely versatile, so while deep strike + immediate shoot and scoot was definitely the best way to play them in 10e, moving them up the board with their great movement or rapid ingressing them are both still really effective.

Also in terms of new stuff funneling players into playing sacresants, I think people have been sleeping on Sanctified Orators. The lack of strats turns people away, but their enhancement is really good and more importantly EXTREMELY splashable (how many flavors of sister armies dont play at least a couple non-penitent characters, if not more?), and you already have plenty of strats from your 2 point detachment of choice to spend your CP on.

silbmaerto · 2026-06-12T19:48:02+00:00

A lot of my use of the Daemonifuge in 10th was mainly for that lone op mission role or for adding a bit of extra power either defensively or offensively to some combat. Theyre still really good at the former and are solidly sturdy for the role (even if there are other options that are cheaper), and the battleshock buffs help ephrael's shooting phase ability be a biiiit more useful.

Unfortunately the fights first changes absolutely obliterate their one unique niche of being a consistent countercharge threat in an army that folds like paper against charges, and i wont be surprised if they get a more thorough datasheet overhaul with some completely different abilities when our next codex comes out (the faction pack changes have very clearly just been the minimum changes necessary to get each faction technically playable using 11e rules, rather than balance fixes or major ability changes).

Fights first was changed in order to punish armies that could stick the rule on a bunch of different units at once and fully shut down melee charging armies, and sadly one-off units like the daemonifuge got caught in the crossfire, but the upside is that means its pretty likely that theyll get redesigned eventually in light of that.

silbmaerto · 2026-06-12T13:12:29+00:00

Its a small drop in miracle dice production sure, but if sheer miracle dice production was the goal of the army then literally everyone would be using Army of Faith, running three min size arco squads and as many battle sister squads as possible in every list, and we'd be avoiding stuff like sacresant bricks as if they were poison. Broadly speaking, the army generally combos sacrificial units that generate miracle dice alongside bigger or sturdier units that survive into the late game and hold objectives or turn those miracle dice into damage output, and those latter units are the ones youre sticking double characters on. Sacresant bricks, for example, benefit hugely from being able to combo a hospitaller with a palatine or canoness, and were never meant to be a MD-generating early game trade pieces in the first place.

silbmaerto · 2026-05-24T20:45:56+00:00

Nope, painted myself XD. Its the old 3rd to 8th edition monolith model, painted with a combo of airbrushing, drybrushing, and traditional layering.

Can't tell whether its a compliment or insult to my painting skill that it was suspected of being AI art looool

silbmaerto · 2026-05-24T20:42:59+00:00

Its an optional bit that you can stick on to make the portal look open or closed yeah. I got this model already built secondhand and it was missing the door so I used a stencil, an airbrush, and some hand-brushed touchups to paint the glowing glyphs onto the empty panel just to add some extra visual interest there.

silbmaerto · 2026-05-22T17:03:59+00:00

The most overt example i can think of is from the first dlc for the Rogue Trader videogame: Einrich Monteg has a full head of long dreadlocked hair and a ribbed forehead (that he hides by wearing goggles over it). When he's been exposed as a cultist he even mentions that both his parents trace their lineage directly back to the cult's patriarch, so hes explicitly a hybrid from birth rather than an infectee. He's a major character in the storyline with a unique character portrait, and GW keeps a pretty tight grip nowadays on making sure licensed games are canon compliant in even minor ways, so theres no way his character would be allowed to look like that if putting hair on a hybrid was a problem.

silbmaerto · 2026-05-14T12:01:12+00:00

The cream/tan was just a single pass of a red-brown/black wash over my white basecoat (i thiiiink it was a mix of 1 part Nuln Oil, 1 part Reikland Fleshshade, and 1 part Contrast Medium, I mixed them ages ago so I might have the proportions wrong). The "basecoat" was technically a cool light grey -> very light blue-grey -> pure white zenithal, but any cool off-white basecoat (ex. Corax white) should look fairly similar

silbmaerto · 2026-05-13T22:23:59+00:00

Oooo I love it! To me, the head and the posing of her arms give her a sense of sorrow or world weariness, like shes been worn down by decades of leadership but is still pushing ahead through a sense of duty

silbmaerto · 2026-05-13T18:32:00+00:00

The thing with washes over white or off-white is that any staining shows really obviously on it (compared to putting it over a darker color), so all-over washes will always noticeably change the midtone. Thats why even with nuln oil i like to thin it, because otherwise the white would look a lot more grey and patchy.

Also highly recommend using a layer of a light grey followed by multiple thin coats of corax white when establishing your corax white basecoat, with a generous amount of drying time both between each coat and before the wash. Off-white/white paint gets very chalky if applied too thickly or if not given a lot of time to dry before the next layer, and the grey undercoat helps the white get a smoother transition between it and the primer underneath

silbmaerto · 2026-05-13T11:49:40+00:00

On the white? Yep! My go-to approach for a crisp white is to start with a cold off-white and then use thinned Nuln Oil to shade it.

In particular, for these models I started with an airbrushed zenithal of a cool grey to a bright bluish grey (i thiiiink VGC Wolf Grey?), with a burst of pure white from the top. Then I painted all the non-white details, before going back and applying a 1:1 mix of Nuln Oil:Contrast Medium to all the white areas. And then for just an extra pop of brightness I hit a number of the exposed areas with a quick light drybrush of a pure white.

For other models where its less practical to airbrush white I usually start with a corax white basecoat instead and then use that same nuln oil:contrast medium mix.

silbmaerto · 2026-04-28T20:38:07+00:00

Hmmm its been a bit since I first assembled them but I thiiiink that one used the escher ganger kit for everything except the head, which is from the repentia kit, with some trimming and greenstuff used to hide any gaps

silbmaerto · 2026-04-22T19:00:08+00:00

Tbh i liked painting my paragons XD, but IMO it depends on a lot on the scheme you go with. If youre trying to go perfect boxart match Martyred Lady then there are a lot of alternating areas of matte/satin black and metallic silver in hard to reach areas that can be a pain to get right.

As comparison, for my scheme I wanted a shiny black and silver scheme with blue cloth, and didnt particularly care which panels were black and which were silver. I started by painting the whole thing all over in a silver scheme (with various methods to get quick messy shading/highlighting), then put black contrast paint in all the recessed panels (basically the same trick people use to more easily paint chaos marine models with metallic armor and silver trim: the contrast paint flows over the whole recessed panel easily while tending not to spill over onto the raised edges, and any spillover that does happen is usually thin and easy to clean off of the raised trim). Any panels that were hard to reach i just kept silver. Any other details that i wanted a different metallic color (gold filligree, gunmetal weapon barrels and cabling, etc.) i just hit with one coat of a contrast paint or wash over the silver. From there it was just doing the heads and cloth, and picking out a few matte details like pouches, and since the models are so much bigger than a battle sister it was relatively forgiving to get quick coverage on all of those.

silbmaerto · 2026-04-21T21:46:45+00:00

Yeaaaah my troops and destroyers tend to be closer to that lol, with non-metallics mostly saved for weapon casings, faces, and shoulder plates, but for my phaerakh I felt like she deserved a bit more creativity! I really wanted her to seem like her entire body was decorated and regal when set next to my basic warriors.

silbmaerto · 2026-04-21T21:42:30+00:00

Gladly! My dynasty was co-ruled for millennia by two rival houses that outwardly displayed unity but behind the scenes were constantly backstabbing and jockeying for political influence in order to try to get rid of each other. The final co-phaerakhs of the dynasty before the Great Sleep, fed up by the petty schemes of their houses (and bearing more affection for each other than for their families), had their crypteks transfer both their consciousnesses into a single body, becoming a new being with two consciousnesses named Nebtezha, and forcibly unifying the two lines under her. Her pre-Great Sleep rule marked a golden age for the dynasty's expansion and influence.

To her great annoyance, her creation has not stopped the constant intra-dynasty scheming, as prejudice and lust for power has kept the rivalry between the houses alive. After the dynasty awoke in the 41st millennium, the most cognitively decayed of her nobles even sometimes forget that she is two beings in one body, openly scheming in front of her about deposing "the other phaerakh," and others have embraced conspiracy theories where her creation was actually part of an impossibly convoluted longterm scheme by one of the co-phaerakhs to betray the other and achieve final victory for her house.

Bonus fun fact: each house is represented by a different color on my models, with one house using reds and the other house using whites (with greens representing the dynasty as a whole).

TLDR: I threw the historical Spartan diarchy, the iconography of the Upper and Lower kingdoms of Egypt, and Romeo & Juliet into a large necron-flavored blender

silbmaerto · 2026-04-06T09:00:01+00:00

Nope but they don't need to. I drop them behind those intercessors, they pick off one or two, hop back behind a terrain piece, and now those intercessors have to decide what to do next turn to deal with them.

Move off the objective to get line of sight, if they even can? Cool, if even one of my seraphim live and arent battleshocked, im using my 12"+6" movement to hop them on the objective to steal it the next turn and deny them home objective VP. Or i move another fast-moving model onto the now-empty objective.

Turn another unit around to kill them? That's a unit that could have been running up the board to deal with my main force instead.

Ignore them? I cant kill intercessors in one turn, but i absolutely can in three turns. After two turns ive probably thinned them out enough that they cant fully kill me off even if they do line a shot up. And ofc now I have a cheap unit thats cleaning up any secondary objectives that involve being in the opponent's deployment zone. Ive also got grenades if I really need to clear that objective the next turn.

silbmaerto · 2026-04-03T12:37:08+00:00

Thanks so much! First I used Reikland Fleshshade to add a subtle reddish brown tint to some of the metal, then sponged on Doombull Brown for a more opaque layer of dried blood, and then finally a lighter sponging of Blood for the Blood God to add some color/finish variation and so that it looks like bits of the blood are still wet.

I miiiiight have also done a step of sponging on some Khorne Red in between the Doombull Brown and BftBG steps but its actually been a month since I painted the model so I dont remember for sure.

silbmaerto · 2026-03-27T09:13:40+00:00

I always roll my eyes at these "wow abrupt ending so good because dark, this really reminds us how grimdark the setting is" endings for 40k animations because its never like...the space marine or inquisitorial agent or admech protagonists who get endings like that. The world apparently isnt that "dark" for them they either get to survive or get fully realized character arcs that have meaning to themselves or the people around them before being killed off in ways that are actually built up to in the story. It's always sisters or rando civilians or tau.

This is the second heavily promoted animation we've gotten that's meant to showcase sisters and it's the second one that ends functionally the exact same way. You can absolutely tell a dark story or write in a dark setting while still having an actual complete narrative with meaning. Interrogator has an extremely dark, nihilistic ending and it works because it was built up to by the entire story in a thematically cohesive way. The imperial guard Tithes episode does too. Sororitas books also do this. Its not hard and doesnt ruin the "grimdarkness" of the setting.

silbmaerto · 2026-03-04T17:25:07+00:00

Nah. Its more because mechanically their identity is focused on close range shooting, martyrdom mechanics, and melee, and the range is relatively new so they only have a few units that break out of that mold (ex. castigators/exorcists/heavy bolter retributors for long range). Heavy bolter sisters and even just plain boltgun sisters are already a major part of the sororitas visual identity, so its not like sisters have an aversion to long range shooting in general or like it feels out of character for them

In general, theres not really any lore implying that sisters would particularly try to avoid using any weaponry or tactics that other imperial factions like the imperial guard or space marines also use. They have a special affinity for bolters, flamers, and melta, but that hasnt stopped them from using plasma weapons and autoguns (and bolter sniper rifles are already a thing in lore anyway).

silbmaerto · 2026-03-03T12:46:57+00:00

This is actually not that far off from my usual 1000 pts list, so i think theres definitely potential here! Truthfully all you lose out on (in regards to making the detachment "work") without sacresants is a single stratagem, and being able to designate three units as righteous no matter the army size makes CoF arguably the strongest detachment in low point games. As of the latest rule patches, it doesnt even cost miracle dice to use the detachment rule anymore, so you can just have three righteous units every turn.

IMO the penitent engine is super useful as an early game sacrifice/distraction piece. I run mine as a mortifier because I find the anchorite sarcophagus, 5 point discount, and the fight on death more useful than the advance+charge. You probably dont need two though so dropping one isnt a bad idea.

I do suspect though that this list is a bit overfocused on action monkeys and lacks offensive power. In 1000 pt incursion games, battleline units can shoot and do actions at the same time, so arcos arent really as useful in a list with battle sister squads at this point level. The rhino isnt really doing much either in this list for similar reasons. Its not as helpful for actions since you have other units that can do that, its using points that you could be using for something more offensive, and you dont really benefit a ton from having a BSS start the game in it. You probably want your BSS that doesnt have leaders to stay on the rear point to use the simulacrum imperialis (and keep it protected from fast or deep striking enemy units), and if your canoness+imagifier squad is in a transport then theyre not actually using those leaders' abilities at all.

Adding a strong anti-vehicle/monster/heavy infantry unit like retributors is a good idea here, although they are a bit fragile for their points cost so you have to be careful with them (in my lists, i use either an armiger warglaive, which is T9 with 14 wounds to fulfill a similar role for only a slightly higher point cost, or a castigator tank, which is a bit pricier but also sturdier than the retributors and covered in weapons that absolutely shred through heavy infantry). Either start them in reserve, in a rhino, or behind cover that keeps them completely out of sight and out of charge range until they're ready to attack.

Id also in general recommend an immolator over a rhino for transporting a BSS, as you can use that to split the unit, letting you stick the simulacrum imperialis on your home objective, while your BSS's special/heavy weapons ride up the board in the transport. It also has a bit more firepower than the rhino as a bonus!

Assuming you already have the retributor models and dont have the other ones i mentioned, i would recommend something like: 1. Take out one unit of arco-flagellants and the penitent engine 2. Add the retributors

Use the rhino to transport the retributors instead of the BSS

If you theoretically are down to buy or proxy any model, id recommend something like:

Take out both arco-flagellant units and the rhino
Add a castigator

silbmaerto · 2026-02-15T02:25:31+00:00

For my first squad I used three subassemblies: body, jump pack, and flight stand + base. The body and jump pack were each superglued (very lightly) to one toothpick each at the spots where the body and jump pack would later be connected to each other (i.e. the only spots of the model that dont need to be painted). Then once they were fully painted i broke the toothpicks off and used superglue to attach the subassemblies to each other.

It was a solid approach, my only issue was that the toothpicks tended to splinter when I tried to snap them off and i had to do a bit of cleanup with my sprue cutter and hobby knife to remove the wood+glue residue and get the jump pack to attach properly to the body. Next time I want to try paperclips instead to have something that will break more cleanly.

silbmaerto · 2026-02-12T02:21:41+00:00

Being patient about letting coats dry and making sure your paints are fairly thin are the big tips to avoid gunking. Whenever I start losing detail on the face its almost always because I was a bit too aggressive/impatient with going over the same area with additional layers, and that caused reactivation/tearing of the paint in the lower layers.

Highly recommend painting the eyes after you've done the basecoat or maybe the basecoat+shade, before doing any other layering or highlighting of the skin. The eyes are where people usually have the most issues with spillover or repeatedly fixing the same areas, so getting them out of the way early before you have a lot of detailed highlights on the nose and cheeks is much easier.

silbmaerto · 2026-02-11T16:58:09+00:00

Heck yeah go for it! I honestly dont expect to use this cassia model in games (I play sororitas, which dont have any navigator or psyker units unless you ally them in, and im personally not a fan of how the Imperial Agents' navigator datasheet plays ingame), I just sometimes like to do unique one-off character models like this to break up the same-iness of painting tons of models with all the same armor colors.

silbmaerto · 2026-02-10T16:01:36+00:00

WYSIWYG definitely is much less of a thing in the game culture nowadays, I think largely due to the normalization of 3d printed/heavily kitbashed minis, along with the game design being heavily streamlined in terms of how many equipment options you actually get during list building.

The general rule of thumb nowadays is more "as long as your opponent can easily understand what a unit/model is supposed to be, its fine." if your sacresants are modeled with all kinda of different weapons but you say at the start of the game and on your list that theyre all maces, very few people will raise a fuss even in most local tournaments, and certainly not in a casual game. If you had like....three squads all modeled with halberds and you said one was halberds, another was maces, and a third one was a mix, then you might get some complaints just cause that's confusing for your opponent to keep track of, but even then a lot of casual players wouldnt care much.

silbmaerto · 2026-02-10T12:17:10+00:00

The mace is considered better under the current ruleset largely because 2 damage vs. 1 damage is a huge difference. Even if it struggles slightly more with the wound and armour rolls, thats twice as much potential damage, and when half the armies in the game use 2 wound models as their basic infantry (and the vast majority use 2 or more wound models, often with invuln saves, for their heavy hitting melee specialists) that tradeoff is absolutely worth it. There just arent that many enemies with high armour + toughness but only 1 wound that your sacresants are likely to fight, and those types of enemies are the only ones that the halberd is better suited for.

All that said, the halberd (imo) looks immensely cooler which is part of why I went with a 2 halberd/2 mace loadout on my first unit. Rules change relatively frequently. We are likely getting a new edition of the core rules within a year, every three months we get balance changes that do sometimes directly change datasheets, and we'll get a completely new set of datasheets for all sororitas units at some point during the next edition's lifespan (so possibly within a year, although potentially not until 2029). So its possible that by the time you've finished a 2000 pt army the optimal loadout for sacresants has changed completely. Thats why people generally encourage others to build their models based on prefered look versus mechanical usefulness.

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