Maths of the Psychic Phase Part 3: New Eldar

I know, right? I go and make a whole series unpacking the maths of the psychic phase, and then the Eldar get to be all special unique snowflake about it. What to do?

Work it out, obviously.


First, how are they special? They have a few things going for them. I'm only going to look at two of those features here, but they are big ones.

The first is the formation ability of the Seer Council, to harness warp charge on a 3+ instead of a 4+. As you might expect, this makes passing psychic tests a lot easier. You could look at this as better resource utilisation or an increased success rate, but frankly, it's a bit of both. Double win.

This is how it looks: probability of each outcome on the vertical axis, the number of dice thrown at a power on the horizontal.

 

 Already, they look pretty good, especially remembering that these are warlocks and are rarely going to be going for warp charge 3+. They can nail warp charge 1 and 2 very cheaply, very reliably.

But that's not all - a Farseer, being far superior to a warlock (or indeed possibly anyone else who likes manifesting psychic powers) may reroll his dice. This is a pretty big deal, as rerolling dice is the best way to reduce the odds of an undesirable outcome.

Let's see what the success curve looks like if we assume that all failures are rerolled, regardless of the chance of suffering Perils! (because, you know, ghosthelm). For now, we'll also assume a Farseer operating independently of the Seer Council, so harnessing warp charge on a 4+.

Two things should be obvious - firstly the large spike in Perils!, which luckily he doesn't care about, and secondly the very low chances of failing completely.

If rerolls by themselves can make a Farseer this reliable, how awesome must he be as part of the Seer Council? Harnessing on a 3+ AND rerolling failures...

The answer is: Badass.

The Seer Council Farseer is very close to being able to throw one dice per warp charge required only, and still pull off his powers. In fact, he generally manifests warp charge 4 powers (like Super Eldritch Storm) more easily than his plebian rivals can cast warp charge 3 powers.

The upshot: assume your opponent's Seer Council will manifest whatever they want to, at least 9 times out of 10. If it is your Seer Council, you do not need to think very hard about what to do. Assign warp charge to each power that you want to cast at 1:1, then assign left over dice to the big ones or the ones you most want to succeed.

Don't listen to the enemies inevitable tears as you do this, it might put you off your game.