Are Rubric Marines over-costed?

Image from Black Library

We can get carried away with new model hype sometimes. As Wrath of Magnus hits the shelves, people everywhere are claiming the great Psychic potential of the army, and the revolutionary new paradigm for Chaos Space Marine players.


People claiming the Thousand Sons are going to be a very powerful army are everywhere, and part of me wants to simply agree to that and ride the hype train.


Then some prick writes an article to ruin everyone's fun.


My fanboy reaction urged me to counter-attack the disappointment, and my sceptical analysis tools jumped into the fray to prove the writer wrong. Rather than looking at the unit as a normal Troop choice, I instead look at it as an Objective Secure Psyker with 4 ablative wounds that have invulnerable saves and really good guns.


But then if I do that, I do need to prove that it is decent in that role. And unfortunately, there are a number of units that can do similar things, if not quie so neatly fitting into a CAD, or a Formation.


For a start, a pair of regular Librarians/Sorcerers on their own have a roughly equivalent points cost. They also have fairly similar wounds to a half squad of Rubricae, just lacking the invulnerable saves.


If you wanted to maintain Objective secured, you can always just have a Librarian buddy up with a Tactical Squad. Or a Sorceror with some Chaos Space Marines.


Rather annoyingly, a Librarian on a bike with a single Objective Secured squad of 3 bikers clocks in at about the same point cost... and they can go fast, have Relentless instead of Slow and Purposeful, and can Jink instead of using an invulnerability save. Bonus Bearded Cheese for using White Scars.


So in the next few days, we'll look at the maths of it all, and see if the Rubric Marines are indeed over-costed for what they do. I want to believe they aren't. But as a Scientist I need to refrain from emotional arguments.


Also it's nearly the Christmas Holidays, and I just can't wait to spend it with my spreadsheets!


That's normal... right?


Right?


Thanks for reading.

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