Games Workshop moved Lion El’Jonson from 335 points to 415 on Monday morning, and the codex he lives in isn’t on shelves yet. Reviewers had copies. The Munitorum Field Manual they were given was stamped provisional. Then somewhere between Goonhammer publishing their Dark Angels datasheet review and the following Monday, someone at GW read the room and found eighty more points. Deathwatch Terminators shifted at the same time, up to 190 for five and 380 for ten.
That’s a restaurant changing the price on the menu while you’re still reading it. I can’t remember them turning a number around that fast on something that hadn’t gone on general sale.
415 is also exactly what Guilliman costs. Whether that’s deliberate symmetry or just where the maths landed I don’t know, but the two walking primarchs now sit on the same number, down to the point.
Five datasheet rules on Lion El’Jonson
He’s T10 with 16 wounds and a 3+ invulnerable save. He has five datasheet rules, which Goonhammer reckon might be a record, and I can’t think of anything that beats it either. Primarch of the First Legion, Dark Angels Bodyguard and The Emperor’s Shield all carry over unchanged. Master Strategist is new and lets you drop him into any combat doctrine during your command phase, on top of whatever he’s already sitting in. The fifth is called The Watchers, and it hands him a 4+ feel no pain against mortal wounds and psychic attacks.
Martial Exemplar now only helps DARK ANGELS units, so generic Marine datasheets get nothing out of standing near him. No Hiding From the Watchers drops to a 5+ and goes Dark Angels only, picking up psychic attacks on the way down. Both pistol profiles got better for reasons nobody has explained, the bolt to S6 AP-2 and the plasma to S10 damage 3. His sweep attack went down to twelve attacks and gained CLEAVE 2, which against a twenty-strong mob of boyz produces a genuinely stupid number.
The eighty points are going on the defensive stack. Goonhammer’s Curie pointed out that under the old sheet he already had the 4+ feel no pain against mortal wounds from his first command phase onwards, so psychic attacks are the fresh part. Mortal wound chip damage is the standard answer to a 3+ invulnerable save. Explosives, Crushing Impact, all the clever workarounds people build lists around now run into a second filter before anything reaches him, and Grey Knights armies in particular are going to have a thin time of it.
The Deathwatch Terminators half of the edit is the quieter one and probably matters more to more people. They moved to 190 for five and 380 for ten, and Goonhammer’s read is that this is the tip of the iceberg, because the Deathwatch support detachment lets you staple those units into a standard Codex: Space Marines army alongside ordinary leaders. Points were the fast lever. I’d expect the rules text to get a look at some stage too.
The rule is called The Watchers
The Watchers in the Dark are small robed creatures that live on the Rock. They kept vigil over the Lion’s comatose body in a chamber at the core of the asteroid for ten thousand years. They don’t speak. Deathwatch: First Founding credits them with a near-exclusive ability to resist warp entities, a trait it says they share with Pariahs, which is a sentence I’ve never fully recovered from. They carry Dark Angels weapons into battle. They appear to be immune to acts of violence. A Dark Angel accompanied by one is destined for greatness.
And the same passage says they will never give direct aid in battle.
The 4+ feel no pain is named after them.
They’ve been in print since before I owned a single model, which at this point covers most of my adult life. Zahariel in Descent of Angels has them native to Caliban, present long before the Emperor turned up, already working against something he calls the most ancient evil, treating the warp-tainted great beasts of the forest as a symptom rather than the disease itself. At some stage they became jailers of the Ouroboros. When the Fallen started tearing lumps out of each other on Caliban as the Heresy unfolded, the Watchers sided with Cypher against Astelan and Zahariel. The Dreadwing novella has them acquainted with Eldrad Ulthran, which is the sort of line you read twice and then put the book down for a minute. And they wanted Caliban destroyed. Saw its destruction as their last hope of getting what they were after.
Almost none of that has been explained, and GW has seemed perfectly content to leave it that way for about two decades.
Confusing side note that took me far too long to untangle. The Dark Angels have two entirely different things called Watchers. White Dwarf #464’s Eternal Vigilance describes a network of tens of thousands of psycho-indoctrinated human agents scattered across the galaxy, living inconspicuous lives, hunting scraps of information about the Fallen, almost all of them unaware they serve the Master of the Watchers, a senior figure in the Inner Circle. Ordinary humans, in other words. Same word as the little hooded lads. I once spent an evening convinced the two were connected and built a whole theory on it…
The bit of Watcher writing I actually like is in White Dwarf #446’s Pain Aeterna, where a Dark Angel called Apharan is summoned deeper into the Rock for judgement. A warrior in bone-white robes opens a door and tells him he’s been deemed worthy to enter, that he’s promised nothing besides hardship, and that he’ll leave changed or not at all. Apharan follows him through. The Watchers fall in step behind, the steelpine aperture shuts, and that’s where the passage leaves them, walking into the dark with no dialogue and no explanation of who they are.
One of the garage regulars ran Dark Angels for about eighteen months around 2014, and his Deathwing Knights box came with the small hooded model you’re meant to stick on the squad’s base. I spent most of an evening insisting it was decoration. Scenery. A bit of flavour on the base, same as a skull or a chunk of rubble. He kept saying no, it’s a Watcher, they’re in the lore, they do things. I was extremely confident about it and extremely wrong, and the part I remember is that I carried on arguing after somebody had already opened the codex and read the entry out loud to me. Pete still brings it up when he wants to end a discussion.
What the 415 buys
A 3+ invulnerable save backed by a 4+ feel no pain against mortals and psychic attacks describes a model you remove with ordinary damage or not at all. Sixteen wounds at toughness 10 is a lot of ordinary damage.
The Lion’s own record, meanwhile, has him on the floor a fair few times. Luther dropped him on Caliban with a psychic blast, which is the foundation the chapter’s entire ten-thousand-year problem sits on. On Tsagualsa, in Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s Savage Weapons, Konrad Curze got the better of him and was strangling him to death until Corswain stabbed Curze through the spine from behind. What the books keep coming back to with him is the tactical brain, and his willingness to run a man through under a parlay flag when the parlay stops being useful.
Now I’m going to argue against myself, because I’ve been sat here a while deciding whether the pre-release edit actually bothers me. A games company moving a number after reviewers have written about it is a bad look. It makes the provisional Field Manual feel like a focus group rather than a document, and you can’t run a tournament scene on costs that shift because a YouTube video went off. Then again. The Dark Angels have been running wild all edition, Goonhammer called them easily the strongest Marines out there before the book had even landed, and 335 points for T10, sixteen wounds, a 3+ invulnerable and five datasheet rules was plainly wrong to anyone who looked at it for five seconds. I’d rather they fixed it in September than left it to a February dataslate. So I’ve mostly talked myself round.
So yeah. The Watchers. Little robed blokes. Been on the Rock since, what, the nineties? Earlier, probably. Never spoke, never helped, carried the swords about and stood there looking ominous while the Inner Circle did its thing. And now they’re part of what eighty points buys you. I don’t hate it. I just keep circling back to that line about direct aid.
The version I keep sketching in my head does something sideways. The Watchers guided the Lion back towards the Imperium when he woke in the mirror-Caliban at the start of Mike Brooks’ The Lion: Son of the Forest. They talk psychically to each other and apparently to nobody else. Give me a rule about movement, or about knowing where something is going to be, or about which unit acts first. A feel no pain is easy to write and easy to play and it goes on the sheet in one line, so I understand the choice.
I was in my local store on Saturday picking up a pot of Retributor Armour and the Lion kit was still on the shelf, two boxes of it, the same spot they’ve occupied since I started noticing. Lovely model. Hundred quid. I suspect the number of people who actually own one has very little to do with what the Field Manual says he costs.
Practical upshot for anyone taking him: 415 is more than a fifth of a 2,000 point list, and the rest of your army has to do the scoring while he walks up the board being almost impossible to shift. I’m not a Dark Angels player and I’m not about to become one over a feel no pain. I’ve got eleven Imperial Fists Intercessors in grey plastic that have been sat on the desk since March, and Pete has finished two full Salamanders squads in the time I’ve spent not undercoating them.
