This series, titled 'The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly' is going to examine the things various companies do extremely well, extremely poorly, or have just done weirdly, from not just a gameplay standpoint but from fluff and design standpoints as well. I'll mostly be focusing on Games Workshop for the start, as I'm most familiar with Warhammer and 40k, but I'm be expanding as I get more games in with other systems.
Today we'll be looking at Flayed Ones from Codex: Necrons. Flayed Ones were originally from the 3rd Edition Necron Codex, and were updated for their 5th Edition Codex. It's their 5th Edition version we'll be taking a look at today.
I'm not sure how to put this politely, so I'll just blurt it out: Flayed Ones are a trainwreck. They barely function on any level.
Their Fluff:
First off the Flayed One fluff is pretty simple. They're insane. That's, uh, pretty much it. When the Necrons turned on the C'tan, and broke them, one of them was destroyed instead, and in its dieing moments cursed all the Necrons with a slow erosion of their sanity. The Flayed Ones are the most insane of the Necrons. They desperately crave eating flesh (that they can't actually consume, they just sort of gum it I guess?), because crazy, and they live in a pocket dimension of horrors, because crazy.
Now honestly, by the standards, of 40k, this isn't that bad. What drives me up the wall about it is that, a few months before the new Codex dropped the Black Library released the novel Fall of Damnos, by Nick Kyme. In it there are not only Flayed Ones, but a Flayed Lord, and you see some of the story through his twisted eyes. In the Damnos version the Flayed Ones are still insane, but it is the insanity of desperately craving their old bodies. They literally miss being flesh and blood living beings so badly it breaks them. They carve the flesh off their enemies and wear it in a desperate attempt to regain something they lost, but it's never good enough, it never sates them.
Not only do I, personally, find this much more compelling, but it also gives them reasons and motives, fleshes them out (sorry, I couldn't resist) into more than just generic boogeymen, of which there are far too many in of in the 40k universe.
Their Crunch:
Sadly, the rules for Flayed Ones are even worse than their generic "rar, I'm crazy" fluff would suggest. They start with the same statline as a Warrior (a Necron Warrior, not a Tyranid Warrior) and cost the same. They lose their gun (and ballistics skill but that hardly matters without a gun), the incredible Gauss Flayer, for an extra 2 Attacks (for a total of 3), and the Deep Strike and Infiltrate rules and they are Elites choices instead of Troops.
They also lose a few other important things that aren't as noticeable up front. They don't have access to any dedicated transports, and they can't be assigned a member of a Royal Court.
All in all... these, well, they actually aren't very good trades. You see without being Troops, and therefore scoring units, Flayed Ones have only one purpose: killing the pants off the enemy. This is not a job they are actually any good at. They have no Power Weapons, not even on a character since you can't attach a Royal Court member, no Rending, no way to punch through armour of any kind. Which means they are utterly relying on just being able to pour a bucket of dice onto the table (admittedly having the option to take 20 of them in a pack helps this).
In addition they also don't have assault grenades, which actually is less of a big
deal since they're only Initiative 2 anyways. They also have average
weapons skill and
All together this means that the Flayed Ones target of choice is theoretically backfield units, heavy weapons squads, objective campers, etc. Weak chaff. Unfortunately, for you and the flayed Ones themselves, they don't have any way to target these units. They aren't fast, and they aren't durable. Now you can Infiltrate them, or Deep Strike them, but since they have no shooting attack, and can't charge after either, it means they must spend a turn just standing their. They aren't durable enough to just stand there. With a Marines toughness but an Armour Save of 4+ they can't absorb much shooting. Worse, when they do finally get to charge their abysmal Initiative and lack of grenades means they will almost always strike last (assuming the enemy didn't counter-charge them on their own turn that is).
When you put this all together, after getting shot for at least one turn, taking Overwatch, and then taking causalities from the enemy striking first in combat your unit that relies on dumping a buttload off attacks... well they won't have the models left to actually do that. Once in awhile you might get lucky, but you can reliably expect your Flayed One unit to fail to perform its job of harassing the enemies backfield.
So what else can they do?
Not much. Again, which is as frustrating to write as it is for you to read. They're too expensive to use as bubblewrap, they don't have Fearless or powerful enough weapons to be able to go toe-to-toe with a real elite close combat unit, which means they fail at any sort of counter-charge responsibility, and they aren't fast enough to actually keep up with any of the good Necron combat units, like Wraiths.
In short, Flayed Ones are a mediocre unit, at best, with no real role to play in a Necron army.
Fluff to the rescue!
Weirdly the solutions to these problems are right there in the fluff. Flayed Ones are quick, cowardly creatures, striking from the shadows against already weakened foes, retreating from stronger. They wink in and out of their own dimension, evading pursuit. Why wasn't this reflected in the fluff?
Couldn't they have gotten Shrouded, or at least Stealth to help weather that first turn of shooting and Overwatch? They are literally, pg. 23 of the new Codex, described as "twisting aside and melting into the shadows" to avoid getting caught in some crossfire. How is that not the Shrouded rule?
How about a higher Initiative to put them on better terms against enemies (I know that Mat Ward was obsessed with having a theme to his stats, ALL the Necron units have Ini 2 except the dang C'tan, but that's a rant for another day).
What about the Shred special rule to at least get the most out of the attacks they do get after being hammered by shooting? Lightning Claws have it, why not a creature that shreds things to eat them for a living?
You could balance any buffs by dropping their Leadership down to 7 or 8, they are supposed to be cowardly after all.
Now I'm not saying any, or all, of these changes would totally fix them, that's not the point of this series, what I'm trying to illustrate is that if Games Workshop had simply followed the outline they'd already written in their own fluff, they'd have a better unit right now.
Why does this matter?
Well for us, as players, it's just nice for us to be able to happily use any model in our collection without feeling handicapped. For a company though, especially one that prides itself on being a 'model company' first and foremost, shouldn't they want to sell lots of every kit? The Flayed Ones even got a new, freshly designed and expensive, Finecast box that you'd think they'd want to make some money on. Providing us a lackluster unit that no one wants to buy is not just bad design, it's bad business.
People buy models for one of three reasons;
- The model is super cool, so they just want to own or paint it.
- The fluff for the models are really fun, and inspire people to make themed armies (like Thousand Sons despite sucking for like three editions).
- The units are just really useful in game, so lots of people buy them to be competitive (take Riptides, or Nightscythes on the overpowered side of things, but also think of how many people bought box after box of Termagants or Chaos Cultists or the lowly Imperial Guard infantryman).
Now number one is down to personal preference, although I like the old metal Flayed Ones better visually (i also like the old metal Wraiths better, so I might just be weird). Numbers two and three though, are resounding failures with Flayed Ones. They don't have interesting enough fluff to make a themed army, or to get people excited enough to at least want one unit in there no matter what, and their rules actively punish you for taking them in a competitive list (and lets face it, tournament players buy way more product then just regular hobbiests).
Bad design, bad business.
P.S. On a design related note it really annoys me that the 3rd Edition Flayed Ones had a rule called Terrifying Visage that was functionally identical to the new Fear rule, and yet they weren't given Fear, and had Terrifying Visage just... taken away. Say what?
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