Warpbane Task Force: The 11th-Edition Grey Knights Flagship Detachment

This is the largest detachment rule in the faction, and the important thing to understand is that it is a zone-control rule rather than a damage rule.

Where Hallowed Ground is. Certain areas of the battlefield are within your army's Hallowed Ground:

• Your deployment zone, always.
• The area within 6 inches of one or more Purifier Squad units from your army.
• No Man's Land, at the start of any phase in which you control at least half the objective markers within it, until the end of that phase.
• Your opponent's deployment zone, at the start of any phase in which you control at least half the objective markers within it, until the end of that phase.

What it does. Each time a model in a Grey Knights unit from your army makes a ranged attack that targets a visible target, or makes a melee attack, re-roll a Hit roll of 1. If that unit is a Purifier Squad and/or is wholly within your army's Hallowed Ground, you can re-roll the Hit roll instead.

So the floor is a re-roll of 1s for your entire army, everywhere on the board, which is a real baseline. The ceiling is full hit re-rolls, unlocked two ways: by being a Purifier Squad, or by standing in the right place.

The strategic point most write-ups miss is the direction of causation. Two of the four Hallowed Ground conditions require you to already control objective markers. The rule therefore gets better as you are already winning, and gives you the least help in the game state where you most need it. That is not a flaw so much as a design stance: this detachment rewards a player who takes ground early and then makes it impossible to take back. It is a poor comeback detachment.

The third condition, 6 inches around a Purifier Squad, is the one you control directly, which is why Purifier Squads are the unit the whole detachment is built around rather than merely a thematic inclusion.

Six, all 1CP, and four of the six get materially better inside Hallowed Ground. That repetition is the detachment teaching you what it wants.

• Sanctified Kill Zone (your Shooting or Fight). Battle Tactic. Target one Grey Knights unit that has not shot or fought this phase and is wholly within Hallowed Ground. Re-roll a Wound roll of 1, or re-roll the Wound roll instead if the unit is a Purifier Squad. The wound-side mirror of the detachment rule. On a Purifier Squad inside Hallowed Ground this stacks with full hit re-rolls to give the most accurate attack sequence in the faction.
• Aegis Eternal (opponent's Shooting). Battle Tactic. Just after an enemy unit selects targets, target one Grey Knights Infantry unit that was selected. Models wholly within your Hallowed Ground have a 4+ invulnerable save. The defensive keystone, and the clearest example of the detachment's logic: outside Hallowed Ground this stratagem does nothing at all.
• Repelling Sphere (start of opponent's Charge). Battle Tactic. Target one Grey Knights Infantry unit. Enemy units charging it subtract 1 from the Charge roll, or 2 if your unit is wholly within Hallowed Ground. Minus 2 is a large number, and it protects the objective holders the whole detachment depends on.
• Fires of Covenant (start of opponent's Movement). Battle Tactic. Target one Grey Knights Infantry unit. Each time an enemy unit is set up or ends a Normal, Advance or Fall Back move within 6 inches of your unit, roll one D6, adding 2 if your unit is wholly within Hallowed Ground: on a 4+ that unit suffers D3 mortal wounds. It triggers repeatedly in one phase, so it is worth most against an army that moves a lot past you. Inside Hallowed Ground the +2 turns a 4+ into a 2+, which is the difference between a deterrent and a tax.
• Flames of Sanctity (end of the Fight). Strategic Ploy. Target one Purifier Squad that was eligible to fight. Roll one D6 for each enemy unit within 6 inches, adding 1 if your unit includes Castellan Crowe: on a 4+ that unit suffers D3 mortal wounds. The reason to run Crowe specifically rather than any other character, and the reason to charge into a crowd: the damage scales with how many units are packed around you.
• Hallowed Beacon (Reinforcements step of your Movement). Battle Tactic. Target one Grey Knights Infantry unit excluding Terminator units arriving by Deep Strike. Set it up wholly within Hallowed Ground and more than 6 inches horizontally from all enemy units. Note the Terminator exclusion, which is easy to miss in a faction where the good deep strikers are usually Terminators. This is for Strike Squads, Interceptors and Purifiers, and it reinforces ground you already hold rather than launching an attack.

The habit: take ground first, then spend command points. Half this list is dead weight if your units are standing in the wrong place.

Four, which is the most in the faction, and the keyword restrictions matter.

• Mandulian Reliquary (20 pts). Grey Knights model only. While the bearer's unit is not Battle-shocked, add 3 to the bearer's Objective Control. Three OC on one model is a large swing in an army that can never out-body anyone, and this detachment is built entirely around controlling objectives. The Battle-shock condition is the risk: an army that gets shaken loses the enhancement exactly when it needs it.
• Radiant Champion (15 pts). Grey Knights INFANTRY model only. The bearer's melee weapons have [PRECISION], and while the bearer is wholly within Hallowed Ground, each melee attack by the bearer that scores a wound inflicts 1 mortal wound in addition to normal damage. The character-killing enhancement, and the mortal wounds only fire inside Hallowed Ground.
• Phial of the Abyss (15 pts). Grey Knights INFANTRY model only. Models in the bearer's unit have Stealth. On the whole unit rather than just the bearer, which makes it the cheapest way to keep a key squad alive while it walks to the objective the detachment needs it standing on.
• Paragon of Sanctity (10 pts). Grey Knights model only. Once per battle, at the start of any phase, select one friendly Grey Knights unit within 18 inches of and visible to the bearer; until the end of that phase, that unit is within your army's Hallowed Ground. The cheapest enhancement and the one that best rewards understanding the detachment, because it manufactures the condition every other rule keys off. Used well it turns on Aegis Eternal for a unit stranded in the open, or upgrades a distant squad to full hit re-rolls for the phase that matters.

The correction. Our earlier page said to invest the enhancements "in the character who anchors your main threat unit, typically a Grand Master or Brotherhood Champion leading Terminators or Paladins". Two of the four are INFANTRY model only, which rules out a Grand Master in Nemesis Dreadknight entirely. Check the keyword, not the role.

(Points come from the Munitorum Field Manual and move with updates; confirm in the app.)

• Purifier Squad is the unit the whole detachment is built around. It projects Hallowed Ground 6 inches in every direction, gets the upgraded re-roll unconditionally wherever it stands, and is the only legal target for Flames of Sanctity. No box is linked, because our catalog has no exact Purifier Squad entry.
• [Castellan Crowe](/40k/boxes/grey-knights-castellan-crowe) is named by name in Flames of Sanctity, where his presence adds 1 to each D6. He is the one character the detachment's rules text mentions, which makes him a rules choice rather than a thematic one.
• [Strike Squad](/40k/boxes/warhammer-grey-knights-strike-squad-new) holds the objectives the detachment rule keys off. Hallowed Ground expands when you control markers, so the cheapest scoring unit in the faction is load-bearing here.
• [Brotherhood Terminator Squad](/40k/boxes/warhammer-grey-knights-paladin-squad-new) is the durable core, though note it is excluded from Hallowed Beacon, which names Infantry excluding Terminators. Terminators walk or use the army rule instead.
• [Paladin Squad](/40k/boxes/warhammer-grey-knights-paladin-squad-new) is the heavy melee option, and is excluded from Hallowed Beacon for the same reason.

One buying note. Kaldor Draigo is a Warhammer Legends datasheet in Faction Pack v1.1 and is not legal for matched play, which matters here because the flagship detachment is exactly where a new player expects to field the faction's most famous character.

Warpbane Task Force costs 3 DP. A Strike Force game at 2,000 points gives you 3 DP. There is nothing left.

That is worth stating plainly because the rest of this faction teaches the opposite lesson. Grey Knights have three 1 DP detachments, and every piece of coverage of them, including ours, correctly describes them as cheap packages you bolt onto a bigger list. They bolt onto five of the six codex detachments. They do not bolt onto this one.

And because Grey Knights carry no Unique Tags, there is no keyword warning to catch the mistake. In a faction with tags, an illegal pairing is usually flagged by a shared tag printed on both detachment entries. Here the only signal is arithmetic that a reader has to do themselves.

So we record no suggested pairings on this page at all, in either direction, and no other Grey Knights page suggests pairing with this one. If you were planning to add Argent Assault, Fires of Purgation or Immaterial Interdiction to a Warpbane list, read the full breakdown.

The decision this forces. Warpbane Task Force gives you six stratagems, four enhancements and an army-wide re-roll, which is more raw content than any 2 DP plus 1 DP combination in the faction. What it does not give you is a second identity. A 2 DP detachment plus a 1 DP specialist lets you buff your whole army one way and one favourite unit another way. This gives you one very deep way. Whether that is the better trade depends on whether your collection has a specialist unit worth building around.

Take it when you want a single coherent army identity with the deepest toolkit in the faction, when you own or intend to buy Purifier Squads, and when you are comfortable playing a positional, objective-first game rather than an alpha strike.

Be clear-eyed about the costs. It consumes your entire budget, so no specialist detachment can support your favourite unit. Its best effects require you to be standing in the right place, which means a bad first two turns compounds: you lose ground, so you lose Hallowed Ground, so your stratagems get worse, so you lose more ground. And its core unit, the Purifier Squad, has no exact box in our catalog, so sourcing it takes more work than the rest of the range.

Sample gameplan: run two Purifier Squads so their 6 inch bubbles overlap the midboard, with Castellan Crowe attached to one so Flames of Sanctity rolls at +1. Screen and score with Strike Squads, because half the rule keys off holding objective markers. Put Paragon of Sanctity on a character so you can manufacture Hallowed Ground for one phase in the turn it matters, and hold points for Aegis Eternal when the big shooting phase comes. Take the centre early; this detachment does not reward you for coming back.

For the fundamentals underneath all of it, read the Grey Knights army guide.