New Imperial Knights detachments for 11th edition bring Dominus Foebreakers and Questor Forgepact, with three Chaos Knights detachments revealed too.
Games Workshop dropped the Faction Focus for both Knight ranges on the same day, and yeah, it’s a a titanic sized amout of rules to chew through. Three detachments for the Imperials, three for the Chaos side, and almost all of them are built around the kind of stuff Knight players have actually been asking for.
Big shooty Dominus units that don’t eat a penalty for firing into cover, an Adeptus Mechanicus alliance that finally feels like a proper detachment, and a Chaos option that lets you bring a 500-point mob of cultists to do your objective-sitting for you.
So, if you’ve been playing Imperial Knights or Chaos Knights and waiting to see what 11th Edition was actually going to do with the world’s stompiest Warhammer 40k factions, this preview gives you plenty to mull over.
Dominus Foebreakers Wants You to Shoot Things in Cover
- Imperial Knights get three new detachments: Dominus Foebreakers (cover-killing big guns), Questor Forgepact (500 pts of Skitarii allies), and Throne-bonded Outriders (Armiger bodyguards).
- Chaos Knights also get three: Bastions of Tyranny (Knight Tyrant focus), Hunting Warpack (War Dog pack), and Iconoclast Fiefdom (500 pts of DAMNED cultists).
- Detachment points plus 1- and 2-DP detachments: Knights players can stack specialties into a single chassis like no other faction in the game.
The Imperial side gets three very different new rule sets to play with, and they all work the way you’d hope based on what each chassis actually does on the table. Which is perfect when you look at how to play Imperial Knights and wish it felt different from “park giant model, point gun, fire,”!
The first Imperial detachment is built straight around the Knight Castellan and Knight Valiant, and it’s honestly a long time coming. The Dominus chassis has always carried some of the meanest weapons in the army (thundercoil harpoons, plasma decimators, the works), but firing into a screening unit hiding behind a ruin always felt like a waste.
- Rain of Devastation gives Dominus Knights +1 to hit into terrain: The detachment rule neatly cancels out the cover penalty. Then it stacks with the new 11th Edition Plunging Fire rule, which now applies to Towering units within 12″ of their target. So a Castellan camped 11″ away from a unit hiding in ruins is rolling at significantly better accuracy than the same model is currently in 10th.
- Blessed Plate bumps a Dominus to Toughness 13: The stratagem means the most common heavy anti-tank gun in the game, your Strength 12 lascannon, now wounds on a 5+ instead of 4+. That’s a serious durability spike for one Command Point, and it stacks against pretty much every other big gun in the game except dedicated monster killers.
- Foebreaker Firestorm strips Blast off your guns while engaged and adds an attack to compensate: Castellans, Valiants, and Dominus Knights generally don’t have melee weapons worth mentioning, so getting to keep shooting at the units dancing around your feet is huge.
Questor Forgepact Brings the Skitarii Back to Knights
The Questor Forgepact detachment rules made their debut in last year’s Grotmas Calendar, and the 11th Edition refresh keeps the core idea (bring up to 500 points of Adeptus Mechanicus) but tightens what the alliance actually does on the table.
- Cogbound Alliance gives Skitarii +1 BS and the Heavy keyword: Skitarii Rangers and Vanguard within 6″ of a Knight get +1 BS and gain the Heavy keyword on their ranged attacks. That stacks. A Ranger squad that moved 3″ or less is now hitting on a 2+, and if you bought them the Omnispex wargear, they’re also Ignoring Cover. That’s a unit suddenly doing a lot more than it should be normally if you ask us.
- Tech-Priests heal Knights every Command phase: Each Command phase, a Tech-Priest within 3″ of a Knight can heal it for D3 wounds, and the Magos Questoris enhancement makes that 2 extra wounds, so up to 5 wounds healed per turn on a single Knight. That’s pretty good on a 22-wound Knight Castellan that’s been taking lascannon fire all game.
- Vengeance of the Machine Cult marks the killer for the rest of the game: If your Knight gets killed, you mark the enemy unit that did it, and all your Mechanicus units re-roll wounds against them for the rest of the game. It won’t bring your Knight back, but it’ll make whoever shot it have some big regrets.
Throne-bonded Outriders Finally Gives Armigers Their Own Lane
The third Imperial Knights detachment is the one Armiger players have been waiting for. Spearhead-at-Arms already exists for going all-in on the little guys in a front-line role, but Throne-bonded Outriders does something different. It builds the Armigers around supporting your Questoris Knights.
- The detachment rule gives Armigers Ignores Cover under a Bondsman ability: A Bondsman buff is something they’re going to be benefiting from anyway, which is obviously great for Helvrins. They sit at long range, get told what to shoot by their bigger sibling, and now they’re blasting through cover too.
- Ancestral Overbleed cuts CP on Fire Overwatch and Heroic Intervention: The stratagem makes both 1 CP cheaper on the upgraded Armiger, which is a big deal because the new 11th Edition Heroic Intervention rules let you bodyguard your big Knights against melee threats.
- Neural Lash un-Battleshocks an Armiger near a Titanic unit for 1 CP: A brutal little safety valve when your Knight is anchoring a position the enemy is trying to dislodge.
Either way, this is the detachment for the player who wants their Knight Errant or Knight Paladin doing the real work, with two or three Armigers running cover the whole game. It’s actually a real archetype now, not just a list of separate models.
Now flip to the dark side. The new Chaos Knights detachments give you three options of your own, and they all play to the faction’s current strengths as well, now too.
Bastions of Tyranny Builds Around the Knight Tyrant 40k Datasheet
The big edition-level boost the Chaos Knights side benefits from is that battle-shock is much harder to shake in 11th. Now, you actually have to pass a Leadership test in your Command phase to remove it, instead of it just expiring at the end of the turn.
Plus, since Chaos Knights and the battle-shock rules already had a love affair going through Harbingers of Dread, this edition pretty much hands them a buff in general, and the three new detachments deliver in three different directions.
The first Chaos detachment is built around the Knight Tyrant datasheet, the Chaos answer to the Dominus chassis, all crammed into one big nasty model.
- Bastions of Tyranny gives Knight Tyrants +1 to hit against battle-shocked units: Exactly the kind of buff that pairs with Harbingers of Dread doing the dirty work of forcing those tests in the first place.
- Hate-filled Dominion re-rolls the Knight Tyrant’s random-attack guns: The Knight Tyrant’s whole gun loadout (except the twin meltagun and gheiststrike) rolls a random number of attacks. Letting one re-roll those rolls every time it shoots is the kind of consistency upgrade that turns it into a real plan.
- Pitiless Focus lets a Knight Tyrant fall back and still shoot: It solves the “what now?” problem for when you may get locked down. You’re not a Loyalist, you don’t owe anyone a fair fight, and now you can shoot your darkflame cannon at someone while running away from a tarpit.
Hunting Warpack Lets the War Dogs Run Wild
The Hunting Warpack is the War Dogs detachment, and it focuses on flushing out enemies for the bigger Knights to delete.
- Scenting Fear extends detection range on a chosen enemy unit: Pick one enemy unit within 12″ of a War Dog once per battle round and give it +6″ detection range that slots nicely into a multi-detachment list.
- Snarling Rivalry gives War Dog Executioners Ignores Cover: The enhancement applies to the long-range autocannons. The Executioner is the standoff variant of the chassis, so this is perfect for what the model wants to do anyway.
- Insensate Bloodthirst gives a War Dog Feel No Pain 5+ in melee: This is the standout strat. War Dogs are already meant to be aggressive close-combat threats, and giving them a meaningful FNP in the Fight phase makes the Karnivore-and-friends melee plan a lot harder to burn down.
Iconoclast Fiefdom Drags 500 Points of Cultists Along
The third detachment is the Iconoclast Fiefdom’s Grotmas Calendar debut coming back for the 11th Edition treatment, and honestly, this one’s the most interesting. Chaos Knights, as a faction, have always struggled with objective play because when you only have 3-6 models in a game where objective control matters, that can be a problem. Luckily, this detachment fixes that by letting you bring up to 500 points of DAMNED units (the same kind of mob you’d run alongside 11th edition Chaos Space Marines detachments) straight into your army.
- Wretched Thralls lets DAMNED units re-roll Leadership tests: In an edition where battle-shock is harder to clear, keeping your cultist mob unshocked on an objective means keeping your Objective Control alive on that objective. That’s a much bigger deal than it sounds at first glance.
- Iconoclast Idol cuts CP on Heroic Intervention for DAMNED: DAMNED within 6″ of a Chaos Knight gets a 1 CP discount on Heroic Intervention. So, now, a cultist mob isn’t just an objective-sitter, it’s also a meat shield that springs out at melee threats.
- Dark Sacrifice heals a Chaos Knight by killing cultists: Spend 1 CP, pick a DAMNED unit, roll D3+3, and your unit takes that many mortal wounds while your Chaos Knight heals the same amount. Up to 6 wounds healed for a Command Point and a sacrificial cultist mob.
Final Thoughts on Imperial Knights Detachments and Chaos Knights’ 11th Edition Direction
Knights on both sides of the aisle are getting the kind of design treatment low-model-count armies actually need. Plus, with the flexible detachment point system, this means a Knights player isn’t picking between three detachments. They’re stacking 1- and 2-point detachments together to specialize a single chassis.
Obviously, low model count armies get more out of dropping an entire Detachment Point on a single powerful model than basically anyone else in the game.
Best of all the new Imperial Knights detachments give you a real reason to build around what you actually own. Got two Castellans? Foebreakers is your wave. Always wanted a Skitarii army on the side? Questor Forgepact is your excuse. Three Armigers and a Knight Paladin? Throne-bonded Outriders is the “free” main-Knight archetype, too.
On the Chaos side, the three options pair shockingly well with the new battle-shock rules and the Harbingers of Dread mechanic the army already had. Now, Knight Tyrant pilots get a built-in battle-shock-punishment buff, War Dogs get a real melee survivability bump, and Iconoclast Fiefdom finally solves the objective-control problem that’s been hanging over the faction since 10th dropped.
Overall, Chaos Knights look like one of the 11th edition factions most ready to take advantage of the system-level changes. Every army getting these previews is getting reshaped in real ways, and Knights are no exception.
We’re still early in the preview cycle, but so far, both Knights factions have just gotten more options, more flavor, and more list-building room than they’ve had in years.
🔗 Related Reads:
- How to Play Imperial Knights – Codex Rules Guide
- How to Play Chaos Knights – Codex Rules Guide
- Warhammer 40k 11th Edition Rules Hub
- 11th Edition Tyranid Detachments – Lictors and Warriors Buffed
- 11th Edition Chaos Space Marines Detachments Roundup
- Imperial Knights Questor Forgepact Detachment Rules
- Chaos Knights and the Battle-Shock Rules Guide
