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I made this post on another forum. I wanted to share the thoughts with others as well.

Overall Usage
The nightspinner is aking to a blue card in 'Magic: The Gathering". It's there to cause annoyances and hindrances to your opponents plans. While it can kill, its main goal is to slow down or immobilize enemy forces.

The nightspinner does not do one thing so well it makes it an auto-take. Instead it does a number of small things so well that I suggest it as auto-take for today's mech'dar lists. This counts even moreso with scarab farms and draigowing growing in popularity.


Accurate Indirect Fire
The nightspinner comes base as twin-linked. This means that there is a 55% of you getting a HIT on the scatter dice, and it has a BS 4 to scatter back on target. When shooting at a large target, such as a squad of scarabs or a land raider, this gives you an estimated 90% of hitting.
(to determine this I wrote a simulator program that would run weapon strikes on targets)

This is an excellent tool to take down scarab farms. The indirect fire means that the scarbs are not getting cover unless they are in area terrain, and the STR 6 instant kills them. You can fire indirectly during night fight, but roll and extra d6 for scatter. As you have a 55% of getting a HIT, that's a perfectly acceptable way to keep the scarabs under control.

The real key here is that the nightspinner cannot be shot back at unless your opponent has indirect fire as well. You can use this tool to your hearts content without having to worry about pesky psy-dreads tearing it apart. Not that its a big deal anyway, as the psy-dreads will be focusing on the dragon's fortuned serpents barreling at them.


Difficult Terrain
Another benefit of the nightspinner is the ability to put a difficult terrain check on whatever is hit by the template. This means that every model that moves after being hit takes non-savable wound on a 1 when they move. This means that the cryptek can die when they move, as you can't just allocate it off. It can also pick off the PK nob, the melta gun in a grey hunter squad, etc...

One common argument is to say 'well, just move one of the models and then you just have to make one test'. Thats true, and that means the unit in question has effectively lost 6" of movement that turn (as they can still run/fleet). This by itself is tremendously useful when your shooting at scarabs or twolves. I would gladly have them lower their movement by over 50%!

You can also use this to slow down draigowing movement. That death star is not quite so effective when its barely moving, and the rest of your army can just move to whereever its needs to be.

In a similar effect, it has a double dip whammy on scarab farms. 2 spinners can keep a scarab farm under control by insta-killing scarabs coming out, and slowing the entire farm down so they can't get far onto the board. And when they try to move, the scarabs take more wounds....

Finally, as its an accurate 5" template, its very feasible to hit 2 vehicles (3 if they are really clustered) in a parking lot. Since each one of those vehicles gets immobilized on a 1, it can be a nice thing to throw on some rhinos/chimeras, etc... Basically by immobilizing the tank, the troops inside will have to get out of it in order to score if they are not sitting on an objective.

If there are no other targets, hit the deathstar of the enemy. 1/6 chance that the LR/stormchicken will become useless for the delivery of DCA/termies. Given that a LC has a 4.66% of destroying that same LR, the 16.66% of immobolization is not all together bad. Its sure as hell not a squad of fire dragons good, but it has an indirect range of 72" Don't forget it rends to, so if your roll a 6 to damage your hitting AV 13-15. (albeit at AP -)


Pinning
Don't forget that its also pinning. When your shooting at targets like draigowing, you have a chance (a small one, but a chance nonetheless) to cause them to be pinned for a turn. When your talking about a 600+ point deathstar unit, its a huge negative blow when it happens.


Rending for Fun and Profit
The final benifit of the nightspinner is that its rending. If you drop the accurate template on 6 MEQ, one of them will rend. Unless they are in area terrain, they will lose at least one person.
This then kicks off the pinning test.


Summary
To paraphrase Alton Brown, I hope that this post gives you a little understanding for the often-overviewed tank known as the nightspinner. Its one of those things that just does not look good on paper until you start playing with them.
Today I don't run fire prisms. I use nightspinners. Any serious mech'dar player does the same IMHO.

Nice

I have had the night spinner model since they first released it from forgeworld. It's super useful, but I don't know if it's worth the points. I wish it was a lot cheaper.

Thanks. I've posted things like this before and had them fall off the front page quickly.
This is because a unit review does not generate nearly as much contraversy as "To Powerfist or Not Powerfist" or "LRC or LRR".
But hey, its good to have threads like this pop up every now and then for the new player to seach off of, right?

Had i played eldar I would use one.

I am not however.

Niiai wrote:Had i played eldar I would use one.

I am not however.

Same here...

I thought that even if only one model moved the entire squad would count as moving (and would therefore have to check for dangerous terrain?) Otherwise the nightspinner is easily one of the best units available to eldar.

chaos0xomega wrote:I thought that even if only one model moved the entire squad would count as moving (and would therefore have to check for dangerous terrain?) Otherwise the nightspinner is easily one of the best units available to eldar.

I wish that was the case. As per p14 of the BRB.

As mentioned previously, some terrain features will be dangerous to move through. This is represented by the dangerous terrain test. Roll a D6 for every model that has entered, left or moved through one or more areas of dangerous terrain during its move. On the roll of a 1, the model suffers a wound, with no armour or cover saves allowed (wounds and saves are explained in the next section).

Unless there is a FAQ or something that I missed the rules show that you can move just 1 model to take the test.
Still...as I mentioned, it does slow down the squad for a turn, which is something!

Read through some of BlueDagger's posts. Hes been preaching the virtues of the Night Spinner for a good long time.

Speaking of BlueDagger, I'd mention doom synergy. You can doom a target, then drop the spinner template on them. Re roll everything that isn't a 6. Since you are wounding on 2s usually anyway you won't actually lose that many wounds overall. This increases the number of rends you get by a fair margin. Then if said elite infantry unit wants to move, they take even more wounds.

The Night Spinner is the new Fire Prism. Its just a better tank. Because lets be honest, nobody was *really* using the prism for anti tank, and if they were they were probably dissapointed.

Whilst the general feelings about the nightspinner are that 1 nightspinner>1 fire prism, what I struggle to get my head around is 2 spinners vs 2 prisms.

Having 2 prisms around really alleviates some of the issues a single prism has, and can allow you to cause a decent amount of damage, but how do they face up to 2 spinners? From what i've gathered, it's not as cut and dry as 1 vs 1.

So what i'd love to know more about here is how valuable 2 spinners are in comparison to 2 prisms in a mech army. Do the side-effects of spinners outweigh the versatility of dual prisms significantly enough to become a no-brainer choice as opposed to simply preference?

I run 2x Prisms and 1x Nightspinner in my Saim hann list. The Spinner is incredibly useful, making my fast jetbikes seem even faster, thanks to the hinderences it brings to my opponents.

Well, many thanks for the summary. My favorite HS in a mech Eldar force are Warwalkers. More bang and kills for the bucks. Although the Nightspinner leaves you with some tactial options like pinning, ramming, tank shocking, contesting, and blocking LoS.