Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Everyone Ive come across seems to think so, they say its really bad and Ive seen a ton of passing comments on here that suggest the thing to hold any bad release up to is the nid release to see if its as bad.
I myself was thinking of picking up either nids or guard soon but all this talk of a bad dex is off putting, is it true?

Ive heard they have lost the parasite and the doom, which already sucks.

Well if you are going by what the internet says, then you are really missing out.

Question is, do you need to win with plastic toy soldiers? Do you go to tourneys and need to win with plastic toy soldiers? Or do you want to have fun with plastic toy soldiers and win and lose?

Lots of people claim Nids suck. I find that funny since a few other people say they do really good with the Nid dex.

So if you want to win, then Nids are not for you. They are not a forgiving army if you make mistakes.

If you want to have fun, they have a great miniature line, takes time to learn to play with, but can be FUN. You can be shooty, you can be assaulty, you can go horde or elite few. You can even mix and match them all.

No allies, so you are already handicapped because other people can do shenanigans and Nid players can't.

Then again, you can see people saying Guard are great, while others say they suck now.

Go with what you think is cool and you like the looks of. If you need to win with plastic toy soldiers, Nids are not for you then.

It's not so much that its bad, per say, but that it is a disappointment. The last Nid codex was not great either, but at least there were more viable play styles, losing the mycetic spore was a major blow and really hurt variety. Not only that but with the new and, well its definitely not improved, changed instinctive behavior suddenly we need to stay closer together than most other armies. Not only that but some of the more useful aspects were nerfed or flat out removed like the Tervigan, Hive Guard, Doom, and BRB psychic powers.

However thats not say that there were not some improvements in the codex such as points reduction, Venomthropes, and the different formations. The only problem is that using things like the formations really limit the variety, and it doesn't help that some tournaments are not allowing the formations.

Honestly they are a mid tier now, just like they were before, with the possibility of being high tier with the inclusion of formations. This is all just my personal opinion of course and it may vary depending on where you are playing and why you are playing. Regardless good luck on whatever army you decide on and may your dice always roll well.

- Jace

Yeah, not bad as in they are impossible to win with. Just a bland and disappointing release.

The main problem is it's unbalanced, so you have units that are clearly better than other units. Taking certain things, like Raveners, is just a flat out bad idea. What makes it annoying is many people realised the lack of balance within minutes of reading the book and those imbalances still apply now 4 months down the track, yet somehow GW managed to completely miss it when they were writing it, does make it somewhat disappointing.

Depends on what matters to you. If all you care about is winning it's a decent book, especially with the formations.
If you want a well-written book with variety, good internal balance and flavour this isn't the Codex you're looking for.
If you want a book full of gorgeous new artwork and lots of new fluff this still isn't the Codex you're looking for.

The book is fun. That's the important thing to me. The dataslates also happen to be totally awesome, and represent units that I take anyhow (warriors and lictors for example).

As an entire dex that runs off Cover, no, they are garbage.

Tau and Eldar being the top codexies atm have far too much IC in their mainstay and completely gak on Tyranids just as badly as they do Nurgle Daemons who rely on Cover.

If Tau, JUST TAU, had marker lights changed and their IC neutered, Tyranids would be amazing. But the fact that they exist and pretty much all the competitive zones for tournies (If anyone was at Adepticon... you know what I'm speaking of) ALL TAU, ALL TRIP-TIDES & Wraith Knights. The entire game has devolved into who can cram the most Tides and Knights into the smallest point armies with Markerlights possible.

It's not really power level. By itself, it can put out a mean shooty army. With the additional DLC purchases, it can be outright nasty. That said, most people are angry because of its imbalance, bland rules, loss of models, loss of an entire form of deployment, and not really solving the problem with the assault side.

DLC should never be a form of balance...

GoliothOnline wrote:
DLC should never be a form of balance...

I have to disagree on this, the concept of using DLC to balance is not necessarily bad in and of itself. I fully support the idea of revisiting codex's that are, for lack of a better term, floundering because of the meta, edition changes, or any of the other things that are problem right now, in order to make them more even with everyone else. That being said what they did with the tyranid supplements stinks of a money grab rather genuinely fixing the codex, just my opinion of course.

 Jaceevoke wrote:

GoliothOnline wrote:
DLC should never be a form of balance...

I have to disagree on this, the concept of using DLC to balance is not necessarily bad in and of itself. I fully support the idea of revisiting codex's that are, for lack of a better term, floundering because of the meta, edition changes, or any of the other things that are problem right now, in order to make them more even with everyone else. That being said what they did with the tyranid supplements stinks of a money grab rather genuinely fixing the codex, just my opinion of course.

agreed, it doesnt have to be a bad thing. PrinceRaven nailed it though..... not much more to add than that.

I still love my nids. But loosing things like scything talons, ymgarls, doom, drop spores made NO sense. They took an army that assaults really well and made it bland. It seems that 6th edition absolutely hates assault and wants to change every army into a gun line.

Would i still pick up nids today if i didnt already have them, Yes I would. They are fun to use still, just slightly less so.

Just to plan to make it into cc or shooting range of a tau gunline, it rarely happens.

Lots of people claim Nids suck. I find that funny since a few other people say they do really good with the Nid dex.

Well firstly those things are not mutually exclusive. Good players can do really well with Blood Angels. On top of that, the dex can SUCK (it does) and still be a powerful army (It can be).

The dex doesn't suck because it's weak, it sucks because its boring.


Also, as compared to the codex before it, it literally has less units. We lost Ymgarl Genestealers, Parasite, Doom and Mycetic Spores, and gained only Haruspex, Crone and Exocrine. Being that the Haruspex is a boring badly priced Carnifex and Crone is pretty much a harpy variant for the same FOC slot, we lost 4 really unique units and gained 2 pretty bland ones and 1 middling one (exocrine).


We also lost a bunch of options, no more biomancy means no more psyker spam, no more pods mean no more steel rain, ScyTal nerf means no more Tyrgons or CC Tyrants and Armored Shell being removed for no real reason at all means no more walking Tyrants. Nerfs to Tyranid Prime means we have one IC in the book and he is pretty much unplayable, right next to his buddy the Swarmlord who with the loss of Biomancy combined with an unexplained point increase, is probably the worst unit in the dex next to the Pyrovore. Hive Guard had their BS nerfed a point making their 2 shot guns about as unreliable as the Tyrannofex's Rupture Cannon, which also surprisingly enough sees no play. Terrible shooting isn't helped by the fact that one of our of coolest tools was taken away from us, in that Old Adversary no longer gives a Preferred Enemy bubble for helping out your low BS shooting, and instead does some junk ass power that I can't even remember right now it's so useless, for the same price as the old one. Tervigon's also became 195 points making them ridiculously overpriced and the only reason anyone stills plays them is an aftershock of how good they were last dex, people aren't seeming to realise now that they are only 30 points cheaper than a Flyrant but 50 whole points more expensive than a Dakkafex, for a unit that does very little, when at this range you could expect something game changing. This + loss of Biomancy + Catalyst no longer being purchasble + needing 30 termagants instead of 10 to take him as a troop, was enough to nerf our mainstay unit into unplayability. Gargoyles who used to get auto wounds on a to-hit roll of 6, now instead get to swap out any number of their wounding attacks for attacks that give out blinding tests. It sounds like it doesn't measure up, and its even worse and far less points efficient in practice, just ignore this ability. Zoanthropes, who were my favourite elite slot choice, are what you would call unplayable, the loss of the critical mobility granted to them from Pods is probably enough, but to seal the deal they lost options for rulebook powers, and became brotherhood meaning they take all their tests as one. Zoanthropes have one of the most unreliable powers in the game, a lot of the time they miss, the best thing about them was that if 2 or even just 1 got through they are S10 AP1, and have a good chance of blowing up whatever they hit. Now its all or nothing, meaning I probably wouldn't play them even if I had pods. Just another terrible, unexplained change. All this, plus little to NO CHANGES or even NERFS to the stuff that was begging for help, such as Raveners, Shrikes, Rippers, Pyrovores, Genestealers, Hormagants, Rupture Cannon, etc, just gives very little to get excited about. And to summarize, I really can't understate how restrictive the rulebook powers things are. If we were not intended to have T7-9 MC's I can understand, although it was hardly broken in the scheme of things. However locking us in to nothing but a Psyker table that doesn't know what it wants its theme to be, with the inclusion of a bunch of absolutely crap powers, is not fun whatsoever.

And I'm not even going to mention Instinctive Behaviour changes I'm sure you've heard how much they sucked as well.


This is not what they should have given us as our update for going into 6th ed and paying $80 for a codex.


It's not all bad though, Carnifex and Tyrannofex got cheap enough to be playable, Venomthrope gives a Shrouded bubble, Mawlocs got cheaper and their blast got better, Termagants got a point cheaper, Crones & Exocrine are powerful without being overpowered (good balance). Lictors are BORDERING on playable , probably only if you use the dataslates and a list built around them, but still its something. Biovores got cheaper and an extra wound. Flyrants can take a template weapon (although firing it means not shooting the Devourers for a turn). There isn't much else that I can think of that makes me happy, most of the fun to be found in fact is in our dataslates. The book itself is terrible and they don't do much to fix it up.


It is undeniably two things, a strong army and a bland codex. There is fun to be had however.

Exalted for being one of the most thought out, reasonable posts I've seen on this topic. It takes a lot of effort to hit all the changes that made the codex less enjoyable with out going into hate mongering.

Nids won't be rolling any tournaments like the deathstar cheese lists but at least you won't be TFG. They are still totally competitive in standard games and I've seen a number of people do really well with the new codex.

 Greenizbest wrote:
Nids won't be rolling any tournaments like the deathstar cheese lists but at least you won't be TFG.

For now, anyway. Better enjoy that while it lasts.

If you only look at every army's top-tier competetive list, they're fine. In the top four or five armies, in fact. On the other hand, the new codex has LOTS of huge problems which never should have existed in the first place. For example:
The total number of units decreased. Four cool, unique, and sometimes invaluable options were lost in exhange for three meh options.
What we had left loses variety. Walkrants and Swarmlords became even less playable than before. Flyrants are very obviously the best unit in the codex, no contest. In fact, there are maybe five units which are near must-takes, and almost everything else falls utterly flat. The new options, (mainly the bio-artefacts,) are stupid and generally worthless.
Almost no new fluff. The amount of copy-paste and lazy writing is HUGE...
Broken rules. You can take armies without warlords, breaking the game. Pyrovores can nuke the entire board. These are mistakes which shouldn't have made it past the first draft.

To be fair to the bio artefacts, I like the concept behind them. Tyranid fluff is full of one off monstrosities that annihilate everything until they're laid low at huge cost to the enemy. The idea behind most of them are neat. Like, a Hive Tyrant with a biochemical liquefier, or a Prime with crab like Rending Claws that absorbs enough genetic information to let the carrier fight the opponent better.

The problem with them is they all just ever so slightly fall short and don't evoke that one off monstrosity feel, just more like a rare but ordinary creature. Like the rest of the book, it just feels like a missed opportunity.

Waaaghpower wrote:
If you only look at every army's top-tier competetive list, they're fine. In the top four or five armies, in fact. On the other hand, the new codex has LOTS of huge problems which never should have existed in the first place. For example:
The total number of units decreased. Four cool, unique, and sometimes invaluable options were lost in exhange for three meh options.
What we had left loses variety. Walkrants and Swarmlords became even less playable than before. Flyrants are very obviously the best unit in the codex, no contest. In fact, there are maybe five units which are near must-takes, and almost everything else falls utterly flat. The new options, (mainly the bio-artefacts,) are stupid and generally worthless.
Almost no new fluff. The amount of copy-paste and lazy writing is HUGE...
Broken rules. You can take armies without warlords, breaking the game. Pyrovores can nuke the entire board. These are mistakes which shouldn't have made it past the first draft.

I agree for the most part, although I think Flyrants are hugely overrated - there just isn't much else in the slot. Also those broken rules aren't really relevant nor am I 100% sure they are broken... how do you take an army without a warlord?

You play Kill Team? In anything else it's an illegal list, just like having only 1 Troops choice.

 SHUPPET wrote:
how do you take an army without a warlord?

The Tervigon is an HQ choice, but not a character. Technically, the BRB says that you must nominate an HQ choice character to be your warlord (page 111).

My frustration with the book (and my warning to any new Tyranid player) is that in addition to being boring and overcosted, many of our units feel useless, even in casual games. You can still have fun with Tyranids, but be prepared to be frustrated. Your awesome Tyranid Warriors with boneswords (great models) will rarely reach combat. Your Genestealers will trip over terrain and get shredded by the most common firepower in the game. Your most elite, terrifying assassin will be afraid to charge a unit with 2 flamers. Watch as your awesome new monstrous creature, the Haruspex, struggles to kill more than 2 Guardsmen a turn.

"THAT bad"?
Heck no. its a good dex.

Sure, it lost a few things from last codex, but the current dex has alot of verity units, even if not all are high-end ones.

And when you are after the high-end ones, you got your flyrants, who are outright brutal, the crones who are also quite destructive, zoans who are annyoing as hell, etc, etc.

Psyker powers? sure you lost the biomancy, but we all know biomancy MCs is outright broken, and the hive mind powers are honestly absurdly strong. the lance is one of the strongest witchfires, the "run and shoot" reacts powerfully with FMC, the one that lowers enemy BS and WS can outright remove his ability to fight back, etc.

The new nids has alot of potential, and alot of room for tactical plays, but people nowdays just seem to go by the notion that if you don't have a glaring obvious auto-win button, the codex sucks.

 BoomWolf wrote:
people nowdays just seem to go by the notion that if you don't have a glaring obvious auto-win button, the codex sucks.

You've never actually paid attention to the complaints at all, have you?

 PrinceRaven wrote:

 BoomWolf wrote:
people nowdays just seem to go by the notion that if you don't have a glaring obvious auto-win button, the codex sucks.

You've never actually paid attention to the complaints at all, have you?

This.

Clearly didn't even read the responses in this thread let alone any of the previous ones.

 SHUPPET wrote:

 PrinceRaven wrote:

 BoomWolf wrote:
people nowdays just seem to go by the notion that if you don't have a glaring obvious auto-win button, the codex sucks.

You've never actually paid attention to the complaints at all, have you?

This.

Clearly didn't even read the responses in this thread let alone any of the previous ones.

The fact I don't AGREE to them, does not mean I "Clearly didn't even read the responses in this thread let alone any of the previous ones"

The loss of most fun units and the stupid nerfs of more or less functioning units with basically nothing new to be excited about, completely discouraged me to play with the current Codex. So I can't speak from practical experience. With friends I will play with the old Codex.

Otherwise what SHUPPET said.

Boom - May i ask how none of those changes seems to bother you, or how you think they are better please?

As mentioned, there are around 4-5 decent units now.
Everything else has had a huge nerf in 1 way or another.
Also, keep in mind alot of people will be pissed since no one likes units being removed outright from a book.

Not only have they done that, they have also jumped up the cost of regular units/models to the point they are borderline on value.

This codex really is a bad joke compared to the previous one.
Infact, nid dex's just get worse as they go on IMO.

Jackal:

Most nerfs and/or removals were of the annoying things that were unhealthy for the game. cheap troop unit MC that can spawn even more units, is a nightmare to remove is a strong unit, but a BAD one for the game, so it an elite solo dude who can reliably kill multiple squads the turn he shows up on the board with several armies having little to nothing to do about it.

The simple truth is that the fact something is not AS good as it was, does not make it bad by default. yes, many nid options were nerfed-but they were unhealthy for the game, and drained the fun from anyone playing against them, and anyone playing WITH them, as they reduced the game to a simple "march forward" playstyle with no need, use or even possibility for any tactics, plays or even choice.
A machine could play old nids and be just as effective as it was SO dumbed down I could tell just what my opponent would do every single turn before he even deployed, and the only question was "can I get lucky enough rolls to stop it"

Now, i know that "run them down" is nice and all fluff wise, but it should not be a game stratagy. so yes, the "run them down" units got nerfed, hard.
The ones that require minimal brain functions to use properly got better though.
Mawlocks? do I want to use them to blast a squad, or is the important thing right now is to insure he appears?
Spores? cheap and useful little annoyances.
The new flyers? giving room for the "nid air" list to work, with thier incredible vector striking power.
New psyker powers? mostly used to trigger new playstyles rather then give raw power now. (run and gun, easy-pin enemies before assault, reduce enemy WS and BS to make them a non-threat while you deal with others, etc.)
Etc, etc. there are many little nasty surprises waiting for the unwary opponent there.

Of course it will crumble the instant you would try the old playstyle, but that's OK, the old playstyle could hardly be called like that, as there was no "play" involved, the new codex gives you alot of reasonable choices, rather then a hand-picked few absurdly OP ones (and we all know the old tervi was just that)
The internet just love pointing anything not absurd as useless, sure nids wont win any turnies, but not because they are bad, its because they are freaking WELL BALANCED, in a meta dominated by a handful of OP builds.

In a world without the "tier 0" trouble-makers (divination's brokenness, T-Ctan, revenant, wave serpents, 2++ combos, and tau's odd interactions with riptides) the nids could be a top-tier army, the only thing holding them back is that they got nothing OP, and got no access to allied shenanigans (who are also only a problem due to the very same "tier 0" problems )
Its a fair match against SM, against AM, against riptide-free tau, against none-grimored demons, against SoB/CSM/DA, and only eldar really have multiple shenanigans-again the very few OP stuff that except them its fair play.

The reason the nid codex looks bad to some, is because he is compared to the top of the top, but you are comparing a "tier 1" to a "tier 0", by this tier system:

Tier 0-"god tier", if its here, its game braking powerful and almost auto-win against anything not tier 0, SHOULD NOT EXIST.
Tier 1-"top tier", extremely good but nothing game-braking.
Tier 2-"mid tier", slightly behind tier 1, but still fair play. usually requires higher tactics, but also capeable of said higher tactics.
Tier 3-"low tier", its playing on hard mode, but can still pull off some niche tactics others cannot, and can take out tier 1s with them.
Tier 4-"crap tier", everyhing this can do, someone else does better. no reason to ever use these, SHOULD NOT EXIST.

So, nids are bad because they cannot pull an equal stand against lists that abuse multiple tier 0 choices at once? lists built directly to abuse MULTIPLE mistakes at the core game balance?
Take tier 0 away, by removing, fixing or nutering them, and nids are at the top of the pack, with powerful FMC, fearless troops, the some of the strongest non-divination psyker powers out there (with the ability to have alot of psykers), strong psyker defense, accsess to both hordes and MC spam and many, many options-even if some are situational or subpar, they are all THERE, unlike some armies that have only 2 or 3 options in several of the slot types.
Nids are wonderful, once you stop comparing them to the mistakes and start comparing them to how the game SHOULD be, as in-how MOST things are.

^ In short, if all you care about is winning, yay Nids?