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.

So me and a few of the guys are having an all night fun tourney, swapping armies and playing funny stuff. My bud let me play his tau against his dark elder, and seeing his beautifully painted riptide, I had to play it, even though we play 600 point games.

Needless to say, I got wrecked pretty quick.

But the riptide. My god. That thing immobilized one raider, blew up the second, and wiped out a small squad before being taken down by poison weapons.

Do you guys think the Riptide is too expensive point wise? 180 points is a lot, but being able to throw out 8 shots that can take down light to medium vehicles with ease is no joke. And as an elite choice, given the option (and the money) I would probably field three of these just for the heck of it!

Too expensive? The Riptide is really undercosted. For it's insane toughness, speed, and high damage output it should be well over 200 points. Yes it does to poison, like all MCs, but it is insanely good.

Undercosted. Grossly so.

Well we just did a rematch and I now see what you guys mean. We went 750 so I thought I would take two riptides. Took out all his raiders first turn, his venoms second turn. That probably explains why Tau is considered top tier!

One of the reasons.

Dude, double Riptides in 750 points? That's cruel and unusual punishment right there.

Riptides should be 250 points base. IMO

GoliothOnline wrote:
Riptides should be 250 points base. IMO

At the least...

And/or have their toughness dropped to 5.

...

Scratch that, they should be walkers.

 luky7dayz wrote:

...180 points is a lot, but being able to throw out 8 shots that can take down light to medium vehicles with ease is no joke...

This made me think of the forgefiend. Very similarly priced, also 8 shots can take down light/medium vehicles pretty easy. Then you compare their durability and just laugh. No way these two should cost near the same, even being from different armies.

Their worst abuses are now gone however, as you can no longer attach a 'Buffmander' to a pair of Riptides, nor do Tau have any access to allies like Eldar or Space Marines who can throw a bunch of psychic augments onto their Riptides. (and Broadsides as well!)

Playing games under 1000pts tends to really, really skew things as those high thoughness/AV models and/or high armour save models tend to become god tier due to the inability to bring more than a bare smattering of viable counters.
Hell, bringing a Land Raider, a tank viewed as generally overcosted and only semi-competitive in a 750pts game is now playing God-mode, as most opponents may have 1, maybe 2 real threats to it. Some opponents such as Tyranids or Orks may not even have anything beyond a single MC/couple of Power klaws that can even scratch it!

In proper games of 1500-2000pts, Riptides are now pretty balanced. They're hard to kill and have great reach, but they're no longer able to simply point at any unit they want and auto-remove them without effort like they did in 6th edition.

Ridiculously undercosted.

I'd say it's costed too low due to its 2+ and 5++, take away either and it's ability to get fnp and it should be costed fine

I think the Riptide is perfectly costed on base wargear, but the Ion Accelerator for only 5 points is a bit under costed. The IA doesn't need the nova reactor to be excellent, the first two modes can deal with most situations. But the point at which a riptide becomes super effective against every thing, is when markerlights happen.

But that poses the question, is the Riptide too good or is it markerlights?

Experiment 626 wrote:
Their worst abuses are now gone however, as you can no longer attach a 'Buffmander' to a pair of Riptides, nor do Tau have any access to allies like Eldar or Space Marines who can throw a bunch of psychic augments onto their Riptides. (and Broadsides as well!)

Playing games under 1000pts tends to really, really skew things as those high thoughness/AV models and/or high armour save models tend to become god tier due to the inability to bring more than a bare smattering of viable counters.
Hell, bringing a Land Raider, a tank viewed as generally overcosted and only semi-competitive in a 750pts game is now playing God-mode, as most opponents may have 1, maybe 2 real threats to it. Some opponents such as Tyranids or Orks may not even have anything beyond a single MC/couple of Power klaws that can even scratch it!

In proper games of 1500-2000pts, Riptides are now pretty balanced. They're hard to kill and have great reach, but they're no longer able to simply point at any unit they want and auto-remove them without effort like they did in 6th edition.

I played a 1,500pts game vs a Tau list with a single Riptide and loaded a metric f**ton of high strength AP2 shooting onto my list to counter it (4 Harbingers of Destruction + Chronotek in a Ghost Ark, a pre-skyfire nerf Gauss Sentry Pylon and a Tessaract Ark, totally in 4 BS4 S8 AP2 shots + 1 re-roll, 3 BS4 S7 AP2 blasts and 2 BS4 S9 AP2 shots per turn, which is a grand total of 565pts of dedicated Riptide hunting firepower, well over twice its cost).

The Riptide was unbuffed, had no markerlight support, no drones, did not hide behind anything that blocked LoS or granted better cover than his invul save and failed every single one of his feel no pain rolls (there's only a 13.17% chance of that happening 5 times in a row BTW) and thanks to good terrain use and some rather insane luck on my part I managed not lose any of the aforementioned AP2 shooting throughout the entire game. Still took all the above 3 full shooting phases to kill the thing...

Running some quick mathhammer on it it seems that if anything my shooting preformed, at best, around average as in 3 turns of shooting they should've averaged at around 4.667 wounds (MAYBE 5 if you account for the re-roll and the blasts somewhat better than 2/3 chance of hitting as I've used that as an approximation).

If that's not an utter absurdity in terms of game balance I don't know what is...

And then some one brings 3 WraithKnights, and the Riptide doesn't seem that OP.

The biggest issue with the Riptide is the fact that it has a 2+ armor save and chance to boost its 5++ to a 3++ inv.

Compare this to the Wraithknight that is much costlier and only has a 3+/5++ save with a Scatterlaser and TL-Suncannon (this combo costs 300 points in total) and you'll realize the only thing the Wraithknight has going for it in terms of defence is T8 compared to T6.

However, then consider the facts that both these creatures can deep strike, or JSJ (Riptide) or move 12" each turn (Wraithknight) and you'll realize that GW missed the chance to nerf them in 7th edition.

They could have created a separate entry called Jet- or Jump-Monstrous Creatures and barred these from deepstriking or moving more than 6" or preventing them from running but nope, they didnt.

Here's a little hint: Asurman costs 220 points.

Now how much of a game changer is he compared to a Riptide? Exactly. Thats why the Tide is undercosted.

 Galorian wrote:

Experiment 626 wrote:
Their worst abuses are now gone however, as you can no longer attach a 'Buffmander' to a pair of Riptides, nor do Tau have any access to allies like Eldar or Space Marines who can throw a bunch of psychic augments onto their Riptides. (and Broadsides as well!)

Playing games under 1000pts tends to really, really skew things as those high thoughness/AV models and/or high armour save models tend to become god tier due to the inability to bring more than a bare smattering of viable counters.
Hell, bringing a Land Raider, a tank viewed as generally overcosted and only semi-competitive in a 750pts game is now playing God-mode, as most opponents may have 1, maybe 2 real threats to it. Some opponents such as Tyranids or Orks may not even have anything beyond a single MC/couple of Power klaws that can even scratch it!

In proper games of 1500-2000pts, Riptides are now pretty balanced. They're hard to kill and have great reach, but they're no longer able to simply point at any unit they want and auto-remove them without effort like they did in 6th edition.

I played a 1,500pts game vs a Tau list with a single Riptide and loaded a metric f**ton of high strength AP2 shooting onto my list to counter it (4 Harbingers of Destruction + Chronotek in a Ghost Ark, a pre-skyfire nerf Gauss Sentry Pylon and a Tessaract Ark, totally in 4 BS4 S8 AP2 shots + 1 re-roll, 3 BS4 S7 AP2 blasts and 2 BS4 S9 AP2 shots per turn, which is a grand total of 565pts of dedicated Riptide hunting firepower, well over twice its cost).

The Riptide was unbuffed, had no markerlight support, no drones, did not hide behind anything that blocked LoS or granted better cover than his invul save and failed every single one of his feel no pain rolls (there's only a 13.17% chance of that happening 5 times in a row BTW) and thanks to good terrain use and some rather insane luck on my part I managed not lose any of the aforementioned AP2 shooting throughout the entire game. Still took all the above 3 full shooting phases to kill the thing...

Running some quick mathhammer on it it seems that if anything my shooting preformed, at best, around average as in 3 turns of shooting they should've averaged at around 4.667 wounds (MAYBE 5 if you account for the re-roll and the blasts somewhat better than 2/3 chance of hitting as I've used that as an approximation).

If that's not an utter absurdity in terms of game balance I don't know what is...

Shockingly, it's rather typical that one must spend roughly 2x the pts cost of an enemy unit's total in order to shoot them off the board.

I typically have to spend 140pts of Tzherald + 200pts of 18 Horrors in order to shoot down 10 Tactical Marines.
By your standards, that Tactical Squad is absurdly undercosted since I had to spend about 350pts just to kill maybe 180pts worth of Marines...


Look at what the Riptide lost in the new 7th edition:
1. Twin-linked everything!
2. Ignores Cover on all weapons
3. T5/2+/4++/FnP w/added Drone support tanker
4. Fortune/Forewarning or any other Psychic augment
5. Nerf to 'Smash' attack

That's a giant kick in the pants to what made them truly game-breaking in 6th.

Yes, they're still very big and quite scary, but they're not nearly as huge a dominating presence as they were. The Buffmander's loss especially has nuked their most heinous aspects.

you forgot the part where its S8 AP2 pie plate can now perhaps grant a 4+ cover, but nevertheless target all 10 members of a tactical squad spread out over the 3 levels of a ruin.

and it still has its EWO shenanigan where it gets to fry an entire terminator squad the turn they deepstrike next to it.

Bump the Ion Accelerator to 15 points, bump the Interceptor wargear to 20-25 points.

Experiment 626 wrote:

 Galorian wrote:

Experiment 626 wrote:
Their worst abuses are now gone however, as you can no longer attach a 'Buffmander' to a pair of Riptides, nor do Tau have any access to allies like Eldar or Space Marines who can throw a bunch of psychic augments onto their Riptides. (and Broadsides as well!)

Playing games under 1000pts tends to really, really skew things as those high thoughness/AV models and/or high armour save models tend to become god tier due to the inability to bring more than a bare smattering of viable counters.
Hell, bringing a Land Raider, a tank viewed as generally overcosted and only semi-competitive in a 750pts game is now playing God-mode, as most opponents may have 1, maybe 2 real threats to it. Some opponents such as Tyranids or Orks may not even have anything beyond a single MC/couple of Power klaws that can even scratch it!

In proper games of 1500-2000pts, Riptides are now pretty balanced. They're hard to kill and have great reach, but they're no longer able to simply point at any unit they want and auto-remove them without effort like they did in 6th edition.

I played a 1,500pts game vs a Tau list with a single Riptide and loaded a metric f**ton of high strength AP2 shooting onto my list to counter it (4 Harbingers of Destruction + Chronotek in a Ghost Ark, a pre-skyfire nerf Gauss Sentry Pylon and a Tessaract Ark, totally in 4 BS4 S8 AP2 shots + 1 re-roll, 3 BS4 S7 AP2 blasts and 2 BS4 S9 AP2 shots per turn, which is a grand total of 565pts of dedicated Riptide hunting firepower, well over twice its cost).

The Riptide was unbuffed, had no markerlight support, no drones, did not hide behind anything that blocked LoS or granted better cover than his invul save and failed every single one of his feel no pain rolls (there's only a 13.17% chance of that happening 5 times in a row BTW) and thanks to good terrain use and some rather insane luck on my part I managed not lose any of the aforementioned AP2 shooting throughout the entire game. Still took all the above 3 full shooting phases to kill the thing...

Running some quick mathhammer on it it seems that if anything my shooting preformed, at best, around average as in 3 turns of shooting they should've averaged at around 4.667 wounds (MAYBE 5 if you account for the re-roll and the blasts somewhat better than 2/3 chance of hitting as I've used that as an approximation).

If that's not an utter absurdity in terms of game balance I don't know what is...

Shockingly, it's rather typical that one must spend roughly 2x the pts cost of an enemy unit's total in order to shoot them off the board.

I typically have to spend 140pts of Tzherald + 200pts of 18 Horrors in order to shoot down 10 Tactical Marines.
By your standards, that Tactical Squad is absurdly undercosted since I had to spend about 350pts just to kill maybe 180pts worth of Marines...


Look at what the Riptide lost in the new 7th edition:
1. Twin-linked everything!
2. Ignores Cover on all weapons
3. T5/2+/4++/FnP w/added Drone support tanker
4. Fortune/Forewarning or any other Psychic augment
5. Nerf to 'Smash' attack

That's a giant kick in the pants to what made them truly game-breaking in 6th.

Yes, they're still very big and quite scary, but they're not nearly as huge a dominating presence as they were. The Buffmander's loss especially has nuked their most heinous aspects.

Really? REALLY??

So in your book it's perfectly reasonable for nearly 3 times the point value of a model in dedicated counters to take 3-4 turns of full, uninterrupted shooting under ideal conditions to kill it?

I guess my Transcended C'tan must be a grossly overcosted glass cannon then, as ~2,000 points of dedicated counters would dakka it into oblivion much faster...

I'd also like to remind people now that the Riptide is a scoring unit.

 Sir Arun wrote:
I'd also like to remind people now that the Riptide is a scoring unit.

That can't contest an objective against anything with Objective Secured, unless the Tau players has some way to give said rule to their Riptide.

I'm a Nid player, don't talk to me about Riptides..

Make the Ion Accelerator and the Ion Cannon a single weapon which only gets AP2 if it novacharges and probably get rid of fnp.

Experiment 626 wrote:

 Sir Arun wrote:
I'd also like to remind people now that the Riptide is a scoring unit.

That can't contest an objective against anything with Objective Secured, unless the Tau players has some way to give said rule to their Riptide.

ಠ_ಠ

"Oy, move over you oversized tin can, WE be holding this here objective!"

*bunch o' poor fools get reduced to so much blood, gore and burning wreckage*

...

Great plan that...

.

Experiment 626 wrote:

 Sir Arun wrote:
I'd also like to remind people now that the Riptide is a scoring unit.

That can't contest an objective against anything with Objective Secured, unless the Tau players has some way to give said rule to their Riptide.

1. Send squishy troops out in the open to contest objective from Riptide.
2. ???
3. Win game.

I'm having trouble figuring out what step 2 is, because the logical progression from step 1 is "troops get slaughtered", bu that doesn't seem to lead to step 3...

The stupid thing doesn't fit the fluff of Tau to begin with. This is a Matt Ward scenario. Something that needed to be pushed through the development stages, got thrown at the shelves before it was properly play tested.

Lets give a MC with a 2+/5++ base and T6 the best shooti in the game. Then lets make it cost less than most Walkers, who by all rights SHOULD perform the same roles, but hilariously can't and ultimately fail so badly at said role they are useless.

If this isn't enough to sell the model (Fluff be damned, never mind the fact Tau fluff stated massive armored vehicles was always a failed attempt on their part and that their technologies and resources prohibited their existence) We will allow them to be able to shoot at Arial targets for cheap, gain FNP for pennies and have Thrust Moves that make no sense! HUZZAH! Lets move boxes of these buggers!

*Womp Womp*

 PrinceRaven wrote:

Experiment 626 wrote:

 Sir Arun wrote:
I'd also like to remind people now that the Riptide is a scoring unit.

That can't contest an objective against anything with Objective Secured, unless the Tau players has some way to give said rule to their Riptide.

1. Send squishy troops out in the open to contest objective from Riptide.
2. ???
3. Win game.

I'm having trouble figuring out what step 2 is, because the logical progression from step 1 is "troops get slaughtered", bu that doesn't seem to lead to step 3...

I'm guessing step 2 is "Knock out your opponent with a swift right hook and skip his turn."

I think that the issue is more in line with the Ion Accelerator than anything else. Which IMHO I think should be swapped with the Ion Cannon on the Hammerhead. Either that or it should go from the three shot normal to an overcharged short range beam weapon.

Looking at the base model, it's got 8 S6 shots at about the same price as a forgefiend. I think that most people will agree that as it is, this is a pretty standard model and is putting out about as much firepower as a unit of Crisis suits with similar weapons with some extra points thrown in for it's durability.

The Nova Reactor does come off as a bit much however to tip it over it's expected cost. Of the four options they are all extremely useful in various situations and I'm surprised it's not a random chart. The offset is losing a wound 1/3 of the time without taking a costly piece of wargear. Now I'm probably alone in saying it, but I think that the Nova Reactor is actually fairly priced in with the HBC since it really presses the player to Nova more often, risking more damage and to actually limit the options to take other boosts like the shield.

Especially with how Psykers work now, Taus complete inability to benefit or defend from psyker powers, and how big of a joke the perils chart is I think that the Nova Reactor is supposed to be a fair replacement for psyker powers.

I will be the first to say that the IA is a huge boost to the Riptides effectiveness. It comes with two good modes of shooting, which not only free up the options to use the nova charge on but make nova charging completely optional as well. If you're not Nova Charging, then you're not risking wounds and increasing the durability of it significantly. That is more than a 5 point upgrade.