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Are tervigons still essential for a tyranid list?

 Mantle wrote:
The crone is a perfect counter for a heldrake because it starts the game on the board, as soon as the heldrake enters play you can vector strike it with 2-4 s8 hits. Haven't read the CSM codex in a while but I can't think of any other AA.

Wait maybe havocs can get flak missiles but that's what your Matlock/devourer flyrant is there for

Who needs AA, hit it with bolters and watch it ground itself 1/3 of the time.

Tyranids are far worse than CSM.

1) CSM can take allies, tyranids cannot. In 6th edition, allies allow players to shore up weak spots. Nids are the equivalent of bringing a knife to a gunfight.

2) Nids new synapse punishes players. CSM has no similar achilles heel.

3) CSM has access to the premiere psychic powers, whereas tyranids are resricted to one of the weakest.

4) CSM have a marquee unit in the Heldrake. Tyranids have no comparable top class unit.

5) CSM troops while poor are still superior to those available to nids.

6) CSM have more useful warlord abilities and artefacts than tyranids. Hello black mace.

@Blacksails: I agree there is very little internal balance in the CSM book, but I feel differently about the NIds. I believe that Nids will play much like Daemons but with better target saturation. With the price drops on many units the book opens up a number of various builds combining elements of horde armies and monster mash.

The nids book might be better on second thought. The only CSM lists that go to tournaments are drake spam and allied with daemons FMC. I think that nids will have more viable builds.

jakl277 wrote:
The nids book might be better on second thought. The only CSM lists that go to tournaments are drake spam and allied with daemons FMC. I think that nids will have more viable builds.

I don't see anything here to support your conclusion.

Mr.Blue wrote:Are tervigons still essential for a tyranid list?

No. Now it's more like 1 Tervigon sitting back with a Miasmic Cannon or something and pooping out gants all day. They are still good, but no longer essential. Same with Hive Guard.

The 5th edition Tyranid codex was awful. Much worse than the current one. The 6th edition rule book was added after, and GW just decided to be like, "sure, let them use Biomancy." Suddenly unplayable units were playable. I feel as though they tried to design a book that was self-sufficient (which fits the fluff), but nothing is obviously powerful at the onset.

All the people talking about the Helldrake can cram it with walnuts - pretty much 100% of you said it was going to suck even a few weeks into playing with it. 170 points was "too much for what it does," as most people claimed.

Tyranids are complicated now, which is both good and bad. The majority of the player base consists of the lowest common denominator, which is the bad part. There are no point-and-click-and-spam choices like the Helldrake and Riptide; no units are miniature armies suited to take on anything like with a Space Marine squad.

If you peruse the more Tyranid-centric websites like The Tyranid Hive and Warpshadow, you'll see lots of interesting combos are starting to emerge. There are ways to create huge Synapse bubbles for cheap, as well as beardy cover saves (with Venomthropes in a Bastion, or behind something in cover now the provides Shroud instead of a flat 5+, for example). Biovores and Spore Mines are great against those armies castling in a corner against Tyranids, and we've yet to see just how useful the large blasts from Mawlocs and Exocrines can be.

Overall, practically everything in the book got cheaper. Broods can now mix-and-match weaponry, unlike before, and the FO is spread out a little better than it was previously. Tyranid players need to understand that everything is expendable, and it's about threat saturation. You want to create more questions than the opponent can answer in a relatively short time.

When someone talks about shooting a Crone down with a quad gun, that's kind of assuming the Tyranid player has nothing else going on, didn't get the first turn, and doesn't have 8 more MC's running at the opponent. Vacuum examples of 1-for-1 scenarios don't mean a thing.

There's not enough data to draw a real conclusion yet, but I know I've had way more fun with this one than the last one (which was strictly mono-build, and only playable because of the addition of Biomancy). There are certainly more lists popping up now than the regular "3 Tervigons + 3 gant squads, HQ w/Biomancy, the end" we had with the terribad 5th edition book. There's even a Synapseless army getting some testing right now. You read that right.

Play with the stuff and find out. Don't read about it and become an "actually" tard on the internet.

I don't remember anyone calling the Heldrake anythinf other than cheese after the FAQ gave it Schrodinger's Flamer. You're right in saying that people are overreacting though, the new book isn't quite as bad as the Internet would have you believe. It's still pretty bad though and I don't see it reaching the same competitive level as CSM can.

 PrinceRaven wrote:
I don't remember anyone calling the Heldrake anythinf other than cheese after the FAQ gave it Schrodinger's Flamer. You're right in saying that people are overreacting though, the new book isn't quite as bad as the Internet would have you believe. It's still pretty bad though and I don't see it reaching the same competitive level as CSM can.

Nah, I do remember some people saying it wasn't worth 170pts when it came out, but I know I didn't agree with that assessment. A S6 AP3 flamer with torrent was obviously amazing as soon as I saw it.

 Andilus Greatsword wrote:

 PrinceRaven wrote:
I don't remember anyone calling the Heldrake anythinf other than cheese after the FAQ gave it Schrodinger's Flamer. You're right in saying that people are overreacting though, the new book isn't quite as bad as the Internet would have you believe. It's still pretty bad though and I don't see it reaching the same competitive level as CSM can.

Nah, I do remember some people saying it wasn't worth 170pts when it came out, but I know I didn't agree with that assessment. A S6 AP3 flamer with torrent was obviously amazing as soon as I saw it.

And then the Torrent FAQ, which made it the Cheese. Before it was just rough.

To be fair, GW tried their hardest hardest to make it a FMC +1. It was faqd to be almost identical to a FMC, just vehicle-ized.

But no, I do not think that this is worse than the csm codex. Lazy and poorly thought out, but not entirely bad.

CSM codex isnt great but theres a couple nice things in there like princes, drakes, oblits

Tyranids codex isnt great but theres a couple nice things in there like flyrants, venomthropes, carnifexes.

 AesSedai wrote:
Tyranids are far worse than CSM.

1) CSM can take allies, tyranids cannot. In 6th edition, allies allow players to shore up weak spots. Nids are the equivalent of bringing a knife to a gunfight.

2) Nids new synapse punishes players. CSM has no similar achilles heel.

3) CSM has access to the premiere psychic powers, whereas tyranids are resricted to one of the weakest.

4) CSM have a marquee unit in the Heldrake. Tyranids have no comparable top class unit.

5) CSM troops while poor are still superior to those available to nids.

6) CSM have more useful warlord abilities and artefacts than tyranids. Hello black mace.

That's all. You have covered everything. And apart from that, one word. Fateweaver.

The big losses to the Tyranids were the loss of the BRB for no apparent reason (seriously, why?) and the loss of virtually any deep striking ability.

This invalidated a lot of lists overnight and has understandably made the Tyranid playerbase quite unhappy.

Oh and standbys like the Tyranid Prime and Tervigon got a price bump, and the Swarmlord got nerfed down hard with the loss of invulnerable reroll forcing and Biomancy.

Overall, it's a lot like resetting the Tyranids back to what they were in 5e. Which is to say, nothing special.

Chaos now do have a way of getting assault units into combat, if your willing to buy a Kharybidis assult claw. Forge world have released the rules for it, and can be used in a standard CSM list as a Heavy Support choice.

 DarkStarSabre wrote:
I'd say no. For one, the new Tyranid book hasn't gone and made anything mandatory for success (hello Helldrakes) and in return has helped some of the older options that languished about unloved.

The Chaos book has pretty much made me shelve the Chaos armies until a later date. Sure, they may look pretty but unless I'm willing to roll over and fart out Helldrake and Obliterator spam they're pretty much a no-go.

The new book invalidated Deep Strike and BRB Psychic Choir armies outright more or less. Which happened to make up a good deal of pre new book armies. This saddens me as I was hoping in vainly for an army that could at least compete with Marines on an even footing, maybe even the Xenos big three.