Tau general thoughts- and advice, if possible

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**Gamgee**

Alcibiades wrote:
Talamare wrote:
Alcibiades wrote:
Talamare wrote:

Neat...
33.3% chance to fail on wounding

I don't want to have to repeat myself like for the 9th time
Hammerheads sound great, but then you realize you only get a single shot.

Like lascannons and missile cannons and 90% of heavy weapons firing at a hard target?

Lascannon Predator
4 Lascannon Shots
~ 200 points

Devastator/Havoc Squad
4 Lascannon Shots
~150 points

Railgun 1 shot
~180 points

Yeah I can add too.

These do about 1.5 times the damage on average to a Land Raider. They are also less durable, have no antiinfantry capability to speak of, and are far less mobile.
.

Yeah and they are usually accompanied by razorback spam with Gulliman bubble wrapped .01 inches behind them and then and between them. I seen two identikit lists fighting for first place and they both had a las predator. Meanwhile the rest of the Tau army will be hard pressed to have enough anti-tank to take all of that down and if they do the grav spam is popping out to take the commanders down and then there's gulliman himself.

**reds8n**

People need to dial back the snark and rudeness in this thread, now.

Ta.

**SevenSeasOfRhye**

materpillar wrote:
I haven't played in any super hyper competitive tournaments so I'm not exactly sure what a tau list would look like in that regard. Probably just as many commanders as you could fit in a list? The detachment you're looking for in regards to Tau hyper cheese is the Supreme Command Detachment. 3-5 HQs, 0-1 Elites, and 0-1 LOW.

That being said, I've been doing fine in my area usually running a list of a fusion command, a coldstar, a fireblade, some stealth suits, some crisis suits, a riptide, a ghostkeel, some vespid, about 30 firewarriors and a fair amount of drones. That is a very paraphrased 2k points list.

Commanders are the best unit we have.
Coldstar commanders are effectively immortal being a character with a 40" movement as long as you're not brain dead with their positioning.
Fireblades are great. 2+ markerlight hit is awesome to support commanders and buffing FW is sweet.

Stealth suits are also awesome. I mean they've gotten buffed like 3 straight editions in a row now. 2+ save in cover with 2 wounds and -1 to hit? Mine often die in the first turn, but it usually takes literally my opponents entire army shooting them to do this, which is usually worth. They infiltrate, if they get charged its basically your fault.

Crisis suits are better than you make them sound. They're worse than commanders, but that's everything in our codex not named "gun drone" so they're still pretty good. They're guaranteed a turn of shooting against a target of your choice and you can position them to take minimal return fire as necessary. Give them a handful of drones and your opponent really shouldn't be able to kill them off quickly at all as they shrug of small arms fire quite well.

The riptide is bad. Not literally unplayable bad (like vespid used to be), but just pretty poor (kinda like hammerheads last edition?). They're still extremely hard to put down with a few drones flitting about them. I've been running mine with DC and a swarm of 8 markerdrones hiding in my backfield and it does fine as an artillery piece.

Ghostkeel really really need LOS blocking terrain. If you have that to park the stealth drones behind it is stupid difficult to kill. Like way harder to put down than a riptide. Without LOS blocking terrain for the drones, it's much worse but not awful.

Notice that I keep saying drones are good? Buy big suits, give them all a handful of shield/marker/gun drones to take lascannon shots, hide the drones behind buildings to avoid small arms fire, and your big suits will take forever to actually put down.

Vespid are like cheap crisis suits. They have a guaranteed alpha strike on something which is super strong. Then they're pretty glass filled. Worse than commanders but still rather good.

The main thing I think Tau need is a better markerlight table. All of our guns hitting on 4+ just makes so many units too unreliable for their points. Commanders benefit most strongly from our current table. If Re-roll ones got replaced with flat +1 BS, I bet a lot more of our units would be viable.

I agree with most of what you said... except the crisis suits. One round of low-strength fire will strip off the drones easily, and then they're ripe for the picking. And the problem of their massive unreliability in terms of shooting remains. And the fact that virtually everything they do can be done better by other units for their cost.
If you have any good counterarguments I'm open to it, but "they get one round of good shooting" is extremely uncompelling given how atrociously unreliable 4+ BS is, and the fact that they'll die in 2 turns at most.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Alcibiades wrote:
SevenSeasOfRhye wrote:

Hammerheads are decent, although still suffer from the 1-in-all problem of having a single shot that can easily whiff, especially with heavy movement. The best way to field hammerheads is with longstrike, who not only hits on a 2+, but can boost other hammerheads within 6' to do the same. Points wise, Hammerheads are now more better than broadsides, for about the same amount of shooting but with better BS and better staying power.

If you have 5 markerlights on the target, the Hammerhead has a 97% chance to hit while on the move.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
Markerlights are cheap (3 points) and you can get them in bulk. They benefot the firing unit, they can fire at a different target, and the benefit each other. You should get one on every shas'ui. You should have no problem getting 5 on an enemy unit that you want taken out.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
They also duplicate the effects of most support systems, meaning you don't have to buy them.

See my post about how you rarely every manage to get a full 5 markers on any one target more than once or twice per game. Seriously.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

DaPino wrote:
SevenSeasOfRhye wrote:
Marmatag wrote:
I'll agree in regards to Forgeworld. Some of these units are incredibly strong.

For Tau - and, I hate doing this, because it's such a nasty unit and invalidates my army completely - you should use the Y'varhna Riptide.

1. 18" fly move.
2. 2+/4++ statline, with a 3++ against melee.
3. 3d6 strenght 6, ap-2, 2 damage flamer.
4. strength 10 anti-tank weaponry
5. Has numerous upgrade options including shield drones.
6. 14 wounds, 7 toughness

All of this for about 400 points, and it's only a FA.

It's immune to assault. It blows up tanks. The optimal weaponry against it - assault cannons - are getting their pants nerfed off in the new SM codex.

Yeah I kinda see no other options, despite the absurd pricing for one. I honestly think it's kind of disgraceful that forgeworld models can just dictate victory like this, but I don't see much of any choice if I want to be competitive.

I mean, how is this different from scatterbikes dictating victory in every single Eldar army until very recent?
Most competitive players might want FW models to become completely useless because that would mean cheaper competitive armies but don't act like this is purely a FW problem.

I never said ONLY FW models are imbalanced, but it seems pretty obvious that if you've bought a forge world model, your chances of victory go up simply by virtue of having a forge world model. And that's obnoxious. It's really annoying that the main GW line can't reliably beat them.

**materpillar**

SevenSeasOfRhye wrote:

I agree with most of what you said... except the crisis suits. One round of low-strength fire will strip off the drones easily, and then they're ripe for the picking. And the problem of their massive unreliability in terms of shooting remains. And the fact that virtually everything they do can be done better by other units for their cost.

If you have any good counterarguments I'm open to it, but "they get one round of good shooting" is extremely uncompelling given how atrociously unreliable 4+ BS is, and the fact that they'll die in 2 turns at most.

I guess my main experience with them is just that manta strike is extremely strong. You have complete control over where to place them and how much danger to expose them to. Crisis suits are extremely strong at punishing misposition by your opponent. With complete control over deployment you can maximize their survivabiltiy by keeping them away from guns that are efficient at killing them or straight up killing the guns that are efficient at killing them first. Because crisis suits laugh off lots of small arms fire. If your opponent overextends they can smash his backfield or weak flank.

Obviously if your opponent is really good they can minimize this and if they're running the finest of cheddar they might not have a "weak" flank. Crisis suits are just significantly more durable than vespid and significantly more flexible in deployment than anything not vespid.

Ignoring commanders, crisis suits exclusively occupy a very useful tactical niche. While they're probably overpriced, they're not horribly so. Outside of the most hyper competive setting they're still fine. With stealth team support they can also go triple flamer which is a niche a commander can't fill as well.

**Gamgee**

Crisis suits are only good when your opponent makes mistakes is what I'm hearing. Much like the fabled distraction carnifex/riptide it relies on your opponent making a mistake. I would rather not gamble. The gamer in my local are extremely savvy and such simple tricks haven't worked for anyone in the past here. Eventually such tricks will stop working when your opponent learns them. Against ultramarines cheese list they basically just blob up around gulliman and the crisis suits simply don't have the alpha or beta strike to get through that amount of vehicles compared t commander spam. They will also fail equally miserably at denting conscript spam barring flamer builds. Not to mention commanders can equally punish people out of position if not out right better. Vespid are faster than most things and can cap objectives or easily get line breaker and in a pinch offer some supporting fire. They play a different role to commander/crisis entirely.

**materpillar**

Gamgee wrote:
Crisis suits are only good when your opponent makes mistakes is what I'm hearing. Much like the fabled distraction carnifex/riptide it relies on your opponent making a mistake. I would rather not gamble. The gamer in my local are extremely savvy and such simple tricks haven't worked for anyone in the past here. Eventually such tricks will stop working when your opponent learns them. Against ultramarines cheese list they basically just blob up around gulliman and the crisis suits simply don't have the alpha or beta strike to get through that amount of vehicles compared t commander spam. They will also fail equally miserably at denting conscript spam barring flamer builds. Not to mention commanders can equally punish people out of position if not out right better. Vespid are faster than most things and can cap objectives or easily get line breaker and in a pinch offer some supporting fire. They play a different role to commander/crisis entirely.

Ok let's talk about commanders for a second. Having commanders in your army forces your opponent to play and position differently. Their threat range is basically anywhere on the board unless your opponent is extremely spread out and bubbling his entire deployment with a 9" nondeepstrike bubble. If at anytime they aren't perfectly situated your commanders can arrive in that weak area and smash it. If not on the first turn then you simply wait until you make a weakness with the rest of your army. Without commanders your opponent simply doesn't have to worry about large swaths of their backfield or the objectives there as they cannot be effectively threatened by your army. The mere existance of your commanders in reserve necessitates more conservative deployment.

Crisis suits do the same thing (and nothing else in our army does), they're just more points inefficient about it. I guess I'd describe it thusly. In 7th edition did you ever run a riptide outside of a riptide wing? Like from an optimization point of view there was no reason to ever do that, objectively and statistically you shouldn't ever have done that. If you never did, you should probably just spam commanders. If you ever ran riptides outside of a riptide wing, crisis suits are probably fine to field.

**Gamgee**

Not in my crazy meta I can't. Riptides Wing was seen as weak in the meta in 7th in that day. These are extremely proficient players and one of them travels to all the tournaments they can and even "fun" casual lists are pretty competitive. There is no room for weakness here.

**TheNewBlood**

Gamgee wrote:
Not in my crazy meta I can't. Riptides Wing was seen as weak in the meta in 7th in that day. These are extremely proficient players and one of them travels to all the tournaments they can and even "fun" casual lists are pretty competitive. There is no room for weakness here.

What tournaments are the people in your local meta traveling to or preparing for? If they're ITC or NOVA tournaments, the alterations to the missions as well as changing kill points and not allowing Power Level 31+ units would seem to put a lot more emphasis on mobility. Tau certainly have a lot of options for mobility in 8th Edition.

**Gamgee**

Base rules for now but it won't be long until ITC. The community is discussing things now. Even without base rules there is an honour agreement to just not bring things over that power level anyways unless you let them know in advance.

**Arandmoor**

HuskyWarhammer wrote:
I'm generally happy with a lot of the changes to Tau - the things that got nerfed (Riptide, Crisis) were units that needed it. Remember - most units got a points increase, so be careful with labeling things as "overcosted."

Fly on so many suits lets them get away from melee without penalty, which might be a bit too strong. Commanders are incredibly powerful, and I predict spam of them will be a thing. Classic gunlines got somewhat of a breath of fresh air and markerlights fit my mental image of how they work now. Rerolling 1's is no small benefit and shouldn't be overlooked - hello, overcharge.

I predict that players that spam commanders are going to get the rug ripped out from under them when the next tau codex comes out because there's no way in hell the intent is for Tau to spam commanders over Crisis teams. So, while it might work now, I wouldn't buy too many of those kits. It won't end well for you.

And, is it just me or does the Tau seem to be the pet modeling project of someone at forgeworld or something? For some reason it seems as if everything Tau hits forgeworld first, and then moves into the main GW Tau line like a codex later. And I mean that the Tau do this way more often than any other army.

**pismakron**

1) If someone brings some imba win-button from Forgeworld, it is perfectly okay to ask him to replace it with something from the regular index.

2) Firewarriors, Vespids, Hounds, 3-4 Commanders with cyclic ion thingys, a couple of Pathfinders, a couple of stealth
suits and more Firewarriors with a couple of fireblades. Also shield drones are a thing once again. Stormsurge and ghostkheel are half-decent also.

**Trollbert**

So what you want Crisis Suits to do is outshoot one of the most imbalanced lists in the game, Gamgee?

**GI_Redshirt**

Arandmoor wrote:
HuskyWarhammer wrote:
I'm generally happy with a lot of the changes to Tau - the things that got nerfed (Riptide, Crisis) were units that needed it. Remember - most units got a points increase, so be careful with labeling things as "overcosted."

Fly on so many suits lets them get away from melee without penalty, which might be a bit too strong. Commanders are incredibly powerful, and I predict spam of them will be a thing. Classic gunlines got somewhat of a breath of fresh air and markerlights fit my mental image of how they work now. Rerolling 1's is no small benefit and shouldn't be overlooked - hello, overcharge.

I predict that players that spam commanders are going to get the rug ripped out from under them when the next tau codex comes out because there's no way in hell the intent is for Tau to spam commanders over Crisis teams. So, while it might work now, I wouldn't buy too many of those kits. It won't end well for you.

And, is it just me or does the Tau seem to be the pet modeling project of someone at forgeworld or something? For some reason it seems as if everything Tau hits forgeworld first, and then moves into the main GW Tau line like a codex later. And I mean that the Tau do this way more often than any other army.

What are you talking about? What from FW has been transferred from there to the regular GW line? All of Tau's releases since 6th (Riptides, Breachers, Coldstars, Ghostkeels, Stormsurges, etc.) came straight from the GW line, not from FW.

As for the Commander thing, I fully agree with you. If GW is actually going to be paying attention to what the community says regarding balancing stuff and reads the forums and the like, I fully expect Commanders to get a fairly decent price hike in the codex, probably while other options are brought down in price.

**Gamgee**

Trollbert wrote:
So what you want Crisis Suits to do is outshoot one of the most imbalanced lists in the game, Gamgee?

Well there's two options. You can nerf ultramarines down to everyone else (mostly gulliman is an issue) or you can buff people up to their level, and I don't see them doing that for some reason so I think buffing things up to that level is a more ideal solution. Also who said they have to outshoot them? They could give Tau units a cost reduction and some better range across the board again. I also hate how unfluffy it is I need to spam commanders and drones to stand a chance at winning competitively and its boring to look at. Not to mention as a FSE player it made a ton of my models in my army useless.

I want balance as I always have you should know me by now. What other people don't seem to want is balance. So far I've been right ton the money about Tau since it came out. Do you suddenly think I'm going to buff Tau so much that they are too strong? Do I seem like that kind of person to you when I'm fairly renowned on these forums for admitting when I'm wrong? If I did do that by accident I would tone them and tweak them until they were nice and balanced (along with everything else). Though I admit I would need help balancing other races since I am not so intricately detailed on their workings.

Right now people hate spam. I want to balance the game so that I don't need to spam commanders as the only viable anti-tank option for competitive play. I don't want them to be terrible units they should be better at buffing than they are. Imps have some crazy powerful buffs. So I would definitely make them more expensive to limit them but increase their buffs to make up for it and still have a reason to take them if so desired. This does mean that crisis suits, riptides, ghostkeels or railguns would need to become points efficient enough to become our main anti-tank options though or perhaps a mix but it's very hard to balance a game like this when with numbers eventually something will be found to be superior. I don't think true and proper balancing can be done until everyone get's their codex which can give intensives to bring some troops or other more mixed lists, but I do think it could be improved in the interim.

**Martel732**

Marmatag wrote:
Martel732 wrote:
What's happening to assault cannons now?

No longer a wargear choice for dreadnoughts. At least, that's the rumor. There's a video on youtube where someone with the book talks through the major changes.

Wonderful. I think I have the bits for other weapons somewhere...

**SevenSeasOfRhye**

materpillar wrote:
SevenSeasOfRhye wrote:

I agree with most of what you said... except the crisis suits. One round of low-strength fire will strip off the drones easily, and then they're ripe for the picking. And the problem of their massive unreliability in terms of shooting remains. And the fact that virtually everything they do can be done better by other units for their cost.

If you have any good counterarguments I'm open to it, but "they get one round of good shooting" is extremely uncompelling given how atrociously unreliable 4+ BS is, and the fact that they'll die in 2 turns at most.

I guess my main experience with them is just that manta strike is extremely strong. You have complete control over where to place them and how much danger to expose them to. Crisis suits are extremely strong at punishing misposition by your opponent. With complete control over deployment you can maximize their survivabiltiy by keeping them away from guns that are efficient at killing them or straight up killing the guns that are efficient at killing them first. Because crisis suits laugh off lots of small arms fire. If your opponent overextends they can smash his backfield or weak flank.

Obviously if your opponent is really good they can minimize this and if they're running the finest of cheddar they might not have a "weak" flank. Crisis suits are just significantly more durable than vespid and significantly more flexible in deployment than anything not vespid.

Ignoring commanders, crisis suits exclusively occupy a very useful tactical niche. While they're probably overpriced, they're not horribly so. Outside of the most hyper competive setting they're still fine. With stealth team support they can also go triple flamer which is a niche a commander can't fill as well.

Honestly while I agree that manta strike is nice, that one decent advantage is not nearly enough to make up for the price jack. You want your points spent elsewhere on bigger, better things- if a 3-man unit cost 260-240 pts rather than 280-300 I'd consider them worthwhile, but on the whole they're really not that great. Along with the riptide and broadside, they've basically lost most of their utility as nearly anything they can do, other units can do better. The cost and the markerlight nerf makes it extremely suboptimal.

**Gamgee**

Day one of the BAO is over.

Two Tau in the first day of undefeated lists and one is top contender so far if I'm reading this right.

However... he took 9 commanders! The other guy took 5 and a Y'vahrah (Papa Bless).

https://www.frontlinegaming.org/2017/07/29/bao-first-3-rounds-results-and-videos/

Honestly I am fine with GW nerfing them in points, as long as they buff them to be actually good at commanding and buff up some other anti-tank stuff for the Tau.

9 Commanders would be the lions share of his army and points probably just took like a million gun drones and probably something to stay on the map so he can alpha strike.

Tau are not "balanced" when the only viable units are commanders, drones, and Y'vahrah.

Hopefully we don't see the Tau just nerfed rather than re-balanced. I want to actually use mini's that aren't hq's in my lists.

I suspect this will be "proof" of Tau being OP all across the board and we'll get another round of nerfs to everything.

**pismakron**

Gamgee wrote:
Day one of the BAO is over.

Two Tau in the first day of undefeated lists and one is top contender so far if I'm reading this right.

However... he took 9 commanders! The other guy took 5 and a Y'vahrah (Papa Bless).

https://www.frontlinegaming.org/2017/07/29/bao-first-3-rounds-results-and-videos/

Haha, this is hilarious.

All the usual suspects are there: Tau commander spam, Tau commander spam + Yvahrah, Conscript spam, Guilliman parking lot, Guilliman + Stormraven spam, Magnus + Knights + brimstone horrors. I am a little surprised, that there are no nids or harlequins.

**SevenSeasOfRhye**

But guys, don't you realize crisis suits are REALLY GOOD? Those guys must just have been really lucky!

**Retrogamer0001**

Spam in general is all over this edition, it's starting to feel like 7th again.

**Gamgee**

SevenSeasOfRhye wrote:
But guys, don't you realize crisis suits are REALLY GOOD? Those guys must just have been really lucky!

Nah the big meta buster is sky ray spam with those seeker missiles. So many people say it, so it must be true.

**pismakron**

Retrogamer0001 wrote:
Spam in general is all over this edition, it's starting to feel like 7th again.

Yes, but no more rolling on the Telepathy table to see if one side gets invisibility. I don't miss that part one bit

**SevenSeasOfRhye**

pismakron wrote:
Retrogamer0001 wrote:
Spam in general is all over this edition, it's starting to feel like 7th again.

Yes, but no more rolling on the Telepathy table to see if one side gets invisibility. I don't miss that part one bit

fething hell, yes, I HATED that spell.