BrianDavion wrote:
Primark G wrote:You will never see an
LR in a competitive list. Custodes have lots of means to move around where they need to be. Every unit is a lot of points so the transport is really superfluous.
in any army you will, competativly, never see anything but the same 2 or 3 units spammed. anyone asking for stuff to fill the army out typically isn't thinking "MOAR POWAH"
The problem with the Land Raider isn't whether you'll see it in a competitive list, it's whether you'll see it at all. They're too expensive to be transports and too underarmed to be tanks in their own right in
any context, no matter how casual it is.
The general shift in the durability/firepower relationship that makes 8e games go fewer turns and makes the first-turn advantage so significant has rendered transports generally ineffective as transports (you can't spend two turns moving somewhere you need to go if the game's going to end with someone getting tabled on turn three or turn four, that just makes it more likely you're the one getting tabled), which means they need to be gunboats first and transports second (unless it's a Stormraven and is going to get you a lot of stuff in the other guy's deployment zone on turn two). And one Predator or two Razorbacks render the Land Raider so completely redundant as a gunboat that there isn't much point in taking one.
The Land Raider isn't underused because it isn't competitive in a vacuum, it's underused because every single assumption underlying its design (a heavy tank is going to survive a large portion of the game, an assault transport is a more reliable way to get units into melee than Deepstriking them, assaulting this thing that's trying to get up in your face to deliver a melee unit isn't going to do a lot, four lascannons and two heavy bolters is a strong armament that's difficult and expensive to match elsewhere, games are going to run long enough that leaving your assault unit in a transport for two turns isn't going to cripple your ability to inflict damage on your enemy over the long term...) is outdated and incorrect. Its position today is basically what the Predator's position was back in 7th, where it was a relevant thing to have at one point but has been rendered meaningless by a long series of changes to how the game operates.
And rather than attempting to change something about it the Custodes Land Raider has taken all those flawed and incorrect assumptions and pushed them further, by making an underarmed gunboat more expensive, a unit that's frequently too easy to ignore tougher, and an assault transport in an edition that makes assault transports a way to waste your assault units' damage potential carry more expensive units.
