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 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

murphs wrote:
Melee battlesuits would be cool. A riptide with some crazy fusion sword is easy to envision.

No. One of the major themes of the Tau is that they despise melee combat, seeing it as barbaric. Farsight is an exception, not a rule.
Leave melee combat to the auxiliaries, which is what GW should be focusing on instead of yet more battlesuits.

I thought the justification was poor close range vision and (relatively) slow reflexes. That was probably 4th edition though.

I'd be against melee suits, just because I want to see the auxiliary models like Kroot and Vespid get some love. Give them their own "Chapter" or "Kultur" or what have you, and some decent CC stats, and suddenly the one-dimensional battlesuit Tau armies start becoming a lot more interesting.

The Newman wrote:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

murphs wrote:
Melee battlesuits would be cool. A riptide with some crazy fusion sword is easy to envision.

No. One of the major themes of the Tau is that they despise melee combat, seeing it as barbaric. Farsight is an exception, not a rule.
Leave melee combat to the auxiliaries, which is what GW should be focusing on instead of yet more battlesuits.

I thought the justification was poor close range vision and (relatively) slow reflexes. That was probably 4th edition though.

Its both. I'd leave the melee to auxiliaries.

I don't get the impression that the tau despise melee.

The ethereals and aunva's guards all have honour blades, and ethereals do have ritual combat, I believe, using them (how else was Aunshi so good at killing orks?). Obviously those are ritualistic, but to place such high importance on supposedly barbaric weapons seems odd. Instead, it seems to me that the Tau simply go the most efficient route and have found shooting to be vastly more efficient than melee (for themselves). The kroot have shown to them also that if you are physically capable, melee can also be useful and efficient.

Then there's the Onager Gauntlets which proved effective, but costly. So clearly the Tau are experimenting with melee combat, which is not something they'd do if they despised it. For the time being, their auxiliaries provide better melee than their own troops, so they use their auxiliaries instead of forcing the issue.

That said, I would like the Farsight Enclaves to be expanded and have actual melee Tau (which is how they were sold originally). So while the Empire uses alien auxiliaries, the Enclaves use specialized melee suits and gear. It would also be a chance to make Enclaves very suit heavy for the Tau players that only like suits but don't like auxiliaries, while the Empire would have a diverse roster of aliens to choose from for the Tau players that like that more than suits.

Well, it's a good thing instead of either of those options happening we instead have Farsight units that are meh at CC and no real love for other aliens in the empire.

The sadness, drags me down.

I'd like to see some melee options for XV25 stealth suits (ninja-to equivalents), XV8 crisis suits (katana equivalents) and maaaaybe an option for riptides (another katana equivalent).

Not anything to turn them into a melee blender or melee-only unit, but I could live with an option that makes them able to hold their own if they get drawn into hand-to-hand combat - and possibly really put the hurt on a monster/vehicle.

orks are all allowed to have top tier shooting I see no reason why tau shouldn't have melle options that are top tier as well.

Factions should not have weaknesses or strenghts, lists should. I should not be punished for running a Titanic list and Tau should not be punished for running a melee list.

flandarz 779769 10556479 se.jpg wrote:I think the Kroot and Vespid were supposed to fill that role, but they are so completely unsupported by the rules that no one bothers to use them.*

*no one is a generalization and may not reflect your experiences or the "top lists".

If they were used in top lists it wouldn't be true to any real degree that nobody used them, why don't you write what you actually mean? Kroot are fine, but they are not a melee unit any more than Scout Squads are. Hounds are fine as well and are an actual melee unit. Tau just happen to have slightly more competitive options at the moment, but you can get some perfectly fine melee units while playing Tau.

 vict0988 wrote:
Factions should not have weaknesses or strenghts, lists should. I should not be punished for running a Titanic list and Tau should not be punished for running a melee list.

You should though. Pure IK armies shouldn't be able to take objectives as well as guard and guard shouldn't be as good at melee as orks. If every faction is identical except for how they look, space marines will become the main pure army played due to having the most models and having a higher chance of having something broken.

 kastelen wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:
Factions should not have weaknesses or strenghts, lists should. I should not be punished for running a Titanic list and Tau should not be punished for running a melee list.

You should though. Pure IK armies shouldn't be able to take objectives as well as guard and guard shouldn't be as good at melee as orks. If every faction is identical except for how they look, space marines will become the main pure army played due to having the most models and having a higher chance of having something broken.

If Tau has access to the same allies as Knights, Marines etc I would agree, same as if they had their aux units that do the same - but they don't.

The Imperium is a super faction which skews things massively and makes it a case "this army can have everything, these armies can't."

That being said - I would prefer the Tau to not go down the melee-suits route.

 Stormonu wrote:
I'd like to see some melee options for XV25 stealth suits (ninja-to equivalents), XV8 crisis suits (katana equivalents) and maaaaybe an option for riptides (another katana equivalent).

Not anything to turn them into a melee blender or melee-only unit, but I could live with an option that makes them able to hold their own if they get drawn into hand-to-hand combat - and possibly really put the hurt on a monster/vehicle.

Honestly, mass-production of fusion blades would be nice. Rather than just having one as a relic.

 kastelen wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:
Factions should not have weaknesses or strenghts, lists should. I should not be punished for running a Titanic list and Tau should not be punished for running a melee list.

You should though. Pure IK armies shouldn't be able to take objectives as well as guard and guard shouldn't be as good at melee as orks. If every faction is identical except for how they look, space marines will become the main pure army played due to having the most models and having a higher chance of having something broken.

If you have a list with pure Knights then that list might have weaknesses, imo Necron Titanic units should not be deliberately UP because you or anyone think my faction should be unable to make as strong Titanic centric lists as Knights. A Guard melee list is going to look way different than an Ork melee list, but it should have a fair chance of winning games based on luck, skill and list matchup and not just be a gakky Ork list. That's how you kill faction diversity because some git decides Ynnari should do everything amazing and Grey Knights should be garbo. You can do the same basic premise, melee, shooting, big tough units an infinite number of ways for each faction to perform a basic premise with a unique spin. Otherwise we can just get rid of the rule of 3 and reduce each faction to two units, put everyone in the box you think they should be in.

Yeah, if any faction should be able to make powerful warmachines, it should be necrons. I mean, they are a race of immortal robots who put nearly all of their points in science and engineering. Heavy vehicles should be their forte, not their weakness.

As a Gundam fan I wouldn't be opposed to some mechs with big swords. Farsight Enclaves seems the best place to put them. A more melee focussedc infantry unit wouldn't be a bad thing for all Tau though. Kroot Broots? Or another alien race allied in. The Reivers entry in my BA Codex says how they dislike using the sneaky tactics, but do anyways because, eh why not? A newly saved Tau ally race with a history in close combat (maybe from a low-tech world with dangerous natural predators, to make it more like a defensive thing than they're inherently murderous) could provide another option for lists and modelling.

Given we are having supplements with unique units presented to factions now. A melee suit specifically for farsight wouldn't be too out of the question.. But I'd personally much prefer to see Kroot and other auxillaries.

The Tau could be so much more, this is true.

The best method for this is to grind all the models into a fine powder, and use it as a filler to cast models which actually fit the 40k setting, as opposed to importing Gundam into 40k because you want to (fail to) expand into the Far East...

 Grimtuff wrote:

 Hollow wrote:

 flandarz wrote:
I think the Kroot and Vespid were supposed to fill that role, but they are so completely unsupported by the rules that no one bothers to use them.*

I have them and use them frequently, as do all of the other T'au players in my area. Don't present your very narrow experience and opinion as fact.

Pot, meet kettle.

I’ve never seen anyone use Vespid in several editions. Only time I’ve ever seen someone using Kroot in 8th was as a speedbump in the same manner as one would use Cultists. So, yeah.

How is this a kettle pot situation? I said what I do... he stated that "nobody does". I was speaking for myself and the people I know... He was speaking for everyone.

I was quite clear that it was a generalization, in the same vein of "due to the expense and danger, no one has a tiger as a pet". Doesn't mean literally no one has a tiger as a pet, simply that it is rare to the extreme. Same thing here.

As someone who was very excited about the Tau when they were first released (don’t judge I was getting started in the hobby after being drawn in by Fire Warrior) it’s quite disappointing how they’ve ended up. They could have done a lot more with the auxiliary races and done a human troops or something at least. The battlesuit focus just comes off as very bland now.

Templarted wrote:
As someone who was very excited about the Tau when they were first released (don’t judge I was getting started in the hobby after being drawn in by Fire Warrior) it’s quite disappointing how they’ve ended up. They could have done a lot more with the auxiliary races and done a human troops or something at least. The battlesuit focus just comes off as very bland now.

To you it does I love it. And I don't want melee options on the suits that just feels like it takes away who we are. A auxiliary that is good at combat would be nice obvious tau touches such as armor or earth caste weaponry

Templarted wrote:
As someone who was very excited about the Tau when they were first released (don’t judge I was getting started in the hobby after being drawn in by Fire Warrior) it’s quite disappointing how they’ve ended up. They could have done a lot more with the auxiliary races and done a human troops or something at least. The battlesuit focus just comes off as very bland now.

I started Tau when they were first released.

Back then they even made rules for using an entirely Kroot army, and you could customize how they had evolved.

Now Kroot are awful, and the new tau units?

Big battlesuit
Different big battlesuit
Commander big battlesuit
Big stealth battlesuit
Redone big broadside battlesuits
Redone regular battlesuits
Battlesuit battlesuits?
Battlesuit.

 An Actual Englishman wrote:
I think Tau lack a psychic unit more than a melee one personally. Hopefully this is addressed in the upcoming Psychic Awakening.

It isn't either/or. They lack both. Either could easily be addressed at any time.

Templarted wrote:
As someone who was very excited about the Tau when they were first released (don’t judge I was getting started in the hobby after being drawn in by Fire Warrior) it’s quite disappointing how they’ve ended up. They could have done a lot more with the auxiliary races and done a human troops or something at least. The battlesuit focus just comes off as very bland now.

I agree. Original Tau was a mechanized scifi hi-tech army which was maybe most believable faction in the game. They did not do close combat because shooting was just so much smarter. Now they're just a mecha army which has huge monsters with tons of wound and bucket of dice. It has become just a parody of itself.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Voss wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:
I think Tau lack a psychic unit more than a melee one personally. Hopefully this is addressed in the upcoming Psychic Awakening.

It isn't either/or. They lack both. Either could easily be addressed at any time.

Kroot have Psykers - Kroot Shamans - which even had official rules back in the day. But no new Kroot units have been released, quite the contrary all the old Kroot lore has been essentially forgotten or ignored because it is more important to release new version of Stormsurge which can dual wield Riptides.