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My Tau playing friend absolutely loves to use his commander with iridium armor and other juicy upgrades to tank shots for whatever squad he is attached to. I've been racking my brain coming up with ways to counter this (aside from just deep striking or attacking from another angle) and this is what I've come up with.

Position one of your units in between the unit you intend to shoot with and the unit you want to shoot so that the tanking model and as few as possible other models in his squad are obscured, thus granting them a 5+ cover save due to treating your blocking unit as terrain.
Focus fire on that unit targeting 6+ cover or no cover.

Since wounds cannot be allocated to the tanking model due to Focus Fire rules, you are effectively bypassing the tanking model.
This is obviously only useful in specific situations (When you don't have the option to simply flank, when the entire unit is not already in cover, etc), but is theoretically possible.
Has anyone had experience with this type of manoeuvre? Am I missing any rules that would prevent this from working? Thoughts in general?

I never thought of that before. Now I'm interested in the answer too.

Could be pretty difficult to set up, but if you can pull it off, and use all the premeasuring and line of sight checking you can muster it is perfectly legal. Just make sure you focus fire 6+ and not 'no cover save' because they'll just GtG for 6+ save.

Focus Fire takes the cover save before Going to Ground into account, not after. So if they GtG for a 6+ save, they'll still get wounds allocated to them if you Focus Fire on no cover.

Um, don't you freely fire thought your own units? And, can take a cover save if someone is shooting through one of your units at another one of your units? Or am I just completely wrong?

ChaosSmaug wrote:
Um, don't you freely fire thought your own units? And, can take a cover save if someone is shooting through one of your units at another one of your units? Or am I just completely wrong?

A model fires freely through his own unit. Singular. Other units block Line of Sight as normal. So with a second unit you can manipulate cover saves.

You can freely fire through the models in the firing unit, but not a third unit (from either team). you are correct about getting cover saves from your own intervening units though (as well as enemy units though).

the BRB just says you get cover save if "a third unit is in between", so thats what makes this work.

Yes this tactic works and is in fact quite clever, another way to deal with the iridium douche™ is use barrage to blow the unit up from behind him.

I should know i use him all the time.

This is a great idea. I'll have to try it out on SW with tanking wolfguard sometime.

People in my group tend to use this tactic regularly. Works too when you position one of your models in terrain so the commander has cover from it (and therefore from the whole unit) and then use focus fire.

Since you also cant kill what you cant see you can also park 2 rhinos (for example) back to back in front of a model with only a slit opening to look through so he can only see one model (the seargent or IC for example) and then snipe it. Nasty but totally legal.

Awesome! Thanks for the feedback and all the expansion on the idea. I'll definitely be trying all these other ideas next warhammer night.

Although using the vehicles to block line of sight in order to snipe a character seems slightly less effective due to Look our Sir. Then again if you're making him roll 10 look out sirs it does pose a better chance if that IC REALLY has to die.

Yup, this works. It's tough to do if your opponent conga-lines the unit, though.

Bojazz wrote:
Awesome! Thanks for the feedback and all the expansion on the idea. I'll definitely be trying all these other ideas next warhammer night.

Although using the vehicles to block line of sight in order to snipe a character seems slightly less effective due to Look our Sir. Then again if you're making him roll 10 look out sirs it does pose a better chance if that IC REALLY has to die.

Jeah not that effective against ICs. But very effective against special weapons for example.