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With the rise of space marine supplements we have seen an almost identical rise of complaining about space marines. This makes perfect sense as people love complaining about space marines and them being OP gives everyone the perfect excuse to unleash their inner salt mines.

What makes less sense is the fact very few people are acknowledging the other top meta army, Tau. This is the case despite the fact that Tau as a whole has had some of its best showings at tournaments every (even better than Tau/dar). This is also despite the fact that playing Tau in general feels horrible. Yes I love it when I can’t assault an army who is bad in CC because I’ll get shot to death in overwatch, that’s interesting gameplay right there. Also it’s a ton of fun when I can’t actually kill a Tau army’s Riptides in most games I play vs them. Savior protocol is an exciting and fairly balanced rule which really helps make games against Tau an enjoyable experience.

Not saying tau deserve more hate than marines, but it is somewhat confusing we haven’t seen more complain about Tau recently with how well they’ve done and on how awful they are to play.

The short answer is people do complain about Tau it's just that Marines are the most popular army. So they get more grief than Tau because of that. Especially if they are doing well.

Salt donkey wrote:
meta

Salt donkey wrote:
tournaments

Well, looking at the game through a meta tournament list lens misses that Tau have exactly one tournament-winning build (Fire Warrior / Riptide / Ghostkeel-for-taste spam, run as Farsight Enclaves), and it's that build that's boring and un-fun to play against. In a more casual context Tau can be shooty but mobile (eg Piranhas, Vespids, Devilfish-borne troops, Crisis Suits) and it makes for a more interesting game.

I find it much harder to hate on an army that has one competitive build than one that smashes tournaments and casual games alike.

Edit: And I'd argue that Savior Protocols is a big part of the problem. All the bigger stuff in the Tau codex is priced around having easy access to ablative wounds, so if they don't spam shield drones they're at a severe disadvantage. Going up against them, although I wish 40K had more restrictions on targeting, it isn't terribly exciting to chew through tons and tons of ablative wounds on targets that are incentivized to stay still.

Tau are doing well because they are very good against marines and marines saturate the meta. They get dumpstered by Eldar Flyers, GSC, Orks, and go fairly even against the rest of the pack. Marines also are something like 50% of top 4 placements in recent tournaments, so while Tau tend to do well they aren't as big of an issue. People complain about Tau though, usually about SP and sometimes about Commanders/Riptides.

Salt donkey wrote:
With the rise of space marine supplements we have seen an almost identical rise of complaining about space marines. This makes perfect sense as people love complaining about space marines and them being OP gives everyone the perfect excuse to unleash their inner salt mines.

What makes less sense is the fact very few people are acknowledging the other top meta army, Tau. This is the case despite the fact that Tau as a whole has had some of its best showings at tournaments every (even better than Tau/dar). This is also despite the fact that playing Tau in general feels horrible. Yes I love it when I can’t assault an army who is bad in CC because I’ll get shot to death in overwatch, that’s interesting gameplay right there. Also it’s a ton of fun when I can’t actually kill a Tau army’s Riptides in most games I play vs them. Savior protocol is an exciting and fairly balanced rule which really helps make games against Tau an enjoyable experience.

Not saying tau deserve more hate than marines, but it is somewhat confusing we haven’t seen more complain about Tau recently with how well they’ve done and on how awful they are to play.

Which sub faction - (Hint its Marines) has had a massive power boost recently - which full Faction has not (hint its Tau)
Which sub faction (Hint its Marines) has had a vast and seemingly unending number of model relases, which full Faction has not (hint its Tau)
Which sub faction - (Hint its Marines) has a huge number of extra power boosting supplements in addiiton to the Codex which full Faction has not (hint its Tau or indeed ANY other Faction or sub faction)
Which sub faction - (Hint its Marines) not satisfied with having the above, has had further Supplements which pretend to be a Campaign pack

I have a small Tau army but not fan of their suit models so its dwarfed by my Marine armies before some nonsense is levelelled about Xenos salt or something.

Tau are in an odd spot. They have a good match-up vs. Marines if (!) played well and build right, which is why you see some players absolutely crush it with them (and have so for the past couple of years before Richard Siegler/Brian Pullen took the US scene too ... Mani Cheema's Broadside-Rampage got him to 2nd place ITC for a while, the Warhammer World GT champs was won by Tau 2 years in a row, etc..).

That said, they have a few very hard match-ups (e.g. Plaguebearers and Ynnari being prime Tau-Predators that magically disappeared from the Tau "list-of-problems"). Also, while most Marine-list can crush people pretty badly on the mid-tables with some random stuff thrown in, the effectiveness of a Tau list drops very quickly if you're not facing the hyper-optimised build, but "just" a random Tau army with Kroot and Piranhas and a Stormsurge or whatever.

I think catbarf has the closest identifier for why people are hating on Marines but not on Tau. Ultimately, it comes down to exposure. Like catbarf said, very few people actually fight the top-tier meta-winning T'au lists. These lists all have something in common: Commanders+Riptides+Shield Drones. There's other stuff in there that tends to change on a list-by-list basis (number of Shield Drones per squad of drones compared to Markerlight Drones, number and type of Fire Warriors/Breachers, types of Commanders, Sept/Warlord choice, etc.), but that's the core.

That core is pretty specific. Few T'au players own 3 Riptides or 3 Commanders or have a glut of Shield Drones. There actually is a second T'au-based competitive list that comes down to Hammerheads and Devilfish and Skyray Gunships, but again, that' requiring owning 3-of (or kind-of-4-of because of Longstrike) for the same model, which not a lot of players do. And people that do own 3-of's of these units don't tend to bring all of them for-fun games. Outside these competitive builds, T'au are good, but not oppressively, strong.

Space Marines are quite a bit different. All their stuff got a significant boost out of Doctrines and vehicles gaining the benefits of their enhanced Chapter Tactics. Lots of players own Space Marines, and they're probably the most commonly faced-against army in the entire game. So people have a LOT of exposure to them, and when they do a LOT of people are seeing a big increase in how strong they are. This still doesn't mean that Space Marines are OP (that's a different discussion), but it absolutely will cause a lot of people to see Space Marines in a negative light. By this point, just about everyone has had at least one game against the New Space Marine codex and can compare it to the old one.

Notice; a lot of complaining happened with Guard when their codex dropped. Why? Lots of folks own Guard, they're pretty commonly faced off against, and their codex had substantial "across the board" buffs such that you didn't need to build a specific list to see the boost. It doesn't matter that Guard have pretty much disappeared from top lists, people's perception will be that they are strong.



So that's it. Fundamentally, it's about whether a codex as a whole or just a specific build is strong, and about how popular that faction already was. These factors link together to create a % chance that someone will have a negative experience against it. Here's a chart:

Frequency of battle: ---- High --------------------- Low
Everything "good": ------ Major Complaint ----- Minor Complaint
Specific Build "good": -- Minor Complaint ----- Minimal Complaint

Salt donkey wrote:
With the rise of space marine supplements we have seen an almost identical rise of complaining about space marines. This makes perfect sense as people love complaining about space marines and them being OP gives everyone the perfect excuse to unleash their inner salt mines.

What makes less sense is the fact very few people are acknowledging the other top meta army, Tau. This is the case despite the fact that Tau as a whole has had some of its best showings at tournaments every (even better than Tau/dar). This is also despite the fact that playing Tau in general feels horrible. Yes I love it when I can’t assault an army who is bad in CC because I’ll get shot to death in overwatch, that’s interesting gameplay right there. Also it’s a ton of fun when I can’t actually kill a Tau army’s Riptides in most games I play vs them. Savior protocol is an exciting and fairly balanced rule which really helps make games against Tau an enjoyable experience.

Not saying tau deserve more hate than marines, but it is somewhat confusing we haven’t seen more complain about Tau recently with how well they’ve done and on how awful they are to play.

Likely it's a difference in groups. Tau may be doing well in the competitive scenes, but at the local scenes, no one is playing them. We used to have three tau players in our group, all of them went to Chaos or Marines in 8th. A buddy of mine who lives back east reported the same thing to me and I myself, used to play Tau just last year, but left due to the large swings in difficulty of playing the army.

Even with SVP, most people would just clear the screen first and then blast my riptides to bits with lascannons or artillery (guard). Bolters and their Equiv are great at clearing drones.

Everyone keeps forgetting they exist.

Few people play tau, so few people play against them, so there is little to be unhappy about. And being unhappy about tau in tournament, would be rather strange considering tournament players should want powerful lists that are good at countering the meta, and still good on their own.

there are always complaints when a faction is topping the charts, but one thing to keep in mind is that in addition to Marines being good, they also get a lot of attention non Marine players tend to be jelous of this, (particualrly as some people LOOOOVE to hate on whats popular it's a physchalogical thing) So when Marines are good, you have the most popular army topping the charts, this provides a double dose of resentment from people.

Also it can legit more be a problem, maybe 1 in ten 40k players plays Tau, but I suspect players with a marine army is closer to half if not more

It's quite simple as to why we see less complaining about Tau and more complaining about Marines - Marines are far superior and perform way, waaay better than Tau. They have a greater variety of competitive builds, they are more interesting to play, they are only really countered by other Marine builds and they enjoy hugely disproportionate win percentages, first loss and 4-0 statistics.

Simply put, Marines are far more of a "meta top tier army" than Tau.

Your premise that "people like to complain about Marines" is stupid and wrong. People don't like imbalance. They don't like it when a game is too easy (if their faction is too strong) or too difficult (if their faction is too weak). We had just as many complaints about the Loyal 32 and the Castellan at the height of their domination and Ynnari when they rocked the meta (from many a Marine player, no less). There is no particular hatred for Marines, any more than there is a particular hatred for any other faction that over-performs competitively.

Tau have pretty much always been competitive in 8th, but haven't risen to boogeyman status.
What they're good at isn't completely oppressive (things like their re-roll wounds stratagem and reroll hits aura have pretty hefty limitations) and they have very clear deficiencies.

Tau happen to match up pretty well against the field-dominating marines...so they see a corresponding bump.

Plus they haven't had any chance for new, more broken, rules since the codex - Having not been in vigilus or seen any new models drop. Maybe, come PA-The Greater Good, that'll change?

People do, but its not on the same level as Marines, they are still very good and annoying to fight against. But the player can still win against Tau, still can kill off 70% of their army and feel like it was a close win.

Against SM it doesn't feel that way.

Because a lot of Tau players became Imperial Guard players for 8th Edition.

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:
Because a lot of Tau players became Imperial Guard players for 8th Edition.

There is more than a grain of truth to this...

If I wanted to sit in one place and shoot stuff off the board, I'd still be running 'Commissar Carl's Used Tank Emporium.'

 carldooley wrote:

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:
Because a lot of Tau players became Imperial Guard players for 8th Edition.

There is more than a grain of truth to this...

If anecdotal evidence counts, it's less 'grain' and more 'truck full of gravel'.

Salt donkey wrote:
With the rise of space marine supplements we have seen an almost identical rise of complaining about space marines. This makes perfect sense as people love complaining about space marines and them being OP gives everyone the perfect excuse to unleash their inner salt mines.

What makes less sense is the fact very few people are acknowledging the other top meta army, Tau. This is the case despite the fact that Tau as a whole has had some of its best showings at tournaments every (even better than Tau/dar). This is also despite the fact that playing Tau in general feels horrible. Yes I love it when I can’t assault an army who is bad in CC because I’ll get shot to death in overwatch, that’s interesting gameplay right there. Also it’s a ton of fun when I can’t actually kill a Tau army’s Riptides in most games I play vs them. Savior protocol is an exciting and fairly balanced rule which really helps make games against Tau an enjoyable experience.

Not saying tau deserve more hate than marines, but it is somewhat confusing we haven’t seen more complain about Tau recently with how well they’ve done and on how awful they are to play.

I agree with what you said. I reeeally don't like playing against the 50 drones 3 tides lists. But some of the SM lists are even worse: IH can overwatch on 4+ rerolling all hit rolls reroll ones to wound with 6's causing another wound. All this on a levi dread that has 2+ 4++ 5+++ and minus 1 dmg and half all damage and getting reapiered the next turn.

The "they don't appear as often" is perhaps a thing - but Tau were a highly played faction in 7th, so I am not totally convinced by the idea "no one has 3 riptides". Getting hold of all the drones legitimately might be a bit irksome - but buying tides and commanders is hardly difficult. This isn't a list dependent on selling your kidneys to acquire 1000 points of weird Forgeworld stuff.

Bluntly... I think Tau are harder to play. Okay you can say "I'm just going to gunline my riptides with all the drones covering them" - but you do have to calculate when to move your castle out and grab objectives or risk falling behind. The fact a few good players have this down to a fine art isn't the same as the various point and click Marine builds.

Which is also part of the antipathy. With Marines I just feel you look across the table and see an army which is just... better than yours. Its hitting you more often and harder, its running around the table without a care in the world or effectively turn 1 deep striking. It doesn't feel like there are lynch pins you can snap or that they are making tradeoffs for this power. And every release for the last however many months just seems to be more and more potentially cumulative buffs.

I also think there is a luck element. There will be times when those shield drones just will not die no matter what you do. (This can be intensely annoying.) Then there are other games where the Tau player fails a disproportionate number of saves, and soon you are killing or crippling the riptides and the list quickly falls apart. Or the Tau player fluffs his dice when it comes to shooting - which I feel he is much more likely to do than a Marine player.

Tyel wrote:
Getting hold of all the drones legitimately might be a bit irksome.

Beer bottle caps.

I think it comes down to the devil you know is better than...

Tau have been solid performers. However once you play a couple games against tau you get it, and it becomes a straight forward dice game.

1. Kill markerlights/Kill shielddrones 3. Kill fire warriors to prevent objective holding and force stuff to move. If the dice go your way and you manage to kill enough drones and fire warriors fast its GG.

With marines its like allowing a select competitive roided up pack of athletes competing with 3rd rate amateurs.

The issue with complaints is... nobody likes the fact only some get to have their cake and eat it too. Get newest models, most models releases, best rules, better at every phase than specialist armies, huge roster not limited to one or two over efficient units carrying the faction.

Some people would be happy if everybody got a slice cake instead. Or they would be happy with a smaller slice if it at least meant getting A slice.

I think it partly has to do with marines kind of getting EVERYTHING boosted. Like its not enough that they get crazy reliable and damaging shooting capabilities, they also do assault fairly well with shock assault and dedicated CC platforms like smash captains. So it's not like a one trick pony like Tau mostly are with markerlights and Crisis Suit commanders, where if you're able to do what Argive mentioned and lock up certain units in CC you can win. Marines not only have significant variety in the different chapters that are available now with supplements, but it's a lot easier said than done in killing things like Leviathan dreadnoughts with the dreadnought stratagem that reduces damage by 1.

Even psychic powers wise they got a boost with all the different disciplines they have now.

Because we ran a game day event at my club recently, and we had 15/20 attendants playing Space Marines. And 0 playing Tau.

That's why.

Tau have literally ONE list featuring 2 (TWO) units for 90% of its points and they utilize 1 (ONE) phase in the entire game.

Marines have the whole table, they have the pie AND they eat it too, you can get the pie in ANY AND ALL flavors and you have the most exquisite and extravagant pick of models and pies.

to even compare the two is utterly stupid.

 Argive wrote:
I think it comes down to the devil you know is better than...

Tau have been solid performers. However once you play a couple games against tau you get it, and it becomes a straight forward dice game.

1. Kill markerlights/Kill shielddrones 3. Kill fire warriors to prevent objective holding and force stuff to move. If the dice go your way and you manage to kill enough drones and fire warriors fast its GG.

With marines its like allowing a select competitive roided up pack of athletes competing with 3rd rate amateurs.

The issue with complaints is... nobody likes the fact only some get to have their cake and eat it too. Get newest models, most models releases, best rules, better at every phase than specialist armies, huge roster not limited to one or two over efficient units carrying the faction.

Some people would be happy if everybody got a slice cake instead. Or they would be happy with a smaller slice if it at least meant getting A slice.

There is also this.

People who play gsc and csm get to be annoyed that they don't get chapter tactics on all their units while marines suddenly do (especially csm where many of the vehicles are the freaking same...)

People who play armies like nids, harlequins and GK who have gakky boring psychic powers get to be annoyed marines now have 54 psychic powers to choose from.

People who play GSC and GK get to be annoyed that they had army wide deep strike nerfed a billion times and marines just get super duper turn 1 deep strike because sell them primaris.

Everyone's got a reason to be pissed because marines now do everything that was everyone else's "thing" and they do it better.

the_scotsman wrote:

Everyone's got a reason to be pissed because marines now do everything that was everyone else's "thing" and they do it better.

*glares at the Phobos Vanguard in Deathwatch*

the_scotsman wrote:

 Argive wrote:
I think it comes down to the devil you know is better than...

Tau have been solid performers. However once you play a couple games against tau you get it, and it becomes a straight forward dice game.

1. Kill markerlights/Kill shielddrones 3. Kill fire warriors to prevent objective holding and force stuff to move. If the dice go your way and you manage to kill enough drones and fire warriors fast its GG.

With marines its like allowing a select competitive roided up pack of athletes competing with 3rd rate amateurs.

The issue with complaints is... nobody likes the fact only some get to have their cake and eat it too. Get newest models, most models releases, best rules, better at every phase than specialist armies, huge roster not limited to one or two over efficient units carrying the faction.

Some people would be happy if everybody got a slice cake instead. Or they would be happy with a smaller slice if it at least meant getting A slice.

There is also this.

People who play gsc and csm get to be annoyed that they don't get chapter tactics on all their units while marines suddenly do (especially csm where many of the vehicles are the freaking same...)

People who play armies like nids, harlequins and GK who have gakky boring psychic powers get to be annoyed marines now have 54 psychic powers to choose from.

People who play GSC and GK get to be annoyed that they had army wide deep strike nerfed a billion times and marines just get super duper turn 1 deep strike because sell them primaris.

Everyone's got a reason to be pissed because marines now do everything that was everyone else's "thing" and they do it better.

Yeah like giving salamanders csm best strategem but BETTER.

And why are my veterans of 10000 years of war less capable than some thin blooded 15th founding neophyte?

And why the feth can't my drop pods come down on the first turn?

Tau aren't as fun to use as previous editions. The loss of their Jump - Shoot - Jump is bordering on criminal. I own a moderate sized Farsight Enclave force that is ALL battlesuits more or less. It used to be a VERY mobile, adaptable force but now (I haven't used them since like fifth edition or something) it'll just be a 'generic' affair, just moving toward the enemies line. That isn't what Battlesuits are good at, their BIGGEST strength was being able to dictate where and how an engagement happened. Losing that is like losing Power Armour to the Space Marines.

 catbarf wrote:

Salt donkey wrote:
meta

Salt donkey wrote:
tournaments

Well, looking at the game through a meta tournament list lens misses that Tau have exactly one tournament-winning build (Fire Warrior / Riptide / Ghostkeel-for-taste spam, run as Farsight Enclaves)

What on earth are you talking about lmao

Am not sure about salt, but I have yet to see a tau list without max riptides, max drones, max commanders. the only difference seems to be the rest of the points. I think most often fire warriors are run, but I think someone did show me a list that won some event that had breachers. In each variation the riptides, drones and commanders are the stuff that does all the work.