Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Well, if you can, ignore them to a great deal and go for the scoring units first.

astro_nomicon wrote:
That math seems a little off or are you assuming the the 3++?
10 fire dragons against Riptide with 5++
10 shots, 6.67 hits, 5.56, wounds, 3,7 unsaved wounds.

Fixed for you

Throw a Doom on the Riptide and things get lulzier.

Most satisfying riptide kill I've had: Riptide wrecks my Wave Serpent but subsequent fire against the now disembarked fire dragons proves ineffective. My turn: prescience on fire dragons, doom on the Gundam. Fire dragons cause a bunch of wounds at range but fail to kill. I assault the riptide (nearby potential support fire is neutralized in my shooting phase). It kills 2 in melee. The rest murder it with meltabombs.

D-weapons, Mind War and masses of fire (which ours usually comes with built in Rending-ish). All of which are easily attainable with Eldar. I see far bigger problems for Eldar to deal with than Riptides, like 3-4 AV12 or higher flyers with good anti-vehicle capability.

 DarknessEternal wrote:

 Marsyas wrote:

Laugh at your opponent for fielding them, and proceed to apply Fire Dragons to the face?

It takes 27 Fire Dragons to kill a solitary Riptide. That's a pretty bad trade.

wraithguard do a much better job.

How would Mechdar best handle this?

In my list I am running a Bright Lance Falcon, 2 Prisms, and 2 Hunters (1 Exarch)...in addition to 2 crushing blow clawxarchs

Should this be enough?

Mechdar can tank shock Tau infantry to death. Lateral thinking.

Powerguy wrote:
I generally find that most Tau players don't go for the 3++

I wonder why that is. It would be silly not to in any fight against low AP armies, especially Eldar. There's no real need for the S9 pie plate against anyone but a parking lot army. Sure, double shots on the SMS is nice, but not really a hard decision when faced with dead 'Tide. I run 2 Riptides with Interceptor, FNP, Ion Accelerators and SMS. I would roll the 3++ every turn on my Riptides. Of course, my new sillyness for my 2k list to sport a Wraith Knight, Spiritseer and 2 Wraithguard WS squads with those 2 Riptides.

offhand I would say ignore them. Unless you have d weapohs ready to rock, and the 3++ shield is down then the rest of the taur army probably has more dakka per point than the riptide and less resilience per point. Sure the riptide is going to hurt you, but the rest of the tau army is going to put out even more hurt. Eldar have more speed, target the glass cannons 1st. Don't waste dakka nearly killing a riptide when you can be forcing morale etsts left and right.

I must be the only person who still fields them. :-P Rangers do well against Riptides.

Angelic wrote:

I wonder why that is. It would be silly not to in any fight against low AP armies, especially Eldar. There's no real need for the S9 pie plate against anyone but a parking lot army. Sure, double shots on the SMS is nice, but not really a hard decision when faced with dead 'Tide. I run 2 Riptides with Interceptor, FNP, Ion Accelerators and SMS. I would roll the 3++ every turn on my Riptides. Of course, my new sillyness for my 2k list to sport a Wraith Knight, Spiritseer and 2 Wraithguard WS squads with those 2 Riptides.

With multiple Riptides, they're all only as durable as the one that failed its Nova roll. If you have three standing near each other, you expect to fail the roll on one of them. Now the Eldar player has no reason to shoot the other two, so you've just wasted their generator for the turn. Plus you've already put a wound on the one the Eldar player will be gunning for. Going for the 3++ probably only makes sense if you know that the other player wants to kill a Riptide and there's only one Riptide he can easily get at.

To the topic: I like Wraithknights for this. But psychic powers are also pretty great. If you rolled Doom, Guardians and Avengers are roughly twice as effective. The normally useless Mind War becomes really nice vs single-model units with < 10 Ld. Misfortune effectively makes their save a 3+, nearly doubling the damage your scatter lasers and serpent shields do to them. Puppet Master lets you use one to lay down a pie plate on another Tau unit, causing ID to suits. Psychic Shriek at BS4 has about a 40% chance of inflicting at least one wound before invulnerable saves (and will often inflict more).

Your best bet is really distort weapons. Too many of these maths aren't including FnP which really considerably adds to its durability. Distort giving a chance to get around that and finish it in one go, goes a long way.

pantsonhead wrote:

Angelic wrote:

I wonder why that is. It would be silly not to in any fight against low AP armies, especially Eldar. There's no real need for the S9 pie plate against anyone but a parking lot army. Sure, double shots on the SMS is nice, but not really a hard decision when faced with dead 'Tide. I run 2 Riptides with Interceptor, FNP, Ion Accelerators and SMS. I would roll the 3++ every turn on my Riptides. Of course, my new sillyness for my 2k list to sport a Wraith Knight, Spiritseer and 2 Wraithguard WS squads with those 2 Riptides.

With multiple Riptides, they're all only as durable as the one that failed its Nova roll. If you have three standing near each other, you expect to fail the roll on one of them. Now the Eldar player has no reason to shoot the other two, so you've just wasted their generator for the turn. Plus you've already put a wound on the one the Eldar player will be gunning for. Going for the 3++ probably only makes sense if you know that the other player wants to kill a Riptide and there's only one Riptide he can easily get at.

To the topic: I like Wraithknights for this. But psychic powers are also pretty great. If you rolled Doom, Guardians and Avengers are roughly twice as effective. The normally useless Mind War becomes really nice vs single-model units with < 10 Ld. Misfortune effectively makes their save a 3+, nearly doubling the damage your scatter lasers and serpent shields do to them. Puppet Master lets you use one to lay down a pie plate on another Tau unit, causing ID to suits. Psychic Shriek at BS4 has about a 40% chance of inflicting at least one wound before invulnerable saves (and will often inflict more).

That's assuming all units can hit all 3, which is highly unlikely. No reason to place them near each other with the range they have. Best way to get rid of them though is Horrify + Terrify.

Well, the Eldar are pretty fast, and Tau will often deploy in a big concentrated group so that everything can shoot anything that tries to come close, but, yeah, going for the 3++ makes a lot of sense if you need to protect a particular Riptide.

In general, though, if the Eldar player is having to split fire against Riptides he's often not going to be able to count on killing one in a single turn, which makes shooting at them somewhat futile. If I spend a whole turn putting a few wounds on each of three Riptides, the Tau player hasn't lost any firepower at all. The Tau player should want me to do that, and should make it as appealing as possible (obviously he should still go for the 3++ if I have a Serpent full of wraithguard ready to jump in).

Mech armies are also pretty rough on Ion Accelerator Riptides. Their SMS can't touch AV12 and the IA is significantly less scary than a single Broadside's HYMP. The HBC is terrifying, but my impression is that it's not as popular (and note that it's actually substantially less firepower than what a single Wave Serpent can put out vs AV12, even nova charged, unless Markerlights are used). For the sort of list I'm looking at, an IA Riptide is to be completely ignored for the first few turns except that I need to consider putting my artillery out of LoS.

toocool61 wrote:
As title explains, I want to know how to effectively deal with Riptides without making a tailored list to killing just riptides.

Same as they have dealt with everything since their last codex.

Guide + Doom.

 kronk wrote:

toocool61 wrote:
As title explains, I want to know how to effectively deal with Riptides without making a tailored list to killing just riptides.

Same as they have dealt with everything since their last codex.

Guide + Doom.

Well, Doom is only a 1/6 chance now, so you can't really rely on it.

However, Eldar have plenty of Volume of fire, and several instant death weapons. a WK can catch it, and punk it in CC, if it doesn't ID it with shooting.

 Sasori wrote:

 kronk wrote:

toocool61 wrote:
As title explains, I want to know how to effectively deal with Riptides without making a tailored list to killing just riptides.

However, Eldar have plenty of Volume of fire, and several instant death weapons. a WK can catch it, and punk it in CC, if it doesn't ID it with shooting.

Has anyone actually put this to the test? Nearly every Riptide I have faced as Eldar has fired up the 3++ at every oppertunity and also bought the FNP upgrade. With the heavy wraithcannons, the Wraithknight has no invunerable save so any successful wound scored by the Riptide goes through the 3+ save (Riptides are MCs too).

While I think the Wraithknight would eventually win the combat, the duration would take up most of the game.

The one time I tried this tactic, both Wraithcannons failed to wound (3++ saved both), the Wraithknight failed the 6" charge, took a wound on overwatch, then was shot to pieces by both Riptides and Broadsides in the following Tau turn.

The lesson I learned? If you are likely to be facing Tau, take the Suncannon and Scattershield and blast away at everything but the Riptides. You might as well buy the most expensive options to warrant the price tag.

-Deploy fire dragons. If he goes for the 3++, he's not shooting and is effectively controlled.
-Ally in some Dark eldar kabalites/trueborn with splinter cannons. Twin-link their shots, Doom Riptide. Laugh evilly.
-Send in some Wraithguard in a serpent. Doom will also help you get more 6's and erase the riptide from existence.
-Swarm it with Invisible Harlequins.
-Get it within range of two Psychic Scream Telepaths.

Has anyone actually put this to the test? Nearly every Riptide I have faced as Eldar has fired up the 3++ at every oppertunity and also bought the FNP upgrade. With the heavy wraithcannons, the Wraithknight has no invunerable save so any successful wound scored by the Riptide goes through the 3+ save (Riptides are MCs too).

While I think the Wraithknight would eventually win the combat, the duration would take up most of the game.

The one time I tried this tactic, both Wraithcannons failed to wound (3++ saved both), the Wraithknight failed the 6" charge, took a wound on overwatch, then was shot to pieces by both Riptides and Broadsides in the following Tau turn.

The lesson I learned? If you are likely to be facing Tau, take the Suncannon and Scattershield and blast away at everything but the Riptides. You might as well buy the most expensive options to warrant the price tag.

That sounds like it was just poor luck to me. The Riptide only has a 2/3rd chance of Nova charging, and the fact you failed your 6' charge, is also below average. The Riptide is also very poor in CC, and is not Fearless. It not only has a chance to fail it's Fear test,in close combat, but it's also not hard to make it run, and sweep it in cc.
The Riptide also hits last, unless it's in terrain with either two smash attacks on a 4+, or three regular attacks on a 4+ that wound on 6's.
On the other hand, the WK hits on 3's, wounds on 2s,with 5 attacks when it charges in, and 4 average. So, on average you should be causing at least 1 unsaved wound even with the 3++ on the riptide. It's a total slaughter if it doesn't get the 3++ off.

You should be able to soften it up with a few shots, and it failing Nova charges, before you even get into CC with it.

Don't charge a Riptide if it has its 3++ up. If it's shooting the WK with an IA, it only expects to be doing 1 wound per turn even with infinite Markerlights (1.5 with a Fusion Blaster if it's in range, but this won't be often and that's still just not very impressive), so they don't expect to make their points back doing that unless they're firing for 5 turns straight. Your WK can be chasing down other suits instead or charging whatever, really, since there's nothing in the Tau list he can't chase down and annihilate in CC except 3++ Riptides.

But the moment that that Riptide doesn't take its 3++ save, you go in hard. With psychic support, if at all possible, but even without it the WK expects to force 1.11 5++ saves (.22 of which are ID) with his shooting and then .83 2+ saves and 2.78 5++ saves on the charge. That's about 2.7 wounds on the Riptide, ignoring the chance of ID. Prescience ups that to 3.6.

Actually, looking at it some more, I don't see why the 3++ should be so scary. If you can actually make the charge, at least (and you said you didn't ,and that sucks, but it's not surprising that the WK gets torn to pieces when he's just standing there like an idiot 6" in front of the entire Tau army).

The Riptide, even assuming it passes its Fear test, is only doing .25 wounds per assault phase to the WK. Even with the 3++, the WK is expecting to deal 1.4 wounds (edit: on the charge, this is only .74 in subsequent rounds and only 1.06 of it is attributable to the assault phase) . That means that you will probably win each round of combat, which forces Ld checks on at most Ld 8. And if the Riptide does fall back, you're testing for a Sweeping Advance on I5 vs I2 (this is all assuming you killed the drones already, but you probably should have anyway in order to force morale tests). Edit: Oops, forgot Smash. Riptide actually does .833 wounds with 2 smash attacks per round, so you aren't quite as likely to win each round.

Edit2: Bad math. The Riptide is actually the favorite to win a regular round of combat (after the charge round) given its Smash attack, provided it has its 3++ up, and ignoring Fear (so it's probably pretty much 50/50 given Fear). So I stand by my first sentence - Don't charge a Riptide if it has its 3++ up.

Broadsides and other suits are still better targets, but the WK is pretty scary for Riptides.

 Sephyr wrote:
-Deploy fire dragons. If he goes for the 3++, he's not shooting and is effectively controlled.

Huh? Riptide can use 3 S7 ap 2 or S8 ap 2 large blast, the SMS/Fusion/Plasma and still get the 3++.

 Homeskillet wrote:
Like people have been saying, lots of shurikens or any one of the plethora of other S6 or higher guns available to Eldar. Seriously, Tau players should be asking: " how do i protect my 3 Riptides from the Eldar?"

And I say, "who cares"? Let them try to take out my riptides, because my counter-shooting is going to do more damage to his units than his attempts to kill my riptide.

Really, if the eldar player is too focused in trying to gun down those riptides, he is going to lose. You need to take out the troops and the force-multipliers (i.e. Ethereal, markerlights).

 MechaBeast wrote:
I doubt you''ll see two many 3 tide lists. Scary as they may seem, Crisis suits will put out more firepower per point and compete heavily for those elite slots

That's what I said about the triple-heldrake Chaos list.

a wraithknight pounds it into scrap.. though you do have to catch it

They have one. ElTau