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How do you kill the Wraithknight? I having being trying to wrap my head around some sound strategies to deal with it and so far I have this...

- Full squad of Sniper Drones with three Spotters and dedicate them to shooting it every turn. This is a method of forcing armour save on it and seems to do fairly well.
- Blasting the wretched thing will everything in range. This is bad though because it leave the rest of the enemy forces untouched and free to move up.
- When it only has a few wounds left, charging it with a Ripetide with his Nove-Charged shield and smash attacking it seems to work rather well. A 3+ invulnerable with FNP really give it a fighting chance.

My opponent has been using a Wraithknight every game with a Suncannon , Scatter Laser ( the gun with laser lock I think) and the giant shimmer shield. It is becoming a dam pain in the ass because it moves forward so quickly making it a large threat and 3 twin-linker blasts really cause some hurt on everything ( particularly suits and fire warriors),

Have any on you guys had any success killing them quickly and how?

Kroot with sniper ammo.

your basic guns on fire warriors can actually hurt it, the only others who do that are both flavours of Eldar

A squad of missile sides and drones, with an attached commander with puretide for monster hunter can take off 3-4 wounds a turn with some marker support.

 Daba wrote:
Kroot with sniper ammo.

your basic guns on fire warriors can actually hurt it, the only others who do that are both flavours of Eldar

But that is dedicating a lot of fire power to one model and it just soaking up shots, the main stay of a Tau force.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I have also being thinking, since we generally play 2500 point games I could allie with my CSM and take a Khorne Daemon Prince with Wings, Power Armour and the Murder Sword.

Odds say it will take the Wraithknight down more time than not

But Kroot are cheap and you can get 40 snipers in two units for under 300 points. It's also what sniper rounds are good for. Putting a lot of wounds onto MC.

murder sword only works on characters. The WK is not a character.

Drown it in saves. like any other MC. which we probably will be seeing alot within the next year or two

 Savageconvoy wrote:
But Kroot are cheap and you can get 40 snipers in two units for under 300 points. It's also what sniper rounds are good for. Putting a lot of wounds onto MC.

That's not actually that great, though. It's probably acceptable for the ~300 pt Suncannon loadout, if the Eldar player really likes shooting it, but there are three big problems here.

First, before Markerlights you're still paying 84 points per wound per turn. All 40 of those snipers are only expecting 3.33 wounds on it with a turn of firing. This improves to 50.4 PPW with 2 Markerlights. For comparison, Kroot are only twice as good as rapid-firing Fire Warriors at this. And note that Markerlights are in very high demand against Eldar - their skimmers have 4+ cover saves.

Second, it's a heavy weapon with 24" range. How are 40 snipers within 24" of a Wraithknight? You're going to be doing an awful lot of snap-firing.

Third, the Eldar player might roll Fortune. The WK is now three times harder for your Kroot to kill.

pantsonhead wrote:

 Savageconvoy wrote:
But Kroot are cheap and you can get 40 snipers in two units for under 300 points. It's also what sniper rounds are good for. Putting a lot of wounds onto MC.

That's not actually that great, though. It's probably acceptable for the ~300 pt Suncannon loadout, if the Eldar player really likes shooting it, but there are three big problems here.

First, before Markerlights you're still paying 84 points per wound per turn. All 40 of those snipers are only expecting 3.33 wounds on it with a turn of firing. This improves to 50.4 PPW with 2 Markerlights. For comparison, Kroot are only twice as good as rapid-firing Fire Warriors at this.

Second, it's a heavy weapon with 24" range. How are 40 snipers within 24" of a Wraithknight? You're going to be doing an awful lot of snap-firing.

Third, the Eldar player might roll Fortune. The WK is now three times harder for your Kroot to kill.

Have first turn, infiltrate.

They infiltrate. That's how they get within 24" range.
If the Eldar player rolls fortune, its going to be harder to kill for most things anyway.
And the math was wrong. 3.33 will be rending, leaving 6.67 regular wounds for another 1.11 unsaved wound on average.

Wounding on a 4+ is a good way to deal with MC. Adding volume at a decent price also helps.

Oh, my bad. I forgot that Snipers get AP2 on to-wound rolls of 6. So 63 PPW without Markerlights against the 5++ loadout. Not too bad.

Do you find that you can reliably infiltrate 40 Kroot within 24" of something you want to shoot? It seems like that's pretty easily blocked, and Kroot that are that far forward are going to get torn to pieces by Serpents.

Edit: Fortune obviously matters more for weapons that allow the WK its 3+ than for weapons that only allow it a 5+. Yes, Fortune on a Wraithknight is bad news either way, but it's not going to be uncommon for a list to have 2 Farseers, and I'd be a little inclined to take at least two rolls on Fate with both of them if it was clear that my opponent was relying on my WK failing some 3+ saves.

I haven't had to play against Eldar except for someone that uses them for allies. I know that Kroot have been very helpful in handling FMC and MC heavy lists. They are extremely frail, but costed to allow plenty to be brought to the party. They do suffer from having to snap fire if they outflank, but markerlights are pretty decent at negating these or buffing them when they're needed.

I'm certainly not saying they're bad, but I think some features of the WK and the Eldar in general make it a lot harder to count on them for this. They may be the best thing in the Tau codex for fighting a WK, but even with them the WK is incredibly scary for Tau.

just bring a unit of sniper drones with controller and a commander.
all the tau players and ally users have been doing that in my meta. 48" rapid fire, bs 5 with cover ignoring/ethereal extrashot snipers, handily deals with riptides, flying circuses, dreadknights, tervigon/nidzilla and wraithknights that have been increeaaingly becoming a lot prevalent.

Adding the Commander does appear to make the sniper drones really good at this. I would have trouble with the unit if it could secure a good hiding spot or a 4+ cover save before Stealth. An Ethereal on top of that might be overkill, and you probably want at least the Commander for the 2+ save.

The big thing to watch out for would be Swooping Hawks. A Wave Serpent could force about 8.5 saves of various sorts, but if the Commander's in front he'd be able to tank for a while. Shadow Weavers might cause trouble too.

But yeah, that'll shred any non-vehicle that gets within 30".

Fighting fire with fire by including some Eldar allies in your list could be delicious. A unit of Wraithguard will decimate a Wraithknight due to their S10 AP2 "cause Instant Death on a 6" guns. You could even include a Wraithknight of your own.

But for Tau-specific advice, an Ionhead tank would work fairly well with three S8 shots that ignore its armor... but drowning it in missiles and Sniper rounds is probably going to be the most commonly-used solution.

Ionhead is S7


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Ok so I did some dice rolling and have found a pretty decent method for fighting the Wraithknight and killing it on average Turn 3.

Commander
2 missile Pods
Puretide Chip
( you can give him the rest of your normal upgrades but he needs at least these)

Sniper Drone Team
9 Drone
3 Spotters

Fire Warrior Team
12 Fire Warriors

Throw the Commander in with the drones, and use Monster Hunter. Then shoot first with the drones. That give you 9 BS 5 sniper shots ( 18 if it moves closer) and 3 BS 5 markerlights. Then there is 4 BS 5 S 7 shot from the command. All with re-roll to wound.

Then there is the 12 BS 5 ( or BS 6 if you want, but making another squad that is nearby BS 4 is also good) that can stack some extra wounds on.