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My friend plays grey knights and has some tough guys. He always kills my riptide with instant death. how do i take him down?

If you tell us roughly what's in your list and what's in his list we may have more useful advice.

Lots and lots of plasma/melta suits.

Also what the hell is killing your riptides with instadeath? iirc GK's only have a couple of ranged weapons that can cause instantdeath and both are Psyker-related and short ranged. Dreadknights could catch a riptide with their speed yes but every GK player i know refuses to use that weapon because its AP sucks (activating it doesnt increase its AP)

 Vineheart01 wrote:
Lots and lots of plasma/melta suits.

Also what the hell is killing your riptides with instadeath? iirc GK's only have a couple of ranged weapons that can cause instantdeath and both are Psyker-related and short ranged. Dreadknights could catch a riptide with their speed yes but every GK player i know refuses to use that weapon because its AP sucks (activating it doesnt increase its AP)

I've seen more and more GK lists in the Army Lists section using psilencers and heavy psilencers (the ranged weapon with force). It's not that bad for insta-gibbing an MC such as a riptide.

Does it have a really high rate of fire or something? Honestly dont know much more than its a Force weapon with crap for AP.

If it doesnt pen the riptides armor, we still get a 2+. Force weapons dont ignore armor, they cause instadeath when activated only.

It's either Heavy 6 or Heavy 12 iirc.

And 1's happen.

The Dreadknight has a Heavy 12 version. It's only Str 4 so it won't cause many wounds... but it only takes 1 bad armour save to kill the whole model.

OP didn't specify if the instant death was from shooting though so it could have been from being charged by a dreadknight. Dodging 1 Dreadknight is fairly easy but dodging 2 of them AND any terminators that deep striked can be more difficult.

I've beaten Grey Knights every time I've played them with my Tau. And I don't have any plasma. Two riptides with IA, fusion and interceptor is a good thing. GKs love to deepstrike terminators. That's my wet dream with Tau. And even without it. Don't you have lots and lots of str 7 shooting..? If you are running tau without a ton of missiles you are definitely doing it wrong, G.

It's 12 shots, str 4, no ap. It isn't actually very good unless you're shooting tyranid warriors, if you do the math a heavy psycannon kills riptides just as quickly and can also hurt vehicles, wraithknights, eternal warriors, etc.

The Heavy Psilencer has been seeming some good use when taken on 1 in 2 NDKs, used to pop mid-range Toughness, Multi-Wound units such as Broadsides and Crisis Suite. Riptides popping to a single bad roll is still fun sauce. On other units, the regular Psilencers are questionable, although mass fired from Purifiers has been quite effective versus the same targets (although the Incinerator is still the better weapon for PAGK).

SJ

They'll have fewer models than you, so abuse that. Fire Warriors to force mass armour rolls, Crisis with plasma to force invul saves, objective grabbing with piranhas, putting drones in his way

His lord caldor drago assults my riptide.

PowerfistPainting wrote:
His lord caldor drago assults my riptide.

If Drago can't assault from DS, you can prevent this from happening with your jump move.

Martel732 wrote:

PowerfistPainting wrote:
His lord caldor drago assults my riptide.

If Drago can't assault from DS, you can prevent this from happening with your jump move.

Sometimes. Rolling poorly on the jump move means no, he can't.

It's nothing to rely on.

rigeld2 wrote:

Martel732 wrote:

PowerfistPainting wrote:
His lord caldor drago assults my riptide.

If Drago can't assault from DS, you can prevent this from happening with your jump move.

Sometimes. Rolling poorly on the jump move means no, he can't.

It's nothing to rely on.

You get your regular move on top of the jump move. Foot sloggers can never catch you. Hell, my jump troops usually can't catch you before they are all dead.

Martel732 wrote:

rigeld2 wrote:

Martel732 wrote:

PowerfistPainting wrote:
His lord caldor drago assults my riptide.

If Drago can't assault from DS, you can prevent this from happening with your jump move.

Sometimes. Rolling poorly on the jump move means no, he can't.

It's nothing to rely on.

You get your regular move on top of the jump move. Foot sloggers can never catch you. Hell, my jump troops usually can't catch you before they are all dead.

I Deep Strike 5" away (slightly risky, but not too bad). You move 6" directly away (11") and then roll a 5 for your jump move (16").
Saying they "can never catch you" is simply incorrect. And Jumpers that deep strike 7" away(not very risky) (move away 6", jump average of 7") need to make an 8" charge.

And that's assuming they can move directly away from you.

Haven't played GK with my Tau much, but fusion/plasma aces them. And spammed s5 can threaten both their Termies and their DKs, by drowning them to wounds.

(Last time, Pulse Carbines did half the wounds on two DKs in the same game. It was lucky, but s5 is twice as good as s4 against t6.)

rigeld2 wrote:

Martel732 wrote:

rigeld2 wrote:

Martel732 wrote:

PowerfistPainting wrote:
His lord caldor drago assults my riptide.

If Drago can't assault from DS, you can prevent this from happening with your jump move.

Sometimes. Rolling poorly on the jump move means no, he can't.

It's nothing to rely on.

You get your regular move on top of the jump move. Foot sloggers can never catch you. Hell, my jump troops usually can't catch you before they are all dead.

I Deep Strike 5" away (slightly risky, but not too bad). You move 6" directly away (11") and then roll a 5 for your jump move (16").
Saying they "can never catch you" is simply incorrect. And Jumpers that deep strike 7" away(not very risky) (move away 6", jump average of 7") need to make an 8" charge.

And that's assuming they can move directly away from you.

Okay, it was hyperbole. But the whole move and then jump in the assault phase is very frustrating. The Tau don't need long to cripple/kill every unit on the table. In your scenario with jumpers, they'll never survive the Tau shooting phase so it's moot. But Draigo probably can.

Riptide could nova charge the thrust move to get an average of 14". That would surely put Draigo out of range.

Granted, nova charging every turn is risky if Draigo keeps DS. But losing a wound is more preferable to losing a model.

It's possible - just maybe - there are more CC threats than Draigo in a GK list that can Deep Strike.

rigeld2 wrote:
It's possible - just maybe - there are more CC threats than Draigo in a GK list that can Deep Strike.

Yeah, but they are probably easier to shoot off the table. Multi-wound models that can't be doubled out easily can threaten Tau. Single wound models eat the pie plate of DOOM.

Heh, I charged a Riptide with Purifiers once. Terminators were behind it and dreadknights were on both flanks so he ran towards the smaller threat... didn't end well for the riptide.

Of course my opponent had no idea how to handle GKs with his Tau. He just couldn't crack the 2+ save and sent his plasma deep strikers after my purifiers in rhinos. His pathfinders scouted too close and were cleansing flamed away from 2 fast moving rhinos.

As a gk player I have been very successful against tau. Eating monstrous creatures is what we excel at, also frying 4+ armor saves.

I play a shunt heavy list so cornering a pair of riptides can be simple and flaming a squad of fire warriors comes easy. Broadsides are easy to catch.

Now crisis suits and stealth suits are a different story. An entire army of them combined with riptides gives the army enough mobility that I struggle to get I into close combat with most of my army. Instead, if played correct, I spend a few turns just trying to corner your far superior guns and then charging into amazing over watch. By turn 4 or 5 I am too crippled to hold objectives.

Use that superior mobility to kite us.

And yes, the psylincer is not that good. On a dk, 12 shots, hitting 8 on average, I have about a 1/30 chance of killing a riptide and will kill about .7 t4 multi wound models per turn at with 2+

Tau fall to grey knights easily. Really all you can do is spam and hope for the best, cause of the grey knights have a good commander, doesn't matter how many times old Riptide can jump or how many you bring, they'll die.

Pain4Pleasure wrote:
Tau fall to grey knights easily. Really all you can do is spam and hope for the best, cause of the grey knights have a good commander, doesn't matter how many times old Riptide can jump or how many you bring, they'll die.

If I owned a Tau army, it would be interesting to see if that's actually true. Also, are you including list tailoring in your analysis? Can a TAC Grey Knights list really do as you describe?

Martel732 wrote:

Pain4Pleasure wrote:
Tau fall to grey knights easily. Really all you can do is spam and hope for the best, cause of the grey knights have a good commander, doesn't matter how many times old Riptide can jump or how many you bring, they'll die.

If I owned a Tau army, it would be interesting to see if that's actually true. Also, are you including list tailoring in your analysis? Can a TAC Grey Knights list really do as you describe?

There really is no such thing as GK "list tailoring" in 7th. We have such few choice in our codex, that any choice is a TAC choice. We'll use the exact same units to kill hordes, vehicle spam, MCs and Flyers, because our choices are that few. On the other hand Tau can tailor to kill GK by loading up with AP2 and always taking the Intercrptor upgrade.

SJ

Interesting. My TAC BA load up on AP 2 because most 3+ armor and less I can punch to death.

He assaults with Lord kaldor drago.

First off, if you're taking FW's put them in a fish or a fortification. Don't bother footslogging them cause they'll die to a stiff breeze, eve more so against a deepstrike army like GK.

Loading up on low ap + interceptor is a great way to neuter their alpha strike potential.

Lastly, GK are slow after their initial drepstrike/shunt rush. If you can make it out of those first 2 turns without getting crippled you have a good chance of either winning the objective game or running circles around them picking them off.

Sure draigo+his unit can gate around, but he's not gonna pass every time, and no matter how strong he is, one unit is one unit. At best they will kill one of yours per turn, and you will have a lot more units than the GKs.

A GK player should be attempting to kill off your marker lights on turn 1, then taking out your soft units (non-battle suit), followed by your hard units (battle suits). Knowing this, a Tau player should force a GK player to deal with hard units first while their soft units avoid being killed by playing to the mission.

SJ