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This will never, ever happen but I figured this couldn't hurt.. It'd be nice to take a competitive Tyranid list that isn't just flyrant spam. Honestly, tell me the last time you saw any Nid players run a Trygon.

Proposed Changes:

Hormagaunts: Decrease cost to 4 pts/model. Make toxin sacs and adrenal glands the same prime. Allow them to purchase an upgrade for 1 pt/model called "Fertile".
Fertile: Most hormagaunts are already born pregnant and often lays their egg clutches immediately after being spawned. When the entire brood has been destroyed, an identical unit goes into ongoing reserves on a 2+.

Trygon: Gargantuan Monstrous Creature. Increase cost by +1 melta gun. Increase S/T to 7 from 6. Increase Bio-Electric Pulse to Assault 8. Must declare EITHER a Terror from the Deep (as per the Mawloc) OR creating a tunnel.
Serpentine Body: Allows the Trygon to perform two smash attacks instead of one but does not allow it to stomp.

Trygon Prime: GMC. Increase S/T to 7 from 6. Remove access to BioArtifacts. Increase BS to 4. As per proposed Trygon rule, allow it to perform either a TFTD or create a tunnel. Give the Bio-Electric Pulse w/ Containment Spines a second profile which would be Assault 1, Large Blast, Haywire.
Serpentine Body: Allows the Trygon Prime to perform two smash attacks instead of one but does not allow it to stomp.

Subterranean Assault: Infantry units in reserves can deploy without rolling for reserves if a Trygon tunnel is available.

Tyrannofex: Remove the Rupture Cannon completely. That thing is awful. Instead, allow it to take a single BioCannon (same profile as the Hierodule's) for the same amount of points. Otherwise, keep the stats and other weapon options the same.

Deathleaper: Increase T to 5 and save to 4+. Decrease cost by 1 melta gun.

Tyranid Prime: Make him cost 100 pts/base. (Right now, a Hive Tyrant costs only 4 melta guns more..) Allow the option to upgrade him to a ML1 psyker for 20 points. Allow him to take Hive Commander and Old Adversary per the Hive Tyrant.
Allow him to take wings for +15 points and making his armor save +1 worse.

Genestealers: Decrease cost down to 1 melta gun/model.

Swarm Lord (c'mon, this guy costs almost as much as a Wraith Knight): New Rule: Psychic Monstrosity. The SL automatically knows all Tyranid psychic powers. New Rule: Monstrous Shadow in the Warp: All psykers within 24" of the Swarm Lord harness warp charges when casting with a +1 penalty (ie. a 4+ becomes a 5+). Additionally, they peril on any doubles. The SL may also use warp charges during his psychic phase to try and negate a blessing/malediction on a 4+ with the number of successes needing to equal the number of charges required for the power.

Tail Biomorphs: Allow them to take advantage of the smash rule. Is a meltagun or 1.5 meltaguns for an extra MC attack really that OP?


Weapons/Biocannons: For MCs with access to TL Devourers, you never see any variation as everything else is so bad in comparison to 12 twin linked shots.

Venom Cannon: Change to AP3.
Heavy Venom Cannon: Increase Range to 48". Assault 2. AP3. Small blast.
Stranglethorn Cannon: Increase Range to 48". Assault 2. AP4. Ignore Cover.

Bioartifacts:

Norn Crown - Reduce cost by 1/2.
Reaper of Obliterax: Reduce cost by 1 meltagun.

When youre giving terror from the deep to both the trigon and the trigon prime, why would there even be a mawloc in the codex?

 M0ff3l wrote:
When youre giving terror from the deep to both the trigon and the trigon prime, why would there even be a mawloc in the codex?

The Mawloc would be 60 points cheaper than a Trygon, has hit and run, and simply wouldn't be "as good" as far as durability/CC. With a Mawloc, you would want to TFTD and then avoid/hit and run out of combat to burrow and re-emerge again. A more durable/higher damaging Trygon (Prime) might prefer to stay on the board and try to take out some armor.

TBH, Mawlocs are a bit undercosted for what they do now.

I'm not completely married to the idea of giving all three TFTD, but as it is now, Trygons and Trygon Primes are next-to-useless and there's so nearly no incentive to take them.

CWDub wrote:

 M0ff3l wrote:
When youre giving terror from the deep to both the trigon and the trigon prime, why would there even be a mawloc in the codex?

The Mawloc would be 60 points cheaper than a Trygon, has hit and run, and simply wouldn't be "as good" as far as durability/CC. With a Mawloc, you would want to TFTD and then avoid/hit and run out of combat to burrow and re-emerge again. A more durable/higher damaging Trygon (Prime) might prefer to stay on the board and try to take out some armor.

TBH, Mawlocs are a bit undercosted for what they do now.

I'm not completely married to the idea of giving all three TFTD, but as it is now, Trygons and Trygon Primes are next-to-useless and there's so nearly no incentive to take them.

Buffing 2 and leaving 1 alone isnt a good way to ballance the game. This will cause power creep. Suddendly the Trygon is better than the mawloc, people will start exclusively using the trygons. Then lets say the mawloc gets buffed again and the trygons remain unchanged... See where im going with that? This is how 40k is turning into a gakky game of buff buff buff nerf nerf nerf. Instead of taking all the units that are part of the problem and reballancing them.

The mawoc is more popular than the trygon, that is true. Giving the trygon toys that the mawloc has is not the way to go about changing that. Increasing the mawlocs cost to reflect the damage it can do with TFTD and then changing around how the trygon tunnel works (buffing it to be more useful). Also turning both the trygon and the trygon prime into gargantuan monstrous creatures is such a bad idea. Give it to the trygon prime only. Make the trygon prime cost a lot but give him some kind of ridicilous rule. Like all your troop casualties can reenter the game trough his tunnel. Or units under the effect of his synapse gain +1 WS +1 WS +1S +1T and +1 LD. Something crazy like that.

Also why the hell are you refering to point increases by a metric of melta guns? This is so confusing and unnecessary.

Oh and recently a tyranids list won a tournament using only 2 flying monstrous creatures. The core was 8 lictors and 3 mawlocs. So its not like only FMC spam nids lists can win. Yes in this case a different unit was spammed, but im sure that if you just try hard enough you can find a ballance of not spamming FMC and using the ground nids effectively. Making up buffs, that you admit yourself wont ever happen, will just enforce the mentality that your codex sucks. This will suck the enjoyment out of the game pretty quickly. Every loss you will blame on "oh well nids just suck if you dont take atleast 6 FMCs!" instead of learning from your mistakes and mastering your army. Any army in this game can win to a certain degree. Writing possible ways to make it easier on yourself is one way to waste your time. Playing the game, trying different things and getting to know your codex in and out (most possible combinations etc) is in my opinion a better way to spend your time... You might even enjoy it.

/rant

Spend 10 points extra on the trygons, mawlock, hive tyrant, and swarmlord. Make them all move as beasts. Done. If everything else was the same points for upgrades, then you may not want to give the tyrant wings.

The prime I would give one more wound and a 5 point upgrade to make it a jump infantry unit.

The cannon on the tyranofex should be ordinance.

I also give all models with instinctive behavior +1 to feel no pain (orn6+ if they dont have it, max 5+) if they are in synapse range to counteract the negative effects of instinctive behavior.

CWDub wrote:

Hormagaunts: Decrease cost to 4 pts/model. Make toxin sacs and adrenal glands the same prime. Allow them to purchase an upgrade for 1 pt/model called "Fertile".
Fertile: Most hormagaunts are already born pregnant and often lays their egg clutches immediately after being spawned. When the entire brood has been destroyed, an identical unit goes into ongoing reserves on a 2+.

Does not even make sense with the fluff. So, no.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

CWDub wrote:

Genestealers: Decrease cost down to 1 melta gun/model.

I was gonna say increase wound count by 1, cost by 4 points per model, give them Stealth, and let them take Scything Talons for 2 points per model.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Lythrandire Biehrellian wrote:
Spend 10 points extra on the trygons, mawlock, hive tyrant, and swarmlord. Make them all move as beasts. Done. If everything else was the same points for upgrades, then you may not want to give the tyrant wings.

The prime I would give one more wound and a 5 point upgrade to make it a jump infantry unit.

The cannon on the tyranofex should be ordinance.

I also give all models with instinctive behavior +1 to feel no pain (orn6+ if they dont have it, max 5+) if they are in synapse range to counteract the negative effects of instinctive behavior.

Hive Guard are blind, but are guided by the Hive Mind. Their shots do not need Line of Sight, and they fly through the air, correcting their course.

BS3. nice job GW.

My idea for Synapse would be to give units +1 BS when in Synapse, or at least Hive Guard. Feel no pain really doesn't fit fluff wise, in my eyes. +1 BS for shooty units, +1 WS for melee units.

Oh, the Prime definitely needs some work. It's not bad as it stands, but it really should have some options to act as either a Ravener Alpha (becomes a Beast, gains Deep Strike - so, not cheap) or a Shrike Alpha (becomes Jump Infantry - not extremely expensive) or a Lictor Alpha (gain Stealth, Deep Strike, Infiltrate, +1S). Of course, taking any of these would confer its WS/BS advantage to Raveners, Shrikes or Lictors, respectively, rather than Warriors.

You have some neat ideas, CWDub, but I feel you might be a bit unfocused with your ideas and simply throwing buffs at things to power them up. As I see it, the issues with ground bugs are as follows:

*They simply aren't as efficient as the flyrant who is durable, dangerous, and psychic all at once.
* Synapse is more of a restrictive punishment than a flavorful reward at the moment.
* They struggle to deal with vehicles
* They struggle to deal with superheavies.
* Many of them have their own unique problems.

These, in my eyes, are the issues that need to be addressed concerning ground bugs. Personally, I feel that the faction would benefit tremendously from a codex that was reworked from the ground up, Giving gaunts Without Number on a 2+ would be cool as a formation or detachment bonus, but it doesn't actually fix the unit's problems (getting at the tasty targets inside of vehicles after surviving tons of shooting as a squishy unit). Giving the trygon a haywire gun would be awesome, but at a single shot profile, it still isn't going to be taken over a flyrant.

Of course, I'm not really a fan of GMCs in general. Anything superheavy is going to force your opponent to dramatically alter their playstyle, probably to something more competitive, and that just leads to power creep. >.<

Don't forget, in the 40k universe bs and ws3 are special forces level capability. A basic guardsman is in the top 10% of their worlds defense force, meaning that most of them are around the level of navy seals. It only looks bad because the universe is obscenely powerful on average.

Just make the damn melee units move more than 6", its infuriating knowing that before I can get into melee I have to take at least 3 rounds of shooting as the enemy walks backwards at the same speed I can get close to them, followed by a final round of overwatch before whatever is left of my unit finally gets into combat.

AtraUnam wrote:
Just make the damn melee units move more than 6", its infuriating knowing that before I can get into melee I have to take at least 3 rounds of shooting as the enemy walks backwards at the same speed I can get close to them, followed by a final round of overwatch before whatever is left of my unit finally gets into combat.

Letting them move like beasts would be a 15 point upgrade on any of them, as far as I could tell. If the hive tyrant (and tyrant guard for +5 each), mawlock, and trygons all had it you might see less flyrants on the table, simoly because they would be moving 12" on the ground anyway and the upgrade for wings would be the same. Meaning the dakka flyrants wouldnt gain as much movement as they currently do, and would be slightly more expensive to boot. Now it's no longer an auto take