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 Kanluwen wrote:

 Luke_Prowler wrote:

Oh, and did I forget to mention they have the Fly keyword? This allows them to Fall Back from combat and still shoot at full effect.

So where are all those people saying that Fall Back is still a penalty to shooting armies? Because I'd like to share a few keywords of my own to them

Probably in the same place where all those people saying that shooting will wipe the board.

Seriously. I'm going to say it again and again and again I think, but:

We're not getting the full picture here. Literally NO mention of the same benefit for the Sniper Drones who have the "Fly" keyword. No mention of it when "Fly" has been mentioned elsewhere either. This is not a great article as it goes from being hyperdetailed(the "Walking Battleship" bit for the Stormsurge is exceedingly detailed, for example) to vague.

The bit about Crisis Suits is very likely a rule tied to Crisis Suits, not every single Tau/Guard/whatever army models.
And quite frankly?

If you charge the Crisis Suits with the appropriate unit to begin with, you're likely going to kill one or two suits.
If they Fall Back?
They're still taking a Morale test, which can potentially remove another Crisis Suit.

This is what I had to point out about the fallback ability - any Tau unit that gets charged is taking wounds, (and if it doesn't then the opponent should probably play a different game.....like my little pony). Most likely what we will see is one or two units who survive combat will retreat and fire.....then completely die to another assault.

 Da-Rock wrote:
This is what I had to point out about the fallback ability - any Tau unit that gets charged is taking wounds, (and if it doesn't then the opponent should probably play a different game.....like my little pony). Most likely what we will see is one or two units who survive combat will retreat and fire.....then completely die to another assault.

I wouldn't bother wasting time defending the Tau in this thread. All these players are jaded by riptide spam and are ignoring the fact that their armies could get lots of cool abilities. We also haven't seen point costs - maybe Tau stuff is all 20% more expensive (not so powerful now then is it).

Just play a balanced list and players can't make excuses.

I'll believe ba getting something from gw other than the finger when i see it. Until i see the full rules, i'm assuming tau shooting is still brokenly good vs most lists.

Tau can now perform Kauyon maneuvers more easily and more effectively. Crisis suits and everything else with the Fly keyword (yes, Kanluwen, we know your stance on that, no need to repeat it for the 17th time), IF they survive CQC, can escape and put their firepower into the enemy turn after turn.

IF they survive.

But there doesn't appear to be the assault 2d6 move any more (certainly not for the Sniper Drone, which used to have it), and that means that Crisis Suits can no longer hide behind terrain after shooting or run away from enemy assaulting units.

So Crisis Suits, and their other jet pack brethren, are now EASIER to catch (and we all know what happens when Tau get caught in CQC, right? They die by the dozens), but harder to hold.

Sounds like a sidegrade, rather than an upgrade.

My apologies, though, the salt mining and explicit word denial can now resume again.

If they took away the jet pack move, this is fine. It encourages the use of melee upgrades so you can cut the Xeno scum apart and not allow them to escape. Plus, the battle shock!

Which I suspect will matter. Tau already have some morale-mitigation stuff - I'll bet they'll need to use it.

Well, BA are gonna shoot them with hand flamers and infernus pistols and then charge and they take shock from all those wounds.

That's gonna hurt. And the meltas on your ASMs might still one-shot Crisis Suits, unless they have better than W6 (doubt it. Ghostkeel/Riptide yes, but not Crisis).

I just hope it's not quite the annoyingly un-fun matchup that BA vs Tau is now: Tau flatten BA until they get there, then the sides are reversed. Can has more strategy and tactics, please?

I'd love it to be even enough that it comes down to player skill, or at worst specific unit matchups, not the kind of "do I get the turn 1 charge? Yes? Win. No? Lose." that it is now.

I think it will be better. Tau will have to actually pay attention to pred annihilators. 4 lascannon shots. And Baals: 8 assault cannons shots, 6 heavy bolter shots.

A few points,
1.) marker lights got it straight in the keister, rerolling 1's is less awesome than a +1 to BS.
2.) The storm surges fire power got cut in half
3.) many of the Taus cool guns were templates, and those caught a nerf.
4.) move shoot move appears to be been replaced by the ability to get out of CC and still shoot.

So yeah, a mixed bag, which is what one would expect from a top army in the prior edition, especially one as prone to abuse and unfun to play as the tau. Yes they can shoot after getting out of CC, but since 8th ed appears to be first turn charge-friendly, there is really no other option for them. It would be an auto-loss for Tau if you could permanently tie them up from turn 1 without them getting to shoot back.

Also, it's fine if the Tau have cool stuff as long as it's priced appropriately Ideally I want every faction to have some cool things, as that makes games much more interesting.

 Grimgold wrote:
A few points,
1.) marker lights got it straight in the keister, rerolling 1's is less awesome than a +1 to BS.
2.) The storm surges fire power got cut in half
3.) many of the Taus cool guns were templates, and those caught a nerf.
4.) move shoot move appears to be been replaced by the ability to get out of CC and still shoot.

So yeah, a mixed bag, which is what one would expect from a top army in the prior edition, especially one as prone to abuse and unfun to play as the tau. Yes they can shoot after getting out of CC, but since 8th ed appears to be first turn charge-friendly, there is really no other option for them. It would be an auto-loss for Tau if you could permanently tie them up from turn 1 without them getting to shoot back.

Also, it's fine if the Tau have cool stuff as long as it's priced appropriately Ideally I want every faction to have some cool things, as that makes games much more interesting.

These are all fair points

I also think GW is being very strategic in what rules they are letting us see. They probably think that the build up to how melee will really work is going to really pull in new players.
It's a dangerous game as they have to keep showing enough variation to please the most people without tipping their hand.

On a slightly unrelated note (but still kinda relavant): Violin Ork -when did Dakka get this Orkmoticon? It's awesome! as is this one: Salt Ork

-

I love the salt one, going to have to use that. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if certain melee units get parting shots at enemies leaving CC. Maybe that's the big reveal behind what makes Khorne berserkers so cool, leave and let them get an unanswered parting shot and then charge you again on their next turn, or stay in the meat grinder.

I just realized the sniper drone profile doesn't mention the drone controller at all!

Meaning they're not leashed to stumbling, bumbling, pathfinder dropout and his tripod...

If commanders can still take drone controllers as equipment they'd be down right terrifying.

I bet parting shots will be more of a Blood Angel thing, actually - think about things like ASMs with special weapons, or Sanguinary Guard with their Angelus Bolters. Khorne Berserkers might have some way to run down a fleeing unit and re-engage them, or maybe engage someone else.

Purely spitballing, of course.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Captain Joystick wrote:
I just realized the sniper drone profile doesn't mention the drone controller at all!

Meaning they're not leashed to stumbling, bumbling, pathfinder dropout and his tripod...

If commanders can still take drone controllers as equipment they'd be down right terrifying.

Though, if there's no drone controller, sniper drones just went from BS5 to BS2, which is a rather substantial nerf especially when they also lost the Rending/Bladestorm equivalent that sniper weapons have in 7e. 48" range is nice but not that much longer than Ratlings, Scouts or Rangers. (Rapid-fire is somewhat more significant, however)

jade_angel wrote:
Though, if there's no drone controller, sniper drones just went from BS5 to BS2, which is a rather substantial nerf especially when they also lost the Rending/Bladestorm equivalent that sniper weapons have in 7e. 48" range is nice but not that much longer than Ratlings, Scouts or Rangers. (Rapid-fire is somewhat more significant, however)

Yeah, absolutely.

Which is why if I can somehow get Drone Controller back... like say, with a nearby crisis commander with a drone controller equipment piece that say, lets me confer her ballistic skill to one or all nearby units of drones (if I don't shoot or something? I dunno)...

That'd be great!

 gossipmeng wrote:

 Da-Rock wrote:
This is what I had to point out about the fallback ability - any Tau unit that gets charged is taking wounds, (and if it doesn't then the opponent should probably play a different game.....like my little pony). Most likely what we will see is one or two units who survive combat will retreat and fire.....then completely die to another assault.

I wouldn't bother wasting time defending the Tau in this thread. All these players are jaded by riptide spam and are ignoring the fact that their armies could get lots of cool abilities. We also haven't seen point costs - maybe Tau stuff is all 20% more expensive (not so powerful now then is it).

Just play a balanced list and players can't make excuses.

That's what I'm still hoping for. People are claiming that points will be released at the back of books like current profiles to make it easier to change them, one can only hope that means we're starting 8th with a complete rewrite on points values with the acknowledgement that they might be way off the mark.

That's a big and blunt claim.
Is one of these orky smiley faces a skeptic?

 Traditio wrote:
Chances are, it's going to be exactly as bad as it looks.

It has been before. It likely will be again.

You haven't even seen 10% of the full rules content for the army, nor have you seen the full rules for 8th edition. You don't even know all the rules for your own army yet or what it can do.

You're making assumptions based on 7e power levels and 7e rules. You can't do that when 40k is getting its first massive shake-up since 3rd edition and nothing will be like we know it now. The reason why in past editions we could reasonably guess how good or bad things would be is because we didn't see these kind of massive changes before. Jetbikes were good before, but scatbikes became the new broken thing simply because they could all have scatter lasers, and people could reasonably predict they would be stupidly broken assuming that nothing else changed because of what scatter lasers do, it basically all hinged on their point cost. Same with all the other Craftworlds rumors...the wraithknight was already giving people trouble, hearing that it gets strictly BETTER without getting a point cost increase to go with it gives people good enough reason to be afraid. Getting BS4 army-wide was scary when the army's shooting was already oppressive. Etc. The core rules themselves barely ever changed from 3rd to 7th, either, just little tweaks here and there to shake up the meta every few years to shift sales of models. That's why vehicles keep going from being good in one edition, to bad in the next, to good again, then bad again, etc.

And even then, I can tell you from experience that the community has been wrong before, and that there are tons of Chicken Littles who freak out about gak and over-exaggerate the power or impact of a rule or a new unit, only for it to be completely underwhelming when they actually get to play with it. Case in point, when 5th was on the way and we learned that troops were the only units that were scoring, everyone freaked out about it and started predicting that the "winning lists" in 5th edition would be mass troop spam, and started suggesting ridiculous armies that basically spent all their points maxing out troop units with a sprinkling of other things for support. Guess what didn't end up dominating the competitive scene? Lists with 72 fire warriors in them, or 60-80 Marines, etc. The 5th edition Tyranid codex is also a good example. I remember everyone crying about how "OP" that book was when it dropped (the Doom of Malan'tai in particular seemed to cause lots of frothing rage because it could potentially hurt dudes in transports and be DSed onto the table), and after a couple of months and a particularly punishing FAQ that might as well have said "Wanna do something fun with this book? Forget about it.", they were basically reduced to tervigon and/or hive guard spam because that's pretty much the only thing that "worked" and then suddenly everyone changed their tune and started lamenting the poor hammering they'd just gotten. Worst thing was you couldn't even get "official" models for your tervigon spam lists until like two years later because of the Chapterhouse thing.

Anything goes now. We don't know what scatter lasers are going to do anymore, we don't know how powerful they'll be, or how much they'll cost (and I don't see why it's crazy to assume that weapons will be re-costed, we've already seen the melta go from a 10 point upgrade for a Marine up to a whopping 27 points, why does everyone think this will literally be the only change and everything else will remain at 7e prices and power?), we also don't know what an Eldar jetbike's stat line and special rules are going to be, how much a bike itself will cost, what the max unit size will be...we basically don't know ANYTHING important, anything you could use to reasonably judge the power level of them in the new edition. You're just assuming scatbikes will be bullgak because they are now. Likewise with Tau.

You're also ignoring the fact that Tau have only been a top tier army for 2 editions. They were a mid to low-tier army for three editions before that. Tau haven't "always been" overpowered, unless you count those idiots who call everything "OP" because they don't like playing against it, regardless of how balanced it actually is or isn't (Hell, tons of people playing this game are immature and just call your army "OP" because it beat them, even if it's a trash tier army like Orks). Very few armies in 40k have been consistently "OP", usually things tend to swing a lot. I'd say odds are pretty damn good they're going to get reigned in, along with Eldar, which seems to be the whole point of this new edition. GW listened to the community, they're aware that balance is incredibly skewed and that this is pretty much the number one complaint about the game and what's keeping most people away from it (second to their prices, which will never change). They've allegedly done more playtesting for this edition than they've ever done for an edition of 40k, and I find it hard to believe that after all that, even with input from the FLG guys (Reece and Frankie both seem to think Tau needed toning down, based on past comments and videos), they would honestly see fit to give Tau buffs of all things, without addressing any of the problems that they will likely be well aware of by now. Doesn't make any sense. And if it was just blatant favoritism then I think we would see Space Marines being hands down the most powerful army in the game, since we hear time and again that Space Marines have consistently been GW's best-selling product line ever.

And even if for some reason you're right, and your assessment of the army based on one or two literal scraps of information featured in an obvious puff piece meant to make the army sound as awesome and "brutal" as possible (just like every single other faction focus they've done so far, tells you basically nothing of any real use and is basically just one guy insisting everything will be great) just happens to be right, GW have already confirmed the game will get annual revisions and rules will be changed and re-balanced as necessary. Even if the new Tau come out and end up being just as bad as they are now (which I really don't think they will be), you will at most have to put up with it for a year. Much better than the current situation.

As for how "popular" Tau are, no one really knows. The only thing we know for certain is that Space Marines are GW's best-selling army, based on an ancient quote from Jervis Johnson exclaiming that they could be mistaken as a front for drugs, and even then we're mainly just assuming that they're telling the truth because everyone sure does seem to love their Space Marines, so it makes sense. As far as I know though GW has never given us any real data we can use to determine what sells and what doesn't, all we really have are our eyes for that. Like when GW recalled boxes of Dreadfleet presumably to be destroyed because the game was a big flop, or when the "limited edition" of Escape from Goblin Town was still regularly available fething years after it was first released, or the fact that Sisters of Battle seem to have this big fan following and there are people practically begging GW for a proper update or revamp for the line, yet have been trapped in limbo with no new model releases for almost 20 years (and even then they just got the new Celestine and a random Finecast model), barely receiving "get-you-by" rules updates and living on the edge of being Squatted, because the army doesn't sell and is mainly only being kept around because they have friends in the studio, supposedly. I think it's obvious Tau are a popular army, though, even if we can't exactly "rank" how popular they are compared to the others based on hard evidence. Tau have been consistently updated since their introduction, only missing an update in 5th edition which was pretty unkind to xenos in general (except Dark Eldar and Necrons, though even DE started to suffer towards the end and have only gone downhill since then). Considering how conservative and risk-averse GW has typically been, it's safe to assume they wouldn't waste their time, money, and effort updating an army to that extent if it didn't sell. Their Start Collecting box has also consistently been on the best sellers tab on their website since it was introduced, for what that's worth. They also get a ton of love from Forge World that most other armies don't get, and are soon to be included in another IA book. The only thing we know about GW for a fact is that they don't tend to throw good money after bad.

Holy gak I talk a lot.

Just this. A thousand times this. We don't know nearly enough information yet about the rules nor the other races to jump to wild accusation

Rather than assuming Tau are still the awesomeness they currently are or anything else I hope, based on the announcement, there are some changes to markers (a big point of contention).
I wouldn't mind seeing the options be increase bs by 1 per marker and/or (as hinted at) each marker allows rereolls of 1s, 2s etc. depending on markers expended.
Cover alterations 1 marker for 1 point of cover.
Morale alterations (possibly like old markers).

I also would like to see the railgun become more formidable similarly to a lascannon I want more hammerheads.

I would like the riptide to be similar to now but more appropriately costed etc.

I have high hopes for Tau in 8th.

 Sidstyler wrote:

 Traditio wrote:
Chances are, it's going to be exactly as bad as it looks.

It has been before. It likely will be again.

You haven't even seen 10% of the full rules content for the army, nor have you seen the full rules for 8th edition. You don't even know all the rules for your own army yet or what it can do.

You're making assumptions based on 7e power levels and 7e rules. You can't do that when 40k is getting its first massive shake-up since 3rd edition and nothing will be like we know it now. The reason why in past editions we could reasonably guess how good or bad things would be is because we didn't see these kind of massive changes before. Jetbikes were good before, but scatbikes became the new broken thing simply because they could all have scatter lasers, and people could reasonably predict they would be stupidly broken assuming that nothing else changed because of what scatter lasers do, it basically all hinged on their point cost. Same with all the other Craftworlds rumors...the wraithknight was already giving people trouble, hearing that it gets strictly BETTER without getting a point cost increase to go with it gives people good enough reason to be afraid. Getting BS4 army-wide was scary when the army's shooting was already oppressive. Etc. The core rules themselves barely ever changed from 3rd to 7th, either, just little tweaks here and there to shake up the meta every few years to shift sales of models. That's why vehicles keep going from being good in one edition, to bad in the next, to good again, then bad again, etc.

And even then, I can tell you from experience that the community has been wrong before, and that there are tons of Chicken Littles who freak out about gak and over-exaggerate the power or impact of a rule or a new unit, only for it to be completely underwhelming when they actually get to play with it. Case in point, when 5th was on the way and we learned that troops were the only units that were scoring, everyone freaked out about it and started predicting that the "winning lists" in 5th edition would be mass troop spam, and started suggesting ridiculous armies that basically spent all their points maxing out troop units with a sprinkling of other things for support. Guess what didn't end up dominating the competitive scene? Lists with 72 fire warriors in them, or 60-80 Marines, etc. The 5th edition Tyranid codex is also a good example. I remember everyone crying about how "OP" that book was when it dropped (the Doom of Malan'tai in particular seemed to cause lots of frothing rage because it could potentially hurt dudes in transports and be DSed onto the table), and after a couple of months and a particularly punishing FAQ that might as well have said "Wanna do something fun with this book? Forget about it.", they were basically reduced to tervigon and/or hive guard spam because that's pretty much the only thing that "worked" and then suddenly everyone changed their tune and started lamenting the poor hammering they'd just gotten. Worst thing was you couldn't even get "official" models for your tervigon spam lists until like two years later because of the Chapterhouse thing.

Anything goes now. We don't know what scatter lasers are going to do anymore, we don't know how powerful they'll be, or how much they'll cost (and I don't see why it's crazy to assume that weapons will be re-costed, we've already seen the melta go from a 10 point upgrade for a Marine up to a whopping 27 points, why does everyone think this will literally be the only change and everything else will remain at 7e prices and power?), we also don't know what an Eldar jetbike's stat line and special rules are going to be, how much a bike itself will cost, what the max unit size will be...we basically don't know ANYTHING important, anything you could use to reasonably judge the power level of them in the new edition. You're just assuming scatbikes will be bullgak because they are now. Likewise with Tau.

You're also ignoring the fact that Tau have only been a top tier army for 2 editions. They were a mid to low-tier army for three editions before that. Tau haven't "always been" overpowered, unless you count those idiots who call everything "OP" because they don't like playing against it, regardless of how balanced it actually is or isn't (Hell, tons of people playing this game are immature and just call your army "OP" because it beat them, even if it's a trash tier army like Orks). Very few armies in 40k have been consistently "OP", usually things tend to swing a lot. I'd say odds are pretty damn good they're going to get reigned in, along with Eldar, which seems to be the whole point of this new edition. GW listened to the community, they're aware that balance is incredibly skewed and that this is pretty much the number one complaint about the game and what's keeping most people away from it (second to their prices, which will never change). They've allegedly done more playtesting for this edition than they've ever done for an edition of 40k, and I find it hard to believe that after all that, even with input from the FLG guys (Reece and Frankie both seem to think Tau needed toning down, based on past comments and videos), they would honestly see fit to give Tau buffs of all things, without addressing any of the problems that they will likely be well aware of by now. Doesn't make any sense. And if it was just blatant favoritism then I think we would see Space Marines being hands down the most powerful army in the game, since we hear time and again that Space Marines have consistently been GW's best-selling product line ever.

And even if for some reason you're right, and your assessment of the army based on one or two literal scraps of information featured in an obvious puff piece meant to make the army sound as awesome and "brutal" as possible (just like every single other faction focus they've done so far, tells you basically nothing of any real use and is basically just one guy insisting everything will be great) just happens to be right, GW have already confirmed the game will get annual revisions and rules will be changed and re-balanced as necessary. Even if the new Tau come out and end up being just as bad as they are now (which I really don't think they will be), you will at most have to put up with it for a year. Much better than the current situation.

As for how "popular" Tau are, no one really knows. The only thing we know for certain is that Space Marines are GW's best-selling army, based on an ancient quote from Jervis Johnson exclaiming that they could be mistaken as a front for drugs, and even then we're mainly just assuming that they're telling the truth because everyone sure does seem to love their Space Marines, so it makes sense. As far as I know though GW has never given us any real data we can use to determine what sells and what doesn't, all we really have are our eyes for that. Like when GW recalled boxes of Dreadfleet presumably to be destroyed because the game was a big flop, or when the "limited edition" of Escape from Goblin Town was still regularly available fething years after it was first released, or the fact that Sisters of Battle seem to have this big fan following and there are people practically begging GW for a proper update or revamp for the line, yet have been trapped in limbo with no new model releases for almost 20 years (and even then they just got the new Celestine and a random Finecast model), barely receiving "get-you-by" rules updates and living on the edge of being Squatted, because the army doesn't sell and is mainly only being kept around because they have friends in the studio, supposedly. I think it's obvious Tau are a popular army, though, even if we can't exactly "rank" how popular they are compared to the others based on hard evidence. Tau have been consistently updated since their introduction, only missing an update in 5th edition which was pretty unkind to xenos in general (except Dark Eldar and Necrons, though even DE started to suffer towards the end and have only gone downhill since then). Considering how conservative and risk-averse GW has typically been, it's safe to assume they wouldn't waste their time, money, and effort updating an army to that extent if it didn't sell. Their Start Collecting box has also consistently been on the best sellers tab on their website since it was introduced, for what that's worth. They also get a ton of love from Forge World that most other armies don't get, and are soon to be included in another IA book. The only thing we know about GW for a fact is that they don't tend to throw good money after bad.

Holy gak I talk a lot.

Have an exalt!

When someone called Tau a mid-tier army, someone else had the presence of mind to ask "relative to what?" a reasonable question. It is all relative. Why aren't people doing this now? We know almost nothing of the entire T'au faction, we know almost nothing of any other faction they will be going up against, and we don't even know the full rules of 8th edition yet. So it's literally impossible to compare the still mostly unknown 8th T'au against the mostly unknown everything else.

Here's a few things we do know:

-units can assault out of ordinary transports now
-monstrous creatures and vehicles will weaken as they take wounds
-mortal wounds ignore all saves, including invulnerable
-heavier weapons like melta and lascannons will be able to cause multiple wounds per hit
-GW is trying to beef up assault units like khorne berzerkers, howling banshees and assault marines etc
-JSJ has been removed (already the movement stat on drones is going to be slower than the, on average, 13" movement they had in 7th)

Most of these things are indirect hits to the T'au.

However it doesn't stop there. These faction focus articles are hype pieces designed to pump up the player base of whatever particular faction they are writing about. You know, the people who actually buy those particular models. So they focus on the good and not the nerfs. Those astute, however, will have noticed something at the beginning of most of these articles-a rundown of how the army currently plays in 7th. Importantly, they acknowledge the overpowered stuff, such as wraithknights, riptide wings, psychic stars etc. A subtle way of informing the player base that they are aware of the broken stuff, which almost certainly means they are going to balance them accordingly.

Maybe I'm way off base with this, but we haven't seen a franchise wide shake-up like this in 40k since the transition from 2nd and 3rd. Perhaps we should wait and see what 8th will bring before we claim the sky is falling.