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What are people doing with Tyrannofexes that makes them good? I just don't see a use for him myself.

 luke1705 wrote:

 benlac wrote:
How many points is a Malanthrope right now?

His points can be found in the new imperial armor Xenos book. It's available now as a digital download or you can get a physical copy

That's ok, I was just curious. The malanthropes are too pricey $'s wise for my side army anyway.

 SideshowLucifer wrote:
What are people doing with Tyrannofexes that makes them good? I just don't see a use for him myself.

I honestly don't feel that he's that useful. I'd just rather take an exocrine every time.

 SideshowLucifer wrote:
What are people doing with Tyrannofexes that makes them good? I just don't see a use for him myself.

The Tyrannofex exists to shoot at T8+ targets. Against anything else the Exocrine is better.

So basically, if you have to fight Knights, you may consider the Tyrannofex.

Tyran wrote:

 SideshowLucifer wrote:
What are people doing with Tyrannofexes that makes them good? I just don't see a use for him myself.

The Tyrannofex exists to shoot at T8+ targets. Against anything else the Exocrine is better.

So basically, if you have to fight Knights, you may consider the Tyrannofex.

Does he, though? I would still much rather use CC to deal with those. Or mortal wounds (biovores, hive guard)

I noticed the heirodule scytal rule too.

It's kind of hilarious.

It gives the barbed version 7 str 10 ap-3 d6 dmg attacks in melee. and the scythed version 9 (he still comes with only 2).

I think those guys are also going to be great knight deterrents. Glad to see that the scythed hierodule has use too

NewTruthNeomaxim wrote:

 luke1705 wrote:
Guys I know some of you haven't seen the book yet (I got the digital version and love it) but suffice to say that his points value barely changed at all. If you like his statline and are ok paying a very similar amount of points to last edition, you'll like him now too.

There is a very large discrepancy between his cost and the idea that 1 power level = 20 points

I own the book, so I have seen his profile/points, and honestly, as good as he is... the pricing isn't outlandish as some make it out to be. We're early days in 8th Ed and people haven't developed the lists, skills, etc... to properly snipe our characters yet. Yes, his buff is tremendous, but requires positioning effort, and outside of said buff, he's not contributing to combat, etc... I can see merit in giving him a 50% price hike in a few months when they do that year-end-review book... but he's not going to suddenly made us the GT winning army of forever.

Also, the PL1 = 20pts thing only makes even vague napkin math when units have options. Clearly Powerlevel can translate a mean unit-cost with semi-decent accuracy, but the minute a model comes with "nothing" war-gear wise, its a total crap-shoot.

Power level convertion to points is actually extra accurate when you don't have multiple options. Swarmlord converts perfectly, like OOE, Deathleaper and Red Terror. Venoms, zoans and pyrovores all convert perfectly, since they have no options. Inquisition acolytes instead are full of options and fail terribly at that conversion.
Deal with it, the malan point cost is a clear mistake. Expect an errata that brings him in the 185-215 range. Which is fair, any less and it would overshadow venoms.

that would be an odd misprint considering they would have to misprinted multiple numbers for it to be what it currently is. And if it is a mistake, what makes you think the PL isn't a mistake? Unit looks costed just fine to me, any more expensive and I'm going back to Broodlord or Flyrant. I don't expect it to change but I'm fine if it does, I've plenty of options.


However at 200 points it's basically unplayable lol. It is not saving you 200 pts worth of wounds, and outside of those cover saves it's doing very little else, and that function doesn't even work with most the popular builds people are looking at right now. 200 pts is 2/3s the way to a Swarmlord, for a +1 cover only so long as you ball up around it, with its 5" movespeed, in an army where that save is going to be ignored a lot of the time anyway the way the game now works.

I'm still preferring a Winged Hive tyrant over a malanthrope.

The psychic powers are comparable buffs & now with the 2+ WS, a beast!

Just match;
Hive Tyrant Str 6 vs T5 ≥ (Light vehicles, infantry)
Trygon Str 7 vs T6-7 (Rhinos, light vehicles, etc)
Swarmlord Str8 vs bigger things
Finally Str 10 vs the biggest things!

Some tactics advice please gents!

I'd like to do a snooty nids list (exocrine backfield) but also drop a threat or two close range with a pod and/or tunnel. Is there a list I can make around this idea that would be competitive?

I haven't seen pyrovores talked about much in this thread. How are they doing?

Hey guys, just wondering how much anti vehicle you have? I just ran an all vehicle necron list against nids, and he didnt have anywhere near enough weaponry to hurt my stuff.

I had a Vault, Monolith, anni barge, DDA, TA, Pylon, screened by scarabs. Tabled him T4. Had 2 Carnifexes, old one eye, 2 flying hive tyrants, a deathleaper and 3 lictors, a mawlock and trygon prime. I had the firepower to delete 2 a turn on average. Tabled him T4.

What could he add to do more wounds?

Mostly our melee monsters and gun beasts are anti vehicle. Exocrine, carnifex, trygons. swarmlord. stuff like that.

But necron vehicles are protected from most anti vehicle because of quantum shields. The better the weapon is at sheering of clusters of wounds the more likely the quantum shielding will negate it.

C1tric wrote:
Some tactics advice please gents!

I'd like to do a snooty nids list (exocrine backfield) but also drop a threat or two close range with a pod and/or tunnel. Is there a list I can make around this idea that would be competitive?

I haven't seen pyrovores talked about much in this thread. How are they doing?

I'am thinking about an over the top biovore armylist:

Spearhead detachment 1:

HQ: Broodlord
Elite: 3 pyrovores
Elite: 3 pyrovores
HS: 3 biovores
HS: 3 biovores
HS: 3 biovores
HS: 3 biovores
HS: 3 biovores
HS: 3 biovores

Spearhead detachment 2:
HQ: Broodlord*
Elite: 4 venomthropes*

(Malanthrope is supposed to be very cheap so I might ditch the broodlord + venomthropes and get a Malanthrope)

HS: 3 biovores
HS: 3 biovores
HS: 3 biovores
HS: Mawloc
HS: Mawloc
HS: Mawloc

You have to make a nice Biovore/pyrovore conversion to pull this off.

In this list the pyrovore are great 'get of my lawn' units. The can do a lot of damage but in any other list the need a tyrannocyte to get close and than it gets expensive. The do a lot of damage but that also means the get killed quick.

 Lance845 wrote:
Mostly our melee monsters and gun beasts are anti vehicle. Exocrine, carnifex, trygons. swarmlord. stuff like that.

But necron vehicles are protected from most anti vehicle because of quantum shields. The better the weapon is at sheering of clusters of wounds the more likely the quantum shielding will negate it.

Yea he got old one eye and two carnifex'es into combat against my vault and tesseract ark. The quantam shielding didn't help but the high toughness and volume of wounds coupled with regen meant they didn't do much damage at all. Walking them up the board, means they eat turns and turns of lots of damage weapons. Then fall back with fly and open up again.

I fought a couple ghost arks with a couple 30 man bobs of termagants. Managed to nickle and dime them to death with volume of shot because quantum shielding couldn't activate against 1 dmg weapons.

Yea, my monolith survived 80 odd gaunts worth of shooting and lost 3 wounds, its a brick vs them. But the arks would be alot easier to gauss to death.

Not sure about the monolith (although that is a different story as it doesn't have quantum shielding) but against the rest, hormagaunts / stealers with toxin seems like a good option for CQC and for shooting an Exocrine shines as the shielding will block almost non of the damage at 2 a piece

 SHUPPET wrote:
that would be an odd misprint considering they would have to misprinted multiple numbers for it to be what it currently is. And if it is a mistake, what makes you think the PL isn't a mistake? Unit looks costed just fine to me, any more expensive and I'm going back to Broodlord or Flyrant. I don't expect it to change but I'm fine if it does, I've plenty of options.


However at 200 points it's basically unplayable lol. It is not saving you 200 pts worth of wounds, and outside of those cover saves it's doing very little else, and that function doesn't even work with most the popular builds people are looking at right now. 200 pts is 2/3s the way to a Swarmlord, for a +1 cover only so long as you ball up around it, with its 5" movespeed, in an army where that save is going to be ignored a lot of the time anyway the way the game now works.

PL being the misprint is totally possible.

I doubt either the points or the power level is the misprint. FW has never been one to care if they're stepping on the toes of GW's product line. Stone crushers are clearly superior to regular Carnifexes. Malanthropes are clearly superior to Venomthropes.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

C1tric wrote:
Some tactics advice please gents!

I'd like to do a snooty nids list (exocrine backfield) but also drop a threat or two close range with a pod and/or tunnel. Is there a list I can make around this idea that would be competitive?

I haven't seen pyrovores talked about much in this thread. How are they doing?

Biovores and Exocrines are both great backfield shooty units. Outside of that, most of our units have to (or want to) be moving up closer, either because of poor range or because they're actually pretty good in melee. Oh and the harpy has good threat range too.

How do you support your guns in melee? Trygons are a great option because they get your troops where you want them to be (in the enemy's face) and they can only overwatch in retaliation.

You can do the tyrannocyte, but I don't find it as necessary because you have the Trygon for big squads of infantry and the Swarmlord for whatever else. His double move ability is SO STRONG.

How you fill out the rest of your list is up to you. Tyranids are good this edition. You just need to make sure that you can deal with tanks and knights.

some calcs:


Fleshborer Term's actually chip away at T8 quite nicely, doing about the same amount of wound point for point as Toxic Stealers, except being able to apply damage first turn from a Tryon, and never proc'ing the Quantum. They also apply damage well to non-fattys. On the flipside of the coin, these are the only unit mentioned with no AP, so honestly the majority of this will likely bounce off in practice

point for point Toxic Stealers do like the exact same damage almost, but at AP4. However I think they are impacted much more by counter shooting since you have to be right in their grills for a turn before even being able to apply that damage. Quantum Shielding (QS from now) will impact it though and cost you ~20% of that average


Shock Cannon HG do ever so slightly less than this amount, but almost half of them are Mortal Wounds. However, unlike practically everything listed so far, they have basically ONE target profile and are not at all versatile in target selection. Also, T8 MC's don't proc the mortal wounds making them a kind of risky choice. Swapping to impalers halves the amount of wounds.

Dima's do this amount too and put the hurt on everything. AP2/4


Stonecrushers with just one set of claws do the most, like 120% the amount of toxic Stealers guys and at AP3, but QS will wreak havoc on that, and also applying the damage is much harder (melee, no Trygon tunnels, slower movespeed)




regular Genestealers do bout 2/3 as much as Toxic Stealers, but obviously deal with counterfire better, and never proc QS.


Trygons are in this ballpark does slightly more than the vanilla Stealers. Don't even want to try to calculate what QS will do here, rest assured it could end up cutting the damage down MASSIVELY to potentially nothing depending on how the roles came out. Thats a wierd one. Swarmlord is the same, but does slightly less. AP-3







I think that's all Ive seen mentioned. Hope thats all legible

All in all, hardest hitting vs S8 is probably ToxicStealers thanks to AP4, but require melee and melt pretty quickly, regular Stealers probably better choice and still hit hard. Dima looks to be maybe the most balanced choice and is what I'll be using, although he might get unlucky vs Quantum Shielding. .







Automatically Appended Next Post:
also Fleshborer Tyrannofex does less than everyone listed and has zero AP. Basically, worse than Termagants.

Exocrine does even less than that, but has AP at least.

Has anyone had the chance to play in a tournament yet? Took first in a 12 man RTT yesterday with a double Exocrine list with the standard Swarmlord/Trygon/Stealer bomb. I'm very happy with how the list is going, and with where we are competitively. Only loss with my current list so far was to a Flier spam DE list. ~15 game or so into 8th edition, a couple of things that I've learned so far (in my personal opinion)

1. Hormagaunts are a trap. I've seen a lot of people raving about Hormagaunts but I just can't get them to effectively work in my lists. Their supposed use is to tie up units in cc but they're so weak in combat now that they're taking casualties without giving any in return, and too many units can leave combat and still shoot. The ones who can't have bubble wrap that Horms can't punch throug because they lack weight of attacks or good wound rolls.
2. Exocrines are my MVP so far. Turn 1/2 I try to eliminate all ranged antitank my opponent has, with help from Stealers, and then the exocrine dominate the midfield. 2 is a must for me, 3 a strong option.
3. Swarmlord/Stealer combo is exactly what we knew. So, so good. What I've seen though is some people trying to solo every unit in range with the Stealers which is kind of silly. Pick one unit you want dead, kill it, tie up more. Saw a buddy of mine charge 3 Daemon princes and split up his attacks evenly. Failed to kill any, then got smacked on. Focus on killing one so you take less swings!
4. Gants with devourers mixed in are our best horde/bubblewrap. I've been using 30 with 15 Devourers. Their cost stayed the same as everything else went up, and they can work over vehicles and the T6/7 range now. Much, much improved! Yesterday they killed 20 Kroot, 3 Grey knight squads, 20 poxwalkers and Typhus. They also never got wiped out either!

Hi all, yesterday i play against a space marines his list was approximatly this :
2 sq of 5 terminator cataphractii
3 sq of scout
1 land rider excelsior
2 stormhawk interceptor
1 stormraven
2 whirlwind

My list was :
1 swarmlord
2 brood lord
3 sq of 17 stealers
1 exocrine
3 sq of 3 hive guard
3 tyrant guard

He go first and litteraly destroy me
I have 2 question :
1 how to play againt that 3 flyers ? Whith them he kill 2 sq of hive guard at the first turn and the rest in the second ..
2 If the terminator is deployed inside the land rider and the stormraven count for the deployment? (To see who starts first)

Thanx for the help

 Lance845 wrote:
Mostly our melee monsters and gun beasts are anti vehicle. Exocrine, carnifex, trygons. swarmlord. stuff like that.

But necron vehicles are protected from most anti vehicle because of quantum shields. The better the weapon is at sheering of clusters of wounds the more likely the quantum shielding will negate it.

Against Necron, Genestealers are all the anti-vehicle you need. Since destroying Necron vehicles is about volume of device, the good 'ole Rending Claws, with four attacks per Stealer, hitting on 2's buffed, does plenty.

The Exorcine also does well as its flat 2 damage on a high number of quality shots tends to get by Quantum Shielding just fine.

Hive Guard also are good against Necron vehicles.

Nasty wrote:
Hi all, yesterday i play against a space marines his list was approximatly this :
2 sq of 5 terminator cataphractii
3 sq of scout
1 land rider excelsior
2 stormhawk interceptor
1 stormraven
2 whirlwind

My list was :
1 swarmlord
2 brood lord
3 sq of 17 stealers
1 exocrine
3 sq of 3 hive guard
3 tyrant guard

He go first and litteraly destroy me
I have 2 question :
1 how to play againt that 3 flyers ? Whith them he kill 2 sq of hive guard at the first turn and the rest in the second ..
2 If the terminator is deployed inside the land rider and the stormraven count for the deployment? (To see who starts first)

Thanx for the help

I think your opponent exactly hit the sweet spot of your list. With a more balanced list, you can go for objectives, while he will struggle holding any of them. But I do not think there is a way to actually destroy all these fliers with Tyranids. Hive Crones are not good enough against stormhawks or storm ravens. You could just go for 3-4 Tyrants with 2x Scything talons. But that itself is very tailored against his list and does not work against a lot of other lists.

I've actually been thinking about fielding a Void Shield Generator for occasions such as this, Knights, and other long range shooting lists.
The Crones can take out fliers well enough, but they have trouble surviving them if they are attacked before they can attack.
I'd drop Genestealers in against the whirlwinds and bring the Swarmlord against the Landraider.
Think you have too many eggs in one basket with so many genestealers though with no real delivery method.

 SideshowLucifer wrote:
I've actually been thinking about fielding a Void Shield Generator for occasions such as this, Knights, and other long range shooting lists.
The Crones can take out fliers well enough, but they have trouble surviving them if they are attacked before they can attack.
I'd drop Genestealers in against the whirlwinds and bring the Swarmlord against the Landraider.
Think you have too many eggs in one basket with so many genestealers though with no real delivery method.

I did the calculation and do not see, how a Crone should possibly deal with Stormhawks or Stormravens. Sure it will deal something between 2-6 damage, but then it will die. Chances are also not small that the Crone fails to do any damage at all.

 luke1705 wrote:
I doubt either the points or the power level is the misprint. FW has never been one to care if they're stepping on the toes of GW's product line. Stone crushers are clearly superior to regular Carnifexes. Malanthropes are clearly superior to Venomthropes.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

C1tric wrote:
Some tactics advice please gents!

I'd like to do a snooty nids list (exocrine backfield) but also drop a threat or two close range with a pod and/or tunnel. Is there a list I can make around this idea that would be competitive?

I haven't seen pyrovores talked about much in this thread. How are they doing?

Biovores and Exocrines are both great backfield shooty units. Outside of that, most of our units have to (or want to) be moving up closer, either because of poor range or because they're actually pretty good in melee. Oh and the harpy has good threat range too.

How do you support your guns in melee? Trygons are a great option because they get your troops where you want them to be (in the enemy's face) and they can only overwatch in retaliation.

You can do the tyrannocyte, but I don't find it as necessary because you have the Trygon for big squads of infantry and the Swarmlord for whatever else. His double move ability is SO STRONG.

How you fill out the rest of your list is up to you. Tyranids are good this edition. You just need to make sure that you can deal with tanks and knights.

This is really helpful advice thanks! What's your view on 3 pyrovores being dropped in a tyrannocyte? I've not played the new ones.

I saw people weren't too fond of the Tyrannofex, which left me feeling a little skeptical as they can get 48 shots/turn if they don't move (with stinger salvo + flesh borer hive). So, I math-hammered Tyrannofex's vs Exocrines. what I found is below, the final number in the tables being # of casualties/turn, also didn't account for the -1 ap on the stinger salvo so the percentages would be slightly higher than what you see for the Tyrannofex.
Results were fairly obvious: Tyrannofex is better vs space marines, worse against Rhinos, and better if they moved that turn. The Exo has added range, is still decent vs space marines and much better against vehicles if it didn't move.
Overall I think people may be discounting the Tyranno a bit too much. Even unmoved it's still better against standard marines and it has more wounds. Not to mention going up against weaker hordes it would absolutely smash them. I think there's a place for it in lists that want more punch for dealing with space marines or weaker infantry while not wanting to rely on staying put each turn.