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Note that no one questions whether all the Tau players actually suck or not. Because we know they all do.

(Quickly scans for public pictures of Adepticon TT Tau army)

Yup. They do.

Heh. I've been saying Tau are in a bad place for a while now. I don't really understand why, because I haven't really taken a look at the Tau books even before this edition (the army does not interest me). But their W/L rate is way off of what I'd expect with a normal distribution, meaning more likely than not there's something going on with the rules.

 Melissia wrote:
It's funny people are whining about others saying Marine players are unskilled when not too long ago in this thread the Ork w/l ratio was explained by several people as Ork players innately having no skill.

In my experience, both these statements are true; Ork players play far more for fun (hence the Joyful Waaaghs, talking like an Ork, etc.) than to win, hence the seeming lack of tactical prowess; and the majority of Space Marine players I've met are young and inexperienced, very few stay with a pure Space Marine army (branching out into one of the chapters with their own Codex, Admech, Knights, Guard and even Xenos factions) and so Space Marines are brought down in skill on average.

This is not true everywhere but it is true where I come from.

(Incidently, what I've said about both Ork players and Space Marine players applies to CSM players too: it is again one of the factions that a lot of players start off with (Branching out into one of the named Legions, R&H, Daemons, etc.) and quite alot of the cc orientated CSM armies play far more for fun rather than to win. This applied to me when I was younger, I would ignore objectives and go for the kill in the name of the Blood God, but since then I've branched out into all areas of chaos and I'm far more tactical in games rather than just going for the kill, though I lapse sometimes.)

Deliberately playing in a fun way is a choice though. Being bad is an attribute that most people wouldn't choose.

Playing with armies that are squishy, with no immortal units, like orks (that also have the worst aim in 40k), harlequins or dark eldar is very difficult. You have to be skilled if you want to win with orks, even with a green tide plus buffs because if you play brainless you won't win. Simple.

Playing in 7th edition with armies like tau, eldar, SM or imperial knights (the most unskilled army in 40k) meant that you may make some mistakes that your chances to win the game are basically the same.

Now that eldar, tau or SM are not as overpowered as they were a few months ago, we see that they lose pretty bad a lot of games, which is something new for them. Orks have experienced a lot of losses in 8th edition according to the users' experience shown in the table but with 7th edition rules the number of losses would have been much higher.

Orks codex in 8th edition is pretty bad, don't pretend it's competitve at last, it's probably worse now and we were already among the bottom tiers. But orks players learnt from 7th edition how to play their units. Some armies were so brainless that now that they're not overpowered anymore their players need some experience to be competitive again.

 Melissia wrote:
Deliberately playing in a fun way is a choice though. Being bad is an attribute that most people wouldn't choose.

Yet if you never try to play in a competitive way, only in a fun way, then you will never "git gud", as the saying goes. Another saying fits what I'm saying also: "practice makes perfect" and certainly the best players are the ones who spend along time playing competitively until they are able to instinctively make tactical decision.

 Melissia wrote:
Heh. I've been saying Tau are in a bad place for a while now. I don't really understand why, because I haven't really taken a look at the Tau books even before this edition (the army does not interest me). But their W/L rate is way off of what I'd expect with a normal distribution, meaning more likely than not there's something going on with the rules.

It's a complicated situation, and I don't have a great grasp on it myself, but I'll get some of it wrong, piss some people off, and generally try to speculate

Looking at the index:

I feel like everything got super expensive, and didn't really get a lot of a boost out of becoming so. I glanced at the index when it first dropped, and I spent some time looking at it now based upon the list Katherine posted a couple pages back, and Fire Warrior spam literally seems like the best option in a codex that was previously difficult to make a bad build for, and based upon the discussion with the Tau player below, that's arguably still overpriced, particularly when I look at stuff in other armies like Scions. I have 40 scions on my desk right now I'm looking to paint. I want them to be as good as anyone, but man, they're seriously, seriously underpriced for what they do. They should be at least 10-11 points base, and fire warriors should be, like, 6-7.

Now, looking at history, Tau weren't a very common army around the 4th/5th ed era. At least, not around here. They were kind of a strange out-of-place thing that existed in the universe but never really fit in there. There was maybe one player around my area, and then the guy I knew who played Eldar got into it in 5th. I don't know if that's representative, but I'm guessing so. They had an old book, a lot of it didn't work any more. It wasn't alluring to start an army with.

Then the power codex dropped in 7th. I'm gonna guess that a lot of it is legitimately substandard players who bandwagoned about this time. I'm a decent player, but by no means a great player, and I have no shame in saying that's when said TT army came from. We even called ourselves "The Bandwagon of Tomorrow", poking fun at how it became the new hotness.

So now fastforward to now and suddenly they're not so good anymore. Thus, there's a lot of players out there that were depending upon that power curve that suddenly had the bottom drop out beneath them. I'd imagine the ones who are mostly unaffected by it in their games are the old ones who were in the army since 4th/5th. I don't honestly know how I'd even do with them nowadays, since I ran a battlesuit spam list with some heavy support. GW in their book design seems to maintain a very "what was first shall now be last, and what was last shall now be first" approach to army design that I've noticed over the years with a handful of exceptions. Maybe it keeps the most competitive players continually buying new stuff?

I think a similar thing happened to GK when their Scooty Puff Junior codex dropped that took away half their toys and separated the Inquisition stuff. Probably good for you as a Sisters player though I guess because you actually got to start taking that stuff again though.

I never took inquisition stuff along with my Sisters. The only time I did anything other than a purist army was sisters/guard, which was more a fluffy "holy crusade" list than anything else.

 Marmatag wrote:

Dakka Dakka: MAREEN PLAYERZ BAD WAREZ MY PLAZTIC SISTERZZZ!!11 L2P MEREENS!! GIT GUD GG WP KTHX BEIIII"

As we pointed out earlier, separating Space Marines and Chaos Space Marines from their special-character-including counterparts makes a big difference.

If we sorted out the Guard lists that have Pask, and the Guard Lists that have Harker, and the Guard lists that have neither, we'd probably see a fairly noticeable decrease in wins by the "neither" category,

And more drastic, if we called Sisters of Battle using Saint Celestine "Order of Our Martyred Lady" and Sisters of Battle not using Celestine "Sisters of Battle". [There'd also probably be 0 games played without Celestine, because she's that essential to our army as written.]

You can add another Eldar lose to the tally

I'm still working out the (apparently extensive) kinks to my army list while desperately trying to keep all 12 of my Windriders in the list (that have been a part of my core army since 4E).
Against Space marine armies with even a handful of Rhino/Razorbacks or Dreads, I just do not have enough weapons in the list that do enough damage, despite having more actual shots than my tourney winning 7E lists.

A big take away for me is that you can't make an "all comers" list in 8E without several D6 damage weapons that can shoot targets turn 1. Also, my lists suffers from always going last - which SUCKS. Due to the Morale rules, Aeldari really don't want big units and are encouraged to run MSU, so I will almost always have more drops than my opponent.

-

The community: Here is my anecdotal data, that I've gathered by watching things happen. Therefore broad conclusion.

Me: Flips all the tables.

Also the community: But you didn't flip all the tables when someone else said something stupid!

Me: *single tear* There are no tables left to flip

Also, what I'm finding interesting is the lack of complaints from CSM players: The bottom three armies in these results are Tau, then CSM, then Orks, yet we have complaints from the 1st and 3rd place but not the 2nd. We all remember how vocal we CSM players were back in 7th ed about our terrible codex yet this edition the only complaints from CSM players have been about the loss of some fluffy items, no complaints about the rules (except MagicJuggler complaining about summoning but again that was about his fluffy Word Bearers army).

I wonder how the CSM results slot into the idea that such bad results could only be because the rules are bad... (honest query since I'm content with the chaos rules, though I am purely playing WE/Khorne Daemons at the moment)

The earliest thread I remember about 8th that got more than ten pages was about CSM players complaining that power levels screwed them over (and tbh they were probably right, power levels are a crap system).

So, I have a CSM army. I just don't play it a whole lot.

The ability to run Magnus basically offsets a lot. He's very, very, very, very, very strong. Probably the strongest single model in the game and he's cheap!

Additionally, CSM got the best psychic powers. Warptime is redundacrunk good. You can deep strike your terminators with a sorcerer and warptime them. With a warp charge value of 6, you're now moving them into guaranteed charge range, and also, into melta range, if you're using combi-melta. That is a beautiful alpha strike.

A lot of the units are actually scary and overall quality. The challenge is figuring out how to synergize it all together into a cohesive vision for a list. Auto-take units aren't auto-take anymore. Daemon princes are vulnerable. You need an effective way to protect / bubble wrap them.

I feel like there's a ton of potential here, i just haven't had the patience or time to do it, since i'm focusing on GK right now.

 Marmatag wrote:
The community: Here is my anecdotal data, that I've gathered by watching things happen. Therefore broad conclusion.

Me: Flips all the tables.

Also the community: But you didn't flip all the tables when someone else said something stupid!

Me: *single tear* There are no tables left to flip

What if you - hear me out - flip them back to how they started out.

 Melissia wrote:
The earliest thread I remember about 8th that got more than ten pages was about CSM players complaining that power levels screwed them over (and tbh they were probably right, power levels are a crap system).

Which is why I've been trying to tell people Power Levels were never meant to be used if you didn't have to. What exactly was this persons complaint about PLs? I must have missed that thread.

 Marmatag wrote:

The ability to run Magnus basically offsets a lot. He's very, very, very, very, very strong. Probably the strongest single model in the game

Haaaave you met Girlyman?

 mrhappyface wrote:

 Melissia wrote:
The earliest thread I remember about 8th that got more than ten pages was about CSM players complaining that power levels screwed them over (and tbh they were probably right, power levels are a crap system).

Which is why I've been trying to tell people Power Levels were never meant to be used if you didn't have to. What exactly was this persons complaint about PLs? I must have missed that thread.

Was multiple people. They were arguing CSM units were given power levels that were too large for their actual effectiveness. I don't remember the exact details, it was literally around release date or earlier.

 Galef wrote:
You can add another Eldar lose to the tally

I'm still working out the (apparently extensive) kinks to my army list while desperately trying to keep all 12 of my Windriders in the list (that have been a part of my core army since 4E).
Against Space marine armies with even a handful of Rhino/Razorbacks or Dreads, I just do not have enough weapons in the list that do enough damage, despite having more actual shots than my tourney winning 7E lists.

A big take away for me is that you can't make an "all comers" list in 8E without several D6 damage weapons that can shoot targets turn 1. Also, my lists suffers from always going last - which SUCKS. Due to the Morale rules, Aeldari really don't want big units and are encouraged to run MSU, so I will almost always have more drops than my opponent.

-

How many drops do you have?

My Guard has 13 drops at 2000, and one of those is a Shadowsword. My Sisters running MSU Dominions are at 10-11 drops, making fair use of doubling-up in transports.

 Marmatag wrote:
So, I have a CSM army. I just don't play it a whole lot.

The ability to run Magnus basically offsets a lot. He's very, very, very, very, very strong. Probably the strongest single model in the game and he's cheap!

Additionally, CSM got the best psychic powers. Warptime is redundacrunk good. You can deep strike your terminators with a sorcerer and warptime them. With a warp charge value of 6, you're now moving them into guaranteed charge range, and also, into melta range, if you're using combi-melta. That is a beautiful alpha strike.

A lot of the units are actually scary and overall quality. The challenge is figuring out how to synergize it all together into a cohesive vision for a list.

So the problem with the CSM army is that the rules are still new and people are still trying to figure out the best synergies? I agree with this completely. This is also why I'm not so quick to jump onto the band wagon that Tau and Orks have been screwed to the high heavens.

(Also, just an extra bit of information, CSM started out pretty average with the W/L ratio and are slowly getting worse whilst Orks started out VERY badly and are slowly getting better, Tau on the other hand started out average, plumeted and are now slowly getting better. Make of that what you will.)


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Melissia wrote:

 mrhappyface wrote:

 Melissia wrote:
The earliest thread I remember about 8th that got more than ten pages was about CSM players complaining that power levels screwed them over (and tbh they were probably right, power levels are a crap system).

Which is why I've been trying to tell people Power Levels were never meant to be used if you didn't have to. What exactly was this persons complaint about PLs? I must have missed that thread.

Was multiple people. They were arguing CSM units were given power levels that were too large for their actual effectiveness. I don't remember the exact details, it was literally around release date or earlier.

Probably because a lot of base CSM units are below average with their basic gear and only get better when you kit them out fully. Lesson is don't play Power Levels. I don't understand why some people won't play points since it's clearly more balanced.

 mrhappyface wrote:

 Melissia wrote:
The earliest thread I remember about 8th that got more than ten pages was about CSM players complaining that power levels screwed them over (and tbh they were probably right, power levels are a crap system).

Which is why I've been trying to tell people Power Levels were never meant to be used if you didn't have to. What exactly was this persons complaint about PLs? I must have missed that thread.

The complaint was thus: a knight of the CSM variety was more expensive (by quite a lot) than the almost exact replica in the SM book. And this was true. It is because while a CSM knight basically comes packing every gun they've managed to strap to it as a base, the SM one has a very wide scope of armament, ranging from fairly cheap to the equivalent of the CSM one. Since the power level is an average of the unit's capabilities, the shoddy options of the SM gear means its power level is dragged down, while the CSM one's low and high point are basically both in the high tier.

So it showed us - to no one's real surprise - that if you want to min-max, it's very easy to game the system of power levels, by bringing the best gun on something that has a wide variety of power in its guns, because you'll only be paying the middle ground of its best and worst gun in power levels.

Also the reason why an Onager is PL6 when it should proooooobably be 7 and a bit.

I feel a lot of people are still missing the complaints most of the more reasonable Tau players are saying; it is not the case that they are unusably bad, but the internal balance is so poor there is no reason to take anything but slight variations to a 'boring' list. Even in the recent GT 2nd place it followed the same standard pattern: Commanders, Infantry, Stealth Suits, and Drones with the slight variation being the Crisis Suits. Tau have quite a number of units which are either fun to play or cool looking, but in so doing you are actively choosing to take a worse version of the core units. Unless you are exclusively playing to win games, you are punished for variety. I also expect complaints to start to appear from the players playing against Tau for the same reasons people complained about playing against flyrant lists last edition.

Purifier wrote:The complaint was thus: a knight of the CSM variety was more expensive (by quite a lot) than the almost exact replica in the SM book. And this was true. It is because while a CSM knight basically comes packing every gun they've managed to strap to it as a base, the SM one has a very wide scope of armament, ranging from fairly cheap to the equivalent of the CSM one. Since the power level is an average of the unit's capabilities, the shoddy options of the SM gear means its power level is dragged down, while the CSM one's low and high point are basically both in the high tier.

So it showed us - to no one's real surprise - that if you want to min-max, it's very easy to game the system of power levels, by bringing the best gun on something that has a wide variety of power in its guns, because you'll only be paying the middle ground of its best and worst gun in power levels.

Also the reason why an Onager is PL6 when it should proooooobably be 7 and a bit.

Which shouldn't really be a problem unless your playing a competitive game using PL and if you are then your kind of asking for problems.

Rockfish wrote:I also expect complaints to start to appear from the players playing against Tau for the same reasons people complained about playing against flyrant lists last edition.

That you can't defeat them unless you've brought anti-air units? I understand what your trying to say, both armies only had one competitive build but the problem with the flyrant build was not because it was competitive but because it was OP and so glaringly better than anything else tyranids had. Tau are in a similar state with only a few competitive builds (according to Tau players) but the Tau builds aren't OP, so no complaint from players playing Tau, and they aren't as restrictive as the Flyrant builds, so you'd think less complaints from Tau players. Also the Tau index is no where near as trash as the Nids used to be.

 mrhappyface wrote:

Purifier wrote:The complaint was thus: a knight of the CSM variety was more expensive (by quite a lot) than the almost exact replica in the SM book. And this was true. It is because while a CSM knight basically comes packing every gun they've managed to strap to it as a base, the SM one has a very wide scope of armament, ranging from fairly cheap to the equivalent of the CSM one. Since the power level is an average of the unit's capabilities, the shoddy options of the SM gear means its power level is dragged down, while the CSM one's low and high point are basically both in the high tier.

So it showed us - to no one's real surprise - that if you want to min-max, it's very easy to game the system of power levels, by bringing the best gun on something that has a wide variety of power in its guns, because you'll only be paying the middle ground of its best and worst gun in power levels.

Also the reason why an Onager is PL6 when it should proooooobably be 7 and a bit.

Which shouldn't really be a problem unless your playing a competitive game using PL and if you are then your kind of asking for problems.

Rockfish wrote:I also expect complaints to start to appear from the players playing against Tau for the same reasons people complained about playing against flyrant lists last edition.

That you can't defeat them unless you've brought anti-air units? I understand what your trying to say, both armies only had one competitive build but the problem with the flyrant build was not because it was competitive but because it was OP and so glaringly better than anything else tyranids had. Tau are in a similar state with only a few competitive builds (according to Tau players) but the Tau builds aren't OP, so no complaint from players playing Tau, and they aren't as restrictive as the Flyrant builds, so you'd think less complaints from Tau players. Also the Tau index is no where near as trash as the Nids used to be.

I guess I kinda used the wrong example, much much less extreme than that, but we have already had people bitch about OP drones/commander lists where the commanders are unkillable and those are kind of lists which people are gonna bring to tournaments.

Rockfish wrote:
I guess I kinda used the wrong example, much much less extreme than that, but we have already had people bitch about OP drones/commander lists where the commanders are unkillable and those are kind of lists which people are gonna bring to tournaments.

And people whine when things aren't easy, because they can't sit back and shoot Commanders from their unmoving gunline they think that Commanders are OP. I've played against the supposedly OP commanders and they are good units certainly but no where near OP. People will scream "OP unit" or "my army is unusable" far too quickly, the only reason Orks, Nids, CSM and DE were allowed to be called unusable is because they had been trying for a good list for many years, not a couple of months.

 Purifier wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:

The ability to run Magnus basically offsets a lot. He's very, very, very, very, very strong. Probably the strongest single model in the game

Haaaave you met Girlyman?

Haha yes i have both models. Guilliman is strong, but it's only because of his bubble. The things around Guilliman die just as fast as when he's there or not. Azrael is actually better IMHO, because he gives a 4++ and allows you to reroll hits. But Guilliman is quite good, too.

On Tau being weak some guy at my local store has been murdering players I guess he tabled a AM player. I know he ran the a drop team of battle suits with lots of burst cannons to clear out the Conscripts and a fusion drop team to cripple Pask. my buddy back in Michigan is a "power gamer" and told me he is working out the tau. I guess they play a lot different then they used to now.

Space marine players please please try bringing a Storm raven vs hordes. Its list should be lascannons, melta and the bolters. We call it the AC130. do to it not needing fire arc and hits on full BS that thing is pure murder.

Legio_xx wrote:
On Tau being weak some guy at my local store has been murdering players I guess he tabled a AM player. I know he ran the a drop team of battle suits with lots of burst cannons to clear out the Conscripts and a fusion drop team to cripple Pask. my buddy back in Michigan is a "power gamer" and told me he is working out the tau. I guess they play a lot different then they used to now.

Space marine players please please try bringing a Storm raven vs hordes. Its list should be lascannons, melta and the bolters. We call it the AC130. do to it not needing fire arc and hits on full BS that thing is pure murder.

The Forgeworld Tau unit, i've said this a million times, is nasty as it gets. It is outstanding at eliminating hordes - 3D6 heavy flamer - has an 18" fly - and can Nova Charge - it also has 14 wounds, 7 toughness, and i think a 2+. It is beyond beast, and it's a fast attack. same model as the riptide, so you probably already have 3.

If you can clear a path to the tanks, there are numerous suits that drop in and deal stronger than melta damage on a better gun platform, with drones.

I'm not saying Tau are top tier or anything, but there are some ridiculously good tools in the arsenal.

As for the storm raven, i just use assault cannons on mine. Lascannons are so expensive, and I need bodies badly. But i play GK.

 mrhappyface wrote:
Also, what I'm finding interesting is the lack of complaints from CSM players: The bottom three armies in these results are Tau, then CSM, then Orks, yet we have complaints from the 1st and 3rd place but not the 2nd. We all remember how vocal we CSM players were back in 7th ed about our terrible codex yet this edition the only complaints from CSM players have been about the loss of some fluffy items, no complaints about the rules (except MagicJuggler complaining about summoning but again that was about his fluffy Word Bearers army).

I wonder how the CSM results slot into the idea that such bad results could only be because the rules are bad... (honest query since I'm content with the chaos rules, though I am purely playing WE/Khorne Daemons at the moment)

CSM is at its best with specific Legion synergies. Just look at how good Thousand Sons and World Eaters are doing; I suspect if there were more games we'd see Emperor's Children and Black Legion much further up the charts than baseline CSM as well.

 mrhappyface wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
So, I have a CSM army. I just don't play it a whole lot.

The ability to run Magnus basically offsets a lot. He's very, very, very, very, very strong. Probably the strongest single model in the game and he's cheap!

Additionally, CSM got the best psychic powers. Warptime is redundacrunk good. You can deep strike your terminators with a sorcerer and warptime them. With a warp charge value of 6, you're now moving them into guaranteed charge range, and also, into melta range, if you're using combi-melta. That is a beautiful alpha strike.

A lot of the units are actually scary and overall quality. The challenge is figuring out how to synergize it all together into a cohesive vision for a list.

So the problem with the CSM army is that the rules are still new and people are still trying to figure out the best synergies? I agree with this completely. This is also why I'm not so quick to jump onto the band wagon that Tau and Orks have been screwed to the high heavens.

(Also, just an extra bit of information, CSM started out pretty average with the W/L ratio and are slowly getting worse whilst Orks started out VERY badly and are slowly getting better, Tau on the other hand started out average, plumeted and are now slowly getting better. Make of that what you will.)

At least that's true for me. CSM seems to be the most changed codex out of all of them. I will openly admit i am not the best CSM player. My experience has been that Tau and Orks are good. But it's fundamentally different from 7th.

I've noticed what you see as well - that factions that started out in the gutter have dramatically improved in win rate. Going from 20% wins to 40% wins shows improvement. That's a fact.